By Tom & Carol Braford
In sports, a walk-on is someone who is not Invited or recruited but who prevails through their own insistence, effort and team spirit. A polymath is someone that studies many subjects in order to understand and solve overlapping challenges in comprehensive ways.
In his recent book, Cheaper Faster Better: How We’ll Win The Climate War, Tom Steyer says the established ways are not working and not moving fast enough, so he invites us to form walk-on Climate Solution teams and do what we know from our informal polymath studies and experiences is right and will work in time.
So at 78, I declare that our growing Just Post Carbon, Islands of Cohesion team and I are finally informed and experienced enough to join my mentor, Sim Van der Ryn, and his Ecological Design Collaborative team in being walk-on Intrepid Pioneers of the Eco Frontier, as The New York Times once referred to Sim. Sadly, Sim recently passed away from complications of Alzheimer’s disease at 89.
Luckily, I got to visit him a couple times at his Eco Retreat in Inverness CA, and we had the opportunity to host him and his partner Eden at the Arizmendi Ecovillage site for a week in 2017. He inspired multiple St Louis audiences. We spent hours pouring over our plans, and he encouraged us to go even further in “breaking the box”.
Before leaving, he entrusted us with his hand illustrated slide decks and later sent us a painting he did of me during a watercolor class in Forest Park, a work of a modern day Dutch Master and Pioneer. It is with deep appreciation that I step into and commit to carrying on that legacy.
I invite all of you who are called to be walk-ons to join the team because “Civilization and the Planet is a terrible thing to waste”.
Please contact us at braford@sbcglobal.net or at www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com.