Waiting for Sandy

It is dark and quiet and calm this early Sunday morning. The trees are still, a bird or two is calling out its morning claim, a gentle rain is falling. But turn on the Weather Channel and the frenzy reveals itself.

This is the last day to prepare for Hurricane Sandy. We are bringing in our trashcans, lawn furniture, extra solar lawn lights, wind chimes, potted plants, anything that can get blown around, away or through our windows.

We have filled up our water bottles and bathtubs (we are on well water; when the power goes out, so does our water); readied the wood we might need for our stove; have our batteries, crank flashlights and candles ready. We are eating down the inventory in our refrigerator and freezer, hoping to have as little as possible that can spoil. But this time, I also scanned the pantry to see how full our stock of non-perishables is. For this first time, I am a bit worried about having enough food.

This storm is being presented to us as a lot scarier than usual. Reaching a thousand miles across, with strong winds and an over-abundance of rain, it has the ability to wreak havoc over a huge swath of the north east. So it is not just your driveway or local street that might be impassable, not just your local stop lights that might be out.  But the trains, the subways, large secondary roads - in other words, significant transportation systems may be disrupted.

This time around, the local restaurants and food stores may also be without power. This time around, it might not be just hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings without power and ready access to reliable transportation. (We are being urged to fill up our gas tanks for if the power outage is wide-spread, the gas pumps won't work.) It might be millions without the basics of electrical power and transportation, and all the life-giving benefits that electrical power and transportation give us.

We hope, of course, that doesn't happen. But this is the third major storm event in 14 months that has hit the mid-Atlantic area. And when you factor in the droughts in the mid-west; the major snows this past winter in the far west; the record high temperatures - you know the drill.

This might just be the new normal.

If it is, we need to radically re-think how we manage our power.

This is a significant reason to promote de-centralized, renewable energy.  Beyond the argument of fossil fuels being the cause of climate change; beyond the politics of the economics of drilling and fracking and coal, we need to move away from depending on these large, centralized power plants if only to create more stable energy systems.

With the increase of so many energy-disruption incidents across the nation, we need to see energy production and distribution as a public health issue, as a national security issue (not just from outside invaders but from systems-security such as transportation, water, medicine, etc) and an economic issue.

Hurricane Sandy is going to cost billions of dollars, both in direct damage to infrastructure as well as disruption of daily affairs due to wide-spread power loss. So, for those folks who think that decentralizing the sources and distribution of our energy; putting wires underground; strengthening local food and manufacturing systems - in short making local economies more self-reliant thus ensuring that they are more resilient is detrimental to our national economic well-being, think again.

It is the continuation of our current mode of energy and business that will sink our nation's economy and threaten our personal well-being. Changing is the way to a secure and vibrant future. But the entrenched business interests will not make the change on their own. It is we, the people, who must lead the way.

Perhaps instead of lists like "Ten Easy Ways to Go Green," we need to create a list of the top ten ways we as individual consumers can collectively urge corporations to change the economic structure of contemporary society - moving from an outdated 20th century model that cannibalizes our earth to an innovative 21st century model that enriches it.