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- With that, I'd like you to help me please welcome John and Lisa. 
(APPLAUSE)

- Can you hear me okay? There we go. Great. Thank you, very much. It's an honor to be invited to share in the dialogue that goes on in the Wisconsin Book Festival. And we're very proud of Wisconsin. It's part of our story. It's part of the story of the festival, and I think will resonate with a lot of the themes we see here tonight. 

John and I live about an hour south of here on our farm and bed and breakfast, In Serendipity, just outside of Monroe. And have had a journey, if you will, in this realm of ecopreneuring that we'll talk about. Of using business, something we all do. Whether we run one, we purchase things, we are all involved in those transactions and how can we do them more consciously to support the state of Wisconsin, to support our environment and from our perspective, truly change the world. So again it's an honor to be here and we hope to share some thoughts with you to get dialogue going throughout the weekend, throughout the week, throughout the rest of the year, throughout the next election cycle to keep it going. Given that this is the Land and Home Series I thought it would be appropriate to bring something for show and tell from our land that's our home, our organic farm in Green County. And we've probably served thousands of bed and breakfasts over the last 12 years that we've been running as a small green bed and breakfast running on renewable energy. And I've noticed over the years that everybody I meet now reminds me of different types of food. Perhaps this has to do with being surrounded by food all the time, but let me give you an example. We have the carrots, freshly harvested actually, a good year for carrots for us. 

But the carrot people are really straight and narrow. They kind of travel in bunches. They are usually tall and look at you and they know what to do and they'll tell you about it. I see some of you guys chuckling. We've met a couple of those. We have the eggs, who are hard on the outside and kind of jiggly on the inside. Different shapes, different transformations. But the eggs. And then we have coffee. A lot of little individual hard beans in a jar. 

Okay, well let's do a little scientific experiment here. This is how these foods are but what happens when they hit hot water? What happens when we as people, when we as citizens of Wisconsin hit hard times? Which, we could argue that all night, but undoubtedly something's coming. How do we react, how do we react to that kind of change? All right, let's experiment here. Let's put our carrots in the pot. Let's put our eggs in the pot. Hey, Vanna, can you throw my coffee beans in the pot. Coffee beans. 

This isn't our secret bed and breakfast recipe or anything like that. Trust me. Now we're going to add some hot water to the mix. There you go. Any references to climate change or things heating up, feel free to let us all know. How did they react? Those carrots, those tall straight, hard guys are mushy. They totally mushed in the state of adversity. Those people who had the opinions that knew exactly what to do and were happy to tell you, all the sudden, are mushy carrots. What happened to the eggs? 

They hard boil in hot water, right? There hardened. It made them depressed, sad, angry, mad, whatever. But they changed shape and hardened. But what about those coffee beans? What happens to coffee when it hits hot water? It turns to coffee. But what does it really do? It changes the situation into something better. Those little individual beans in the jar took something hot, took something tenuous, took something that we didn't know anything about and they worked together and they made it better. 

Arguably really better if you ask us about coffee. But that's what we're going to be talking about is that theme of coffee. How can we all be coffee. Because the question is what kind of fruit, vegetable, mineral do we want to be. Do we want to be those carrots? Do we want to be the eggs? Or how can we be coffee, work together and change a bad situation for the better. So, on that note, what we're going to do briefly here is for some context is talk about this climate for change. What's going on now. What's happening. 

John promised me he's going to summarize the doom and gloom of the world in one slide. We'll see. Ecopreneur profiles. We're going to talk about people here in Wisconsin. I'm sure there's people that I'll mention that you know, or you've been to, or you've eaten at. And how these folks are really changing the scene of Wisconsin through their businesses and livelihoods. We're going to quickly go through some ecopreneuring tips, whether you might be harboring an idea to start a business one day or want to support more of these types of things and end with some resources and ideas and then open things up for discussion.

- All right, so here we go. The 21st century is all about small, local and ecopreneurial. And that really is what we have and are now going on almost 12 years worth of interviews and research, discussing, meeting with folks all across the country but also in our lone little enterprise have really discovered that we're going to need a whole new way of approaching things. 

We have climate change. We have ecological collapse, just about every living system on the planet now is in decline. We have peak oil or something there about. And we all know it, more so from the same point of rising energy prices, whether it's natural gas this winter or what we're paying for at the pump. And finally we're in the midst of this wonderful debt based economy that in the last 15 to 20 years we found ourselves supporting and now we're kind of having to pay the bill for it. So what do ecopreneurs do? They solve the problems. And they make a little money doing so. That is what an ecopreneur does. They use business as a catalyst for these changes. 

So from our perspective we're looking outside what the government is supposed to do. Bailout big companies to get our financial system back on track. We're looking at business to actually solve those problems because we're finding the governmental sector and social sector are falling a little behind. So from our standpoint, business is both for-profit and nonprofit. And it really comes down to how you designate yourself in the IRS. So as you go through this presentation you'll hear us talk about for-profit, nonprofit and hybrid organizations. They're a little bit of both. And they keep their paperwork and bank accounts different, but there is the sense of business of being all of those things. For nonprofit it's just a matter of using those proceeds to go to support whatever the mission is of the nonprofit group.

- We should probably add the disclaimer, everything we're talking about tonight is legal.

