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It’s hard to believe, but NWEI’s 20th Anniversary is just around the corner. One short year from now NWEI will turn 20, and in preparation for our 20th Anniversary we’re creating a map that will “pin” locations where NWEI courses have taken place over time. Whether you participated in 1993 or just last week, in one course or all 11, we invite you to “pin” your location on our Alumni Map.
Click here to complete a very short web form, and we’ll use your City/State/Zip Code information to create a pin on our NWEI Alumni Map.
Thanks for helping us demonstrate the reach of NWEI’s programs and our impact across North America! As an incentive to create your Alumni “pin” on the map we have a couple of swell raffle prizes that everyone who completes the form will be eligible to win–including a free pair of KEEN shoes and a KEEN bag.
One of NWEI’s long time volunteers, Betty Shelley, will be offering a “Reduce Your Waste, Reduce Your Impact” class beginning Tuesday February 7th – hosted at the NWEI office in Portland. Alarmingly, since 1900 the US population has tripled but use of materials has increased 17-fold (from David Wann’s Simple Prosperity). If you would like to reduce your waste and lessen your impact on the planet, this class is for you! Below is information from Betty regarding the class:
I will be offering my three-session “Reduce Your Waste, Reduce Your Impact” class this winter at the Northwest Earth Institute office beginning Tuesday, February 7th from 6:30 to 8:30pm. The class will deal with solid waste, aka garbage, but will also touch on reducing water, energy, and other resource use. The format is interactive with the goal of engaging participants through discussion and assignments to explore their actions and behaviors, and learn ways to make lasting changes. Learn my techniques and share your own.
*To sign up for the class, either email or call no later than January 31st. The number of participants needed is a minimum of eight and a maximum of twelve. The class will be cancelled if fewer than eight sign up. The $25 fee (cash only) is due in full at the first meeting.
Please share this with anyone you know who is interested in making a commitment to reducing their impact.
Betty Shelley 503-244-8044 greenhouseone@gmail.com
“It was great to talk to other people about their efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle. Just going to the class made me feel great and inspired to take more action.” Barbara
“Even knowing as much as I know, I still learned quite a bit that I take and use at home and in my business.” Lane’
“The activities and lecture portions were just short enough to keep people interested. The small tips had the best impact for me.” Jessica
Download the class flyer here: BettyShelleyWasteReductionClass
The Northwest Earth Institute is seeking an experienced development associate to join its team. This 15 hour a week position will provide key coordination and support of NWEI’s fundraising efforts in the areas of annual giving, campaign support, database management and miscellaneous department support. The Development Associate reports to the Development Director.
Please see the complete job description for more details and application instructions: NWEI Dev Assoc Job Description.
Happy New Year! We are excited to bring you another edition of our EarthMatters newsletter. The Winter 2012 EarthMatters feature article, by Sarah van Gelder and Doug Pibel of YES! Magazine, lays out a plan for creating an economy that builds real prosperity without undermining the natural systems that we all rely on. Inside you’ll also find a wonderful Knowing Your Place piece, “Thinking like Aldo Leopold” and the latest news from the NWEI community and partners.
I can’t think of a better time to pursue a life that’s simpler, richer and more fulfilling than right now.
Year-round NWEI helps you to experience the “Aha!” moments that change the way you live, work, create and consume. NWEI’s work to spark the conversations that create change, through our discussion courses and the EcoChallenge, wouldn’t be possible without your support.
As we reflect on the past year, and a year of inspiring stories of positive action relayed by our participants, we also give thanks for the donors who support our work. As a nonprofit, we rely on the support of the people for whom our work resonates. Perhaps you were inspired by a discussion course—recently or years ago– to take action to simplify your life. Maybe participating in the EcoChallenge launched a lasting new behavior to save water or energy, or choose more sustainable food options. Or, you might be one of the thousands of people each year who take part in a discussion course and find the inspiration to make changes at home or in your community to reduce your impact. Whatever your “NWEI story”, you are a valued member of our community. And, your support as a donor will go directly toward our efforts to create a simpler, richer, more sustainable future for us and generations to come.
Make your gift today knowing that your donation will be invested wisely. NWEI is a nonprofit with a strong volunteer base and small staff, and we work year-round to ensure that we’re having the greatest impact possible.
Every dollar truly does count. Thank you for your generosity today. On behalf of NWEI’s entire staff and Board of Directors, we wish you happy, healthy, joyful holidays.
A guest post by Duncan Berry
Duncan Berry has spent most of his life as a designer turned business man at the intersection of values based businesses like the global organic cotton movement. He is currently a partner in Ecosystem Services LLC whose business incubator is the coastal temperate forests of North America where he labors happily to strike a lasting balance between human communities and the natural systems of which they are an inextricable part.
