Speaking out loud about an idea like this for the first time has a lot in common with bringing your first baby home from the hospital. Until that moment you leave the sheltering corridors of the hospital, the baby--and your motherhood--is all peace, perfection and potential. It doesn't take more than a minute after you pull out in traffic for all of it to speed right on into the real world. That's a good thing, but a little scary.
We began by mentioning it to a few friends at home. The reaction was almost universally enthusiastic. Bit by bit, step by step, we've begun the process of networking ourselves into the bigger world of green development, and we are heartened and pleased by how well the idea has been received. We've begun to learn about the meaning of LEED-compliant development, triple-bottom line, zero energy building, net metering and a whole host of ideas that various contacts along the way have introduced us to. And once you learn about one of these ideas, it seems you begin to see it everywhere. Which reminds me of something that happened years ago. John and I lived in a little rented house on the beach and we decided we would start a salt water aquarium using animals from Long Island Sound. We poked around the beach quite a bit and never found any hermit crabs, but we figured we'd manage without. The first step was to gather gravel from the beach. We came home with two buckets of gravel, only to find that the pebbles and stones were in fact about a third hermit crabs. And after that? We saw hermit crabs all over the place every time we walked the beach. Well, it's like that with green building. I'm delighted to report people are thinking about it--and doing it--everywhere. Just last night, on the way out to dinner, we saw a school under construction, with a sign that read "Largest Solar Project in the State" and that was right in our own backyard! Cool!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Proust writes in Sodome et Gomorrhe:
"Odysseus himself did not at first recognize Athena. But gods are immediately perceptible to gods, as like is to like; so M. de Charlus had been to Jupien. Up until now, I had been watching M. de Charlus like a preoccupied man who, facing a pregnant woman whose heavy figure he has not noticed, listens to her cheerfully repeating 'Yes, I am a little bit tired these days' and stubbornly, indiscreetly persists in asking her: 'Well what's the matter?' But let someone say to him: 'She's pregnant,' suddenly he catches sight of her belly and will see nothing else from then on."
(from Richard E. Goodkin: Around Proust, Princeton U. Press, 1991; pg. 25)
The theme of recognition, which you are referencing in "everyone's going green, it seems" is something Proust works on throughout A la recherce du temps perdu.
Your comment is far more toney than my blog, and forces me to admit I've never read Remembrance of Things Past in French or in English. Thanks for classing up the joint, Tim!
Post a Comment