Just one more thing I love about Vermont: all you have to do is show up. October 10th wielded the state's 3rd "annual" (the third in five years anyway) Biodiesel Conference. I made the trek in Vercedes to Burlington where the conference was being held in UVM's new Transportation Center, swank digs indeed.
Tim Keaveny of Sprague Energy breaking down some of the barricades and breakthroughs on building up biodiesel's supply infrastructure.
By simply footing the fee (that ended up being covered by GMC) and showing up I got to be privvy to all of the dialogues that manifested between state politicians, members of the Vermont Fuel Dealer's Association, farmers, environmentalists, and the growing number of people representing the biofuel industry.
The half-dozen workshops that filled up the afternoon provided everything from a 101 to a session focused on the investing and policital climates surrounding the industry. The sessions were broken up by guest speakers, my favorite of which was Lieutenant Governor Brian Dubie's personable take on where we're at:
No real surprises there for anybody, hopefully. But there's a profound difference between realism and pessimism. We all know (and need to know) that things aren't great and a lot needs to happen if they're to get better. Well, we're in the process of beginning to utilize the single-most auspicious resource at our disposal:
The beautiful thing is: guess what? We're all somebody's child. There's a lot of hope in that; a lot of realism too.
Each of us is just what it will take to get from worse to better. Our voting in each federal, state, and municipal election means the world, literally. No new news there, again. But it seems we too often forget that the daily votes we make in our private and professional lives do just as much to inform the powers that be what kind of world we want to live in. Not many of us have been so passionate about phasing fossil fuels out in practice as we have in our increasingly angst-ridden weather talk. But the options to do so are already out there. This conference was all about just one such ballot.
The organic food movement grew from its vaporous origins in people's minds and the periphery of industrial consolidations to an industry experiencing over $14 billion in revenues annually, and it's still just getting started. Biofuels are boasting similar growth trajectories. The expansion of the solar industry trumps all of them. All of this in the face of what amounts to government disincentives when the aid given to the established petroleum-based order is taken into account.
While those of us under thirty will undoubtedly have a prolonged role in the pending revolutionizing of americana, the young at heart will continue to go to bat for the causes they all but created in the 'sixties and 'seventies. Many of them were present at this conference, much more I daresay then their children. I only spotted a dozen students tops at the conference (which took place on a college campus in a town of several colleges). Not Okay. Our generation can't afford to be absent in times like these.
It's not that I expect everyone to be a pioneer or bleeding heart advocate of whatever nobel cause, only that more of us stand up and be counted. Remember, it's Vermont. All you need to do is show up to make a change. There's not even 700,000 of us. If not here, where? Plus, there's always the chance that showing up may change you.
The best part about the conference was that it made tangible the fact that the hopes of all assembled are shared by a diverse, capable community. Rest assured next year's will be bigger in both size and its positive implications for the wide world.