Marc Mowrey
In 1984 in New Jersey, after the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA) ammendments of '84 had been passed, Marc and his father put together a company called Chem Link. The idea was to automate the requirements of RCRA so that companies could have their Material Data Safety Sheets and their Hazardous Waste Manifest automated to comply with the new law. It was too expensive (before personal computers) and no one went along with it - but the idea stuck with him.

He got involved in more grassroots efforts in the 80's (Nader groups, Citizens Action, etc.). Then Axil and Marc got involved in a number of "out there" ideas including the Fuller Environment Company to go door to door in a van, dressed in jump suits, knocking on doors selling environmental products and services. Another was the Globall - a computer shaped like a globe that would sit in your home and act as an in-and-out-port for environmental information.

After he got mono he decided to read the history of the environmental movement but he couldn't find one - so he decided to write it himself. He recruited Tim Redmond, Editor of the Bay Guardian, to help him write the book. The book was called Not in Our Backyard. It was a history of the modern environmental movement from the Santa Barabara Oil spill to about 1992.

Marc has been at the EPA for about five years and involved with Green Home for a year and a half.

John Greenberg
In the 80's, John worked for the New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution - a New England-wide anti-nuclear group. John did more or less everything at one time or another - fundraising, administration. The final issue he worked on was that of low-level radioactive waste. At some point he realized that the way to kill nukes was not to fight them but to make them unnecessary and the way to make them unnecessary was to save or conserve enough energy to make it plausible to displace them. In Connecticut, 500 megawatts of electricity per year is displaced by energy conservation which, not coincidentally, is Connecticut Yankee.

John was also involved with the now-defunct New Alchemy Institute. They researched and developed a lot of technology but did not do anything with it. One idea was for green houses that could be done in a n urban environment. They would grow fish and the fish waste would be used to fertilize the green house - an entire ecosystem, called The Arc, but it was never commercialized in any way.

Started GreenCo. Products in 1992 for the New Alchemy Institute but the Institute disappeared before that could happen. The idea was to get these green products into the mainstream by supplying existing mainstream retailers rather than retailing the products themselves. If we could just get real people to use the products in quantity - that is how you make a dent.

They do business with natural foods coops and other natural food stores. He is always most pleased when he sells to the mainstream - the person who just buys products, like the Greek pizza place near him - they don't speak much English but they understand that a compact fluorescent bulb is going to save them money. It has to get to the person who doesn't think of himself as an environmentalist but who just buys products.

John personally has an aversion to products that "look" green but are not - like paper that only looks recycled. It is dangerous because it is pushing away the mainstream customer.

Linda Mason Hunter
Linda approaches or begins from the standpoint of "home" more that from the standpoint of "green" which has been a sub-theme of her work. Linda is a journalist who writes about the home and building and design for magazines, several books for other publishers such as Meredith (the publisher of Better Homes and Gardens and other magazines). Linda was introduced to the idea of "green" during the very first Earth Day. She was 24 years old, looking around, thinking that she wanted to be a socially responsible adult and this really got to her and stuck with her ever since.

In 1985 she quit Meredith and went to work for Rodale Press where she began writing an article called "the Healthy Home" for New Shelter Magazine. A lot of people wrote and called her looking for information asking questions. Linda could research these questions find the answers, but she was amazed to learn that nowhere had it all been put together before.

During the solar revolution Linda sought out solar houses to write about - some of which were done poorly and some were done well. During the energy crisis when people were "tightening up" their houses, she saw some scary things being done. She visited an apartment complex with a builder who said that the place was so tight that he could light a match and the match would not stay lit (which he demonstrated). Linda realized that this was the next trend - the next route to take.

She went out to Rodale and started writing the column. It was frustrating because it was hard to put all of the information into a column, so she decided to write a book. Rodale published the book in 1989 (The Healthy Home). It was the first book of its kind (though only by a couple of months.)

Linda is still writing about houses and she still tries to take the green approach. Later this fall Linda has a book coming out this fall with Northland publishing in Arizona about houses and design of the Southwest. The Southwest by its nature lends itself to building in a natural way.

Three years ago, Linda met Lawrence at a yoga retreat shortly after he returned from India. He invited her to be a part of Green Home. She had spoken to a number of people that weekend, told him to give her a call and did not really expect to hear from him. Then nine months ago, she got the call. Now she is here and excited and hopes we can make it happen.

Christi Graham
As a child Christi was asthmatic and that started her consciousness about materials like carpeting and synthetically-created environments. Later, she got involved with earth-based spirituality through Outward Bound and deep ecology. The idea was to challenge one's own personal belief system through nature. She took a program called Eco Team - a program to get together teams people (friends, neighbors, co-workers) and gets them to work over a series of seven meetings, using a resource/work book on issues like reducing waste, reducing chemicals, issues of transportation, water, energy, etc.