- Finally what we're really talking about is redefining free enterprise. We were brought up from the standpoint that you're supposed to go to college to get a good job, to have this house in the suburb or somewhere and that is what we're supposed to do. We're all in, from our perspective, we've been misled. And really it's seeing the opportunity and launching your own business, your own green enterprise you can actually control so much more of what's going on in your life but also take the profits and make those changes that you wanted to see take place. We're a large group of people. Very large. In fact, one out of every four workers in the United States is a free agent. That's 33 million workers. Roughly 23 million run a micro-enterprise like we do with five or fewer employees. In our case, you're looking at both of our employees. 

Eventually our son Liam is going to be a part of the business. That's 87% of all the businesses. Or you can look at it from a different way. The self-employed side of it. And 75% of all businesses have only one person. What's fascinating is there's no payroll. So the unemployment rate is not even reflected in this other segment that are running their own business. And these are your artists, your craftspeople, shopkeepers. And that group is really growing. Because there's a lot of folks in their 40s, 50s, 60s who said hitting around the ball on the golf course is okay but I still have this one last thing I want to do. 

They actually call it an encore career. But this whole sense of doing something more and creating an enterprise, the dream business they've always wanted. So we're seeing a lot of the retired or near pre-retirees going in and launching their own businesses. Now, from the standpoint, we don't see economics quite the same way people in Washington, DC, do. We look at economics from the ECO part being capitalized. Because the current global free market economic system, currently allows the system where about 5% of the world's population use 25% of the planet's resources and produce 40% of our waste and pollution. And, by the way, we also house about 25% of our global prison population. There's something wrong with this so-called free market global economy that we've been told is the way to go. And we'll go into this a little bit more in the presentation but we really need to shift in a different direction, and ask why is selling for less better. How did we get to the cheapest thing is the best thing. 

What about the thing made in your community that actually supports your neighbors so they can keep doing whatever they're doing. Those are the questions that we keep asking. And a new sense of value is emerging, and that's what we're seeing with the growth of energy fairs and green festivals and, back in spring, you had two different weekends these green days and green events. It really is growing because more people are beginning to think about values and fair trade and ecological sustainability. Now from the standpoint of folks working in a job, you'll realize that control, flexibility and freedom is kind of a rare thing. We both worked at an ad agency for a very limited time because we got tired of someone telling us when we could go for lunch, when we could take a holiday or even what we could do for our retirement. Controlling how we were allocating our resources. All of that leads to stress and insecurity and more and more people are becoming aware of this. And as bigger corporations start having more and more challenges, they're finding ways in that fine print to sidestepping some of those pension responsibilities and medical responsibilities. So a lot of ecopreneurs by how they devise their enterprise are building that right into their DNA of how they operate. 

So when you're working for a job, oftentimes you're working for money for someone else and you're helping someone else achieve their dreams, not yours. So ecopreneurs really turn that on their head and then focus really on restorative opportunities. Not the doom and the gloom of this incredible scarcity mode that the United States right now, we're out of money, people aren't loaning to each other, we're chasing and trying to find more oil, we need to drill, baby, drill. The ecopreneurs look at it from a very different way. And they're focusing on things that are life-restoring, not depleting. Not depleting all that offshore oil. But why don't we live off solar and renewable energy of various sorts. And why don't we do that in our own community. Sustainable business, if you were to kind of distill it very briefly, is a triple bottom line. That's what we often times call it. 

People, planet and some profits, we argue. And it's all about making those reinvestments in the people, the planet and the profits that really define what a green business or a sustainable business is. Incidentally, that also defines a sustainable community when you have all three. And these businesses oftentimes thrive in what is called the honeybee economy. And for those of you who know beekeeping and all, you notice they operate on renewable energy very nicely with nectar and honey, they have all sorts of natural interdependencies. Two million flowers pollinated for just one pound of honey. They are real, real community activists here. And one-third of our human diet is based on crops pollinated by bees. So there's this relationship with all these other animals in their community and they're very important. But what's key is they're industrious and efficient, but they're decentralized. 

It's kind of the opposite of both the Russian economy and the United States economy, as of late. It's very decentralized. Very centralized. What's amazing to us, and most of the ecopreneurs we talk to, this is a pretty important thing, they're having a lot of fun doing what they're doing. And if you know about bees, when they signal where they need to go for honey, they do this funky little dance. And so folks that are looking at why we want to do this, we really prioritize quality of life over how much money we have in our 401k. So the other key aspect of a lot of ecopreneurial enterprises, they serve customers. They serve human beings. You all are human beings. You're not consumers. 

But in the last 20 years, a lot of big companies and then our media, which are also big companies have led us to believe that two-thirds of our economy is consumer spending and you all are consumers, therefore, you need to go out and keep consuming to keep our economy going. But we need a different model because, as I alluded to earlier, we're ruining globally this relationship and we're oftentimes destroying our communities thinking about things that way. We've got a growing awareness of our human impact on the planet now. And it's really leading to a lot of changes in how we live, work, play and interact. And this consciousness is really crossing over in a lot of different ways. And we'll give some great examples a little later on. One of the things that we developed quite a bit in ecopreneuring, our book, is the sense of earth mission. What is it that I'm here for. And I went through an undergrad and two years of graduate school and not once did anyone at any time put up happiness, self-fulfillment or any of that, those kinds of expressions or terms on the chalkboard. It was all about getting through, getting the grades, getting a job to go work for a company. 

