Goodbye to the Oil Man — Steve Chiasson

I just wrote a check for $469.77 to the oil delivery man. This strikes me as hugely ironic. First of all, it’s the middle of July, for crying out loud! And secondly, we don’t even heat with oil! Well, maybe I should qualify that…

We heat primarily with wood, but use some oil in the “shoulder” seasons, when firing up the wood boiler (we have a forced hot water heating system) is hugely inefficient. Our domestic hot water is also connected to the same system, so we wind up using oil there as well when the wood boiler is inactive. On the whole, I’d guess that wood supplies probably 75% of our heating and hot water. And since the wood is cut right on our property, there’s no trucking involved and I get to make some choices about which particular trees are harvested. Let’s call it a “green-ish” or “sort-of-sustainable” approach to supplying our heating needs.

Still, there is that matter of the oil man. $469.77 for 127 gallons of fuel. My mom, who lives on a meager fixed income in a big drafty house, cringes when she hears the furnace fire up on those cold winter nights. Dollar bills fly out the window. Does anybody see this getting any better?

Images of plumes of oil billowing from a blown out well into the Gulf of Mexico and vast tracts of boreal forests in Canada being leveled to mine the tar sands of Alberta make it clear that the oil companies intend to extract every last drop, wherever it’s found, whatever the cost. There are even plans afoot to drill areas of the Arctic now made accessible by receding sea ice. Hello?!

When I look for places to lay the blame, I don’t have to look any further than the mirror. In my younger days, I was just naïve. Lately, it’s more a matter of lifestyle momentum — choices I’ve made (such as living ten miles from the nearest store) that dictate many of the terms of my “agreement” with the oil producers. Still, I have to believe that it’s never too late to make course corrections. And though I may not be able to cut that cord just yet, throwing my lot in with the other members of Belfast Cohousing & Ecovillage is a significant step towards that goal.

I’ll live in a house that requires 90% less energy than a conventional home. I’ll be located just two miles from town. I’ll have much of my food supply growing just outside my door. I’ll be sharing a multitude of resources with my neighbors. I’ll be part of a group that has made sustainability a guiding principle, and not just a buzz-word. I’ll be making a difference in the world. And seeing a whole lot less of the oil man.

Cohousing as Art

Belfast Cohousing & Ecovillage is the featured "artist" for the month of July at the Belfast CoOp! Members have put together a show entitled "A Child's Day in Cohousing," a visual depiction of 24 hours in the life of a child reared in an intentional community. Such communities are designed so that generations mingle, grass replaces asphalt and neighbors watch out for each other's children as they roam the outdoors. Complementing this visual essay is a series of precocious photographic portraits of families in the Belfast Cohousing & Ecovillage by one of its youngest members, 7-year-old Pia McKim-Gibson.

Friday, July 1st is the official "opening" of the show, accompanied by the CoOp's free monthly wine tasting. It should be a fantastic event to meet and mingle, enjoy some tasty snacks and see cohousing from a child's point of view.

We hope you will join us!

Who's in Charge? — Jon Ippolito

"Who's in charge?" is a question that comes up occasionally when people ask me about Belfast Cohousing & Ecovillage. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised; in my life, I've had my share of bosses. Explicitly, or implicitly, I've handed over to landlords, CEOs, and presidents the power to decide for me what color my walls should be, which computer programs to use, and whether to go to war.

These days a lot of people seem to think such hierarchies are natural. Children have grown used to their parents telling them what they can and cannot do. Even tenured professors at my college expect a president to give them a vision and tell them how to achieve it.

But I don't think that's the way it has to be. Nature knows few hierarchies; geese switch off leading a migrating flock, while the behavior of bees, bacteria, and boletes emerges from a complicated set of interactions with no single creature leading the others. In soil, sand, and surf, networks abound. The largest creatures on the planet are not elephants or blue whales, but interconnected colonies of the Great Coral Reef or the subsoil mycelium that takes up 2000 acres in Oregon.