I have had 2 questions on my mind ever since I spent 30 days in seclusion with the systems thinker and deep ecologist Joanna Macy 4 years ago.
What does it mean to be indigenous?
Can one become so in a single lifetime by living in deep relationship with a place?
My wife and I live on the edge of a continent, where 5000 miles of open ocean meets the buckled, young lands of Oregon’s coastline. We are the minority in this majority of wildness and we spend as much time as we can out under the sky working, exploring, feeding ourselves and occasionally slowing down long enough to lose our sense of separation in this wild place.
With the holiday season upon us, I wanted to remind you that NWEI course books and memberships make wonderful gifts. Share the gift of simplicity with your loved ones, and wrap up a copy of NWEI’s newly revised Voluntary Simplicity book. Or, provide your friends and family with the information and inspiration to pursue sustainable food choices with a copy of our newest book, Hungry for Change.
To share NWEI’s mission and message with your dear ones year-round, an NWEI gift membership makes a perfect present. For $30 you can purchase a gift membership for a friend or family member, or for $45 purchase a gift membership package, which comes with the NWEI book of your choice (shipping is on us!).
Simplify your shopping and support NWEI in the process by ordering NWEI books and memberships for everyone on your list who’s interested in creating a life that’s simpler, richer and better!
To order gift membership packages (memberships+ a book) please call us at 503-227-2807 and reference the holiday gift membership package. Gift memberships and books can always be ordered separately on our website too: for gift memberships click here, and to order course books click here.
Happy Holidays!
A rain barrel installed as part of my personal EcoChallenge
This was a record year for our EcoChallenge. A total of 1533 individuals participated–more than 3 times the total from the previous two years combined! As always, we were amazed and inspired by the stories of change, and thought we’d share a few of the insights we enjoyed this year:
- In his challenge to spend less time in front of the computer, college student Benjamin Guy found that “screens just seem to occupy so much of our livelihood. We need to be able to maintain a certain amount of distance so that we can appreciate the things around us instead of images of those things.”
- EcoChallenger Susan Joseph Rack found an unexpected insight in her transition to CFL light bulbs: “Some time ago, I noticed a pang of impatience when I turned on a light and the CFL bulb hesitated a second before going on. Now I hardly notice it. I find that that brief hesitation slowed me down a bit, has taught me that rushing is not necessary. A simple blessing from a CFL bulb.”
- And new bike commuter Greg Karpicus discovered that “there is a big difference between preaching about going green and actually following through. One makes you sweatier but it is so much more rewarding.”
We are particularly grateful for the incredible participation by Multnomah County employees – in all, 565 individuals from 50 different Multnomah County teams took on the EcoChallenge!
We also loved sharing the insights, humor, photos and recipes of our Featured Bloggers – Courtney Carver, Bill Gerlach, Shelly Randall, Stacey Ho, Lauren Savaglio and Kathleen McDade. Visit the Featured Bloggers page to explore their words of wisdom.
This year’s challenge brought home the power of story in helping to shift our individual and collective behaviors toward the future we aspire to. Stories make change more personal, more doable and–in the end–shape our culture and become the norm for how life can be lived. Thank you to all who participated in the EcoChallenge for your inspiring work and I’m looking forward to creating more stories of change with each of you!
If you were not able to join us in the EcoChallenge this year, mark your calendars for October 1-15, for EcoChallenge 2012.
Day three of our North American Gathering took place on Saturday, September 17th. We were honored to have Will Allen join us on Saturday, and thank Shelly Randall for blogging about his keynote speech.
He came, he saw, he loved our farmers market!
“Genius” farmer Will Allen of Milwaukee, Wis. (he’s only the second farmer to have been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant), made a very special visit to Port Townsend Saturday to be the keynote speaker on on Day 3 of the Northwest Earth Institute conference.
The “good food revolution” founder‘s schedule was booked: first with an interview on KPTZ and then back-to-back Q&A sessions with a group of 20 young people interested in food activism, then with 65 local farmers—sandwiched around lunch at the Port Townsend Farmers Market. (He had a Bavarian bratwurst, with mayo, in case you’re wondering.)
The 500 people who filled McCurdy Pavilion at Fort Worden to hear his evening talk were delighted to hear Will compliment our beloved market.
“You guys are fortunate to have one of the best farmers markets I’ve seen—and I’ve visited almost every city in America!” Will said to enthusiastic applause.
Click here to visit Shelly’s blog to read the rest of this post.
Following is another guest post by our conference blogger, Shelly Randall. Visit Shelly’s website at www.sustainabletogether.com.
If not me, then who?
