Name: Jamie
Web Site: http://www.homesthatfit.com/blog
Bio: When I found NESEA in the late 80's I found my tribe. I've been striving to keep our community whole ever since. Been on the board, chaired conferences, stirred up (good)trouble, and am now happily collaborating on the Whole Systems in Action track. Participate with us at http://wholesystemsinaction.wordpress.com. Follow me on twitter @jwolfworks where I tweet about #BE10.
Posts
This is Where You Belong: Engaged. Informed. & Connected.
January 22nd, 2010
After 30 years at sites around New England NESEA’s Building Energy Conference arrived at the Boston World Trade Center in 2005. We named that conference “The Practice of Sustainability: Art/Science/Business”. And we said this to the NESEA community:
If you practice sustainability, this is where you belong!
I see sustainability as a principle equivalent to democracy or justice and a practice we are constantly striving toward; imperfect in execution, but aspirationally fundamental. If your practice supports sustainability you belong to the community that shares this principle and we belong together in Boston in March. I want to invite you to consider how important it is for you to join me at Buiding Energy in 2010. This is about the necessity of advancing your practice together with mine.
Narcissism led me to NESEA in the late 80’s. It was then the “Advanced Residential Construction Conference” and I concluded that it was most obviously for me. The moment I arrived I knew that I had found my tribe. This community made it apparent that the foundation of my ethic, to be a “good builder”, must always include an understanding of what it meant to be a “green builder”. I could not be one without being the other. The journey had begun.
Like any good journey, it led to discovery. Over time, and not without some resistance, I came to appreciate that the practice of sustainability required us to understand and operate as connected parts of a whole system. My provincial practice, building, confined my view.
Our good fortune is that NESEA, considering energy as its fundamental currency and sustainability as our aspirational principle, attracts and symbiotically connects a cosmopolitan breadth of practices, of which mine is only one. I came to appreciate and rely on the diversity of experience and ideas that this community continuously challenged me with. And I grew.
On a good day at NESEA I am engaged, informed, and connected. I am engaged by ideas that demand me to think clearly. I am informed by practitioners with an uncompromising commitment to action and measurable results. I am connected to a diverse network of fellow travelers, at every stage of their own journeys, and with whom I can differ as easily as I can agree, without acrimony.
If you practice sustainability this is where you belong, having good days at NESEA with me and the thousands of others who continue to shape what Ambrose Spencer so aptly termed our “confident vision”.
The journey continues again in Boston in March. I can’t imagine finding my way forward without being there, where I belong.
