She had $7,000 in cash.  A realtor showed her a lot priced at exactly that, but all her friends advised her against buying it.  The property sloped steeply south to a beautiful little valley, a perfectly matched solar exposure and view.  But it was right beside the main road from Vineyard Haven to Edgartown, which was very loud and loomed over the property.  Except for that proximity and the fact that the whole lot was a hillside, it was a lovely site.  There was nothing else on Martha’s Vineyard within her price range.

I suggested that we could cut and fill and she could build an earth-bermed, partially underground house.  “The southern orientation aims away from the road just enough, and the berming would dull the noise as long as the house doesn’t open to that side.  We can design the traffic right out of the picture.”  She was excited. Even though she didn’t imagine that she could afford to build anything at all, the idea that the land could eventually be sensibly used was appealing.  She bought the property.

We learned that the Farmer’s Home Administration had a rural housing program with very low interest loans for low and moderate income people.  She qualified.  Would they finance a passive solar earth-integrated house for Madeline?  We completed plans, submitted them to Farmer’s Home and requested that they raise the mortgage limit from $40,000 to $48,000 due to the promise of carefully analyzed and documented energy savings.  After extensive bureaucratic wrangling the increase was approved.

The house was built. Madeline’s dream was realized.  She and her dog moved in and lived there for many years.

In the mid 90’s she met an older man named Edwin Heath, re-married, and reluctantly moved to Florida, where he was accustomed to the gentle climate.  With a heavy heart Madeline sold the house, but she always stayed in touch with the buyer, a woman named Tillie, because the house was such a part of her.  Tillie loved it too.  Madeline was glad of that.

I lost track of Madeline after her move, but when my book, The Company We Keep, was published, I tracked her down and sent her a copy with an affectionate inscription.  She wrote back – a wonderful letter in longhand about what that house had meant to her.

A few years ago Madeline’s husband died, and she, quite old now too, and somewhat ill, had one dream left – to move back to the Vineyard for the final years of her life.  But there was little hope of that.  Undaunted, she put her name on the long list of people waiting for housing through Island Elderly Housing.  Miraculously, her name was drawn a short time after.  She accepted the apartment offered, sight unseen, packed up, and made the trek.

Twenty six years after I first met Madeline, she called me and said she was settled in on the island and wanted to come to see our new shop and office, and the cohousing neighborhood next door where we live.  Her neighbor Joyce would bring her.  We arranged a time.  They drove up to the office.  Once inside she stopped, looked around, and sighed deeply.  “My god it’s beautiful,” she said.  She walked into the main office, with a look of wonder on her face as if she had just entered a botanical garden in full bloom – touching everything, gazing around, taking it all in.

She looked older, of course, but not so much.  More wrinkled, and smaller – compacted in a way.  She moved more slowly, too, with the help of a mahogany cane.  But the eyes and the voice had not changed at all.  And her character – observant, candid, emotional,  expressive, and vital – was the same as always.

Everyone in the office was drawn to her.  Her presence was magnetic.  She strolled through like an old master, pointing out things of interest, but humbly, not grandly.  She was awed by everything she saw and everyone she met.

After touring, we sat down in my office to rest, to talk, to have a glass of water.  She said, “John, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but you and the others didn’t just build me a house.  It was so much more.  I found myself in that house.  I loved everything about it, and everything about being there, and every day I lived there I found myself again, in some other way, and found something else in the house to bring me pleasure.”  That’s what she said.

•                  •                  •                  •

Last week I got a call from a lawyer.  It said that I was a legatee in a Will.  I had never heard the word.  I looked it up – it is, of course, a beneficiary.  Hey, not bad – I guess you never know what you’ll find when you open an envelope from a lawyer.  Sometimes it’s something unexpected.  Sometimes it’s actually something you want.

He e-mailed me the Will.  It was Madeline’s.

Here’s what it said, in part:

Second:   I give and bequeath the following sums to the following individuals for the specified purposes:

A:  Fifty Thousand Dollars ($50,000.00) to JOHN ABRAMS (or his designee) to be used in conjunction with the South Mountain Company, Inc. for the purpose of making an innovative and educational renewable energy installation at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School or another appropriate public setting on Martha’s Vineyard.  Said sum shall also be used to erect a brass plaque engraved to reflect this bequest came from Edward Charles Heath and Madeline Blakely Heath, with specific wording to be determined by JOHN ABRAMS, such plaque to include a bas relief of my solar house design.

That was followed by B, C, D, and E – four bequests of $2-3,000 to friends.  And then this:

Third:  I give and bequeath all the rest, residue and remainder of my estate to said JOHN ABRAMS (or his designee) to be used for affordable housing initiatives on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.

