Catherine Greener is chief executive officer and founder of Greener Solutions, Inc. Her previous positions included vice president of Sustainability Consulting at Saatchi & Saatchi S, team leader of the Commercial and Industrial team of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and director of quality and customer focus for a division of ABB. Greener lives in Boulder, Colorado, in a house featured on the Boulder solar-home tour.

Excerpt:

There has been a tremendous amount of work done by the business community
to contribute to the field of sustainable business. There are numerous
examples of companies using less energy, less raw material, and less
water. Some would argue that if we had another 500 years or so to continue
this trajectory of incremental and continuous improvement, doing less bad,
we would be able to reinvent commerce without much disruption. We don’t
have that luxury. Our climate and our world are changing rapidly around us.
The spirit of sustainable pioneering is what is needed now. Individuals and
companies who are pursuing the bold experiments are proving that success
of the company and success of the environment are not inverse relationships.
The first principle of natural capitalism emphasizes the need for radical
resource efficiency to buy time. But the companies highlighted here are
going beyond the first principle and are finding ways to reinvent their products,
processes, company governances, and infrastructures. These organizations
are exploring virtually the unknown and claiming these new territories
as viable ventures.

Despite their differences, all four of the companies have similarities.
They have been guided by strong visions, goals, and commitments to creating
a sustainable future. They have opened up new areas of thought and possibilities,
making appropriate adaptations based upon the lessons learned
through their sustainable experiments, and have openly shared their adventures
with others. They have a strong sense of “what if?” and inspire others
in their industry to follow the paths they have created.

Sustainable pioneers such as Pangea Organics, New Belgium Brewing
Company, Namasté Solar Electric, and ProLogis are providing the leadership
and paths for other companies to quickly follow and find their own
pioneering spirit to reinvent everything and restore our climate and planet
for generations to come.

Lisa Jones’s first book, Broken: A Love Story, the story of her friendship with quadriplegic Northern Arapaho horse gentler and traditional healer Stanford Addison, was published by Scribner in May 2009. She has written for High Country News, Smithsonian, Tin House, the New York Times Magazine, the Summit County Journal, the Burlington Free Press, and the Tico Times of San Jose, Costa Rica. She lives in Colorado with her husband and cat. Her website is www.lisajoneswrites.com.

Excerpt:

