Balinese cremation ceremony (June, 2011)
In May 2010, after selling my sustainable PR agency, Straus Communications, I set out on a 15-month odyssey backpacking across Asia: Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Russia, Mongolia, China, Nepal, India and Indonesia.
Today, I’m a Reuters-syndicated Contributing Editor for GreenTravelerGuides.com, a freelance journalist, and communications consultant. I’m also exploring the realm of phenomenology - ranging from Quantum Physics and evolutionary biology, to Tibetan Buddhism and Jungian theory of the Collective Unconscious.
Previous work history includes:
- Straus Communications – one of the first agencies in the U.S. (and probably internationally) to specialize in Sustainability. We helped build major brands such as Safeway’s O Organics, business innovators as Bon Appetit Management Company, Organic Bouquet, and ground-breaking initiatives like launching the entire category of sustainable flowers. At the same time, and going beyond our client work, we generated literally billions of media impressions with informative feature articles and TV news to build public awareness of critical environmental problems and solutions.
- Beyond Organic Radio – award winning, nationally syndicated radio show, breaking stories often years before they hit the mainstream media.
- Straus Family Creamery – back in the dark ages, when mentioning the word ‘organic’ elicited nearly universal looks of dismay and skepticism, I helped launch our family’s new venture – the first organic dairy west of the Mississippi – running the PR, marketing and sales (and throwing my back out repeatedly on the production line).
- International Consulting: consulting on dairy marketing in post-Soviet Ukraine; with a former-KGB agent turned dairy entrepreneur in -40 degree (C or F, take your pick) Siberia; and helped establish a network of farmers, scientists, environmentalist and government officials in the Republic of Armenia as a foundation for their development of an organic agricultural program.
- Fund Raising: this is a strange one … having promised my mother, on her death bed, that I’d help raise awareness of, and money for, the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (of which she was a co-founder), I authored her (and later, my father’s) obituaries, which generated $250,000 in donations to MALT. This, however, is not a form of journalism which I’d like to pursue further.
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