A Santa Monica surfer, teacher and biologist (and local badass) garnered lots of publicity when he posted an alarming set of photos to Facebook in order to raise awareness about ocean pollution. Benjamin Kay, a science instructor at Santa Monica College and Santa Monica High School, took a picture with H-E-L-P spelled across his surfboard in plastic garbage gathered from his local surf spot.

“It’s getting vicious out there,” Kay told KTLA.

Kay says trash levels in Southern California are killing seabirds by the thousands. He hopes to continue raising awareness of the problems facing the world’s oceans. If only every Facebook account did as much good.

[Via: KTLA]

[Photo via: Flickr]

There’s just one little thing… although the one-man cockpit is sealed, Scubster still requires its passenger to wear an oxygen tank and mask in order to breathe and see clearly. Either way–Scubster is a cool new way to see the sea.

[Via: Inhabitat]

[Photo Via: Inhabitat]

What do you do with your outdoor and recreational “accessories” when they’re all worn out? For example–Where does your old wetsuit end up? What about your hiking shoes? And what happened to that battered skateboard deck that got so much use once upon a time? If old items such as these are not collecting spider webs in your basement, chances are they’ve made it to a landfill by now… where they’ll likely remain for years and years… and years to come.

For this reason, we find it strikingly awesome when a designer or a company takes old crap and re-purposes it to be useful in an entirely different way. Designer Seven Ply does just this by taking old skateboard decks and turning them into multicolored rings. They’re made to order so customers can specify their choice of size and color. What’s more, these little tokens of skateboards past are just $18 bucks (plus shipping). To purchase one, go here.

[Via: Etsy]

[Photo Via: Etsy]

Pretty soon, fans of the Maryland Greenhawks, a minor-league basketball franchise, will be saying, “nothing but hemp.”

The Greenhawks, who changed their name from the Nighthawks as part of their vow to “go green,” held a press conference recently about their plans to become the country’s first eco-conscious professional sports team. Along with the name change, the organization plans to build a sustainable playing field with a bamboo court and hemp nets. Uniforms and basketballs will be made of recycled plastic and/or bamboo and carbon offsets will be purchased to relieve the heavy footprint left by road games. Coach Ron Spon also promised to dress like a leprechaun during games, wearing green suits and ties.

The Greenhawks’ season kicks off on January 19, 2010 and star player Byron Mouton says the team plans on not only winning a championship, but that “we’re out here to convince the kids to recycle… and do the right thing.”

Greenscool, a non-profit organization that installs renewable energy systems in impoverished schools around the world, just launched its first project in Guaymas, Mexico. One of the primary goals of the Guaymas Project is to salvage solar panels in neighboring San Carlos, Mexico, and repurpose them to help power a primary school in Fatima. The blog post below, by Christian Beckwith, the Guaymas Project’s communications director, is the seventh post of an eight-post series on the project. You can see the rest at www.greenscool.org.

Nothing like it had ever happened in the barrio before.

El Presidente, Antonio Astiazaran Gutierrez, the mayor of Guaymas, was coming to Fatima to commemorate the solar panel project. It was ten in the morning, and the schoolchildren whirred around the schoolyard like frenetic hummingbirds. Above them, the Mikes and Kina and Khyber hustled about on the roof, rushing to finish the installation before the entire school assembled to hear El Presidente speak.

Mike Chase, his right thumb wrapped in bright yellow electric tape, nicked marks in the roof with a carpenter’s pencil, then blasted a hole in the asphalt with his drill. A local man named Pedro moved behind him with slow precision. When Mike finished drilling, Pedro knelt onto the asphalt, inserted a long black rubber hose into the hole, then blew the thick dust out of it with a sharp puff of breath. When he was finished, Khyber wrestled another panel into place and bolted it to metal runners. Panel by panel, the strip of clean energy took form above the school.

I climbed down the rickety ladder and walked around the building to the center of the schoolyard, where the empty nests of the goalposts cast thin shadows against school’s blue walls. Mati had just finished an inverted pushup and was now walking on his hands while a gaggle of kids ran beside him, screaming. Kina leaned against a post, adjusting his camera, as half a dozen schoolgirls crowded around him to watch.

