Diamond-Cut Life

I’m hiring! Rather, the state agency I work for is hiring me a full-time assistant to work on the Governor’s Commuter Challenge (I am the program manager). Full job description and link to apply is here
Perhaps I’m biased, but this is the coolest project in the greenest state in the nation (Oregon). The theme of [...]

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How do we sustain ourselves as we work on sustainability? There is so much work to do, how do we keep from being just another group of American workaholics, set apart only by a bigger vision and slightly different consumption patterns?
It’s 3:49 a.m. as I’m writing (I have insomnia). My upcoming day, my recent days, [...]

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I’m reading about the pain of high gas prices, and the auto industry shrinking, and Americans actually driving a bit less. While I care about people’s pain, I’m not experiencing it, myself. My husband Thor commutes via TriMet (the public transit here in Portland, Oregon), and I carpool with five other people to get to [...]

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Happy Memorial Day weekend! It’s time for a patriotic activity. Please join me in doing a specific two-minute task today: cut and paste below the dotted line and email it to noimpactman+nadler+pelosi@gmail.com (it looks like a weird email address but, don’t worry, it will work).
What’s this for? My fellow blogger and change-agent Colin Beavan at [...]

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“More Ways To Make Us Pay” was the Oregonian’s headline yesterday for an article on airlines now charging for baggage due to the rising cost of fuel.
In my counseling days, we called that attitude ‘playing victim’. I would have used a different headline for the paying-for-baggage story, something like “Now We Get Paid [...]

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Jeff Merkley, of my home state of Oregon, is now one of the top hopes in the nation for the Democrats to take leadership of the U.S. Senate. Yesterday’s election results mean that he’ll be running against Republican incumbent Senator Gordon Smith in the November election. I want him to win!
My household will be contributing [...]

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Here is my Portland, Oregon response to Sex And The City: The Movie. It is Green Girls Take On CRAG. Read it to see what I mean. My Green Girls social circle has more fun and is more joyful, I suggest, than the characters in the hit HBO series.
Why do I think that? We green [...]

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I’m sipping my coffee at 6 a.m. at Stumptown in Southeast Portland (joy). The Oregonian’s front page shows an ocean of the 72,000 faces that turned out to see Barack Obama yesterday (yes, I voted for him, too) and the lower right corner story is: “Who loves high energy prices? The environment.”

The gist is basic [...]

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I’m here at Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center for the weekend, off the electricity grid, yet wi-fied onto the Internet grid. A huge snowdrift (it was a hard winter) blocks half my view out the window of the lodge. But it and pretty much all the snow in Oregon is melting fast with the sudden [...]

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Here in Portland, Oregon we’re expecting 95 degrees today, which for our mild climate is a major heat wave. How to cope with it? I suggest we do what people did for the 99.9% of human history prior to the invention of air conditioners. They slowed their pace down so they wouldn’t overheat themselves. And [...]

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