Transcription of Green Streets #19
Speaker 1: You are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and podcast. Recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland, Maine and broadcast on 1310 AM Portland. Streaming live each week at 11 AM on wlobradio.com and available via podcast on doctorlisa.org.
Thank you for joining us.
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Lisa: Hello this is Dr. Lisa Belisle and welcome to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and podcast for January 22, 2012. This week’s topic, which is on show #19 is “Green Streets.” On our show today we are featuring Maine’s former governor Angus King, Michael Stoddard from Efficiency Maine, and Doug Welch from Maine Island Trail.
If you’ve ever wondered how it is that we come up with these topics, there’s a lot that goes into it. I thought I would spend time deep dishing with my co-host Genevieve Morgan on the subject. Good morning Jen.
Genevieve: Hi Lisa. These three guests that we have, have been involved in some conservation and energy efficiency for a really long time, decades I think. It’s so interesting that we’re bringing them on the show. Why energy efficiency? How does that relate to people’s personal health?
Lisa: Anybody who has been listening to the podcast, and I’m sure you’ve all downloaded every single one of the 19 that we’ve done, right?
Genevieve: I’m absolutely sure, don’t you think?
Lisa: Yes. Everybody has gone to iTunes and they have become subscribers of the Dr. Lisa podcast, has listened to the segments that we’ve done with regard to personal energy. We’ve talked to Marcelle Pick, “Are you Tired and Wired?” We’ve talked to Dr. Christiane Northrup about the body’s wisdom, and actually we haven’t talked yet to Joanne Arnold, but we will be and we know she’s going to talk about personal energy. We’ve talked to Steven Anderson of “The Body Architect.”
All of these shows are talking about personal energy and what you can do to promote and conserve simultaneously your own energy and the energy of your family. One of the things is to take into consideration that there is outgoing energy involved with sort of existing on the planet.
Genevieve: We all breathe in and we all breathe out and that is energy.
Lisa: Yes and if you have polluted air or you have polluted water or you have food that is impacted by potential toxins or things that create more of a burden, we’ve talked about the body burden as well, then it requires more energy of you personally from a health standpoint.
Genevieve: To detoxify and cleanse your system?
Lisa: Yes. I hate the word toxin and I hate the word detoxify, and this is nothing on you Jen, but because the body can handle a lot, but the point is that it doesn’t have to handle these things if we can minimize the sort of problematic things or the more heavy burdens that can go into the body potentially.
Genevieve: Right, well so recognize and then lower the load. Where do people start?
Lisa: That’s very interesting and in fact I picked up “Our Daily Tread,” which is the book that we are encouraging people to get and to purchase and in honor of my late Bowdoin College classmate, Hanley Denning, and it offers daily inspirations and this daily inspiration is, “Go forth on your path as it exists only through your walking.” This was a quote from St. Augustine. Of course if you want this book you go to islandportpress.com and all proceeds benefit the organization Safe Passage.
It’s a very good quote because the point is that you start where you are and you move forward. Start where you are. Start where you are. Don’t get discouraged or overwhelmed by the fact that you could potentially have to do so many things.
Genevieve: How does that relate to energy efficiency and our guests, when we’re talking about people starting where they are?
Lisa: It relates in different ways, Angus King came in to the state of Maine as a very different sort of governor, he was an independent, he had very different thoughts on sustainability and promoting business within the state and energy efficiency and he just started where he was from a governorship standpoint. His wife Mary Herman actually supported him and did her own thing throughout her time at the state house, so there’s that piece. Then you have Michael Stoddard of Efficiency Maine and of course …
Genevieve: He works to help all of us in the state of Maine save money through conservation of energy through changing our light bulbs and weatherizing our houses and also business people, so I guess in that he started out by assessing problematic areas and then trying to find solutions for them, which is sort of what we’re saying we should do individually.
Lisa: Yes, that’s right. Then we have Doug Welch from Maine Island Trail and they started with an island and a bit of path and they just kept moving forward. They …
Genevieve: Literally, literally. Exactly, that’s so interesting.
Lisa: Extending the path as they saw fit over several decades now. It is about starting where you are and not getting overwhelmed. One thing that I talk a lot about is instead of having a fear based approach to energy, the environment, personal health, is just do what you can.
Genevieve: I always feel guilty when I don’t recycle, but sometimes it just seems like it all goes into the same bin anyway, so occasionally I’ll throw in the wrong thing in the wrong bin and I get this guilt when I walk away from it.
Lisa: Oh Genevieve, I’ll do you one better. I used to bring my recyclables back from my hotels and my trips and put them in my luggage and bring them back on the plane. My ex-husband would make fun of me because of course, you think about that, you’re putting your semi-trash into your luggage which costs more, so you’re actually using energy to bring it back to your house to recycle it. Believe me, I totally get this.
