By BILL CHAISSON
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CLAREMONT — A series of lectures was held on Saturday at the Claremont Makerspace called “Sustainability and the art of living well.” The event was organized by artist Allison Zito, who like a lot of nervous partygoers, thought perhaps no one would show up. In fact, about 30 people of all ages turned up. Chairs from all over the makerspace had to be dragged into the large computer lab where the speakers gave their presentations. When speaker Lionel Chute asked how many people present were from Sullivan County, most hands in the room went up.
In Claremont groups of people often gather at sporting events and at private clubs, but the makerspace is a place that is not about recreation per se and to which the general public is invited. As organizer Zito writes in the the program for the event: “[The makerspace] creates an environment that embraces the core of our best selves. United interests that reverberate beyond the place and ripple throughout the larger community …”
The event began at 3 p.m. with a lecture by Grace Gershuny, an organic inspector and a member of the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition, who was determined to give a presentation with a positive outlook. She shied away from talking a lot about what ruins soils and focused more on the characteristics of good soils, how to maintain or restore them, and “the things that healthy soil does for us,” including storing carbon and filtering drinking water. In a proactive attempt to forestall gloom about climate change, Gershuny said that she thinks of hope as being something that reminds you something is “worth doing no matter what the outcome.”
She described a healthy soil as “more bread-like than flour-like” as it is held together by a root system and supported by a microbial community. She advocated preservation of the “rhizosphere,” the zone immediately around roots, by disturbing the area as little as possible.
Gershuny is not a vegan activist; she pointed out the co-evolution of grazing animals and grasslands, and the importance of the former in the development and maintenance of the latter. She does not want to get rid of cows, although she is no fan of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).
The conventional wisdom, she said, has been to return the organics to the soil that you take away, largely through composting and growing of cover crops. The new wisdom, in contrast, is to leave as much in place as possible.
Althought Gershuny spent the lion’s share of her lecture saying what should be done, she did take some time to advocate against the Haber process, an industrial method for fixing nitrogen. She noted that 3-5 percent of natural gas produced is used to make fertilizer by this process, which was originally developed to make dynamite. Atmospheric nitrogen is combined with hydrogen stripped from methane (natural gas) to produce ammonia, ammonium nitrate, and urea. Over-application of fertilizers, Gershuny said, causes nitrous oxide to rise into the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas that is 310 times more potent than Carbon dioxide.
Lionel Chute is the director of natural resources for Sullivan County and the district manager for the Sullivan County Conservation District. He began with a definition of “sustainable””: activities that meet the needs of the present without compromising the well being of future generations. While Gershuny was determined to positive, Chute did not hesitate to enumerate many ways that earth, air, soil, and water (“the great elements”) were being depleted or despoiled by current practices.
Chute said that one third of all arable land had been lost since 1950 and that three pounds of soil is lost for every pond of food produced. Forty percent of all U.S. waterways are too polluted to swim in. Each year between 4 and 18 million people die because of air pollution. Since 1500 875 species of plants and animals have been documented as going extinct and by 2100 perhaps half of all species now living will be extinct. Until 1973 the ocean was absorbing the surplus carbon dioxide generated by anthropogenic emissions, but it is now saturated and therefore atmospheric temperatures are now rising rapidly.
After providing his audience with an alarming litany of facts and figures, Chute then made them aware of local resources that help Sullivan County residents to lead more sustainable lives and decrease their contribution to the destruction he had just described.These included many programs on the county campus in Unity, like the community garden, the Eco Ag Center, and the Pollinator Garden.
Anita Gonzales, who works for Revision Energy, a solar panel installation company in Brentwood, also spoke, and Jan Lambert, the author of “Water, Land, and Climate: the Critical Connection” (2015) was on hand to make available copies of her publication The Valley Green Journal.
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