Meet Grady Pridgen

Thanks for visiting our website. If you’re looking for great places to locate your business—we’ve got a space for you. If you’re looking for a great place to locate your home—that’s coming soon. If you’re just looking for information, I hope you’ll find that right here. We’ll be updating the site regularly, adding more information and features. We hope that you’ll come back regularly and that you’ll sign up for our e-newsletter.

I’ll bet you’re wondering why our website is this odd combination of business purpose and public education? It’s because I’ve spent thousands of hours over the last handful of years researching the worldwide best practices for green technologies, environmentally-sound planning, and environmental policies and it’s been a real steep learning curve. And, I’m only getting started.

Here’s the most important thing I’ve learned: Everything Connects to Everything. It’s astounding. When we pollute the air, it pollutes the water, which reduces the quality of it and harms aquatic life. That reduces our enjoyment of the very things that make Florida special.

When we don’t use smart building techniques or available green technologies and products, we waste our natural resources. We also waste our financial resources because it costs more to heat or cool our homes. When we waste limited resources such as electricity, gas, and water we create more pollution in our air and water. By not recycling, we overfill our landfills and sewers and create a separate set of problems. We can delay the need for new power plants (and the pollution that goes with them) by greatly reducing electricity demand. This not only saves money at home, it prevents millions of tons of carbon and other pollutants from getting into the air each year.

When we build homes far away from jobs we force people to make long, frustrating commutes. The commutes aren’t just costly; they burn natural resources and time, increase carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change.

Of course, we can do just the opposite: we can build homes close to work, so that people don’t have to commute—they can take public transportation. We can use smart techniques and green products to reduce our environmental impact and the cost of our monthly bills. We can capture and treat our stormwater, we can consider our solar and other renewable energy alternatives and we can create a better life for today and for tomorrow.

But to do that, we have to understand our alternatives.

That’s why this website is part business and part public education.

I want to share what I’ve learned in the last few years. I’d like to make it easier for you to understand what’s at stake than it was for me to uncover it.

More important, to protect our quality of life, we have got to work together. To be effective, we have to understand the challenges. It’s our hope that this website will help us learn together and focus our attention on the things we need to know, do and change to make sure that Florida is a great place to live and work today and for years to come.

Join us.