I went to a place in my life when I was a doctor and I was really focusing on the environment and energy where I felt so guilty. If I couldn’t do absolutely everything, then I was so overwhelmed and so angry with myself and …
Genevieve: It’s exhausting. You feel guilty when you eat the wrong thing, you feel guilty if you don’t recycle in the right bin, if you leave your car on when you’re waiting for your child in negative 10 degree weather, it starts to feel like its own stress load.
Lisa: It is, and that’s its own energy drain. That’s so interesting that if you are trying to do something that’s sort of good for yourself, your health, your family, the environment, and you aren’t able to do it and you feel guilty, then it’s another energy drain. I think …
Genevieve: What do you suggest?
Lisa: I think it’s doing the best you can. As Michael Stoddard points out, one of the first things that they ask people to do is this sort of energy efficiency assessment. You go in and you see what’s sort of going on from an energy standpoint and try to minimize the outflow of energy and try to maximize sort of the heat in your home and then sort of shore up the areas that need help. Start with the simple and then sort of move outward. You can do that in your own personal life and your family life as well.
Genevieve: That makes a good point that you also can call in people with expertise that know how to do this.
Lisa: Yes, that’s absolutely true. There is this idea that really what you need to do is just live your own life in the best way that you can. Go forward as a role model in your own life to yourself, and then role model for your family, role model for the community, and don’t do it in sort of a, “Look how great I am,” but just live your life and live your life in a way that makes sense to you, that resonates with you.
Genevieve: It seems like these guests that we’re having on the show really exemplify that.
Lisa: Absolutely, and we are going to talk with Angus about his trip across America so that’s a way that he … that’s totally different from his governorship but that’s a way that he just decided at the end of his governorship he needed to replenish and he did something a little different.
Genevieve: I can’t wait to hear.
Lisa: I think it’s going to be a great show and we’re really glad that people keep downloading the podcasts and subscribing or listening on WLOB 1310 AM Portland at 11 AM on Sunday’s every week. We like the fact that people are liking our Facebook page and going to doctorlisa.org. We’ve had a ground swell of support and we know that people out there are using us to replenish their own energy, so we thank everybody for joining us on this “Green Streets” episode this week, #19 on January 22, 2012.
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This week’s wellness innovation comes from sustainablebusinessoregon.com. “In an area of Maine generally known for its strip malls and big box stores, newcomer Sebago Farms plans to build a 1.7 million square foot mixed-use facility that will house hydroponic greenhouses, a fish farm, and an algae-based biofuels research area and employ up to 170 people.”
“The ambitious project — the size of about seven Walmart superstores — is the first venture of WNWN LLC (which stands for Win Win or Waste Not Want Not), owned by Arundel, Maine, businessman and retired school teacher John der Kinderen. Der Kinderen also is a principal in project planning and management at BioSynEnergy LLC, a Doylestown, Penn.-based company that describes itself as a team of worldwide, multi-disciplinary experts focused on refining waste streams into green revenue and jobs.”
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Lisa: Today in the studio with us we have Maine’s former governor, Angus King, who has a lot to offer in a lot of different areas so we’re going to try to narrow it down. We know that whatever he has to say will be interesting. Thank you for coming in.
Angus: Delighted to be here.
Lisa: We also have Genevieve Morgan who is our co-host. Hi Genevieve.
Genevieve: Hi Lisa, hi Angus.
Angus: Good morning.
Lisa: There’s a lot of intersections. I wanted to let you know that you spoke at my son’s graduation at Yarmouth High School’s graduation last June.
Angus: That was a lot of fun. That was a great graduation.
Lisa: It was and I think you were invited because of Maine’s Technology Initiative?
Angus: That’s right. A couple of the students really got into the laptop project and they were doing national kinds of things and they invited me and said, “Because of your involvement with the laptop, we’d like you to come,” and I couldn’t really say no. It was fun.
Lisa: Then there’s been a long reach to this laptop program and a lot of things you did as a governor.
Angus: It’s in our 10th year now and it’s still going strong, about all 7th and 8th graders, about half to two-thirds of the high schools are now one to one, which means each student has a laptop, and this year, and there’s a lot of head-scratching over in Lewiston Auburn, every kindergartener in Auburn has an iPad, which is really amazing. When you think about it as I did, first thing you think is, “Oh, that’s crazy, these devices for these little kids,” but then you stop and think, “How do kids interact with the world? With their fingers, touch.” Remember we all learned to finger paint. The iPad is finger painting times 10,000 and they don’t need to learn how to use a stylist, they don’t have to need to learn … And they can do these incredible things. They’re seeing terrific results on just things like kids learning their alphabet, the little kids. It’s been quite an amazing project.
Lisa: I think about the laptop initiative as one way that you’re sort of helping people to be mindful of their energy, to learn in an energetically mindful way that’s going to help them later on in their lives. If you help them to be more efficient in the way that they learn when they’re younger, then it’s going to impact them and it’s going to impact the state’s economy ultimately when they come back to work here.
