{"id":7875,"date":"2018-03-14T18:47:09","date_gmt":"2018-03-14T22:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greenneedham.org\/blog\/?p=7875"},"modified":"2018-04-30T19:56:05","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T23:56:05","slug":"neighbor-spotlights-from-the-prairie-to-the-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenneedham.org\/blog\/2018\/03\/neighbor-spotlights-from-the-prairie-to-the-east\/","title":{"rendered":"Neighbor spotlights: From the prairie to the East"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Monarch on swamp milkweed in Eleanor and Jay’s pollinator garden<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When Eleanor and Jay moved to Needham in 2001 with their two teenagers, they were surprised.\u00a0 \u00a0They were coming from West Lafayette, Indiana (home of Purdue University), where Eleanor in particular, had been part of a very active environmental community and many local projects — the most exciting of which was the conversion of a soybean farm back into native prairie and seeing it become part of a new State Park. Both Eleanor and Jay were looking forward to getting involved in the more liberal East.\u00a0To their surprise, they found that – at the time – there was little environmental activity in our town. (Happily, this has changed\u00a0a lot<\/em>\u00a0since then.)<\/p>\n

Well, Eleanor is not one to sit on her hands, so she transformed part of their lawn into a pollinator-friendly mini-mini prairie with native perennials.\u00a0She worked with the local League of Women Voters to reduce pesticide use and energized the green committee at First Parish in Needham, but generally, climate change was not on her radar.<\/p>\n

Until the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006.\u00a0 \u00a0That was a wake-up call, says Eleanor.\u00a0 Since then, she has felt that there is simply no more time to waste.\u00a0 Green Needham had just been founded, and Eleanor became a lead organizer of the “10 percent challenge,”<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0The on-line carbon reduction tool resulted in 900 Needham households and organizations pledging actions to reduce carbon emissions by 7 million pounds annually (!).\u00a0 Eleanor was also a key member of the group that led First Parish to commit to being a\u00a0Green Sanctuary.<\/a><\/p>\n

At home, utility bills were pared down with extra sweaters in winter and minimal air conditioning\u00a0\u00a0in summer. Jay taught college courses about the Green Movement in Germany. The new sense of climate urgency spurred Eleanor and Jay to aggressively look for ways to put solar panels on their east-west roof.\u00a0 In 2008, they were one of the first homes in Needham to have solar panels.\u00a0 Those 12 panels covered much of their electric need<\/p>\n

When they added a sunroom for light and solar gain, they made sure that it was super-insulated,\u00a0\u00a0made with a reclaimed wood floor, and used non-toxic finishes.\u00a0 They also added a second solar system as part of Needham’s 2014\u00a0Solarize campaign<\/a>, and now they are producing more electricity than they are using.\u00a0 What to do with it?\u00a0 Lease an electric vehicle of course!\u00a0Yet with all the exciting new technology, Eleanor still finds the most heart-warming sight to be her half-wild garden alive with bees and butterflies.<\/p>\n

Babette Wils<\/b> is a Needham resident and active Green Needham volunteer. Babette is stepping down from a career in international education consulting and stepping into a career as a food forest farmer. This article is adapted from a post on Babette’s BigFoot Gardens<\/a> blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Eleanor and Jay moved to Needham in 2001 with their two teenagers, they were surprised.\u00a0 \u00a0They were coming from West Lafayette, Indiana (home of Purdue University), where Eleanor in particular, had been part of a very active environmental community<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":7217,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-7875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-neighbor-spotlight","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenneedham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenneedham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenneedham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenneedham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenneedham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenneedham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenneedham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenneedham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenneedham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenneedham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}