We’re not sure what to do with the $50,000 yet.  But one of my partners – Phil Forest – has us thinking about making the first electric charging station on the Vineyard, way up in Aquinnah at the extreme western tip of the island.  It would be solar electric powered and provide electricity for cars, chilled water for cyclists and hikers, and a shady and welcoming oasis for these several kinds of travelers.

She’d like that.

Whatever we do, it better be good if it’s to measure up to her spirit.  And it will have, of course, a bronze plaque with a bas-relief of Madeline’s beautiful little solar house.  Maybe the rest of the words will be, “She loved her solar home, where she found her self – again and again.”

And I don’t know how much will be left to support our affordable housing efforts.  But I wouldn’t mind using it –if there’s enough – to build a replica of her sweet little house for a young island family who needs stable housing.  Community preservation in Madeline’s memory.  She would like that too.

When he arrived here last Tuesday, it was different than most times.  First of all, his partner Jill DeLaHunt was with him.  Second, her dog Leela was with him.  Third – they had a big U-Haul truck with them, and inside were most of their belongings (including their nine bicycles, but not including the bicycle he built in 1974 as his senior thesis in engineering at MIT.  At the time, it was the world’s lightest bicycle, at 12 pounds – today, it hangs in the MIT museum).

Finally, it was different because it has now been more than three weeks and he hasn’t left yet!  That’s because, for better or worse, Marc and Jill have moved here, and Marc is joining forces with SMC, and will be running our Energy Services department (as well as continuing, part-time, through South Mountain to satisfy the needs of his clients throughout New England).  We are thrilled to be able to add his expertise and wealth of experience to our own, and to offer his services to island (and off-island) residents, businesses, and towns.  He and Jill are also neighbors; they live four houses down from us here at Island Cohousing.

This is an important development for our company.  It expands what we able to do in the realm of energy and building performance and it sharpens and refines our abilities.  Not only does Marc bring an incisive mind and a tremendous range of knowledge and experience, but he also brings a fierce sense of purpose, an intensely focused moral compass, a profound dedication to professionalism, and a remarkable spirit of deep inquiry.

Marc enhances our connections to the world of building science, which is changing at breakneck speed.  We are rapidly learning much that we never knew before.  Recently Alex Wilson of Environmental Building News (quite simply THE most thorough and impeccable source of information for the green building industry) reported that a Canadian researcher discovered that the blowing agents used to make a familiar insulation product (extruded polystyrene [XPS], which people in the building industry know as the blue rigid board Styrofoam, made by Dow Chemical, and the pink rigid board Foamular, made by Owens Corning) gradually seeps from the board over its lifetime and is a powerful contributor to global warming.  Depending on thickness used and climate zone, insulating with these materials might take 40+ years of energy savings to “payback” the global warming potential.  Our zero energy homes, therefore (if they use these common materials) may, in fact, use no energy, but they may at the same time have a large carbon footprint!

That’s big news; it’s hardly what we’re after.

New information like this is coming all the time. But there is also a ton of green building mis-information floating around out there.  Often, the nuances and subtleties and variables make it impossible to know what’s right and what’s not, what will work long term and what won’t, what makes the most sense, what might cause problems, what needs monitoring over time, what requires experimentation.

When we get reliable new information we must change our practices.  Marc helps us figure out what’s what because he keeps up with new developments, because he understands the engineering and the science, because he knows who and what are reliable sources of information, and because he knows who to talk to when he doesn’t know (and, just as important, he KNOWS when he doesn’t know – - and, of course, sometimes NOBODY knows).

Marc is constantly examining our practices.  He’s an insurance policy against big mistakes.  He’s a creative force in pursuit of better buildings.  He’s also a superb educator, and has been responsible for explaining complex building performance information (and making it understandable without dumbing it down) to thousands of New England building professionals, helping them to improve their practices.

But he’s a stickler, too.  He’s fussy.  He doesn’t let anything go and he makes damn sure we get away with nothing.  That’s good for us, good for our clients, good for our community.

But it’s not easy.

He’s not easy.

His arrival is the culmination of a year of planning.  It’s very exciting.  But it’s one of those things – sometimes you get what you wish for.

For better or worse.

Nature has always had that potential, but nature also has the ability to repair itself; we humans apparently do not.  Bill McKibben, in his new book Eaarth:  Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, says that “For almost all of human history, our society was small and nature was large; in a few brief decades that key ratio has reversed.”

I’m reminded of discussions – 35 years ago – about “appropriate technology.”  These were inspired by British economist E.F. Schumacher, whose 1973 book, Small is Beautiful, was the catalyst for an unprecedented period of small-scale renewable energy innovation that was brought to a screeching halt – in this country – by the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1981.

