Duane Ranney rejoins the show today to share stories of hauling a bike trash trailer in Monday’s snowstorm. He also adds his humor in other pieces of today’s show, like my talking about eating everything (mid-show), and towards the end of the show, anecdotes about needing and sharing quarters around town.
Karl Meyer, who I met on the pipeline walk a couple weeks ago, talks about the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station, which was built to utilize unused nuclear power to pump the CT River up the mountain, when electricity demand is low, and then release the water at other times of day when demand/price is higher. Now that the nuclear plants are closed, the river is being pumped up with fossil fuels, sometimes reversing the current from as far as 1.5 miles downstream at the French King Bridge! Karl talks about how draining and releasing the river wreaks havoc on the water ecosystem. (karlmeyerwriting.com/blog)
More about clothes drying, including Johanna and Sue talking about Coachlight Condominiums’ ban; Joyce on using the NHA clothesline at Cahill Apts, Tammi talking about drying in India with irons and monkeys; and unrelated, my sister Juji talking about the Heathcote community in Maryland where she lives.
On March 17-20, 2016, I joined several hundred people marching along the proposed Kinder-Morgan/NED pipeline route. It was about 50 miles, from Windsor, MA, to Northfield, MA, both towns where compressor stations are proposed. The walk was stunningly organized by Sugar Shack Alliance (http://www.sugarshackalliance.org).
People along the way joined and fed and housed the walk, and organized special events. In this show, you’ll hear Will Elwell talking about a cabin he built in the middle of the proposed pipeline route; Josh Fox talking about his latest film, loving the things climate can’t change; Rep Steve Kulik sharing Kinder-Morgan stories as he has witnessed in the legislature; Dragonfly, one of the members of the “Rev Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Choir” making up songs as we walk; Lisa McLaughlin talking about Native American sacred sites along the proposed route; Leigh Youngblood of Mt Grace Land Trust reading a list of Article 97 protected conservation lands that the pipeline would go through from Pittsfield to Dracut; Carolyn Shores Ness of the Deerfield selectboard explaining how Deerfield has been able to defend their town from a proposed compressor station; Moonlight Davis of Irving singing a pipeline original…and other voices.
A couple of months before her 97th birthday, with walking places becoming more difficult, Frances Crowe sold her car. She tells us about one day navigating transportation options around Northampton. Then she talks about her birthday visit yesterday to Gov Baker’s office to tell him to stop the pipeline and raise the solar net metering cap.
I have some anecdotes about the Unist’ot’en pipeline resistance in western Canada, about biking through fracked territory in PA, “natural gas” vs my natural gas, and a song “Wake up and Smell the Gas” by Mark Kelso.
Angie from Simple Diaper and Linen (http://simple.coop) talks briefly about the cloth and compostable diaper business.
In the last 15 minutes there is a clip from a Black Lives Matter forum in February, actually organized by WHMP, where 4 local Black panelists talk about their experience in Northampton.
In honor of International Women’s Day, March 8th, Western Mass Code Pink organized an event to honor women working to stop pipelines, mainly the proposed Kinder-Morgan/NED pipeline. Nearly 20 women speak, representing a dozen organizations across Western Mass (North). Music is by the Raging Grannies, Molly Scott, and Sarah Pirtle. The show is full of announcements and action items, so keep your pen and paper handy.
Take a bike ride with me through coal country of Eastern KY, and hear the mountains being trucked away. To where? Mountains of landfills full of consumer goods in Western Mass? And then there’s cardboard, mountains of Amazon boxes. What does online shopping mean for trash haulers? And then there’s compost. Susan Waite, Northampton recycling coordinator, talks briefly about the negative effects of putting organics in the trash. And then there are a couple of interviews from a composting conference I went to in FL in January: Brenda Sanders talks about incinerators and community gardens in Baltimore, Debbie Ullman shares her New York comPost box project, and Michael Robinson talks about collecting compost by bike in Cleveland, OH.
This week’s episode features Alex Jarrett talking about sharing, busyness and creating non-traditional family. More information at www.sharett.org/?p=146.
Medical marijuana was legalized in Massachusetts in 2013. But it has taken almost 3 years for the first dispensary to open in Western Mass. Meet Ezra Parzybok of Florence, a medical marijuana consultant and outspoken advocate for medical marijuana. Ezra was also running a dispensary out of his home – until it was raided last fall. Ezra talks about his personal story, and about ways cannabis can ease people’s pain, including a story about how one of his clients found healing from lung cancer by smoking marijuana. Ezra also talks about issues with the law, and how the laws and stereotypes around marijuana are applied differently depending on race and class
And at the beginning of the show, Luna Puchalsky has a 5-min segment of street interviews she did, asking people about the biggest problem this country faces in the upcoming year.
This seemed like a timely topic, given the recent spike in heroin overdoses in MA. My housemate Tammi Kozuch works at the Holyoke Health Center, so I talked with her and two co-workers, Gene DiVincenzo and Liz O’Dair, about their work in the suboxone program there.
Whether it’s food, clothing, or lottery tickets, how do we decide what to buy? Or what we want? I asked about 20 random people around town their thoughts on this. It sounds like we’re generally pretty impulsive – and the advertising industry gambles $180 billion a year to shape our wants.
My good friend and housemate Alex Jarrett talks in depth about some of his consumer decisions. Other featured voices include Nao, Stan-the-Fixit Man, and Joanna V. For me, I try to answer two questions before buying anything: Where did it come from ? and Where will it go?
The last quarter of the show is highlights from a presentation about refugee resettlement by Deirdre Griffin, New American Program Director at Jewish Family Services in Springfield. The presentation was at the Friends Meeting House in Northampton last Saturday. The event was prompted by the current Syrian refugee crisis. For more info, or for ways to volunteer, go to http://www.jfswm.org/healing-world/refugee-services
Tune in every Friday from 4 to 5 pm on Valley Free Radio, 103.3 FM in Northampton, MA USA or streaming online at valleyfreeradio.org
