By Shawn Dell Joyce
Elizabeth and John Capello signed up for the Ten Percent Challenge last summer, and decided to retrofit their historic Walden home with energy efficiency upgrades. The Capellos started off by having a home energy audit performed by the Regional Economic Community Action Program (RECAP), based in Middletown. The RECAP auditor made several suggestions that would reduce the Capellos’ energy use and utility bills by 10 percent or more this year.

The main suggestion was to reinsulate their attic, insulate the basement and floors, and upgrade the lighting. The Capellos decided to follow through with all the auditor’s suggestions and have RECAP perform the upgrades. A modest investment, and a few months later, the work was done and the savings began to show.

Elizabeth says that her home “feels warmer and more comfortable” with the thicker insulation. John agrees, adding that it’s safer as well since many of the upgrades improved the electrical usage and reduced the heat output of lighting and home heating. Additionally, the Capellos increased the value of their home, and lowered their monthly utility bills.

According to their recent bill from New York State Electric & Gas Co., the Capellos used four fewer kilowatt hours of electricity and three fewer therms of natural gas, much more than the initial 10 percent goal they set for their home by signing up for the Ten Percent Challenge. If you would like to save money and improve your home’s efficiency, you can sign up today, March 8, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Walden Village Hall, 3rd Floor, 1 Municipal Square, Walden.

Bring your past utility bills, or a 12-month summary of electric and heating use for a Home Energy Makeover, and become part of a county-wide effort to reduce energy use (and costs) by 10 percent or more this year.

If you are looking towards renewable energy systems to reduce operating costs, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) offers significant incentives for solar panels (photovoltaic), small wind and solar thermal systems, and a new program that allows you to finance the efficiency upgrades and renewable energy systems through your utility bill. That means the cost of owning a solar hot water system is financed at a very low rate and deducted from the energy savings on your bill. You don’t notice the added expense because it’s financed to be less than the energy savings. Your bill doesn’t increase but your energy efficiency does.

These programs and incentives don’t last long, so come to the Home Energy Makeover to learn how to take advantage of them now. If you have questions, contact Meridith Nierenberg, at Mid-Hudson Energy $mart Communities, meridith.nierenberg@gmail.com or 845-331-2238, or the Ten Percent Challenge at sites.google.com/site/sustainablemontgomery/ or on facebook/MontgomeryTenPercent.

Shawn Dell Joyce is the director of the Wallkill River School in Montgomery.

Olympia Snowe

By Jean Webster
Senator Olympia Snowe has been all over the news since her surprising announcement that she’s through dealing with what she called “an atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies” in Congress.

Since then, the question has arisen about whether Maine without Olympia Snowe would be like Massachusetts without Ted Kennedy, both of whom served in the Senate for decades, he for 47 years, she for a total of 34 years in the House and Senate (plus five years in the Maine Legislature before that).

My immediate response is “no.”

I respect Snowe as a person who often did good work, without keeping her name in the public eye. But as a lifelong Democrat, I never voted for her.

Of course there were years when I wasn’t in Kennedy’s corner either. These were the times when his personal behavior more than embarrassed his family and his country, culminating in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. It was the low point in his life and ruined any chance to be president, though over time he worked his way back from spoiled rich guy to patriarch of his family and beloved senator who was admired by several of his ideological opposites in the Senate.

But, besides that personal conduct, there were vast differences between Ted Kennedy and Olympia Snowe. He was a public person, frequently seen in the news, not only in his home state but in the national and international media and had a far more public persona than Snowe. Despite their differing personalities, Snowe and Kennedy worked closely together, particularly on defense issues.

Snowe has served on a number of important committees in Congress – Small Business, Intelligence, Commerce, Science and Transportation – but she’s seldom seen in the news. It seems she prefers to remain in the background.

Between Snowe and Susan Collins – Maine’s other Republican Senator – Collins wins hands down in getting her face and name on television and radio, and in print. Probably three to five times more often. If Snowe has a statement to make, she does it quietly and without fanfare. Perhaps she’s more like Maine’s first woman senator, Margaret Chase Smith, another Republican, who worked quietly yet who was one of the first members of the Senate to stand up to condemn the tactics of Joseph McCarthy in 1950.