The rest of the developed world continued to build on the  early successes of solar and wind technologies which mostly originated in the U.S.   Tremendous progress has been made since, but far less here than in Japan, Western Europe, and now China.  As recently as 13 years ago, the U.S. made 40% of the world’s photovoltaic cells to generate electricity; now, it’s less than 5%.

Perhaps this new spill, as it continues to drift ashore, will point us in a new (old) direction.  We’ve been here before, but we lost our will.  Even now, as a country, we remain unable to stop the destruction caused by oil and coal and move swiftly and surely to benign energy sources.  Last year China spent twice what the U.S. did on renewables.  As McKibben says, we have already done the damage – we have already changed the planet irrevocably (that’s why he calls it “Eaarth”) and now we must minimize the damage.

Part of that is using technology to develop ever-more effective and scalable solar and wind technologies.  But just as big a part is using less – transforming ourselves into a low-carbon society.

Buildings play a big role in that.  They use 40% of our total energy, and 70% of our electricity, but they don’t need to.

A focus of South Mountain’s work these days is learning to master the art and science of the Deep Energy Retrofit – the practice of building renovations that result in profound energy use reduction, increased health and comfort, and greater durability.

We don’t pretend to know what we need to know about this practice, but we know enough to do a credible job and we continue to learn.  We are just completing – over the next several months -  two fundamentally different deep energy retrofits – the Lake/Hodgson house in Aquinnah and the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth (click on the attached article to read more about it).   One is a patched together summer house from the 50’s; the other is a sturdy masonry building from 1910.  They share the following characteristic:  both were buildings that nobody wanted and both, therefore, suffered years of neglect.

Now they are restored, and they share other things too.  They are energy efficient, they are beautiful, and they will each provide many decades of joy and sensible – appropriate – service to their occupants.

The practice is spreading.  The other day I received an e-mail from Ian Bowles, the Secretary of Energy and the Environment for the state of Massachusetts.  The heading was “deep energy retrofit in Boston” and the message said, “john — i hope you are well.  looking for advice on any local experts in the boston area on energy efficiency measures for an old (1878) victorian we are about to buy.  any ideas/leads welcome.  thx.  ian”.

Massachusetts is making a commitment to clean energy that goes beyond that of most states and far beyond the federal government’s.  But the e-mail above means more than all the programs – it means the person in charge has taken this all to heart.

He means it.  That’s good.  We all need to mean it.   Because what we’re doing to ourselves and our planet is far more than a gash in the knee.

On Tuesday, March 30^th, a standing room only crowd packed the meeting room at the Howes House.  At stake:  seven new LEED platinum houses at Eliakim’s Way off State Road in West Tisbury. There was a mix of nervous applicants, expectant children, public officials, and housing advocates.

In the front of the room David Vigneault and Terri Keech of the Dukes County Regional Housing Authority,  lottery administrators, explained the process.  A complex matrix of preferences and qualifications was so arcane nobody could actually understand it.  The crowd chuckled when David finished his explanation and said, “Is that all clear?”

But everyone understood the real meaning.  Qualified applicants would drop their tickets into a slot in a gaily painted cardboard house, and public officials would draw them out one by one to determine whose future would change in a heartbeat.  A large easel in front of the room showed, for each house, the qualified applicants.  After each drawing Terri, decked out in a leopard skin hat, would flip the sheet with a flourish to reveal the next house and its applicants.

Philippe and Maddie Ezanno, and their 11-year-old daughter Juniper, embraced as their name was drawn.  Future on Martha’s Vineyard:  assured.  George Drew and Krissy Kinsman sat eagerly in the front row.  Their name was drawn.  They were silent, sat back, and breathed deeply before collapsing into each other’s arms.  Future on Martha’s Vineyard: assured.

It was all done in a half hour.   Lives had changed.  Others hadn’t.  Some slipped out, disconsolate, wondering when the next one would be.  As the glow wore off, others remained.  They realized they would soon be neighbors.  They hugged and congratulated each other.

This is the fourth time I have witnessed one of these lotteries.  They’re bittersweet – I’ve seen plenty of tears of both happiness and sadness.  The sad ones – they’re the reason we do it.  Again and again, despite the trials and tribulations, which are ample. And also because we may be able to look back sometime soon – perhaps in 5 years, perhaps in 10, perhaps in 15, and say, “Amazing.  We had a problem – a big knotty complicated problem – and we truly solved it.”  How rare.  How wonderful.

But for now – cheers and tears.

*                                  *                                  *                                   *

This weekend the chosen families moved into their new homes. Here they are at move-in time.

