Last week: On Monday I attended the hearing on solar siting. I was trying to make a point at the hearing. Trees do it all for free! While solar systems (at considerable cost) can capture enough sunshine energy to power the most possible electric energy, it is over a short life span of 20 or 30 years. With no cost, forest trees actually pull the carbon gas out of the atmosphere, at a rate of 30% of excess emissions, annually, and then they store it in trunks and branches, leaves, and the ground, all for free, lasting the life of the forest tree (100-400 years!). That total greatly outdistances solar systems over time. But we need to do it all, because what if we do not have that much time.
However, trees are even making their own babies, (and have been doing it for 390 million years! ) without any help from people managing the forest, and without hospital insurance (which, according to the Aug. 18 Recorder, is going up 20% for human beings. Therefore we need to work hard to pass single-payer health care. ) All of that on Monday.
On Tuesday, I wrote letters to the state and congressional representatives that were struggling just to read and then vote on a hundred local and regional issues, just one of which is solar versus cutting forest trees and replacing them with solar systems! Later, I was standing outside in a protest, with a sign on gender equality, an essential element in developing a consensus.
Friday, at the Pocumtuck Homelands Festival, I attended the special Tree of Life dedication led by Tom Porter, spiritual leader of the Mohawk Tribe, one of the six Tribes of the Iroquois Confederation. He was warning us that we may not be able to sustain life on Earth, and I know from my own work over the past two years that it is really, really hard to even get a hearing about how forest trees are able to capture and store the greenhouse gasses, when cutting the trees down for profit is killing the entire earth’s ecosystem!
Saturday, I read the article in the Recorder by the faithful observer of educational policy, Doug Selwyn, on why we need to sustain school lunches because (another insanity!) without food our students in schools are unable to learn! And another one highlighting the long-term reminder of our deeply compassionate federal representative, Jim McGovern, on making sure everyone can eat! (Eat? Without eating, we also will not survive!) Meanwhile, with little fanfare, Guerilla Gardener, Danny Botkin, has experimented for years with growing his own food, with excellent results using a small greenhouse, and could help those growing food in their back yards and in community gardens.
My question for us all: With such a confusion of information, and ideas, most of us seem to lack the time to focus enough to think outside the box of our rushed lives, to actually act on things that may have drastic consequences due to inaction. How do we sort through the worthy and wise, one issue at a time, in order to focus in this era of great consequences and confusion?
From Pam Kelly, a resident of Greenfield.