Following The Path of Service -- to Nature

On December 10, 1988, Michael Green took his camera and slipped out of the Tibetan hotel that he and other tourists had been warned not to leave. It was International Human Rights Day, and Tibetan separatists in Lhasa were gathering in the city square to demonstrate for independence from China. Chinese soldiers, trucked in en masse the day before, ringed the square. Chinese police scanned the crowd from balconies and second-floor windows. Green began surreptitiously photographing the scene.

"I had this very naive idea they wouldn't be hurt," Green says. "And then, a group of nuns opens the Tibetan flag. They're standing maybe 40 feet away from me, in a triangle with the soldiers. And the soldiers shot them. Right in front of me. And then they tear-gassed the square."

Green escaped unharmed but not unaffected. He was 26 at the time, a student of dharma who had arrived in Tibet two months earlier to experience the culture he had read about for years. What he got instead was a lesson in earthly suffering and injustice. He never saw his photographs printed -- they were lost when he tried to smuggle the film out of China -- but what he had witnessed stayed with him. Within months, he was in Calcutta at Mother Teresa's Home for Dying Destitutes, carrying terminally ill patients back and forth to the restroom. And doing lots of thinking.

"I realized two things," he says. "One, I could do anything; and two, I became immensely grateful for the affluence in this country."

He also realized the value of service: "The sisters at the Missionaries of Charity [Mother Teresa's order] dedicated their lives to service of the poor. And I had this very proud idea: 'Oh, I'm the guy who documented the struggle of the Tibetans.' And I saw that I didn't really do anything. And I still haven't."

The Path of Service

The service ethic began to influence Green's path. After returning to the United States, he got master's degrees in public policy and natural resources from the University of Michigan, building on his UC Berkeley bachelor's degree in conservation. He spent his last school year in Dharamsala in northern India, home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile, trying to solve the impoverished refugee community's overwhelming garbage problem -- "not sexy work."

After graduation came an idealistically driven but disappointing three years with the federal government in Washington doing environmental protection work. That led to Green's loading up his Honda Accord and lighting out for his old stomping grounds: the San Francisco Bay Area.

He had a plan. He wanted to start an organization that would work to make the environment safer for everyone, especially poor people, who tend to live in the most polluted areas. As he drove, he mulled some advice he had gotten while on a summer internship in The Hague. It came from Michael van Walt, longtime legal adviser to the Dalai Lama.

"Basically the message was: Just do it," Green says. "Don't worry about the money. Just do it and the money will show up."