Conservation Defines Marcellus Challenge Photo by Tina WrightSarah Highland demonstrates a natural slow-cooker at the Marcellus Challenge event on March 3. Highland came up with the Marcellus Challenge idea while visiting her home state of West Virginia.
Local green builder Sarah Highland had an epiphany during a recent visit to her native West Virginia. Driving by mountains torn up by strip mining, she made the connection with her use of coalproduced electricity in Ithaca. She began to see the prospect of unconventional gas drilling coming to upstate New York as “chickens coming home to roost in terms of our energy use.”
Let’s just quit using so much, she thought, pulling the plug on her inefficient refrigerator. As a builder using local lumber and material like straw bales, she knows that local and renewable energy is a good goal, too. And maybe a community could work together and really make a dent on local energy use.
Sustainable Tompkins adopted her idea to get local folks to pledge their energy-reduction efforts through a Web site that tracks the community’s progress. And so the Marcellus Challenge was born.
“The Marcellus Challenge: Connecting the Dots” was an educational and networking event at the Women’s Community Building in Ithaca on March 3, when 150 people heard speakers and checked out green energy fair exhibits. It was sponsored by Sustainable Tompkins, the citizen-based organization for all things sustainable; and Shaleshock Action Alliance, whose goal is to protect communities and the environment from exploitive gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale.
Speakers were Gay Nicholson, president of Sustainable Tompkins; Dominic Frongillo, Caroline town board member and SustainUS delegate to the Copenhagen climate talks; Martha Robertson, chair of the Tompkins County Legislature; Sara Hess of Shaleshock; and Sara Culotta of Fall Creek Neighbors.
The room was ringed, kind of like a cool science fair, with green builders, alternative energy folks and educators available for the picking of their brain power. Sponsors and exhibitors were literally too numerous to mention, but easy to find at (www.sustainabletompkins.org) where you, too, can take the Marcellus Challenge pledge.
The crowd seemed fired up to cut energy use, a positive kick for many who have been fighting unsafe gas extraction. All the speakers cited energy reductions in their own lives: Robertson and husband have one car and they are tightening up their old house. Frongillo lives close to the town hall and a bus stop. Sara Hess is washing clothes in cold water now. Frongillo noted that some people don’t have the choices he does, which calls for social justice.
He added, “By the way, ‘natural gas’ — what a great marketing term for the industry. Let’s call it what it really is. It’s fossilized gas, it’s mostly methane and it contributes substantially to global carbon emissions. This is not a clean source of energy. It’s 20 times more powerful as a heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide and extracting it on a large scale, you are naturally going to have leaks.”
The young Caroline Town Board member wants to see every home in Tompkins County made energyefficient. He suggests that it would cost a third of a billion dollars, employ local folks and then would save us all, every year, $34 million and a quarter of a million tons of airborne CO2.
Gay Nicholson of Sustainable Tompkins does not buy the idea that unconventional gas drilling is inevitable here. “But what if demand for natural gas stopped growing, and what if it even began to fall?” she asked. “What if more people embraced the benefits of transitioning straight to a clean energy future, bypassing an era of massive hydro-fracking across our country and other nations?”
Nicholson has already met 17 of the 26 Marcellus Challenges and plans on more next year, including checking on that car tire pressure.
Robertson (D-Dryden) listed energy-saving projects in Tompkins County. The county’s solid waste division wins awards for recycling and education, and the airport on Warren Road has a green master plan, the first FAA initiative of its type in the U.S.
The county health department is using green technology to develop new digs on Brown Road in Lansing, while townships in the county have adopted geo-thermal heating and solar power. If you support green-thinking in government even in troubled economic times, Robertson said, let your representatives know.
Hess, of Shaleshock, has a background in early education. “What drew me into the fight over gas drilling were many things really,” she said, “but the one thing is — it is about the children.” Children’s health is declining along with our environment, she added.
Cullata has pulled some of her Fall Creek neighbors into a Marcellus Challenge group, offering a chance to have fun and share support. Maybe they’ll have little “bees” at different homes as they add insulation or string a clothesline, maybe they’ll just keep each other from backsliding. They don’t know yet. She suggested we all use our imaginations.