Nor does every successful human enterprise involve a powerful executive that others follow. The Wabanaki people of the northeast, whose ecovillages predate ours by millennia, shared power in a way that lessened the higher up the ladder: decisions of the tribal confederacy could be overruled at lower levels by the elders of a village, which could in turn be overruled by the clan mothers of a family. And today the single resource that is arguably the most concentrated repository of human knowledge ever, Wikipedia, is maintained almost entirely by volunteers with no bosses — by ordinary people like you and me.

No matter how natural it seems to me, the fact that Belfast Cohousing & Ecovillage has chosen a self-developed, consensus-based model of governance has caught some people's attention lately. At the 2010 ESTIA conference "Ecovillages Redefined" on 22 October, Equity Member Joline Blais talked about this at a discussion she led on the role ecovillages might play in a sustainable future. Also presenting at the conference were Roger Kelly of the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Wales and Daniel Greenberg of Living Routes at the University of Massachusetts. Local luminaries featured at the conference included small farming advocate Mark Fulford, LongGreenHouse veteran gkisedtanamoogk, and Belfast Cohousing Equity Member Jeffrey Mabee.

Joline and I also presented on bottom-up governance at the William S. Cohen Forum on The Promise & Problems of Transparency on 12 November at the University of Maine. Representatives from the Maine governor's office and Senator Susan Collins spoke mostly about sunshine laws in the era of Wikileaks, worrying about how to reconcile the need for privacy with the danger that some leader will hide information that should be shared. In contrast, Joline presented Belfast Cohousing & Ecovillage as an example of built-in transparency. When decisions are made by everyone sitting in a circle coming to consensus, everyone who needs to know automatically does, and all are invested in the process of decision-making.

Meeting cohousers

We're on the road a lot these days, giving presentations in Portland, Boston and elsewhere about our project as we race towards breaking ground. Recently, we gave a talk about the project in the Portland Public Library. Many of the folks who came were already familiar with cohousing, and it was exciting to be amidst a group of people who were already committed to the idea of creating sustainable community.

We meet so many new friends (and neighbors) on these trips, and in the midst of all the troubles and woes in the world, it's exciting to meet people who are committed to improving their communities and the world around them. Everyone has different reasons for wanting to join cohousing - families looking for an old-fashioned neighborhood to raise their kids, older folks looking to find a community to age in place, the environmentally conscious trying to find a way to live more sustainably... the list goes on. This is one of the beauties of cohousing: a varied group of individuals and families coming together with intention to create something better than they had before.

If you'd like to come see us "on the road", you'll be able to find us in Salem, MA this Saturday, at the Living Green Festival. It looks like it'll be a great time, and who knows - you might bump into some new, like-minded friends!

A Cappella Voices — Sarah Smith

Let me tell you one of the reasons why I want to live in cohousing, and especially cohousing on forty-two acres of rolling pasture land with areas of woods. Silence. Silence gently broken only by useful sounds: a tractor tilling, doors slamming behind laughing children, a tire swing or a hammock squeaking. And conversation. And music. My true hope is that the music we hear outside will be the music made by people and other creatures. And, I hope to have walkable spaces which even in the heat of a busy day will be so silent that my ears will ring and I will shake my head just to be sure I haven’t suddenly become deaf.

Let me share two quite different acoustic experiences I had recently near my home in the Salem, Massachusetts area.

For the first one, Bill and I traveled to the resonant Boston Symphony Hall for an extraordinary combined concert by The Del McCoury Band (bluegrass) and The Preservation Hall Jazz Band (Dixieland and Blues). It was a romping, rollicking, musical two hours, which had the sold-out crowd roaring and screaming for more. But the part that hit me the hardest was an a cappella moment. The words a cappella mean literally “in the manner of the chapel, ” but it refers specifically to voices without instrumental accompaniment. The four members of the Del McCoury Band stepped away from their microphones and stood in a curved group on the edge of the stage. The expected hush fell, which in a space like Symphony Hall is remarkable enough. Then, one voice at a time, they began a traditional gospel song. It was led by one voice on the simple verse, then joined by the other three voices at the chorus. It was so quiet that I could hear the entrance of each man on his part, then the tingling ecstasy as they met and swelled and tuned into the chord. I sat straight up in my chair in rigid listening pose, not wanting to miss a crumb of each musical moment. I didn’t. My hands burned with heat when I was finally convinced to stop clapping, whistling and hooting along with everyone else. So, you see, I love music — the more a cappella the better.