Angus: The truth is the laptop project was an economic development project. As I looked out over the landscape in the late 90’s, what I saw coming was an economy that was much more dependent upon education and technology than hard work and a strong back. My theory was, pretty straightforward, if we had the best educated and the most digitally literate society in the world, we would win. That’s the whole idea, because when employers look at where to move, it’s mostly about qualified people, that’s what they’re looking for. That was the whole idea of helping our kids to become the most adept with those devices of the 21st century.
Lisa: I understand that you spent some time working with our co-host Genevieve Morgan’s grandmother on something that wasn’t specifically energy, but it was forward thinking.
Genevieve: Yes, you are very forward thinking. Go ahead and …
Angus: Your grandmother, Marion Fuller-Brown, is one of the icons of recent Maine history. She was a stalwart throughout her 90+ years, particularly in environmental matters. I first met her in about 1976 when I was lobbying for the environmental community and she was working with the Garden Club and other environmental entities and together we came up with the billboard bill.
Genevieve: I might say that she was a long-term stalwart republican …
Angus: Oh yes.
Genevieve: And adored you.
Angus: Well, she was real funny. We worked together on the billboard bill. It was Jim Longely’s initiative as a matter of fact, Governor Longely, my predecessor is an independent governor. A lot of people have forgotten this. One of his major things was the billboard bill. I was assigned to draft the law. An assistant attorney general and I sat in a room one afternoon and we took Vermont’s billboard law and everywhere it said Vermont we crossed it out and wrote Maine and that was the extent of the draftsmanship. It’s been one of the things that’s sort of a trademark of Maine is how clean the roadways are.
When I became governor, your grandmother would call me about once, I’d say once every six months and say, “Angus, they’re trying to do something to our bill.” Sure enough, there’d be a bill in the legislature to say, “Well, okay billboards are okay for flea markets or for whatever,” there were always efforts to sort of chip away at it. Marion Fuller-Brown was always there at the front of the barricades.
Lisa: That’s an interesting point that you bring up, the fact that she would keep calling you because people would keep being on your case. I mean that you actually have to be sort of ever vigilant in some ways in order to keep the streets clean, to keep the billboards off the streets.
Angus: The legislature never sleeps in a sense, there’s always change and nothing is ever finally settled. In fact, that’s one of the problems with term limits. I voted for term limits back in 1993 and I think it was a mistake frankly, because one of the things that happens is the legislature now turns over so fast that there’s a loss of institutional memory that there could be a major issue, a lot of argument, a lot of debate, a lot of research, a lot of data, and then four years later two thirds of the people that went through all that are gone.
In my eight years as governor I had four speakers of the house. We have perfectly good people now, but it’s just this sort of turn-over and what’s happened is a lot of the power of the legislature has sort of migrated to the governor’s office or to the lobbyists or just sort of evaporated. Yeah, you think an issue is settled and two or three years later, you’re right back at it.
Lisa: Yeah, so it is that sort of start-up energy that is required in order to just kind of beginning again every so often whenever a time limit has been reached.
Angus: Yeah, and there’s some good things about term limits. It does sort of refresh the system, but in my view we probably ought to at least stretch it out to 12 years or something like that, because being a legislature is a complex job, it’s not easy. There are complicated issues and the issues get more complicated all the time and you really do want some expertise up there. Right now, just when you get the expertise developed they graduate.
Genevieve: That is one of the bonuses of getting older is you get experience and wisdom and you can use that for the benefit of the greater good like you’ve done your whole life practically.
Angus: One hopes you learn something over time. I know for example that I was elected governor when I was 50, and I’m pretty sure I can say safely that I was a lot better governor had I been elected at 40 because the experience that I had between 40 and 50 of starting a business, buying workers comp, shopping for health insurance for my employees, staying up late, borrowing money, all those kinds of things really contributed a lot to the judgments that I made when I was in office. Hopefully, it’s a question of learning from experience.
What I tell my students at Bowdoin is, “That’s why you need to read history.” History, if you think about it, is condensed experience. When you read a book about Lincoln and the Civil War, you can’t live what he lived, but you can experience it in a second hand way and hopefully learn something from it. Mark Twain, I love … Mark Twain has a lot of great quotes but I think my favorite is, “History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it usually rhymes.”
Lisa: There are patterns that people …
Angus: Absolutely. Isn’t that great? It usually rhymes.
Lisa: Wouldn’t it be nice to learn from somebody else’s failures instead of your own every once in a while?
Angus: My father used to say, “Even the worst person can serve as a bad example,” so.
Lisa: How does what you’re talking about relate to the work that you’ve done with wind-power, for example?
Angus: I came to realize … First I should back off and say I’ve been involved in energy and alternative energy all my adult life. I was involved in hydro-power in Maine in the early 80’s and then biomass and then energy conservation, so except for that weird eight years in Augusta, I’ve been doing pretty much energy work. I’ve always had an interest in it. When I did hydro, back in the 80’s, people used to yell at me and say, “Why are you ruining our rivers? Why don’t you do wind-power?” Of course now we’re doing wind-power and people yell at you and say, “Why are you ruining our mountains? Let’s do more hydro.” There’s no way to win that one.
