The Green Collar World

  I grew up Lower-middle Class.  My mother was a manager at a fast food restaurant and my father was a construction worker.  They divorced early in my life.  After the divorce my father became the more financially successful of the two, though he wasn't burdened with feeding, clothing, and entertaining two children for a majority of my upbringing.
  My mother sacrificed her entire life to make sure my brother and I were well taken care of, she worked a 50 hour work week then always had an odd job lined up; whether it be mowing grass or a paper route or anything.  Early in my teen years she found that the company she worked for didn't value her highly enough so she moved onto different ventures, always excelling. My father worked in construction for various companies then decided to start his own carpentry business.  He was an artisan that gained name recognition for his high quality of work.

  Blue Collar is the grossly generalized way of explaining their two drastically different career paths.  I had a blue-collar upbringing.  I ate pasta or chicken six nights a week, got a Nintendo when Super Nintendo was popular; a Super Nintendo when Nintendo 64 was popular.  But my parents provided me with things that were much greatly than material objects; they gave me survival skills and appreciation.  Early into my life I had  learned lessons few of my cohorts understood.  Never accept a free lunch, earn it.  When you fight for every foot, you appreciate every inch.  When you show up to fix someone's toilet you are king, but once it's fixed you are just another bum with poo on your hands.
  By the age of 12 I was working with my father every Summer.  Most days it was clean-up or carrying cement bags up a couple of flights of stairs.  But I would often get trained in the trade.  I am sure is was concerning for folks to walk into a room and seeing a child hanging dry wall unattended, but at the end of the day you couldn't tell the difference between the sheets my father hung and the ones I had.  I was becoming Blue-Collar myself.   
  At 16, within a month of receiving my working and driving permit, I had my first "real" tax-paying job.  I worked for what was essentially a regional Wal-Mart.  The second full month I was there I received the employee of the month award, in receiving that I became one of the few part-timers to get it and the youngest ever (so I was told) to earn it.  By the end of my tour of service in that place I was the unofficial department lead, and had supervisors coming to me for consultation.



Then I went to college.  A very Unblue-collar college.  I quickly picked up the bourgeois passion of Environmentalism and became as my father called me "A Liberal Nancyboy".  During my collegiate years I bounced around between my two worlds.  From the get-go I was too rough for the Environmental Sphere, and I increasingly became too soft for my blue collar upbringing.  My brain was wracked with guilt the more I thought of leaving an old life behind to pursue a higher calling, which is the direction I knew my life would take me.
  During my Environmental Movements and Social Change course I found a way to meld the two.  I learned of an environmental organization now called Earth First!, but initially it was a loose band of individuals that simply called themselves Rednecks for Wilderness.  Rednecks with an S, as in plural.  There were others like me.  From there I learned about the "radicals" involved in homesteading, modern day Eco-villages, and other sorts of off-the-grid, more Appalachian-American styles of living.
  Not many want to reduce their standard of living, so I sought out more modern/industrial alternatives to these great practices that the mainstream would consider quaint or backwoods.

  What I found was the Green Collar Economy.  LEED Houses, Industrial Ecology, the hard-working people that create/install/maintain all those gorgeous Solar Panels and Wind Turbines.  I don't have to throw away my skills and work ethic and past to be a part of the Environmental field, chastising others from an ivory tower of Academia.  I can take my principles and skills, combine them with science and advocacy and become a member of the of the thousands of others that know the true meaning of efficiency and waste, that understand the importance of integration opposed to separation, and are happily assisting in providing the small changes that millions of Americans want and need.  In fact, in 2008 I went to the inaugural Powershift event in Washington DC where myself and hundreds of other young adults participated in conferences and a lobbying day to raise awareness that such a movement exists and we demand it to be acknowledged.  There were people from all walks of life in attendance; from the Virginian affected by mountaintop removal mining, to the composting toilet salesman, to the youthful Green-collar college student that paid his own way 500 miles to see others like him and to find his way in the world.

  This blog is another minor step in that process.  My Consulting start-up is another minor step in that process.  I am happy with providing the assistance anyone needs in order to help bridge the gap between their principals and their daily lives.  We are all living in an exciting, not scary, time.  Things are changing and it is up to us to change them for the better.