Dev and I were sitting on a concrete bench in front of the supermarket in
Needles, California, working our way through six avocados, a jar of salsa,
and a loaf of bread. We chewed silently and stared at the sun-blasted parking
lot. An old man emerged slowly from a battleship gray, old-model sedan.
He unfolded a walker and carefully made his way past a gleaming row of
Winnebagos. Eventually, he reached the square of shade that covered our
bench. He set his walker aside and sat down. He looked well over eighty.
He wheezed. His eyeglasses sat at an awkward angle on his face. He started,
softly, to hum. We ate. He hummed. The recreational vehicles came and
went. The sun brightened a notch, and I felt the contraction in my eyes as
my pupils set themselves on minimum aperture.
“Hi,” said Dev.
“Hi,” said the man, introducing himself as Vern.
Would he like a sandwich? asked Dev. Nope, Vern said. What he would
like is a way out of this town. This state. Goddamn drug addicts everywhere.
Thieves. Mexicans. Bad doctors. Opticians. Hippies. Liars.
Vern’s eye doctor back home in Gulfport, Mississippi, had sent him to
another eye doctor in Needles. To have his cataracts removed. Two months
ago. He was legally blind.
But he had a car?
Yep. He met people who needed rides. They drove his car, with him in
it, where he needed to go. And now it was time to go home. Back to Gulfport.
But he hadn’t had his operation?
Right. The doctor kept putting me back, putting me back.
Why?
Because he’s a goddamn liar, and I’m fed up.
Dev and I were full of many things. We were full of cold water and ripe
avocados, which, after a week camping in the desert washes of the Chemehuevi
Mountains Wilderness, made us feel optimistic. We were full of triumph
at having sprung ourselves from our desk jobs to hitchhike south and
be hobos for the winter. We were full of a feeling of rightness that we would
burn no fuel for the next two months, easily meeting our needs via the
excesses of our countrymen. We had started with only $20 in our pockets—
no credit cards—figuring with our shared Presbyterian frame on the world
that we could get odd jobs when we needed more money. We had already
spent one evening bussing tables at a restaurant in Needles.
We thought about Vern’s idea. If we drove him 100 miles down the road
to Quartzsite, Arizona, he would at least be on Interstate 10, albeit 1,700
miles east of home. There was a truck stop in Quartzsite, and maybe he
could find a driver there to take him on to Gulfport. In return for us taking
him there, he’d buy us a hotel room for the night. We badly needed a
shower. We’d hitchhiked here from Colorado two weeks ago, spending our
first night on a snow-streaked mound of dirt behind a gas station in Saint
George, Utah, where the nighttime low reached seventeen degrees. We’d
spent the next night somewhere south of Las Vegas underneath a mile-long
tunnel of barbed wire that had been used for training troops during World
War II. For the last eight days, we’d been in Trampas Wash, in the company
of edgy wild burros and phainopepla birds, which looked like they
were made of black velvet and sang sweet piping melodies suggestive of wet,
green, medieval Europe, not the ageless, bony, empty New World. We’d survived
on rice and beans and drunk from a tank holding water for mountain
sheep that were being reintroduced to the area by the government.
The deal was struck. We would drive Vern to Arizona. My heart flared
with hope. Dev was an environmental saint. He had built a cabin out of
recycled materials for less than $900. He cut wood and hauled water. I had
rented out the house I owned in town and moved in with him earlier that
month. He was tall and wise. I wanted to be more like him—despite my
supposed credibility as an environmental journalist, I still occasionally
drove away from the cabin to the gym twenty-five miles down the road to
work out. I wanted to be better, more self-sacrificing, more helpful, less consumptive,
more Dev-like. This trip, I figured, would help me be better. The
old man was a godsend.

David Akerson is an international criminal lawyer and lecturer on genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies and the Sturm College of Law at the University of Denver.

Excerpt:

The notion of raising chickens was the latest piece in my family’s locavore quest. We had already plowed under our postage-stamp backyard and planted vegetables. This left our two dogs with no real place to poop, but we figured that that problem would sort itself out. We also had beehives. And whenever possible, we shopped at the weekly farmers’ markets.

We had taken some significant steps to live more simply, less commercially, to be more responsible for our own consumption. But chickens! Now, that represented eggs, a nice protein addition to our tomatoes and squash.
The decision, therefore, felt like a righteous one.

Effecting that decision, however, was an entirely different matter, given the fact that no one I knew had yet tried it. What I did know was that vestigial city ordinances still permit residents to have two hens within Denver city limits. Serendipitously, one day I stumbled across an urban chicken class via an enticing advertisement: “Learn how easy it is to have the reward of eggs and more!” “Easy” comported with my vision of me in a hammock, hens leisurely pecking around my tomato plants, devouring undesirable pests, offering up eggs and the occasional drumstick or two.

So began my journey on a sunny and frigid Sunday afternoon. I love autumn afternoons in Colorado, and the Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield was made for days like this. On the historical farm that had been relocated
to the park, animals were bustling about. My eyes almost hurt from the brilliant blue skies refracting light on the yellowing prairie grass. Families in minivans were arriving for the nearby corn maze.

I waited with a dozen other strangers in a relocated one-room schoolhouse where we had assembled to learn about raising chickens in the city. The teacher was late. I cupped a coffee with two hands. We squirmed on chairs never meant to deliver comfort.