It’s an especially poignant moment for all of us at South Mountain, as we have poured heart-and-soul into this project for the past two years – through design, permitting, and construction.  It has been a wonderful collaboration with the Island Housing Trust (the property owners), the Island Affordable Housing Fund, the Cape Light Compact (who provided funding for solar and energy efficiency through the Mass Renewable Trust’s Green Affordable Homes initiative), Habitat for Humanity of Martha’s Vineyard (who built an eighth house using our design), and others. The Town of West Tisbury and a number of private donors were generous, providing the funding to fill the gap between the sale prices and the cost.  Our crews and subcontractors were nothing short of spectacular – efficient, effective, and passionately devoted to quality.

Recently Island Housing Trust director Philippe Jordi, SMC designer/project manager Derrill Bazzy, SMC energy sales manager Rob Meyers, and I met with the eight excited families to review their new Owners’ Manuals and teach them how their houses work.

We also unveiled a new contest!

The houses are designed to be super low-energy users, and we told the new homeowners that any household that is able to get through the first year using ZERO energy (or being a net energy producer!) would win a prize:  a one year membership to the Whippoorwill Farm CSA, or an equivalent gift certificate at the Net Result fish market. If everybody does it, they each get the prize.  If nobody does it, the lowest user gets the prize. As Rob said, “These houses are net-zero possible.  It all depends on how you live in them and operate them.”

Below is an article that will appear in the MV Real Estate Guide about a “zero-energy possible” spec house we’re building on West Spring Street in Vineyard Haven that uses an enhanced version of the Eliakim’s Way design.

Will the Eliakim’s Way houses make zero energy?  Will the West Spring Street house?

Don’t know.  As the headline says, “We’ll find out.”

.

The first two are recent articles in local magazines about projects of ours.

The third is a piece on an on-line magazine called TONIC.

I hope you enjoy these.  We have.  I’ll be back with something more substantive than all this fluff soon!!

But the Cape Wind announcement in Boston last Wednesday took my mind off that and inspired me to get back to this.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said a lot about Cape Wind.  But the best thing he said was, quite simply, “This is the final decision of the United States of America.”  Final Decision.  Good decision, great decision, unequivocal decision – by the United States of America!  How rare is that?

During the past nine years Jim Gordon and his colleagues at Cape Wind have re-defined the words “stamina” and “perseverance.”  And I hope – for their sake and ours – that Wednesday’s confirmation gave them a stiff and steady tailwind to propel them to their ultimate destination – the commissioning of the first offshore wind farm in the U.S.

None too soon.  The collected intelligence tells us, as Alex Steffen of Worldchanging says, “We have five years to start making big changes, twenty years to finish making them here, and at most forty years to spread those changes to every corner of the world.”  Bill McKibben, the longest-running, most articulate chronicler of Climate Change, looks at it differently his new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet . He says we have already changed the planet irrevocably, and while we try to minimize the damage our new challenge is to learn to live in this unfamiliar place.

In the U.S. we remain stuck.  Still no comprehensive energy bill, still no carbon tax, still no feed-in tariffs.  We have plenty of catching up to do, and the Cape Wind decision is a good start.

It’s like we’ve been holding our breath, waiting anxiously for this logjam to come loose.  Up and down the east coast developers, communities, and government entities have been waiting for Cape Wind.  The state of Massachusetts and the federal government have both identified hundreds of wind “plots” off the coast.  They’re ready to award them, and there are many takers waiting anxiously.  Cape Wind will be the first of many.

I doubt it will be trouble-free; I’m certain there are mistakes to make and learning to do.  I remember nine years ago when Cape Wind first started; they hadn’t a clue what they were getting into and they were surprised by the firestorm of resistance that met their plans.  There are many things they could have done better, had they only known.  There could have been a stronger package of local community benefits.  But who knew?  And what is ever perfect?

On Martha’s Vineyard, I’m thrilled to see Vineyard Power our very own community-owned cooperative offshore-windfarm-to-be, taking shape and making big progress.  As the membership creeps toward 1000, I’m beginning to think this bold effort to create (and manage) a membership of thousands and pull off the biggest development project in the history of the Vineyard truly has a chance.

Meanwhile, we’ll be pulling hard for Cape Wind to leap over each hurdle and for many others to follow suit.  Onward we go!!

For now.

Four years in the making, this long-term plan for the future of Martha’s Vineyard, initiated by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission,  engaged hundreds of people in the collaborative process of its production.  To quote from the plan:  “ The purpose of the Island Plan is to chart a course to the kind of future the Vineyard community wants, and to outline a series of actions to help us navigate that course.  The Island Plan is both a blueprint and a call to action.”

I served on the Steering Committee and chaired one of the nine work groups – Livelihood & Commerce (the others are Development & Growth, Natural Environment, the Built Environment, Energy & Waste, Affordable Housing, Transportation, Water Resources, and Social Environment).

