Susan Innis is the Colorado Carbon Fund program manager for the Colorado Governor’s Energy Office (GEO). Prior to joining GEO in 2007, Innis spent eight years as an energy policy advisor and green-power marketing director at Western Resource Advocates, a regional conservation law and policy center. She holds a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Colorado at Denver, studied energy planning and sustainable development at the University of Oslo, and earned a bachelor’s of science degree in biology from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Excerpt:

Coloradans have long had a strong interest in supporting clean-energy projects
in their own communities. For the past decade, most of the state’s electric
utilities have offered voluntary green-pricing programs, whereby folks
can opt to pay a bit more on their power bill to support new wind farms.
Those programs were instrumental in helping to jumpstart the first few
renewable-energy projects in the state. They were successful in part because
folks could drive an hour outside the Denver metro area and see some of the
country’s first large wind farms. Citizens felt a strong and direct connection
in helping to make those new projects happen.

In 2004, Colorado voters increased support for renewable energy by
passing the first statewide referendum on renewable energy. Amendment
37 required utilities to obtain 10 percent of their energy mix from renewable
sources like solar and wind. Due to popular support, the state legislature
later expanded that policy, and now the state’s largest utilities will get
20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020. The voluntary
green-pricing programs and progressive state renewable-energy policies
have led to the installation of more than 1,000 megawatts of wind energy
and thousands of rooftop solar panels.

Over the past few years, some consumers have started to question whether
paying more on your utility bill can really help drive renewable-energy
installations beyond what would be happening anyway in response to state
policy mandates. There is a strong interest among some businesses—Aspen
Skiing Company, for example—to drive development and innovation even
further. Aspen Skiing Company and others have expressed a strong interest
in directly helping to fund brand-new, local projects. They want to see
that their investment in renewable energy directly leads to new projects
being developed and they prefer to see those projects developed as locally
as possible. Through the Colorado Carbon Fund, we now have a product
that responds to this market demand to link a voluntary purchase with a
brand-new, local greenhouse gas– mitigation project. While carbon offsets
are rather intangible, to the extent we can help make the direct link between
a company’s donation and a new project, the more we can build credibility.
There are a number of carbon-offset programs that are run by nonprofits
and for-profit companies. Many of them are focused on developing projects
overseas, which is terrific for helping the developing world move ahead with
innovative technologies. However, here in Colorado, many folks want to
have a more direct role in solving the climate-change problem. Since our
reliance on fossil fuels has helped create the problem, it makes sense to try
to change the way we do things locally.

The Governor’s Energy Office hopes that the Colorado Carbon Fund will
build capacity within the state to develop greenhouse gas–mitigation projects
and monetize the reductions to participate in national and international carbon
markets. With President Barack Obama’s administration’s commitment to
make the United States an international leader in tackling climate change, the
Colorado Carbon Fund can serve as a model for developing expertise among
local businesses and agencies in participating in the international market.

Jason Salzman is an award-winning writer and media consultant. His articles or commentaries have been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Christian Science Monitor, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Nonprofit World, Sierra, Utne Reader, and elsewhere. He’s a former media critic for the Rocky Mountain News, and he’s the coauthor of Making the News: A Guide for Activists and Nonprofits and 50 Ways You Can Help Obama Change America. Salzman is cofounder of Effect Communications.

Excerpt:

You’d expect a newspaper like The Denver Post to give major play to the story
about mountain pine beetles devouring Colorado’s lodgepole pines, and it is.
It’s no Jon Benét Ramsey–style media frenzy, but the pine-beetle infestation
was the focus of fourteen staff-written news articles from January 2008
through May 2009 in The Post, covering everything from its potential impact
on tourism to legislative efforts to fund beetle-related battles.
But The Post’s coverage of the possible connection between the dying
forests and global warming has been skimpy at most….

The Post’s news coverage about the pine beetles raises the question of
whether journalists should discuss the possible role of global warming when
reporting on an event that may—or may not—be caused by it. And if they
do mention global warming in this context, are journalists obligated to quote
skeptics who may not think global warming is occurring at all?
Addressing the first question, Christy George, special projects producer
at Oregon Public Broadcasting, told me that when it comes to covering
events like forest fires or hurricanes, reporters should explain the possible
role of climate change in their stories. (George is the current president of
the Society of Environmental Journalists, but spoke to me as an individual
reporter, not on behalf of that organization.)