I scanned the class. We were all at least three generations from any actual knowledge of chicken rearing. For our ancestors, raising chickens was a real and necessary fact of life and probably not so romantic. The animals provided eggs, meat, and fertilizer, and they spread the manure of the other animals as they scratched for grubs and other insects. Today, most people’s only contact with chickens is through polystyrene packaging. The benefit of raising one’s own chickens had long been eliminated from modern life. This class was poised to restore to us the lost knowledge of our ancestors.

Through a wavy schoolhouse window, I spied a large chicken coop in a large fenced enclosure. I made a quick mental calculation—the neighbor’s house would need to go. Thoughts of demolition and perhaps a second mortgage
were interrupted by the teacher clambering loudly up the wooden steps in her boots.

She settled in at the lectern uneasily. She was tall, thin, nervous, almost agitated, and I detected a faint facial tick. I resisted the thought, but it was inescapable—she possessed a slight poultryesque quality to her. Perhaps one could spend too much time with chickens. The teacher explained that she had been a chicken farmer in the foothills of Boulder, Colorado, raising 200 or so chickens of the Araucana breed. She described the birds as if she were describing her children. Some were mischievous and full of verve, others were serious, dutiful soldiers that laid an egg every single day. Her favorite chicken, Chloe, had apparently followed her around like a devoted assistant. The teacher’s eyes misted when she told us about Chloe—Chloe was no longer with us. I imagined a stir-fry. She regaled us with stories of poultry wackiness, laughing as she reminisced down chicken lane. In the midst of one laugh, did I heard a cluck? I shook it off.

Kirk Johnson is the chief curator and vice president for Research and Collections at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He is a fossil-leaf specialist best known for his research on the global extinctions that happened 66 million years ago when a 6-mile asteroid struck what is now the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico.
He is the author, with artist Ray Troll, of Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway: An Epoch Tale of an Artist and a Scientist on the Ultimate 5,000-Mile Paleo Road Trip, which won the Colorado Book Award for best nonfiction in 2007.

In November of 2005, I gave a lecture about the relevance of paleoclimate
to modern global warming to an audience of nearly 1,000 oil and gas geologists
in Calgary. I had innocently assumed that their geologic knowledge
would predispose them to understand the significance of climate change. My
assumption was not correct. I was startled by the number of attendees who,
with their questions, rejected the idea that human activity had anything to
do with global warming. Many of them strongly objected to the methodology
of using mathematical climate models to predict future climate trends.
The pairing of paleoclimate records with climate models creates a smooth
framework from the past through the present to the future that allows the
creation of testable hypotheses about climate processes. This is solid science
with tremendous potential, yet several of the questioners responded to it
with dogmatic denial. I had clearly misjudged my audience and it made me
want to understand what was going on that would cause such an emotional
response to a series of scientific observations and predictions.

Susan Moran is a freelance journalist who writes for The New York Times, The Economist, and other publications. She is currently on a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Excerpt:

“… I’m struck by the fact that Sayles, fifty-two, is as much an entrepreneur as an ordinary farmer. Or that “ordinary” farming looks a lot less ordinary as guys like Sayles scramble to keep the farms, and the towns they reside in, afloat by diversifying their income streams. Sayles, for example, is launching wind, biomass, and other ventures, and he is organizing farmers in the community to negotiate a lucrative contract with a large wind-farm developer that’s been scoping out the area. If necessity is the mother of invention, then
the people who work the land might be the ones to help us figure out how to save it. Just don’t go calling Sayles a tree hugger.

Sayles is among a small but growing subset of farmers and ranchers who are becoming part of the climate-change solution. Many of them are driven more by a desire to save the farm than save the planet. Some of them are generating renewable energy in the form of cooperative wind farms or biofuels production. Others, like Sayles, have entered carbon-trading markets, such as the voluntary Chicago Climate Exchange, as carbon-offset providers, as they’re called in industry parlance. In essence, they are reducing or sequestering carbon dioxide in the soil through practices and technologies such as conservation tillage and methane digesters—a way to capture this superpotent greenhouse gas on dairy farms. Still other farmers are planting forests or native grasslands where they had grown crops. The climate exchange, as well as other regional carbon-offset programs, are gaining appeal among farmers from Georgia to Oregon. …”

Florence Williams is a contributing editor at Outside Magazine. She also frequently writes on science and the environment for the New York Times, OnEarth, High Country News and other publications. A former Ted Scripps Fellow at the University of Colorado, she lives in Colorado with her family.

