This New England

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

-- Robert Frost

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It's difficult to put up any new-energy facility anywhere, it seems. Even if you try to install a small windmill on your roof, some neighbors may complain.

But New England state governments might have more freedom to do it on state land than people planning projects on private land. And governors, after all, have all used a lot of rhetoric talking about the need to go green.

The Massachusetts Executive office of Energy and Environmental Affairs notes that state land and buildings could be used for a wide range of alternative-energy projects, such as solar panels on rooftops and wind farms.

It estimated that wind projects on the grounds of state facilities (e.g., UMass campuses?) could produce 57 megawatts and solar installations 32 megawatts. There are also such other alternative energy sources as hydro power, for state facilities near rivers -- especially in the hilly western part of the state -- as well as bio-mass, etc.

That would be just the start. Consider all the parkland and other large tracts the state owns.

You'd think that at the very least you could put some windmills on campuses. After all, most students these days want to be considered green. They could go look at the windmill of Babson College, in Wellesley, as an example.

Lots of campuses in New England -- lots of easy space for alternative energy. Rural and suburban campuses, anyway, should strive to become energy-independent.

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What is it about Vermont? How do the endless winters result in Green Mountain people being so obsessed with nudity?

The latest, the Associated Press reports, is that the Town of Westmore, in the Northeast Kingdom, will be asked next week whether to approve $25,000 to enforce a nudity ban after some complaints about a cove on the hyper-scenic, fiord-like Lake Willoughby (purported to have a Loch Ness-style monster, by the way) being considered "clothing optional'' by devoted nudists.

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"The Snowstorm,'' by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delated, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hiddden thorn;
Fills up the famer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

 Tags  Babson College Vt. Wetmore windmills

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