And what we're finding is more and more people are putting the happiness, the quality of life, being with my kids, if I have them, being with my parents, if I want to, and being able to create situations like that. Looking at respecting nature. Looking at fair trade, not free trade. And looking at those relationships among things. And build community well in a living, restorative economy. And we see it, and many do is wealth without purpose is poverty. So what they do with their earth mission, once they figure out what it is they want to do, is they turn those purposes and those passions into their business. A lot of folks say, well, you don't want to turn a hobby into an enterprise. Well, we kind of come back, well, why not. If you like traveling around the world, why not be a travel writer. 

If you like reading children's books and wish you always wanted to write one, why not? If you like interacting with people and wouldn't mind hosting, why not start a bed and breakfast? Why not do all of those things? Nature is diverse, why not also incorporate that into your life? Resource Revival is a company, the guy really liked biking so he takes junk bike parts and turned them into practical gift items. Takes a waste dream and turns it into something. Patagonia we all, many folks of heard about. Their mission of their organization is to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. Where is it make gobs and gobs of money so the CEO can retire early with a multibillion-dollar yacht. That's your mission. 

Inspire and implement solutions to environmental crisis. So you've run your business to generate the revenue and profit to support whatever that mission is. That change that you're seeking to make. And another key one. We all know about ecological diversity in nature, different species, plants, animals fill ecological niches. What our global free market economy we're talking about everybody is using the same brand of toothpaste everywhere on the planet. Ecopreneurs look at how do I fill an economical niche. Or several economical niches within my community. And small sometimes is a competitive advantage. Wal-Mart could never sell our produce. 

Especially certain things like our pea tendrils that we harvest. We could do things they could never ever do. And by doing that we have this little niche that we filled.

- Ours comes with dirt on it.

- Those are a bigger versions. But our success is really defined on our values, and a big part of that is defining things qualitatively not quantitatively. We're kind of really stuck into how much money this growth idea that we have to keep growing one quarter to the next, one year to the next. We have a status quo that once we get to a point where our obligations are met, all that surplus is either given away, reinvested or channeled in other ways. So we stay about where we are. That's a status quo business, if you will. 

But the status quo, when we had good years, we were able to do things like purchase an all electric city car to go back and forth to the bank as a way from not having to go to the gas station. Self-reliance, as you'll hear, is a big part of that. It's all about a shift from consumption to collaboration. It's a different way of interacting with things.

- Okay, so with those food for thought, if you will, let's talk about how different people, different businesses are doing that here in Wisconsin. And to start off with, a real quick tour of our own place, In Serendipity. We are a small corporation that, as John mentioned, just like Mother Nature, very diversified. We have the bed-and-breakfast at the farm. Two rooms for the B&B. We're completely powered by renewable energy so we get a check back from Alliant rather than paying them. 

Our neighbors still come over to watch the meter go backwards when the wind turbine is spinning. It's a new way of looking at things. We have a very local breakfast. We have the hundred mile diet. And of folks in Madison support that. Well this is the hundred foot diet. The hundred foot breakfast, from kitchen garden to plate. We also have a small cabin that we rent again with a diversified idea. This is in more of a forested area of Vernon County that we both rent but we also use the woods for sustainable forestry, harvest. And use it from a practical business perspective. 

In there's words up here like to demortization. And you'll see things flash that we're not going to talk about here, but if there's things you're interested in from a practical perspective, that's why we wrote Ecopreneuring. Because we are getting questions from folks like how can you do this legally? How can you live on so little financially yet still have such a high quality of life? That's what we write about. But we don't want to talk about it on Friday night. We want to talk about these bigger issues and come to some solutions. Other ways we diversify is through the writing and John through his photography for a variety of magazines. A variety of contexts. We went kicking and screaming into the blogosphere finally this year but we're working on it.

- It's one of those things that if you got an interest in an area that you would like to develop, we could write about it and just put it up there somewhere or we could write about it and actually get paid for it. Not a lot, but something. And for us all those little bits are these little payroll elements or revenue elements within our enterprise, that allows us to be more stable. Right now we get about 1000 different checks from different people every year. So if one particular part of our enterprise doesn't do so well, it's okay, it can get absorbed. In our case, that cabin you saw had the two hundred year events happen within a year with the floods. So we lost an incredible amount of revenue and business and spent a lot of money fixing roads and so forth but our business was able to absorb that because climate change is a reality and we are personally coming up, it's right on our doorstep.

- And also on that note, John has authored several children's books in partnership with different non-profits. That's a theme you'll see with a lot of the stories I'll be talking about. That collaboration, working collaboratively. 

You might not want to start your own non-profit. There might be somebody doing something, in this case, working with global diversity issues in children's literature. Okay, now the stories I'm going to talk about here in Wisconsin are from a book that's outside there with the bookstore folks. But Renewing the Countryside Wisconsin, folks might have seen. It came out last year, Renewing the Countryside is a Minnesota based nonprofit that focuses on the positive sides of rural revitalization. And John and I contributed a bunch of the stories to this. But to use these as examples, -- grass farms, the -- are outside of, where they from?

- East Troy.

- Thank you, Elkhorn. Doing farming unusually. 

Now, granted we're an agriculture state, a dairy state. It doesn't have to be same old same old, and these guys prove it. Now Alfred --, I won't try to attempt his German accent, what are some things they're doing differently, innovative approaches to farming. They're organic dairy. They're part of the Organic Valley Dairy Cooperative. They're part of the largest farmer owned cooperative in the country, thank you very much. The rent their land from a land trust. They don't own their farm. Now that is almost sacrilege here in America, much less here in the farming heartland. Of course you want to own your land. 

