Sometimes the truest stuff is fiction …

The header images you see above are now a random rotation from a growing set.  Most were taken by my son, a few by myself.  If you get the one with the snow shovel, yes, that is me walking out in the field in a futile attempt to shovel out the Subaru during the Valentine’s day storm.

This is a new theme.  If there is a huge public outcry I will bring back the old look - but I think this is a bit cleaner and highlights the writing.  I will slowly be adding back the essays that got wiped out by the change-over.

The first Trimester at the Marlboro Grad Center has ended! I made it through ten credits of an MBA in Managing for Sustainability while holding down a full time job! How’d I do? We’ll know for sure when the grades come in … in the mean time I have posted two of my book reviews [in the sidebar under ’sustainable practices], so you can decide for yourself.

Is this work pace sustainable? For another trimester or two …

[cross posted to the Pennsylvania for Obama group at barackobama.com]

Hello to Pennsylvania from a Vermonter!

I wanted to say that we carried Vermont because, among other things, there was room for every kind of support, from every kind of person. From folks organizing honk-n-waves to the political heavy hitters raising thousands of dollars. From those that love to make phone calls to those that sat quietly in the background, but kept our organizing web sites up and running. Our own Philip Baruth has a great write up, with some great pictures, at Vermont Daily Briefing in his March 4th post.

I have heard from the campaign that the most effective thing you can do is canvass - and this is probably true in a strict political sense. But I know that really, the most effective thing you can do is what you feel passionate about - and the most helpful way to put this passion to use for Obama is in the way that you feel to be the most effective.

I know that joining this campaign has stretched me beyond my comfort zone. I hate making cold calls, and I spent several evenings calling down to SC, wondering who would listen to a white boy with a new england accent - and I had great conversations, found support, and learned something about others and myself. I walked up to trailers on dirt roads in New Hampshire, dogs barking inside, knocked on the door - and found people that were eager to find a candidate that offered hope of a solution to problems they were facing. I have done what I can to surface support at work, letting people know it is OK in this apolitical office to show concern, show support, talk to each other about things besides business.

But, when you boil it down, the effectiveness did not come from my discomfort, or where or how the conversations happened. The effectiveness came from one person talking to another, listening to each other’s concerns, making connections between those concerns and the possibility of change, between those concerns and hope.

The effectiveness came from the human connection of talking to each other about the issues that are important to us, and getting back in touch with an idea that we have the power to create a solution. That we have the power to change, and that Obama is asking us to believe in that as much as he is asking us to believe in his ability to serve us as president.

One person talking to another. That is how it works - be it via canvassing, on the phone, over coffee with a neighbor, writing a letter, posting to a blog, or holding a sign and waving at a street corner. One person talking to another - something each of us can do, in whatever way we can.

I look forward to supporting all of you in PA

Just a quick note. I wanted to find a simple, lightweight text editor to compose posts with, one that had a running word count (for school assingments), and a spell check - and not much else.

I found this one, Q10. It is an editor designed for one thing - banging out text. It has no fonts, none of that fancy bullet link format paragraph double spacing stuff. No scrollbars. No hover help.

Just a big black screen - no distractions - and when you type, text appears.

You can save it to a file. Cut and paste. Spell check. Best of all, down the bottom, on the status bar, there is the word count. So, for example, I can tell you that I am on paragraph 3, line 12 (lines of text, not lines on the screen), word 133.

And, it has a timer, so you can set a time goal, keep you from getting lost in those thoughts, or drifting around moodle. (or, for those of you interested, it is a perfect setup to run drills for NaNoWriMo in November - if you don’t know what that is, just ask …)

Now, for those assignment word limits - 500 words, 250 words … who cares? I can just bang out text on this baby till, well, till I’ve said my piece, or … that little word counter down in the corner ticks over.

Nice light executable, so it fits on your flash drive, you will always have your “pen” with you.

Closest thing I’ve found to a typewriter. A writer’s editor. Perfect.

Go to http://www.baara.com/q10/. Download it. Start typing (alt-tab to get to your other windows apps, F1 to get the help card) Oh My God, only twenty five more words till I hit the two hundred and fifty word goal for this piece. Oh, yea, you can download a sound file so that this baby even sounds like the typewrite you used to play with in your father’s study when you were a kid.

[Originally posted on Vermonters For Obama]

It was great to see everyone at the Sheraton last night, and great to watch the delegates roll in on the big screen.

It was even better to get up at 6:00 to a blanket of new snow, nervously peek at politico.com while the coffee was brewing, and see the percentages in California up from the 32% I went to bed with …

I just loved the line “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”.