“It’s not that we want bad science, where people say [a hurricane] is
caused by climate change,” she says. “But the good science that says you can’t
say this is climate change, but this is what we’d expect with climate change.”
The pine-beetle story also deserves this type of journalistic treatment,
with different views on the possible role of climate change in the infestation.
And should global-warming skeptics be quoted?
George observes that the most hard-core global-warming skeptics have
made a shift, previously asserting that there was no such thing as climate change
at all but now saying the climate is changing, but humans are not responsible.
She thinks the views of these skeptics need not be included in stories.
“There’s no value to me as a reporter to continue to throw in that person
who says humans aren’t causing climate change at all, because we’re just
past that, in terms of the scientific evidence,” she says. “There are tremendous
disagreements about the impacts [of climate change] and what to do.
We don’t have to look hard to find conflict in the story,” she said.

Martha Records is a Cleantech investor and the founder of Green Spark Ventures. She lives in Denver, Colorado, and enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountain region with her husband and three children.

Excerpt:

The Cleantech space is fairly unwieldy. Spanning the entire spectrum
of possible end users and including technologies in areas as far-ranging as
renewable-energy generation, energy-efficiency infrastructure, water, energy
storage, transportation, building materials, plastics, chemicals, recycling,
and waste, the Cleantech sector is hard to contain. Since opening our doors,
we have met with such a variety of companies. Two Colorado start-ups have
developed new energy-efficient window technologies. Another focuses on
the conversion of organic wastes such as cow manure into pipeline gas. An
Idaho Springs company, Oberon, is working on converting liquid waste
from breweries and food processors into protein meal that could be used as a
replacement for fish meal in aquaculture. In Boulder, EEtrex converts hybrid
vehicles into plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles and is developing a vehicle-togrid
bidirectional charger. Porous Power, a company based in Lafayette, has
developed a laminable battery separator that can reduce production costs,
enable faster charge times, improve battery performance, and increase the
cell cycle life of lithium-ion batteries. And there are so many more.

Green Spark has met with thirty-five Colorado companies and a handful
of companies on the West Coast. We have heard from dozens more at
industry conferences and Cleantech gatherings. This is just our experience
in Colorado, a small slice of the larger Cleantech market. I doubt there is
any precedent to this full-throttled enthusiasm on the part of entrepreneurs
for creating such a wide range of companies with the dual purposes of both
making a profit and contributing to the social good. At times it feels almost
like a war effort, but instead of it being led from above by charismatic figures,
this effort is instead advanced by the individual efforts of idealists and
businesspeople who are frequently one and the same.

The extent of the entrepreneurial activity in this space is particularly
impressive given the difficulties these emerging companies face. They must
try to secure capital. They must find and hire scientists willing to work for
below-market pay until operating funds are secured. They must assemble a
competent management team, protect intellectual property, create groundbreaking innovation, and, in many cases, do so without the certainty that any real market will ever exist for their product. Although Cleantech entrepreneurs operate in widely disparate business fields, what most of them share is a desire to make a difference. And that is where we find common ground.

Heidi VanGenderen is a third-generation Colorado native who served as the state’s first gubernatorial climate advisor. She has worked on energy and climate issues in the nongovernmental organization, public, academic, and private sectors and recently completed the Chevening Fellowship in Edinburgh and London.

Excerpt:

“Climate change is like the Internet. It’s getting bigger every year, it’s not
going away, and you need to figure out how to make money from it.”
This entrepreneurial observation comes from Paul Dickinson, cofounder
and executive director of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) in London.
The CDP is a nonprofit organization that has amassed the “largest database
of corporate climate-change information in the world.” The CDP issues questionnaires
to companies of all stripes, and the responses can be accessed
by essentially anyone, including institutional investors, governments, and
individuals. In a world in danger of being filled with too much information,
CDP’s database is information that can matter, because it can and does help
guide investment decisions. And that is one key strategy in our ability to
meet both the challenges and the opportunities of climate change.
We who are fortunate enough to reside in the western United States
know challenge well. We live on unforgiving lands, and, by god, we can
face adversity and come through whatever comes at us because we are self-reliant.
We are rugged individuals who also can demonstrate an entrepreneurial
flair. When it comes to climate change, can and will we apply both

of these traits? Will we do so, in part, by reaching beyond the borders of our own well-loved region to learn what is working elsewhere so that we may borrow and adapt good ideas?

Awareness and acceptance of the human ability to alter the Earth’s
atmosphere clearly differs around the planet. I know this better now through
the opportunity to gather in an international fellowship thanks to the British
Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Fourteen of us representing eleven dif-
ferent countries listened, learned, and debated solutions to climate change
through the lens of finance and investment.

