| When we newcomers got here — where “here” is the small town of Paonia, in western Colorado — in the 1970s, many vital institutions were missing. There was no health food store, no public radio station, no alternative school. Also missing was a local environmental group and a hometown weekly newspaper that didn’t print “Stop Gun Control Now!” exhortations on every page.
So we set out to fill the gaps, as newcomers did in thousands of small towns across the West. Betsy Marston and I started a local weekly in January 1975. Others created a Waldorf alternative school, a green activist group called WSERC (which some locals called berserk), a public radio station, and an organic food store.
If the locals had their little berserk jokes, we had ours. We said we were a self-funded Peace Corps civilizing a forgotten corner of America. We got even more obnoxious in the mid 1980s, when our coal boom went bust. The local people, we said, had misused the land by mining and drilling and grazing and logging it. Their strategy had failed and many were forced to leave in search of work. All we needed were green ways of taking over the landscapes and homes they had left behind.
Looking back, it is clear that we had overlooked something important. We could establish an alternative elementary school and a public radio station and an arts center because we didn’t have to create a medical clinic or hospital or fire department or community meeting hall or library. The basic services were already here.
We could try to go back to the land because almost every house, no matter how small its acreage, had irrigation water. The water that fed our plots came off the mountains via dirt ditches scraped into hillsides by landowner cooperatives 100 years ago.
For many years, I took what was here for granted and saw only what was lacking and the wounds to the earth caused by a rural population eking out a living far from the urban centers. My eyes began to open when, in 1983, I was elected to the board of directors of the Delta-Montrose Electric Association — a rural electric co-operative that then served 18,000 meters, and had 110 employees and $20 million in revenue.
I came on the board determined to turn the co-op green. But at my first meeting the board had to decide whether to fire 14 supervisors to keep the co-op’s financial nose above water. Which direction was green in that vote? Longer term, the co-op got its electricity from dams and coal-fired power plants. Forty-year contracts made those arrangements tamper proof. Even though I was now sitting at the table, I was hemmed in by old institutional arrangements. And most of the questions we faced had nothing to do with conservation or solar energy or dirty air. To my dismay, I was plunged into the gritty job of keeping power flowing and affordable to two of Colorado’s lowest-income places.
There was also the local culture to deal with. My 11 fellow board members — mostly farmers and ranchers — would tell me that they’d had to drive “clear across the road to run over a prairie rat” on their way to the meeting. But they were left jokeless and stunned when a Utah group proposed draining Glen Canyon Dam. How, they asked me, could anybody who had spent even a day in the West want to destroy 28 million acre-feet of storage? Environmentalists, certainly including me, left them befuddled and angry.
Plunging into an alien world would have been a stretch for any newcomer. It was especially schizophrenic for a former New Yorker whose day job was publishing High Country News — the West’s environmental newspaper.
To move forward 23 years, I am no longer the publisher of HCN, but remain on the board of DMEA. The board and staff are still conservative, but today our co-op promotes energy conservation and makes it easy for members to connect wind and solar generators to our system. And while we are still bound to our power supplier by a long-term contract, we are very skeptical over its plans to spend $5 billion to build three new coal-fired power plants.
As another sign of change, DMEA was among the very few Colorado utilities to back Amendment 37 in the 2004 election. The ballot measure passed, and now requires utilities to include solar, wind and other alternative sources of electricity in their mix of power generation.
I was reminded of this evolution when I heard that Courtney White of the Quivira Coalition was taking a sabbatical from his “A West that Works” column. Courtney helped create an environmental group that works with ranchers to improve their economic and ecological situation.
What Courtney does with Quivira and what I do with DMEA falls under the catchall of collaboration, which to many critics means compromising away nature. But I know first hand that Quivira’s goal isn’t to patch together a failed system through compromise. The goal is to create a new approach to ranching.
In the same way, I don’t want to make DMEA a little less damaging to the environment by having our meter readers drive Priuses, or by buying wind power from some distant wind farm. Putting less air pollution into the air would only deal with part of the damage our co-operative unwillingly does to its communities. The major damage is political and economic. We live in one of the poorest parts of Colorado, and yet we send $30 million a year to distant communities to buy electricity.
What makes this cash hemorrhage especially irritating is that we are surrounded by potential sources of electricity. The manure from three dairy cows can power two houses, and we have thousands of dairy cows in our area. We have a timber mill whose waste wood and sawdust could provide our utility with five percent of its power. And the three local coal companies produce methane gas as a byproduct of mining. At present, because of regulations and lack of a market, that climate-changing gas is vented to the atmosphere instead of generating electricity locally.
I estimate – wildly – that we could generate a third of our power locally. But the present system doesn’t allow it. We are locked into a long term contract to buy electricity from distant power plants. The terms of the contract makes it impractical or impossible or unprofitable for us to encourage conservation or to generate our own power. DMEA earns $50 million a year in revenues and has $100 million in assets, but we are helpless in many important ways.
What weapons do we have to change the situation? The most effective is collaboration.
Twice a month in our Montrose board room, people of very different values and skills sit down to figure out what we can do to improve life for our 30,000 owners. The key to our effectiveness is that we’re diverse, and therefore we are forced to avoid the narrow solutions we would each implement if we had our way. For example, if we were all "green", we would probably be heavily subsidizing solar energy at the expense of consumers who can’t afford such systems. If we were developers or contractors, we’d be subsidizing new home connections at the expense of existing homeowners. If we were tied to mining, we’d keep industrial rates as low as possible to keep mining jobs here.
But because it takes a near consensus to approve major change, our solutions have to work for all of us. The solutions have to protect or at least not harm the environment. They have to be economical. And they have to be workable and safe for our line crews.
What does hard-nosed collaboration lead to? Making homes and businesses electrically efficient is to everyone’s advantage. Through a subsidiary, we sell ground-based heat pumps to homes and businesses because they’re inexpensive to operate and provide DMEA with a steady, profitable load. And we seem to be in agreement that the development of unsubsidized local sources of electricity makes sense all around. But the system we are embedded in will have to change substantially before we will be able to turn manure or coal-mine waste gas or sawdust. into electricity.
To implement those changes, we will have to exert political pressure within the family of electric co-ops and out in the larger world. Because our board and staff are diverse, when we can agree on something, we have a variety of strings to pull and many different logs to roll. We can build red-to-blue coalitions, and .we can go at the opposition from every point of the political compass.
I’ve heard it said that collaboration is for sissies. It isn’t. Collaboration is a way to reform society by creating solutions that work for everyone. The alternative to collaboration is to have one set of ideas — one ideology — call the shots. That winner rules approach often leads to disaster. |
