Author Archives: Patricia Wild

January 26, 2011*: Arright, Already!

This summer, while at Baltimore Yearly Meeting, I went to a wonderful workshop: “God, the Chesapeake and Us.” At its conclusion, participants were asked to promise to do ONE  THING to change how we lived. So, because the woman sitting next to me had mentioned them, I’d promised myself to check out “wind credits”—although I still don’t know what she was talking about. When I returned home, I promptly forgot my promise. (Looking at my notes re that workshop, the workshop leader had lots to say re covenants. Guess it’s a good thing I’m not God, huh?)

But while moseying around while researching how the electricity currently powering this computer, the radio softly playing in the background, my space heater et al, I found this re a New England-based Wind Fund.

[* Written a day early!]

January 24, 2011: Date Scheduled? Check.

Called the number listed on the MassSAVE website and was connected to a pleasant woman in. . . Florida. She connected me to another pleasant woman in Fall River, MA who scheduled our house for a Home Energy Assessment in 4 weeks.

How pleasant was the Fall River woman? When she asked me why I was signing up, I answered, “Because I want to save the planet,” then remembered (not for the first time) that most people don’t get my sense of irony. So I amended my answer to something about my concern re my carbon footprint. She didn’t snicker at that, either.

THAT’s how pleasant she was!

January 23, 2011: Plugging In

When I first opened the envelope, our electric bill seemed higher this month than I’d expected. When I thought about it, the increase seemed easy to explain: my daughter and her family here for a cold, blustery Christmas meant turning on our third-floor space heaters for a week (although NStar’s bar graph re monthly use seems to counter that fact), baby, it’s been cold outside this month and, I’m afraid,  I’ve gotten into the very bad habit of simply turning on the space heater next to my desk.  The bill also announces a 2011 “rate change”, i.e. increase, too.

Gotta admit, this $28.05 increase—not a big deal, really, and certainly within my budget—has nevertheless upset me.

But why?

Well, first of all, because I know about it (lucky me: my husband pays our natural gas bill so I am totally, ahem, in the dark about that expense). And secondly, I realize, upon reflection, that although I have about as much understanding re how natural gas is produced and physically gets to my house as I do about our household’s NStar gas bill, I have a slight understanding of how electricity gets here.

When I think “natural gas production,” nothing comes to mind. Zip. Ah. But ask me to think about an electric plant (is that what you even call it?) and I can easily picture a) a roaring, powerful waterfall making some humungous turbine spin or b) a coal-burning plant doing the same thing. And , yes, it’s not hard to conjure up images of the top-razed mountains I have seen in West Virginia or miners trapped in poorly ventilated and dangerous mines.

But, really, is any coal burned to provide New England with its electric power?

I have no idea. But now that the Home Energy Assessment thing is moving along (I’m calling MassSAVE tomorrow to set up an appointment), maybe my next project this month will be to investigate this.

Stay tuned. Or should I say, plugged in?

January 22, 2011: George Fox said it, too

Only after posting yesterday’s musing re encouraging others to consider changing behavior (vis a vis climate change) through modelling (which is, I guess, how they spell that word in Australia) did I realize that George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, exhorted us to “Be patterns. Be examples.”

For the full quote, click here

January 21, 2011: Another storm; no power loss

Relieved to wake up this morning to the radiators clanging. Because although I’m learning a little about how to heat this house, nothing’s actually changed.  We still don’t have a back-up system. And what I think is in place just might not be: Yesterday I discovered that our plug-in flashlight only works for about two minutes!

It’s a tricky balance, isn’t it: being smart about the predicted brownouts and blackouts due to climate change and remaining SANE about preparedness.

Speaking of sane: Yesterday I read an excellent piece, “How the Science of Behavior Change Can Help With Sustainability,” by Les Robinson, director of Enabling Change, based in Australia: We humans resent unwanted advice, especially when it threatens our comfort zones. Denial and resistance are driven by fear and the worst fears are social fears . . . Behavior change is therefore rarely achieved by persuasion or marketing but almost always requires modelling [sic] how to carry out unfamiliar behaviors with ease, aplomb and dignity.

January 20, 2011: So Is This What You Mean?

Not totally clued in to the principles of permaculture, nor of Pattern Language, I am often kind of stumbling around in the dark when it comes to really grokking what the hell this whole movement that I’m supposed a part of is about. Or as Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Movement would put it: “. . . none of us really know what we are doing.”

BUT: I think that what happened today is, maybe, an example of Pattern Language. (Maybe I should end that last sentence with a ?)

To wit: As of today, everyone, here, at 25 School Street is now on board for the MassSAVE Home Energy Assessment. And guess what? Today I receive an e-mail hoping that Somerville Climate Action (My peeps) might join in a statewide initiative to—you guessed it—get lots and lots of people to sign up for a a Home Energy Assessment!