I’ve come to realize, and particularly … Remember the summer of ’08 when gasoline went up to almost $4 a gallon and as it’s been that range, $3.44 today I think, I’ve come to realize how vulnerable Maine is in terms of energy. To be honest, it wasn’t a big focus when I was governor, gasoline was 90 cents a gallon in my last couple of years in office. It wasn’t something we really looked at. I’ve come to realize how vulnerable we are. Something like 85 or 90% of all the energy used in Maine comes from fossil fuels, almost 80% from oil of which we have zip, zero. That makes us incredibly vulnerable not only in terms of supply of just plain running out, but also price.
Every time … Here’s an easy calculation, you drive down and you look at how much gasoline is, every time gasoline goes up 10 cents or home heating oil 10 cents, that’s 100 million dollars a year out of the Maine economy. Ten cents. A dollar, which it’s gone up in the past year or so is a billion dollars a year that just evaporates out of the Maine economy. It’s money that people don’t have to spend at stores and at the mall or going to the movies or anything else. It’s an enormous economic impact. My conclusion from that is we’ve got to do something. If there’s any one characteristic I have is that I like doing things and not talking about things. That’s what lead Rob Gardner and I to go into wind-power.
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Angus: Wind-power happens to be something we have. We’re not lucky enough to be over a big pot of oil or natural gas. Hydro-power and wind-power are the indigenous … And wood, wood pallets and bio-mass, that’s what we have. I found a wonderful speech by Joshua Chamberlain, when he was governor in 1867. He’s talking to the Maine legislature and he has this … He was an incredible writer. He talks about, “There is in Maine power to the millions of horsepower’s that now passes unfettered to the sea,” and he’s talking about the rivers, the hydro-power. This was 1867 when they were just figuring out how to tap hydro-power. Basically he was saying this is something we have and we should take advantage of it.
To me, wind-power is the same idea. We have the biggest wind resource in New England. Is it a panacea, can it supply all our power? Absolutely not, but it’s part of the solution. We American’s tend to look for one big solution, the silver bullet, it’s going to solve everything. My friend Laurie Lachance up in Augusta at the Maine Development Foundation coined the term, “Silver buckshot,” which I like much better because that’s how you solve problems is with a lot of smaller answers which added together get us out of a particular dilemma. This energy thing, I mean the long term, and I don’t know whether that’s 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, but the long term is the definition of unsustainable.
Lisa: Isn’t it also about making choices? It’s not as much about what you chose to do oftentimes as what you chose not to do?
Angus: That’s right. We often don’t … That’s exactly right. We often don’t think that way. We say, “We don’t want wind-power.” Okay, you don’t want wind-power and you think, okay I’m saying no to wind-power. Really what you’re doing when you say that is, we’re saying yes to oil or yes to natural gas or yes to nuclear. It is a choice. That’s what I say to people. There are lots of opponents of wind-power and I say, “Sure, if you don’t like wind-power, tell me what you want.” Because there is no, no-impact solution to a problem of this magnitude. You’re not going to be able to cock a few windows and solve our energy problem. That’s part of the solution.
Anything we do, particularly when we’re talking about producing power, is going to involve change. It’s going to involve something different than we are doing now, unless we really are happy with what we’re doing now, which is putting a lot of junk up into the atmosphere and the cost is going to continue to escalate.
There was a wonderful quote from this prince in Saudi Arabia on CNN last summer, late last spring. He said, “We want to lower the price of oil a bit because we’re afraid the west will find alternatives, so we’re going to lower it.” In other words, he’s betting on us being dumb.
Genevieve: It’s that old question of, “Who are you going to serve?” I think Bob Dylan wrote about that.
Angus: Where do you want to mail your money?
Genevieve: It’s interesting to think about it that in Maine we’ve really taken to heart the buy local motto for our agriculture with all the CSA’s that are cropping up. What you’re really talking about is buy local for our energy.
Angus: Yes, but it’s got to be competitive. Governor LePage, I think to his credit, is worried about price. It’s got to be roughly competitive. Right now the dilemma we face is that natural gas is at the lowest price it’s been in probably 50 years, adjusted for inflation. In the summer of ’08 it was $12.60 a million BTU’s, today it’s 350. That’s amazing. The danger that I say is that we say, “Oh, natural gas!” We retrofit all our houses and we do all our power plants and then all of a sudden natural gas, of which we have none, starts to go up and then we’re stuck once again. To me the answer is some kind of diversity. To have a diversity of sources.
I’m a big believer in natural gas. I helped facilitate the new pipeline down from Nova Scotia. I do think it’s dangerous to become 60 or 70% dependent on natural gas, again because we don’t have any of it and it’s a worldwide commodity. Wait until the Chinese … Here’s an interesting thing, I don’t know if you all remember a few years ago there were all these so called LNG plants proposed in Maine? One up in Eastport, one in Harpswell where they were going to bring gas in on ships compressed then decompress it, put it into the pipeline, it was going to be natural gas. I predict we’re going to see the reverse. We’re going to be sending natural gas to China in ships. Then it becomes a worldwide commodity and then the price starts to go up just like oil.
