Two emails came this week to let me know about some work I did more than twenty-five years ago.
The first told me about a profile of Mark Liebman, CEO of Pictopia, a successful online commercial photo business. The article was in the 10/8 issue of the San Francisco Business Times. Liebman says, in the article, that his favorite book is The Seven Laws of Money. I wrote that in 1973 with Salli Rasberry. It was re-issued in the early 1990s as a classic edition by Shambhala Press. Thanks Mark.
No other book written since then has covered the same material, sad to say.
Rasberry and I looked in the Library of Congress in Spring of 1974 to see if the title The Seven Laws ….was on any other books; it wasn’t. Since 1974, more than 160,000 books have been written with a title that includes The Seven Laws of, according to an Amazon.com search.
My father, now gone, used to insult the memory of William Randolph Hearst by saying that regardless of his power, wealth and newspaper empire Hearst never contributed a word to the English language. Dad, does my book title count?
The other email told me about an article in the latest New Yorker by David Owen called Green Manhattan. Owen writes a good article and the New Yorker has made a major contribution to environmentalism by publishing this article (readers of my blog know I think of the New Yorker as reading matter for the nattering nabobs of the Upper West Side of Manhattan).
Owen explains how a dense city, especially one like New York, is a masterpiece of environmentally intelligent living. Owen quotes an article I wrote in 1979 and published in the CoEvolution Quarterly in 1980. I pointed out, and gave data showing, that a person living in a house in a suburb uses five times as much energy and material resources as a person living in a city. Owen expands on my article.
My article shows a co-author, Bob Gnaizda, we’ll come to that matter later.
There have been no articles since 1980 that make the point I did, until Owen came along. However the article had a significant effect, publicly acknowledged, by several of the leading architects and planners who founded the New Urbanism movement.
My final comment on both of these tributes at my mid-life (I don’t think that much of what I’ve written will be noticed unless I live three more decades), is that the friends I worked with on these two projects, Salli Rasberry and Bob Gnaizda, are still my closest friends.