Tonic Water (eBook)

Fluid, dynamic approaches towards Environmental Leadership

Wano Urbonas (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
336 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-1192-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Tonic Water is an innovative Environmental Leadership guidebook that intends to collaboratively and gregariously excavate and energize leadership capacity throughout our conservation communities. Tonic Water is a fluid and dynamic Environmental Leadership guidebook, chock-full of exploratory conservation conundrums and environmental health prophecies. Tonic Water serves as a conservation leadership navigator, aiding current and future Environmental Leaders in exploring greener pathways while exposing common pitfalls. Throughout this guidebook, green leadership growth pastures are sown with sound Environmental Science and creative Environmental Education. Tonic Water dives deeper by navigating watersheds in a jocular fashion that promotes concepts of liquid linkages, fluid approaches, hydro-logical cycles, conservation conduits and an ultimate confluence of community stewardship. Tonic Water concocts a smorgasbord of Environmental Leadership anecdotes and potential antidotes, challenging the reader to utilize their internal fortitude to perform self-examinations of their personal conservation conviction and commitment towards ecosystem health. Tonic Water serves as a transformational Environmental Leadership guide that challenges our current and future green leaders to immerse themselves into our ecological innards (airsheds, watersheds, foodsheds) and to devise community-specific Conservation Leadership agendas. Tonic Water is an environmental science version of 'Show & Tell' leadership, building upon chemical trust, biological respect, physical effort and psychological lessons learned along the way. Our green vision is to produce a sustainable field of robust environmental leaders, serving as crucial leaders in a vast and varied environmental field. We lead the way!

Wano Urbonas is an accomplished Environmental Scientist with over three decades of integrated Environmental Leadership fieldwork throughout the Rocky Mountain West. As an ardent and active advocate for environmental integrity, his experience includes being a graduate of the Regional Institute of Health & Environmental Leadership (RIHEL), founder of the Western Environmental Leadership League (WELL), Board member for Montana Audubon, Emerging Leader recipient from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), TogetherGreen Leadership Fellow, two-time Peace Corps Volunteer (Congo & Niger), Associate Peace Corps Director (Mali), President of the Colorado Directors of Environmental Health and lead NEPA Reviewer for the Hawaii Army National Guard. Apart from his professional pursuits, Wano is an avid long-distance trail runner, mushroom forager, tenor saxophone student and six-time winner of 'Joke of the Day'.

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Tonic Water is an innovative Environmental Leadership guidebook that intends to collaboratively and gregariously excavate and energize leadership capacity throughout our conservation communities. In order to significantly enhance the integrity of our natural and human environment, Tonic Water tries its hardest to inflict thirst upon the reader. By instilling unorthodox-yet-vital environmental leadership principles and possibilities into potential leadership equations, readers will progressively develop a greater green leadership desire that provokes action and reaction, percussion and repercussions, with elements of Environmental Leadership regurgitation as a positive indicator. Tonic Water concocts a smorgasbord of Environmental Leadership anecdotes and potential antidotes, challenging the reader to utilize their internal fortitude to perform self-examinations of their personal conservation conviction and commitment towards ecosystem health. Tonic Water serves as a transformational Environmental Leadership guide that challenges our current and future green leaders to immerse themselves into our ecological innards (airsheds, watersheds, foodsheds) and to devise community-specific Conservation Leadership agendas. Tonic Water is a fluid and dynamic Environmental Leadership guidebook, chock-full of exploratory conservation conundrums and environmental health prophecies. Tonic Water serves as a conservation leadership navigator, aiding current and future Environmental Leaders in exploring greener pathways while exposing common pitfalls. Throughout this guidebook, green leadership growth pastures are sown with sound Environmental Science and creative Environmental Education. Tonic Water dives deeper by navigating watersheds in a jocular fashion that promotes concepts of liquid linkages, fluid approaches, hydro-logical cycles, conservation conduits and an ultimate confluence of community stewardship. Welcome to tomorrow's Environmental Leadership horizon. We rid ourselves of the mundane, milquetoast leadership concepts of yesteryear, and take on newfangled Environmental Leadership as both a critical challenge and a tremendous opportunity! Tonic Water dissects the essential ingredients that green leaders are made of and plunges into exploration of eco-challenges facing watershed protection and regional habitat connectivity. We strive to recruit and hone influential Environmental Leaders who will ultimately produce an amalgam of conservation stakeholders, environmental stewards and regional, impactful green leaders. Tonic Water will also assist in amplifying your listening and inquisition skills powerful areas for green exploration and expedition. Tonic Water brazenly assumes the role of Trip Leader, daring you to develop that intense thirst for greener leadership progressions, despite the daunting hurdles and maneuvering required to attain our community-based conservation goals. Tonic Water attempts to be both a catalyst and a cathartic providing action and reaction, inducing greener labors of love, and engaging stakeholders in Environmental Leadership, Fellowship and 'Followship' potential. Tonic Water is an environmental science version of 'Show & Tell' leadership, building upon chemical trust, biological respect, physical effort and psychological lessons learned along the way. Our green vision is to produce a sustainable field of robust environmental leaders, serving as purposeful leaders in a vast and varied environmental field. We lead the way!