Lisa: This is interesting because what you’re also saying is work with what you have and conserve those valuable resources. You wrote this book, Governor’s Travels, how I left politics, learned to back up a bus, and found America, that is sort of about working with what you have as an individual, that you actually went in there and you started driving your own bus around.
Angus: It had been an very intense 8 years. Mary and I started thinking two or three years before the end of the term, “What do we do? What comes next?” We sort of stumbled on this idea of the RV trip and it turned out in retrospect … I wish I could say we were brilliant and had this carefully conceived plan. It was sort of accidental but it was the right thing because it provided us an opportunity to refocus on family, to get away, to literally have a change of view of scenes, of everything. It got me out of Maine so I didn’t have to sit and read the newspaper about what I was being blamed for and all that, and for me it was a great transition because it had its own kind of intensity but it was different.
In other words, instead of worrying about what the legislature was doing, I was worrying about whether the next RV park had a dump station. It was still important, occupied my time, I wasn’t sitting looking at the ceiling and sitting in a rocking chair. It was great and it allowed us to sort of focus and bring our family back. Now, I have to say some of my anti-wind and critics say, “Well, he drove around in this big bus and it used all this energy and everything.” That was our house. That was our house, our car.
Lisa: You weren’t paying for the utilities that you needed to heat up your space because it was on the bus.
Angus: Right, that was our heat and water and electricity and everything else driving down the road. It was a one-time experience. Mary and I are looking at a new RV that gets 3 times the gas millage, is much smaller. It was an incredible experience to be with your family for five and a half months in that enclosed space and to see what an incredible country this is and to see what’s going on all over the place and put a lot of what we were dealing with in Maine in perspective, that was important too.
Genevieve: I love it, when you look at your book it’s like you lit out for the west.
Angus: That’s essentially what we did. The biggest thing people say, “Well what did you learn on your trip?” I say, “The biggest thing we learned was ‘no plan,’ no itinerary.” We didn’t sit in Maine and say, “Okay, on January 17th we’re going to be in Charleston and the 18th we’re going to Savannah,” it was all by the seat of the pants and according to the weather and tips and that lifted a lot of stress off us. It was an incredibly relaxing experience to have what amounted to 180 days of Saturday. If the weather was bad one place, we unplugged and went somewhere else.
Genevieve: That’s interesting to me because one of the things you have talked about is history and the importance of sort of looking backwards. Now you’re looking forward and there’s this enormous transition that took place in your life. Did you learn anything about transitions as you were going through this?
Angus: Absolutely, I learned a lot. In fact there’s a little section in the book that’s called transitions. I list a bunch of things. One is you need to think about transitions before they hit you so that you’re not just sitting there. You don’t want even one day of scratching your head and wondering what to do. You want to go right into something else. Secondly, you should sort of practice it. If you think … For example, I’ve heard people say, “Well, when I retire I’m going to take up golf and that’s what I’m going to do.” You probably ought to try golf first because you may not like it and then where are you?
We did a practice RV trip two or three years before this one. We flew out to Phoenix on the kids vacation and rented an RV and spent some time in Arizona riding around and deciding if this was something that was even remotely possible. I think that’s important. I think a transition at least initially should involve a change of physical space. We all associate our physical space with our current lives. You need to sort of get away, literally. Jimmy Buffet the great poet of our age, “Changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes.” I think those are words to live by. Sort of like the “The weather is here, wish you were beautiful.” I don’t want to go too far into Jimmy Buffet.
Genevieve: We’d like to hear you start singing at some point if you are willing to.
Angus: No you don’t.
Genevieve: No?
Angus: No, no definitely not.
Genevieve: Well John our audio guy is always catching us on mic singing, so if you can do that for us, we’d be happy to have it.
Angus: No, because it would be very hard on your listeners and your ratings … That would be it.
Anyway, you need to think about transitions. It’s an important part of life. The other thing I tell people is that if you do see a time in your life, whether it’s a time you’re between jobs or you have a summer off or some reason, go off and do something like this. We just loved it, it was just a great experience and this country is fascinating. You learn something everywhere you go.
Genevieve: I’m wondering, when you’re talking about transitions and if you can click the lens back, it feels very much like our country is in transition right now and there are a lot of people listening who are struggling, they’ve lost their jobs or they feel at risk, it can be a very incapacitating feeling. I know Lisa treats a lot of people in her practice who feel physically stuck, and a lot of that is due to outside environment. I’m wondering if you have any advice for our listeners out there … I like what you said about, “Just do something.” How do you get to that point?
Angus: You know that moment in the morning when you wake up and you are lying in bed and you’re awake but you’re not quite ready to get up and you start thinking about things?
Genevieve: Yeah, obsessing.
