On Community

One day one of us said:    Right on.

It has been my experience that community is a verb, not just a philosophy. And this is definitely a community, whether it's just here as an Internet resource for those of us who are trying to learn more about and use alternative energy at Burning Man and elsewhere in our lives, and in the physical sense within the AEZ village at the event.

The folks who are most likely to look us up are the people who are already "sold" on what we do. When this list started, probably the majority of those who got on are people who are already using or interested in using alternative energy. Nobody had to go out and say that people should be using more renewable energy sources because if people don't already have that message, then preaching to them is not going to do any good. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink. It's important to know who your real community, or "family," is and who is not. And it is also important to balance that with being open and not cliquish. (I'm not saying that anyone here is cliquish! Just that it's something to be aware of that it can happen in groups.)

I agree that proselytizing is not likely to do much good, nor is it my style either. The one problem with that is that some of the cool altNRG powered stuff is not readily apparent to the observer. Someone who walks by the village may not know that a string of LED lights is any different than a regular string of Xmas lights, or that the juice came from the sun or wind. At my first year at BMan ('99) I walked around hoping to find some alternative energy and I found precious little. There may have been more there, but sometimes these things are hard to see. We are doing a service to the entire Bman community by getting word out that says, "Hey, here we are, come see what we are doing with alternative energy!", and making ourselves available to show what can be done.

That is a peaceful revolution right there, IMHO.