Silver Donald Cameron shows that we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope, measuring the wrong things, making our problems worse by attacking them with the same mind-set that created them. The good news is that better tools and ideas already exist, and that millions of people are already using them. 

We are also the only organism that believes it can enjoy infinite growth in this finite environment.  Production, waste, consumption and population can't rise forever, but we act as though they could. In truth, the only question is whether we will stabilize our population, for instance, or whether nature will do it for us, as it always does when animal populations get out of hand.

We need to re-think concepts like “success,” and “wealth,” and “power.” We need to get over the idea that we can really “own” such assets as land. The land was here before we came, and will be here when we have vanished. We are its temporary stewards, not its owners.

Greening our minds means transforming our understanding of ourselves, and of our place in the world.

Happily, millions of people are already engaged in that transformation – redesigning our world, restoring damaged landscapes, developing new yardsticks to measure success, acting on the understanding that sustainability can't be achieved without social justice. Paul Hawken, one of the leaders in this transformation, estimates that, worldwide, between one and two million voluntary organizations have arisen spontaneously to address the environmental crisis and to seek solutions.

That's the future, both frightening and exhilarating. Silver Donald Cameron tells you how to embrace the change, join the movement, and prosper in our green and harmonious future.

Minding Our Own Businesses: Commerce, Community and Renewal

On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford shocked the business world by more than doubling his employees' wages, from $2.34 a day to $5.00. On that day, he said later, “we really started our business, for on that day we first created a lot of customers.”

In1971, Allan Blakeney's government in Saskatchewan introduced Canada's highest minimum wage –and business profits went up. “Employees who get good wages spend their money,” says Blakeney, “ and – big surprise – employers do well.”

Business is an integral part of the larger community. It's the people of the community at work. It includes public-sector and non-profit businesses, like schools and hospitals and the Red Cross. Every business is a network of customers, employees, suppliers and professional practitioners. It relies on its community at every turn. And every community is equally reliant on its businesses.

In adversity, that deep integration is the greatest resource of both the community and its businesses. Ask the people of Isle Madame, Nova Scotia. What did they do when the codfish went away? 

Travel with Silver Donald Cameron back to 1992, when the closure of the fishery threatened his island home with complete economic collapse. Isle Madame would lose 500 jobs in a workforce of 1500. A tsunami of unemployment would produce poverty, family breakdown, suicides, out-migration. Isle Madame could become an island of ghost villages.

Instead, the island's people came together to re-invent their economy and to help fisheries workers reinvent themselves. They started new businesses in new industries, financed by Nova Scotia's first community investment funds. They created new business models, lobbied and argued and built alliances. In five years – while other small communities withered – Isle Madame's people created 460 jobs, attracted $15 million in new investment, and cut their unemployment rate from 62% to 12.5%. They ultimately cut it to zero. Today the island is an importer of labour.

Silver Donald Cameron's colourfully-illustrated presentation is based on his own leadership role in the redevelopment process. As well as serving on the island's development organizations and writing its development plan, he analyzed the process in newspaper columns and magazine articles, and personally oversaw the creation of a non-profit community television station in Arichat which now serves the entire eastern shore of Cape Breton.

Silver Donald Cameron knows it can be done – because he's done it, and he's reflected deeply on the implications. The main lesson, he says, is a simple old truth. 

“United we stand, divided we fall,” he says. “A community can't survive if its people can't earn a living, and business can't survive without workers, suppliers and a market. As businesses, as families, as citizens, we're completely interdependent. We find meaning, satisfaction and prosperity only in the framework of our community. It's a lesson that can benefit any community, anywhere, any time.”

He smiles. “Just ask Henry Ford.”

In July, 2004, Silver Donald Cameron and his wife Marjorie Simmins set sail from Cape Breton Island, bound for the white sand beaches and palm trees of the nearest tropical islands. They were accompanied by their Brave and Faithful Dog, Leo. The skipper was an old age pensioner. His youthful mate was new to the cruising life. At 13, the BFD was antique and arthritic.

Six months later, after 3000 nautical miles, this improbable crew browed ashore in Little Harbour, in the Bahamas. The BFD frisked like a puppy. The skipper and mate looked ten years younger. At Pete's Pub, a palm-thatched tiki bar on the beach, they would celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary by eating conch salad and lemon hogfish, and playing Cape Breton jigs with a muster of sun-browned vagabonds. The skipper -- in swim trunks -- raised a glass of cheap rum.

“To Marjorie's voyage with two old dogs,” he said. “And to absent friends, God help 'em, frozen stiff and buried in snow.” 

Well, Silver Donald and Marjorie were lucky, right? That's the romantic life of an author.

Wrong, says Silver Donald. Hundreds of couples cruise south every autumn, and what they share is not luck or wealth, but discipline, imagination and and a lusty appetite for life – the very qualities that produce successful businesses, happy marriages and rewarding careers. 

The skipper's great love had always been sailing and cruising – but it had taken diligence and effort to reach that tropical beach. He had dreamed of this trip for 30 years, and had spent two winters upgrading the 33-year-old Norwegian ketch they had bought for the voyage. He had studied the cruising guides, the equipment manuals, the charts of the IntraCoastal Waterway from Virginia to Florida.

Furthermore, he had married an adventurous woman who knew the sea from her years of commercial fishing – and who knew the skipper, too. In Jonesport, Maine, when the skipper smashed the boat into a wharf and punched a hole in the bow, it was she who insisted that the voyage continue. When the engine died in Long Island Sound, it was she who said, “Well, this is a sailboat. We can sail.”

