Discovery Blog

One of the themes of building community resilience we have been focusing on is re-skilling: the teaching and learning of timeless, practical, and increasingly endangered skills. Re-skilling is important for ensuring that communities are able to provide for their basic needs, but also because knowing how to do stuff is just plain satisfying and fun! To this end, our class spent a day at Kelly’s Working Well Farm (KWW) in Chagrin Falls.

About an hour outside of Cleveland, Ohio are vast amounts of land that will make you forget that you are just a drive from the bustling city and its suburbs. Whether this may seem daunting or picturesque is up to you, for the six students of an environmental studies class taught by Professor Debbie Kasper called “Building Community Resilience,” this was the perfect setting to put our new knowledge to work and to gain more new skills and knowledge in the process.

Last semester, we surveyed the campus, asking if people around campus if they thought they used more or less electricity than the average. More than half said they were below average.

During the winter of 2011, a powerful winter storm known as the Groundhog Day Blizzard left over 100 million people all over the United States without power for many weeks. People were left in the darkness questioning the centralized energy system. It was not until weeks after the storm that the power was restored to normal.

A quick Amazon search for books, using the phrase “local food,” turns up more than 53,000 results. “Local economy” produces over 62,000, and “local community, over 100,000. The word “local” is big right now, especially in sustainability circles.

Last fall, a water main on the northeast side of campus burst, shutting down water in that area for a few days. It was on one of those days that I went to the dining hall for lunch, and found myself fascinated to see people waiting in long lines to fill their cups with the elixir of life. Just a few moments after I got there, all of the rectangular brown coolers ran dry. Initially there was confusion—which quickly turned to panicked agitation—as those at the front of the lines tipped the coolers upside down to shake out the last remaining drops of water. Everyone behind them had to find something else to drink.

This year the SEED Scholars are investigating energy.  The first thing we learned is that there is a lot we don't know. Curious about whether we were the only ones in the dark about energy production, we decided to do a bit of investigating.

I personally own five gadgets that need to be powered or charged with electricity.  And that doesn’t count the electric items I don’t plug in myself--like lights, printers, lab computers, ovens, refrigerators, and so on. If you count those items too, you begin to realize just how much our daily life relies on electricity.

Have you ever realized how hard it is to find the origin of things you use every day? Do you know where the food you ate this morning came from? Where your car was made? Or what country your phone was produced in? I bet you don’t! These blind spots in our everyday lives make it hard for us to understand the actual resources that go into the things we consume. One huge blind spot the SEEDS have been investigating is electricity. If you are like us you probably don’t consider the path the power takes to charge your phone when you plug it in after a long day of texting.

This morning, while putting what we hope will be the last of the wiring and LED light fixtures in place at the TREE House, one of our electricians, M.J. Viggiani quipped: “Good thing the Energy Star rating doesn’t include work efficiency….” We were laughing about how the work at the TREE House hasn’t always gone as smoothly as we might have wished. From time to time on this project, we’ve found ourselves dancing two steps forward, one step back while tripping over our left feet, right hand definitely unaware of what the left hand is up to.