There was a time when the only concerns that certified financial planner Bradley Roulston had to face when setting out for his daily run was Toronto’s noise, pollution and traffic.

These days, the president of Toronto-based Healthcare Financial Group Inc. has other things on his mind when he goes running: keeping an eye out for bears and cougars. That’s because Roulston now lives in a close-knit community in British Columbia’s Interior. Roulston still directs his financial planning business from its Toronto and Vancouver offices — and he still loves many aspects of city life. But, Roulston says, his move to Nelson (slightly less than 700 kilometres from Vancouver) has helped him achieve some much-needed balance between the artificial world of finance and the natural world he cherishes.

That balance includes participation in a number of local environmental initiatives, such as Transition Towns, a global movement that encourages communities to find their own solutions to address the issues of peak oil and climate change. Self-sufficiency and sustainability are the major themes of that movement.

Roulston, 36, first visited Nelson (population: 10,000) five years ago, when he was in the province looking for a location for the Vancouver branch of his practice. For a break, he took a side trip into B.C.’s Interior. Within 20 minutes of driving into Nelson, however, Roulston knew he had found his future home.

“I didn’t know what was going on here, but I knew I needed to be part of it,” he says, adding that the town was politically engaged and artistic. He bought a house that day.

Roulston returned to Toronto, restructured his company, sold his car, gave his belongings to charity and, within 36 hours, he was on his way to his new life. Although he’s not normally prone to impulsive decisions, Roulston says, something about the place just clicked with him. “It felt so right,” he says. “I’ve never had any regrets.”

Surrounded by mountains and set on the shores of Kootenay Lake, Nelson has a proximity to Nature that Roulston didn’t know he was missing in his old city life. Nelson is full of opportunities to be active while also being connected to the environment, says Roulston, who enjoys mountain and road biking, swimming (he organizes triathlons), camping, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing and ski touring, among other pursuits.

“Any time you’re living close to Nature,” he says, “you have a better appreciation of it.”

The move to Nelson was, in a sense, a return to Roulston’s roots. He grew up in a family that focused on environmentalism long before the advent of blue boxes.

“My mom, who I thought was crazy, was an environmental activist all her life,” he says. In fact, his parents and three siblings had appeared on several television shows to promote their “reduce, reuse and recycle” lifestyle. “Our weekly garbage was less than a shopping bag,” he says.

Roulston, who has been in the financial services industry for 13 years, admits he veered off the environmental path for many years while building up his financial planning career. Creating wealth for his clients and himself while living in downtown Toronto had separated him from environmental consciousness, he says. He wasn’t connecting his investments and purchasing patterns with his values: “[Money] became a means in itself.”

But Roulston’s recent move closer to Nature has changed all that, he says: “Now, I’m more consciously aware of how I’m spending my money, both in and out of investments. We vote with our dollar every day. The systems we’re supporting through our purchases and our investment patterns are shaping the world around us.”

The birth of his baby girl, Jupiter-Jane, last summer likely also helped drive home this new perspective.

Nelson is the fifth community in Canada to join the Transition Towns movement. So far, Transition Nelson consists of a working group of 15 community members that plans to hold a public forum and create specialized groups to focus on various areas of sustainability. Roulston will be in charge of Transition Nelson’s economy group.

Roulston, who is also a manager with the local credit union, is working on a few ideas of his own: he plans to establish a local bond market to link people with capital to those without — a move that, he says, will decrease the community’s reliance on outside capital. He also hopes to launch a local venture-capital fund that will enable community members to invest directly in the community. And he would like to establish a local currency as a community-building tool. There are 2,500 such currencies around the world, he says; Canadian Tire money is probably Canada’s best-known example.

@page_break@Roulston has no illusions that all the money in Nelson would revert to local currency. (Roulston lightheartedly calls the proposed dollars “Kootenay Green,” which is also the regional slang for marijuana.) But, he says, even a small fraction of local money would boost the community’s economic development: “It loses value once it leaves the community, so people are encouraged to spend it locally.”

The “local food” movement, which has been embraced by B.C. (the infamous “100-mile diet” originated here), is also important to Roulston, who is an enthusiastic proponent of community-supported agriculture (CSA). To that end, he participates in a local grain coalition. Each year, he says, about 600 individuals buy grain shares from local farmers in a neighbouring town.

“We’re on the hook,” he says, “if they have a bad crop.”

At harvest, the farmers “export” the grain to Nelson by sailboat. Many members of the community go down to the waterfront and help unload about 20 boats. A few people, including Roulston and his wife, Natalka Podstwskyj, own gristmills and offer to grind the grain into flour for members of the CSA.

“Finance is this energy that is so disconnected from Nature because it’s man-made,” he says. “But you can do a lot of social good with that energy if you think about it.”

Roulston’s environmental focus isn’t solely on Canada. Last year, he travelled to South America to learn more about the local co-op movement. He spent some time in the Amazon and spoke at length with Bolivian activist Rosa Maria Ruiz, the driving force behind the creation of Madidi National Park, one of the largest protected areas in the world.

During the conversation, Roulston asked Ruiz what message he could bring back to his clients — and Canadians in general — to help indigenous people in Bolivia.

“I expected her to say: ‘Oh, help this fund’,” Roulston says. “But she said: ‘Get out of debt. Debt is slavery. You can’t help us if you yourselves are enslaved’.” IE