My less-car week
Vital Communities Communications Director It all began one December dusk on a quiet back road when a deer met the front of our car. My spouse and I were driving slowly, so the deer was able to scamper away, but our car suffered a cracked headlight and damaged front bumper. After calls and estimates, we were given a repair appointment in late February which would require leaving our car at the body shop from Monday through Friday — our...
Communication’s carbon footprint
Vital Communities Communications Manager Everything a business does or produces — its goods and services — has a carbon footprint. And so do the words and images that describe those goods and services, including the business’ marketing and communications. Granted, the footprint of telling people about your medical services, baking products or manufacturing equipment is nowhere near as great as the footprint of providing those services...
Making the most of fresh, local food
For Vital Communities Whether coming from your own garden or nearby farm, locally grown, in-season food has greater flavor and nutritional value than food that’s shipped from afar or heavily processed. It can also impose a much smaller carbon footprint.So when designing a new kitchen or redesigning an existing one, it’s worth keeping in mind features that help you bring in fresh, local food and bring out the food scraps it...
Heat pumps are here to stay
For Vital Communities Imagine a refrigerator that increased threefold anything you put in it. Nice thought. But what sort of device multiplies by three what’s put into it? Heat pumps do. Every BTU — or British thermal unit — of electricity used by a heat pump produces three BTUs of heat, or thermal energy. That’s 300% efficiency. Compare that with 90% or lower efficiency of heaters using fossil fuels, wood or electric resistance. This...
Is wood heat still good heat?
For Vital Communities Here in northern New England, wood heat is in our DNA. We live by that old “saw”: “Wood heats you four times: when you cut it, when you split it, when you stack it, and when you burn it.” But now we’re also being warmed by climate change — which is caused in large part by combustion, including of wood. In light of this fact, can wood heat still be considered good heat? The argument against wood heat starts with...
The electronic vehicle transition
Vital CommunitiesNext time you’re driving behind another car, don’t tailgate, but do study its bumper. Is there a tailpipe?If not, the car is an EV (all-electric vehicle). And its driver is reaping big personal savings and contributing to positive regional economic trends — all while lowering the climate-change-causing greenhouse gases of which, in our region, fossil-fueled vehicles are the single largest source.While still a long...
Creative Economy: Award-winning jazz composer-conductor takes lead in digital piracy battle
When Maria Schneider was in graduate school in the 1980s, she was mildly interested in her required music-business courses, but her focus was the music itself. Little did she suspect that, decades later, along with having risen to the top of her profession as a big-band jazz composer and conductor, with five Grammy awards and high-profile commissions throughout the world, she also would emerge as a leading figure in debates about the...
Creative Economy: At the Hop, Sharing the (Cultural) Wealth
April 13-18 was a week to remember at Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts. The Nile Project was in town, and this collective of 11 musicians from the Nile Basin dove into a slate of activities that brought them in contact not only with students and faculty from all ends of Dartmouth College but also a remarkable cross section of the Upper Valley. They met with students in a high school global studies class at Rivendell Academy;...
Creative Economy: At the Hop, Sharing the (Cultural) Wealth
April 13-18 was a week to remember at Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts. The Nile Project was in town, and this collective of 11 musicians from the Nile Basin dove into a slate of activities that brought them in contact not only with students and faculty from all ends of Dartmouth College but also a remarkable cross section of the Upper Valley. They met with students in a high school global studies class at Rivendell Academy;...
