  Yesterday we met up with a friend of a friend, an architect who, along with her husband, trained in architecture at Yale and somehow ended up here in Taos, designing houses with a slightly green tilt for the wealthy minority in this beautiful little impoverished villa. The woman was very nice and I’m sure she’s a very talented architect, but I cannot understand her path in life. I honestly don’t mean to judge here, again, she was a great person in and of herself. But why go all the way to Yale for such an esteemed and expensive education to design houses for rich people in Northern New Mexico? Such an endeavor could just as easily be undertaken with a state school education. What was even more mystifying is that we met her in the pretext of attempting to combine John’s and my experience with the UN, my experience in grassroots organizing, John’s experience testing and creating safe water supplies, with her experience in sustainable living (she used to live in and help design Earthships) for the creation of a sustainable living proposal for the United Nations. However, in the face of all our ideas—and at least she had the guts and articulation to make this clear—she said her interest was really much more in how such sustainable living ideas could be marketed here in America.
So I’m left with these questions. And they’re questions, not judgments, I honestly don’t know the answers. Did Yale, or the Ivy League pedagogy at large, create these very creative capitalists? Did their education make them risk adverse? How can anyone not want to save the world? Does Yale attract people who are already this way? We’re moving on. Unfazed, we see that the individuals involved in the Earthship movement have much to offer our greater desires to improve the quality of life for individuals living in developing countries.
The attempt for this venture can only result in good because the worst outcome is no real product to offer the UN or NGOs or other humanitarian institutions, but a lot of time wasted enjoying Northern New Mexico along the way. At best, maybe we really have something here. Maybe… 
