Building Awareness with Solar
“The process of providing for people’s needs within ecological limits requires a cultural revolution.”
-2002- David Holmgren
Co-originator of the Permaculture Concept
By Paul Shippee
Has this ever happened to you? One day, out of the blue, my friend Alice asked me, “How can you live a life that has meaning?” I began thinking about that, about what the world needs, what do I need, where does my life connect with the world.
That seemed like a good start. Today, as the bonfires of fossil fuel burning around the world are heating up the earth and sending out troublesome clouds of carbon dioxide and air polluting particles, I am helping people design and build solar homes and have started the Crestone Solar School. It’s a small thing but seems to be in the right direction.
On a much larger scale, corporations and governments are battling the primal fight over what’s more important: the biosphere or the economy. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide, deforestation and over-fishing the oceans are us. We are becoming more primal and the meaning of that is wide open.
Since the elephant magazine is in Boulder, and I started my solar career in Boulder, well, actually at Shambhala Mountain Center in northern Colorado in 1972, I shall make a story here that is more personal and local.
I first learned about the direct use of the sun’s energy at a commune in southern Colorado. Then I began reading, studying, then building boxes of wood and glass, putting blackened cans of water inside, and measuring the temperatures with a thermometer. In this way, I saw first-hand the potential and capacity of solar heating.
Then I began building a small passive solar house at Shambhala Mountain Center that was to be the first solar heated residence in Larimer County. Over the years the retreatants who stayed in this house reported enthusiastically about its warmth. Within a year I began teaching this stuff at Colorado State University (CSU) in Ft. Collins, then later in Boulder.
There seemed to be some meaning, even way back then, in helping to relieve the earth and her people from a casual addiction to our finite supply of fossil fuels. Perhaps it was visionary of us, in 1972, to see the impermanent nature of a less-than-thoughtful reliance on fossil fuels. For me this was about building awareness as well social change.
Then I upped the ante by accepting an invitation to be a founding teacher at Naropa in 1974, teaching “Alternative Sources of Energy and the Human Environment”. This is a course I made up after solar experiments conducted at Shambhala Mountain Center, and after teaching (everything I had been learning) at CSU in January 1973 & 1974.
So, this is now a long ways from there. But then in 1978 I designed and built the SunEarth House in Longmont which, when monitored by US Dept of Energy along with several hundred other solar homes of that era, was published widely to be the best performing solar home in America. It was very nearly 100% solar heated, and showed what could be done. This and other homes I designed and built won design awards from US Dept. of HUD, and made the cover of a couple of national magazines.
I designed and built other passive solar homes after that in Boulder; you can see some on my Crestone Solar School website www.crestonesolarschool.com To me it seemed natural to continue teaching this stuff more widely up and down the front range (all this bio-stuff appears on my site too).
An old friend in Halifax, Michael Chender, recently wrote to me: “Just wanted to send greetings to someone who was onto solar power before many people knew there was a sun!”
Well, then in 1980 Ronald Reagan became President, ordered the solar collectors removed from the White House roof, and killed the tax credit incentives that were driving the US solar market. As the market dried up, I and hundreds of others went out of business.
So, now after building another 100% Passive & active solar heated home in Crestone, which I now live in, we find ourselves in the midst of what some are calling a serious crisis of the environment, with another fiery emergence of Renewable/Alternative Energy initiatives, projects, education, investment, manufacturing, sales, and building that is being driven by three drivers:
-high and uncertain energy prices
-food and energy security, and national security
-climate change & global warming.
Whereas 25 years before the driver was only economics (more or less), now you see the picture in three dimensions.
And, importantly, this time the Solar & Renewable Energy movement is here to stay and grow. It won’t be stopped like before.
Just last year I established the Crestone Solar School at my 100% solar heated home in southern Colorado that took me 4 years to build after leaving Boulder in 2002.
So, maybe my vision and caring saw all this stuff coming way back in the 70’s and got on the wagon 100% at that time with learning, designing, building and teaching environmental awareness stuff that I never was taught in my Civil Engineering education. And it sparked my caring and vision and gave me a reason to want to show others what could be done with applying today’s sun today in heating homes, instead of burning up our bank account inheritance of fossil fuels. It seemed obvious to me that anyone who took the time to look could see this inheritance would not last forever, and would provoke resource wars in order to preserve our American high-convenience high consumer and energy wasteful and environmentally destructive lifestyle.
So, in all those senses, I suppose that I am pioneer of environmental preservation, solar energy applications, and teaching renewable design methods, which I did for years before the public interest faded along with the all important market incentives Bsoon after 1980. I always knew the time of solar and energy conservation would come back someday, and here it is. I knew there would be these resource wars but did not know how serious and complex things would get as they are certainly now. There seems to be an urgency to all this stuff, but most people still don’t see that part. But it is slowly dawning and things are certainly heating up, so to speak. Re-localization is now being envisioned from Colorado to Ireland, from Boulder to Carbondale to Crestone.
Paul Hawken and David Orr and many others are all seeing a great resurgence in taking care of the health of our floating planet. Grass roots organizing is moving ahead like a groundswell and it is our best resource.
Many are caught, though, in an intractable ambivalence about our energy future. The basic uncertainty seems to be whether we are entering an age of precipitous energy decline, or whether we can keep up our profligate and wasteful lifestyle and dependent consumerism in a business-as-usual environment. You must make your own meaning out of this serious question.
Perhaps, I have something to offer because of working in this area for so long, taking risks in business to help spread the knowledge, and gaining deep experience in how to take advantage of simple sunshine to heat a home and avoid the use of fossil fuels and reduce a person’s ecological footprint on this earth where all life support systems are now in serious decline.
I invite you all; dreamers, designers, builders, architects, inventors, engineers, writers, owner-builders, visionaries to learn more about solar heating design and natural building at the Crestone Solar School. View the curriculum and learn about the summer 2009 schedule at www.crestonesolarschool.com