The perspectives from colleagues, and now friends, from China, India,
Malaysia, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Turkey, South Africa, Canada, Australia, and
Indonesia vastly expanded my personal horizons. Because we were based
at the University of Edinburgh, with several forays to London, one of the
world’s premier finance capitals, we were treated, in particular and under-
standably, to a UK perspective.

For starters, the public presence of climate change is greater in the
United Kingdom than in the US and most certainly far greater than, say,
in Kazakhstan. Whether on the British Broadcasting Corporation television
news in the debate over whether another runway should be added at Heath-
row, in product labels, in public displays in museums, or in ads everywhere,
the direct topic of climate change and the imperative to reduce carbon emis-
sions is a much greater part of the UK’s lexicon than that of the US. We in
America are more likely, perhaps, to use the phrase global warming than in
the UK, as they seem to use climate change nearly exclusively—but we are far
less direct in our address of the topic overall than those in the UK.
Consumer labeling is an evident strategy in the UK. The supermarket
chain Tesco, for example, has taken the initiative to list the amount of car-
bon dioxide emitted in the production and distribution of some of the prod-
ucts it sells so that concerned consumers can use this information in their
purchasing decisions.

Mark Eddy is a former environment writer for The Denver Post and current principal at Mark Eddy Communications, a Denver-based consulting firm specializing in strategic communications. In his spare time, he travels, hikes, and bikes with his wife, Diane, and dog, Charley—and tends his bees. He can be reached at wmmarkeddy@gmail.com.

Excerpt:

The story jolted us. It was a wake-up call we couldn’t ignore. It was late
2005, and my wife and I had just read that some scientists were predicting
the glaciers on Kilimanjaro could be gone in as little as fifteen or twenty
years. Doing some online research, we found many similar stories, including
several that said the glaciers had lost 82 percent of their mass since 1912 and
the mountain could be ice free by 2020.

We’d always talked about hiking to the top of Kili—it was on that jumbled
list of travel adventures we keep in our heads—but somehow other
trips kept pushing it back to next year, and then the next, and the next.
It wasn’t as if my wife and I were living in a cave. We knew climate change
was happening and that it would have devastating impacts. But we, like a lot
of people, thought it was happening relatively slowly. We tend to think of
major Earth changes in terms of lifetimes and not years. And at the time, the
estimates of how fast the changes were happening were much more conservative
than they are today. These changes, we thought at the time, wouldn’t have
dramatic impacts for quite a while. We had time to see the glaciers.

But this news was transformational for us. If the glaciers Hemingway
made famous were really going to be gone in less than two decades, that
meant they were getting smaller all the time. We needed to make climbing
Kili a priority instead of something we just talked about.

We researched outfitters that fall and winter, and in early 2006 booked
a climb for that September. Through the spring and summer, we hiked Colorado’s
fourteeners to get our legs and lungs in shape. On September 1, we
took off for Tanzania.

…On Kili, you walk slowly, very slowly. In fact, until you do it, you
wouldn’t think you could walk that slowly for five and a half days (the day
and a half downhill is taken at a sometimes-breakneck pace). So on the way
up, there’s a lot of time to think and talk. I wondered about not only the
glaciers, but everything that depended on them. What would happen to the
rain forest we’d walked through and the white colobus monkeys, giant ferns,
and massive trees that lived there? How would they survive without the
water from snow- and glacier melt? How would the farmers who depended
on the corn they grew on the flanks of the big mountain to feed their families
fare if the crops withered when the glaciers were gone? Would the entire
area turn into a moonscape covered with volcanic dust and populated with
drought-resistant plants like the upper slopes of the mountain?

Matthew H. Brown has worked for twenty years in Europe, North America, and Asia on energy issues. Brown has written more than fifty articles and books on renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy regulation, transmission, energy technology, and critical infrastructure protection. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from Brown University and a master of business administration from New York University.

Excerpt:

The typical activist government or business response to evidence of climate
change is to commit to reduce carbon emissions. Many go further and make
specific commitments to buy power from renewable-energy sources or to
reduce their energy consumption. A few take other steps like buying carbon
offsets to effectively neutralize their emissions of greenhouse gasses.
These are critical steps. But an essential element is missing—one that is a
necessary step if the fight to stabilize carbon emissions is to be successful:
financing. This chapter describes a few innovations in financing the transformation
to a low-carbon economy. These innovations do not rely solely
on government funding; such funding will always be limited and will never
be sufficient to stimulate the massive changes that will be required for this
transformation. Instead, these innovations focus on exploring ways to leverage
private and public capital, using both funding sources together so as to
multiply their combined effects.