At the edge of the roof, Mike Miller stood with his cell phone to his ear, the ubiquitous pair of sunglasses clapped over his deep brown eyes. Mike had been calling, calling, trying to get CFE’s permission to tie the solar panel system into the grid, thus far without success. Given that he had yet to procure permission to tie the wind turbine to the grid, either, I was beginning to have my doubts about our chances. Was it possible the only real value of the solar panels would be symbolic?

Regardless of how it went with CFE, we were nearly done with our work. Thin puffs of clouds, the first we’d seen since our arrival, crossed the sky. Spotty bits of green dotted the rugged hills in the distance. Power towers stood at the confluence of hill and horizon. Down in the rocky, dusty schoolyard, the principal shielded her eyes against the mid-afternoon glare to watch as we finished the installation.

Jennie’s Spanish had flourished like an exotic plant in a sympathetic climate. The children adored her, as did the teachers, and as she gained confidence, she had surged ahead, grammatical errors be damned, breathing conviction into her spine. Appropriately, given the fact that no one else in our group spoke passable Spanish, she had been named Greenscool’s spokesperson for the commemoration ceremony, and now she went over her notes with the teachers in the computer lab.

Khyber and Mike were just finessing the final panels into place on the roof when the teachers began lining up the schoolchildren in a giant L. As reporters and television cameras positioned themselves—both media and local dignataries had arrived to witness the ceremony—a teacher of about forty blew into a microphone, testing the sound. Young girls in blue blouses and young boys in short-sleeved shirts snapped into order. Mike Chase had exchanged his Carhartts and baggy t-shirt for a button-down shirt and clean jeans, and he took his place next to Terry Challis, who had materialized to watch the proceedings.

Suddenly, there was a stir at the gate. El Presidente had arrived, and now his entourage guided him through the metal fence while the kids and the teachers applauded in unison.

The television cameras found their angles. El Presidente walked to the head of the line and, bent at the waist, gladhanded his way along it, tussling heads while the cameramen got their shots. Behind him lay the solar panels, aligned in a neat row on the roof.

The man blowing into the microphone began to speak. I focused, trying to discern words in Spanish, as he introduced Greenscool and then handed the microphone to Jennie.

Jennie began speaking. The children held rank as she outlined our goals in poised if broken Spanish. She swept her hand from one end of the L to the other, then gestured at individuals in the rows to make her points. Gone was the hesitant young idealist who had picked me up at the airport. In her place stood the confident teacher who had introduced the barrio to the concept of renewable energy.

When Jennie was finished, she yielded the microphone to El Presidente, who tapped it twice, then cleared his throat. In impeccable English, he thanked us for the project before turning to address the children and the cameras. I recognized simple words—“petroleum,” “sun,” “clean energy”—as he explained to them the value of the solar panels. Jennie looked on, her engagement so intense she could have been praying.

Mexico was just starting to explore green alternatives. The kids probably cared less about the fact that the energy was green than they did that there was electricity at all. But as I watched El Presidente speak, I remembered what Terry Challis had told me our first day in Fatima. “It will be the next generation who makes the difference,” she had said.

“This project is good,” El Presidente said into the microphone, “because above and beyond what it generates in electricity, it creates consciousness in the children.” The kids looked on, rapt; it was the first time someone as important as El Presidente had addressed them, and they didn’t miss a word. “The children are our future, and by providing them with clean, renewable energy, we are giving them a better Mexico.”

The cameras panned to the solar panels. The reporters scribbled notes on their pads. The children held their positions. As El Presidente spoke, our message went out, over their heads to all of Mexico.

While our work on the project was now complete—or would be, when Mike gained permission to tie the project to the grid—our work on the website continued.

It was seven p.m., and we had hours of uploading still ahead of us. In two days, Jennie would fly back to Flagstaff, and I’d depart for San Francisco. Conversation had already turned among the others toward the long drive home. Momentum was beginning to ebb, we were falling behind our goal of posting every day—and now Mike wanted us to drop what we were doing and go to dinner.

We had been invited to the home of one of the electricians who had helped us install the panels. “He’s cooking for us,” Mike said over our protestations. “He expects us all there. Plus, he’s got wi-fi. We can upload from his house as we eat.”

The electrician, whose name was Servando, lived in a nice part of Guaymas. Jennie drove, navigating the narrow, cobbled streets. As we moved deeper into the city, the housefronts grew more elaborate, and the black metal grills on the windows became ornate. We could have been in Spain.