What happens when you own your land? You can't access the capital. We see that in Green County a lot. Where there's elderly people sitting on their farm, can't sell it, don't want to sell it but don't have any money for their daily expenses. Well in this case they are on a long-term rental contract from a land trust so the same organic sustainable ag principles are in mind and they pay rent. So what happens? They have more cash in the bank. They have a different economic equation by changing the equation. They also have an innovative approach to insurance. It's a huge issue with getting more people, more younger people involved with farming. 

They looked overseas for a model, it turns out in New Zealand, farming is up there as one of those professions you want your kid to go into right after, you know, doctor, accountant, farmer. Now how great would it be if we could honestly say that here in Wisconsin, here in the United States that this is what we want our kids to go into. But it's a valued, economically viable profession there. And part of the reason they have that is they have this intensive internship program where people not just come out and help all free labor for a summer they are economically invested. So when folks come and intern at the grass farm, they leave a couple years later with their own head of cows, with some money in the bank ready to go. Baraboo Valley Windsor Chairs' Dave Ogren is a classic example of an ecopreneur. He was a chemist, a science guy in a lab, because again that's what he was tracked to do. But in his mid-life said, this is not really what I want to do. I want to be working with my hands. And he was drawn to chair making. 

Windsor Chairs, the revolutionary style kind of chairs. He taught himself how to do it. He went to some workshops out in Maine. Harnessed the Internet to try and get the word out about this. And really focuses on a high-quality product. He uses local woods, he works with other people in the area collaboratively. For folks familiar with the Fall Arts Tour going on this weekend in Spring Green, Baraboo, Dodgeville, Mineral Point area, Dave is on the cover. He's one of the key organizers in getting people to their communities to see the artisans. So all these things have added up into an economically viable business for him. Where his commute is walking out to his barn where he has his shop. 

So go out to see him if you're out in the Arts Tour. Great guy. White Winter Winery. We're headed way up north Iron River, just outside of Bayfield. John and Kim Hamilton graduated from Northland College up there. They loved the area, they wanted to stay. It was that sense of place that drew them. Well there aren't a whole lot of jobs in Iron River. Let's create our own. What could we do that's different? 

Well they had this thing about mead. For those of you who don't know, it's like the oldest fermented beverage ever. Before wine, before beer. Let's try to make that. So that's what they do at their place. It's lovely, if you ask me. But I'm a fruity person. But they use all local fruits and honey. Honey is the key ingredient in mead. The honey beekeeping population has gone nuts way up in Bayfield County because of this operation. 

They use local honey. They thrive on community support and barter. They were just out of college when this started. They didn't have any money for much of the infrastructure. So they found a kind-hearted chemist, a science guy on staff at Northland, and bartered with him to get the chemistry right for this process of making mead. So it's a very mutual relationship. He'd get the mead, they'd get the formulas and community groups. Closer to our corner of the state in Greene County, Brodhead, Applied Ecological Services, folks might have heard of it as AES. This is a sleepy little place outside of Brodhead that's actually a multimillion-dollar leader in nationwide, globalwide in landscape renovation. In ecological stewardship. 

How can we create landscapes that are native that help preserve the environment. And Steve Applebaum, there you see, again he started this business because of his love for the native plants, for the prairie. And despite the fact that he has a successful multimillion business you'll still see him just like this with his car pulled over on the county roads collecting prairie seed because that's where his heart is. But he's brought a whole lot of people along with him to make a livelihood out of it. Now they're particularly focused on urban conservation developments. Things like re-plantings at the 9/11 site. How can you recreate things of pain and create them into better things. So they do a lot of creative work there. But based in Wisconsin. We got that theme going here. 

All right, WOJB back north to La Courte Oreilles, the reservation land there. This is a good example of a lot of stories in Renewing the Countryside, a lot of stories in Wisconsin. Some of these places sound really hip and new, and very exciting and trendy ecopreneurs, but this wasn't something that started yesterday. WOJB started several decades ago when there were issues between the native and non-native populations in the community needing to communicate better. Well somebody had the idea of starting a radio station. A community radio station that we can literally all express our views, express our music, express our issues and collaboratively grow. Well that has become an incredibly successful community radio station. Now they use the web to streamline that message across the world, across the globe. And do so still with a very community feel. If you're ever up to that area outside of Hayward, I mean, well it's like WORT, but it's community to a T, because it's in the middle of nowhere, they have records there. 

Falling off the shelves and somebody's making coffee and people just show up and do their own show. It's a fabulous community spot. Lake Michigan Wind and Sun, Sturgeon Bay at the start of Door County. John and Ann Hippensteel are leaders in renewable energy here. They helped us put our wind turbine system in. For those of you who've been to the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair, you'll see John sitting at his booth the whole weekend talking about wind energy and the power of renewables, the power of alternatives. That's the kind of people these ecopreneurs are where they have a viable business, they use the land on their farm as a little test laboratory. If you ever pass it by you can't miss it. There's turbines, there's panels, there's everything going at once. But the focus is on education outreach. 

