Bootstrapping Green

It is sometimes amazing what you find in your own backyard or more correctly your community’s backyard. A few days ago while grocery shopping I saw an announcement posted for a community meeting at the Doyle Center here in Leominster, MA. For those of you not up on Leominster trivia, the Doyle Center is a Gold LEED certified conference center set amid 170 acres of pristine park land overseen by The Trustees of Reservations. The meeting was at 6 pm that evening (June 30th) and would focus on the best use of this magnificent resource in my community. How could I not go? It had all my favorite things being discussed: maintenance of a beautiful old house that was part of the original property, a new eco chic conference center with all the bells and whistles, and a discussion of sustainability. I was so there.

Wesley Ward, Vice President of Land Conservation for The Trustees was heading up the meeting which was focused on presenting preliminary ideas for how The Trustees envision making better use of the property and to garner ideas and feedback from the community members who were present. As with all meetings, there were naysayers, rules quoters, and the sort of people who you have to listen too, BUT there was a good number of people who saw the vision of what was trying to be acheived. That was very exciting!

Of course yours truly couldn’t let this occasion go by without getting on my soapbox and stumping for more places for people to learn the skills to “Go Green” in cost effective, economical ways. After all, let’s get real, if we wait around till the government, our educational systems, corporations, etc. get around to embracing sustainability, I mean really embracing it, we are in real trouble. This has to be a grass roots, neighborhood, community based level movement and I’m excited that places like the Doyle Community Park & Center exist. They deserve a lot more attention than they are getting. Check out Doyle Community Park & Center, as well as the great work of The Trustees of Reservations in Massachusetts.

Have a fabulous 4th of July!

Technorati Tags: Conservation, environmentalism, sustainability, The Trustees of Reservations

Tags: Conservation, environmentalism, sustainability, The Trustees of Reservations

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at 6:00 pm and is filed under environmentalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.