“That’s it,” said Mike, when our lights flashed on a numbered gate. We stumbled out of the van, frazzled, and followed him to a door that swung inward to a large, open foyer. My eyes went to the back wall, where a neon sign advertised Tecate. An industrial-size grill sat behind an island covered in dishes of food. Massive speakers stood against the side of the grill. A table covered in linen lay in the open courtyard, clean and spacious and immaculately presented. Was this someone’s house, or a nightclub?

Servando came out to greet us, and now I recognized him from the school. He introduced his wife, who wore a dress as blue as the Sonoran sky. Servando’s father stood behind her, smiling. Their children, two young boys and a girl, shyly introduced themselves with the Guaymas handshake: open palms sliding over ours, followed by a fist bump.

Mike walked back to the grill with Servando, where he busied himself with small talk. I looked at Kina.

“What’s the password?” I asked, flipping open my laptop.

“I don’t know,” Kina said. He’d been shooting hundreds of stills a day, laughing, solemn, confident, beautiful compositions that revealed the project from the schoolchildren’s perspective. Now, his black eyes carried a shadow of exhaustion. This would be the fourth night in a row of late nights, and it didn’t look like we’d finish any earlier than we had the night before. “Man, this is crazy. We’ve been working every night, and we’re still falling behind. We gotta get this done.”

The speakers vibrated with music. Servando’s father handed me a beer.

“I’m sorry we have to keep working,” I said to him.

He smiled kindly. “Don’t worry,” he said in English. “You’re doing good work.”

Servando flipped thin strips of carne asada on the grill. His oldest son ran up and hugged his leg, but he brushed him away, laughing, and turned back to his conversation with Mike.

Jennie caught the boy’s hand and leaned over to hear him speak. He guided her through a side door and they disappeared.

A moment later, Jennie burst back into the room.

“We’re on TV! We’re on TV!”

Kina and I exchanged quick glances, then crowded into the room beside the others. There, on a television set perched up in a corner of the room, was El Presidente, addressing Fatima’s Vicente Guerrero de Guaymas Primary School. He spoke with compassion and concern about the future of the children and the future of Mexico’s energy sources. The cameras swept to the asphalt roof. Above the broken courtyard lay the solar panels for all the audience to see.

Earlier that day, after the ceremony, Mike had disappeared. When I’d found him in the courtyard, his eyes had been red.

“What’s wrong?” I’d asked.

“I just balled my eyes out,” he’d said. “The emotions are so intense.”

Now I watched him as he witnessed his project unfolding on Mexican television. His dream of installing renewable energy sources and educating children in impoverished schools around the world had just taken its first step.

[Photo: Kina Pickett]

Greenscool, a non-profit organization that installs renewable energy systems in impoverished schools around the world, just launched its first project in Guaymas, Mexico. One of the primary goals of the Guaymas Project is to salvage solar panels in neighboring San Carlos, Mexico, and repurpose them to help power a primary school in Fatima. The blog post below, by Christian Beckwith, the Guaymas Project’s communications director, is the sixth post of an eight-post series on the project. You can see the rest at www.greenscool.org.

I’d always wanted to swim with dolphins.

Our second day in town, we’d seen them from the deck of Charley’s Rock, a San Carlos restaurant with a thatched roof and pale orange walls and an open patio on the second floor from which you could hit golf balls into the bay. We finished off fish tacos while pelicans dive-bombed the water.
Suddenly, a different movement caught my attention. It was a dolphin, breaching.

Jennie’s voice broke with delight. “There they are!” she said. The dolphin’s back and fin glittered in the sun. Another fin appeared, then a smaller one, moving smoothly through the water.
You could swim with the dolphins here in San Carlos. You could snorkel with whale sharks, scuba dive with sea lions, fish for marlin, mountain bike the tumbling hills. You might even be able to wander out to those red ribbed walls I’d seen my first day in town and climb. Ordinarily, that’s what our group of adventure athletes would have loved to do.

Adventure athletes: men and women who engage in pursuits that contain an element of risk. Pursuits like ski mountaineering. Whitewater kayaking. Alpine climbing. Things where, if you screw up, you could die.