I spent more time working on the plan than I wished to and less time than I should have.

The Plan is not what I hoped it would be when we first began work.  I hoped we could create something that would knock our socks off – a plan that people would embrace wholeheartedly because How Could You Not?  So compelling it didn’t even seem like a plan but a great never-ending story.  A truly inspiring plan.  A mouth-watering five-course meal.

That was unrealistic, of course.  It’s not one person’s dream meal; it’s a stew, added to and stirred by many.  At times, during the process, I found myself somewhat heartbroken, because the opportunity was so great and I felt we were falling short, but toward the end it got better, and I got better, and it’s not a bad stew.

Here are some important things about the Island Plan:

• It has created a new lexicon and new awareness – obscure terms like “multiplier effect”,  “economic leakage”, “ecosystem services”, “minimum viable landscape”, “undevelopment”, and “carrying capacity” have become commonplace.

• It’s an iterative plan, not a Final Solution study that’s going to sit on a shelf collecting dust.  There is a commitment to implement, to measure, to assess, to re-work, to “freshen up” the plan and add ingredients as the years go by, and to make alterations as conditions change in our rapidly changing world.

•  People are thinking about it as 50 year plan.  In a way it really isn’t.  Early on we started saying “We need to think long term” – not a five or ten year plan but a 50 or 100 year plan.  The local papers started writing stuff like  “these guys must be nuts – you can’t do a 50 year plan” but the idea tickled peoples’ imagination.  Now people say, proudly, we’ve got a 50 year plan.  And the papers refer to “the island’s 50 year plan.”  So what if it isn’t?  As long as we think we’ve got a 50 year plan we do.  And in many ways it really is.

•  The 207 recommended strategies are a wealth of possibilities that we can dig into over time, each as its time comes.

One of these – a community owned electrical cooperative that uses local renewable resources to generate a large fraction of the Vineyard’s energy – has become the most immediate and visible direct outgrowth of the plan.  A small group of people got so excited about the idea that when they got done with their work in the Island Plan Energy & Waste Group they went right to work on Vineyard Power and now, less than a year later, the cooperative has formed and begun to assemble a membership, create financing opportunities, and consider sites for an offshore wind farm.

It’s a bold idea and a challenging project that will take years to implement.  It combines the need to create a membership of thousands, and manage it, with the goal of completing the biggest development project in the history of the Vineyard.  Big job.  But as the nascent membership approaches 500, I’m beginning to think it may be possible.

If the Island Plan stimulates nothing else, it will have been a success.

Here’s something I wish about the plan.  I wish it connected the dots more.  It is good at recognizing interdependencies, but less good at making them come alive.  Here’s the kind of thing that’s not in the Island Plan that I now wish was.  It’s an idea – which I’m going to call Hogtied Brewery for the moment – which could work just fine here on the Vineyard:

•  People like beer, especially local beer from a place they like.

•  So an MV brewery (like Offshore Ale, our local brewery) produces beer & the process produces waste mash.

•  The waste mash is used to feed pigs.

•  The pigs make meat and manure.

•  The meat feeds people hungry for local food – everybody loves that – and the manure powers a bio-gas digester.

•  The bio-gas digester makes electricity.

•  The electricity is used to run the brewery.

Round and round it goes.  Makes sense, doesn’t it?  An unbroken circle of synergies.  There’s no reason we can’t do things this way.  There’s no reason we can’t keep making improvements to the Island Plan.  There’s no reason we can’t implement its most promising strategies.

The result?

As Jim Athearn, who chaired the Steering Committee says,

“ In many ways, the Island Plan’s proposals for the next generation will help keep the Vineyard much as it is today – characterized by carefully protected open spaces, vistas, and historic neighborhoods, and provided with great services and recreational opportunities.  In many ways, however, it will be different and greatly improved.  Although tourism and construction will still be important parts of the economy, many people will have transitioned to well-paying, year-round “green” and knowledge-based jobs, encouraging young people to stay on the island.  Farming and fishing will be expanded and feeding more of the population.  Our energy will come from a community-owned offshore wind farm.  There will be an Island-wide greenway and trail network.  New buildings will fit their neighborhoods.  It will be an even more vital year-round community, as our families can live here affordably.  The Island Plan is a guide to keeping the Island safe, beautiful, healthy, and culturally rich – the best place it can be for our children and grandchildren.”

Doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

All it takes is insisting on the future we want instead of settling for the future we get.

