Green Man Thriving

Celebrating our Anniversary with Simple Pleasures

My wife and I just celebrated our 10th anniversary .   Since neither of us can get enough of Florida beaches, we stayed at the Tradewind resort on St. Pete Beach Friday night. The gulf was beautiful (though we did miss the sunset sitting in traffic before we checked in), and in the morning we walked a couple miles of the best, sandy-white beach in the world.   The gulf seemed bluer and calmer than usual.

The Start of My Radical Green Journey

It was four years ago. Global Warming was a simmering topic, punctuated with hot debates, but Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth was not yet exploded onto the scene. The notion of Peak Oil was sitting out there, bubbling up here and there on the Internet but laying largely undetected on the media landscape. China was churning out waves of cargo containers filled with cool cheap stuff sailing into our lives for a short time and then winding up in the attic, garage, or trash becoming the flotsam and jetsam of our lives.

Me - I was a happily married, father of a three-year-old daughter, residing uneventfully in a Tampa suburb.  My career in the corporate world had treated me reasonably well, and now I was growing a small business. A story like a million others.

My radical transformation was the culmination of many things. I can't say I had an epiphany, but there was one moment that sticks in my memory.  It was when I decided, with enthusiastic encouragement from my lovely wife, to clean our garage and re-organize the attic.

I won't bore you with the litany of life junk that I waded through that day, or should I say weekend, but all this flotsam and jetsam, surely repeated in many garages and attics across the US, suggested more than that my housekeeping stinks. It told me that, while we were on a great, exciting, luxurious cruise called our life, perhaps we, along with all Americans, were really headed for a ship wreck.

This is when my radical green journey began...

It was four years ago. Global Warming was a simmering topic, punctuated with hot debates, but Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth was not yet exploded onto the scene. The notion of Peak Oil was sitting out there, bubbling up here and there on the Internet but laying largely undetected on the media landscape. China was churning out waves of cargo containers filled with cool cheap stuff sailing into our lives for a short time and then winding up in the attic, garage, or trash becoming the flotsam and jetsam of our lives.

Me - I was a happily married, father of a three-year-old daughter, residing uneventfully in a Tampa suburb.  My career in the corporate world had treated me reasonably well, and now I was growing a small business. A story like a million others.

My radical transformation was the culmination of many things. I can't say I had an epiphany, but there was one moment that sticks in my memory.  It was when I decided, with enthusiastic encouragement from my lovely wife, to clean our garage and re-organize the attic.

I won't bore you with the litany of life junk that I waded through that day, or should I say weekend, but all this flotsam and jetsam, surely repeated in many garages and attics across the US, suggested more than that my housekeeping stinks. It told me that, while we were on a great, exciting, luxurious cruise called our life, perhaps we, along with all Americans, were really headed for a ship wreck.

This is when my radical green journey began...