Angus: Bad idea. I guess I would … The lesson there is get right up. We all have that experience and it always gets you all anxious and worried about the day. The thing you ought to do is just get up. I think the same lesson applies to life in general, don’t sit around obsessing and thinking about all those things, get going, do something. Somebody said to me, “How are you doing? How are you enjoying retirement?” I said, “I’m flunking retirement. I’m very busy doing a lot of things and I’d frankly like to look at my schedule one day and find when I don’t have something going on.”
I think keeping occupied is a key thing. There’s no end to things you can get involved with. Everything from Leon Gorman left running L.L. Bean’s and now he works in the soup kitchen at Preble Street. I’m sure he finds that very engaging and rewarding. He’s been doing it for some years. It really sort of doesn’t matter what it is, except that it’s important to do something. We need to be refocused on what’s really important, what’s important to us, what do we need to live comfortably? It doesn’t mean you got to turn the thermostat down and be cold in the dark kind of thing, but what do we really value?
A trip like ours was a tremendous experience for me because it made me think about this little family and that was what was really important. The other important experience for me was when I was in my late 30’s, I had two young children and I came down with a rare and rather dangerous form of cancer and made the mistake of going … We didn’t have Google in those days, so I went to the medical library and read about it and it said, “Survival rate 50%.” I did survive.
That experience was very profound because it makes everything else … Don’t sweat the small stuff, and everything is small stuff. You say, “We made it through this,” the legislature didn’t like a bill I submitted, eh okay I can live with that. Again, it’s perspective and trying to figure out what’s important. I think the best days of America are ahead of us. We are incredibly creative, energetic, adaptable people. Part of it has to be that we have to face reality and understand that it involves choices and change is hard.
Lisa: Change is hard, but we know that you’ve helped us through a lot of changes in the state of Maine, I’ve read your book and I appreciate the changes that you’ve documented along the way with yourself and your family and I appreciate your coming in and talking to us today. Genevieve Morgan and I are very happy to have you in the studio with us.
Angus: It’s been fun and maybe it was Jane, your producer sent me an email and it said, “We want to give you time to get into a talkative mood,” and I emailed back and said, “That’s never been a problem,” so thanks for the opportunity.
Lisa: Each week on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and podcast we feature a segment we call Maine Magazine Minutes, which is hosted by Genevieve Morgan.
Genevieve: Thanks Lisa. I’m delighted to have Michael Stoddard in the studio today. Michael is the first executive director of the Efficiency Maine Trust. On July 1, 2010 the trust became the successor to all funds and programs of Efficiency Maine including the electric and gas conservation programs, the energy and carbon savings or RGGI trust, and most energy related projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The trusts mission is to help Maine consumers save energy, save money, meet environmental goals and stimulate the state’s economy by administering cost effective energy efficiency and alternative energy programs.
Welcome to the studio Michael.
Michael: Thanks very much Gen.
Genevieve: I have to say that the show today is “Green Streets” and you’re doing a lot to keep Maine Green.
Michael: We are, we’re doing a lot. We’ve had an incredible first year on the job which we completed … Our fiscal year ends in June, and we just finished our annual report several weeks ago on our first year. We just had a record breaking year, so we’re thrilled about that.
Genevieve: What does that mean when you say record breaking?
Michael: Most importantly we saved the most amount of energy on people’s electric and oil bills of any prior year of the programs. We’re thrilled to be able to deliver that.
Genevieve: You actually help keep money in people’s pockets?
Michael: Yeah, people save energy when they implement energy efficiency improvements to their home or their business and when they do that, more of the money stays in their pocket instead of being sent out of state to buy another gallon of oil or another kilowatt hour of electricity.
Speaker 1: This segment of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and podcast is made possible by the support of the following generous sponsors: Pierce Atwood, part of the Portland legal community for 120 years. Clients turn to Pierce Atwood for help with important deals and critical disputes. For creative solutions and sound advice about legal or business strategy, for peace of mind. For more information on Pierce Atwood go to www.pierceatwood.com; and by Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine. Makers of Dr. John’s Brain-ola Cereal. Find them on the web at orthopedicspecialistsme.com.
Genevieve: Do you think that Maine people are more interested in energy conservation than being green? I’m looking at the January, February issue of Maine Home and Design. Of course this is the sister or brother publication to Maine Magazine, and the Portland Public library just had Scott Simons Architects come in and do energy efficiency at work. This is a business, a big business in the middle of Portland that’s doing this. You’re talking about individuals that are doing this. Do you think that Maine in general is more progressive when it comes to energy conservation?
Michael: I do. There’s a culture of conservation in this state that goes back hundreds of years. You didn’t make it through the winter if you weren’t conscious of your energy needs. That started long before we had oil or oil crises or oil price spikes. We’ve always worried about having enough fuel to get through the winter. You could labor away cutting one more cord of wood or you might say, “You know, I think I got enough wood, what if I spent a little more time filling up the cracks in my log cabin or in my house,” or “I live in a 1927 home so it’s got some cracks in it that could be filled too.” It’s actually going to be cheaper for me to focus on filling up those cracks and insulating than it is to go out and buy that next unit of fuel.
