Back To The Future

We recently visited Old Town San Diego and the California State Historic Park, and I continue to be impressed with the design and longevity of what over time (200 or so years) became "a city within a city." In the midst of all of the modern construction going on around us, and then thinking seriously about our leadership in "a new day for nonprofits and creative community enterprises" through Sunrise Advisors, I now realize that Old Town San Diego, and its remarkable and colorful history, has much to teach us today about what we are working on with our valued One Earth client and its CEO Steven Matt..."sustainability."

Consider this passage from the California State Parks brochure entitled La Casa de Machado y Silvas: The Commercial Restaurant at The Machado-Silvas House:

The original house (c. 1843) was a simple, rectangular, adobe structure with low-pitched thatched or tile roof. Little wood was used for construction due to the lack of available timber around San Diego. Adobe, composed of clay, water, cow manure, and sand, was a highly regarded building material that brought coolness in the summer and warmth in the winter. Whitewash, composed of crushed seashells and lye, protected the somewhat fragile adobe bricks (that have since survived earthquakes, floods, heavy rains, the 1872 fire that destroyed much around it and more) and helped brighten the rooms...The original floors in the house were likely made of compacted earth. Sometime later, they were resurfaced with ceramic tiles -- possibly with tiles salvaged from the Spanish Presidio -- fort -- on the hill above Old Town, common practice around 1835.

So in this time now, 2007, when we are hearing "alarm bells" about global and US deforestation and over development -- "sprawl" -- all around us, and we see so much building, and business and consumer materials that further add to global warming, perhaps there is a very real and very important lesson to be found in a certain adobe casa or house. Later it became a restaurant and more, that across its history, found a way to make good use of cow manure as a sustainable building material.

I have read methane from cows and their wastes are also a huge contributor to global warming, all over this way-too-rapidly "developing" world. Perhaps there are serious opportunities for affordable, environmentally "positive" housing, and related community investment, eco-friendly development or redevelopment, and truly, empowerment...maybe even a "new market" for the otherwise harmful cow manure and methane that could actually generate "new" and better building materials that would generate new US and global blue collar jobs, on the economic merits, that are seriously in need...through looking "back to the future," and learning the good of our past.

Sunrise Advisors hopes to tangibly generate measurable results in that "new day" which must come soon for our environment -- and all of us.