It was the first time I had been to George and Katherine’s house.  I got off the boat, walked up the road, and turned right on Church Street.  As I walked I gawked at the sprawling old-world summer mansions on the right side (the water side) of Church. Woodwell’s is on the left, and is smaller and more subdued, except for the giveaway large solar thermal system on an outbuilding to the left. Built by George 26 years ago, it has provided half the home’s heat and hot water ever since.  But the house is a big old leaky rambler needing many fixes.  We’re doing some of them now, as partial steps toward George and Katherine’s eventual goal: eliminating the use of fossil fuels altogether.

Several of our carpenters were working there.  Just as I turned into the driveway our foreman, Pete D’Angelo, was ripping a 2×4 on a table saw and the grain was running all ragged so it bound up and kicked back on him. He turned to one of the carpenters, Curtis, who was right next to him, and said, “What else could possibly happen to screw me up today?”

At that moment he turned and saw me walking up the driveway, threw his hands skyward, and said, “Oh no – not him!”

I checked out the job.  Tough work.  Tearing stuff apart, re-working, insulating, and airsealing in a messy old attic with cast iron pipes and BX cable running everywhere.

As we looked at the work Peter (who is also one of my co-owners) revealed to me that I was the least of his problems on this particular day, unlike on so many other days.

I was glad to hear that but troubled to see how hard this important work is.

Unlike the Carriage House, the Woodwell project does not qualify as a true Deep Energy Retrofit as we’re only doing a part of what needs to be done – picking the low hanging fruit.   Hopefully, over time, we’ll be able to do the rest.

On the Vineyard we have another complete Deep Energy Retrofit in progress,  for Bill Lake and Morgan Hodgson in Aquinnah.  Bill and Morgan bought a typical patched-together summer camp from the 50’s on a beautiful site overlooking Lobsterville.  The realtors were selling it as a tear-down (obviously nobody would want that worn out hunk of junk) but Bill and Morgan were interested in saving it and fixing it.  It had charm, character, and some good parts – why cart it all away to the dump?

We helped them figure out how to make sense of it.  This is a gut re-hab, which makes it easier.  When it’s done, it will still be a charming old camp but with more light and space and new aesthetics.  And it will perform, in terms of energy use, comfort, and durability, nearly as well as the high-performance new buildings we are making these days.  In my last post I said  “On the Vineyard we have approximately 18,000 existing buildings.  Each will – at some point – need to be brought into the 21st century, or just thrown away.”

One down, 17,999 to go.

The Lake/Hodgson House and the Woods Hole Research Center Carriage House will be, when completed, the first true Deep Energy Retrofits our company has produced.  Sometime in the future, when we have monitored and measured, I will quantify what this means, discuss the components, tell of the successes and failures, and try to explain what it takes to do these (aside from committed clients, which is the most essential requirement).

Meanwhile, on March 6^th we are hosting an open house at Lake/Hodgson’s, mid-construction, with bones exposed, so people can see what goes into such a project and how it’s done.  We will examine the troubles and the triumphs midstream.  If you’re around, join us.

I’ll be there – if the carpenters don’t kick me out first!

No more.  He just finished the rocker.  I’d show a picture but I don’t have one yet that does it justice (I do have a picture of a prototype reclaimed wood SMC floor lamp he made; here it is).

Pinto’s a superb woodworker (and one of my fellow owners at South Mountain), a sublime musician, a great Dad, and many other things that make me proud. (No bias here, of course).  The rocker is so artfully crafted that to look at it takes your breath away and to sit in it makes you sink into reverie and wonder who will be sitting in that chair in 200 years.

Pinto grew up watching and helping my colleagues and me build.  He wandered around the shop.  He made stuff all the time.  I didn’t grow up with that.  But I did have shop class in seventh grade with Mr. Eddy.  I built a slalom water ski out of mahogany.  To bend the tip I had to slice it with a bandsaw, glue in lots of small pieces and bend it on a form.  I wasn’t that good with a bandsaw, so if you look at the edge of the ski in the picture below (I still have it today; it’s gathering dust in the rafters of our shop)  you’ll see that the laminations wander.

Can you tell?

The laminations may wander, but the ski is true and the experience of shop class was so memorable that I remember it clearly almost 50 years later.  The thought of that shop class – which is a dying part of our educational system – leads me to the juxtaposition of craftsmanship, factory-produced housing, and the work ahead.

In a 2006 essay called “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” (which has become a book of the same name that I haven’t read – the subtitle is “An Inquiry into the Value of Work”) the author, Matthew Crawford, makes a case for the importance of manual work and craftsmanship:

“Skilled manual labor entails a systematic encounter with the material world, precisely the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science.  From its earliest practice, craft knowledge has entailed knowledge of the “ways” of one’s materials – that is, knowledge of their nature, acquired through disciplined perception and a systematic approach to problems.”