It’s the conference theme and the rhetorical question we are all grappling with at the Northwest Earth Institute’s North American gathering at Fort Worden State Park here in Port Townsend. If we don’t step up to take action, how can we expect others to?
On Day 2, the first full day of the conference, we heard several inspiring stories from leaders who have stepped up to build coalitions around local food, to facilitate local investing opportunities, to create a lifestyle change action guide, and more.
Participants are appreciating the level of detail shared on how to replicate these actions in other communities. “A good mix of pragmatism and idealism,” was one comment. “The best feet-on-the-ground presentation I’ve seen,” was another. Snooze-inducing Powerpoint presentations these are not!
I plan to write detailed posts about the presentations I attended in the weeks to come, especially the success stories from Port Townsend: using NWEI Menu for the Future discussion groups to bring farmers and local-food customers together; and growing community capital with a membership group called LION (Local Investing Opportunities Network).
Right now it’s past midnight, and my head is swimming with “feelings of excitement, interest, intrigue, befuddlement,” as presenter/attendee Kurt Hoelting described it at the end of this long and mind-bending day.
But before I hit the sack, I want to share Kurt’s original and heartfelt response to the question, “If not me, then who?”
“It’s exactly the question that sent me on this journey. And it’s probably the most important question I live with every day,“ he said at the start of his keynote talk on how he chose to take personal responsibility for his role in global warming.
Kurt, a wilderness guide and meditation teacher who traveled all over the world for business and pleasure, decided to dramatically reduce his carbon footprint by giving up jet and auto travel for one year. He wrote a book about his 2008 adventure called The Circumference of Home: One Man’s Yearlong Quest for a Radically Local Life.
For that one year he decided to travel only within 100 kilometers of his South Whidbey home, within a circle that encompasses the stunningly beautiful Puget Sound basin. Tonight we enjoyed a slide show of images from his walking, biking and paddling trips, and considered his advice for avoiding despair or denial over the state of the world: “The question is not do we respond, but can we turn it into an adventure?”
Kurt asked us to tell the person sitting next to us the boldest thing we could imagine doing to address the current environmental crisis. Then he urged us to consider actually doing it.
“The invitation I leave you with is to really ‘up the ante.’ To dare one another, in a way, to move in the direction of something bold. Something that begins to match the scale of the challenge we face.”
What’s the boldest action you can imagine taking to move yourself or your community to greater sustainability? Leave a comment if you want to share.
After all, if not you, then who?
Many thanks to Shelly Randall, our conference blogger, for providing the following summary of Day One of the our North American Gathering. Visit Shelly’s Blog, Sustainable Together, at www.sustainabletogether.com.
“We are the ones / We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” was the hopeful message raised in song at tonight’s opening event of the Northwest Earth Institute’s North American gathering in Port Townsend.
Some of the voices were a little off-key, but we just looked at each other, shrugged, smiled, and kept singing.
Not many conferences kick off with rounds and layer songs, but this isn’t just any conference, and the attendees are not exactly shrinking violets. They are bold and innovative environmental activists. They are agitators for change in their communities. They are passionate people with causes–and they are pretty good vocalists, as a whole!
Presenter Gretchen Sleicher (stepping in for Pam Wood, who was unable to present at the last minute) gave a program on “The Great Turning,” which she described as “the adventure of moving toward a life-sustaining civilization”—in opposition to the “the idea that we can keep going and going on a finite planet.”
Using call-and-response, Gretchen taught us songs to illustrate the four “points of the spiral”—Gratitude, Honoring Our Pain for the World, Seeing With New Eyes, and Going Forth. She wrote some of the songs herself, and has collected others from around the world. The words and MP3 files with the melodies are available at songsforthegreatturning.net.
“Songs metabolize human emotion,” Gretchen told us. She is passionate about the power of music to enliven and inspire: here in Port Townsend she co-directs the PT Songlines choir and she leads workshops around the region that combine group singing and Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects.
Judging by the wholehearted participation of the conference’s early arrivals (50 so far, more to come in the morning) and the positive vibrations ringing in the room, the singing was a great icebreaker. We also paired up to do some get-to-kn0w-each-other exercises where we alternated between active listening and sharing our thoughts on topics such as, “Some things that are concerning to me in this moment of planetary crisis are…”
Serious stuff.
“We don’t know if this great turning is happening at the same time as this great unraveling,” Gretchen said. “But if we knew, would it [this global challenge] elicit our greatest creativity? It is a blessing to be alive at this time and not know.”
