Green Options

Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay up to date.

I, for one, don’t remember the stagflation of the 1970s.

It was a time when prices were increasing at the gas pump and grocery store, and when the economy sputtered along with little or no growth. Some neighbors saw their wages flatten — or their jobs disappear altogether. Gold, often seen as a barometer of economic confidence, was at an all time high (adjusted for inflation). I was pre-teen in a comfty Detroit suburb with a father who worked at then stalwart, GM, so a roof over my head and food on the table was never a concern.

But here we are today, with Priuses outselling Suburbans. Oil and gold are at all time highs. Things seem far more perplexing, interconnected, global. First, there’s the perception of a housing crunch, even though fretting over a 15 percent decline in home values over the last year or two seems rather odd given the incredible run-up of many homes over the past decade, sometimes by over 100 percent.

Second, the sub-prime mortgage mess has snared many who agreed with greedy lenders that living beyond our means was okay. That more jobs are being outsourced overseas or replaced by fancy machines in this increasingly global marketplace isn’t helping either.

Even if the Federal Reserve or Congress and the Bush Administration do manage to convince the American people that they should keep on spending by splurging with windfall tax refund checks — thus avoiding a recession — the printing presses rolling off fresh greenbacks and mounting debt on a national level could result in the onset of stagflation. Oil, while swinging up and down with the speculator’s bets and value of the dollar, will continue on its upward trajectory reflecting the reality of “peak oil,” the period by which its extraction and refinement will get ever more expensive and difficult. Our economy, and those linked around the world, are based on this fuel and this fuel is largely denominated in US dollars. When the dollar falls in value, the price of a barrel of oil must increase.

So why will ecopreneurial businesses fare any different than all the rest if, in

They say everything is bigger in Texas and that certainly applies to the giant windmills that have replaced oil derricks in the rural area of Sweetwater, in Nolan County. According to the New York Times, the towers stand 20 stories high and the turbine blades are as long as a football field, and farmers can earn $500 per month for each turbine they allow built on their […]

After the mighty industrial military complex (the companies behind the missiles and the satellites to guide them), tourism is the world’s largest industry, according to the World Tourism Organization.

While tourism is big business, much of the industry can be just as destructive as the other extractive industries (mining, lumber, agriculture), sometimes operating in the same places around the world, places like the spectacular Alaskan Wilderness or rainforests of Indonesia. Oceans containing fish or oil hidden deep below the surface in certain parts of the world, provide the setting for the popular love affair by many people, of living on floating cities called cruise ships, turning port stops into Mall of America-type shopping sprees.

Not all tourism, however, thrives on the consumptive value of mass tourism that burns through resources or exploits people for the benefit of pleasure seekers. A small, but rapidly growing segment of the tourism industry, “ecotourism” has emerged which now accounts for as much as 4 to 7 percent of the industry, depending on definitional terms. While the academics debate these definitions ad nauseum, the industry and number of ecotravelers are growing at double digit rates according to The International Ecotourism Society.

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.