The importance of not being a "downer" when saving the world

The fact is, there have always been some at the top and others at the bottom. Sometimes the world seems to be modeled as Charles' Dicken's novel. Once you realize that quite a few people have more in common with Bob Cratchet than Scrooge, it's easy to get depressed. Along with the depression that sometimes comes with truth, there is frequently an even greater danger to any would-be activist. You become a bore. People are emotional beings after all. So it's the rare person who will choose to be with the "Debbie Downer" types during their leisure time.

The problem of unintentionally alienating people with one's own feelings is a very old problem. Fortunately, our libraries are filled with books full of solutions. One of them is Dale Carnegie's book on "How to win friends and influence people". I highly recommend the book. The techniques it describes offer hope that we all have some control of our fate by what we say and how we present ourselves. Such skills will be critical in making life worth living no matter what challenges the economy or environment throw at us. We can't always be happy all the time. However, the occasional little kindness of remaining silent on depressing topics sometimes is the greater service. After all, there is a time and place for everything.

Field trip to a hydroponic greenhouse

Jean Siracusa was kind enough to show off her geothermal heated hydroponic greenhouses. Her son, Marty and a few other part time employees maintain the operation. The first crop I saw was fresh lettuce which they sell to several high-end restaurants in the area. They also grow hydroponic tomatoes, cucumbers and other crops as well. Some of the crops from heirloom seeds taste...simply amazing. By maintaining ideal conditions, the plants have an impressive growth rate which also means an impressive harvest rate - all year long! What is also amazing is that it is all done without pesticides or modified seeds. The farm produces cash crops in the winter months, starter plants for the spring growing season and additional crops that are grown outside in the summer months. To the left is a stock photo of some lettuce plants just getting started.

Green houses and buildings consume large amounts of energy; a factor where their cost can be prohibitive for greenhouse climate management. Geothermal system's pumps provide winter heating and summer cooling, especially important in greenhouse food production in the the northeast climate. After initial installation, the heating/cooling system has proven to be an inexpensive source of heating and cooling energy.

So, if you have an interest in growing plants hydroponically or you just want to eat in a healthy way, come to the next Green Drinks event! I'm sure Jean or Marty can tell you what they have learned by growing high-quality food during all seasons!

Conversation about Conservation - in the news!

During the last green drinks event, there was an unexpected bonus. A reporter from the Auburn Citizen decided to see what the Green Drinks event was all about. A few days later, there is a full page article in the "Lake Life" section of the newspaper! The online news article can be found HERE.

Re-localization with rapid prototyping!

In the years ahead, energy prices will increase. So, it may make sense to produce small plastic items such as replacement parts locally rather than ordering those items from distant places. To explore the idea of re-localization, AuburnSIG has partnered with the Syracuse Innovation Guild to build a MakerBot kit. Once it is put together, the hope is that a machine could make small plastic parts on demand. That would potentially save energy, packaging and ordering time for plastic items. One use might be for making replacement parts for items that currently are not cost effective to repair.

The parts produced by these printers may not be as stylish as true injection mold but they can function quite well. For example, the black part is not as smooth as it's original on the left, but it is built heavier. Read a story about a person who used just such a machine to produce this part for his dishwasher. There is also this youtube video about another home repair that was done with a makerbot. The areas of open-source OS systems, 3-d printing and renewable materials give hope that our technological infrastructure can be maintained in the years ahead in spite of declining energy resources and economic problems.

Getting involved with local government

I find it amazing that "town meetings" are not more well attended. It's a rare opportunity for an average person to voice specific concerns and possible remedies in some detail to people who might be able to do something. Since I strongly believe in participatory local government, I made a special effort to attend even if I didn't have a specific agenda.

Before the meeting, I chatted with Mayor Quill. He was aware of at least some Hydrofracking issues. I did inform him that even using pure water to hydrofrack had problems since it would force god-knows what to different parts of the ground elsewhere. Due to that reason, hydrofracking of any sort should be approached with a great deal of caution. For now was not in favor of it. However, he was in favor of developing conventional gas wells around the area. During the meeting, I also learned that the landfill bio-gas experiment had disappointing results. So the city wants to fuel it's power plant with new conventional gas wells. The city was also trying to develop hydro resources but it is slow going due to technical and possibly other reasons that were not explained in detail. The city does use some self-generated electricity for it's own use. The excess capacity is currently sold to our local electric company NYSEG. The former mayor was also at the meeting. He suggested that this inexpensive source of electricity should be used for stimulating specific businesses instead of keeping overall city government costs down.

When it came time to publicly voice specific concerns, I stated that we should make an effort to keep the city walker and biker friendly. We don't want to "fail" at it. Specifically, give some thought to bicycles when planning street repairs. I also put in a plug for keeping sidewalks in repair for electric wheelchair people who I see making their way along some rather busy streets! I was pleased to hear that the city planners are aware of those issues and they will continue to try to keep the streets wide where possible. Although homeowners pay for sidewalk repairs themselves, the city maintains wheel-chair accessible sidewalk corner slabs on each intersection at no cost. Plus they are building additional walkways along the river. One question I had was if some of the parking garage space could be assigned to bicyclists. They currently can only park outside of the parking garage and some people do ride in the rain. I also asked one of the planners if a new bike path to WalMart might be possible. Promoting Walmart isn't the goal. It's to get people on bicycles. My hope is that they might do so if they can easily reach popular destinations such as the bus hub and shopping centers.

Intentional Communities

The Westcott community center in Syracuse was an active place this Saturday. This weekend, the "The Alchemical Nursery" was giving out free bags of bulbs to people who live in the community. As a result, each spring, flowers bloom in front of homes and apartments of those who participate! The center also was distributing recycle bins provided by the county and of course there were organic vegetables for purchase.

Although this was all good, I came to Syracuse for a different reason. The Alchemical Nursery people were also showing a film and hosted a Q&A panel about "intentional communities". These come in more forms and are much more numerous than I was initially aware of. Some intentional communities seem nothing more than weak homeowner associations while others manage member activities to an almost cultish level. Communities tend to change over time and members themselves tend to change too. Some communities deal with aging members simply by limiting membership to younger members while others have gone as far as setting up assisted living arrangements. One thing in common with the successful communities is that there is usually some common theme that binds the members together which is above a purely economic benefit.

The topic is much more complicated than this blog posting can cover. The main message I got from the movie and Q&A panel was that successful intentional communities do exist and no two are the same. The lifestyle can be quite rewarding but a planned community requires a lot of work to maintain. If you want to check out what types of intentional communities are out there, check out http://www.ic.org/

Low cost water heater

What if you knew, absolutely, that high energy demand and inelastic supply were to cause energy prices to quadruple 3 months from now? Would that not change your incentive to act now? We may not know the specific day this will happen, but even the most optimistic predictions show very high prices will happen in less than 10 years. At some point, high energy prices will be months or even days away! So, why risk the wait?

IMHO, There needs to be a major effort to adopt renewable technologies now. One such solution to high energy costs is a low cost, high capacity, drainback solar water heater. The high-capacity unit featured from the site BuildItSolar.com looks like it's ideal for this climate. It's simple, low tech and low in cost if installed by the homeowner. Just build the unit, place by the side of the house, add siding, pipe it in and it could provide years of service generating hot water!

Barriers to ecologically friendly ways of doing things are not always about the technology. It may also be about cultural and governmental bias as well. If you would like to exchange tips for how to gain energy independence while still playing within the rules, have a chat over some Green Drinks (at Green Drinks.org)!