Our Fall EarthMatters newsletter is here, a little in advance of the change of seasons. In addition to the latest NWEI program news, inside you’ll find articles from:
- Scott Dodd, who writes for OnEarth Magazine
- Duncan Berry, a values-based business man, who also writes beautiful poetry about his place, the Oregon coast, and
- Barbara Duncan, a long-time NWEI volunteer and director of the Catamount Earth Institut
Inside, you’ll will also find all the latest details about the 2011 EcoChallenge. Join us from October 1-15, 2011 as we collectively prove that many people taking action adds up to real change!
Click here to download your electronic copy of the Fall EarthMatters newsletter.
In just over a month, our cadre of EcoChallengers will set out to save water, conserve energy, reduce the waste that ends up in our landfills, prove that car-free transportation is a viable option, and eat more sustainably–and we hope to count you among our 2011 EcoChallengers.
There are a few ways to participate–by starting your own team (and inviting your community to join the ranks), by joining the NWEI Community Team, or by signing up as an EcoChallenge fundraiser.
If you need inspiration to start a team, just check out the list of teams who have signed up so far–the list includes large companies like The Standard, community groups like the Unitarian-Universalist Church Of Belfast and even an extended family taking on the EcoChallenge together, the Alex. T Jones Family Reunion team. We’d love to have your neighborhood, business, family or congregation join us too, so consider starting a team.
We’re also welcoming participants on the NWEI Community Team. The more the merrier and everyone is welcome! For details on how to join the NWEI Community Team visit the team page on the EcoChallenge site. You’ll join Sarah Crump, our fabulous EcoChallenge intern, who’s taking on a no-trash challenge (and any trash she does generate during the EcoChallenge she’s pledged to carry around with her, as a visual of what can’t be recycled, composted or otherwise diverted from the landfill), and Sky Trombly who is undertaking a human-powered transportation challenge.
If you’re feeling inspired, you are also invited to take on the EcoChallenge as an EcoChallenge Fundraiser. Our team of EcoChallenge Fundraisers will set out to raise $25,000 in pledges during the EcoChallenge–by collecting pledges from friends and family to support their EcoChallenge. Raise $50 as an EcoChallenge Fundraiser and you’ll also be eligible to win some great prizes. You’ll be in good company as an EcoChallenge Fundraiser- the entire staff and board of NWEI are participating as fundraisers again this year, and you’ll join other NWEI supporters like Erin Simons and Tami Boardman.
Registration is underway, and we look forward to hearing what your EcoChallenge will be this year!
Just in case you missed our big announcement, yesterday we launched EcoChallenge 2011. The EcoChallenge will change your life. No, really! it will! My first EcoChallenge was to take on the hyperlocavore 100 mile diet, and since then I’ve thought about food, food transportation and the import/export systems nearly every time I grocery shop. Last year I took on a no-plastics challenge, and attempted to live plastic free for the 2 weeks of the EcoChallenge. Note that I said “attempted”. Lesson learned: plastic is everywhere. Since then, I’ve continued to eliminate as much single use plastic from my life and don’t think I’ll ever consider packaging and single-use items in the same light again.
This October we hope you will take on your own personal EcoChallenge and maybe you too will change for good.
We’re seeking participants who are interested in being EcoChallenge Bloggers. The EcoChallenge always leads to great stories, fun anecdotes, and shared learning, and we want you to help us tell the fun, compelling, thought-provoking stories of making a positive impact through sustainable change. The EcoChallenge runs from October 1-15, and we’d love to find a few folks who will commit to blogging at least 2-3 times each week.
In exchange for your words, wisdom and tales of challenges and success, we will feature you here on our blog, on the EcoChallenge website, and in our social media posts during the EcoChallenge. If you’re interested in blogging your adventures in changing for good email me at kerry at nwei dot org. If you’re already blogging elsewhere on the web, send me a link to your blog too.
If you’re up for the Challenge, we look forward to hearing from you!
EcoChallenge 2011 is your opportunity to change your life for good. Whether the EcoChallenge is your first step toward a lower impact lifestyle, or you’ve been around the environmental block many times, we invite you to Challenge yourself this October 1 – 15. Register today, and join a growing community of people who are taking action on behalf of the planet!
Participating is simple, you choose your EcoChallenge category (water, energy, food, transportation, trash or choose-your-own) and your EcoChallenge Actions, and get ready to take on your Challenge for 15 days in October.
Your EcoChallenge successes are both good for you and good for the planet. To provide a little extra inspiration (and thank you for a job well done), we’ll be raffling off prizes throughout the two week event.
Find out more about the EcoChallenge and get registered at www.ecochallenge.org. We look forward to taking on the 2011 EcoChallenge with you!
Ryan Harper
Deborah McNamara
Kerry Lyles
Mike Mercer
Lacy Cagle
Carolyn White
Rob Nathan