Yeah, he's marketing when he's at the fair. Yeah, somebody's probably going to buy something eventually. But that really isn't his mission. His mission is to change some minds, give people some options and perspectives. And that's what drives the success of the business. It's different than a marketing plan, it's different than taking out ads in local whatever publication. This is from the heart and that makes a big difference. So to go into some tips and ideas here quickly and then we'll move on to some discussion. Obviously a big idea behind all this is going green, but the issue is why. This is what we found so exciting and inspiring, the numbers are growing. 

You might hear terms like cultural creatives. These are folks who are prioritizing their food purchases, wanting things to come local, wanting to know that the places they spend the night, hey, how are you getting your energy? Show me your wind turbine. Show me your green energy. It's growing in number to 50 million people. Sometimes you hear it called the lifestyles of health and sustainability or LOHAS. This is what's inspiring a lot of new innovations. And here's where again we can be really proud of the things that are happening in Wisconsin. I realize we Cheeseheads tend to be a humble lot sometimes but you leave our state borders, people are copying what we're doing here. Learning from it right and left across the country. 

Travel Green is a great example. For folks not familiar, our Wisconsin Department of Tourism issued a statewide green travel certification program launched two years ago. You go to: travelgreenWisconsin.com. You see businesses like ours that run on renewable energy, but you see places like Monona Terrace, conventional convention centers that made steps to become green and improve. Now other states are copying this because we're the first state in the nation to really do a statewide green certification level to that level. And I give credit to the Department of Tourism because they got it. They got that folks, even those crazy Chicagoans like ourselves, want to know what's the locally owned cafe that might be five miles off the interstate but actually uses Wisconsin cheese on its burgers? You'd think that would be a law here. It's not. You have to find it. 

Be fossil fuel free. How can we reduce or eliminate our need for fossil fuels? Working from home is a big plus to that. Again, our commute is up the stairs or outside or to the barn. But part of that, and this is the part, we hope to see you guys out on the farm some time, when people see the wind turbine or solar panel, those are really interesting. But the point is we spent the first couple of years doing those things we're probably all doing of energy efficiency and conservation. And we're talking a lot about stocks and declines of markets these last couple weeks but there's still one investment that you can do that has a guaranteed 120% return on investment and that's a compact fluorescent light bulb. Very exciting, I know, but we put them in 12 years ago and we haven't replaced one of them except for one that John hit with his head. But that's kind of the Slovakian height issue in small farm houses. Alright, generate your own electricity if you can or there's lots of options within the green energy programs with the utilities. 

We're with Alliant and Second Nature for what we don't produce. Using renewable energies, biofuels. And that's the city car that John had mentioned. It's where we're restoring a 1975 city car. We've got some off-grid solar panels we plug in. But we are contemplating entering it in the next Cheese Day Parade in Monroe as a big chunk of gouda. Tapping into these multiple economies of ecopreneurship.

- One of the things that we've found, and Lisa's touched on it already with the idea of barter, but we kind of are in this economy, this free market global economy where everything has to be exchanged with money. That's the way the game is played. Ecopreneurs don't play that game. 

They, first and foremost, almost every one of the ecopreneurs we talked to, more on the family size of enterprise, have figured out their household economy. The one that for folks who have got a few years behind them know all about the household economy because that was just what you do. You dealt with some of your own energy needs. You grow a little bit of your own food in your backyard. Maybe took turns taking care of kids in your neighborhood. This is not new stuff. But that sense of household economy, the sense of self-reliance and interconnections locally is a big part of what makes ecopreneuring work for a lot of enterprises. Lisa alluded to already barter. But we also like to reuse economy where there is no money exchange. It's just putting things, moving things around like that third microwave just sitting and taking up space in your garage. 

So freecycle.org, craigslist.org, those are great resources that weren't even around 10 years ago that are now around today to try to facilitate that. So we actually go there first if we have ruled out all our other options to see if there's anything else locally first that we can tap into. And we also funnel materials and so forth to that same place. The volunteer in the gift economy has always been around and the common joke you often hear when you go to farming conferences is you need to lock the door in August because if you don't you're going to get zucchini in the back seat. It's that sense of moving food around. And we're sitting here right now we have a whole box of produce, root crops, destined for someone in Monroe that were dropping off on the way back through. He doesn't even know it's coming yet. But we know he will appreciate and use it all up. It's a surplus. But that sense of sharing that surplus. 

We need to get back to that sense within our communities and most ecopreneurs that we've interviewed for this book are all doing it in their own way.

- I've got a couple carrots here if anybody wants to take them home.

- We've got some carrots to give away. But also we look at the view of a harvest economy rather than having to go make stuff. Why not use what's already freely there. We're farming but around us we're not farming because we're not growing soybeans, corn and alfalfa, but we're harvesting the wind and we're spinning our meter backwards. That's harvesting to us. Because we get $200 a year from our utility company. We're thinking about it in a different way. And that cooperative economy, Organic Valley Family Farms, obviously based right here in Wisconsin, is the largest owned farming cooperative looking at it differently in how you own things. 

You're not a shareholder, you're the owner. Willy Street food co-op, the largest retail cooperative. There's no coincidence this is happening right here in Wisconsin. It's a sense of change in the theme for this particular Wisconsin Book Festival. It's really reflective of a very smart choice because this is where it's happening and more and more people globally are looking at the United States to see how we're doing it but specifically Wisconsin, and how we're doing it here. Now the other aspect, and this is the subversive part of all of this because we used to have W-2s and jobs somewhere. It turns out when you mind your own business, you come out way ahead. And I mean way ahead. When you try to deduct your business expenses that reduces your revenue. It whittles down that actual taxable part that you pay. 