Christi took the course to meet people. She thought she was as green as one could get because of her awareness of toxic chemicals, ingredients in cleaners, etc. Through the program Christi realized that she was wasting tons of energy and the program got her to take action on her good intentions and deepened her understanding of green.

She eventually became the director of Eco Team which they renamed Earth Team and changed the program. Great satisfaction came from training these local teams of average Americans who were thrilled to get all of this information distilled into one place and the support to do it. If the book told you to put a low-flow showerhead on it would also tell you where to get one and the team was there to get you to do it. However, a lot of these resources were still hard to come by (mostly small, unreliable manufacturers).

She moved to San Francisco and got more involved in the building side because she believes that that is where the environmental movement is going. Everyone wants a healthy house - that is where environmentalism begins. She got involved with Architects, Designers, Planners for Social Responsibility - sat on their Northern California Chapter.

She got interested in environmental home inspections through the Institute of Baubiologie. Christi took their certification course which she just finished in December (Linda Mason Hunter helped write the workbook).

Since working with the Eco Tem program, she started thinking that it should be made easily available to the general public. She wrote her thesis on how to get people to take action on her good intentions around environmental issues. She wrote a business plan to do something similar to Green Home is doing. She took a business course and tough she intended to get into retail and took a business class to that end. After taking the course, however, she realized that she did not want to go into retail. She decided that if she didn't want to do retail, it could still be done on line and about one week later Lawrence walked into the Green Resource Center (in Berkeley - Christi is Director) and told her about Green Home.

The idea of having another body of people working on the project - being a part of it rather than leading the charge and having to do it herself - was thrilling. It is the right time and she sees potential for collaboration between Green Home and the Green Resource Center - a center dedicated to education for alternative materials.

Susie Shannon
Started environmentalism as an animal lover and later a vegetarian. She almost felt as though she was born an environmentalist - she was always aware of air pollution, factories and people "breaking the planet". After college she went to Eco Expo in 1993 and could not believe what was out there - she saw it as a revolution. Susie got involved starting to do their conferences and later started producing their trade shows, marketing the products and helping different companies.

A year and a half ago this crazy guy called her up and she thought he had a great idea. He didn't hear from him for a while - then in May (of 1999), the day before a show, he called and wanted to meet with her. They met and talked for two or three hours and she was amazed at how quickly he had gotten the project up and running since they had last spoken.

Susie is still dedicated to environmental products but the show (Eco Expo) has switched over to business and government but she would like to concentrate on the retail consumer in order to create the market for these products.

Susie recently did a report for the EPA on their environmentally preferable purchasing program - trying to map out a plan to show how procurement officers can start buying these products.

Lawrence Comras
His involvement in greenness stemmed from his involvement as a producer for what ended-up being the very first multi-media CD-ROM produced in 1988. A consortium of businesses (National Geographic, Apple Computer, and Lucas) were investing in renovating one of the pier fronts in San Francisco to turn it into a recreation of turn-of-the-century waterfront life. As the centerpiece, they wanted an interactive environmental museum. Lawrence wrote a proposal for something called GAIA (Globally Aware Information Architecture) which was to be an interactive computer environment that would ask visitors and participants to help save the planet. It would act as a meeting place, a tourist attraction, a front end for environmental organizations, and it would provide information for scholars and visitors, all in an interactive environment with kiosks that would allow you to tap into up-to-the-minute reports on the eco-status of various key environmental issues. It would also allow you to learn what you could do about these issues. The new multi-media environment allowed people to follow the interests they had engendered from the things they were just learning at the time - the notion of what Lawrence called "learner-directed learning". The project did not happen - partially because although there was an Internet, there was no Web at that time.

Later Lawrence started a BBS (bulletin board system) which attempted to list the key environmental issues and the organizations working on them. You could type in the issues you were interested in and it would tell you the groups that were working on that issue.

Although these projects didn't pan out - going around Northern California to interest people in the project was a great learning experience. He met with Jerry Garcia, Baba Ram Dass, and a lot of other Marin/Bay Area people about what it would take to do a project like Green Home on a grand scale.

Lawrence also tried to put together Eco-line, a 900 number but none of these got funded. In 1991 he realized he needed to learn more about the business and technology parts of the equation - which he did.

Lawrence worked for Broderbund Software in Marin, and ended up learning a lot about business, technology and websites. He got more involved in the environmental movement through the Black Point Forest Rescue Project. They tried to save the Blackpoint Forest from being developed (it was a partial success).