Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative in Bristol

Last Tuesday morning we had one of the most exciting events in the short history of the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative. As one of our student members put it, it was "one of the most important things we've done."


Basically we gathered all the players in the Bristol biomass heating community to discuss a potential LIHEAP pilot program in that area. There were people from LIHEAP, the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, ACORN, Norwich University, Pellet Vendors, Farmers, the Extension Service, the Bristol Selectboard, and two Addison County Legislators, among others.

It was (needless to say) very productive. We discussed the basic idea, and then broke up into sub-groups to address different aspects of the pilot project: the Human Side, the Burning Technology/Production & Farming side, aaaaaand Funding.

These committees will continue to meet, and hopefully make further headway. I was on the Human Side, which I'm particularly interested in as I would like to be certified to do Home Energy Audits in the future.

This will be followed by a meeting this Thursday in Montpelier about the heating situation in that area. We'll discuss a bulk purchase of pellets (or pellet purchasing co-op), and how we can make this transition. More on that to follow.

Two Books on Theology and Ecology

The Ecophysicsteacher has been in radio silence for the last month, but maybe that's just an indicator of my free time lately. So here on this Memorial Day weekend I find myself with time to read, write, and reflect on the last month's events.

Let's start with today and some books.

I recent read Serve God Save the Planet by J. Matthew Sleeth, which is basically a good introduction to the idea of Christian Ecological Stewardship. As someone who has been deep into this issue for a long time, I didn't necessarily find it challenging or novel, but for someone who is a non-scientist or a new Christian, this would be a great place to start. However, I must admit I was affected by the book. As a result of reading this book, I now wash my dishes by hand whenever I can (as it uses *far* less energy than a dishwasher), and I avoid red artificially colored foods. J. Matthew Sleeth, who is a doctor by trade, claims that most artificial red dyes are incredibly toxic to humans. No more cherry Kool-Aid for me!

I'm right smack in the middle of For the Beauty of the Earth by Steven Bouma-Prediger, which I just had to put down because it was so thought-provoking. I found the beginning compelling as he pushed the idea "We care for only what we love. We love only what we know. We truly know only what we experience." And so we must start with ecological literacy. We must know our place. After some meandering trips through different ecological habitats and statistics about the state of Earth, we were back to discussing theology. This is where I had to put the book down because it caused such a reaction in me. Basically the thrust of chapter 3 is that Christians are largely to blame for the destruction we currently see, and he cites four main reasons tied back to our flawed theology.

1. Misinterpretation of Genesis 1:28, aka "the dominance clause".
2. Neo-gnostic dualism, e.g. "only the soul matters - not the body", transfered to "only the Spirit and saving souls matter, not the creation"
3. Misled End-Times Theology, such as "It will just get trashed anyway."
4. (An extension of #1) If we apply the Christian-born sense of mastery over nature to Science, Christians are largely to blame for the ecologically-conscienceless results Science and Technology have produced.

I find these ideas all too true. I have thought these things. I have seen other people in churches express these misunderstandings, and having put all these complaints against Christianity in one spot fills me with a sense of repentance. Which is one of the reasons I am writing this: You are my confessional. Previously I had thought that all people need to repent of their ecological mis-behavior, but now it seems clear to me that Christians (more than other folk) need to examine their ideas.

If environmental reconciliation is to occur within the church we will need to directly address these misconceptions.

Roads vs. Paths, or Who Conforms to Whom?

Ever since I heard the Dredg song Pyramid, I've loved the line "We live like penguins in the desert/why can we live like tribes?" It made me think of summer time office buildings that are over air conditioned such that it makes one wish for a sweater.

I went to a conference this last weekend on Christianity & the Arts in Middlebury and I went to a session led by Matt Dickerson, a computer science professor and Tolkien scholar (author of Following Gandalf, Ents, Elves, and Eriador: the Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, and From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy). So I was pretty excited about that session, and I seem to have emerged with something I'm still chewing on.

