New York Times just did an article on a couple who have found themselves the new caretakers of this old house in Concord, Mass.  No big deal that it’s Emerson’s house.  They get to live their for free, only responsible for the general upkeep (mowing the lawn, pruning the grape vines, vacuuming and dusting).  While the article mentions that since Emerson himself, only three tenants have lived in the home (each for several decades), I am still gunning for the next open spot.

Here’s the link to their blog (which also has delicious looking recipes-they also work on an organic farm near-by).

Reading this article immediately reminds me of a movie I watched last week-Milk.  This film tells the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to a major office.  In this film, and indeed throughout Milk’s struggles for gay rights, references were made of the many young gay men who took their lives-depressed by their inability to live a full, open life or were struck by grief when they did come out and found those closest to them unable to accept them for who they truly were.  One of Milk’s boyfriends even commits suicide, fully depicted in the film, pushing this reality to the forefront of the viewer’s mind.

While watching this, I couldn’t help but find a personal connection to a close family friend, Eric, who killed himself in January of 2005, soon after coming out to friends and family.  While I am unclear as to the exact events that led to his action, I can’t help but believing that part of his decision to take his own life stemmed from reactions to his announcement.  I can’t speculate what exactly drove him to suicide, especially because, knowing his parents, I can’t imagine either of them doing anything that would make him doubt their love for him.  My younger brother Brian, who grew up with Eric, in the same grade since we were all in preschool together, was one of the first people who Eric came out to. I know that Brian felt a great deal of guilt about this, and I don’t know if he ever got over it.  I think one part of suicide is that after it happens people don’t really talk about it.  After the immediate emotional response is over it becomes internalized and people deal with it on an individual level.  I wish Brian, and all of us, could talk about this more.

This connects so well to another suicide-my uncle’s.  Not long before Eric killed himself, my uncle took his life, right before Christmas of 2004.  The silence surrounding this suicide has been strongly felt-I don’t know how it happened, our family didn’t go to the memorial service, and we haven’t spoken of it since.  At all.  I wish we could talk about it more.

Thinking of these two prominent instances of suicide within my life, I consider the fight that Harvey Milk was fighting.  As a voice for the gay rights movement he tried to bring into public consciousness the realities of young gay men and women, his “brothers and sisters” as he called them, whose lives he was fighting for, literally.  I can only imagine how hard this was, considering the fact that we don’t like to think about suicide, talk about it, deal with it.  This makes waging a movement, with suicide as a major part of the problem being addressed, all the more difficult.

Finally, I can bring it back to Sylvia Plath’s and her son’s death.  I think of all the famous people who have committed suicide, whose stories have become a part of pop culture, a headline, a piece of gossip.  It’s as though we are all yearning to talk about suicide but can’t address the instances that are closest to us.  It’s easier to talk about those cases from which we are removed, the people who are merely characters on a movie screen, people who are not real to us.  It allows us to talk about suicide from a distance.  But really it seems to me that we would all benefit more by dealing more directly with the suicide that we know in our own lives.  I at least know that this is true for myself.

A recent email included this video:

I love this-the video is really simple and the music is moving.  It’s amazing how you can just get caught up in the movements of a paper airplane and be concerned with how its flight will end.  I like to think that at the end, the car that almost hits the airplane moved out of the way just in time, to save it.

In similar news-I have started to very actively use my Google Reader.  This is a problem as I continue to add more web sites, blogs, and search terms to my Reader.  I have over 200 unread posts and I don’t know when they will be read, but my obsessive compulsive side really wants to go through all of them so I can see that I have no unread posts. We’ll see if that ever happens.

This summer the New York Times published an article, “The 11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating.” I remember having a conversation with at least 10 people about this article.  They would usually start around meal time or at the grocery store.  One of us would say, “Oh, hey there are pumpkin seeds in this dish.  I should get that because pumpkins seeds are one of the 11 foods you’re supposed to eat more of” or “You know, I really don’t really like swiss chard, but I guess I’ll get some because it’s good for me.”  We would all know immediately what the other person was refering to, and discuss the various foods on the list and when we last ate them.  One time a group of us was at a salad restaurant and I was able to get a single salad with beets, pumpkin seeds, and blueberries in it-we all celebrated my success.

