Gowdy's Corner - First Post!

Welcome to the Gowdy's Corner blog on Greener Nashville! 

Before I begin this first post, I want to say "Thank You!" to Anthony Davis and iDesign for their idea of Gowdy's Corner.  I will do my best to provide both useful and hopefully sometimes inspirational information on sustainability.  For those of you who I am "meeting" for the first time, I own and operate a sustainability consulting firm in Nashville.  To learn more about the firm and/or me, please visit www.JGowdyConsulting.com.

I write this first post from the Appalachian Trail (the AT), amongst the middle of fall's colors in New Hampshire's White Mountains.  The first snow of the season fell the night before this three-day backpacking trip.  No trace is on the ground, but a thin layer of white still blankets the north and west sides of the evergreen trees on Mount Lincoln.  The winds are blowing stiffly today, signifying that the Franconia Range can and will create its own weather on an hourly basis.  Conditions out here remind me of my state of being in the natural world - vulnerable.

I am hiking the Falling Waters Trail in Franconia Notch State Park with several old friends from my undergraduate days in Charlottesville, VA.  This is the 2009 installment of a now annual backpacking trip somewhere on the AT.  It's a great chance to renew friendships, leave the noise of the man-made world behind, and just… breathe for a few days.  More importantly, it serves as a sort of spiritual reset for me - like a slow and fluid pressing of an inner reset button.  Some might label this a form of natural theology or just intermittent dirtbagging.  Maybe so.  I believe I do it to remind myself why I work in the arena of sustainability.

The great John Muir once stated, "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."  I believe that within this quote, this poem, one can find a definitive approach to sustainability.  As humans, we all need money to survive in the market economy, but we equally need the natural beauty of the world.  We need it to heal when we feel low.  We need it to find strength when taking on new challenges.  We need it for unadulterated pure fun, like hiking straight up to the peak named for our 16th president and enjoying a 360-degree view of orange, red, yellow, and green!

Not only do we need it for all of those soulful reasons, but we need it for making our "bread."  Every input to our financial economy comes from our land and water.  Our financial economy is a subset of the natural economy.  I often feel that we have forgotten this basic knowledge.  I know that I forget, sometimes, in between my forays into the wild.  But every time I return, I remember.

Jeff