The historical background upon which these innovations rests began
in the late 1970s in the United States when states like California and the
federal government adopted policies to encourage renewable energy. Climate
change was not yet on the policy agenda at the time; energy security
was paramount. Some of these early policies worked successfully over several
years to nudge emerging renewable markets closer to the mainstream.
California’s combination of tax credits and standardized utility payments
to independent renewable-power generators in the 1980s are an example
of this kind of financing policy. The financial returns from these California
policies alongside federal tax incentives meant that developers of renewableenergy
facilities could often make money from the incentives alone, whether
or not their facilities actually produced any energy. Fundamentally, though,
such a policy is not sustainable; it relies on a business model that is entirely
dependent on subsidies, and subsidies themselves rely on government’s
unpredictable appetite to consistently extend those subsidies.

Ideally, the financing arrangements to support energy efficiency and
renewable energy should rely less on subsidies and more on sustainable
financial partnerships between governments and the private sector to provide
low-cost capital for clean energy. To be really successful and sustainable,
however, any public-private financing initiatives should follow four
rules. The initiatives must be:
• Scalable. They must be able to step up to a very large scale; pilot programs
are fine, but the goal should be to mobilize large amounts of capital and
deploy that capital through well-marketed programs that reach large numbers
of people.
• Secure. Initiatives must recognize that money put at greater risk will cost
more than money put at lower risk. Therefore, financing programs should
be structured to provide secure ways to recoup money and to distribute
risks to those who can best bear those risks.
• Sustainable. Initiatives that rely on rebates may have a short-term impact
on building a market for technologies that are more expensive than their
traditional competitors. However, a goal for financing should be to seek
sustainable sources of funding that can provide steady support to the
investments that the private sector and governments must make over a
period of many years.
• Simple. Simplicity is key. People must be able to borrow money through
a streamlined process that performs quickly and minimizes paperwork
while adhering to underwriting standards necessary to ensure that borrowers
will be able to repay their loans. Financing programs, whether
designed for homeowners, developers, industry, or government agencies
should be designed for simplicity.

James R. (Randy) Udall developed Colorado’s first solar-energy incentive program, the world’s first renewable-energy mitigation program, and some of the most progressive green-power purchasing programs in the country. Udall is cofounder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas–USA and writes from Carbondale, Colorado.

Excerpt:

In Colorado, as in China, the petroleum-fueled automobile and coal-fired
power plant are at the center of the climate challenge. To slow and then halt
global warming will require dramatic changes in how we produce and use
electricity, and equally dramatic changes in how we transport people and
move goods.

In 2007, Colorado governor Bill Ritter asked the state’s electric utilities
to develop a plan to reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions 20 percent
by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 from their 2005 levels. In response, Holy
Cross Energy, a rural electric utility, studied how it—and the Colorado electric
sector as a whole—could meet those ambitious goals.* Here is a snapshot
of our findings:

• The growth dynamic—the difficulty of running down an up escalator—
complicates efforts to reduce emissions. Cutting greenhouse gases in the
face of increasing demand for electricity will be difficult and potentially
expensive.

• In 2005, coal plants produced 72 percent of Colorado’s power, natural-gas
plants 24 percent, and hydropower, wind, and solar the rest. To meet Governor
Ritter’s 2020 goal, coal use would have to fall by nearly half, while
natural-gas generation would have to nearly double. Carbon-free resources
and efficiency savings would need to provide one-third of the state’s electricity
by 2020, up from 4 percent in 2005.

• Up to 2,700 megawatts of the state’s existing coal generation, out of about 4,900 megawatts operating today, would need to be retired and replaced with combined-cycle natural-gas plants, wind farms, and other lower emitting
generation technologies.

• The statewide price tag for meeting the reduction targets would rise over
time as natural gas replaced coal and new, lower-emitting plants were
built. If electricity consumption grows by 2 percent annually, then by
2020 Coloradans could be spending $1 billion more each year for electric
power, above and beyond normal price escalation.

• If Colorado wants to reduce its carbon footprint, bipartisan leadership will
be crucial. Citizens must be engaged in the discussion, since effective climate
policies can only be crafted with their support, and because they will
have to pay the costs of climate protection.

Catherine Greener is chief executive officer and founder of Greener Solutions, Inc. Her previous positions included vice president of Sustainability Consulting at Saatchi & Saatchi S, team leader of the Commercial and Industrial team of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and director of quality and customer focus for a division of ABB. Greener lives in Boulder, Colorado, in a house featured on the Boulder solar-home tour.

