A friend of mine once met the Dalai Lama and asked him what was necessary for people to solve the environmental crisis. "Radical Confidence" was the reply: The belief that, no matter how bad things seemed, people could learn how to live in harmony with the planet and that things would get better.

In the last month, Gail Lindsey and Greg Franta, two giants of sustainability -- each of whom was the embodiment of Radical Confidence -- left us far earlier than any of us could have ever imagined in our worst nightmares.

Incandescent lives, like light bulbs, always seem to go out too soon.

Gail Lindsey, Principal Pixie of Design Harmony in North Carolina, having battled back from a near-fatal brain aneurism and breast cancer, succumbed to liver cancer on February 3. Just a few days later, on February 8, Greg Franta, who took over Rocky Mountain Institute's Green Design Services went missing while driving home after having dinner with his daughter. Greg's car was found in a ravine off a mountain highway just two days ago.

Gail A. Lindsey

Anyone who ever met Gail was immediately struck by her RADIANCE and it wasn't just her larger-than-life blue eyes and megawatt smile. Gail was the embodiment of Radical Confidence in a positive future.

Some of my fondest memories of Gail were an outrageous PDA with my wife during the Greening of the White House, contemplating how the green building movement would survive if our small plane going to the Grand Canyon Park Charrette went down, reading medicine cards and delving into their deeper meanings and soaking in a hot spring next to the Yellowstone River with several other long-time green building stalwarts.

I'm always amazed at how philosophical people are who have overcome the kinds of challenges Gail faced. She always looked at them as an opportunity to learn, but in the end, she wrote to a friend that she was "ready to let go of learning thru pain and suffering and INSTEAD go for learning thru creativity and JOY!"

Greg Franta

While at NRDC, I had recruited Greg Franta from a long list of applicants to help the Belorussian government design some sustainable housing to relocate villagers who were forced to leave their homes due to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl.

My first meeting with Greg was in Frankfurt airport on our way to Moscow. The flight was about to leave and Greg was nowhere to be found; I was paging him every couple minutes with increasing panic. Suddenly this lanky, longhaired figure comes around a corner, saying with an impish grin, "I'm here."

There was no worry or stress in him, just Radical Confidence that he could go to a new city without any clue how to get around, tour Frankfurt's architecture and make it back to the airport in 4 hours to make his flight on time. At the time, I wasn't sure whether to hug him or throttle him, but to paraphrase Rick from Casablanca, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Are they GONE? Strangely, I don't feel it. Given how crazy things have gotten with my life, it got so that I was lucky to see each of them once, maybe twice, a year. An energizing, flash-bulb encounter that left me dazzled and smiling, and thinking fond memories from earlier, less complicated days (damn, I'm sounding old…), but soon the background noise would overcome their strong signals and "life" would resume.

Now, I think about them every day. Every day, I see the programs and organizations they've created or influenced. Ironically, on some level Gail and Greg are more present in my life than they were before. So, while their physical bodies are gone, their incandescent energy and vitality still live on.