Green Mountain College, VT

11 November 2009

Some people write with facility and grace, words flowing from their fingers seemingly without effort. Others, like myself, struggle, stare, chew the inside of the cheek, and generally suffer until something comes to life.

Green Mountain College in Vermont invited me to be artist-in-residence for a week, my destination after the Nashville NRDC/Gibson/Mountaintop Removal event (more on that in a later post). I've just arrived on a brisk November night, had a delicious vegetarian meal in Rutland, and was deposited on the campus. The thought of dialoging with students and describing what I do and why is exciting is weighing on me. The focus of my work is getting people to change behavior, realize the emminent danger, and participate in a new economy. GMC is a college that made the decision to "go green" in the nineties and has not looked back. So, here I will be "preaching to the converted" but we all still have so far to go, and will only get there by constantly refining and tweaking our methods. In spite of the energy audits that have been done here, I'm sitting in a library with lots of lights on, fighting the temptation to turn them off.

Is it possible to change our behavior before the situation gets drastic?