Excerpt:

There has been a tremendous amount of work done by the business community
to contribute to the field of sustainable business. There are numerous
examples of companies using less energy, less raw material, and less
water. Some would argue that if we had another 500 years or so to continue
this trajectory of incremental and continuous improvement, doing less bad,
we would be able to reinvent commerce without much disruption. We don’t
have that luxury. Our climate and our world are changing rapidly around us.
The spirit of sustainable pioneering is what is needed now. Individuals and
companies who are pursuing the bold experiments are proving that success
of the company and success of the environment are not inverse relationships.
The first principle of natural capitalism emphasizes the need for radical
resource efficiency to buy time. But the companies highlighted here are
going beyond the first principle and are finding ways to reinvent their products,
processes, company governances, and infrastructures. These organizations
are exploring virtually the unknown and claiming these new territories
as viable ventures.

Despite their differences, all four of the companies have similarities.
They have been guided by strong visions, goals, and commitments to creating
a sustainable future. They have opened up new areas of thought and possibilities,
making appropriate adaptations based upon the lessons learned
through their sustainable experiments, and have openly shared their adventures
with others. They have a strong sense of “what if?” and inspire others
in their industry to follow the paths they have created.

Sustainable pioneers such as Pangea Organics, New Belgium Brewing
Company, Namasté Solar Electric, and ProLogis are providing the leadership
and paths for other companies to quickly follow and find their own
pioneering spirit to reinvent everything and restore our climate and planet
for generations to come.

Lisa Jones’s first book, Broken: A Love Story, the story of her friendship with quadriplegic Northern Arapaho horse gentler and traditional healer Stanford Addison, was published by Scribner in May 2009. She has written for High Country News, Smithsonian, Tin House, the New York Times Magazine, the Summit County Journal, the Burlington Free Press, and the Tico Times of San Jose, Costa Rica. She lives in Colorado with her husband and cat. Her website is www.lisajoneswrites.com.

Excerpt:

Dev and I were sitting on a concrete bench in front of the supermarket in
Needles, California, working our way through six avocados, a jar of salsa,
and a loaf of bread. We chewed silently and stared at the sun-blasted parking
lot. An old man emerged slowly from a battleship gray, old-model sedan.
He unfolded a walker and carefully made his way past a gleaming row of
Winnebagos. Eventually, he reached the square of shade that covered our
bench. He set his walker aside and sat down. He looked well over eighty.
He wheezed. His eyeglasses sat at an awkward angle on his face. He started,
softly, to hum. We ate. He hummed. The recreational vehicles came and
went. The sun brightened a notch, and I felt the contraction in my eyes as
my pupils set themselves on minimum aperture.
“Hi,” said Dev.
“Hi,” said the man, introducing himself as Vern.
Would he like a sandwich? asked Dev. Nope, Vern said. What he would
like is a way out of this town. This state. Goddamn drug addicts everywhere.
Thieves. Mexicans. Bad doctors. Opticians. Hippies. Liars.
Vern’s eye doctor back home in Gulfport, Mississippi, had sent him to
another eye doctor in Needles. To have his cataracts removed. Two months
ago. He was legally blind.
But he had a car?
Yep. He met people who needed rides. They drove his car, with him in
it, where he needed to go. And now it was time to go home. Back to Gulfport.
But he hadn’t had his operation?
Right. The doctor kept putting me back, putting me back.
Why?
Because he’s a goddamn liar, and I’m fed up.
Dev and I were full of many things. We were full of cold water and ripe
avocados, which, after a week camping in the desert washes of the Chemehuevi
Mountains Wilderness, made us feel optimistic. We were full of triumph
at having sprung ourselves from our desk jobs to hitchhike south and
be hobos for the winter. We were full of a feeling of rightness that we would
burn no fuel for the next two months, easily meeting our needs via the
excesses of our countrymen. We had started with only $20 in our pockets—
no credit cards—figuring with our shared Presbyterian frame on the world
that we could get odd jobs when we needed more money. We had already
spent one evening bussing tables at a restaurant in Needles.
We thought about Vern’s idea. If we drove him 100 miles down the road
to Quartzsite, Arizona, he would at least be on Interstate 10, albeit 1,700
miles east of home. There was a truck stop in Quartzsite, and maybe he
could find a driver there to take him on to Gulfport. In return for us taking
him there, he’d buy us a hotel room for the night. We badly needed a
shower. We’d hitchhiked here from Colorado two weeks ago, spending our
first night on a snow-streaked mound of dirt behind a gas station in Saint
George, Utah, where the nighttime low reached seventeen degrees. We’d
spent the next night somewhere south of Las Vegas underneath a mile-long
tunnel of barbed wire that had been used for training troops during World
War II. For the last eight days, we’d been in Trampas Wash, in the company
of edgy wild burros and phainopepla birds, which looked like they
were made of black velvet and sang sweet piping melodies suggestive of wet,
green, medieval Europe, not the ageless, bony, empty New World. We’d survived
on rice and beans and drunk from a tank holding water for mountain
sheep that were being reintroduced to the area by the government.
The deal was struck. We would drive Vern to Arizona. My heart flared
with hope. Dev was an environmental saint. He had built a cabin out of
recycled materials for less than $900. He cut wood and hauled water. I had
rented out the house I owned in town and moved in with him earlier that
month. He was tall and wise. I wanted to be more like him—despite my
supposed credibility as an environmental journalist, I still occasionally
drove away from the cabin to the gym twenty-five miles down the road to
work out. I wanted to be better, more self-sacrificing, more helpful, less consumptive,
more Dev-like. This trip, I figured, would help me be better. The
old man was a godsend.

