You should see our office: coffee donations stacked high, green flags and green shirts, maps and laptops, the lavender walls barely showing
beneath lists of our endorsers and newspaper clippings. It’s not that we’re messy (well, that could be true); people just keep showing at our door, asking to help ? friends, neighbors, and the guy from the bagel shop downstairs.
And it’s not just the office that’s swelling with activity ? it’s the whole Granite State. Now we have a bus coming from Portsmouth and carpools from Hanover. Newspapers are publishing letters from natives of Hooksett, Amherst, and Nashua daily. A woman we met at the Canterbury Fair yesterday remarked, “You guys are everywhere.”
It certainly feels like it ? one second I’m on the phone with the Governor’s secretary, and the next I’m wondering if I bought enough pancake batter for Saturday night’s celebration of New Hampshire maple syrup. Amidst the hype and excitement growing all across the state, it’s easy to forget why exactly Granite Staters are set on walking
five full days in the first place.
One farmer reminded us this morning. Eero Ruutila looked out over his rows of summer squash and said, “For the past three years, it’s flooded. It hurts everything. The climate never used to be like this.” He’s in his 21st year of managing the Nesenkeag Cooperative farm, where the March to Re-Energize New Hampshire will stop on Wednesday night.
Farmer by summer, artist by winter, and an every season advocate for the land he works, Eero knows what it takes to build a community around a green enterprise. The farm cultivates nearly 100 organic crops: the specialty varieties go to restaurants in the area, and the others he sells for no profit to food banks to feed low-income
families. A walking, breathing almanac, Eero’s spoken at nearly every National Organic Farming Association (NOFA) conference across the state, and he educates on the importance of sustainable farming.
We weeded the garlic, built a stage, dried the rye, and strung our banners, visible from the road. Eero stepped back, approved, and said, “Now we just need people to come.”
And I hope you do. There could not be a better place, or a better time, than right here and right now to send a call to action for real, national global warming solutions. Join the March to Re-Energize New Hampshire – walk for an hour, a day, or all five. By the time we get to the State House Lawn on Sunday, August 5 at noon, we’ll be
thousands strong!
Sign up at:
Peace,
Sierra & the whole ReEnergize NH Team
reenergizenh@gmail.com
(610) 220-5378
<
p>
I hope they’re in the form of boxes and paper/ceramic cups, not Styrofoam cups! Take it one step further and buy a box of sugar, a carton of milk and a carton of cream, and get rid of the dozens of little bits of paper and plastic caused by single serve coffee condiments. Go even further and wash & reuse the plastic stirrers! It’s a small thing, but it’s easier for people to talk the talk if they know they’re doing the little things themselves to walk the walk.
<
p>
P.S. With a name like Sierra, maybe you should form some kind of club focused on these environmental issues…
I very much appreciate your comment. I go to a lot of environmental conferences, workshops and the like for community based and grassroots oriented organizations. Every time I went for my cup of coffee, I was always slightly disappointed with the use of the individual packets of sugar, individual stirrers, etc. I always wondered about the reason for individual stirrers. They make sense within the context of a fast food restaurant, but not in an office.
<
p>
I will tip my hat to the Toxics Action Center here in MA. At their annual conference, they use paper cups and encourage people to bring their own coffee mugs, set out a few spoons for scooping sugar from a large sugar bowl, and have non-disposable utensils available for spreading cream cheese or peanut butter on the bagels. The only individual disposable packets of anything they had were the Sweet-and-Low (which were mainly for the diabetics in the room). I say this to reaffirm Stomv’s point that with a little tiny bit of effort, small things like this demonstrate your own commitment to your ideals.