Michael Green

Writer and producer

Repair Cafe

In Community development, Environment on

IN October 2009, Martine Postma coordinated the first Repair Café, in Amsterdam. Why? Because we all throw out way too much good stuff. And then we manufacture more not-so-good stuff, so we can throw that out too. And now we have a giant global shit-storm of environmental problems.

What to do? Postma’s idea is to get volunteer repairers together with people who have broken things.

Repair Cafés are now running in dozens of locations in the Netherlands. They’re regular events, she explains, organised by locals, for locals. People bring all kinds of knick-knacks: busted blenders, moth-eaten woolen jumpers and toy cars with loose wheels.

“Many things can be fixed – often it’s not hard and lots of fun,” she says. “We call them ‘cafés’ because they’re not just about repairing, but about meeting people, chatting, learning and getting inspired.

“At the first Repair Café, the atmosphere was so positive it struck me as somewhat unreal – as if we were back in the ’60s, with love and peace. But now I’m used to it.”

The expert repairers range from professional craftspeople to enthusiastic retirees, like one old mechanic who attends the Amsterdam café. “He can repair almost everything,” Postma says. “He’s a genius with electrical appliances, but he can also mend the broken handle of a suitcase, for example. He is precise and takes his time. I think he’s never happier than when he’s working with his tools.”

Postma is a keen fixer herself, and when she’s not too busy she likes to build bookshelves. But these days, she hasn’t the time. She’s devoting all her energy to the revolution: the Repair Café foundation, her project to “spread the idea all over the Netherlands and Europe and the rest of the Western world.”

Fetch your broken toasters.

Published in Smith Journal, Winter 2012.

Q&A: The Sharehood

In Community development, Environment on

For the current EarthSong journal, I answered these questions about The Sharehood and why I’m a part of the volunteer collective.

How did the Sharehood begin and what does it aim to do?

The Sharehood began in 2008 when it occurred to web developer Theo Kitchener that he probably didn’t need to walk all the way to the Laundromat – there were many washing machines lying in wait much closer to his house. He just needed to know their owners. And, of course, it wasn’t just washing machines that we could share.

So, together with other volunteers, he developed The Sharehood, a social-networking website that helps neighbours share skills, things and time. When you sign up, you see the hundred members who live nearest to you, and the things they’re happy to lend and borrow. You also see a local noticeboard, where people within walking distance can post events and questions.

People can share anything: veggies, tools, books or washing machines; gardening help, bike fixing, languages or childminding. Often, neighbours get the most out of spending time together – be that at a picnic, swap party, movie night, or with a simple hello in the street.

Tell us about a Sharehood activity which was particularly satisfying.

I’m very fortunate to live in a street with a park in it. In the summer, on warm evenings, we put on free moonlight cinema screenings for all the neighbours. I promote it using the website. Usually, just before it’s scheduled to begin, I knock on doors to gather what we need: extension cords, speakers, rope and so on.

Everyone loves those evenings – they’re easy, free and open to all comers. The movie screenings bring the street to life. They also feel a little wicked in a good way, because we’re gently breaking the normal rules of behaviour (and copyright and council requirements!) that keep us stuck indoors, apart from one another.

There are a number of local initiatives working towards a more sustainable future at the local level.  What is it about this particular initiative that attracts you?   What do you value most about it?

I particularly like The Sharehood, because to me, it gets as close as possible to the heart of the problem, and it does so in a fun, welcoming and generous way that improves people’s wellbeing. It not only challenges our pattern of over-consumption and saves money, but it brings people together. Once people get to know one another in a neighbourhood, a street begins to feel like a community: people are more likely to take an interest in their local issues and – I hope – also become more engaged citizens on a larger scale.

In Australian cities, it has become awkward to say hello to people on the street. My experience has been that most of us are thrilled to have an excuse or a reason to connect with one another – and The Sharehood helps give us the icebreaker we need.

Tell us a little about the worldview that informs your life choices.

I have a very strong sense of gratitude for the life I’ve been born into. But I recognise that my circumstances are a matter of chance. Given my good fortune, I would like not only to strive for personal contentment, but also to share that with others, in whatever way I can. To my eternal wonder, all my experiences have convinced me that these two purposes are inextricably entwined.

When you imagine life in 20 or 30 years time what do you see?