Just reacently I noticed that this article was back up on the NYTimes website’s “Most Popular” list.  Why are we so fascinated by these 11 foods?  Is it because we want to be healthy and eating the right things?  Is it because we aren’t and we need to be constantly reminded of why (really, who wants to eat sardines? and how many people really know what dishes to use tumeric for?)?  Or is it because we are starting to eat them now that we know how great they are (it was just pumpkin season)?  I am just eternally fascinated by food and what we eat, so that’s my excuse.  But I’m still not eating sardines.

I think the second most beautiful thing that I’ve ever seen are the Rocky Mountains, the Flatirons over Boulder, as I look in my rearview mirror as I am driving away from them, usually going back to the places I have just returned from.

Goodbye Colorado

Clearly this picture does little to capture the beauty of the view, and mostly just incriminates me for taking a picture while driving down the highway, but goodness it makes me miss Colorado.  Not that I can’t find beauty everywhere, and Iowa in fact is a state that I truly enjoy, but there is surely a reason that Coloradans tend to stay in the state for most of their lives.

I suppose that the good thing about leaving is that everytime I come back the view is even more magnificent.  It’s good to know that there will always be something to come back to.

Where am I?

While Boulder didn’t make it to the Top-10 of any of the lists I was recently reading, I think few people would disagree that it is a super-blue city.  So to go from super-blue to number two of the reds is a big shift, to say the least.  It’s not that people are running around with their guns slung on their backs or publicly celebrating the passing of California’s Prop. 8, but there is definitely a different feel to things here.

One of the reasons that Abilene got such a high ranking was due to the three Christian universities the city is home to.  I have found myself going daily to Abilene Christian University (ACU) because that is where I found office space for my short stint here.  I have a wonderful contact in the Environmental Sciences department there, and he has been very helpful in getting me set up in town.  But being at a Christian university is a new experience-nothing like Oberlin.  Students are required to go to chappel every day at 11:00; girls are allowed to have male guests in their dorms on Thursday night, from 7:00-11:00, and they must leave the door open, lights on, and all four hands and feet must be visible at all times; and their was basically a riot when the school newspaper, The Optimist, decided to endorce Barak Obama during the election, something that everyone thought was not representative of the student body.  Everyone has been very nice, as everyone in town is, but I do get the sense that when I tell them what I’m doing here they give me the “liberal hippy” label.  It’s been interesting to notice the trend of people asking me when we meed “Are you a Christian?”

Another part of the city’s “redness” is the presence of Dyess Air Force Base, one of the five largest employers in Abilene.  I have yet to actually see this place, so its physical presence hasn’t been huge, but the number of veterans and “Support Our Troops” signs is very visible.  Something that I found immediately interesting about this base is that it is run entirely on renewable energy.  Wind power is very big in this part of the state (the largest wind farm in the world is located in Abilene’s own Taylor County), but Dyess is also using solar and biomass.  It’s cool to see two things that generally don’t go together-military and clean energy-finding a place where their are equally important.

So while I find myself in the #2 most conservative city, the culture shock is not as harsh as may be expected.  People are nice and generally open to my tree-huger, solar-loving ideas, and I’m just learning to how work with people of a different mindset…until I can escape back to my liberal haven.

23,600+ Supporter Cards

8,000 lbs of Lawn Signs

66%

That last number is the one to spend more time on.  Sure, we moved around 100,000 lawn signs in about a month.  Yes, we stood on many street corners, canvassed lines at political rallies, and talked to tons of groups, convincing people to vote yes and to sign a supporter card.  But that last number, that 66%, that was the pay-off.  Because on November 4th, when Missourians went out and actually cast their ballots, they passed Prop. C-the Missouri Clean Energy Initiative- by 66%.  To contextualize this a bit, Colorado and Washington are the only other states that have passed a Renewable Electricity Standard by ballot initiative, and neither state passed it by more than 55%.  And I think we can all agree that Colorado and Washington are far more “Granola-y” than Missouri (this is what someone I talked to on the street told me, and I fully agree).  This just goes to show that across America people are realizing the value in renewable resources, and maybe that Missouri is a little greener than we thought.

And what’s next for Team MO?

Off to the Lone Star state to get solar panels on one-million roofs!  Yee-haw!

P.S. GObama!

How is it that four months ago I was paying $4.00/gal?  When the gas in Kansas City dropped to $2.99 I was so excited I took a picture on my phone.  When it dropped below $2.00 I went so far as to take a picture on my camera.  Now that I am paying $1.86 I have stopped documenting it.  My shock will be logged in my memory forever.