Veterans Green Jobs was the brainchild of Brett KenCairn, a Wyomingbred community organizer who worked to retrain loggers in the Pacific Northwest after the spotted-owl controversy and then worked with Native Americans on sustainable-forestry projects in Arizona and New Mexico. Now based in Boulder, he saw linking veterans and green jobs as solving two big problems: underemployed vets and an existing workforce too small to tackle global warming. “If we don’t figure out how to mobilize a new workforce at a dramatic scale, our chances of averting climate change are virtually nil,” says KenCairn, who never fought a war but whose father served in Vietnam. “We need to retrofit every building in our built environment. Veterans represent one of the best workforce assets because they’re already
ready for rapid training and deployment.”

…..  Both Reppenhagen and KenCairn expect the military may just be the bridge America needs to popularize the green economy. “The link to average Americans is missing right now,” says Reppenhagen. It’s one thing to want to be a hippie in Boulder and hug a tree; it’s a whole other level to be a veteran and say, ‘Hey I’m coming home from [a] war fighting for oil.’ I think the culture clash could be decreased by realizing there’s something seriously patriotic about energy independence.”

Josh Radoff is cofounder and principal of YRG sustainability, based in Boulder, Colorado. He is a regular speaker on sustainability issues and has consulted on hundreds of sustainability projects at the intersection of the energy, climate, and green-building fields, both nationally and internationally.

Excerpt:

“… there is also a trend toward more explicitly recognizing the interlinking
nature of both our problems and our priorities and goals. If, for
example, we recognize that we are healthier and happier if we have access to
natural landscape and daylight, if we eat fresh, nutrient-rich non-processed
foods, if we exercise, if we can walk to get around, if we have access to
quiet places, if we get out of our cars, then we start to see our building and
development projects very differently. Development, after all, is literally the
“bringing about of potential or possibilities.” With this in mind, it makes us
ask the question, what is the potential of this piece of land, this urban infill
site, this building, this community? And then the follow-up question, why
are we doing this and what do we hope to achieve?

Some in the green-building industry have started to ask this question
about their projects. Their clients tell them they want an office building.
They ask why. Because they want a place to house their workforce. Why?
Because they want a place where everyone can come together and be productive
in getting their work done. Because they want to develop a community
where people are aligned with the goals of the company and are
inclined to stay there. Because they want people to be healthy and feel good
about coming to work. Because they know if their people are happy, then
they will have a good chance of being successful in their endeavors in the
long term, all of which would make them happier too.

So what they need is not an office building, but a place that can create
community and wellness, foster creativity and productivity, and bring out
the best potential of their people and their company. This changes quite a
bit in how we think about the project. It’s no longer a building. It’s a vehicle
for something else entirely.”

Laura Pritchett is the author/editor of five books. Her fiction includes the novel Sky Bridge, which won the WILLA Fiction Award, and the short story collection Hell’s Bottom, Colorado, which won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and the PEN USA Award. She is also the editor/coeditor of three anthologies: The Pulse of the River, Home Land, and Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers. Pritchett has published over seventy essays and short stories in numerous magazines. She lives in northern Colorado, near the ranch where she was raised.

Excerpt (in which Pritchett describes the sorting process that follows the delivery of dumpster treasure to the waste processing facility):

“…Finally, the workers are done: we have 108 pounds of cans (that’s about
3,215 of those babies), 400 pounds of scrap aluminum, 10 pounds of clean
and dirty copper, 174 pounds of radiators (aluminum/copper mixed), 116
pounds of insulated wire, 26 pounds of number-one single wire, 25 pounds
of soft lead, 23 pounds of stainless steel, 30 pounds of yellow brass, and a
bunch of batteries.