David Akerson is an international criminal lawyer and lecturer on genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies and the Sturm College of Law at the University of Denver.

Excerpt:

The notion of raising chickens was the latest piece in my family’s locavore quest. We had already plowed under our postage-stamp backyard and planted vegetables. This left our two dogs with no real place to poop, but we figured that that problem would sort itself out. We also had beehives. And whenever possible, we shopped at the weekly farmers’ markets.

We had taken some significant steps to live more simply, less commercially, to be more responsible for our own consumption. But chickens! Now, that represented eggs, a nice protein addition to our tomatoes and squash.
The decision, therefore, felt like a righteous one.

Effecting that decision, however, was an entirely different matter, given the fact that no one I knew had yet tried it. What I did know was that vestigial city ordinances still permit residents to have two hens within Denver city limits. Serendipitously, one day I stumbled across an urban chicken class via an enticing advertisement: “Learn how easy it is to have the reward of eggs and more!” “Easy” comported with my vision of me in a hammock, hens leisurely pecking around my tomato plants, devouring undesirable pests, offering up eggs and the occasional drumstick or two.

So began my journey on a sunny and frigid Sunday afternoon. I love autumn afternoons in Colorado, and the Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield was made for days like this. On the historical farm that had been relocated
to the park, animals were bustling about. My eyes almost hurt from the brilliant blue skies refracting light on the yellowing prairie grass. Families in minivans were arriving for the nearby corn maze.

I waited with a dozen other strangers in a relocated one-room schoolhouse where we had assembled to learn about raising chickens in the city. The teacher was late. I cupped a coffee with two hands. We squirmed on chairs never meant to deliver comfort.

I scanned the class. We were all at least three generations from any actual knowledge of chicken rearing. For our ancestors, raising chickens was a real and necessary fact of life and probably not so romantic. The animals provided eggs, meat, and fertilizer, and they spread the manure of the other animals as they scratched for grubs and other insects. Today, most people’s only contact with chickens is through polystyrene packaging. The benefit of raising one’s own chickens had long been eliminated from modern life. This class was poised to restore to us the lost knowledge of our ancestors.

Through a wavy schoolhouse window, I spied a large chicken coop in a large fenced enclosure. I made a quick mental calculation—the neighbor’s house would need to go. Thoughts of demolition and perhaps a second mortgage
were interrupted by the teacher clambering loudly up the wooden steps in her boots.

She settled in at the lectern uneasily. She was tall, thin, nervous, almost agitated, and I detected a faint facial tick. I resisted the thought, but it was inescapable—she possessed a slight poultryesque quality to her. Perhaps one could spend too much time with chickens. The teacher explained that she had been a chicken farmer in the foothills of Boulder, Colorado, raising 200 or so chickens of the Araucana breed. She described the birds as if she were describing her children. Some were mischievous and full of verve, others were serious, dutiful soldiers that laid an egg every single day. Her favorite chicken, Chloe, had apparently followed her around like a devoted assistant. The teacher’s eyes misted when she told us about Chloe—Chloe was no longer with us. I imagined a stir-fry. She regaled us with stories of poultry wackiness, laughing as she reminisced down chicken lane. In the midst of one laugh, did I heard a cluck? I shook it off.