www.greenbuildermag.com 07.2012
FROM THE TAILGATE Sage advice from the trenches
64 E Leading from Within
VEN AS WE PREPARE THIS ISSUE of Green Builder magazine, we bear witness to massive natural disaster and human tragedy, as almost a score of unchecked wildfires—some of truly gigantic dimensions—explode through stands of timber, grazing tracts, diverse natural habitats and human neighborhoods over nine of the western states. News reports
display horrifi c images of former timberlands reduced to ash, smoldering remains of homes and barns, smoke plumes and scorching fl ames that can be seen clearly in photographs from space. The video spectacle of an air
tanker disintegrating in mid-fl ight, claiming the lives of its crew on sudden, wrenching impact jolts us. The determined, exhausted faces of firefighters—professional and volunteer alike—intermingled with shell-shocked evacuees, reinforce our realization that man’s best eff orts are often barely enough to scratch the surface in these dramatic struggles. Such pressures have taken their
toll, both on nature and on our state of mind. Decades of misguided policy and forest mismanagement, (with all the vitriol it has created), along with weather that seems to grows hotter and drier with each passing season—plus the choices we all make that in one form or another put us in harm’s way—seem to have set the stage for an era of catastrophe. There are times when a feeling of helplessness is so
overwhelming that it seems to be all we have left. Nature will have her way. And the road we travel toward wisdom and understanding is not an easy one. We fi nd ourselves stopping to ask, “How do we even know where to start in making our world a more sustainable place?” There seems to be a global vacuum of leadership in
these matters. I am truly at a loss when it comes to where I can turn for courage and reassurance. But perhaps that
is part of nature’s lesson as well, that leadership ultimately comes from within. A friend and colleague recently shared an essay by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, titled “You Were Made For This.” “Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage at the latest degradation of what matters most to civilized, visionary people,” she writes. But she also imparts a nugget of sagacity, an idea whose proportions give us hope that perhaps we can aff ect the fi nal outcome: “Ours is not the task of fi xing the entire world all at once,
but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” GB
By Ron Jones
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