Sustainability

I am sitting at my desk in my tiny house in my tiny town in my tiny state. This is a state of 621,760 and one well-founded estimate says that in 2009 there were 300,000 wage earners paying taxes in this state. [CORRECTION!!! My friend Bill says: "310,000 income tax filers of whom 160,000 must pay something. The rest are income-sensitized out of any income tax liability."]

That is, all the schools and all the roads are paid for by 160,000 people.

In normal times, these two issues are hugely contentious at town meetings which determine the expenditures by local government. This town of 800 or so people has a $2 million school budget for 57 elementary school kids and 22 children who are bused to area middle and high schools.  We are lucky that the town came out relatively unscathed though Rodney and Alida lost their sweet corn and there are sections of road out on North St. and West St.

My friend Emmett came by this morning with 5 lovely garden tomatoes. I gave him a yellow squash and some patty pan squash and some sun gold tomatoes. Our friends Linda and Ursula are drowning in a half bushel of tomatoes for sauce, from another neighbor's garden.  If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I describe gardeners as a generous breed. Sometimes we are too generous.

But I am struck by this generosity at a time when there are people who can't get out of their homes because of the road closures and bridges that have washed out.There is an estimate of 250 road closures state-wide due to Hurricane Irene.One friend can't get to her job in a town a half hour from here, across the washed out east-west Rt. 4. Her father leaves his truck at the paved road and gets on the 4 wheeler at the top of a logging road to get home--before dark. The small bridge to his trailer was washed out.  Multiply that by tens of  thousands.

I am actually longing for some protein and since I don't eat meat and eat fairly little poultry, that means fish. And there isn't any in the freezer.I can drive to the town with the supermarkets - that section of road is open. Not everyone can. Multiply that by some thousands.

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I am teaching a class in NYC in a newly minted program in Sustainable Interior Environments, and the first class was drowned out by Hurricane Irene. I am teaching students I have never met, by email and the internet. Certainly driving to NYC is not a sustainable solution but the train system is a disaster, and it won't be easy to get to Boston to take the bus to NYC which had been my plan. So I could see my huh-huh-husband from time to time.

And that's not much more sustainable than driving to NYC in the first place.

I suppose I am hyper-aware of what sustainability means when the road system has failed. Vermont has few roads to begin with - two major north south roads and a handful of major east west roads, and three southern/central  ones had been severed as of last night. (One seems to have been fixed as of now, so I may actually have a way to see my huh-huh-husband on the weekend.)

So I have asked my students to define sustainability. And they will no doubt talk about "green materials" and low energy use.

And I am thinking that sustainability has something to do with living in communities that don't require a trip to the supermarket for protein (which if I ate meat I could do here). Which reminds me that two of our friends have start-up farms and one raises chickens. I wonder how they are faring.

And living in a place where if I have squash and you have tomatoes, we both eat decent food. A NYC friend took an apple from my tree that I had transported from VT and ate it without washing it. "No sprays," she said.

I understand that two warring parties in town came together to get North Street paved (though there may be some remuneration involved).
 
Now if only .... Herb sometimes says that my posts aren't finished. I think he's right again.