So, you know, some of the largest corporations have figured this out. Like AT&T, Time Warner, Walt Disney Corporation. Because the corporations pay taxes only on their profit, which is if you have a job with a W-2, you pay taxes both income and payroll taxes on your gross income. So if you, and I'll go into this in a second, if you think about this little equation and approach it differently, you'll find out you're going to come way ahead. So let's just take a random example here. A nice middle amount of money. If $35,000 of income from a job and you have $35,000 of business revenues of a business that you own. For that job you might be working for a corporation transforming human natural capital into wealth for a few shareholders of which you may not even be a privileged to be a shareholder because you have to buy your own stock if you want to be an owner of that company that you're working for. Now on the other side, if you run your own business, you're thriving in this restoration economy, taking advantage of these opportunities, using things that come amongst nature and your earning revenues for the owner of the business. I'm not going to go into all the details. 

We can open that up perhaps for discussion because I'm sure there might be some ecopreneurs in the audience or at least some entrepreneurs in the audience. But after you settle everything out, you actually come out quite a bit ahead. It's allowed a 41 and 42 year-old to pay off.

- I'm 41.

- Right. To pay off our farm. Because we are able to generate enough of these revenues coming through, we're able to control things in ways we could never do when we were working for someone else. And so with the job, you live to work and earn a living. Sound familiar? If you carry a mortgage, which is also called a death pledge, you earn money to pay bank one. 

You have a car that you purchased with a loan, now you're paying bank two. And if you carry balances on your credit card or card you bank three, four, five, six or whatever. It turns out all you're doing is living to work to pay all these people because you've gotten yourself entrapped in this debt economy. It's no wonder here we are with the national dis-savings rate. Now if you run your own business, you can control so much more and you can make a living and live the good life and the focus is using the revenues and profits to make the world a better place. It's what you do with that money once you get it coming in. And you can control that. So we're actually not very income rich, but we have enough revenue coming into the enterprise to make a good go of it and it allows us to make the investments that we think are important. Rather than having someone else make them for us with our tax money. So you invest for the future, not save for it. 

We spend our money on sustainable transport and renewable energy system and there's lots of benefit to doing so. Lots of benefits and most recently the renewable energy tax credits were are all renewed. So if your business owns some of the systems you get tax credits.

- Keeping it local, it's a theme we've been talking about throughout. But that idea of when you need to make a purchase, thinking about how you can do that as bioregionally as possible and maybe something we could talk about to think about are what are some of these businesses here locally that you share and support to share that with others as resources and options. Rethinking retirement. Again, we could have lengthy discussions on this one. But who wants to be working their whole life to then be doing what they want to do is the equation that more and more people are saying we can rethink this, we can we do this. We don't want to be floating around on a boat. Okay, fine let's make that assumption but what do we do about it? 

How can we plan creatively, financially and create more self-sustaining options than relying on Social Security. Which we can also debate, but arguably is just not going to be there for the long-term. What are some alternatives. Practice home care and healthcare. This is this idea of creating a healthy lifestyle for better health. I mean, this is again a trap that we all fall into, where I have to do this job that I hate, because I need to have this health insurance, because I might get sick one day. And the whole process is making you sick. What are other solutions and alternatives. And again we go into this more with ecopreneuring, but the bottom line is there are some. From our perspective there's no reason to feel trapped into doing something that you hate because something really bad might happen one day. 

Again what are ways to rethink that equation. Fail fast and intelligently, again something that we don't get taught at school, much less rewarded for. But it's this idea that failure is what prompts success. And if your head is buzzing with four, five, six different ideas of things you want to do, try them all on a small scale. That's the intelligent part. Get them going. If you've got this idea to start a B&B, okay, fine start with one room, small on the weekends. Don't quit the day job just yet. See how it goes. Plant some seeds. 

That's the key that we've learned particularly from the gardening aspect of our farm is some things just don't germinate and some germinate more prolifically, like these damn carrots, than we ever expected. But that's okay because for whatever reason we got no zucchini this year, I'm almost embarrassed to admit. But it's okay because our neighbors collaboratively dumped more than we needed on us. So again it's the interdependency that we've been talking about, but you've got to put yourself out there to be caught by this net of community.

- A couple other big changes that are going on, trends if you will, is this concept of knowledge and information. And were emerging in this society, so we may not necessarily even need to own the factory but if you have this fantastic idea like our six year-old son does; the little tea thing, normally they're metal for loose tea. He said why don't you make it out a plastic so when people put the tea in the thing you can just microwave it and then you don't have to-- light bulb. But the point is you don't need, he did not need the factory to make this thing. You can contract that out. The means of production are no longer necessary. 

In fact, some all largest companies in the world own very little of their actual factory to make the stuff that they're selling. The other side is the innovation economy, we hear a lot about that. Greentac and Cleantac are some of these innovations that are coming about. LED technology. Compact fluorescents to lights are really what the hybrid cars are to transportation. They're sort of the stepping stone. It's where we're headed. We need the hybrid cars and we need the compact fluorescents but everyone's going to eventually be using LED lights for lots of reasons. It's also a sense of a durable economy where there is no waste. We are still using our stereo system from college because they made some component back then very differently than they make them today. 

And anyone knows this when they get appliances they're broken within two or three years and you go back and get another "cheap" appliance. Cumulatively it starts adding up that cheap appliance.