Assuming that the aluminum would be produced by a coal-fired power
system, we have saved 18,000 pounds (9 tons) of carbon dioxide from being
released into the air. That’s 56 million BTUs. Add to that the copper—about
175 pounds—which saves another 10 million BTUs (and an additional 3,000
pounds of carbon dioxide from being emitted). And we’re just talking about
the aluminum and copper here; we’re not even talking about how much
earth would have been stripped, processed, and laid waste in a tailings pile
left to further pollute.

On top of this, my kids are holding their first $100 dollar bill, which
they’re looking at with reverence and awe. Compared to their lemonade
stands, this diving business is the better deal.”

Michael L. Beatty is chairman of Beatty & Wozniak, PC, a thirty-five-attorney law firm headquartered in Denver, Colorado, and dedicated exclusively to the energy industry. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School, Beatty currently serves as a director of two publicly traded energy companies. Beatty served as chief of staff to Colorado governor Roy Romer, and was chairman of the Colorado Democratic Party.

Excerpt:

Green energy policy has now taken on the same moral connotation as
homeownership. America has made a moral choice for affordable, abundant,
carbon-free energy and doesn’t want to hear dissent. Unfortunately, turning
the energy debate into a moral issue instead of a policy discussion is
destructive and keeps us from exercising prudent judgment. Fossil fuels can
represent the values of either George Bailey or Henry Potter. Fossil fuels have
enabled America to become the most powerful nation in the world, given us
the highest standard of living, enabled our agricultural industry to feed the
world, and saved us from destruction at the hands of the Kaiser, Tojo, and
Hitler. Coal, oil, and natural gas continue to provide steady, dependable, and
affordable energy for our nation’s homes, commerce, and industry. Likewise,
we can argue that fossil fuels are not only destroying the planet, but also
dehumanizing humanity. These “fuels from hell” and their greedy sponsors
have bankrupted our nation, increased our trade imbalance, fueled Middle
East terrorism, funded the Taliban, exploited labor, created monopolies, and
precipitated every ill from the Ludlow Massacre to 9/11.

After more than a century of being cheap, plentiful, and ignored, fossil
fuels are either the root cause of every problem or the foundation for every
solution. Fossil fuels heat our political rhetoric as well as our homes and
fuel partisanship as effectively as automobiles. Nowhere is the fight more
acrimonious than Colorado. Our plentiful natural-gas resources and strong
environmental ethic have caused a bitter fight with no middle ground. Making
energy policy a moral choice has polarized the vocabulary such that
reasoned discussion is now impossible.

For the great majority of citizens, the contradictory claims create paralysis,
typified by the shopper who drove her car home to get Whole Foods
cloth bags because she was unwilling to choose between paper or plastic.
We need to have a serious discussion about energy policy and we need to
make hard choices, but we also need to start that discussion with a clear
understanding of the facts and a willingness to be rational.

Diane Carman is director of communications at the School of Public Affairs, the University of Colorado Denver. She is a former columnist for the Denver Post.

excerpt:

“Dad wore his clothes until the pants were shiny and his shoes until they
could no longer be resoled, and I never saw a no-deposit, no-return beer
bottle in the house until after the old man died.
If anybody had measured his carbon footprint, it would have been a
fraction of mine, as I pursue the life of a twenty-first-century carbon-calculating
eco-consumer in earnest. While the eco-consumer of my dad’s era
was defined by what he didn’t buy—which was essentially anything that
wasn’t absolutely necessary—subsequent generations have embraced the
philosophy that almost any challenge can be met by hypervigilant shopping.
Now, I may not be as nuts as my friends who insist they won’t drink
anything but organically grown coffee prepared in the world’s only solarpowered
coffee roaster—Pueblo, Colorado’s, Solar Roast Coffee—but I’ll
admit I’m a sucker for product with a green pedigree.”