We’ve also been enjoying delicious pastured buffalo from Johnson’s Buffalo Ranch just west of Lonsdale. Dennis and Nancy Johnson are friendly folks who switched from pigs to pastured bison a number of years ago. Their bison are on pasture their entire lives, with no supplemental feed other than hay as needed seasonally. They live under humane conditions until they are field-slaughtered, so don’t have to endure that final ride to the slaughterhouse.

Dennis and Nancy sell all of their meat directly (I pick up mine at their farm on Highway 19; they also sell at the Lonsdale and New Prague farmers markets) for very reasonable prices. With farmers such as the Johnsons, the Latino Farmers Cooperative, and CSAs such as Big Woods Farm, Open Hands Farm, Valley Creek Farm and Gardens of Eagan, the Northfield area is well positioned to develop a full-blown relocalized food economy. Support your local farmer!

I

The subsequently oft-ridiculed Carter said “Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth. We waste more energy than we import. With about the same standard of living, we use twice as much energy per person as do other countries like Germany, Japan and Sweden.” He also said “We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.”

Carter’s austerity plan and commitment to energy conservation and renewable energy didn’t sit well with the American public, and he was blown away by Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” appeal in the 1980 election.

Thirty-one years later:

• We continue to use about twice as much energy per person as Germany, Japan and Sweden.
• We now import about 60% of our oil, compared to 46% in 1977.
• We’re on track to spend about $600 billion on imported oil in 2008. Most of this money will be sent to Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Nigeria, Venezuela, Algeria and Iraq.
• The US economy is generally in the tank.
• The federal budget deficit for 2009, according to the Bush Administration, will be about $482 billion (and is likely to be much higher according to independent analysts, not even including the cost of the war in Iraq, which remains “off-budget”). Since 1977 our foreign policy and military expenditures have been strongly influenced by our dependence on foreign oil.
• We have spent about $543 billion on the war in Iraq; estimates of its ultimate cost (including medical/disability costs for injured/psychologically damaged vets and other long-term costs) are in the range of $3 trillion. This war would never have been fought had Iraq not controlled the third largest oil reserves in the world (trailing only neighboring Saudi Arabia and Iran).

It seems safe to say we have let the future control us.

While we whine about $4 a gallon gas and demand expanded off-shore and ANWR drilling, we’re not even willing to drive slower to save a bit of gas. We’d rather delude ourselves into thinking we can keep the good times rolling until the SUV flies off the edge of the cliff and the world economy comes to a screeching halt, I guess.

While there are a million and three things we can and should be doing to fight “the moral equivalent of war,” one of the simplest and most effective would be to reinstate the national 55 mph speed limit, and enforce it vigorously. Why do we have to be in such a hurry all the time??? Such a measure would immediately reduce national petroleum demand significantly, and reduce petroleum, gasoline and diesel fuel prices. I’ve been a slow (55 or as slow as I feel I can safely drive without being a total road hazard) all my life.

Recently, I put a Green Slow Moving Vehicle bumper sticker on both of my family’s cars in an effort (likely vain, I know) to educate road-ragers. I ordered a bunch of these stickers-if you’d like one, I’d be happy to give you one. Give me a shout if you’d like to scheme about how to wage the moral equivalent of war right here in Northfield, buy me a cup of coffee, and it’s yours!

In just over two years, I (with more than a little help from my friends in the spring of 2006!) have made and sold 416 rain barrels. All have been made from recycled Kentucky bourbon barrels. With each barrel holding 53 gallons, that means that these barrels collectively hold up to 22,048 gallons after each rain event in southern Minnesota. A goodly number of the barrels have gone to loving families in the Twin Cities and other surrounding towns, but many grace homes here in Northfield.

