I live down in Moncure and I work at Piedmont Biofuels in Pittsboro so for me coming to Chapel Hill is a treat. This is a trip to the big city. I’ve been driving up to Chapel Hill on 15-501 for the past seventeen years and I’ve noticed a couple of things along the way.
The first is how our view is vanishing. I used to come up the hill by Southern Village and see endless trees in the distance. The good news is that the trees are still largely there. They are a vast expanse of green but it is no longer possible to make them out as discrete individual trees. Nowadays they are wrapped in a thin blue haze of air pollution that obscures the view.
I realize my eyes have lost some of their power in the past seventeen years-but that’s just for reading. My long distance sight is the same as it ever was and now what I see on the drive to Chapel Hill is what the EPA refers to as Non-attainment.
Something else I have noticed is that there is a Park and Ride on the south end of town. I love the fact that the University is not building parking fast enough to keep up with its expansion which is forcing people onto sidewalks and bikes and public transportation. And while it is illegal for me to use the park and ride. I do it all the time. After all the lot is never full.
As an illegal user of the park and ride. I have asked its creators to turn the lights off during the day-and they went to work on that. My next request is that they tell the bus contractor to stop idling while the buses are parked-and from my experience-they will listen.
I would love to lay out some positive messages about how the Town of Chapel Hill gets it. After all they buy our biodiesel. Not only do they buy a bunch of biodiesel but also they understand the difference between biodiesel that is made in Pittsboro versus the biodiesel that is brought in from Iowa.
And I would love to inspire you with an upbeat message on how well we are doing but we are not. Some say there is not enough carbon left for us to transition to a sustainable epoch.
Let’s pretend for a moment that we already know this. After all we are the ones gathered at a conference on sustainability. We all get it. We are a subset of the sustainability community. Yet our sustainability community is hopelessly behind.
When I lecture about sustainability at UNC in the dead of winter and the classroom is too hot-there’s a simple fix. Open the window. Did you know that it is possible to get a masters degree in sustainability in this town without ever studying energy?
The logic goes like this: The price of energy is a political decision and we are not studying politics we are studying sustainability therefore we don’t study energy.
Which means that our sustainability community can get hopelessly off topic. Sustainability encompasses everything from the state of adolescent mental health in rural India to child slavery in Ivory Coast chocolate to the fair trade shade grown bird friendly organic coffee I downed on my way to this event.
Everyday sustainability is not as complicated as all that. We simply need to consume less energy than we produce. Even better: put as much into the pot as you take out.
That sounds simple but that is not what we do. We get in our gasoline powered cars pick up our dry cleaning stop for a bite at the Lantern (which is renown for serving local food,) go home and tweak the thermostat and when we jump into bed with our partner we discuss what a lovely time we had at the sustainability conference.
The pot is depleted. We’ve taken more than our share. We’ve had a nice conference and we are wondering who is responsible for getting Jr to soccer practice tomorrow night.
One night my wife and I stayed at the newly minted Franklin Hotel. We spend a lot of time in fancy hotels and on this occasion we chose Chapel Hill as our destination. The next morning we dined at Breadmen’s and there it was on the front page of the Chapel Hill News: Top of the Hill had gotten rid of Styrofoam cups. Whew. And for that the Chamber of Commerce was recognizing them.
That’s where we are today. Front-page news. Switching from plastic to paper or losing the Styrofoam is not going to get the blue haze that envelops this town to go away.
Start with your diet. Draw a hundred mile shape around your house and start eating within it. I think it’s fantastic that we are dining on food from Whole Foods today. They buy biodiesel from us and lead the way on so many fronts. Unfortunately not on food miles.
In a town that is surrounded by farmland we dine on organic pickles from Corvallis. Oregon. And while we enjoy them it is debatable as to whether or not you can even have pickles from Mt. Olive that is right down the road. The energy required for putting the pickle in the jar and the embodied energy of the jar itself probably means pickles are unsustainable.
It’s funny during the “tainted food from China” scares last year-the same ones which got the head of their FDA executed. I would listen to NPR with disbelief. They made it sound like it is impossible to know where your food comes from. No it’s not. It’s actually rather easy to learn the names of the farmer for every product in every meal once you start eating locally.
Goodbye Pottery Barn hello local potters. If the clothes you buy for back to school are made “by kids for kids in Indonesia,” start over. Get to the thrift store or find your local seamstress but take trips to the mall off your list.
Traveling is out. Next month Rachel and I are traveling to the artic to talk about sustainable biodiesel. That has to stop. I could say you should run around on locally produced biodiesel but that is unsustainable too. Figure out how you can walk ride your bike stay at home take the bus carpool or stop commuting.
One of the things we do at Piedmont Biofuels is we insist that if you are going to work for us you will live locally. You can’t live in Durham and work for us in Pittsboro. We call it geographical discrimination and it is already perfectly legal. Police forces and fire departments have been doing it for a hundred years. You are the business owners. You have a choice. You can employ commuters and enjoy the haze your business endeavors are creating or you can start implementing geographical discrimination now.
I think it would be great if you woke up tomorrow and fired all of the commuters on your staffs. The moment I first explained this was the same moment I lost my chance to win an award for being one of the best workplaces for commuters.
The reality is that sustainability salvation lies in conservation. The tragedy is that conservation is the largest resource we have left to exploit. If everyone cut his or her consumption by 75%. I would be out of work and there would be no need for “sustainability lunches.”
Which means I should “go easy” on the baby steps we see which begin mining the conservation resource. Switch to compact fluorescents-daylight is even better-fix the leaky faucet and yes lose the Styrofoam cups. Cut your consumption by seventy five percent. The scary thing is that we can all do it. We all have 75% worth of fat we can carve out of our energy budgets.
We don’t need SUVs because we sometimes like to take the dog along or occasionally like to fish at the outer banks. Those who don’t think it is possible to produce more than they consume should think about putting a solar hot water heater on their second home in the mountains. Why the solar installer is not the wealthiest person in the room remains a great mystery to me and suggests that perhaps our journey toward sustainability has not yet begun.
I note with interest that Orange County is staging its first ever Energy Conservation fair on November 2. Where are we as a society? We have 255 years of over consumption under our belts and we are having a conservation fair.
I’m going to leave it at that. Fortunately you have an afternoon slate of folks who can turn the message to something a little more upbeat. Eric Henry is a phenomenal inspiration-I go out of my way to hear him speak-and he knows me as the guy who can’t seem to get a biodiesel shed built in the front yard of T. S. Designs. And Tobin Fried has been fighting for societal change for years. She funds education and tracks progress and has been a champion of alternative fuels. Tobin rides her bike to work. And Cindy Shea tirelessly continues to carry the rock up the hill-despite guys like me who continually point out that it has rolled back down again.
Earlier I said I wished I could make you feel like you were in good hands and I apologized since that was not possible. But when I look at the afternoon lineup. I take it back.
Great work Lyle!I have been in the week long SEI training class with Rachel. Matt and Andrew. The visit from Maria Alovert was great too! I have seen what you and your people do it is going to take this type of action to ever get any change in this country person by person. The tour of the biodiesel production plant was AWESOME! I am all for biodiesel. I think it is going to be a slow process of getting people to accept alternatives to their current way of life and the bigger picture from oil companies and auto manufacturers is to keep the “oil junkie” hooked and resist any change that might cost them profits. If we can educate people and let them understand that they have these alternatives and they can work we might just have a chance. Keep up the fight!
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Related article:
http://energy.biofuels.coop/general/2007/10/03/everyday-sustainability/
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