Diamond-Cut Life

I’m getting a sense of deja vu: a Republican candidate for president, protective of wealthy interests, choosing a running mate who is wedded to fossil fuel interests. John McCain’s choice of Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin to be his vice presidential candidate is parallel to George Bush’s choice, eight years ago, of Dick Cheney to be [...]

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Even when we love our work, it can land us in places we wouldn’t have chosen. I’m currently in a luxury hotel, the Intercontinental Buckhead in Atlanta, Georgia, because that’s where the transportation conference I’m attending is being held.
The overconsumption, the wasting of resources, is setting my nerves on edge. It feels plain wrong to [...]

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I’ve written in recent months about how a low-car diet and a low-TV diet can help us with our national obesity problem and also our carbon obesity (a new phrase I just coined).  I practice both these diets. The new diet I’ll add to the mix today is an advertising diet: limiting our exposure to [...]

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Too long without a post! I just returned from a trip (via Amtrak, my favorite travel-mode) to Olympia, Washington, where I was researching that state’s outstanding transportation options program. I am so itching to do in Oregon the kinds of trip-reduction programs they are doing in Washington (I work in transportation).
On a separate but very [...]

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Earlier this week I noted that sustainability needs a lot of entrepreneurs, and supplied the first half of my best tips for them, gleaned from twelve years of owning and operating my own business. Here’s the second half. Feel free to add your own suggestions and experience!
Be willing to [...]

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Sustainability needs lots of entrepreneurs. It needs outside-the-box thinkers and doers to help us find new ways of producing, consuming and being of service to each other. I’ll bet that you, yourself, have a talent or idea you’ve fantasized about making a living at.
I spent 1992 to 2004 as a small business owner, designing and [...]

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Oregon’s new ’solar highway’ project officially kicked off yesterday at the I-5/I205 interchange — yet another intersection between energy and transportation as the fields work toward sustainability (see Electric Vehicles).
Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is partnering with Portland General Electric to install solar panels that will produce 104 kilowatts of energy — equivalent to 28% [...]

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I suggest that the best thing you could read today would be Nicholas Kristof’s piece in the New York Times on the Dalai Lama and China. All that I will do is explain why I’m suggesting that.
To go five miles up into the big picture, we human beings as a species are in our spiritual [...]

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I’ve read that the average wedding in the U.S. costs $20,000. (I wonder how many fights ensue over getting it all paid off?) Portland’s green wedding of the year, that of our friends Noelle Studer and Eli Spevak, was long on community, short on materialism. The joy and vitality were palpable.
Here Eli and Noelle [...]

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I had an exhilarating swoop into the heart of the diamond-cut life Saturday night when I bicycled all the way home from my mother-in-law’s house.  (For newcomers to this blog– welcome! — the diamond-cut life is happiness chiseled down to its essence, with excess consumption stripped away).
I felt free and strong as an eagle bicycling from far [...]

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