This was my first year at the Energy Expo held last weekend at Prairiewoods
in Cedar Rapids, a retreat area run by Franciscan sisters.

The location was well chosen.  Prairiewoods is a community committed to
renewables and recycling.  They have two strawbale retreat houses, powered
by a solar collector placed between them.  Their paths are made from
recycled carpet laid end to end, covered with woodchips and bordered by
fallen tree parts.  These are paths certain to gladden the heart of St.
Francis, winding around through the acres of woods behind the main
buildings.  I took a walk after the expo was over and changed my direction
twice because of deer on the path.

The two days of the Expo were jam-packed with demonstrations of PV wiring,
strawbale house building, earthfloor construction, and instructional
seminars on batteries, composting toilets (which also use redworms,
folks!), cave homes (very elegant structures) and solar and wind energy
from individual energy-independence to utility scale.

All the food served at the Expo was organic, including sausages and bison
burgers!

There was another energy running through this Expo, the energy of people
positively engaged in making the world better - a cheerfulness that ran
through all the demonstrations and the board meeting on Saturday morning.

If you have a chance to go next year, don't miss it.  Our Sierran concern
for the environment is crucially needed at this point in the development of
these technologies and we need to bring up the issues of bird safety with
wind turbines, concern about the potential for sulfuric acid leakage and
lead use with solar power, and the health and safety of living things in
rivers with the small hydro-electric motors that can be mounted on boats
and submerged in rivers.  If our concerns are brought up now as the
technologies are being developed, they are much more likely to be truly
environmentally friendly technologies.

Peggy Murdock

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