Will's Thoughtstream

A story about sustainability and building community (see left sidebar), as told by Gifford Pinchot. Excerpt:

Here's one example of what happened and how developing a sustainable business can impact an entire community. An unemployed logger had a son who had a smokehouse that used to smoke salmon for the tourists. He had tourists from Germany asking him “can you send us fish back home?” So the logger went to some of his friends who were fishermen and said, “I need fish and I will pay you four times what you get wholesale for those fish. But you have to refrigerate them and give them to me when I want, not when you catch them because I need a steady supply all year long.”

So the fishermen joined together and bought a refrigeration plant that had been shut down. Then the logger found some folks who used to have a cannery that had shut down and they got that going. And he found some folks who were making guitar tops out of big leaf maple which was considered junk wood and was left lying on the forest floor....