Welcome to Our Village Green! Every month, beginning with the March issue of the Eccentric, we will highlight ideas, big and small, to help save our environment.

We are fortunate to be in an area where innovative people are helping create positive change every day. We all need to know how we can help and to do that, we must understand what is possible and what makes sense.

"Our Village Green" will introduce you to a network of individuals in Loudoun County, Virginia, the United States and the world who are rolling up their sleeves to build a better tomorrow. And we will tell you how you can help make a real difference in the future of our community.

We welcome writers and advertisers who would like to partner with us as we help build a new sustainable foundation for our community and our world.

Over the past few years, we have often covered innovators in Hunt Country who have embraced and re-shaped their businesses to reflect environmental needs. Although many do not realize it, our area is a center of commitment, innovation and brilliant thinking about how to make the world a better place.

Many have asked us to formalize this coverage as a regular multi-page feature. As of our next issue, that is what we intend to do.

Ideas Matter at "Our Village Green" because the intelligent application of ideas will change society. By casting a light on continuous innovation, and building equity in our natural resources we will compound the value that surrounds us. In a world of scarcity, ideas and the ingenuity of the human spirit are abundant resources to be tapped.

First and foremost, we believe it is time to expand the notion of the Declaration of Independence. For just as for Thomas Jefferson and the other foundering fathers who set out to address the remote tyranny of their day, so too do we need to address a new form of tyranny --- one that is imbedded in our daily actions.

We need to declare a Declaration of Inter-independence, that liberates us from the traditional ways of doing things that are compromising our future. More importantly, we must adopt a new approach to living for our children. We can do this by ripping off the shackles of our bad habits, poorly designed processes and products and ineffective rules and regulations.

Just as Jefferson championed the notion of 'generational sovereignty' by asking, "whether one generation of men have the right to bind another?" We must accept that one generation has no right to tyrannize the generations that will follow us.

Help make Our Village Green. And watch for it in the March issue of the Eccentric.

As Jefferson said in a letter to his friend James Madison, "The Earth belongs in usufruct to the living; the dead have neither rights nor powers over it." With this awesome right comes a major responsibility --- that of passing on a world as good, if not better, than the one we inherited.