Author Biography
Joanne Poyourow is the author of Legacy: A Story of Hope for a Time of Environmental Crisis and the founder of the Environmental Change-Makers community group.
A lifelong Southern California resident, raised in the hills of Malibu, Joanne now lives in Los Angeles where she battles freeways, chokes on exhaust and smog, and works to create greener tomorrows.
Once a C.P.A. with international accounting firms, with a “Masters of Shopping” license plate frame on her car, she has lived the transformation of which she writes. She has campaigned to save the local wetlands, and designed workshops about Purpose and Legacy. She founded and leads the Environmental Change-Makers, a network for positive action which meets monthly in the Westchester area of Los Angeles.
As a past manager and trainer to community-rallying service projects, Joanne knows well the power of a positive vision. She now shares that vision through her environmental presentations with a wide variety of organizations (see sidebar). She assisted the city of Culver City with the creation of their Sustainable Community Plan. She has appeared on public radio and Los Angeles television. She was featured in AOL's Propeller.com online video series on Sustainability.
In spring 2008, Joanne designed the Community Garden in Westchester, which grows food for the needy, broadcasts the beauty of front-yard vegetables, and teaches the skills of food cultivation to local volunteers.
With the Environmental Change-Makers, Joanne plans to pioneer the Transition Towns concept in Los Angeles in September 2008. The Transition Towns movement, with its positive, forward-thinking, community-based response to peak oil and global warming, is catching on like wildfire in the UK.
A devoted gardener, Joanne finds haven in her edible landscaping home garden. Through her experience with organics, native plants, Permaculture, wildlife and soils, Joanne has a tangible sense of the web of life, and the disconnect between modern city lifestyles and this natural wonder.
She holds a B.A. in Business Economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and was a C.P.A. in public practice for 13 years. She is a founder of the Culver-Westchester Homeschool Network.
The mother of two young children, Joanne hopes that Sustainability will be the environmental legacy we leave to future generations.
Specialization tends to limit the field of problems that the specialist is concerned with. Now, the person who isn't a specialist, but a generalist like myself, sees something over here that he has learned from one specialist, something over there that he has learned from another specialist--and neither of them has considered the problem of why this occurs here and also there. So the generalist--and that's a derogatory term, by the way, for academics--gets into a range of other problems that are more genuinely human, you might say, than specifically cultural.
--Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
