In 1978, I read "Buddhist Economics" by Fritz Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful, and this essay changed my life. He posited what would now be called ecological economics, and the concept of appropriate technology. In his hypothetical Buddhist economy, the idea was to live better with less. Runaway consumption of increasingly scarce resources would lead to violence against nature, which would inevitably lead to conflicts among people and nations. He also cited the Buddhist teaching to plant trees, which really rang a bell with me, as I've been a tree‐lover since childhood.

This essay propelled me to seek recycling work at a time when there was not a recycling field in the US. I wanted to preserve resources and the environment while creating green enterprises and meaningful jobs, and I figured recycling would bring this all together. I was sure I'd never look back and have regrets about making recycling my life's work.

It took a few years for me to realize this objective. After much research, I found the only recycling program in Chicago and began volunteering there. When Harold Washington was running for Mayor, I wrote a Recycling/Job Creation Plan for Chicago saying that citywide recycling would create 7,000 jobs, and to my amazement, he made this a central plank in his economic development program. Once he was elected, city funds became available for recycling for the first time, and that made it possible for me to become a paid staff‐member of the Resource Center and mentor under Ken Dunn, one of the legends of the recycling movement.

I've worked in recycling ever since, helping to launch programs in Chicago, California, Massachusetts; designing recycling programs for the Navy, government, corporations, and non‐profits. To me there are crystal clear, and increasingly urgent connections between how we use or overuse resources and world peace, climate change, and the fate of the planet.

I continue to have a special interest in the fate of forests around the world. I would like to take an active role in preserving forests of all types, and in developing ways to keep forests standing as oxygen banks, carbon sponges, and rain‐makers. The Chipko Reforestation movement in India has the slogan: "What do the forests bear? Soil, water, and pure air." I'm convinced that the climate change meetings in Copenhagen must devise a sweeping program to preserve and restore forests and plant more trees around the world to soak up all the CO2 we keep churning out in countless ways. After all, what are we thinking? We need oxygen to breathe, and trees and plants are the machines that make oxygen. We must have holes in our heads to think we can knock down trees, wipe out forests, and not reap the consequences. In New England, where we are privileged to have luxurious forest cover, the trees make our weather just like rainforests. If plans went forward, as some wish, to harvest our forests to burn for energy, we would turn New England into a desert. Farming would cease, lakes and rivers would dry up, soil would blow away, ecosystems would collapse, and our sublimely livable environment would become a wasteland. All this for a flash‐in‐the‐pan shot of energy that’s but a fraction of our energy needs.

I would like to see a new type of socially responsible investment created, or find out if such a thing already exists, that I'll call forest credits. It would be along the lines of microfinance, that is, a small investment within the reach of most people, whereby individual

contributions could add up to a huge fund to support preservation/restoration of forests worldwide. It would work along the lines of a carbon fund, and would be directly tied with bona fide, verifiable efforts to keep forests intact, such as the Prince’s Rainforest Project led by Prince Charles of Great Britain. Besides recycling paper to save trees, I would like to work to create such a program, or otherwise be directly involved in forest protection and tree‐planting. The silver lining of having recently been laid off from my government job is that I now have the free time to work on this to my heart’s content.