Practicing Hope amid Climate Upheaval
The leaf colors in our yard resemble a wine tasting, with shades from chardonnay to merlot. Amid this autumnal collage, incongruous pink and white cherry blossoms have emerged in response to the warm fall....
Category: Sustainable Practices
‘All Other Life Exists within Their Shelter’
Along a stretch of shore I routinely visit, chestnut-gold rockweed and barnacle-encrusted rocks form a natural collage that is quintessential Maine. The sprawling rockweed encompasses two species: willowy manes of knotted wrack and the...
Are Maine’s Electric Utilities Prepared for Climate Disruptions?
In the wake of Ida, a hurricane intensified by the warming climate, more than a million electric consumers in Louisiana and hundreds of thousands more households across the eastern U.S. lost power. It was...
Getting to the Grid of the Future
The U.S. electricity grid is a dinosaur, a huge, unwieldy relic of the past. Built with an expected lifespan of 50 years, much of its infrastructure is now more than 60 years old. Its...
The Changing Face of Electricity Generation
Switching on a light, you may not think about where that power is coming from – whether a gas-fired generating plant, biomass boiler, hydropower facility or one of the new solar farms springing up...
Taking the Future into Their Hands
The climate crisis is disrupting more than ecosystems, economies and societal infrastructure. It’s inverting the normal developmental progression from youthful optimism to an acknowledgment of limitations with advancing age. Older people – with diminishing...
The Next Solar Frontier
Shortly after passage of a 2019 bill, construction of community solar farms began ramping up in Maine and the search for subscribers began. These farms hold great potential to help Maine transition off fossil...
Launching a Sustainability Accelerator
As the Maine Climate Council concluded work on its climate action plan last November, one legislator issued what Sen. Anne Carney (D-Cape Elizabeth) recalled as a “plaintive plea: ‘We have to figure out how...
