It’s easy to get frustrated when trying to make big things happen without seeing any immediate results. The long-term goals that we are trying to tackle as members of Summer of Solutions take many small steps to achieve. Sometimes when I am sitting in a meeting, discussing a minuscule detail of the overall picture, I can start to feel extremely pessimistic. I start to think there are so many small steps that need to be completed before we can even start to see a glimmer of our desired end result.

For example, I have been working on Cooperative Energy Futures where there are TONS of small tasks to get done, a completely daunting list to look at. Really, I have to give props to the leaders of this group (Ruby, Timothy, Jason, and Austin) for making sure that they covered every last thing that needs to be done for this project in order to be a success. We have community outreach, website design, grant writing, background research, and much more to get done. The end goal is to get communities organizing their neighbors to make energy efficient improvements to their homes. When you hear the end goal, one would think that this simply involves going up to people’s houses, giving them an LED light and a 5 minute talk about energy efficiency. But, oh no, it is much more involved than that. And it should be, because this project will do amazing things.

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This weekend I took some time to do some real thinking about my involvement in SoS, and the reasons behind it. This was the first time I had done this in a critical manner.  In the beginning SoS made a lot of sense in a very linear way. I could spend a summer doing my own garden project, gain friends, fight famine, and have enough fortune to live on. The realities of finishing school and frisbee and african music, buying seeds and growing plants, writing organizing emails, keeping up with a thousand new opportunities and directions to go in, working close to 40 hours a week, and making a new spot in my minnesota life for my new york compatriots, have all found a way into the mix. Now there is a mess and I feel like it’s my fault for not managing my time and commitments better.

Where do I go from here?- I’m stuck in this mess. I feel like quitting summer of solutions all together because my project vision has failed so far mostly because there hasn’t been enough input from all the smart people who want to work with me, not for me as I had perhaps made it seem. I’m no longer giving it the attention that it needs and deserves. On the other hand, there’s a bunch of people now working full time on these projects and I feel a groundswell of support.

Now it’s raining and the ground can’t freeze anymore, the ground calls to the plants who are wilting in the weight without a large enough root system to stand upright. There’s a jumpstart meeting tuesday and I have many welcoming yards with some spots to spread some love around through giving living things. It’s my second day off in a row tomorrow which gives me uninterrupted time to get some things and more thinking done. I have friends, funds, frisbee, forthcoming flora, but no F harmonica I lost it at a music festival. Doesn’t mean I can’t still get Funky.

My friend Zach McDade recently posted to a Macalester blog explaining the housing bubble and how it has helped shred the broader financial system. I wanted to note two trigger factors obscured by his general statement: “the market decided that we had built too many houses.” Here they are:

1. Suburban housing values fell, causing people to default on mortgages, precisely because demand for new subdivisions slackened. This happened at exactly the same time as energy prices spiked (both home energy use and transportation are higher in the suburbs), and America saw its first net flow of people from the suburbs to the cities since the 1950s. Decoded: the energy crisis => the change in suburban-urban land use value => the housing crisis

2. Low-income urbanites started defaulting on mortgages or rent payments as the cost of fuel, energy, and food rose. Food prices rose due to A. rising energy prices increasing input costs and B. crop failure due to adverse weather in several food-producing areas (US Midwest, East Africa, India, Australia)  globally reducing supply. Decoded: the food crisis (itself caused by the energy and climate crises) + the energy crisis itself => rising cost of living for poor => the housing crisis.

So what does this have anything to do with me, the career I’ll be trying to start when I graduate in 10 months, or the stimulus package?

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