- What he's really saying is he still listens to cassette tapes.

- That sense of durable economy where there is no waste. And finally the service economy, and this is really interesting, where there are no products. And there's a carpet company that doesn't sell you carpet. It rents you a walking surface. It's that kind of change that we're talking about. Change is a big thing with these elections, obviously, everyone's talking about it these days. But part of it is adapting and coming up with a different approach to things are really important in that sense.

- He's really actually waiting for betamax to still come back. He still got these beta tapes at home. Traveling to garner experiences. We are very much footloose farmers in the sense of we're taking off tomorrow for Washington, DC, to talk to our representatives about the farm bill issues. But it's the idea of putting yourself in new contexts for new ideas, for creativity, for stimulation. If that's part of your thing like it is ours, how can you work that into part of business. Now this whole idea of green travel as a growing industry in and of itself, often called ecotourism. But that's this growing movement of people who want more than just sitting on a beach escaping from my life. I want to feel new cultures. I want to taste new foods. 

I want to be stimulated in ways that I don't get at home, and how can you incorporate that. But the key with ecopreneurship is how can you work that into the business. Yeah, we're going to DC for three weeks. Yeah, we're taking our son. Yeah, we're doing all this stuff but it's also again part of the business. We're doing some research for future articles, some meetings, some this, some that. But it all adds up to, as John was mentioning earlier, those infamous deductions. And lastly and importantly it's important to define the good life on your own terms. We've shared a little bit of our story; you've heard some of the stories of other folks in Wisconsin for ideas. But the core is really within yourself, of what is it that's important to you? 

How do you define the good life? Place based, is it where you are? Is it the urban city of Madison, which as far as I'm concerned if you're going to be urban, Madison's the place to be. Or is your heart out on Madeline Island and that's where you see yourself. As you can see, even on Madeline Island, people are creating innovative businesses based around where they want to be and it's the build it and they will come. Or give me a DSL connection and I will build it and they will come attitude. Happiness not based on money, but redefining currency based on joy, friendship, meaningful work. And John's grandfather, who passed away years ago but grew up during the depression, would always say about how back then people didn't consider it, you weren't considered rich if you had money, because nobody had money. Richness was defined by the quality of your relationships, the number of friendships. And maybe that's the silver lining to all the things that we're going through now is we're going to rediscover that again and we're going to rekindle that essence of authentic currency. 

To wrap things up with some resources and we've got some cards here with our web sites, it's all linked there as well, but under the ecopreneuring umbrella we have a portal set up on the Web site to share your own story. This is in partnership with ecosector.com. Even if you're just harboring a little bit of an idea or you have those six little bits of an idea. Enter it on, it's all a free resource. But this idea to connect people and their stories. And truly, I think once you put it on paper, once you put it on the web, it's real. But that's when these connections start happening. And there's a reason why we named the B&B In Serendipity because we're firm believers of that. Things happen along the way, you meet people and we could go on and on and that's a lot of what we write about in our first book that's out on the bookstore table, "Rural Renaissance: Renewing the Quest for the Good Life," the stories of our moving from the urban center of Chicago to our farm in Wisconsin. And the people, importantly, that we met along the way that made things happen and helped us. 

Co-op America, coopamerica.org is probably, it's a co-op but it's also one of the largest networks for green business. So there's a lot of resources out there. There's green business database. But this is broader, national issues, they work a lot with sustainable wood and importantly green investments. The Midwest Renewable Energy Association. Largest energy fair in the world here in Wisconsin, in Custer, outside of Stevens Point. Some of you folks I'm sure have probably been there it's every year around the solstice. But we are so fortunate to have this amazing resource both for the fair but year round and this is the organization to contact if your laundry falls off your laundry line like it did for us for a couple of years. And you start thinking this might be a good windy site for a wind turbine. Contact the MREA and they can connect you more with local resources in your area. 

Greenoptions.com, that's a portal that we're now doing some blogging for, and they have I think it's over 14 or 15 different sites under their umbrella on specific green issues ranging from food that I write for and the ecopreneurist on more green business issues that John does. Renewing the Countryside that I mentioned earlier, that Minnesota based nonprofit that really showcases the positive stories of rural revitalization. Too many times in the media you hear these stories about serious economic issues in small towns and declines of farms but there's also the strong vibrancy. And those of the folks that John mentioned earlier often falling off statistical radar. We had to go to the USDA office and demand that we get counted as a farm, because we didn't fit any of their boxes. Check 200 acres of soybeans. We had an acre in rutabaga. Where do they put you? They don't know. But it's promoting these stories collectively. 

So RenewingtheCountryside.org web site has hundreds of case studies, stories and John and I have contributed a lot to these. So you can search by state, you can search by topic to hear other folks' experiences and learn from them collaboratively.

- They're one of the ecopreneur profiles, we have six total in ecopreneuring. But they're one of the profiles because they're an example of a hybrid organization because it's both for-profit and nonprofit entity. They're separate but related. And we have several. We're seeing this emerging now, these relationships and changing the way businesses are structured to the point now where there's actually something called a B Corporation which is B for benefit corporation. This real growing change in how we need to approach things because a lot of folks are getting fed up with the current model which is costing us taxpayers a lot of money.

- So lastly, the ecopreneuring book we've been talking about most. I mentioned Rural Renaissance and Renewing the Countryside Wisconsin and we also have a cookbook from the bed-and-breakfast, Edible Earth. 