And here’s what the Pattern Language guru, Christopher Alexander, has to say: The specific patterns out of which a community is made may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free: but when they are dead, they keep us locked in inner conflict.

Or maybe we could just say: synchronicity.

January 18, 2011: First Step/Home Energy Assessment

Okay, today, in preparation for a Mass Save Home Energy Assessment, I watched this video—and sent it along to our tenants and to my got-other-things-on-his-mind-besides-energy-efficiency husband.

BTW: My friend Lynne explained that the reason utility companies do this is, surprise, they actually make more money when their consumers save energy!

January 17, 2011: “We’re all in this together”

This afternoon I joined my friend Lynne  at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall for A Day of Service and Celebration in Honor of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I’d thought I’d gone so as to spend some time with Lynne—whose wise counsel re writing is always helpful—and because Nikki Giovanni was to be the keynote speaker.  But when I teared up singing “Lift Every Voice,” I realized, “Patricia, you’ve been hungering and thirsting after this kind of righteousness.”

So, yes, it was teary afternoon, a powerful afternoon: seeing and listening to those beautiful, talented young people of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra. Nikki Giovanni’s passionate and wry enlargement of the Rosa Parks story.  Listening to Dr. King’s words read aloud. And how wonderful to hear the crowd roar when Chief Justice Roderick L. Ireland, MA’s first African American Chief Justice—and one of the readers—was introduced!

AND, if that weren’t enough, I had a personal satori, as Lynne would say: A couple of days ago another Friend/friend who’s interested in leadings, asked me: “Civil rights, the criminal justice system and climate change? How do those fit together?”

My answer was something about being open to Spirit and believing that working on climate change was what was being asked of me right now. (And, oh, yeah, while keepin’ on keepin’ on re criminal justice, too.)

But, hey, what did MLK have to say about interconnectedness, huh? That concept that’s so much at the heart of the climate change movement? Dr. King said this from the Birmingham Jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

So that’s why the Transition Towns movement/permaculture/working on global warming issues so powerfully speaks to me, huh?

Nice to know.

January 15, 2011: (Packing) Heat

Even Tombstone had gun laws

By KATHERINE BENTON-COHEN | 1/10/11 10:53 AM EST

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, during a press conference about the Tucson shootings, called Arizona “the Tombstone of the United States.”

Some journalists gave the word a lowercase “t,” but the sheriff was clearly referring to the infamous silver-mining town 70 miles from Tucson — site of the shootout at the OK Corral.

Journalists invoke the hoary image of “frontier violence” and “Arizona’s poisonous political rhetoric,” it is not that surprising it took less than a day to mention Arizona’s most infamous bloodshed—and from a local sheriff no less.

The irony of Dupnik’s remark is that Tombstone lawmakers in the 1880s did more to combat gun violence than the Arizona government does today.

For all the talk of the “Wild West,” the policymakers of 1880 Tombstone—and many other Western towns—were ardent supporters of gun control. When people now compare things to the “shootout at the OK Corral,” they mean vigilante violence by gunfire. But this is exactly what the Tombstone town council had been trying to avoid.

In late 1880, as regional violence ratcheted up, Tombstone strengthened its existing ban on concealed weapons to outlaw the carrying of any deadly weapons within the town limits. The Earps (who were Republicans) and Doc Holliday maintained that they were acting as law officers—not citizen vigilantes—when they shot their opponents. That is to say, they were sworn officers whose jobs included enforcement of Tombstone’s gun laws.

Today, in contrast, Arizonans can legally buy guns without licenses, and are able to carry concealed weapons without a permit. The state bans cities from passing their own, stricter laws. The legislature will consider a bill this session that would force schools to allow guns on campus — like Pima Community College, which the alleged shooter attended.

There are comparisons between the horror that unfolded in Tucson on Saturday morning, and the bloodshed on that cold October day in Tombstone, 130 years ago.

Vitriolic politics served as the backdrop in both cases. Most historians of the Shootout at the OK Corral now agree that partisan divisions between the mostly Republican Earp faction and the Southern Democrat Clantons and McLaurys helped stir the pot. The violence can be viewed as a last battle of the Civil War — the bloodiest political conflict of them all.

Arizonans, myself included, love to tout their vaunted independence and Western values. But when we perpetuate the idea that Arizona is some unchanging Wild West, we fall into the trap of a myth that only serves to embolden those who refuse to support commonsense restrictions on purchasing firearms.

Even the Tombstone town council of 1880 realized that some people with guns have intent to kill—and that reasonable laws could help stop them.

Katherine Benton-Cohen, an Arizona native and history professor at Georgetown University, is the author of “Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands.”