It wasn’t long before Tami and I became an item, and when she joined me in the woods of Chatham County, she was suspicious of ecovillages and co-counseling and all such talk of radical changes to the way people should live.
And while she kept her distance from the long, complex arguments that were ongoing at the kitchen table, her presence didn’t change our love for theoretical conversations about “community.” While activists and organizers talked late into the night, the unincorporated village of Moncure, where we lived, was in the throes of a bruising battle over whether or not it should become a town. We were oblivious to the actual life in our community. We missed the meetings in the fire hall, and missed the petition drives at Ray’s Supermarket.
We were newcomers, and outsiders who simply lived here. Our concept of community was abstract. Instead of putting our names on a petition, we were reading books about societal change. Instead of voting, were debating the concept of democracy.
Some worked on the farm to produce food. Some worked at micro-enterprise to produce products we would need.
While we explored structures that would permit us to vote for the inclusion of prospective neighbors, our actual neighbors were actively involved in the life of the community. In our make-believe world, different people assumed different tasks. The process and the people intrigued me, and I loved the fantasy. I think everyone assumed that I would simply be the person responsible for “cash inputs” since I spent far too much time in airports to be actively engaged in the creation of community.
I was wedded to the global economy. My outpost of the family business had grown substantially, and I found myself traveling the globe to do deals on behalf of our vendors. I spent considerable time in the “Technology from Canada” booths in Germany, and Las Vegas, and Budapest. I found myself at parties in embassies, and consulates around the world, and with my selling skills in high demand; I was routinely flown to Caribbean countries for conversations on how to close the next big deal.
Mine is not a John Perkins story. He’s the author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man who knowingly checked his conscience in exchange for riches. I thought I was on the right path. I worked in concert with my brothers, on a quest for a billion dollar empire. I genuinely didn’t know any better.
I was running a profitable, ethical corporation. I was creating jobs. I was generating wealth. I stabbed no one in the back, saw no need to crush anyone below me, and if business is to be described as a “dog eat dog” activity, I had no occasion to “eat dog.”
My employees tended to stay with me for many years; I won awards for workplace culture, for family friendly environments, and for waste reduction. I had a disciplined program of charitable giving, and donated a percentage of my profits to local charities in the markets where the profits were produced. We all did. The family business was simply a good thing.
I gave money to our local National Public Radio affiliate, and to Family Violence and Rape Crisis, and to the Carnivore Preservation Trust, and to the Chatham Arts Council, and to the Education Foundation, and to a host of other local causes that I believed in. My company’s name was on the rolls of pretty much every charity in Chatham County.
On one of the rare occasions when I was in town long enough to participate in civic life, I went to a town hall meeting only to hear one of my activist buddies proclaim that it was “transnational corporations that are the problem.”
I was a transnational. I didn’t see a problem, exactly. In the ancient world Hermes was the god of travel. He’s the fellow with the wings on his boots. It was business people who tended to be the travelers, so Hermes was the god of business. Thieves also traveled. So Hermes was the god of thieves. I spent a couple of decades traveling on business, and never had to participate in the thieving part.
Although I did have a sense that something was wrong.
I saw the pure wastage of international business. And I started worrying about life on the planet. In an effort to remember my days as a “global producer,” I delved back into my journal entries. Before pouring my heart out on Energy Blog, I used to journal occasionally, and I found an entry that was penned in a sidewalk café on Avenida Libarado in Lisbon, Portugal on May 8, 1995. I had just paid sixty thousand escudos for a night in a hotel, and I reflected:
As I walk past restaurants and prostitutes and night clubs familiar from the prior evenings, it occurs to me that in my four days here I have spent close to two thousand US dollars, or roughly twenty percent of the average Portuguese wage earner’s yearly take.
Pondering the energy required to come by two thousand dollars is a daunting task. With an equal sum I could spare one thousand hectares of Amazon rainforest. Or I could adopt a kinkajou in Pittsboro and provide it with sustenance and habitat for three years. Two thousand dollars is more than a Cabloco family will spend in a generation, and yet, it’s been a delightful four days in Lisbon.
It was starting to dawn on me that I did more environmental destruction with my commuting than several generations of Cabloco farmers in the Amazon. I once canoed a portion of the Amazon and I saw multiple families sharing a single machete. At the time it was fashionable to knock Brazil for the “burning of the rainforest,” and traveling through the fires made me wonder about my own business travel.
Waste worried me. When I left my home and native land, the City of Guelph was ticketing people at the curb for failure to properly sort their recyclables. When I arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, they were still tossing everything into the landfill. There was no recycling. I’m not sure I even was an environmentalist at the time. But when you’re in the recycling habit, it’s hard to throw an aluminum can in the trash.
I had an ingrained sense that the failure to recycle items into new products was wrong-headed. When I was in high school in the late seventies, my father and I would tote tin cans down to ARC Industries to be resold into the metal markets. He grew up in the Depression, and wasted virtually nothing.
Moving to a culture that had no sense of recycling jarred me. It awoke the desire for change. When I decided to use recycled cardboard boxes for our shipments, we gobbled up all of the cardboard of two neighboring office buildings. I started shredding fine paper for use as packaging materials, and I pushed several vendors on design changes for their product packaging. We implemented a “buy green” purchasing policy back in the late 1980s.
We were “greening” our operation before the term had been invented. And we weren’t doing it to gain market share. We were doing it because it felt like the right thing to do.
Although we were not running foundries, or locomotives, we were producing. We were kicking out a lot of wealth. Ayn Rand would have been impressed. Our names appeared on a bunch of donor lists. And we employed a lot of people.
We were simply utilizing our skills to exploit markets and opportunities that happened to be global in nature. There was a nagging sense that something was wrong with the trajectory of our lives, as we shuttled back and forth from the airport to our piece of paradise in the woods, but we were not sure what that something was.
We were deep in what David Korten refers to as the “Imperial Consciousness.” We were building an empire.
There was a time when “casual Fridays” meant less starch in our button-down collars. We used to sit around our lunchroom table, in our coats and our ties, discussing the new trend in corporate apparel that we had heard about.
We mused about the local economy, and speculated about our role within it, but we were so immersed in our corporate endeavors, it was a mere topic of conversation — sort of like new trends in office apparel.
That was until I bought BLAST, and moved it to Pitts–boro.
Before it came to Pittsboro, BLAST was a slick little communications tool that Dan and Polly Henderson and their company had developed in Baton Rouge. It would be nice to say it came from the