Choices for Sustainable Living – Part 1b

I came out of the Choices for Sustainable Living meeting in Salida last Wednesday with a whole new array of thoughts attempting to organize themselves in my head. As I had anticipated, everyone sitting at the table all pretty much agreed with the idea that we must as a society work toward better sustainability. What struck me though were some of the responses to the very first and only question of the evening:

When it comes to sustainability, are you a pessimist or an optimist?

Choices for Sustainable Living – Part 1a

Tonight is the first Choices for Sustainable Living discussion to be held in Salida. This is an eight part course sponsored by GARNA and created by the Northwest Earth Institute. It will likely be the only one I will attend as we are working to get a group together for here in Buena Vista. I would like to reflect on some of the ideas that occurred to me from the homework articles before I go because I am curious to discover how my thoughts will be influenced by the upcoming discussion.

While I’m on the Topic of Consumption…

I was recently waiting for a flight at an airport where CNN was being broadcast on a television in the seating area for all to see. I am usually pretty annoyed at perpetual involuntary exposure to audial and visual stimuli but after watching for a couple of minutes I instead nearly felt compelled to stand up on one of the benches and shout out to the concourse world that everyone needed to partake of the news report at hand.

The Good Side of Consumption

I’ve really enjoyed spending the past couple of years discovering the variety of foods that are grown and raised locally to the Buena Vista area. The higher the percentage of a meal that incorporates local foods seems to add tremendously to the level of satisfaction both in creating and consuming it. In addition to that, actually having met or even befriending the farmer who raised the food makes it that much more real.

Yesterday, my husband and I cooked a meal where almost all of the ingredients came from within a 90 mile range of Buena Vista. Here is what we had:

• Hashbrowns made from potatoes which came from White Mountain Farm in Mosca – San Luis Valley (available at the Mosca Pit Stop gas station on the west side of Highway 17. They are also one of the only organic Quinoa growers in North America)
• Eggs from Weathervane Farm in Buena Vista (available at Guidestone Farm co-op)
• Pork sausage, also from Weathervane Farm
• Biscuits made from home ground white spring wheat berries from Gosar Ranch in the San Luis Valley (look for their organic flour in grocery stores in the San Luis Valley)

Green as the New Red, White, and Blue

A community member recently forwarded this Pop!Cast video clip to me. In it, Thomas Friedman, op-ed writer for The New York Times, speaks about the correlation of the price of oil with the amount of freedom throughout the world. In his remarks he states that we are in essence funding terrorism with our energy purchases. He makes a call for us to redefine green as, “geopolitical, geostrategic, capitalistic, patriotic… green is the new red, white, and blue.”

Regardless on where you stand in the opinion spectrum of this topic, it is well worth the 20 minutes of viewing time to get some additional perspective on issues that will most certainly define our generation.

View the clip here.

Act on An Inkling

All great ideas were once inklings.

I should remind myself of this often but rarely do. In every instance there must have been some magical point in time where a someday great idea started as the tiniest twinkle of inspiration in some unsuspecting mind. What makes these inklings unique from most others is that they were acted upon and often quite deliberately.

I’d like to do a better job of acting upon inklings and determinedly pursuing some of the ideas that come from them. I love to think, imagine, and test new ideas in my head but I don’t develop them nearly as much as I could. I enjoy considering ways in which my life and the lives of others around me could be improved simply or even dramatically. The challenge is that moving forward with an idea often forces one to place themselves in a position of the risk of being misunderstood, criticized, or even of having to face a sense of failure. This is scary stuff, especially when coming from a culture where security and safety are among the most highly regarded values.

Thus, I start this blog with the intention in mind that here is a place where I will post inklings and ideas of my own and others to share and develop. We shall see where they go…