Starting with a Concept

By: Michael Mortimer

About a year or so ago I started working on a concept I had for a book about cities, environmental sustainability, and the unique problems we face in the Anthropocene.  And that, I can tell you, is no mean feat.  If it was easy, it would already be done.  But as the saying goes “nothing worthwhile is easy.”  In my case, never having written a book before, naiveté was the narcotic clouding just how challenging it would be.  Not because it’s hard to put words on paper, and not because conceptualizing the book was difficult.  No, it was because with every rock I turned over I found a dozen more rocks to pick through.  Think of the Wikipedia sinkhole that we’ve all experienced, where two hours of hyperlinking around later you can’t even recall what you originally searched.  But all these new rocks are more than just potential distractions from the main thing.  They are perhaps interesting ideas and concepts that swirl just outside the confines of the book’s cover.  They may need some air, and this the place to do just that.

The book is tentatively entitled “Green Empire: Cities in the Pursuit of Global Sustainability.”  As I make progress, I’ll share some of the ideas percolating in one chapter or another, or that perhaps don’t fit neatly within the book at all.  I like to think this book will tie together much of what the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability is all about.  But I’ll let you be the judge of that.  Cheers.

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The opinions expressed are those of the individual and not of Virginia Tech or the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability