A Challenge

While watching the Regents’ meeting of 2/2/10, I was waiting for a challenge and significant inspiration.  I spent a day wondering why that wasn't the focus of the meeting.  The word "they" was on my mind a lot.  Then I turned around and looked at myself.  What about me?  If I'm so smart, is this the best I can do -- just sit here and wait for someone to inspire, direct, and lead me, and, in the meantime, cast about for something or someone to blame?

 

Once I issued myself that challenge, my lens started to clear …

• Ideally, those of us at NSHE are supposed to, at least to an extent, represent the intelligencia of Nevada.
• We’re charged with teaching our state’s young people the skills they need and fostering the creativity necessary to meet challenges, triumph over obstacles, and support themselves well in a difficult world.
• Given the above, we ought to be able to do more with the current state financial crisis than 1) cry uncle and subtract and cut back and 2) plead for assistance from an already struggling population.

 So, we have a challenge to walk our talk. Can we meet a crisis of this magnitude with innovation?  Can I do that?  Can you?

 

I look around at the advantages we have to work with:

• First, here in Elko, we’re the brightest spot in the country, economically, at least if we can believe the Wall Street Journal.
• We also, community-wise, have plenty of grit. We’re isolated from urban centers and urban resources and accustomed to self-help. We live in a very harsh climate and we cope. The unofficial theme song of our community, as I’ve identified it over the years, includes these lyrics: “I ain’t askin’ nobody for nothin’ if I can’t get it on my own.” I can’t count how many times I’ve heard various bands play Long-haired Country Boy when everybody present sings along during that line, with unbridled passionate gusto.
• In addition to grit, many people here have an amazing skill set. I suspect we have among the best mechanics and industrial electricians (etc.) in the world.

I’m thinking of my friend Jeff Ford, who’s the most skilled and brilliant person I have ever known. He can suss out solutions to any kind of mechanical or structural or electrical or otherwise tangible, real-world problem and then actually make it happen expeditiously. I believe he’d have been a bridge or skyscraper engineer had he grown up in a way that supported him in gaining the necessary credentials. And there’s Lee Dyess, my neighbor, who’s innovated ingeniously useful objects from discarded stuff – not only useful but aesthetically pleasing. He’s also gifted at writing songs and jingles.  What if they were part of the discussion?

 

We also, community-wise, have plenty of entrepreneurial zest and the courage to take risks, to spend time and resources on the if-come. I’m thinking of Jim Russell, who recently began www.elkolist.com to provide free regional classifieds in our corner of the world – unfortunately for him, Craig’s List started up an Elko site just about at the same time. But Elko List can do things craiglist can’t – like foster constructive community dialog. Besides, Elko List has a way nicer human interface. Then there’s Joe at Milex Technologies in Elko, who dreamed up a brand new strobelight design, principally for underground mining equipment (see www.deltekstrobes.com)

 

I have to count myself here too – and I many others will add to this list. I brought the first high-speed Internet access to Elko County, a move that caused Frontier to bump us up on their DSL list. Then, when Frontier charged way to much for DSL, I did it again, right up until I and the ladder I was on while trying to fix a wifi radio careened down two stories onto concrete (I’m too old for that kind of can-do, I concluded – I’m also too much a klutz).

 

I think about how in the early days of radio technology, some of the greatest advances occurred in the outback of Australia, because radio was so valuable there. Outback doesn’t have to mean hick or left behind. Sometimes it’s only outback people who have the time, space, “stuff,” and, perhaps most important, the necessity, to innovate.

 

In addition to human resources, we have:

• A lot of sunlight (this winter excepted!)
• A lot of open space
• Windy ridge tops
• Arsenic in our water
• Significant numbers of old mobile energy-inefficient homes
• ?? [add to this list]

 I own and live in a 1973 trailer in the spring creek mobile section. Over the years, I’ve replaced my windows with energy efficient ones and added an insulated roof and skirting, but my walls are still only 2” thick. What saves me is lots of glass (with insulated blinds) facing south. In winter I keep my solar oven open in behind my patio door – it’s a fine heater for my living room during the mornings. I cook all summer long with that oven. My oven was pricey (~$250), but if I had the can-do, I would have experimented making one on my own.

 

I’d love to hire someone to add passive solar heat collectors to my southern wall.

 
I’d also love to learn how to install and maintain solar panels, inverters, batteries – whatever it takes. Old grandmas like me can learn such things -- as is evidenced so beautifully by the Barefoot College in India where grandmotherly, illiterate village women who don’t even speak the language of their instructors become village solar engineers.

 

There’s arsenic in my drinking water nearly five times greater than the safe standard. I’m especially sensitive to arsenic – my skin has been ravaged by it. I have a reverse osmosis filter that wastes water. My neighbors who don’t have such a gizmo are being poisoned daily; yet MIT students came up with a remarkably cheap and easy cure for heavy metals in water several years ago. 

 

In addition, I have a 40’ radio tower at my place, which I used to use for distributing Internet access wirelessly to my neighborhood. Would it be worthwhile to put a wind-power device atop? It frustrates me not to know, and not to know how to make that happen if it would be worthwhile.

 

To top it all off, I think of one man, Greg Mortenson, who did the impossible: set up dozens of girls’ schools in an at-war country that historically has frowned upon educating women (and “frowned upon” is a gross understatement). See http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01152010/watch2.html for an inspiring example of what one person can do.

 

SO…WHAT COULD HAPPEN…

 

if we at GBC invited a consortium of people in our region to create a sort of informal energy/water/etc. think-tank (or, more to the point, a can-do tank) with the idea of reducing dependency on oil and other resource-depleting forms of energy and/or solving the arsenic-in-water problem so ubiquitous in the west, while also fostering platforms for new jobs and generating income for the college? Such a center or group could innovate and test products and/or serve as a clearing house for people who want/need to make their homes and businesses more energy efficient (etc.) and those who can actually do the work or provide the product.

 

If not in rural Nevada, then where? Who else has the grit and the courage and the know how?

 

And if we, who purport to be educators, cannot enable and inspire efforts and ingenuity to meet and triumph over Nevada’s economic crisis, then who can? Who will? And if we can’t or won’t, do we really have any business purporting to teach young people how to solve the often insurmountable obstacles in their own lives? Will we simply model for them fearfulness and turning to the public dole as the only hope?

 

If we can’t or won’t find solutions, maybe we’re not worth the money the state spends on us.

 

Will we wait for our administrators and regents to guide us in such endeavors (they who are already spread so thin trying to do damage control), or will we, individually, pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, tap into our own knowing and experience, and look around for what we have to offer that might be meaningful/valuable in this very new world that’s upon us? Can we leave off blaming them, whomever they are, and ourselves rise to the challenge of our lifetimes?

 

I’d love to see a meeting, maybe of three people, maybe of 12, maybe more – some women, some men, at least as many can-do people as thinkers, in an setting that levels the playing field and defuses incentives for egos to take charge of individuals (I’m including myself in that challenge) and, at the same time, inspires candor and ingenuity. So I’m seeing beer served, good ol’ Budweiser. It’s good at leveling the playing field and inspiring candor.