Candidate Biography (submitted by campaign):

• 28 year resident of Buncombe County and lives near Five Points.
• 25 years as a "green builder"
• Lectures college, high school and workshop audiences on sustainability, organic gardening and related issues.
• Has owned and operated Brave Ulysses Books, a micro-publishing company, since 2000.
• Founding editor of the Warren Wilson College environmental journal, Heartstone.
• Former managing editor of Asheville's weekly Mountain Xpress.
• Principle investigative reporter responsible for exposing Buncombe's corrupt Sheriff Bobby Lee Meford (now in federal prison).
• Author of the best-selling city guide, Finding Your Way in Asheville, with six other books in print.
• Weekly radio commentator on WNCW 88.7FM for three years, DJ on WPVM 103.5FM for five years.
• Born in 1950. Mother lives in Spruce Pine, brother in Bryson City, Father deceased. Married once.

In many ways, local government is a job I have prepared for all my life: as a builder, investigative reporter and editor, sustainability lecturer, community activist and networker. A colleague recently observed that my career path is that of a systems thinker. Whether founding an environmental journal and collaborating with Jane Goodall, Bill McKibben and other environmental leaders; building passive- and active-solar homes; teaching and tutoring at colleges, high schools and the Reid Center; addressing the roots of societal discord through my church and jail ministry; or organizing local opposition to our misguided war in Iraq -- I have worked for the betterment of our community by fixing what's broken and connecting human dots.

I believe we need to use 21st century tools to solve 21st century challenges and want to move our city to Government 2.0, using the interactivity of the Web to diversify citizen input. We can move beyond simply responding to the hired guns working for outside corporate intersts and attend to the people who live here. Facebook and Wikipedia are a better model for modern governance than the good-old-boys cooking deals in the back room. And I have proposed voluntary conservation models for water and energy that will benefit any resident or business owner who wants to participate.