Kina had skied big lines in the Tetons for years; on many of them, if you failed to make the right turn at the right time, you would fall for a thousand feet, pinballing between the rocky walls of the couloir until you ragdolled out the bottom. Khyber began running Class V rapids in his early teens; deadfall often lurked just below the river’s surface, which could hold you under until you drowned. I climbed in the Tetons, in Alaska, in Scotland and Kyrgyzstan and Peru, where avalanches, rockfall and inclement weather were an inherent part of any ascent.

We’d all lost friends doing what we loved to do, but every season we were back, staring over the tips of our skis at the narrowing funnel below us, finding the balance in the kayak just before the thirty-foot drop, swinging our ice tools into thin brittle ice that creaked in the twenty-below cold. The sports we did were dangerous, and they were addictive: when the endorphins began bubbling up right below your sternum, you always wanted more. We’d built our careers and families and lives around such experiences, and we always sought out new ones that could produce them as well. I would have loved to kayak the serrated coast, to hike up to those cliffs on the hills around Guaymas and find out if they were climbable, or simply to dive into the sparkling sea and paddle as hard as I could for the dolphins.

But Mark Mulligan was addressing the San Carlos Men’s’ Club Thursday morning, so Kina and Mati and I drove to hear him speak instead.

The San Carlos Men’s Club met in a cafe across the street from the Marina Terra hotel. We ditched the car alongside the broken cobble and, guided by signs in English, walked upstairs to a low-ceilinged room on the second floor.

Fifteen or twenty men, most of them in their sixties, gathered around the L of a table. Sunlight splashed in through the windows, illuminating their tans. I had expected all Americans, but four Mexicans sat at the table as well.

We were directed to the president of the club.

“Why’s Mark here to talk to you?” I asked.

“Every other week our group gets together,” he said. He wore a green golfer’s hat and a Hawaiian shirt; like most of the men in the room, he was in his late sixties. “We try to bring people we think are interesting to talk. Mark plays a lot of music around here, and he’s been mentioning Castaway Kids in his shows, so I asked him to come to tell us more about it.”

Mark was leaning over in conversation with a bald septuagenarian who wore large, rose-tinted glasses and looked like a retired B-Movie producer from Palm Springs.

Mark was five-ten, with close-cropped gray hair and a healthy tan. He was fifty and rested; he also looked as if he would have been more comfortable in a Hawaiian shirt than in the short-sleeve button up he wore. Part of the shirt poked up from his belt, untucked and askance, as he talked to the producer.

He slowly made his way to the front of the room, introducing himself as he moved. Then, he began speaking about his group.

The roots of Castaway Kids had started with Mark’s early years in the barrio, when he had been a missionary teacher, and solidified with his marriage of seven years to his wife, Adela, a Fatima local. When Adela died in a car accident, she left him two sons, Marcos, seven, and Luis, three. In 2007, Mark had organized the building of a park in Fatima for the barrio children; Adela’s family still lived in a home across the street. Unbeknownst to him, the barrio residents had built a monument to Adela in his honor. They unveiled it at the park’s opening ceremony.

“Castaway Kids provides money, food, and care to the children of Guaymas,” Mark said. He had the easy, conversational tone of a singer who was comfortable in front of an audience. “Our goal is for these children and their families to become self-supporting so that they can assist other families like them.”

Mark continued to describe the group’s efforts. A month earlier, they had orchestrated the purchase of a home outside the barrio for a family whose shack had been swept away in a flash flood. At Christmas, they had taken some of the barrio children and thrown them a Christmas party, complete with presents.

I looked around. The retirees of the San Carlos Men’s Club listened attentively as he spoke.
Next to me sat a tall, friendly American who looked to be in his early sixties. What did he think of Mark and his Castaway Kids? “They’re doing good work,” he said. And why was he here at the meeting? He smiled gently. “I want to give something back.”

I thought about Terry Challis, the woman from Arizona we’d met our first day in the barrio. She had impressed me with her pragmatic understanding of the children’s needs. She didn’t seek to put anyone through college; the scholarship fund she had helped to start simply covered the costs of secondary school for the children who might otherwise not go.

David Keilholtz, the husband of our translator, Rosa, had similar, modest goals. He had assisted in the construction of the park across from Adela’s family’s home, and he’d helped families in the barrio to build small cement-block houses where before they’d had nothing.

In addition to the eighteen-hole golf course where Mike Chase’s house was located, San Carlos featured tennis courts, bowling lanes and two marinas. Above the harbor, houses with a Mediterranean accent ringed the hill in tight, hierarchical rows. There were restaurants featuring seafood, Sonoran beef, Mexican dishes and American cuisine.