The second experience came a few weeks ago as I stood in the early morning with my dog on his first outing of the day. Nearby was a city yard, grassy and tucked behind the house next door, so that even in busy Salem it was relatively quiet. As I stood in reverie with the cold March air on my bare cheek and my ears exposed, the soft call of the mourning dove pierced my thoughts. Again, I stood in rigid silence, afraid to lose any part of the sound or the moment.

I have had similar experiences at my house in Waldoboro: standing intently on the river bank and craning my ear to the woods as the evening falls and hearing the enchanting rising song of the hermit thrush. Or the high cry of the slowly circling osprey, looking in vain for a fish for dinner. Or a robin caroling along after a summer thunderstorm.

For the most part, it’s hard for me to find silence a walkable distance from my house, since I can’t drive or even bicycle. I can take the commuter rail and subway to Symphony Hall, but it takes more than an hour, and it costs about $60. My dream is to be able to step out my door into the peaceful quiet of a Belfast summer morning and stand, silent and still, until once again a soul-piercing bit of a cappella music wafts to me on the breeze.

Trust and Let Go — Barbara Chiasson

This cohousing project reminds me of the exercise I did back in college where you close your eyes and fall backwards and trust the group to catch you so you don’t crash to the floor. John Ryan, a consultant who has been a project manager/coordinator for several cohousing groups, has said that the success of a cohousing project depends on the ability of each member to trust and let go.

I took my first steps in that direction when I attended an open house, where I was warmly welcomed first by Anne, and then by Wendy. They were so patient and answered all of my questions. Later, I walked the land with Hans and Chuck and made a wreath with Elizabeth. What fun! I felt their excitement, and I decided to make my exploring member payment just as soon as I could get it in the mail… trust and let go.

I clearly remember the meeting when we decided that our houses weren’t going to be single-family homes — they were going to share walls and be duplexes and triplexes and quads. What a concept! Many of us lived in the woods or out of town, away from others; and the single-family model was what we were used to. But we also wanted increased energy efficiency, and a shared wall meant shared heat and less energy waste. After all, that is in our mission statement! OK, maybe we can let go of that single-family house concept… trust and let go.

Then there was the question of, “How do I best fit in with this group? What will be meaningful to me, and how can I best offer my skills and experience to the group? ” It’s a little like dating — how can I show them what I have to offer and how do I gain their trust? But we’re not talking about just one person, we’re talking about 45-50 people! I took a mad dash into facilitating (big meetings, lots of people, difficult decisions… Yikes!), and the process committee/conflict resolution team. You never know what will come up… trust and let go!

Since then it has been a journey of trusting and letting go and falling in love with the people of this project. At some point, I had a paradigm shift; I stopped worrying about whether my house had this or that, or even how much it might cost or what else I might have to give up. I found so much more when I found this project. Not only will I be living lightly on the earth in a beautiful, well thought out energy efficient house, but I also found my tribe of people. I feel like I can trust and let go, I know they have my back! Steve and I joke about being willing to live in a shack or a teepee if we can just live with this incredible, brave, amazing group of people that call themselves Belfast Cohousing & Ecovillage… I’m trusting and I’m letting go!

Twelve Months in Waldo County — John Lightner

I have sometimes been asked what my favorite time of year is. Truthfully, I don’t really have one. Every season, every month has something unique to offer. I can’t imagine sacrificing one month’s benefits to afford more of another’s. Here follows a list of some of my favorite events and activities in a Belfast calendar year.

January — New Year's Dip

This year, Pia Gibson lured me into participating in the New Year's Day plunge and I have to say that jumping into Penobscot Bay with a crowd of enthusiasts is a wonderful way to start the year.

February — Ski Touring

For me, February means cross country skiing. One of the reasons I moved to Belfast was to be able to ski out my back door and I haven’t been disappointed these last few winters. I know that skiing at our new home will be equally satisfying.

