BLOGGER INDEX
Thursday, April 10th, 2014 | Posted by Guest Contributor | 2 Comments
Guest Contributor Brian Depew: The cooperative spirit that brought electric service to rural America represents the community-driven values of small towns. Today, more than 900 rural electric co-ops serve 42 million people in 47 states. Co-ops remain democratically controlled, run by elected customer-members. But they have drifted from their community-oriented mission. [ Read More ]Monday, March 10th, 2014 | Posted by Guest Contributor | No Comments
Guest post by Virginia writer and lawyer Ivy Main: Advocates of enlightened energy policy march into session every January bright-eyed and optimistic, only to become mired in the slough of despond. We watch the best bills die, while bills we thought too backward to survive the light of day flourish like an invasive species. Yet even in Virginia, the past few years have produced glimmers of hope that suggest a slowly shifting mindset among legislators. [ Read More ]Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013 | Posted by Guest Contributor | No Comments
{ Editor’s Note } Guy Caroselli is the Local Energy Alliance Program’s senior technical advisor, but is also known as “The House Doctor.” He says he love mysteries and being challenged and shares has thirty-five years of experience in Home Performance and residential energy efficiency.
“The House Doctor,” Guy Caroselli, conducts an energy assessment at a Charlottesville, Va., home. Photo by Andrew Shurtleff
As the Local Energy Alliance Program’s senior technical advisor and trainer (a.k.a. “The House Doctor”), people ask me all of the time how they can make their homes work better – and shrink their energy bills.
As we approach winter, those questions are more frequent and urgent. Everyone has memories of being shocked by a January heating bill or fighting with a loved one over the thermostat setting. Based in Charlottesville, LEAP works with residents of central and northern Virginia to help them prevent those scenes from repeating for yet another winter season. How can you make sure your home is energy-efficient? Let’s start with a short quiz. (more…)
Read More ...Friday, November 15th, 2013 | Posted by Guest Contributor | 1 Comment
{ Editor’s Note } Anthony Flaccavento is a regional leader in sustainable agriculture, local foods and their overlap with economic development. This is the second part of a post on building a stronger regional economy in Appalachia. Click here to read the first part.
“What’s needed is not a dilution of our commitment to the environment or social justice, but an expansion of our strategy to include working folks, and their needs and concerns as central to our efforts,” Anthony Flaccavento writes about strategies to make real progress on strengthening Appalachia’s economy. Photo by Jessica Kennedy.
Last week, I briefly described three key questions to frame the discussion about economic transition in Appalachia and around the nation:
1. Is the economy for people, or are people for the economy?
2. What is the proper role of government, the right balance between the ‘public sector’ and ‘the market’?
3. How do we live within our means, cultivating more widely shared prosperity, with less energy, waste and dependency?
In this second part to last week’s post, I’ll suggest three strategies I believe to be essential to making real progress on economic transition that builds greater prosperity, self-reliance and ecological sustainability. As someone whose work focuses on the details of economic diversification and transition, my perspective here is deliberately broad in hopes of providing some guidance applicable across sectors, communities and regions.
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Thursday, November 7th, 2013 | Posted by Guest Contributor | 2 Comments
{ Editor’s Note } Appalachian Voices is pulling up another chair to the Front Porch. Through our new guest blog feature, we’ll regularly invite influential voices to reflect on issues you care about — mountaintop removal, clean water, and promoting a strong, healthy economy and environment for communities in Appalachia and the Southeast. To kick things off, we invited Anthony Flaccavento, a regional leader in sustainable agriculture, local foods and their overlap with economic development, to share how Appalachia’s economic transition is already underway.
Organic farmer and one-time congressional candidate Anthony Flaccavento works to build a “bottom-up” economy in Appalachia. Photo by Laura Elizabeth Pohl, courtesy of Bread for the World
In the mid-1980s, more than 60,000 people worked in Central Appalachia’s coal industry. During that same period, more than 75,000 tobacco farms dotted the region, helping small farmers make a decent livelihood. By 2008, the year before Barack Obama became president, employment in the region’s coal industry had fallen by more than half, and today the number of tobacco farmers in Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee is barely a tenth of what it had been.