I could almost imagine the life of the retiree here: snorkeling among the parrot fish, sailing the desert coast, fishing for yellowfin tuna, the hills tumbling, tumbling, tumbling toward the sea. You could relax in comfort and never even notice the barrio. Which is what I’d been sure most of the retirees did.

“If we get some downtime, I want to go kite surfing,” Mike had said the day before. He’d been talking about kite surfing in Guaymas since he’d first told me about the project, months earlier; the bay was expansive, and the winds came rushing down the hills across the surface of the water.

“You should try it,” Mike said. “You’d like it.”

He was probably right. I’d probably like the kayaking, too: for years, I’d heard stories about NOLS courses that came down to the Gulf of California and explored its mysteries by boat. In fact, there seemed almost limitless things we could have been doing that would have been a blast. But such things were secondary to getting the panels on the barrio roof.

For a moment, I almost understood something that had been in the back of my mind since the trip had begun. Mark, Terry, David and the other volunteers could have been golfing, fishing, sailing, doing whatever you do when you’re a gringo retiree in Mexico. And they probably did do them, most of the time. But they also had their projects, and they kept chipping away at them, bit by bit, until they made a difference.

When we’d arrived in San Carlos I’d had a certain skepticism about what we’d be able to do with The Guaymas Project. Any solar power we brought to the school would be minimal, if we could get permission to tie it to the grid at all, and I wasn’t sure our lessons would have much of an effect on the children, either. Plus, we’d be in and out of there in a week—hardly the amount of time you need to make any real impact.

Terry had been handing out scholarship applications at the Fatima school the day we met. She had given me one.

A line in particular had jumped out at me. “We can change the world,” it read, “one child at a time.”

I’d thought it horribly naive at the time. Now I wasn’t sure.

On the way back to town, we drove in silence. I looked for the dolphins as we passed the bay, but they were nowhere to be seen.

[Photo: Kina Pickett]

Jennie Gershater is a petite woman of thirty-two with riveting brown eyes, a pert nose and an athlete’s lithe body. The fact that she had joined a group of five hard-charging men in Flagstaff and driven to Mexico in a fetid van with three dogs, multiple video cameras and a hoola hoop spoke to her fortitude. But she was also a spiritually conscious graduate of Naropa University from the politically, environmentally, and socially correct town of Boulder, Colorado, who didn’t drink and couldn’t quote Borat. I had no doubt she’d be able to handle the barrio. But could she handle us?

When we got to the Palacio on Monday, Mike had taken me aside. “Jennie lost it, right before you got here. Just burst out crying in the van.”

“What for?”

“’Cause we weren’t wearing our seatbelts. Her cousin died in a car accident a few years ago because he wasn’t wearing his. Dude, she freaked.”

“I’m not sure how this will go,” Jennie confided to me on Wednesday morning. We were driving to the barrio, where she and her brother were scheduled to teach the children about the panels twice that day. Mati sat in the back seat without speaking. “My Spanish isn’t very good,” she continued. “And I’m shy.”

Jennie and Mati were our education specialists. Mati taught children about the environment with what he called “enviro-tainment camps,” while Jennie had finished her Master’s in May.

“In what?” I asked.

“It was a dual concentration in dance/movement therapy and body psychotherapy,” she said. “Technically, my focus is community-based somatic counseling and psychology.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. Naropa, psychosomatic therapy, community-based movement, enviro-tainment: this brother-sister duo approached things differently than I did. But Mati had been charismatic with the children yesterday, and Jennie, even if she didn’t party with us, sure smelled good. Plus, she would make a great designated driver.

Jennie and Mati had expected a couple of dozen schoolchildren for their lessons. There were eighty in the first class alone.

The vast steel roof above the cement floor of the central schoolyard served a single purpose: to provide shade for the kids. It was the middle of January, and perhaps 75°, but in the direct sunlight it felt warmer. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like in September. “Imagine 110° with 95% humidity,” a local had told me the day before.

The teachers corralled the students into a broad U beneath the roof. Boys gathered in gender-specific clumps; girls did the same. Many of the boys had product in their hair that inverted their cowlicks. The girls giggled and whispered to one another as they settled into place.