What we learned from this program we ran last year to help folks weatherize their homes, is that for an average cost of $1.16 per gallon you can save a gallon of oil through energy conservation.
Genevieve: That’s an impressive number.
Michael: You want to go buy it from your oil dealer it’s going to cost you $3.65 a gallon. For about a third the cost you can button up your home and be more comfortable and more healthy in your home than you would be if you went out and bought another gallon of supply.
Genevieve: You’ve just come off this great year, what’s ahead for Efficiency Maine?
Michael: I think the program we’re most excited about is the PACE Loan Program. While we do not have rebates that we can offer homeowners who want to weatherize their homes, we do have the PACE Loan Program. If people go to efficiencymaine.com/pace, they’ll find out all the information about how to qualify for a loan if they want to borrow the money to make these improvements. We find that on average the cost of paying for the loan is less than the monthly cost of the energy that you save. That’s a great deal.
We’re also really pleased to be helping the governors initiative to weatherize some low-income homes so we can reduce the burden on LIHEAP customers in Maine because we’re disappointed that we’re getting less money from the federal government this year than we have in the past, but we’re helping to mitigate the impacts of that by helping to weatherize more homes of low-income customers.
Genevieve: I have one last question for you Michael because I know you were born and bred and raised in Maine, what’s kept you in our state? You’ve studied elsewhere, you’ve come back to do this job in Maine. What’s the motivation to stay here and do this here?
Michael: Anyone who lives here now knows the great things that this state offers. We have such a fantastic natural resource all round us, you have the ocean, you have the mountains, you have the rivers and lakes, so our family likes getting outside as much as we can. I think … You talked about the culture of people here that look to conserve are very sensitive about their impact on their community.
I grew up in Brunswick, I live in the Portland community now, I love the fact that I see people I knew from when I was growing up. My dad still lives in Brunswick so I’m connected to his friends, I’m connected to my friends, my kids now are of an age where I’m connecting with them and their families so that’s very special to me, and to be able to make a contribution to improving the quality of life and the quality of the economy here is a real privilege.
Genevieve: Thank you so much Michael for the work that you do in our state and also for coming to our studio.
Michael: Thanks for having me.
Genevieve: To learn more about individuals like Michael Stoddard making an impact in our state, explore the pages of Maine Magazine online at themainmag or pick up our recent issue at a local newsstand near you.
Speaker 1: This segment of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is brought to you by the following generous sponsors. Shepard Financial with offices in Yarmouth, Maine the Shepard financial team is there to help you evolve with your money. For more information on Shepard Financial’s refreshing perspective on investing, please email [email protected] for more information; and by Mike LePage & Beth Franklin of ReMax Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine. Honesty and integrity can take you home, with ReMax Heritage it’s your move. Learn more at rheritage.com.
Lisa: On the bountiful blog I spend time, well trying to on a daily basis, if not daily at least several times a week, pondering some of the questions that I have found impact my own health, the health of my patients in the world around us. One of my recent interests has been physics, because what we’re finding is that science is beginning to backup things that perhaps we’ve thought might be so for a very long time. This blog post is called Quantum Entanglement. It is from December 16, 2011. It can be found at bountiful-blog.com.
Quantum Entanglement. Can we remain connected to and impacted by another being, even when that being is not nearby? Emotionally this seems to be so. Physically? Well this might be possible too. It certainly is the case for particles. The institute of experimental physics at the University of Innsbruck in Austria has done studies showing that when two or more particles are entangled, they retain a connection. If an action is performed on one particle, its linked particle will also respond. It has been suggested that these same particles could continue to respond to one another from across galaxies. This idea which has been labeled quantum entanglement is a bit difficult to prove, but it is a fascinating proposition none the less.
After all, humans are large collections of electrically active particles. We are our own walking, talking galaxies. Our galaxies can’t help but be impacted by the galaxies of other walking, talking beings. Anyone who has ever known love, whether for a significant other, a child, a family member, or a friend knows how vulnerable a galaxy can be. It is good to know that this vulnerability may be explained by a physics. For those of us who tend to fault ourselves for wearing our hears on our sleeves, it’s nice to have something to justify our energetic bewilderment. After all, we now have the science of entanglement to back us up.
Read this blog post and others like it at bountiful-blog.com.
Speaker 1: Our bodies are often the first indicators that something isn’t quite working. Are you having difficulty sleeping, anxiety or chronic pain issues? Maybe you’ve had a job loss, divorce or recent empty nest, Dr. Lisa specializes in helping people through times of change and inspiring individuals to create joyful sustainable lives. Visit doctorlisa.org for more information on her Yarmouth Maine medical practice and schedule your office visit or phone consult today.
Lisa: On our “Green Streets” show “Give Back” we featured Doug Welch the executive director of the Maine Island Trail Association. The Maine Island Trail is a 375 mile waterway extending from the New Hampshire border on the west to Machias Bay on the east. The trail winds it way along the coast along magnificent and exposed capes through protected saltwater rivers and quiet bays and among islands large and small. It includes over 180 islands and mainland sites along the route available for day visits or overnight camping.