And the rewards? Fireworks over the Tall Ships in Halifax Harbour. The tranquility of September in Maine. Rushing down the East River with Manhattan whizzing past to starboard. Feasting on hush puppies, grits with chicken gravy, sugar toads, ankle-biters and endless shrimp. Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, shrouded in live oak and Spanish moss, with vibrations of voodoo hanging in the air. The ancient streets of St. Augustine. The glittering opulence of Fort Lauderdale.

The boisterous 75-mile Gulf Stream crossing – and then the vivid turquoise waters of the Sea of Abaco, rimmed by narrow islands. Spanish Cay, Green Turtle Cay, Man-o-War Cay. Pastel villages clustered under the palm trees. Coral reefs crowded with tropical fish, yellow and scarlet and black. Woodcarvers, painters and wreck-divers. Wild Spanish horses in forests of palmetto and casuarina.

Audiences can share it all in this splendidly-illustrated presentation. And the lesson, says Silver Donald, applies to every adventure, in every aspect of life.

“Yesterday's gone,” he says. “Tomorrow's unknown. What are you waiting for? Dream. Plan. Go!”

The Ship on the Dime

And out in the harbour, an elegant wooden ship, 143 feet long, looking like a vision from the past Bluenose II, looking just like the ship on the Canadian dime. She's an exact replica of one of Canada's most cherished national symbols, the Grand Banks fishing schooner Bluenose – the ship that beat every Canadian and American challenger in a racing career that spanned nearly three decades.

As the author of a book, a radio play and several articles on the subject, Silver Donald Cameron knows the Bluenose story intimately. In this presentation, illustrated with dozens of period photographs by such notables as Wallace MacAskill and Frederick William Wallace, he traces the history of schooners and the schooner fishery as well as the races themselves, illuminating the shared sea-going culture of New England and New Scotland.

That culture, he says, should be an inspiration to Nova Scotians and New Englanders today. 

Fundamentally, these regions are populated by the same people – the same families, in many cases  and their stories are deeply interwoven. When Halifax was leveled by an enormous explosion in 1917, Massachusetts sent a train full of doctors, nurses and medicines that very day. In gratitude, Nova Scotia still sends a huge Christmas tree to Boston every December.

Yet the two regions have repeatedly gone to war with one another, and their frictions and rivalries are also entrenched and historic. John Paul Jones, for instance, began his career by raiding the coast of Nova Scotia, the “loyal” British colony – which in turn provided a base for the British troops who sacked Washington and burned the White House in 1814.

The Gloucester schooner Esperanto was freighted with this history when she sailed into Halifax in October, 1920 and defeated Lunenburg's Delawana in the inaugural races for the International Fishermen's Cup. That winter, the chagrined Nova Scotians built a new schooner called Bluenose, to be skippered by Lunenburg's Angus Walters. Thus began an almost mystical marriage of man and ship, and that autumn, Walters sailed Bluenose to Gloucester and brought the trophy home for good.

The schooner races were held intermittently over the following two decades, and they were eventful, hard-fought and sometimes bitter. They represented the last flowering of the last major fleet of working sail in North America. Bluenose was occasionally beaten in individual matches against a series of excellent New England challengers, but she and Angus Walters never lost the Cup. That remarkable record made Bluenose a Canadian icon. In 1937 her image appeared on the Canadian dime, where it remains. She was lost on a reef off Haiti in 1945, but an exact replica, Bluenose II, was built in 1964.

Stephen Leacock put it perfectly.

You know, said Leacock, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he would be what he won't; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don't know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn't be?

Okay. As we take our places in the work force, what should we know that we don't know?

We should know that we're working for ourselves, no matter who writes our pay cheque.

People today change jobs and careers the way they change their motor oil. So, despite the illusion of permanent employment, nobody actually has an employer. We just have serial clients. The main difference between employment and self-employment is that the self-employed professional usually knows when the job will end. And s/he knows how to get another, and another, and another.

Shouldn't everyone know that? 

Aside from a couple of years as a university dean, Silver Donald Cameron has been self-employed and living by his wits for more than 30 years. He's learned what he knows about self-employment at the College of Painful Experience. Some clients are impossible to satisfy. Others go bankrupt and don't pay. Some are generous and appreciative. You learn to tell the difference. You persevere. Over time, you get smarter and faster and better.

Self-employed people find that they're not only writers, or engineers, or dentists. The bank and the government think they're businesses. And they have to do all the things a business does. Research and development. Production. Marketing. Selling. Book-keeping. Cash-flow management. Budgetting and planning. Creating a benefits plan. Collecting and remitting taxes.

So what are the most important things for you to know? What are the mistakes that will sink you? What are the tools you really must master if you're going to succeed? Where should you spend your money and when should you conserve it?

How do you know how much to charge? And what can you do to make your work fun? After all, says Silver Donald, if it isn't fun and it isn't rewarding, why in tunket would you do it?

Silver Donald Cameron has chosen “ten top tips” for you – short-cuts to make self-employment easier, more lucrative and more enjoyable. The same techniques will also make you a more valuable employee. From marketing to time management, from continuous learning to continuous communication, from fee-setting to financing, Silver Donald reveals the secrets of making your working life so enjoyable and rewarding that it doesn't even seem like work.

“And that,” says Silver Donald, “is the goal. That's the only kind of success worth having.”