It Takes a Village
The zebra we saw in the cornfield on our drive out to Osage, Iowa was an early sign that we were soon to see something unusual and unexpected. And even though what we found in Osage was not as dramatic, it has left a more lasting impression.
There was a different energy in Osage as if this community shared the best of our past simultaneously with the promise of the future. When we arrived, Osage for over a generation had been using energy efficiency as a means of promoting the well-being of the community. Just a few months earlier the country had been engaged in Desert Storm, a war fought over oil, not the first nor the last.
What was so different about the energy in the community of Osage? It found ways to not need foreign oil.
What was the technological breakthrough that made this possible? Better insulation and windows for their homes; more efficient and healthier lighting; low-flow shower heads; weatherstripping; and a new culture that valued “living more comfortably at lower cost”– the Osage definition of energy efficiency. This definition came from the director of Osage’s Municipal Electric System, Wes Birdsall, to counter the 1970s oil company advertising that depicted energy conservation as “freezing to death in the dark.”
This was no easy task, as Birdsall related to me in person. It took a few years to overcome that image of deprivation and a new term of energy efficiency, as well as some innovative counter-information in the monthly utility bill envelopes.
“We got an infrared camera and took pictures of people’s homes in the evening when their house lights were out. Many homes were bathed in a white glow. This was a heating loss from the poor windows and door insulations,” Birdsall said. He had the photos mailed to the municipal utility customers, and after a while “people started to come in and ask, ‘What can we do about this?’ I knew we had turned a corner when that started happening.”
Our kids were playing on a public playground while I was interviewing Wes, enjoying the fruits of a community that had lower taxes and utility rates because of their simple, straightforward efforts to “live more comfortably at a lower cost.” A community of 3500 people at the peak of their efficiency efforts was able to save $1.1 million per year. When Wes told me this, I did the math quickly in my head for Oswego County, New York, where we lived at the time. The county population was roughly 30 times that of Osage in the early ‘90s. What could we do with an extra 33 million dollars at our disposal while at the same time living better?
I thanked Wes, and my wife and I got all five kids loaded into the station wagon, with the two of our youngest strapped into car seats, pulling a small trailer with camping gear, and we headed north to our next energy efficiency community, Lester Prairie, Minnesota. The innovator in Lester Prairie was a public-school science teacher and the mayor, Eric Ingvall. What kind of Middle American community of 1100 people can afford to have a municipal pool and community center? One that has an energy efficiency program guided by a team of public-minded citizens, including the owner of a non-franchise hardware store stocking the latest in Energy Star products. It is a community that, during the buildup to the Gulf War, initiated a Ride Share program that proved transportation costs could be cut to the point where no foreign oil would be needed there. It is the community with a public-school science teacher as mayor who was so well respected that the governor established an Eric Ingvall Day to celebrate those achievements. It is a community where the mayor’s family welcomes a family of strangers and makes them feel so comfortable their five children drift off to sleep in their living room as their parents get acquainted with the First Family of the village.
One more distinction needs to be made in describing Lester Prairie. A few miles from town, there is a park featuring a long boardwalk that winds visitors through a marsh. This walk so thoroughly immerses the hiker into nature that it engages all the senses in the experience, making the native pilot black snake we encountered moving across the planks more of a neighbor than an intruder because we were on his turf, in his domain.
There were more stops on this journey seeking glimpses of energy-efficient USA, including Cortez, Colorado, where the program intended to see how many new jobs could be created, and Olympia, Washington, where Mike Grady (Chief Growth Management Planner for the Washington State Energy Office and Department of Community Development) walked me through a state-funded energy efficiency program that had already produced 20 full-time jobs and paid back its starter grant on the state college campus in Ellensburg. The results had proved so promising that they were contemplating duplicating it with a water efficiency program, also to create new jobs.
New York State lacked the supportive regulatory framework that had enabled Washington State’s progress and also the kind of municipal utility operation that had made the Osage, Iowa program so successful. However, that did not discourage the Town of Fenner from establishing one of the largest wind farms in the state in Madison County, a 30-megawatt facility providing enough clean, renewable power for 7800 homes.
There is a Free Center at the wind farm in Fenner that provides information on other forms of renewable energy available to communities, such as another facility in the town that was using the gas from solid waste to provide additional electricity to the community. While on a tour bus on its way to the Free Center, I had the opportunity to talk with Town Supervisor Russ Carey about the benefits of their renewable energy facilities. He pointed out that with the savings from the wind farm contract they were able to purchase the best snow removal equipment for the highway department so their hilly roads in Madison County would be safer and maintained more inexpensively, while simultaneously cutting taxes.
Like the Washington State model, this is an excellent example of the concept of spillover, where progress in one area of environmental policy creates momentum for change in other areas. It is what is known as transformational politics, as the energy of citizen engagement not only causes changes in technology and processes but also in cultural values.
The bottom line is that by engaging in the activity of taking charge of their own communities’ energy destiny, each individual involved has the opportunity to increase their sense of efficacy—the feeling that their participation will matter. Participants may feel this is more empowering than voting and essential, though it occurs much less frequently and with limited options for voter choice. Because the impact is felt in real terms, it generates more than just clean, renewable, resilient energy; it creates democratic energy.