There are so many possibilities, but in one of them, The Sharehood (or something similar) has spread throughout our cities and towns, as one element of strong, engaged local communities – places where we provide for many of our needs while assisting others to do the same. I see a society where improving everyone’s quality of life is the priority, rather than improving material welfare.

How might interested readers connect to the Sharehood or similar initiatives which reduce consumption and increase local community connectedness?

The Sharehood website has all the information you need. It just takes a moment to sign on, and then you can start sharing! If you want to get your neighbours in on the act, we’ve written up a sample letter you can drop in their letterboxes, inviting them to join.

Andamooka boomtown blues

In Community development on

I wrote this in 2008, after visiting Andamooka, a remote opal-mining town in South Australia. It is about the way the big mining boom was changing the character of the kookiest place I’ve visited, anywhere in the world. The story was set to be published, but then the financial markets collapsed and the nearby BHP Billiton Olympic Dam mine expansion didn’t happen as soon as expected. Now, SA Premier Mike Rann has sworn he’ll stay in the job until its controversial environmental impacts statement is approved and the deeds are signed – probably by November. So it’s time to re-visit Andamooka:

I drive and drive. North for hours in the South Australian desert, then right at Woomera and keep going; right again at Roxby Downs and on through the red glare. Finally, I arrive at Andamooka: Mars on earth. And here, real estate is booming.


By the historic miners’ huts, the barbecue sizzles. It’s Sunday lunchtime, the sky is blue, as always, and the Andamooka Progress and Opal Miners’ Association (APOMA) is holding its annual membership drive. The secretary apologises as she asks for $5 to cover my meal, as a non-member.

Ted Jones, the town’s oldest resident, is over at the picnic tables. The 93-year-old has a crinkly mouth like a turtle and broad strong hands. “I can still work a bloody pick and shovel and handle sixty-pound rocks,” he says, proudly. He’s been building a retaining wall in his backyard, with the help of his son-in-law. “You’d never find another place like Andamooka. That’s what I always tell people.”

He’s right. Homes jumble in among the tailings from the mines – mounds of dug earth like giant white anthills in the red sand. Coober Pedy, hundreds of kilometres north-west, is Australia’s famous, eccentric opal mining town, but from my table at the barbecue, I get the feeling that Andamooka matches it. About 800 people live here, in corrugated iron sheds, ramshackle weatherboards, rusting caravans and old buses. Car wrecks and corroded trucks fill vacant blocks.


“We were in the habit of doing what we wanted to do and then arguing the point about it afterwards,” says Ted, explaining the haphazard layout. “That’s the way we’ve always lived here and that’s why we don’t want it to change.”

The town has no council and no rates. No sewerage system. Neither water pipes nor street lights. The last police officer left a year ago and has only just been replaced. Only two roads are sealed – the way in and out, and the route to the nurses’ clinic. APOMA volunteers manage services as best they can on an annual budget of about $80,000, partly funded by the South Australian government.

The roads are still unnamed, but not for much longer. It’s a sign of the times: bureaucrats down south are forcing the recalcitrant locals to name their hundred or more streets and dead ends. Until now, although everyone’s address read ‘Government Road’, Andamooka has surely been among the least governed communities in the country.

In 1930, two boundary riders, Sam Brookes and Ray Sheppard, found opal at Treloar’s Hill, on Andamooka Station, a pastoral lease south of Lake Eyre. They tried to keep it quiet, but word slipped out and fortune seekers struck in.

It was a mining settlement, not a town; there were few rules. Newcomers pegged their claim and lived on it. They lived rough. “Several people got shot. Everybody had a revolver, and a rifle,” says Ted, a smile wrinkling from the right side of his mouth. “We only had the warden, we didn’t have any police.” Some men excavated their own “dugout” houses in the low hills to keep cooler in the blazing summers. There were no sealed roads north of Port Augusta, 300 kilometres away, so after every heavy rain the miners were marooned. Despite the distance, by the ’60s the opal boom was on and Andamooka was roaring.

I take my plate up for seconds. Bev Burge, with thin red hair, pink lips and pushed-up tracksuit sleeves, busies herself serving the food. Burgers, onion, gristly steaks and fat sausages are laid out on one trestle table; bread, coleslaw and potato salad on the other. Bev moved here in 1971. “When I first came up, [I saw] everyone had their washing out and it was dry in an hour. We were in Melbourne and it wouldn’t dry for days. And that tempted me.”

