150-Strong: A Pathway to a Different Future

Rob O’Grady is an engineer and father of three who has been stirred to action by his reflections on environmental issues and his everyday encounters with the perversity of our current system. Trained in the discipline of “sustainability engineering,” he discerned early in his career that to talk of sustainability in the world of business and politics was “to pour from the empty into the void,” because the underlying context is subversive of such efforts. Rejecting a career dealing in irreconcilable contradictions, he went into the construction industry and helped to build a thriving company that employs some 150 people. But he continued to think about environmental and economic issues. Having never come across an approachable account that, to his mind, adequately addresses the intractability of our current situation, he set to writing. He took an engineer’s approach—working from first principles, drawing on real-world experiences, and understanding the need to keep things practical and simple—and found, to his surprise, that the germ of a solution emerged. This book is the culmination of a journey that started from a vote of no confidence in our current system, and ended in a fledging hope that a better future might be possible.