In addition to providing aesthetically pleasing landscaping, rain barrels and rain gardens offer the following benefits:

• Retention of stormwater runoff on-site (in both barrels and rain gardens). This reduces the flushing of driveway and road surface pollutants (e.g. unburned hydrocarbons, oil, diesel and gasoline spills, etc.) into surface waters, and reduces the volume of water flowing into area streams during heavy rains.
• Free, pure source of water for house plants, shrubs, trees and gardens.
• Wildlife habitat.
• Lawn reduction (and corresponding lawnmower use reduction!)

I’ve had a great time making and selling rain barrels the past couple of years, and talking with folks about their use. I have plenty on hand if you’d like to join the rain barrel revolution. If the price of an oak barrel doesn’t fit your household budget, cheaper plastic barrels are available from numerous sources, as well.

I’m also able to help you design a rain garden at modest cost if you’d like to take the next step. Give me a shout if you’d like to talk about either rain barrels or rain gardens.

I had the privilege of serving on the Task Force (chaired by George Kinney), which was created by resolution of the Council in May 2007. The Task Force was charged with the following:

“1. To assess opportunities to develop local energy efficiency and clean energy projects that will
a. Protect the community from future energy price and supply instability
b. Enhance local economic development
c. Provide local, regional and global environmental benefits
2. To assess the efficacy of creation of a municipal electric utility or special energy district
in achieving the above
3. To recommend citywide target greenhouse gas emissions reductions to fulfill Milestone 2
of the City’s commitment to the Cities for Climate Protection Campaign (CCPC)
4. To develop an action plan to meet the CCPC targets identified in step 3 above.”

From the executive summary of the report:

“Both City operations and the entire local economy are vulnerable to energy
price spikes, and the Council resolution creating the NETF acknowledged the
obligation to respond locally to the global climate change problem. Northfield
has an opportunity to thrive while responding to this vulnerability and
proactively building a new local clean energy-based economy. This report
provides an action plan to take advantage of this opportunity.”

I’m looking forward to the discussion of the report with the Council, and getting a sense of what they’re willing to get behind. I truly believe that the challenges posed by energy price and supply instability and global climate change represent an opportunity for a community ready to lead by example. I hope the Council shares that view.

Discussion between the Council and another task force I served on over the past year, the Nonmotorized Transportation Task Force, chaired by Bill Ostrem, also takes place at the same work session meeting. Should be an interesting evening of local politics for those interested in local sustainability initiatives!

One of my primary interests throughout this nearly quarter-century has been energy policy, from the local to the international level. I’ve always felt that sound energy policy is central to not only effective environmental protection, but to rational economic policy and foreign policy.

At pretty much the same time that I was founding RENew Northfield, Dick Cheney infamously opined in the spring of 2001, three months into the Bush Administration’s first term, that “conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”

This was during the time that Cheney’s Energy Task Force, stacked with fossil fuel and nuclear industry insiders, was meeting in secret and developing the Bush Administration’s energy policy, which has been an abysmal failure in nearly every conceivable way: Oil prices have skyrocketed from $28 a barrel to the current $144; peak oil is likely here or just around the corner; US greenhouse gas emissions have increased at the same time that international consensus is developing that global emissions need to be reduced by something like 80% to preserve anything resembling the atmospheric, climatic and sea-level conditions humanity has experienced over the past 10,000 years; we are more beholden to oil despots in the Middle East and elsewhere than ever; our Middle Eastern foreign policy, perverted by our foreign oil dependence, has fueled (and financed) Al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks; North American natural gas production has plateaued; and on and on. The only bright spot (if you can call it that) is record oil industry profits…

In light of all of this, I had to laugh out loud this morning when I reached the Strib’s Sunday comics and saw the Opus strip above by Berkeley Breathed.
I’ve probably done roughly 2,000 energy audits since 1984 (158 of them for customers of Xcel Energy since November 2006 as a sub-contractor in my current incarnation here at Sustainable Community Solutions; click here for details on how you can get me into your home for a thorough energy checkup for just 35 bucks). If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, save some money, and move toward Berkeley Breathed’s “rare and final stage of oil grief,” I’d love to talk with you.