What will Snowe be remembered for? It will be her centrist views and her attempts to get beyond partisan politics. Recently, both she and Collins were called the most moderate Republicans in Congress. In 2010, they were two of the three Republicans to support President Obama’s financial reform bill.

Although Maine voted wholeheartedly for Barak Obama, people here are very loyal to their two Republican senators. I think it’s the Town Meeting mentality; every March, Mainers convene in town halls to vote for those who will run their local governments. In a mostly rural state, these are their neighbors, their friends. In Maine, we vote for the person, not the party.

In 2008, I made phone calls for Tom Allen, the Democrat running against Susan Collins. Remember, I was calling only Democrats. But many I spoke with said yes on Obama, no on Allen. When I asked why, they would invariably cite a personal story about how “Susan” helped them. No problem about crossing party lines. I understand that Susan’s not Olympia, but to me it’s an attitude here in this state – about people and about how to vote.

Perhaps it’s this attitude of fairness that Olympia Snowe misses in the Senate of the 21st century.

Post comments to jean@zestoforange.com

By Gretchen Gibbs
Orange Environment is hosting a barn dance on March 24, and the occasion turned me to thinking about gender, dancing in general and barn dancing in particular. A number of men of my acquaintance “won’t dance, don’t ask ‘em” and yet some of these same men will show up at a barn dance. Why? I wondered.

I took a trip to the Galapagos not long ago and watched the mating dances of the blue-footed booby and the albatross. With birds, although sometimes the female joins in, it is the male who dances, his beautiful plumage puffed up to heighten his attractiveness. Why don’t men follow the lead, so to speak, of our animal counterparts? At some periods in history, they did flaunt their bodies, as in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when they wore tights, mini skirts and codpieces. I don’t think they practiced mating dances per se, though.

I looked up the history of dance in that universal font of wisdom, Wikipedia, and found that someone, a male, has a theory about the origins of dance. He says that primitive man (presumably not woman) danced to induce an altered state of consciousness preparatory to battle. Like the Maori dance, the haka, I suppose, which is so fierce and hypnotic that it strikes awe and fear in the beholder. At least it did in me when I saw one, a highlight of a trip to New Zealand. The New Zealand All Blacks still perform a haka before starting each rugby match www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4LNjNXt1yM.

I tried to develop a theory of my own. There is male dance, like the haka, or female dance, like waltzing around with one’s beloved in fancy plumage. Perhaps Freud’s theory was better: dance could focus on aggressive needs vs. sexual needs. After all, women can dance aggressively and men can perform those mating rites.

And that brought me back to barn dancing, which didn’t fit my theory or Freud’s. Barn dancing is not aggressive, neither is it romantic and sexual. As I noted at the beginning, men are almost equally likely as women to take part. Barn dancing originated from the ceilidh in Scotland and Ireland and contra dancing in England, events which brought the community together for a rollicking good time.

Perhaps the distinguishing feature between types of dance is whether they are communal or performed in pairs. I went to see an Irish step dance performance recently, and part of the pleasure of watching it was the synchronicity, the perfect unanimity of those pounding feet. Watching people dancing as a group can be thrilling.

Of course, a pas de deux can be thrilling too, or watching Fred and Ginger, or watching a single incredible dancer like Baryshnikov. But that kind of dance demands excellence with the dancers on display, and judged, as in “Dancing with the Stars.” There’s something egalitarian about square dancing, or step dancing, or the haka. We can all do it, women, men, children, seniors, and it’s fun.

Go to orangeenvironment.org for Barn Dance details.

Photography by Rich Gigli

Silently a flower blooms,
In silence it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,
The world of the flower, the whole of
the world is blooming.
This is the talk of the flower, the truth
of the blossom:
The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.
– Zenkei Shibayama- (Rinzai Zen Master 1894 – 1974)