The faces watching as Mati set up a solar panel were typically Mexican—black or brown hair, brown skin and brown eyes—with few exceptions. One young girl had strawberry blond hair and blue eyes. Another had big pouty lips and a concentrated expression that broke apart radiantly when she smiled. A boy of perhaps eight watched the proceedings with blue eyes, his wool-knit hat pulled low over fair features. He could have been an American from the ‘hood.

In fact, in their t-shirts and sweatshirts, dresses and blouses, sneakers and jeans, the kids could have been from anywhere. It was easy to forget the context of their lives… until you walked back outside, into the barrio.

When the teachers had successfully herded the children into order, Jennie began talking in Spanish. She spoke tentatively at first, watching the translator for corrections. As she talked, Mati began jumping around the semi-circle, acting out concepts—the sun, the wind, electricity, light—and encouraging the children to mimic his behavior. When he had made a complete tour of the semi-circle, he returned to the front, where Khyber helped him hook a small black electric fan to the positive and negative wires of the panel. It began instantly to spin.

The children were riveted. Gone was the squirming and jostling that had characterized their assembly, replaced by concentrated faces. A chubby boy in a red sweater stood up and asked a question, his face focused in thought, the color of his sweater standing out in marked contrast with the blue walls behind him. The girl with the pouty lips swiveled to watch Jennie’s answer.

Jennie’s Spanish seemed to move deeper into her body with each passing breath. She gesticulated, finding individual children in the sea of faces and coaxing answers from them. Mati did a quick run around the circle, slapping hands in exuberance. The kids cheered.

Twenty minutes passed, then thirty. The children of Fatima’s Vicente Guerrero de Guaymas Primary School were engaged.

Mike Chase stood in the yard when we returned home in baggy Carhartts and a loose t-shirt. He’d spent much of the day putting together the panels with a power drill and bolts. That assembly had gone well, but another problem remained. The Comision Federal de Electricidad—the Federal Electricity Commission, or CFE—didn’t want us to tie our solar panel systems into the grid.

The CFE, Mexico’s state-owned electric monopoly, controls and develops the national electric industry, and they didn’t seem particularly sympathetic to renewable energy in general and our project in particular. Despite his best efforts, Mike still hadn’t gained permission to connect the wind turbine to the grid; the negotiations necessary to connect the solar panels were perhaps more formidable yet. We had the advantage of El Presidente’s support, but even El Presidente lacked the power to dictate demands to one of the most powerful state-owned companies in Mexico.

What if we couldn’t get permission? Would it be possible to call the project a success if the solar panels weren’t actually producing any usable energy?

Mike was on his cell phone, talking, talking. It was what he did best, but even he was up against distressingly deep layers of bureaucracy.

Late that night, for the second evening in a row, we settled in front of our computers.

The Guaymas Project was a trial run for Greenscool; provided it went well, more ambitious initiatives in more remote areas were to follow. Without media outreach, though, the chances of raising funding for future projects were nil.

We’d committed to posting video, blogs and photos about the project every day. Now reality set in: such work would need to be executed once the panels were installed and the teaching completed and meetings with municipal authorities wrapped up. We were looking at another long night.

Though I’d published and produced extensively in the past, I’d never attempted anything like this from the field. As I watched Mike shift the components of the home page for the seventh time, I was shocked at how easily it could be done. He was using iWeb, an inexpensive Apple product. It’s not the sort of program you’d want to use to run a professional website, but for M.A.S.H.-unit type dispatches such as ours, it was ideal. We could create new pages in minutes and post them with the click of a button. This was guerilla broadcasting with an edge.

Kina sat over his computer in the main room, editing his photographic take from the day. Images scrolled across the screen: an eight-year-old girl, her expression achingly distant, peered at the camera from behind a whitewashed column. A single hand, fingers covered in warts, grasped a wire fence. The paint of a Coca-Cola mural peeled from a bright red wall. What had been, hours earlier, part of Guaymas was now snatched from that moment and shifted into ours.

Mati sat in front of his monitor, moving panels of video from the hard drive into a streaming montage. Kina had pulled together last night’s clip in iMovie, but now Mati used the more sophisticated Final Cut Pro to create a three-minute representation of the journey down to Guaymas. A waving hand went white on the monitor, then focused back in on the Border Patrol truck in front of the van. Mike sat in the front seat, relating the details of the bribe he had just been forced to pay to get the backup panels into the country. Mati laid in a track by Michael Franti; before long, everyone in the room was humming the refrain.