I would love it if anyone could explane to me why this is happening.

“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”
-Sarah Palin
VP Nominee

I know this is only my second week on the ground working on my campaign as an organizer, but I didn’t realize until the other night that I actually don’t have any responsibilities. I have been pretty busy and stressed out over this past week working on my college campuses and in the Kansas City area to activate and energize people around clean energy and the upcoming election. I have been scheduling and attending many meetings, going to classes and talking to them about the importance of this issue and why they should get involved, working with student organizations to get them on board, and talking to hundreds of people and asking them to volunteer to work on this issue. Had I known that I didn’t have any responsibility to Green Corps, to my fellow organizers, to the people I was talking to on campus, or even to my fellow human beings who are concerned with the state of our environment and are working to reduce the effects of global climate change – had I known this I definitely wouldn’t have been working so hard this week.
Thanks Ms. Palin for letting me know how it is. Thank goodness you are standing up against someone who understands what it means to work with people, to get them excited about an issue, to empower them and and teach them how to create change in their own communities. I am glad there is someone out there working against this guy-how dare he think that he can run our country and tell our citizens that they have a voice in the democratic process.
I think I will go and quit my meaningless job now.

What a wonderful sentiment to welcome me into Kansas City, Missouri.  But let me back up:

I have now completed my three weeks of Green Corps training in Boston.  It was an amazing, enlightening, and exhausting three weeks.  The many high-profile members of the environmental community who came to give us information and advice on what we were getting ourselves into were inspiring, to say the least.  The stories people told about their triumphs and failures, about their passion for their work and what keeps them going were emotional and powerful.  People were in tears on a daily basis after hearing these people speak.  One of the most important lessons I took away is that these issues, particularly climate change, need our attention now.  How we address these problems within the next few years will determine how we will be able to exist on this planet for the rest of our lives.  Climate change isn’t an environmental issue, it is relevant to all people, everywhere, now.  This isn’t just about saving the spotted owls anymore, it’s about saving ourselves, our homes, and securing a future for the rest of human kind.  This is big stuff.  It was vital for this to get through to me because this is going to be a tough year, and I need to know that we’re playing with high stakes.

About a week-and-a-half into training we got our placements for our first campaign.  There are four different campaigns this fall, all dealing with climate change issues and all strongly tied to November 4th, a day that will live on in infamy.  After a couple of tense hours waiting, ultimately being the last of the 26-person class to find out my placement, my campaign organizer told me that I would be in Kansas City, Missouri (along with another organizer in KC and six others across the state), working to pass a Renewable Energy Standard (RES) on the ballot.  This is an amazing campaign-Missouri has attempted to pass a RES through the legislature for the past eight years, unsuccessfully.  But this year, a coalition of organizations has gotten the issue onto the ballot through a petitioning process.  If, or should I say when, this issue passes it will make Missouri the 27th state in the nation to adopt an RES.  As more and more states adopt their own renewable standards, it will become impossible for the federal government to continue to hold off on national legislation.  So the work we are doing is seriously important to pushing federal legislation to slow the effects and persistence of global climate change.  Amazing!

This brings me to the title of this post: two days ago my partner Katy and I arrived in KC, excited to discover what would be our memorable first campaign city.  On our first day here we decided we should find a map of the city so that we could start to get our bearings.  We really didn’t think this sounded like a strange idea-we were new to the area, wanted a simple map of downtown, the kind you find in most cities, usually for tourists.  Unfortunately this request didn’t seem so natural to the many Kansas City-ans who we asked for help.  The various people at the gas station, the college visitors center, AAA, and the travel center all looked at us like we were crazy when we said we were looking for a map of the city.  “You want a map of Kansas City?” they all asked in disbelief.  The woman at the travel center clarified, “we send people out of this city.”  Not something you want to hear after just moving to a place.  Finally we were able to locate a tourism center after about three hours of searching.  We were so thrilled by the simple little map we found that we each took two.  With our maps in hand we began to make sense of KCMO and started to feel a little more grounded.

So this is my home for the next few months, my battleground state.  “As Missouri goes, so goes the nation.”  When we get this RES passed (and it’s currently polling at 70% approval rate across the state, so it will pass) the country as a whole will know the importance and the future of clean, renewable energy.