Eliminating shop class assumes that it is a good idea to herd everyone into college and get them busy in front of a screen as soon as possible.  It assumes that there is little to be learned from manual labor and little value to society.  But who’s to say that the “jobs of the future” in a “post-industrial” economy are more fulfilling or more valuable?

Meanwhile, Inga Saffron wrote an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in January called “City’s Green Groundbreakers”  about the Philadelphia Four, a group of rising design firms that see architecture “as a weapon in the battle to stave off environmental ruin.”

The four are convinced that conventional building methods are as obsolete as “hunting and gathering.”  Building takes too long, wastes too much, and costs too much.  “Rather than attempting to make our system greener, these architects are bent on overthrowing it,” says Saffron.

It’s all about digitizing what we build, electronically sending models to factories, building under controlled conditions, and snapping together components on a site.

Doesn’t sound so new, does it?  It’s the old modernist call to arms, which has been going on for a century, and still nobody’s figured out a way to do it better than the Sears Roebucks kit homes of the early 1900’s, which combined craftsmanship with factory production and automation.

(Between 1908 and 1940, Sears customers ordered about 75,000 houses from the Sears Roebuck mail-order catalogs. The houses were shipped by rail all over the country.  Each kit home contained 30,000 pieces, including 750 pounds of nails and 27 gallons of paint and varnish. A 75-page instruction book showed homebuyers, step by step, how to assemble the pieces.  Many of those houses still exist.)

Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, the elders of the Philadelphia Four, wrote a manifesto called Refabricating Architecture in 2003 that says that buildings should be produced like airplanes and cars.

I’m not convinced.  A large part of the process of building has already found its way to the factory – building is more a process of assembling manufactured parts than ever before.  Maybe most of what can successfully be produced in factories already is.

This is especially true of the big work ahead in the building realm, which (in the times of diminishing resources and declining population to come) will be about fixing the buildings we’ve got in transformative ways.  Deep Energy Retrofits for profound energy use reduction, increased comfort, and greater durability.

Here on Martha’s Vineyard there are 18,000 existing buildings.  Each will – at some point – need to be brought into the 21st century, or just thrown away.  This is true of the entire developed world (in the developing world the story may be different).

This work is not going to happen in a factory.  It is going to happen with teams of well-trained designers, engineers, technicians, analysts, craftspeople, tradespeople, and laborers.”  The digital information will flow from studio to site rather than from office to factory.  Much of the digital information will be collected at the site, in the same way that  a craftsperson collects information “through disciplined perception and a systematic approach to problems.”

Craftsmanship is the practice of staying with a pursuit for a long time and boring deeply into it to get it right.  That’s not something we want to disappear; it’s something we want to encourage.  We’re trying to learn to do Deep Energy Retrofits this way.  Let’s bring back Shop Class, get the kids away from the screens for a bit, and let them make their own wandering saw cuts which will, in due time, straighten out.   Mine did.  Sort of.

Wind has been in the local news in four distinctly different regards at once:  the release and reaction to the draft Massachusetts Oceans Management Plan, the public coming-out of a new organization called Vineyard Power, the continuing saga of Cape Wind, and the adoption of a new wind by-law in Aquinnah.

Before diving in, some context might be useful.

According to Lester Brown, the president of Earth Policy Institute and the author of Plan B 4.0,  the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) has identified 1000 gigawatts of potential offshore wind energy on the U.S. East Coast.  That’s an extraordinary number.  A gigawatt is 1000 megawatts.  The size of the proposed Cape Wind project is 420 Megawatts.  That means NREL has identified the potential for 2500 Cape Winds on the East Coast.  That’s right – two thousand five hundred.  Coupled with similar West Coast potential, there is offshore capacity sufficient to power the entire U.S. economy.

How much offshore capacity does the U.S have at present?

None.

Not so in Europe and Asia.  Wind energy is growing, worldwide, at a furious rate.  Last month, according to “Progressive Investor” ,  “Spain supplied 53% of its electricity from wind” with more than 10 GW (24 Cape Winds) installed.  They are expecting another 5.3 GW (12 more Cape Winds) online by 2012.  That’s just Spain, with a coastline roughly one quarter of the length of the U.S. coastline.  Will we even have our modest first effort –  Cape Wind – installed by 2012??

The U.S. is now a full decade behind the rest of the developed world in the transition to renewable energy and the battle to tame climate change.  We’re discovering the shame of following for the first time ever.  As David Orr says in his new book Down to the Wire “The global crisis ahead is a direct result of the largest political failure in history.”  We have been at the forefront of that failure.

Here in Massachusetts, however,  the political commitment to change is strong.  The Deval Patrick administration has been stellar, demonstrating serious leadership and investing heavily in diverse renewable energy initiatives.

