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.

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!!

The crew had done a stellar job readying up, and the placed looked about as pretty as a just-insulated house with no walls or ceilings can look!!  The questions were intelligent, and it was instructive to see how a house at this stage – where everything is invisible – is a wonderful educational laboratory.

Afterward I received the following e-mail:

John,

Thanks again for the open house — very informative; inspiring, even.  I don’t know how many clients would go for this profound rebuild instead of a new design/build, but, whether in a new or retrofit, the energy efficiency is impressive.

At Habitat, we’ve been building pretty good houses for an amazingly low price, thanks, in part to you.  One of our homeowners came to us a few months after moving in and asked, “Our electric bill is $15 a month. Is that right?”  Efficiency is the gift that keeps on giving.

Best regards,

Jon Snyder

Thanks for coming Jon.  And everyone else too.  Today it looks completely different – everything covered up with smooth plaster.  You only get one chance to see the bones and the muscle.

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.

The house needs a new boiler, so it’s a good time to think hard about the best approach to heating and cooling for the next 20.  It needs a new roof so it’s the one chance they’ll get (for decades) to add insulation under the roofing.  Is it worth it?   Is now the time to add a solar electric system to stabilize long-term energy costs?  A detailed energy evaluation will determine the answers to these and other questions.

When we discussed solar electric I was struck by a comment they made (I’m paraphrasing but I think this is close):  “We do not want to look at that option as ‘making a statement’.  Until our country makes a serious commitment to doing what we must, and we’re all in it together, we’ll base this decision on economics.”

I thought that was particularly well put – clear and simple.  The implication:  the massive political failure that has led to our current predicament is holding people back.

My friend Matthew Kiefer recently wrote an essay in the University of Colorado Law Review called “Toward a Net-Zero Carbon Planet:  A Policy Proposal“ in which he says that “the global economic adjustment now underway was in part caused by a prolonged period of living on excessive credit – of borrowing from the future.  In a similar fashion, we have borrowed the planet’s carbon absorption capacity to finance our economic growth, and after more than a century, the debt is coming due.”

He calls for a scientifically derived balanced carbon budget to replace the current arbitrary greenhouse gas reduction targets.  Carbon sub-budgets could then be allocated to each nation, each region, each state, each city, each town, even each neighborhood.  Those affected would have choices about how to implement.

My client would be part of something instead of feeling like a lone wanderer spitting into the wind if he puts some solar panels on his roof.

I should add that here in Massachusetts the Department of Energy Resources is about to announce a very strong solar electric incentive program that is likely to make many people install solar who previously might not have – like my clients.  The economics will look better than ever.  I don’t know the final details yet – more about this later – but the intention of the program is to encourage the installation of 400 megawatts of solar electric in the coming years.  The current installed PV capacity in the state, after years of attractive incentive programs, is right around 20 megawatts.  The 400 megawatt goal amounts to 20 times more in the years to come – quite a commitment, and a giant leap forward.

Unlike yesterday’s Massachusetts senate election, which was a backward stumble. Ted Kennedy’s none-too-happy about this one.  Hopefully it will serve as one big wake-up call.

And there’s more.

Rodney North of Equal Exchange (the Massachusetts-based worker owned co op fair trade coffee company)   made me aware of an article on the New York Times Economix blog by Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at University of Massachusetts.  In “The Case for Worker Co-ops” she says, “Since many of our most prestigious economic institutions have embarrassed themselves at our expense over the last year, maybe it’s time to look around.  Worker-owned and -managed businesses combine the romance of entrepreneurship with solid family values and commitment to community. What’s not to like?”

In addition to the Mondragon/US Steelworkers agreement and the worker co-ops featured in Michael Moore’s new movie, she says, “Rousing examples abound.  CNN Money recently profiled six worker-run businesses including Pelham Auto, whose mechanics have cheerfully fixed every car I’ve owned for the past 20 years.” One of the companies CNN profiled, by the way, is South Mountain.

But all this attention being paid to worker co-ops makes Folbre, the economist, wonder what the economic research says.  Not much, according to her.  Worker owned and managed companies are “largely ignored in economics textbooks.”

I have found that even the socially responsible business movement, to my ongoing surprise, pays little attention to true workplace democracy.

But she does, at least, find a little research – or maybe it’s just opinion.  Mostly it’s about the troubles – or potential troubles – with employee ownership.  One of these is that worker-owned and managed companies, with more complex goals than maximizing profit, tend to be less growth-oriented than other companies.

“Don’t tell Wall Street,” says Folbre,  “but that could be a good thing.”

I want to say more about the USW/ Mondragon agreement.

The Mondragon initiative is not the first innovative Steelworkers alliance.  In the 1990s, the USW helped found the Blue-Green Alliance together with the Sierra Club  and other environmentalists and they have been involved with Van Jones’ Green For All.

And now, if this new alliance works, it might make a system of worker-owned enterprises assembled with the purpose of a green restructuring of the U.S. economy. That  could be a powerful force.