Textauszug

Temperamental Intelligence & Nebulous Leadership

Remember that vintage television show, ‘The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau’? There were so many exotic forms of marine life, and such freedom of aquatic movement! Things appeared effortless, naturally adapting to tides, seasons and marine fluctuations. Holistic ecosystems flourished and functioned, ocean communities thrived, and life was mysterious-yet-invigorating.

I must have excreted 60% of my innermost beliefs before (in a dehydrated state) coming up with this EL tonic revelation. There were certainly secrets and secretions that needed to be spelled, expelled or dispelled. There are natural occurrences as well as human-induced ‘designated use’. There are myths, half-truths and perhaps some undiscovered treasures. In as much as bile can be the good guy or the bad guy, we strive to limit our intake. When we discover drunken sheriffs, neglectful pet owners, dubious clergy and crooked politicians, we attempt to speak up and put an end to their reprehensible conduct. Environmental leadership can be blurrier, and accusations need to be tempered. Holding our environmental future hostage is criminal, yet usually legal and even commonly accepted as normal operating procedure.

I personally define a watershed simply as a receiving area that includes all contributors. The watershed is diverse, extensive, dynamic (non-static) and most importantly, fluid. A watershed includes inlets, outlets and in-betweens, and performs various functions for our natural and human environment—our habitat. Remnants of the past sea world can be explored, observed and documented, while sunken vessels and human fossils can also be discovered behind solid oak desks, within the same watershed.

A stream section, for example, could be designated as high-quality, cold-water aquatic life use, but also designated for irrigation, agriculture, drinking water and other ‘beneficial use’. Who benefits from these uses depends upon maintaining or enhancing the integrity of the entire watershed, sustaining its blue blood. With timely monitoring and evaluation, impairments to the stream environment can be quantified, assessed and reported—but what happens next?

Reports and public meetings attempt to convey the condition of the watershed, with efforts to identify probable sources of impairment— cow poop, fertilizers, erosion, dirt roads, wildfires, wastewater, etcetera. But when the rubber hits the road or the stuff hits the fan, it is ultimately up to the local watershed community to take corrective actions. It makes sense, since the eyes, ears, hands and feet of local users are the most connected to the water resource. But who puts these things into motion, emotion or commotion depends upon environmental leadership.

Support groups can help Uncle Joe cut back on his six-pack intake, but it is Joe who ultimately decides whether to flip the pop-top. Yet when deliberating as to what sort of pollution diet is in-store for the Mimbres River, the river is usually not the responsible party. What’s at stake depends upon those that actually have one—the irrigators, farmers, ranchers, municipalities, recreationists, industry and everybody in the neighborhood. In terms of educating, communicating, explaining, suggesting, planning, mobilizing, implementing, monitoring, evaluating and taking a long, deep breath, environmental leadership is extremely crucial. Sadly, our leadership may be as impaired as the river itself, or more so.

Making a verbal motion might interest some, but can I spell it out for you? I probably can’t, and if I could, maybe I shouldn’t. Environmental leaders will need to conjure up ways to deal with semi-deplorable situations, refusing to stagnate or be content with green-washing and rigid thought processes. Go forward in your thinking, guessing, proposing, fishing, hunting and exploring—keep going forward!

