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Chelsea Man Will Help
To Galápagos Islands By M. D. Drysdale Allan Baer thinks so far outside the box that you tend to forget the box was ever there. He thinks economic growth should be measured in calories, not dollars. He's sure the industrial economy is making people poorer in essential assets. He thinks teenagers in African villagers ought to get on the Internet. He even lives outside the box. Instead of inhabiting an urban area where he would find the contacts to fuel his international career, he makes his home high on Beacon Hill in Chelsea with his family. But no doubt about it, Baer does pursue an international career which has included developing solar electricity in remote villages in Uganda and Tanzania, and creating a solar-powered communication system in Bolivia. And now he's poised to begin his most ambitious project ever—assisting the United Nations to switch the entire Galapagos Islands over to renewable energy. The United Nations Development Programme has chosen Baer's organization, SolarQuest, to set up a "Renewable Energy Applications Laboratory" in the Galapagos to test the performance of a new, mostly wind-powered, generation system that is intended to wean the remote islands away from dependence on oil. The UN project was a response to a tragic oil spill in January, 2001, when the tanker Jessica ran aground and sank on a reef, bringing attention to the environmental vulnerability of the Galapagos. The island chain, which is a province of Ecuador, is considered by the United Nations to be an environmental area of worldwide importance. As a result of the Jessica spill, a global grouping of high-powered organizations have joined together to create ERGAL-the Renewable Electrification of the Galapagos. Organizations participating in ERGAL include several UN agencies, the World Wildlife Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, the German Development Bank, the e8 Network for Expertise on the Global Environment, and more than a dozen other organizations-one of which is Baer's SolarQuest. No Oil! The ambitious goal is to produce all the electricity needed in the Galapagos, while using no oil. "The primary mission is to demonstrate the efficacy of renewable energy for sustainable development," Baer told The Herald in a recent interview shortly after presenting a paper on the project to a United Nations-sponsored conference on the sustainable development of the Galapagos. SolarQuest's role will be to create a laboratory which will measure how this state-of-the-art generating equipment works in the field. The laboratory is intended also to demonstrate how such rural societies can develop people with skills to participate in sustainable electric systems. As a start, international funding was provided to decide how to monitor a proposed wind turbine farm on the Galapagos island of San Cristobal. SolarQuest has already begun the work. It has brought broadband internet services to several organizations in the Galapagos, which will eventually create a network to test and analyze energy generation stations all over the islands. Actually, Allan Baer considers himself mostly an educator, not a technician. The technical expertise comes from the other half of SolarQuest, his business partner Ron Swenson, who lives in California. Thus, Baer's biggest priority in the Galapagos is not just to measure energy production but to teach young people in the islands how to do it. His first team there included 22 young people. Learning Theory Using young folks from underdeveloped places is a key to a process Baer has developed that incorporates everything he's done in an incredibly varied life. He calls it "productivity-centered, service learning." Although that sounds complicated, it's not. It simply means getting kids to learn modern high-tech skills by being part of productive projects that are really important. It's a teaching methodology that Baer started to use in California, where he assembled a group of underprivileged young people—a "bunch of misfits," he says with a grin—and using them to build low-income housing and an administration building for a non-profit organization. "I found we could create a community of people who begin to take responsibiltiy for each other within a project setting," he said. The system worked so well that he was convinced it could work on a national level, and he began to lobby Washington for a chance to try it out. His ideas eventually fell on fertile soil when President Bill Clinton set up the White House Millennial Council in May 1999, which included a youth delegation. Baer found himself being asked to set up computer communication through the World Wide Web, in undeveloped countries, using solar power so that the systems could operate in remote villages. The first idea was to try to build 10,000 sites, all connected with information and communication systems. He plunged into the work. He never did develop 10,000 sites, but he did develop 100 systems in Uganda and Tanzania, again using teams of young people, both African and from the United States. Using 300-watt panels, Baer's team set up communications sites with cameras and computers that could send web-cast images from the interior of Africa to Hillary Clinton in the White House. Why Computers? Why equip African villages with computers and web-cams? Shouldn't they have shoes first? Baer was asked. It turns out that providing telecommunication services—-radio, TV, internet, or cell phones-is considered by international development agencies to be absolutely key in helping the two billion of earth's people at the bottom of the development ladder, Baer explained. So important is it that in 1999, the countries of the G-8 put forth a "universal service mandate" that required aid-receiving countries to move toward universal telecommunications systems. And people in undeveloped countries are well aware of the benefits, he said. "People in those villages had heard about the Internet," he said. "We asked the villagers how they wanted to use it, and they had clear answers. Mail isn't reliable, there are no books, no medical people. They need access to government, and young people need contact with each other." Since remote villages are beyond the reach of the electrical grid, most are in need of an off-grid solution. That's where SolarQuest and its solar-powered electricity comes in. On to Bolivia After the African experience, SolarQuest committed to put up energy and communication systems in a remote village in the Amazon rain forest of Bolivia. There, he experienced a demonstration of just how important this work was—a negative demonstration but a vivid one nonetheless. "There's a generation gap in technology, so with the technology, young people have more power," he explained. "So the communication system was dismantled by the village leaders within a few weeks. "Information has a major effect in changing the power structure," he observed—with some satisfaction. "This was the first time I had a real sense of what this (enhanced communications) was all about." In fact, changing the power structure has been driving everything Baer does ever since he served in the Vietnam War. It was that experience that drove him to make the choices he's made in his life and that has made him "refuse to participate in the industrial economy." It's what has led him to homestead on Beacon Hill while he works globally. It is why his laboratory in the Galapagos would be staffed partially by groups of 16-year-old kids, kids who suddenly may glimpse visions of a much, much bigger world. A world in which one of the creative hubs is a family of Norteamericanos high on a hillside in tiny Chelsea, Vermont. |
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