The USW-Mondragon collaboration grew out of a ‘green industrial revolution’ project that created a partnership with Gamesa, a Spanish wind turbine firm, to retrofit abandoned steel plants in the U.S. (40,000 U.S. manufacturing facilities have closed since the beginning of the current economic crisis) and produce wind turbines (there are 200 tons of steel and 8000 moving parts in every large wind turbine).  Gamesa’s connection to nearby Mondragon brought the USW and the co-operative giant together.

While this historic business alliance gives hope to the possibility of reviving manufacturing (and the communities that have been devastated by the losses), there is also congressional activity coming along to support employee ownership.  According to the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont will introduce two new bills that would seek to expand employee ownership in the United States. 

The first, the Worker Ownership, Readiness and Knowledge (WORK) Act would create an Office of Employee Ownership and Participation within the Department of Labor to promote employee ownership and employee participation in company decision making.  The second bill, the U.S. Employee Ownership Bank Act, would provide loans and loan guarantees to employees to purchase a business through an ESOP or a worker-owned cooperative.

On the eve of the Copenhagen meetings, this collection of related activity is heartening.  Perhaps the most important thing about the expanding co-operative business movement, in the long run, may be  as an avenue to the large-scale collaborative alterations to the architecture of the economy that will be necessary if we are to successfully tackle the challenges of climate change and the post peak oil transition to come.

It was about youth.    

Having just turned 60, I am acutely aware of the role of young people (in their 20’s and 30’s)  in my work life and civic life.  At work they are a constant theme and a growing force.  There is a great transition in process at South Mountain Company – from first generation leadership to the next.  It’s a long, gradual journey, sometimes a bit frightening but mostly thrilling, and it’s gathering steam.

In Vineyard politics and civic affairs the young are quieter.  Those of us in our fifties and sixties have been active, but we’re graying.  Sometimes, in the rooms where policies are being shaped that will shape our future, there’s very little representation from the next generation.  What does that mean?  I know they’re here – it’s not like some places where the young have jumped ship – and I know they’re active and vital, but where are they?  What are they doing?  What are they thinking?

The forum was an attempt to find out by putting four of them up on the stage in a public setting and asking the following questions:

• How could your age group be more engaged in next generation leadership and governance of the Island?

• In considering our Island’s future, what do you care about the most that’s not being done now, or could be done better?

• What’s your one or two sentence dream for the island in 25 years?

And one other, a beauty that came from one of the panelists, Jeanette Vanderhoop, a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah:

•  How do we keep the young and idealistic still idealistic when they’re no longer young?

And, of course, how do we keep them here?  My friend Tom Chase, who grew up here, says that his father once told him that the Vineyard has two exports:  fish and brains.  As he tells it, his dad told him that just after Tom told him he’d decided to stay on the Vineyard (hmmm).  Re-localization is about keeping our fish AND our brains right here where we’ve raised them.  And doing more to do what we can within our local economy.

It was a lively evening.  Besides the diverse panelists, we had two born-and-raised “elder” questioners and an engaged audience.  I was the moderator.  The panel consisted of a farmer, a boatbuilder, a Wampanoag environmentalist, and a mother of two with many civic responsibilities.  Three of them were born and raised here; the fourth summered here and then married into an old island family. They all seemed a bit nervous, but they spoke beautifully, from the heart.

Each of the four individuals is so different that I hesitate to lump them together, but themes developed quickly:  the appreciation each has for their many mentors and the community that has nurtured them; their love for the island and the delicate mix of their attachment to the “way it was” and their pragmatic sense that change must come;  their understanding that sufficient affordable housing, meaningful work, and limits to growth are all keys to the future; their shared certainty that the time has come for them to take the ball and run with it.

It became a celebration of a way of life that they want to preserve, renew, and re-make.  But not only a celebration.  They also stirred the pot, and were clear that when we talk about the wonders of this place we also have to talk about the painful parts – the homelessness, the alcoholism, the fractiousness.  Jeanette said “I always read the court report in the paper to remind me.”  And they subscribed to the belief that you “can’t complain unless you’re willing to change it.”

The most poignant moment for me was when one of the panelists, Myles Thurlow, who described himself as “more interested in boats than school” when he was growing up, fielded a question.  The question, from an audience member, was “How do you feel about Wind?”

Big question.  There’s no hotter topic on the Vineyard right now.  I will say more in a future post about this, but this piece isn’t about the topic, or the content of the response (although I will mention that all basically responded that “we gotta get real; this is an important, necessary, and desirable part of our future”).

It’s about what happened when Myles answered.  As I listened to him, speaking off the cuff, I heard a compelling, coherent, elegantly worded statement.  And I saw something in his face.  It appeared to me that he was saying to himself  “I said that?  Wow.”  And I sensed that he was feeling the stirring empowerment that comes from expressing yourself well, in public, about a controversial topic that you feel deeply about.

I was glad for him, and glad for us. In these perilous times, when these young men and women will be facing and contending with global climate destabilization and its monumental effects, they gave us Hope.

Thank you Chris Fischer, and Katie Carroll, and Myles Thurlow, and Jeanette Vanderhoop.  We’ll have to do this again. You guys want to organize the next one?  I’ll be glad to help.