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KUFM Commentary - October 2009 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Future Is Now An unpopular war was dwindling to a close, and energy was on everyone's lips. The United States had said goodbye to thirty-cent-a-gallon gasoline after months of long lines, rationing, and "sorry—no gas today" signs at the pumps. And there was a plan, devised by big energy corporations and the federal government, called the North Central Power Study, which would turn much of eastern Montana and Wyoming into a National Sacrifice Area (this term was actually used). Stripmines, smokestacks and power lines would clutter this open land, enormous quantities of water would be sucked out of rivers, and coal would be burned to heat water to steam to spin turbines, and send electricity away to light up high-rise/car-lot/suburban America. Urban conservationists deplored this plan, but the real news was the resistance that rose up out of the remote prairies and pine hills of eastern Montana. Ranchers and farmers saw their land, water, air and way of life threatened with extinction. The urban and rural resisters coalesced into Northern Plains Resource Council, one of—literally—hundreds of public-interest, non-profit organizations being born in the early 1970s all over the nation—all over the planet—to say no to war—a war that was deeper even than the war in Vietnam: the war on Nature, the war on our future. Soon a group of Northern Plains members and their allies (I was part of this group) realized that saying no was not enough. We also needed to say yes. So we put together the Montana Alternative Energy Conference in May 1974, in Billings. This event drew hundreds of people—farmers who remembered when wind generators dotted the plains, ranchers who wanted to generate methane gas from livestock manure before spreading it over their fields, tinkers building flat plate solar collectors in garages, legislators, citizens, young people and old, along with a surprising number of renewable energy experts from around the country, delighted to find an audience for their arcane expertise. A month later, in June 1974, eight of us participants in that conference gathered on the porch of a house in Billings—with a ninth in touch by telephone—and we created another of those non-profit, grassroots membership groups; we called it AERO—Montana's Alternative Energy Resources Organization. Through the 1970s AERO became known for its hands-on workshops in a variety of renewable energy technologies, and for its traveling New Western Energy Show, which toured Montana and other parts of the West with technology but also with music and guerrilla theater. One reason for doing this was that, to mainstream media, something like solar energy sounded nice, but it was practical only in some distant future. Facing that, the only thing to do is to create your own face to face media. When someone strolled into the New Western Energy Show, reached up and felt heat pouring out of the solar hot air collector, the message was: the future is now. Other groups around the U.S. were doing similar things. And not only in the U.S. A group of engineers in Colombia moved from Bogota to a remote site in a vast grassland and established a town called Gaviotas; they experimented not only with solar, wind and earth power, but also with kid power, creating swings and teeter-totters that actually generated electricity. In the U.S. Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981, and promptly removed the solar water collectors that his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had placed on the White House roof. Reagan rapidly de-funded federal support for renewable energy, and as the worldwide price of oil also collapsed, conveniently, America forgot about energy for the next twenty years. Funding from foundations for renewable energy also collapsed. Many groups like AERO ceased to exist. AERO stayed alive because farmers and ranchers among its members were pioneering low-chemical, low fossil fuel approaches to agriculture, and working with other groups to kickstart the what became the local food movement. In Colombia, Gaviotas survived by beginning to bring back a forest which had vanished from the region. Now, with an energy (and climate) crisis upon us, again, renewable energy is back. For AERO this meant that some of us veterans of the 1970s worked with younger members to write "Repowering Montana: A Blueprint for Homegrown Energy Self-Reliance" (published in 2007), which argues that Montana can meet all its in-state needs for fuel and electricity through energy efficiency and renewables. Meanwhile, Northern Plains Resource Council built itself a new headquarters by retrofitting a former grocery store in Billings into the most energy efficient commercial building in Montana. In human organizations, as in ecosystems, "succession" must be working if the system is to survive. The young learn from the old, and when it's time, the old step aside. AERO will celebrate its thirty-fifth birthday at its annual meeting in Livingston, October 23rd through 25th. Some of the original founders will be there, to do what members of all successful social "ecosystems" do: look back at what we’ve learned; gaze forward and say yes to our future. I'm Wilbur Wood for the Alternative Energy Resources Organization. AERO is a grassroots membership organization that's been building communities by linking people with sustainable agriculture and energy solutions for 35 years. If you'd like to get involved with sustainable food, agriculture or energy policy this legislative session, give us a call in Helena at (406) 443-7272.
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