Being bile-lingual:

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is fond of providing alternative courses of action for comprehensive public lands utilization scenarios. After rounds of scoping environmental issues and convening public discussions, they can occasionally produce new (improved?) alternatives to the original alternatives, prior to coming up with a final decision. One of my strengths early on in this process entails looking at the potency of the alternative actions, and discerning whether the goals and objectives are ambitious enough. It is easy to get blown away by 1800 pages of conservation science facts and figures. But the true mental tenacity comes into play when figuring out in my mind whether we are trying hard enough to protect our natural resources. Are we doing well enough? I think not.

Environmental consultants are renowned for generating documents that span an environmental mountain range—air, land, water, wildlife, soils, recreation, agricultural, energy development, travel management, you name it. The environmental review process starts with the status quo, which is almost always insufficient in key areas—thus the need for a newer, better plan. Then we see how green we can get by going in one direction, and how dirty we can get by looking 180 degrees over at the industry-sponsored alternative. Usually there’s enough bile there to cause intense disgust.

Lastly, there is a middle-ground alternative that seeks compromise on uses and on-the-ground conditions. Environmental leadership comes into play when teams contribute their key issue for consideration—let’s say riparian vegetation. They state what facts they have regarding past and present health of the ecosystem, and then expand upon what future conditions ‘may’ look like if Alternative B, for example, is selected. The consultants always seem to mince their words at this stage, stating that conditions are ‘likely’ to improve at a faster rate than under Alternative A.

After identifying critical areas of concern, leadership takes a coffee break, and upon returning, identifies ‘fair’ conditions, and moves on to other discussions. My bile starts flowing big time when I read the word ‘fair’—fair is not good, and good is often not good enough. Yet if we want to be better than average, and if we truly want to maintain or better yet, ‘enhance’ the integrity of our natural and human environment, then let’s reach higher up that fruit tree, branch out and set our sights on something special.

‘Whhoo, whoo…--Youu, youu….’ –-

That pesky owl again!

Incontinental Divides—

A lonely raindrop falls atop of the Rocky Mountains. Frenetic and solitary, it plummets, spatters and nearly disappears, but not quite. Have no fear, other droplets are on the way, and a magical moment is about to begin. Her name is Flow.

If we are to experience a watershed moment—a time and place where there is a substantive turn in direction and an alteration in course, we will rely on Flo and her friend Mo (mentum) to lead the way. With strength in numbers, we will experience environmental tipping points where our presence is known, and our impact felt. Supported with consolidated-yet-diverse origins, we will produce historical trajectories, ‘aha’ moments and environmental epiphanies. Transforming our personal, dank water closets into opportunistic, thriving rivulets will reveal our values as well as our leadership vulnerabilities.

It can happen with a blink of an eye, but it usually takes years for clear direction and decisive paradigm shifts to occur. Environmental leadership should be opening the floodgates and encouraging the free flow of innovative, collaborative environmental movements. But the bowels of many conservation organizations and agencies are blocked by fibrous figureheads, well-intentioned stool-sitters, symbolic desk jockeys and that ever-present ‘Conservation Constipator’.

Historically and geographically, watersheds were often considered as dividing lines and divisional ridges. Our fluids run east, and their fluids run west. I believe that we must live and thrive with several thousand watersheds, and that the diversity and unique history of each should be affectionately worshipped and experienced. You see, it’s the conglomeration of the billions of petrified raindrops that are in dire need of our attention and nurturing. I used to be one of them, but have finally grown into a puddle.

Genuine environmental leaders are destined to produce profound environmental effects. Like the discovery of a vaccine for smallpox, the invention of the printing press, or the storming of the Bastille, we seek a revolutionary revival. We too will have our watershed moments.

We will initially be looked at as unwanted and unneeded, and told politely that our extra green efforts are ‘not necessary’ or ‘will be considered’. Many of us work (not thrive) in environments that think of us as foreign intruders, out-of-staters or out-of-minders. Our departments are run by some very important managers— political insiders, seasoned professionals, well-intentioned ‘kumbayakers’, right-place and right-time individuals-- and we are really jealous. We don’t normally butt heads with them, as we are lower in the pecking order and rarely chirp up.

We constantly wonder if we are being seriously employed or just downright ployed or taken major advantage of. Our green army needs enhanced environmental leadership. We deploy environmental troops on the ground, we pray for miracles, and we...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.10.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-1192-3 / 9798350911923