The economy of Central Appalachia is in the midst of a long term “transition” away from tobacco, away from coal, away from relying on a handful of industries for the bulk of its jobs. Without a doubt, it’s moving away from that. The question is, what will it move towards, and how will we get there?
As more and more people grapple with this question – from coal miners and entrepreneurs to activists and elected officials – it is good to remind ourselves of this: Appalachia’s economic transition is part of a larger national, even global, transition with many of the same root causes. To be clear, with so many people laid off from the mines, our region’s problems are particularly acute, and the solutions we seek are both urgent and specific to our place. But the essence of the shift we must make goes far beyond our mountains.
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Monday, July 5th, 2010 | Posted by Guest Contributor | No Comments
By special guest to the Front Porch Jaden McTaggart
Bonnaroo, the four day music festival in Manchester, TN is considered our modern day Woodstock. It’s a gathering of hippies, hipsters, veteran festival goers, techno ragers, families, crazies, and all things outside and in between. All these groups and cultures come together to celebrate something we all have in common… music!
Festival goers celebrate the community that naturally occurs when so many people convene to celebrate and share with one another. This community offers organizations like Appalachian Voices an excellent forum to share their messages with almost 90,000 people from all over the world! With this unique opportunity ahead of us, we set out from Boone ready to brave the heat and dust and start talking to folks about the people and environment of Appalachia.
We arrived Wednesday morning. After a long day of driving and a minor directional issue, aka driving 20 or so minutes if the wrong direction, we were all checked in and ready to set up camp. We set up and survived our first adventure, a torrential downpour that left our campsite in an inch or so of standing water. Man this is it! Mother Nature had welcomed us to this land. We were excited and anxious to see what the following day, the first official day of Bonnaroo, had to give us.
With a good nights sleep… well, with a soggy nights sleep, our pillows and blankets were literally soaking, we got pumped up to get going! If campsites were cars we rolled in a Bentley. We woke and cooked bacon and egg scrambles. We quickly made friends with our neighbors, an excellent crew from the voter registration organization Head’s Up, by sharing our delicious fried pork fat. We cleaned up camp and began the trek from our camp to Planetroo, the festival’s non-profit booth headquarters.
Hydration was absolutely essential.
We talked to so many amazing people over the next four days. One of my favorite quotes was, “Is this for real?” directed at the large images of devastating mountaintop removal sites. Some folks had no idea that mountains in Appalachia are being leveled to extract coal. Other people would walk up say something along the lines of, “I’ve been signed up for your email for years. I know about this and it’s horrible. What can I do now?”
Bonnaroosters flock to our booth and pledge to help end mountaintop removal!
We circulated a petition to urge the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate coal wastes as hazardous. We generated so much interest in this issue that by the end of the festival, people were coming up to the booth and asking us where the coal ash petition was. By Sunday night we had so many signatures that we ran out of paper and had to start drawing the petition form on scraps!
Bonnaroo in itself is an incredible weekend of music and, for the most part, peace and community. I feel so fortunate being able to travel with this wonderful group of folks. It was so satisfying creating dialogue with such a diverse community on a subject that affects us all.
It was amazing to be at a show and see so many people sport their “I love mtns” tattoos and buttons. I’d be in a huge crowd of people and someone would see my button and say, “Hey, I love mountains too! What’s this all about?”
Clearly, mountaintop removal and pollution issues in Appalachia have claimed a place in the national agenda. Thousands of festival goers, through their sleep deprivation, hangovers and sunburns, took the time to seek out our booth and find out about our organization, and for that we extend our grandest thank you’s!
Jaden and Maeve spread the love for the mountains.
