I recently attended a seminar on buying real estate properties and then soon after my wife and son and I bought a $200,000 distressed home from a motivated seller that we remodeled this summer. I’ve been hesitant to tell my friends about this career change, which I know seems so ludicrous to begin at my age, especially in a housing slump. But after hearing a TV real estate guru answer questions from two callers who are tapping their IRA retirement accounts to buy decrepit homes to flip, I realized I am not alone.

Suddenly everyone claims to have a green product. It saves energy or uses fewer trees or produces less greenhouse gases or does or doesn’t do something else that someone claims is important for the environment. Or the seller simply calls it green without ever giving a reason why.

David Garic’s column in this issue, “Rules for Leading” (page 40), got me thinking. When I started this publication 18 years ago this month, Tony Sarver, a developer friend I had only casually known through my church, offered me a small office in his building rent free to help me get started. I sincerely appreciated his generosity then and I still do today. But what I remember appreciating most during our three or four months together was his willingness to share his business knowledge with me. Almost every day I would visit with him in his office about some problem.

Over sixteen years ago, in the December 1990, issue of PERMANENT BUILDINGS & FOUNDATIONS, I wrote a column titled, “Keep Your Chin Up.” I began, “Every day for the past month the business news reports have made me want to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head. No one seems willing to actually say the “R” word. You know, the word that means we’re teetering on and rhymes with depression.” Then, as now, house building was in a slump. Then, as now, I was worried about the war in the Middle East. Then, as now, there was much spin on global warming.