Bev ran Opal Air, the airline that flew daily during the boom years. She mined for over three decades and now she runs the bingo. Later, she tells me about the town’s old characters like Aggie Biro, whose car only drove in reverse: “Everyone just stayed clear if Aggie was on the road.” And Gelignite Jack, who walked along the creek bed at night, drunk, sparking and throwing explosive: “The first time it happened it went off right near my bedroom.”

She tells me about the old drive-in, which had open-air speakers: “The whole town could hear all the movies. Every night you’d hear trains and shooting and cowboys and Indians fighting all through the town.” Then she tells me about the gunfight in the Tuckabox, a local bar: “The Serbs were at one end and the Croats the other, and they had guns and they had the tables tipped up and they were shootin’ at each other.” She sighs and laughs. “We really loved those years.”

Locals say the population got as high as 4500, a mash of European immigrants escaping war and state tyranny. Opal miners and buyers found big money and lost it again with legendary excess. No one, of course, paid tax. “The whole lifestyle was gambling,” Bev says. “It was one big gamble.”

In the late ’70s, traces of the rainbow gem slowed and so did the town. In 1980, the year television arrived, Opal Air stopped coming. “All those years they kept saying the town’d finish one day. But it never did,” says Bev.

Judging by the barbecue though, I wonder if the end is nigh. APOMA had catered for 200, but after two hours the two-dozen comers have dwindled to single figures and a cold breeze has wrested control from the retreating sun. Bev has left her post and a stray dog barks at the remaining sausages.

Association president Peter Allen, clad in khaki and sitting alone on the low wall near the dugout huts, offers two explanations. First, is a scheduling clash: every Sunday afternoon, the Opal Hotel runs a popular poker tournament. That’s where Bev went and about 30 others with her – no surprise really, in this town. Second, is BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine.

In the mid-’80s, while opal rarely surfaced in Andamooka, Western Mining Corporation began trucking copper, uranium, gold and silver from an enormous ore-body not far to the west. With the South Australian government, the company fabricated the Roxby Downs township – a suburb-island in the burnt sand – to service the mine. Many Andamookians also found jobs there and commuted. It was good for the old town.

Olympic Dam expanded in 2000 and, now owned by BHP Billiton, is set to expand again – at its peak, the open cut could be the size of the Adelaide CBD and parklands. They’ll need a lot of workers. Even now, before the expansion, Roxby Downs real estate is scarce and steep.

Miners are once again moving to Andamooka in spades. But with 12-hour shifts and continuous production, the big mine doesn’t schedule for community spirit. The old timers complain to me that they don’t see the new townsfolk: if they’re not at work, they’re at home in bed.

Allen, a charismatic ten-pound Pom and ex-crocodile farmer, is wrestling with change. He wagers that the population will burst to 2000 within two years. Shacks worth $20,000 four years ago can fetch $200,000. A 62-apartment eco-village is under development. In two days, new owners will take over the Opal Hotel and will begin construction to double its capacity by mid next year.

Fresh water is in short supply. The tip, on a hill just out of town, has no fence and the rubbish pile is spreading. Ever more sewerage seeps into the natural watercourse. Allen is riled: “What we’ve been saying to government is, ‘If you want to have your two-bobs’ now with building rules and all the bullshit – all right. But give us some infrastructure.’”

The big mine is bringing jobs and money to Andamooka. It’s bringing progress, order and rules. More people will come and, eventually, the infrastructure, but then the old opal miners will leave. Many already have, striking high prices for their land.

“Even with the big influx of people from more civilised environments, I would like to think they will be incorporated into the community,” Allen says then breaks into a knowing smile. “And relax.”

Few holidaymakers stay in Andamooka and the locals are still generous. Someone offers me a free bed for a few nights in an old bus. It’s that sort of town. APOMA lets passers-by camp on its grounds for $2 per night. I leave the barbecue and walk on the abandoned opal fields towards the great white cross on the horizon, where, my new host says, a drunk man died years ago. He had fought with friends, fled their car and set out for home across the fields. In the dark, he plunged down a shaft.

Allen and a handful of flannel-clad drinkers linger all afternoon, arguing over town politics. The leftover meat and salads are stowed in the bottle shop fridge. At sundown, the stayers adjourn to the Opal Hotel. Tonight, before the pub changes hands, the long-time owner will shout the drinks. 


