Empowered Highlights Local Energy Efforts

By Kristie Snyder, 

GreenLeaf Editor

Tompkins County is famous for its cloudiness. And it's quickly becoming famous for something else — renewable energy. Despite all those clouds, there's plenty of sun and wind, and more and more Tompkins residents are figuring out how to curb their fossil fuel consumption with a variety of sustainable energy approaches, from the tried-and-true to the purely experimental. A new locally produced documentary film, Empowered: Power from the People, highlights many of these efforts.

"Locally there is a huge trend" toward renewable energy, said Director Shira Golding Evergreen. "Art Weaver told me Renovus [a local renewable energy installer] has had as much work in the past two years as in the previous eight combined."

Those featured in the film live throughout Tompkins County, from Enfield to Caroline and at many points in between, including the City of Ithaca. They include households with pricey grid-tied solar systems, and those with low-budget off-grid efforts that include innovations like iceboxes and vegetable oil-fueled generators. Local solar installers Renovus Energy make an appearance, along with founder Art Weaver's new project, Weaver Wind. Also featured are the forthcoming Black Oak Wind Farm, along with the Ithaca Biodiesel Cooperative. Local social justice media group Green Guerrillas shows off its veggie oil-powered bus, and Town of Caroline council members proudly give a tour of the new town hall, which may not be beautiful, but will one day pay for itself with features including geothermal heat and an impressive photovoltaic array. You're sure to recognize friends and neighbors, or maybe those folks up the street you've been meaning to introduce yourself to — the ones with all those solar panels on their garage. The people profiled come from all walks of life. "We're hoping everyone sees someone in the film that they can relate to," says Evergreen.

Read more: Empowered Highlights Local Energy Efforts

You Say 'Tomato' ...

By Joe Romano, 

Marketing Manager

The metaphor of the melting pot is unfortunate and misleading. A more accurate analogy would be a salad bowl, for, though the salad is an entity, the lettuce can still be distinguished from the chicory, the tomatoes from the cabbage.

— Carl Neumann Degler

Food is social. It is shared by friends, family, and community. It represents one's culture and even has its own meaning. So what does it say when people don't share food, or when people disagree about how to eat? Or even when it polarizes people?

We are used to political disagreements; in fact, we can barely understand people of "that other" political party, whichever it may be. We seem to happily divide ourselves into nations and neighborhoods and draw up borders at cultural, racial, and class boundaries, too. We have to admit that somehow it comforts us to classify things — even people, sorting them like socks as alike and different. And somehow food is right there in the mix — think, for example, how many insults and slurs refer to what people eat.

Read more: You Say 'Tomato' ...