Renewable Energy as Social Relationship
The current issue of the New Yorker has got a must-read article by Elizabeth Kolbert on the carbon-neutral Danish island of Samsø. Luckily for everybody, the free full text is online.
The article details exactly how the residents of this island came together, over time, to produce sufficient renewable energy to both power all of their home/business lighting, heating, electricity, etc. and offset the fossil fuel they continue to use in some of their vehicles.
Apart from being an inspiring story, Kolbert’s narrative constitutes a case study for community organizers wondering how to bring about substantial collective efforts against climate change. Kolbert details community member Søren Hermansen’s effort, over a number of years, to guide the island from the static state in which everybody’s waiting for everybody else to take action to the current state of affairs, in which everybody’s invested in a truly collective creative venture.
He did it by recognizing, early on, that relationships are the key to community:
Rather than working against the islanders’ tendency to look to one another, Hermansen tried to work with it.
“One reason to live here can be social relations,” he said. “This renewable-energy project could be a new kind of social relation, and we used that.” Whenever there was a meeting to discuss a local issue—any local issue—Hermansen attended and made his pitch. He asked Samsingers to think about what it would be like to work together on something they could all be proud of. Occasionally, he brought free beer along to the discussions.
(Please note that the “free beer” is in accordance with my theory of the importance of showing up with sandwiches.)
Here’s another important point: Kolbert notes that all of the efforts of the islanders of Samsø are canceled out by just a few of the new coal-fired power plants going up every week. But this doesn’t deter them, as it ought not deter any of us from taking the small steps that in-and-of-themselves seem not to make a dent in huge problems.
So many huge human-generated problem are the result of an accumulation of choices by individuals. Contrary choices (going vegan, recycling, withholding war taxes, etc.) also accumulate. You can’t not choose and you can’t choose for your choices not to count. Whatever you do or don’t do factors into the aggregate, thereby helping to create the world in which others live.
Thus all of our personal choices turn out also to be social acts. When we recognize this, we can more easily envision the kinds of social strategies that create real change.
July 7th, 2008 at 8:39 am
An EXCELLENT article. Sort of goes against my grain in a personal way (I am no good at making connections, seeking out social relationships, especially with random people, all that stuff, plus I’d rather we all just disappear), but the fact is, this is the kind of thing that has to happen all over the world — small, local solutions, crafted specifically for specific places (just as humans should have remained, animals geared toward their own specific climates and ecosystems).
No solutions are forthcoming on a broad scale, and none will be — so, the best humans can hope for are pockets here and there, places where truly sustainable practices are conducted, like this place (well, other than the “farming” of cows and the use of motorized vehicles and such), so that when everything crumbles, there will be something SANE to look toward instead of what most people will do, which is revert to horrid violence in an effort to maintain a way of life that won’t work any longer.
Anyway. Thanks!
Charlotte