March — Maple Syrup Season

I have slowly been refining my technique and have recently been able to meet most of my family’s annual syrup requirements (which are considerable). The 2011 season has been astounding and I already have almost three gallons of syrup in my basement. All this from just a dozen taps in five trees. We will need to get busy planting sugar maples if we want to incorporate home boiled syrup into our diet at BC&E.

April — Spring run-off

Technically this starts in late March. Time to dust off the old canoe and get in the fray for the St. George and Passagassawakeag whitewater races. Hi water or low, sleet or sunshine these are great races to participate in or just to watch. If the competition isn’t your thing, it is equally great just to paddle these and a handful of other great runs around the county. I did just that last weekend and made a leisurely run down the St. George river in Searsmont. We were a party of two canoes, a raft and a handful of kayaks. The day was sunny but crisp and we took our time, basking in the sun when we could; bailing out the boats beneath the rapids. A much different experience from the race.

May — Planting Time

Ideally, I would have started some of this in April and perhaps even March if there is an early spring, but I seem to get most of my vegetable garden organized and planted in the month of May. Who would want to work in the garden without a black-fly net anyway? I do fantasize about there being a greenhouse in my life someday.

June — Sailboat Prep

We have quite a few sailors in our community and most of us put off our boat maintenance until just before we float. As far as work goes, there are few things more worthwhile than messing about in and under a boat (with apologies to Rat) in anticipation of launching. Often there are a few improvements or new gear to be installed. It remains to be seen if or how boat storage will be worked out at the Ecovillage, but I have hopes for a more communal atmosphere around sailboat prep once we move in.

July — The CoHo Cruise

The past two years we have put together a joint sailboat cruise involving Cohousing boats and friends. Penobscot Bay is famed as a sailboat cruising ground. The first year featured a memorable full moon reach across Penobscot Bay to our anchorage at Holbrook Island. We rafted up and had a five boat platform at our disposal. Kids had the run of the decks and the parents found a safe haven in the Gibson’s big catboat cockpit. We haven’t managed more than three days, but we aspire to longer adventures.

August

If you can’t figure out what to do in Maine in August without my advice…..

September — Around Islesboro Race

The first Saturday after Labor Day, the Northport Yacht Club (three miles from downtown Belfast) hosts an open race around Islesboro Island in the middle of Penobscot Bay. The starting gun goes off at 10:00 AM and, depending on the prevailing wind and general forecast, forty to fifty boats set out to sail around the island — twenty-eight miles as the crow flies. Most of the boats aren’t serious racers and there is a great informal atmosphere, but it is a race and many of the boats will take a shot at hoisting their spinnakers even if it is the only occasion all year they will take the chance. Last September’s race (2010) saw twenty-five knots of wind at the start with the race beginning downwind. The sight of forty mostly over-canvassed boats headed off down the bay was spectacular.

October — Bald Rock

Early October is usually peak foliage in Waldo County. Just driving around is wonderful enough, but with the bugs driven underground and lots of clear weather, it is a great month to do some hiking. This might lure me out of the county to nearby Acadia, but there are plenty of great short hikes within fifteen miles of Belfast. Bald Rock in Lincolnville marks the northern end of the Camden Hills and offers unbelievable views of Penobscot Bay in reward for just an hour of mild uphill work.

November — Winter Prep

Like June, November is a month that features a significant amount of prep work for the coming winter. For the last three years this has meant storm window installation and weather-proofing, catching up on my woodpile and moving it close to the house, putting chains and the plow blade on my tractor and finally putting the garden to bed. Looks like I will be able to forget about quite a bit of this in my new home, but I’m sure we will find plenty of other projects to occupy the time.

December — Pond Skating

Some winters on the Maine coast this season will last for several months, but with the relatively snowy winters of the last three years, the season has been a short one. Nevertheless, there are few activities more pleasurable than strapping on a pair hockey skates on a crisp December afternoon with a pond full of black ice in front of you. Throw in a dog or two, perhaps a pick up hockey game and maybe a home built ice boat and you have the makings for a memorable day. When the ice is really good you can skate for miles and miles along the shores of dozens of scenic ponds.