A shopkeeper sweeping up in front of her store in the morning does more to better our world than a hundred corporate executives giving greenwash.... A shopkeeper sweeping up in front of her store in the morning does more to better our world than a hundred corporate executives giving greenwash money to environmental charities.

After all, far too many NGOs exist nowadays more for the purpose of processing donations than to support projects on the ground. The median income for CEOs of environmental organizations was nearly $125,000 in 2003, and while this is a pittance compared to what corporate CEOs receive, it is, as in the corporate world, only a portion of compensation costs. Many NGOs seem to produce more press releases, brochures, and vice-presidents than concrete results. (Many, of course, do great things with few resources.)

But the little Latina shopkeeper whom I saw on my walk from the bus stop to the Metro entrance was taking care of our world directly, right there on the hard concrete, at no financial cost to anybody, anywhere, any time--and she does it every day except Sunday. And maybe Sunday too, for all I know.

Later that same day, I was waiting at a different bus stop, in East Hollywood this time, a gray and often shabby part of town. While I peered into the eastern gloom for sign of the 217, I saw a hugely fat black man, dressed in sloppier than usual hiphop clothing, ambling up the street while eating out of a cardboard fastfood tray held up to his mouth. He finished his dinner a few doors up from where I stood, and then--on a street nearly carpeted by garbage--carried the cardboard tray with its food leavings an extra hundred feet or so to the trashbin by the bus stop.

This is the way we'll save the world. Not with grand programs imposed by the fast talkers in their boxy suits, but by the simple, casual, even unconscious caring of the people on the street. From the bottom up, for free, by folks who care because they care, and not because it reads well in brochures.