Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Seventeen: Achieving Resilience 321gas they had stored in Pennsylvania. Such incidents remain fairly common, andthe only response local officials can make is curtailment: turn down thermostats,huddle over wood stoves, shut down factories, and listen to emergency broadcasts.Yet in some communities that have none of the access to sophisticatedmanagement and resources that might be expected in Massachusetts, energyshortages have already led to remarkably effective responses.One such instance is fairly well known: in a dispute over prices in the lateautumn of 1977, the natural gas supply of Crystal City, Texas was shut off. 79Low income and the imminence of the brief (two months) but cold Texas winterforced the townspeople to work with what materials they had. They didso well with weatherization, mesquite stoves, and simple improvised solarwater heaters costing eighty-five dollars each that many are still using andindeed expanding those “stopgap” measures, reinforcing their energy independence.Thus responses developed expediently served to introduce peopleto energy options of which they had previously been unaware and whose economicadvantages they then wished to receive routinely.A less well known but equally impressive case comes from the San LuisValley in southern Colorado—a sunny but cold plateau, nearly as large asDelaware, at an elevation of eight thousand feet. The traditional Hispaniccommunity in the valley heated with firewood, cut on what they thought wastheir commons land from old Spanish land grants. A few years ago, a corporatelandowner fenced the land and started shooting at people who tried togather wood. The crisis was unexpected and immediate. Some of the poorestpeople in the United States, they could not afford to buy wood or any commercialfuel. But a few people in the community knew how to build verycheap solar greenhouses out of scrounged materials, averaging under twohundred dollars each. Through hands-on greenhouse workshops, somewhatakin to old-fashioned barn-raisings, the word spread quickly. In a few years,the valley has gone from a documented four to over eight hundred greenhouses—whichnot only provide most or all of the space heating but alsoextend the growing season from three months to year-round, greatly improvingfamilies’ winter nutrition and cash flow. Now there are solar trailers, asolar Post Office, even a solar mortuary. Baskin-Robbins has installed a hightechnologysolar system on its ice-cream parlor, and other renewable sourcesare starting to spread. Wind machines are springing up, and some farmers arebuilding an ethanol plant fed with cull potatoes and barley washings and poweredby geothermal process heat. The valley is on its way to energy selfreliancebecause, under the pressure of a supply interruption, people foundthey were too poor to use anything but renewables. 80Tools for such local action are becoming widely available. There have been