Down to earth

In Community development, Environment, The Big Issue on

Communes are back. Actually, they never went away. They’ve shaken the naked-hippie image to offer a practical alternative to modern challenges.


ONE idyllic Friday afternoon – like many afternoons at the Homeland community – an impromptu parents’ circle formed outside Rose West and Kai Tipping’s small, rented house.


Rose knelt on the grass in her long skirt, while their elder daughter, Mali, home from primary school, alternately strode and sprinted around the open space with her friends. Their other daughter, Persia – two years old and possessed of an altogether wicked zest for life, laboured indiscriminately in the vegetable patch.


Two years ago, the young couple had left the city for the country. They sought a manageable, affordable lifestyle and more freedom and safety for their daughters. They found a commune. And in that, they’re not alone.


TWENTY-FOUR years before Rose and Kai made their life-altering move, Phil Bourne’s family moved to Seymour, 100km north of Melbourne, to start a communal living project with another like-minded family.


The small community was named, aptly, Commonground. Over the years other families have come and gone; the community hasn’t yet grown as Bourne had hoped. But the original two families, the core group, remain, and have since formed links with others through Cohousing Australia – a hub for communal living projects, which Bourne chairs.


Living enmeshed with others isn’t always ideal. There are times when, as he says, Bourne would have preferred to be a “hermit”. But he still feels that, ultimately, it’s worth it. “It’s what we term a high-input, high reward lifestyle,” he explains.


Recently, Bourne and the old guard of communal dwellers have been sensing that people are, once again, beginning to see value in their way of life. “I don’t know whether we’re kidding ourselves, but when the people who’ve been in this scene a long time get together, we’re convinced there’s a new energy around,” he says. “People are looking at what’s happening with the world and they’re hungry to find other options.


“In current times of climate change, peak oil and social isolation, when the single person household is the fastest growing housing sector, we think it’s time for the next wave of intentional communities,” Bourne says. “But to get from dreaming it to doing it is not easy.”


In Australia, rural landsharing communities flourished throughout the 1970s. After the 10-day Aquarius festival in Nimbin in 1973 – often described as Australia’s version of Woodstock – a number of attendees stayed on and started utopian communities throughout northern NSW.


The movement was inspired by New Age and simple-living ideas, together with concern about spiking oil prices, environmental degradation and the limits to economic growth.


“The intentional communities of the ’60s and ’70s had a lot of good intentions, but the application was vague,” Bourne concedes. “In many ways, it was downtrodden by the mainstream as hippie nonsense – a percentage of which had truth to it and a percentage of which missed the point.”


The Homeland community was founded in 1977, on a former dairy farm half-an-hour by car from Bellingen, an artsy town on NSW’s mid-north coast. Now, about three-dozen adults and children live there. The members aren’t allowed to own any land, but they can own their home. Each adult pays $30 per week in rent to cover upkeep on the extensive shared facilities, including the recreation house, guests’ cottage, laundry, shower block, barns, orchards and festival fields.


The community was modelled on the Findhorn Foundation, a spiritual community in Scotland, famous for mystical gardeners who grew supernaturally large cabbages on sandy soil. But the connection vanished in the early 1980s, as the overseas philosophy became obscured by the haze of marijuana smoke closer to home.


Like all communities, membership and motivation has ebbed and flowed. “Five years ago,” one long-term Homeland resident explains, “we were lamenting that we were becoming a geriatric farm.” Then a number of young families started moving onto the land.


AT Homeland, the afternoon continued on its comfortably unplanned course. A friend of Rose and Kai dropped in with his toddlers, and two other young mums from up the hill happened by with their daughters. “There are no play dates on Homeland,” Rose explained later. “You don’t ring up the other mother, organise a week in advance and go to a cafe and spend money. It just happens.”


While the children whooped, the adults spoke about placentas and sleeping patterns, the uncomfortable crevices that ticks find, and the humility required when asking someone else to remove them.


It was an earthy conversation, not an astral one: more permaculture than counter-culture.

 

IN all likelihood, this kind of practical exchange wouldn’t be uncommon among latter day communal dwellers. “You don’t get naked hippies running around the hills any more,” says Dr Bill Metcalf, a ‘communitarian’ scholar at Griffith University who has published several books on the subject.