Thank you for coming in Doug. The Maine Island Trail Association has been in existence for several decades now, how did this all come to be?
Doug: The original recognition came in the mid to late 1980’s that Maine had an incredible resource of thousands of islands off the coast that were not inhabited in many cases. Obviously there are a sizable handful that are inhabited and have been for a long time. They were truly spectacular places that very few states, if any, could rival and yet the islands weren’t really being cared for systematically let alone used recreationally in any coherent way. A vision was put forth that there could be a waterway for small boaters so getting to your metaphorical street the idea is a waterway. At the time there was not such a thing as a water trail, that word did not exist. If you talk to a modern boater about a water trail, they all know exactly what you mean. It was described simply as a water way for small boaters.
The idea it started off with about 30 publicly owned islands, islands that were owned by the state that people had camped on or used for different traditional purposes and gradually grew by bringing in privately owned islands, islands owned by families sometimes for many generations that were for one reason or another were not used regularly but was a piece of property that they maintained so they were willing to allow people to come out and recreate on them, camp, picnic, etc. as long as they would do so appropriately, so long as they would leave no trace in the process and that’s exactly what the Maine Island Trail Association is all about. We’ve been doing that as you said, for 24 years now.
Lisa: If so much of the support for Maine Island Trail comes from volunteers, how can people get involved?
Doug: The first thing … We’re an association, we’re a membership organization. We’ve got about 3,500 members and we rely on that as being our primary means of communicating with people. If you join the Maine Island Trail Association, you can go to mita.org to learn how to join. You’ll get all the benefits of membership which include first and foremost people often think about our guidebook, which is a 250 page guide to the islands themselves and what you can do when you get there and what the owner asks that you not do. Some islands you can build a campfire on, some you can’t. That’s the first step in getting involved is to become a member.
If you’d like to check us out in some other way, we also do public volunteer outings where we will go and clean the beaches of say Casco Bay’s islands in a day, we do that twice a year, although people should know that those tend to be oversubscribed. We don’t end up having to look too hard to fill our boats. There’s something very rewarding about walking on a beach, looking around and just cleaning it up. Everybody knows about the dangers of plastics that are getting entangled with various marine life let alone just the idea that when you have a pristine place like a little island, it feels like a little planet almost unto itself. If you’re part of cleaning it up, you can very tangibly walk away that day and say we left a little piece of the earth incredibly beautiful and somebody is going to arrive here tomorrow to visit and feel like they are the first people who ever stepped foot here.
Lisa: Are the trails opened all year long?
Doug: We have members who are out there year around, which I will tell you I’m not one of them. I’m a fair weather boater. On a day like today, there are surely people out on the water. We don’t necessarily recommend that for people who are not extremely expert and trained in cold water conditions, but yes nothing closes down officially, it just becomes more difficult.
Lisa: Thank you for being with us today Doug. I’m sure our listeners will be inspired by our conversation and want to learn more about your organization.
Doug: Absolutely, thank you.
Lisa: Thank you for listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and podcast. This week our theme was “Green Streets.” We had the good fortune to interview former governor of Maine Angus King, Michael Stoddard of Efficiency Maine, and Doug Welch of Maine Island Trail. Each of these individuals gave us their take on keeping the streets on which we walk green. We also talked somewhat about the notion of doing something, starting where you are and doing something to live mindfully on this planet.
We began with a quote and that’s part of our deep dish, “Go forth on your path as it exists only through your walking,” which comes from St. Augustine as read from Our Daily Tred. The importance of doing so, of course, is that it impacts not only us when we go forth in our walking, but those around us because we are indeed all entangled in a quantum or otherwise way to those in our world.
Thank you for listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and podcast this week. A special thanks to those who listen every Sunday at 11:00 on 1310 AM wlobradio.com. A special thanks also to all of our podcast subscribers, for those who are listening to the first time and have not subscribed yet, we hope that you will do so and get our show sent to your inbox on a weekly basis. Go to our website doctorlisa.org for more information on our show, on my own medical practice, and of the many good things that we’re hoping to accomplish in the world and that indeed we are accomplishing in the world.
This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, thank you for being a part of our world. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors; Maine Magazine, Tom Shepard from Shepard Financial, Mike LePage & Beth Franklin with ReMax Heritage, Robin Hodgskin of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine, Pierce Atwood UNE at The University of New England, and Akari.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and podcast is recorded in downtown Portland at the offices of Maine Magazine on 75 Market Street. It is produced by Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Original content produced by Chris Kast and Genevieve Morgan. Our assistant producer is Jane [inaudible 00:58:54]. Audio production and original music by John McCain. For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, visit us at doctorlisa.org. Tune in every Sunday at 11 AM for the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour on WLOB Portland, Maine 1310 AM or streaming wlobradio.com. Podcasts are available at doctorlisa.org.