Which actually if you can squint there you can see Liam, our son, is one of the co-authors on it. So it's very much a family endeavor as all our business efforts here. But thank you guys very much again for coming. Hopefully these spark some ideas, some new perspectives or maybe reinforce some old ones. And we can first just throw things open for questions, comments, perspectives. We're fortunate this room is really good acoustically. If you kind of shout out, they promised me everybody will hear everybody. Or stories about businesses, local businesses that you frequent, support, or things folks might not heard of. Yeah.

- Who's running the bed-and-breakfast while you guys are here?

- Who is running the B&B? That's a very good question. If you would have called tonight I would have told you we're booked. Which is technically, legally true because we're here. Now being small, to your point, nobody. Because there's nobody to run that. So it's caused us to prioritize and keep that calendar a little booked out. Where it's like yeah, we wanted to be here tonight with you and to talk about some of these ideas which means we couldn't be there. We're not paid to be here at the Book Festival but it's still part of the overall mission and we'll probably see some of you guys eventually or have already and it all fits under that exactly. Exactly. 

Any questions, thoughts? Any local businesses here folks want to share? Yeah? 
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- The cabin is outside of Hillsborough. Vernon County, by the way, has the largest number of organic farms in the state of Wisconsin which primarily is because Organic Valley is based close by in Lafarge. But because of that, Wisconsin produces the most organic dairy and meat in the country. California still beats us on produce but slightly longer growing season. Will give that to them. But amazing things happening in Vernon County if you guys get a chance to tool around there. 

Yeah?

- There's another aspect to what your saying. We have a small farm. And I've retired and live there in what we thought would be undisturbed for the rest of our lives. Then a large bottling company -- decided to build a bottling plant right across from our farm. Which destroyed our world. So we became involved in fighting the bottling company. There's developers and factory farms, there's a lot of these enterprises here in Wisconsin that are getting bigger and they encroach on the kind of life you live and the kind of life we live. It's a fight. In fact, we're in another fight now. 

We're fighting a developer, we just hired Steve Applebaum to represent us.

- Good for you.

- He's expensive. I'm saying is you have to really fight for what you believe in too, because you have these other forces coming at you and they're big. They've got a lot of money. They're going to destroy our farm, I think. So someone's got to resist them.

- That's very true. One thing to mention, I heard recently myself is from a core planning perspective an ideal situation is you have enough community support to just garner, muscle and fight those things. Wisconsin is one the leading states when it comes to this growth of it eco-municipalities. 

Folks might have heard of the natural step program out of Sweden. There currently 42 eco-municipalities in the planning stages in Wisconsin. It's coming through Extension. There are varying levels. Bayfield is extremely well organized, as is Madison. St. Croix Falls has a strong sustainable development plan. So I hope to see more of that coming through. But any other thoughts on that? Because that's huge. 

I mean, if somebody's coming next door with bucks. Other thoughts? Yeah?

- Well, it really helps to know your neighbors, and in Columbia County where we live, we are starting to sort of copying the examples set by Sustain Dane. There is also Sustain Sauk. And we're just beginning to start Sustain Columbia. So if anybody here is from Columbia County, see us.

- Excellent. Well, I want to share with you guys a little story, if you will, that might put some of this in context as we wander our own ways home. But just the other day, John was wandering on our five acres on the farm, when all the sudden he looked behind him and he was being chased by a ferocious tiger. 

First he thought, that's peculiar, I knew garlic mustard was an invasive species, I wasn't aware of tigers in Wisconsin. Then he said, I better run like hell. So he starts to run and when all the sudden he looks down and there is a 200 foot cliff that wasn't there yesterday. He said, that's peculiar too, this is a bizarre day. He started blaming his wife, I think, but I was nowhere to be found. So he said, I need to solve this situation. The Tiger is coming and he looks on the 200 foot cliff, about a foot down is this branch sticking out. He says, okay, I'll jump on that, I'll still be hanging 190 feet, but I'll be alive and the tiger won't get me, so he reaches for the branch. And he holds on and he says, okay, life is momentarily a little better until he looks up and he sees two mice chewing on the branch. And then he says this is not getting well at all. 

Where's Lisa? When he looks up, now I'm trying to do a seasonal interpretation for you. Usually I do this with a strawberry but this is October in Wisconsin. He looks up and he sees this delicious rutabaga growing. It's sweet and crunchy and it's just there dangling from the 200 foot cliff. He says, what should I do? And he reaches for the rutabaga and eats it. Now you can probably surmise the ending of a creative interpretation of a lovely Buddhist fable here, but the point is in the story the tigers symbolize death which is chasing all of us and is going to catch up with all of us eventually. And the mice are represent time which are eating away at everything all the time anyway. And the moral to this story is to eat the rutabaga, eat the strawberry. 

Enjoy what is there, right now, right here today within your reach. Because there's things in our lives we can't control but there are some that we can, and choosing that joy and that passion and that living in the moment is something we can all definitely do. So with that thought, in the moment, I again appreciate you guys coming out to the Book Festival. We're very fortunate to have this as a resource here to prompt thought and discussion and ideas and we're happy to hang out more, we're happy to hang out more informally too or come check out my rutabaga. But again, thank you guys, very much. And enjoy the rest of the night, the festival, or other questions prompt to mind, feel free. We're here. 
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