The Orion Blog

Featured Staff Member: Scott Gast

October 02, 2008, by H. Emerson Blake

Scott Gast has just joined Orion as the Orion Grassroots Network Intern. He’ll be here with us for the next year.

Q: Who are you and where are you from?

A: I grew up by the lake in Chicago, Illinois, where my family comes from a long tradition of custom stone monument making and getting depressed about Cubs baseball. I’m a recent graduate of Allegheny College, where I studied environmental science and creative writing.

Q: What’s on your mind these days?

A: Lately, I’ve been thinking much about how, like ecology, sustainability might boil down to connection. I’d love to know what a culture, economy and government would look like if it could sense its life-giving connection to community and nature. I think the environmental crowd is in a really fascinating place right now, with “green” being a mainstream buzzword, yet still something not fully defined. Our role might be to keep raising the bar beyond just whether or not Wal-Mart’s vehicle fleet is carbon neutral, to asking questions about what we want our world to look like.

Q: We expect you’ll be at the office day and night, but hypothetically, if you had free time, what might you do with it?

A: You could find me reading and re-reading my favorites by Paul Hawken and Herman Daly, cooking with too much garlic, writing fiction and comedy, and getting lost in the forest.