“A lot of people see communal living as a very sensible option,” Metcalf continues. “They aren’t looking at it in the utopian sense – it’s just a much more sane way to live in a rural area. The interest is moving to a strata of society that wouldn’t have considered it 20 years ago, because it was seen as too outrageous.”


Metcalf says there are hundreds of intentional communities throughout Australia, from spiritual groups to survivalists, nudist colonies to eco-villages.


“No matter where you go, we’ve got these communities. Some are very upmarket, some very downmarket.”


For two decades, Metcalf has been working on an encyclopaedia of communities established in Australia before the ‘baby boomer’ generation. When he began, he expected it to be a brief undertaking. But, he says, “I keep finding new ones faster than I can research them. In every state there are amazing examples: there are lesbian separatist communes from the 1870s; groups who believed in a single tax; nudist groups; vegetarians. You name it, they’re out there.”

 

JUST as the kinds of communities and structures change over time, utopian dreams are also tempered from within. Close to Rose and Kai’s house, along a short walking track, is an open-walled barn, set among small beds of flowers and vegetables. It is home to Jacque Flavell, who has lived on Homeland for 22 years.


“What we’ve gradually come to realise is that you don’t have to try and work it all out so you love everyone,” she said. “When you see someone and you don’t really want to talk to them, it starts to make you sick. Eventually I think: ‘Well, I better do something about myself. I may not get to love them, but I better not let them give me an ulcer.’”


Flavell arrived on the community as a single mother with two young children. She had been a cabaret dancer, including a stint with the Moulin Rouge in Paris, but decided to radically simplify her life. She raised her children on the property without a car, avoiding machines wherever possible.


“I laugh now, when I look back,” she said. “I thought I would come here and learn from these much more evolved beings, but they were just like us. We’re just a bunch of people who are trying to figure something out. I still have things to learn.”


Later in the afternoon, Kai arrived home after teaching a samba drumming class to school kids in another town. He has the broad shoulders of someone who’s grown up on the land but, until recently, little of the practical know-how. (“I’m terribly scared of snakes,” he confided.) He and Rose, like Flavell, both hail from cities.


“I’m reaping the benefits of the work other people have put into the community, and it’s been a blessing,” he said. “The relationships are more complicated – I’m still getting used to the protocols. If you see an old fridge, you can’t just throw it out. It takes a long time to get anything done.”

The couple are clear about the obstacles associated with life this far from the mainstream, be they snakes and ticks, car-reliance or disputes with ex-members. Even so, their choice makes sense.


“If you look around the world and throughout history, I think people have lived like this most of the time,” Rose said. “When I travelled overseas this is how I saw people living: they pool resources and they share work, and a big part of that shared work is raising kids.”


Mali entered the room with a present for her mother: a soft, crocheted bird she had made at school. Rose murmured her approval by clucking like a chook, but the child protested. “Oh, it’s a bluebird,” Rose said. “It just looks a bit like a hen.” Unfussed, Mali raced off again, after asking permission to go to the common house with another child.


“All the faces around here, I know them all, and they’re my friends,” Rose continued. “I hope to spend many years together raising our kids and doing that all in a beautiful environment, with mountains in the background and a river flowing in front. I can’t ask for more than that.”

 

DIY community


IF you want to start an intentional community, don’t be naive: expect conflict and learn how to get over it. That’s the advice from Dr Bill Metcalf, gleaned from decades researching and living on communities.


“None of them run smoothly,” says Metcalf. “And the vast majority of people who want to create a community never succeed.”


The flip side, however, is that at their best, communities are socially enriching, environmentally sound and cheap to live on. “Almost invariably, people who grow up in intentional communities say they had a wonderful childhood.”


There are some practical challenges. Wedged by strict council regulations and steep property prices, people often have trouble finding suitable land. Also, properties classed as multiple occupancies usually can’t be subdivided, and without the security of individual title, banks take a lot of convincing to approve loans. Increasingly, would-be communities opt for strata title, rather than a cooperative, corporation or tenants-in-common structure.


“The old model, where a few hippies would pool their dole cheques and put illegal shacks on a clapped out dairy farm – those days are well and truly gone,” says Metcalf. “Now it requires elaborate financial management. It can cost millions of dollars by the time you get something operating with roads and facilities.”


