WINTER ECOLOGY

     We know I have an arguably unhealthy, at least morbid obsession with the world of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions - but I like to argue that more than anything, this world of post consumption ‘waste’ is the most uniting force and burden we bear as modern humans on earth. Just as we all eat food, drink water, and digest those things - sometimes into gaseous waste, the homes and buildings and modes of transit in between generate (perhaps less stinky, yet formidable) gases.

     In this painting, I’ve plotted the consumption of propane (in cold colors) and electricity (in warm colors from October of 2019, pre-COVID, to February of 2021 - including the overturn of life at MOSS and our lives as we know them. The electricity is plotted ‘upside-down’ because I wanted to use the overlap in the fall and winter as a beam of light, like the rays of the sun when it sets behind the landscape across the lake. The black triangles scattered across the propane data are purely aesthetic, but the colors of the propane indicate which tank required filling in number of gallons within each billing cycle. The scale for propane is in thousands of gallons between 0 and 3,000 gallons, and the scale (upside down) for electricity is in 10,000s of kWh from 0 to 30,000.

     The bottom purple band is the Lodge kitchen, the next (only to the 2021 side) is the Rose Yurt, deep blue is the Old Shower and Yurtville, then the Cabins, and at the top - The new shower facility. As for the bands of electricity, the yellow band is the main campus, whereas all the space above the yellow; orange, red, pink, and black ‘sky’ are the electricity eaten exclusively by the shower facility.

Then entering the ‘empty space’ found in the summer months, in this case in the summer of COVID where the campus was not one with cabins full of residential program campers and staff day in and day out, there are 198 bubbles - each bubble represents 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent from our energy use according to the following:

     Idaho Power provides our energy from their basic portfolio, consisting of 40.2% non-renewable energy from Coal and Natural Gas. From the 252,951 kWh of energy consumed in this 17 month painting, an average of roughly 101,686 kWh were fed by these sources. The 23 bubbles with green centers are natural gas, the 58 orange centers are from Coal, totaling 81 tons from electricity based emissions. Then there are 117 yellow-centered bubbles accounting for the 117 tons of CO2 emissions generated by propane from AmeriGas, used on campus in the same time period, bringing us to the sum total of 198 tons from our heating and electricity needs on campus here at MOSS.

     In summary - when I look at this graph-turned-into-what-looks-to-me a little like our landscape with some liberties taken, I don’t become sad. Instead, I get curious about what it would take to make our needs in this little community create a graph that looks more like the flatness of the lake or the fields in Long Valley. It takes intention, and choices, and thought - and I know in our MOSS community we make a point of practicing those as much as we can. I suppose when I look at the colors and peaks and valleys of our need to stay warm and teach and learn, I see an entire geography of experimentations and potential that have yet to be explored.