Saint Michael's College loves VSHI

As usual I'm behind on blogging about the cool stuff that's been going on (perhaps because of the cool stuff!?)

I was invited to speak at Saint Michael's College by their "Green Up" group about the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative's work, which was pretty sweet. Here's the poster Dan (my contact) made up for it:

Green Up SMC would like to thank everyone that made it out to see Jim Merkel yesterday.

Today, Wednesday, April 16, we are presenting:

Anne Watson

Montpelier High School physics teacher

speaking about her project:

Grasses for the Masses: switchgrass and Vermont’s energy future

Farrell Room (St. Edmund’s Hall), 4:30-5:30 p.m.

Anne will be speaking about the work that she and some of her students are doing to reduce Vermont's reliance on fossil fuels through the growth of switchgrass on unused farm land for use as a renewable biofuel.

http://biofuelsresearch.freehostia.com/biomassvt/

Check out our full schedule of events for Earth Week at our new website:

http://personalweb.smcvt.edu/greenup/

It was probably our best-received presentation yet. They were so enthusiastic. Dan was like, "listen, we're in. Whatever you guys need we'll help with: funding, volunteers, whatever". Woe. Sweet. Sometimes I forget that this stuff is pretty cool. So now we've just got to figure out how to involve them.

Here are some possibilities:

• Man a Farmer's Market booth helping spread the word/advertize/collect email addresses of interested homeowners
• Help fund the Farmer's Market booth
• Help us set up a carbon offset program (I know: evil. but nonetheless useful for facilitating a transition)
• Get trained on how to weatherize people's houses, and then... go do that :)

We'll see. The whole thing was VERY encouraging.