Several months ago the Patrick administration released their draft Oceans Management Plan for Massachusetts waters. Although pleased by this pro-active planning, I was disappointed to see that the competing matrix of uses left very little area available for offshore wind development.  The only areas identified as suitable are near the Vineyard and the adjacent island of Cuttyhunk.  I assume there must be others.

But that was not the primary concern for most Vineyarders.  The designation of our waters drew a swift and negative reaction from local community and political leaders,  and a demand for local control.  Some accommodation has been reached, but at this point, it seems that the state government’s resolve remains firm.  They may add to the area (that’s good!) and they may award a stronger voice and greater community benefits to the Vineyard (that’s good!) but they will not let NIMBYism rule the day (that’s good too!).

A group called Let Vineyarders Decide formed to demand alterations to the state plan.  Meanwhile, the real good news is that during the last two years a new organization called Vineyard Power  has been in the design and formative stages and has now completed a business plan and formal incorporation.  This is a citizen-owned cooperative that will “secure our energy future and keep control in our community.”  Electricity will be generated from offshore wind turbines and distributed to co-op members through the existing grid. Go here to join now.

This exciting development is the perfect Let Vineyarders Decide vehicle.  We’ll own it and we will make the decisions.  Where will the turbines be? We will decide.  Fortunately, one of the Let Vineyarders Decide organizers also serves on the Vineyard Power advisory board.  This promotes important dialogue.

When it comes to wind turbines, location always seems to be the rub. The current debate, it seems to me, is missing the point.  Sometimes, when we’re busy formulating an answer, we fail to identify the right question.  For years people have been debating the location of Cape Wind – is this the right place for it or should it be at Otis Air Force base, or someplace else?  Now we’ve got the same thing going on with the Oceans’ Management Plan.  Right place or wrong place?

Wrong question, it seems to me.  We need as many locations as possible, as much investment as possible, as much political support as possible, as much local support as possible, and as many local community benefits as possible.  We need, finally, to end spurious arguments about birds and fish and instead do the best possible job of mitigating environmental harm that we can.  We need to learn from the rest of the world, which has addressed the issues thoroughly; we are not the first people ever to contend with this.  The town of Aquinnah missed that boat; they created an impossibly long, confusing, obstacle-filled wind by-law, which may effectively outlaw wind energy in that town. I hope not.  Read it here, if you can.

We need to stop running around in circles, get off the dime, and move forward.I think we will.  Initial perceptions can change dramatically, as they have in so many places.

Years ago, after the first large wind turbine in Massachusetts was installed in the town of Hull, I drove along Nantasket Beach and through town with my daughter and a friend.  Suddenly the immense wind machine, owned by the local municipal utility, came into view.  My daughter Sophie gasped:  “It’s huge.  Scary.”  We parked in the parking lot just steps from the machine and walked to it. The tower is 165’ high and the blades extend 75’ above that. It is almost noiseless – it makes a gentle whooshing sound. As we walked away we turned and stared back at it.  Sophie said, “It’s quite beautiful, isn’t it?  Especially because of what it does.”

That’s my girl.  Perceptions can change in a heartbeat.

The Hull machine, right on the beach, adjacent to the high school and a residential neighborhood, and in plain view of downtown Boston, was so successful that the town wanted to do another – three times the size.  They polled the residents who live in the shadow of the beast.  Of the five hundred respondents, 480 supported more turbines.  That’s 96 percent.  You tell me: when are 96% of people positive about anything?

This degree of support is a common reaction, world wide, in areas that are making the commitment to large-scale wind energy. Not before development, when many are scared, but after development, when consciousness seems to shift.

Remarkably, the citizens of our small sister island Cuttyhunk, whose waters the draft Oceans Management Plan also designated for wind development, are pre-development supporters.  Yes, in my backyard, the citizens say!   They are attracted to the economic benefits, but they also say that they would favor wind development even if there were no potential financial benefits, because “we all have to do our part”.  Because if they’re not in our backyard they’re in someone else’s.  I expect this attitude to become pervasive in the years to come – a collective un-tethering from the urge to reactively say no to change.

Because as some do battle with large-scale turbine development, many others are battling, as author Bill McKibben says, “to see them not as industrial eyesores, but as part of a new aesthetic.  The wind made visible.  The slow, steady turning that blows us into a future less hopeless than the future we’re steaming toward now.”

I’m glad for all the discussion, for the intensity of feeling, and for the widespread community involvement.  While I may not agree with all that’s being said, it’s essential that everyone is heard.  I hope that ultimately we’ll realize that we, as stewards of an area with an inexhaustible resource, have an obligation to find comfort with its use.