In January of 2008, a group of Truro citizens who were tired of feeling helpless about climate change met for the first time in the home of one of the participants. We had one thing in common: to learn as much as we could about energy efficiency/renewable energies and to establish our own action plan to meet our personal goals. To guide us, we selected the book called, Low Carbon Diet by David Gershon. We were driven by the need to do something!
The first step we took was to have home energy audits. This was a key step toward understanding how our homes use energy. In addition, learning to read our N-Star bill was one of the first educational goals. Bill Worthington, our Cape Light Compact Representative for the town of Truro at that time, attended one of our meetings and taught us how to navigate the bill and to focus on kilowatts used, not dollars. This was an eye-opening moment for many of us.
At most meetings, we talked often about our behaviors that needed change to impact energy use. We became a support group for one another, asking each other how one managed to bring cloth bags to go food shopping, alternative ways to wash clothes so as not burn so much oil, how to improve our driving behaviors, ways of thinking about more efficiency, and many other issues. Each of us made our own personal list of goals and tackled them as we could figure out how. A reporter from the Cape Cod Times came to one of our meetings and wrote an article about us, mentioning that we were possibly the first Eco Team on Cape Cod.
Unfortunately, we did not get to a point of measuring the impact our efforts had on our collective carbon footprint. This would have been the next step, but because of time constraints, the Eco Team disbanded. Every so often if we run into one another, we ask how things are going. It was a great way to get to know neighbors and to come together to feel that we could play an important role in addressing climate change at a local level and feel good about it.
The Energy Committee is committed to bringing the Town’s citizens together, in small groups and in neighborhoods, to build more eco-teams. For more information, contact Sally Brotman at 508-349-2601.