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Just an Idea

Three years ago I was gutting my way through a spring semester at UW – Green Bay, energized by a class on Sustainable Development I had taken as an afterthought.

I took the class because it seemed thought-provoking, but also because it was Web-based (thus easier on my commute and schedule). Turned out my professor was one Larry Smith (profiled on page 8), a Nasewaupee resident and Plan Commission member fond of free-flowing thought and the great encourager of ideas. A month into class my eyes were open to a new set of possibilities.

The February, 1981 National Geographic.

I spoke to my boss at the Pulse, Dave Eliot, about the class. Dave is another “ideas guy,” who has more than he knows what to do with. Within minutes he was hashing out notions of an entire issue devoted to sustainable building and practices. Three years later, here we are, at the next step in that idea’s evolution.

Part of our goal was to spread ideas, to show people and businesses all the little ways we can all do better.

In the two years that have passed since our first sustainability issue, we’ve witnessed a sea change in attitudes toward energy, conservation, and waste nationwide, but especially in Door County. Some of those changes, we’re told, were inspired by this issue, for which we are very proud.

But will we let this moment, and this warning pass? We did once before. One of our most ridiculed presidents tried to be honest with us 30 years ago. Jimmy Carter tried to spur a nation to use a little less, to not so easily discard what other people are so envious of.

Months ago I was digging through the used magazine rack at St. Vincent DePaul thrift store. I came across a cover on a National Geographic that, at first glance, I took as a fairly current issue. It read in big yellow letters, “ENERGY: A special report in the public interest. Facing up to the problem, getting down to solutions.”

The March 2009 cover of National Geographic.

But I looked closer and pulled it out, flipping its pages a bit and unleashing the must of decades on a shelf. On the first inside page, above the editor’s note, was the date – February, 1981.

“A chief problem facing the new administration in Washington,” the editor’s note concluded, “is devising an energy policy that encourages American economic growth while coming to grips with the international economic balances that are being so radically altered by the pressures of energy cost and social unrest. “

Sound familiar?

The United States of the 1980s was not ready or willing to respond to the challenge. Displaying a galling lack of vision, priorities shifted at the first sniff of cheap oil, and America plunged back into dependence on Middle Eastern oil and fossil fuels.

Four-dollar gas was the slap we needed, coming last summer on the heels of a wave powered by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, technological improvements, and a louder chorus from those who had enough of excuses.

But sometimes even the Titanic turns on a dime, as this country proved in the early 1980s. It will take muscle to keep this ship on course.

So here we present the ideas, innovations, and people who are powering the movement on the Door Peninsula. People providing the deserved pangs of guilt in the stomachs of those who choose to sit the moment out.

Now, spurred by what those champions have shown can be done, we present an idea. An energy-independent Door County.

Sounds far-fetched, maybe impossible. Certainly it wouldn’t be easy. But if it were accomplished, it wouldn’t be the first. In Samsø, Denmark, a small island community gave it a shot – and succeeded. In a decade’s time they went from energy takers, to energy leavers, producing more energy from wind, solar, and other methods than they needed and selling it back to the grid.

It wasn’t a mandate. It wasn’t forced upon them by the state. It was, beautifully, just an idea.