Green Options

Tired of your increasing electric bills?  Want to change your relationship with energy, making your own, renewable, local power while doing your part to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and lessening the impacts of climate change?

Read no further than Power from the Wind: A practical guide to small-scale energy production (New Society), by prolific writer and sustainable living practitioner Dan Chiras, with contributions by Mick Sagrillo and Ian Woofenden.  This book helps you assess your energy needs, your site’s wind energy potential, and sort out every aspect of the design, purchase and installation of a small-scale, or residential, wind system.  Amazingly, it does so without demanding that you be some technical tinkerer or electrical engineer.

A big part of sustainability is being able to meet some or all of your energy needs, yourself, with renewable energy if you’re fortunate enough to live in a place where it’s windy.  The timing couldn’t be better for the release of their authoritative book as millions of dollars in state and federal funding support or tax incentives are being made available for homeowners and businesses to install such systems.

People often ask me: “So what set you on your present course of operating a sustainable business, growing most of your own food organically, working from home, and powering your entire farm and business with renewable energy?”  People ask me about that definitive moment where it became obvious that I needed to live and work a different way, a better way that didn’t involve never-ending growth, consumption, and earn-and-spend.

There was no such moment, or crisis, that transformed my life of power suits, lattes, or gotta-have-it-all-now mindset.  Instead, my sustainable journey (which very much continues to this day as an evolving journey) resulted from a growing understanding about the issues facing the planet and its inhabitants, both through personal experience and by learning of these changes from other organizations or individuals.

One such organization that serves as a compass for my endeavors is the Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit organization that produces the authoritative State of the World book series as well as numerous other books and resources to build an ecologically sustainable society that meets human needs. Each year, a new State of the World book is not only jam-packed with interdisciplinary research and analysis that a non-scientific mind (like mine) could comprehend, but organized in such a way to make it both practical and powerful for anyone searching for ways to express a vision for how to live on a planet without destroying it or exploiting its inhabitants.

Each year, the State of the World book series focuses on a particular theme which might address energy, community, food and agriculture, population, health, trade policies and natural resource use, just to name a few.  For 2008, their State of the World: Innovations for a Sustainable Economy provides both a timely analysis of how our “free trade” global economy has gone astray and insights into the powerful movements afoot, including localization, a triple bottom line approach to business, microfinance, and the low-carbon economy.

Book Review: 

Ecopreneuring:  Putting People and Planets Before Profit, by John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist. 

“One of the biggest ironies of our growth model is that we’re coming to relize that it has failed to make our society particularly satisfied–indeed, the number of americans who say they’re very happy with their lives was higher in 1956 than it is today, though the standard of living has trebled over that half century.”
Bill McKibben, in the Foreword. 

In Ecopreneuring, Ivanko (a writer for Ecopreneurist) and Kivirist give us an inside view of what it’s like to be a social entrepreneur.  There are frequent interviews with other social entrepreneurs, as well as an in-depth look at the Inn Serendipity (Ivanko and Kivirist’s green bed & breakfast), as models of social entrepreneurship lifestyles and business models. 

If you’re wondering who these social entrepreneurs are, how they operate, how they think, and what their values and lifestyles are, this book demystifies it all–and replaces the conventional American Dream along the way. 

With a campaign tag line, CHANGE WE NEED, President-Elect Barack Obama and a large portion of the American population should have some rather meaningful New Year resolutions for 2009.

For many of us, as we review the financial carnage of 2008 and the dismal outcomes of poorly conceived foreign policy decisions on the part of the George W. Bush Administration over the course of his term (practically rubber stamped by the majority of Congress), we are looking forward to the New Year, a new start, and a renewed sense of hope.

Among the first steps, before we usher in the New Year, is a New Year’s Resolution. But unlike years past, will we embrace the responsibility, sacrifice and curtailment so necessary in these times of climate change, ecological collapse, peak oil and the economic hardship experienced by so many, caused in a large part by our debt-based, growth-on-an-infinite-planet obsessed approach to capitalism? Or do we just try to refinance our house one more time, to take advantage of the latest Red Tag Sale?

Here’s some restorative resolutions for 2009:

1. Stop being a consumer: Let’s get back to an era, as imperfect as it was, where we were citizens or people, instead of being nothing more than consumers.
2. Break our fossil fuel addition: Our fossil-fuel-based luxuries and lifestyle are coming at a dire cost to the planet (if not, also, leading to unprecedented exploitation of people to provide those goods or services at cheap prices). Plus, there’s a good chance that fossil-fuel-based energy is going to get a lot more expensive in the coming years. Let’s cut fossil fuel use out of our lives like we might cut a cancer out of our bodies. Renewable energy is in abundance around us, so why not embrace the sun, one of my “Strategies of Abundance for ecopreneurs“.

The more income-producing and complementary projects my wife and I have in our ecopreneurial business, the more stable and secure we feel, careful to not let work override quality of life considerations.

After all, we, like many ecopreneurs we’ve interviewed or met, don’t live to work. Instead, we find our livelihood and the businesses we navigate deeply satisfying as we make the world a better place through the green businesses — for profit and non-profit alike — that we own or direct.

The key to our approach to ecopreneurship is looking to nature for inspiration. Our green business is both diversified in enterprises as well as the products and services we offer, filling economic niches in much the same way as plants, animals and fungi fill ecological niches that create sustainable, interdependent and healthy ecological systems. For example, there are thousands of bed & breakfasts in the U.S., but only a few that specialize in serving vegetarian (or vegan) organic breakfasts with ingredients mostly harvested a hundred feet from their back door, like we do. That the Inn is completely powered by the wind and sun and welcomes children as guests, serves as additional niche experiences we offer our guests who we generally refer to in our ECOpreneuring book as “conserving customers,” not consumers — but more on this in a future blog.

The clock strikes prime time Friday night as I send you this introductory greeting. Back in my corporate cubicle days over a decade ago, “happy hour” did not find me at the computer screen. Most likely, on Friday night back then you’d find me physically and mentally as far from my work scene as I could muster: camping over state lines, social at a party, buzzing at the local coffeehouse. While I had a enviable job and paycheck, “work” remained something I did to pay the bills and indemnify my escapist fun.

I’m a business school failure — in a positive sort of way.

Rather than spend most of my life in a carpeted cubicle, earning-and-spending and, in my case, pimping for the culture of consumption at a large advertising agency in Chicago, my wife, Lisa Kivirist, and I exited corporate America. We resettled on a 5.5 acre small farm in southwestern Wisconsin, endeavoring to learn how to grow our own food, generate our own electricity and in various other ways reclaim the ability to meet our own needs without depending on Corporate America to provide all that we need, for a price. That goes for providing a job as well. The business school I attended as an undergrad primed me for a “successful career” earning income from a Corporation, paying taxes to the government and owing much to the banks that would one day own my home, car and credit worthiness.

By exiting the fast track overflowing with Lattes and legions of consumables (remember, you have the look the part of an Advertising Executive), I’ve settled into my own skin, weeding our bountiful gardens, harvesting more solar and wind energy than Lisa and I can use on our farm, and raising our son with the Earth in mind. Our business, Inn Serendipity Bed & Breakfast, when paired with our other enterprises like writing, speaking and “green marketing consulting”, provides a lifestyle and workstyle that’s sustaining to us and the ecological community in which we’re inexorably linked.