Rural communities aren’t the only option. Phil Bourne, from Cohousing Australia, is promoting an urban hybrid model, called cohousing, in which about 15 to 30 homes are clustered around a common house and open space.


The individual dwellings are private and self-contained, not communal, but the residents pool some resources. The common house might include a shared guest room, kitchen, laundry and shed.

The concept began in Denmark in the 1970s and has become popular in Europe and North America. There are about half a dozen cohousing communities in Australian cities already, and several more in planning.


“Cohousing has a lot of appeal for current generations because you maintain personal equity and autonomy,” Bourne says. “And you don’t have to move out to the country. It’s an option for medium density urban living that still has the room for chooks and a veggie garden.”

 

Published in The Big Issue, with photographs by Conor Ashleigh.

For further information, go to abc.net.au/rn/utopias

Greensburg, Kansas

In Architecture and building, Community development, Environment on

On 4 May 2007, a tornado nearly three kilometres wide ripped through Greensburg, in Kansas, USA. It levelled the town and killed 11 people. The townsfolk decided to build back sustainably, with all city buildings to meet the highest level of the US Green Building Council’s rating system. Their blueprint for recovery was all green, taking in public buildings, infrastructure, housing and the downtown business area.

Last year, Greensburg mayor Bob Dixson visited Australia. He spoke to the Green Building Council of Australia, and also to the people of Flowerdale, who lost much of their town during the Black Saturday fires.

MG: What was your message to people in Flowerdale?

BD: The number one thing is to know that there is hope and you will recover. The other thing is sometimes you have to be real patient – we want things to happen faster than they do. Sometimes you have to plan and do the best you can without getting in such a rush that you find out later mistakes are made.

Over 95 per cent of the buildings in Greensburg were totally destroyed and that’s a lot like in the Flowerdale area, so there was a real kindred spirit between us because of the smaller town atmosphere and the sense of community.

MG: How did you come up with Greensburg’s long-term community recovery plan?

BD: Planning started the first week after the storm. The community had no place to meet so we met under a big circus tent and we did everything there; we had meetings, we ate together, we had church services together. And part of the planning process then was to come up with a sustainable long-term recovery plan. It was facilitated by government agencies, but we were the ones who had the input in what we wanted the community to look like. It’s a living document and we need to revisit it regularly.

We’ll be totally sustainable. We’ll have a community wind farm that will generate electricity for our town and it will be big enough to [connect to] our fellow communities that belong to the power pool. It’s kind of a cliché, but it’s a wind-wind situation.

MG: It’s a big change from the way the town was before. How did it come to be so environmentally focussed?

BD: We knew what we were doing was for future generations. We needed to make sure we built back for the 21st century, not for the way it was beforehand. It was about being good stewards of those resources we’ve been blessed with, and about seeing how our ancestors handled it when they pioneered our area. They utilised the resources they had available; no more, no less. And they understood that if you took care of the land, it took care of you. So really the concepts of being green have been around for generations. It’s just that we have such modern technology now to take advantage of those environmentally friendly and energy-saving green initiatives.

MG: What message do you have for communities, towns or cities that haven’t suffered such a disaster?

BD: One thing we’re really proud of is we’re the first community in the United States to have totally LED street lights. That’s a saving of 43 per cent on our energy and when you figure energy and maintenance combined, it’s a 70 per cent saving. It reduces our carbon footprint by 40 tonnes of CO2 per year. If Melbourne went to LED street lights, it could cut its emissions tremendously. Any community can implement things – you just have to do it.

MG: Has the Greensburg community changed since the tornado?

BD: It reinforced the values of our community. It mattered not your economic status in the community, you lost everything. So the only thing you had left was not your possessions, not your vehicle and not your home; all we had left were our relationships with each other. And we found out they were there all along.

Several young couples have moved to the community who have no ties to the area and that’s because of the excitement and the sense of renewal and rebirth. In the midst of it all we’re seeing interest from all over the world. To me, it’s beyond the disaster and building sustainably. People see hope in Greensburg right now; hope that you could come back from a disaster. We have been blessed with a tremendous opportunity, but we also understand we have a tremendous responsibility to share with the world anything we’ve learned, because as far as sustainability goes, we are all the new pioneers of the 21st century. We live in the most exciting times in the history of this planet, because we have an opportunity right now to truly make a difference in where we’re headed.