We read an essay by Wendell Berry from The Art of the Commonplace, which touched on the difference between a road and a path. Matt said that a road was like conquest of the Earth. A road is the fast place from here to there, never mind what's in between: plow through the hills, uproot the trees. Nature is in the way, and so we plow over it. Whereas a path is a submission to nature. If the hill curves around, so does the path. If there is a cliff, we go around it. It is working within the environment we've got. In short, a road transforms nature to meet my needs, and with a path it is I who conform.

And today it occurred to me that that is really the same idea behind the Dredg lyric - we shape the earth to meet our needs so that it is a pleasant 70 degrees no matter where we are rather than sweating a bit in the summer.

One quote from the session has stuck with me from C.S. Lewis' Abolition of Man:
"There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men".

I think I might present my students with some philosophy of science type questions and ask them to write a reflection on them. I love physics. :)

Renewable Energy Presentations are Beginning!

Today was the first day of renewable energy project presentations. Apparently my intern has been talking about my class in her science methods course, so the teacher approached me yesterday wondering if she could bring her class to see my presentations, so of course I agreed. So we had a troop of college kids in my somewhat small 7th period class today.

The presentations went really well. The kids had great calculations, conclusions, and for the most part were very into the work they had done.

Afterwards the college kids said the presentations had been "college level work, like I'd expect to see this in one of my classes", which I plan to pass along to these students. We talked about how to modify this to a lower level physics course. We talked about how I had the lower level students create their own rubric for their presentations.

The teacher wondered if I had published about any of this work, and I said I had (so I showed them the Science Teacher article), but even so the teacher later asked me if I'd be willing to work with her on writing another article about my work. Ha! How exciting.

Anyway, I'm just glad to have a bit of closure (just two more classes to go - but they won't be ready for at least another week or so, and frankly I don't have that kind of patience). :P

Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Started My National Board Application

Some of my colleagues at the Knowles Science Teachers meeting wanted to know what it was like to go through the National Board Portfolio process. So I told them and it from that conversation it seems to me that I ought to write a list entitled Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Started My National Board Application.

I wish I'd

• read all the response questions before I even planned the lessons
• joined a National Board Support class/group
• studied harder for the test (harder? this one might be moot, since hindsight is always 20/20, there's no guarantees that I would've studied the right thing - and far be it from me to let slip what's on it)
• I think it probably would've been a really good idea to the Take-One option, so to get my feet wet, feel the whole thing out and then go for the rest of it.
  

Maybe this list will get longer, but that's it for now. (I'm sure I'll refer back to this post when Knowles asks me to present about my NBPTS experience at their summer meeting in July).

Concept Attainment Game

This past weekend was the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation's Spring Meeting for the '04 cohort (which I'm a part of) in San Diego, CA. Amy Germundson from Virginia (who's working with Carole Ann Tomlinson, a "Differentiated Instruction" genius) worked with our cohort to help us critique a differentiated instruction lesson from our own classrooms: totally helpful. One of the techniques I learned was called Concept Attainment. So here's how you play:

I give Positive Examples and Negative Examples of a principle or pattern and you hypothesize about what the principle/rule is.

Hey, let's try it:

Positive Examples
mud
jersey cows
chocolate

Negative Examples
ripe watermelon
the sun
fresh snow

If you guessed "Things that are brown", then you win!

Do you get how it works? Ok, let's try a harder one:

Positive Examples
Biomass
Wind power
Hydro (dam) power


Negative Examples
Geothermal
Nuclear Fission
Hydro (tidal) power

i'll post the answer in the comments section ;)

Lungless Frogs and Remembering to Breathe

Just for kicks (since we're on April break right now), let's talk about some weird discoveries in science, specifically a lungless frog discovered in Indonesia. Apparently it "breathes" through its skin, which is extraordinarily rare among tetrapods.

Why was I thinking about this? Cause I just finished watching Rob Bell's NOOMA video called Breathe, which is neither environmental, nor education, nor physics related, but nonetheless yummy.

Don't forget to breathe this week :)