“The Monkey Wrench Gang Meets the Third Industrial Revolution”
On a beautiful late summer day, Sasha Brandt, an Iroquois woman from Canada, is hiking the Mahoosuc Range along the Appalachian Trail with her companion, a wolf named Cochise. There she meets Daniel Roy, a guide and outdoorsman. After a unique first encounter the three continue their hike together. A few days later, while paddling on Lake Umbagog, they find themselves unexpectedly camping together with an unusual assortment of people including a former Olympic paddler, a deer farmer, a retired spook who was the first US victim of Lyme disease and an iconoclast named Thomas who lives in multiple backwoods abodes in the Great North Woods and rides a moose named Metallak.
They discover that they have one very important thing in common . . . a deep concern about a private consortium proposing to bring a powerline with massive 150 foot towers through the most beautiful parts of the state to transport electricity from Canada to the toney suburbs of Boston and beyond.
The threat to the environment is only the tip of an iceberg that includes the value of homes, farms and businesses built by generations in this hardscrabble land. In short, “Granite Skyway” poses an existential threat to an entire way of life.
Determined to do more than shuffle papers and employ lawyers, the compatriots form a band of brothers and sisters - along with Cochise and Metallak - calling themselves "The Trust". Armed with only their wits and a lot of heart they embark on a rolicking campaign of civil disobedience that would make Thoreau, Saul Alinsky and Dr. King proud.
While the book is a work of fiction, teachers and professors may find it a book that would add a new dimension to classroom discussions and a lively addition to classes on sustainability, or the American tradition of protest.
In the coming “Age of Electricity” a principal battleground will be over who controls the production and distribution of electric power. Across America today, the battle lines are being drawn and the two sides are rushing to create advantages for themselves. More than 10 trans-national power transmission projects are proposed across the US and the Canadian Electricity Association projects a tripling of that demand in the next 10 years.
Utility companies represent one front in this battle over competing visions of our energy future. Already in an existential battle for survival, they seek to maintain control of the revenues generated by the flow of electricity. With the rare exception, most are pitted against advocates of a new distributed energy paradigm where small, renewable power production replaces the large electricity generation model of today.
Most Americans notice that things are changing, they have yet to put together the full picture of what will be a sea change in life for every American.
“Sacred Trust” tells this story in the context of a novel about a group of citizens banding together to stop one especially egregious powerline proposed in the small state of New Hampshire where the people deeply cherish their beautiful and pristine environment.
The power company behind the transmission line proposes to bypass the state - like a giant extension cord - bringing power directly to the larger cities and suburbs. In short, like the oligarchs of a previous age, they intend to reap 100% of the benefits and to pass off a large portion of their costs through the generations-long visual pollution of the public commons.
The citizens of the state who stand to lose most from the destruction of real estate values and cherished viewscape are dead set against the project but the political winds are against them. It is in this setting where eight unlikely compatriots from across the political spectrum come together to take on the consortium proposing the “Granite Skyway” transmission line.
While the compatriots, who call themselves The Trust, engage in creative civil disobedience intending to stop the project, or at the very least drive it underground, a group of citizen activists, writing in the style of the writers of the Federalist Papers, produce a series of essays in opposition to Granite Skyway; making the intellectual case justifying the actions of The Trust. One business writer, in search of a pulitzer, takes on the task of describing the tableau in which all of this takes place beginning with the 1972 election of Jimmy Carter and the drafting of the National Energy Policy Act and the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act into which one lone New Hampshire Senator, John Durkin, inserted two lines that changed history and ushered in the renewable energy revolution.Through the device of a series of articles scattered through the novel, business editor James Kitchen leads his readers through a virtual primer of the battle for a new post-carbon energy paradigm.
"Sacred Trust" is a hilarious and vicarious, high voltage campaign to stop Granite Skyway, that leads the reader through not only the hijinks of The Trust, but also through the series of choices with which we all are currently confronting, or will be, in this new “Age of Electricity”.
“Courage is the fire in which all virtues are tempered. No virtue can stand without the flame of courage at its core.” - Wayne D. King
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Available from Kobo: http://bit.ly/ST_Kobo