And it got me thinking … Vermont is a small state … and we are a pretty lively group … what if we wanted to knock on every door in Vermont?

According to the most recent projections from the US Census, there are 309,557 dwelling units in Vermont. Run that through the 82% occupancy rate from the ‘00 census and you get roughly 253,800 doors to try.

Now, all you GOTV vets know that we target Dems and Independents. But here in Vermont we have the TVI - the True Vermont Independent - who will put a Republican governor in office, but send a Socialist to the US Senate. Go figure. But this means you never know which door a vote might be hiding behind, so we’ll skip the targeting.

Besides, we don’t want anyone to feel left out. Bad for business if word gets around we skipping some folks.

Now our volunteer list here has about 128 people on it. A quick survey of the other VT lists shows that they are smaller, around 50 - 30 folks each. Add ‘em all in, adjust for overlap, and we get, say 175 people. If everyone brings a friend, that goes to 350, maybe pick up some strays and call it 400.

Now, for the big calculation. 253,800 door by 400 people gives us each 634 doors. 634 chances to figure out how to get that get that piece of campaign lit to sick in the screen door with the dog barking, have a great conversation with a new voter, hear stories of elections past, share thoughts & concerns, argue, be told “get out of my dooryard” …

634 doors. That is a lot. But not impossible, in the next four weeks, if we gather some help.

What do think? Willing to give it a go? Imagine all 30 VT delegates for Obama … It could tip the balance. It could send a powerful message: We are the one we are waiting for.

OK, who’s got those voter lists?

[origionally posted as class assignment]
Response to “A Roadmap to Natural Capitalism”; What are natural capital and eco-system services, and why are they important for both business and the planet?

Natural capital is a way to express the productive value of ecosystem services, much like financial capital expresses the productive value of monetary assets. Ecosystem services are the basic biological functions that supply resources in the form of materials and energy, and provide a sink for wastes of various kinds.

Like financial capital, natural capital can be spent, conserved, or accumulated. Consider a five acre farm field, growing vegetables. We can view the ability of the land to support the crops as the natural capital inherent in the land, much as we view the ability of a tractor to support the farming operations as a form of fiscal capital. The productive ability of the field depends on both inputs.

Now, when we eat a carrot, are we extracting capital? Perhaps. We can farm in such a way that next year the field will not produce as many carrots. If we don’t replenish the soil with organic material, it will be a tad bit more tired. If we don’t rotate crops, the pests, accustomed to the same crops in the same places, will be a bit more bothersome. In this case, yes, that carrot represents a bit of spent natural capital.

On the other hand, we can farm in such a way as to leave the soil as productive next year as it was this year. We apply compost, we treat the soil with care as we plant and plow. Crops are rotated, and some land is always under cover. In this case, the carrot does not represent capital expenditures. It represents the use of the productive power of the natural capital.

How does the concept of ecosystem services tie in? Think of it this way. The land, the soil is not a thing - not simply a pile of dirt, or a place to walk – but a system. The soil is a complex system that cycles nutrients, manages moisture and water flow, builds up and builds up and breaks down stocks of organic and inorganic materials, and hosts whole communities of living organisms that both use and facilitate these processes. Any combination of these processes can be tapped into to do something useful for us.

We generally aren’t too specific or clear in our thinking about these services. We say we use the soil to “grow things”, and, unless we are a farmer, don’t think of which of the suite of the services provided by the soil-as-system we are making use of.
Natural capital then, is the productive capacity of ecosystem services. This is essential – capital is not inherent in the thing, but in the usable excess productive capacity generated by the system. This is perhaps counterintuitive, but, it is true of financial capital as well. The capital value of dollars in the bank is nil. The value of these dollars is in their power to increase productive capacity through the purchase of equipment that increases production efficiency.

The notion of natural capital is essential to a sustainable business model as the concept of natural capital changes the costs associated with natural resource use from production costs to capital costs.

Any business is loath to spend capital – it is suicide. This is especially clear when we view capital not as a thing, but as productive capacity. Give away enough productive capacity and you are done. So, a tight lid is kept on capital expenditures, and capital is always expended with an eye towards increasing productivity enough to recoup the capital, with some extra in the form of profit.

So, by putting casting resource costs as capital costs, the idea of natural capital brings the power of business to bear on the issues involved in preserving ecosystem services. This is essential to business, in that it prevents them from consuming their resource base. It is essential to the planet for the very same reasons.