[Ccpg] solar in detroit and more

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

A LINK TO THE FUTURE

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, May 1-7.2005



On April 20-21 students at  the Catherine Ferguson Academy (CFA) in Detroit
assembled a small wind turbine  and solar panels and then climbed a 25¹
scaffolding to install them on the roof of the (student-built) red barn.



The installation of the wind turbine and solar panel is a project of

the Nobel Peace Center and Marjetica Potrc, a Slovenian artist/architect who
creates visionary and practical solutions for communities around the world.
She came to Detroit to supervise the installation, which was designed and
carried out by Philip Holdom,  of

Alternative Power Solutions,  with the help of the students.



CFA  was selected as a site for this project because it is known world-wide
as a public high school with a life-affirming curriculum for pregnant and
parenting teenagers, mostly African American, 90% of whom go on to college.



The students learn science by running a fully-functioning on-site farm with
a community garden,  fruit orchard, donkey, and ducks, goats and chickens
that provide eggs and meat for the school community. The school includes a
nursery for their infants.



In June a video documentation of the CFA installation  will be presented at
the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway,  together with a video of Barefoot
College in Tilonia, Rajesthan, India.



Barefoot College was founded in 1972 with the conviction that solutions to
rural problems lie within the community. In the Gandhian tradition the
college encourages practical knowledge and skills rather than paper
qualifications and serves a population of over 125,000 people  in immediate
as well as distant areas.



Built entirely by local people. completely solar-electrified,  and spreading
over  80,000 sq. ft,, the campus consists of residences, a guest house, a
library, dining room, meeting halls, an open air theatre, an administrative
block, a ten-bed referral base hospital, pathological laboratory, teacher's
training unit, water testing laboratory, a Post Office, a puppet workshop,
an audio visual unit, a screen printing press, a dormitory for residential
trainees and a 700,000 litre rainwater harvesting tank.



.             Marjetica¹s  designs are inspiring examples of how poor urban
and rural communities can address questions of immediate survival in ways
that are both  practical and aesthetically pleasing. They include a dry
toilet in the La Vega barrio of Caracas, Venezuela, which reduces the amount
of water used by residents while also providing a sustainable solution to
the waste water problem;  and a roundhouse for earthquake victims in El
Retiro, El Salvador, which is resistant to small earthquakes and  can be
built by as few as two people in ten hours. See www.potrc.org/
<http://www.potrc.org/>



As I watched Marjetica working with the CFA students, I was reminded of one
of my favorite passages from Margaret Wheatley¹s Leadership and Modern
Science:



"From a Newtonian perspective, our efforts often seem too small, and we
doubt that our actions will make a difference.But a quantum view explains
the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to
be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those
complex events occurring simultaneously.  We are more likely to be sensitive
to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective.  However, changes
in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism,
but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness.
Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant
places.  Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in
working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will
affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness.  I have
learned that in this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of
critical mass.¹  It's always about critical connections"