I wrote. Before my company’s collapse in October, I’d edited a climbing magazine, but although I’d spent the past fifteen years laboring over the sentences and narrative arc of alpinists and their adventures, now I was the one telling a story. The concentration necessary to create a single sentence was so intense I hardly heard the music playing from Kina’s computer.

Mike walked from person to person, checking progress, a cigarette in one hand, a Tecate in the other. “You done yet?” he asked me.

I swam up out of an ocean of words. “No,” I grunted. “Getting there.” Then down again, into the depths of the page.

Mike Chase leaned in over Mati’s shoulder.

“You know, I’ve never liked those Suzanne Summers-type shots of impoverished children. Too much of a bummer. You need to get the kids smiling in there or nobody will be interested.”

Kina and Mike looked at one another, then looked at me. Mr. Chase, jovial bear, was absolutely right.

It was if we had all plugged into the same power source. The synthesis of our individual creativity into a greater whole was electric.

It was nearly midnight when we finished. With no internet at the house, we drove back to the cafe. Closed.

“Hey, look,” said Kina. “The bar above it is open.”

Mike and I bumped fists, laughing. Atop the cafe, the wi-fi connection was perfect. The Jack and Sprites weren’t bad, either.

1 a.m. Home. I lay down on the couch cushions that comprised my bed and closed my eyes. Visions of the day—Jennie straightening her spine as she spoke, Kina focusing his lens on a leaping girl, words metastasizing on the screen in front of me—tumbled through my head. It seemed like hours before I dreamed.

[Photo Kina Pickett]

Greenscool, a non-profit organization that installs renewable energy systems in impoverished schools around the world, just launched its first project in Guaymas, Mexico. One of the primary goals of the Guaymas Project is to salvage solar panels in neighboring San Carlos, Mexico, and repurpose them to help power a primary school in Fatima. The blog post below, by Christian Beckwith, the Guaymas Project’s communications director, is the fourth post of an eight-post series on the project. You can see the rest at www.greenscool.org.

If possible, Mike Chase was even more of an outlier to this project than I was: a builder, sculptor and father of two, he had accepted a fifty-hour ride in a van with four men a decade or two younger than him and somehow ended up providing them with housing for their project. Worse, he had been shanghaied into helping engineer the solar panel installation as well.

Mike’s house sat on the sixth hole of a golf course in a gated community in San Carlos. Beige stuccoed walls, terra cotta tiles on the roof, an open car port, air conditioning, microwave, a forty-foot palm tree in the yard: it was a little slice of America next to the Sea of Cortez. We dubbed it The Bubble.

The locals call the harbor town of San Carlos Gringolandia. The two-summitted Teta Kawi, “the Goat’s Tits,” sits atop an ancient talus field, poking its spiky nipples at the sky. Below it, the hills tumble down to a sparkling ocean. Powerboats and sailboats were moored against the wharfs when we arrived in the morning, and condos and brightly colored houses rose up at the harbor’s edge. A billboard announced in English: “Dianna Rheingberg: Your Real Estate Agent in San Carlos.”

Khyber stood atop a bucket loader, carefully manhandling a solar panel from the top of a lamp post into the bucket. El Presidente had come through with the extra help: a heavy equipment operator guided him back down to the ground.

Mike stood beside the van, holding something that could have been a geiger counter to a black box on the back of the panel.

“75 watts,” he said. He looked at me through amber sunglasses. I squinted at the panel.“Is that good?”
“Good as the day they were new, every single one of them so far.”

The panels looked like most solar panels I’d seen: round blueblack circles of photovoltaic cells in a flat white rectangular board. One of the concerns of the trip had been whether these panels would actually work, but now the poetry of reclaiming non-functioning panels from San Carlos and reinstalling them on the roof of a barrio school seemed possible.

Two white-haired retirees pedaled past on mountain bikes. A gunmetal gray Hummer with Arizona plates drove by. In a bay behind the restaurant, three older Americans spoke with Midwestern accents as they prepared their fishing poles, baseball hats shielding them from the glare. A line of pelicans perched on the edge of a rowboat. On an unfinished building down the street, a white plastic banner announced, “Condos from $189,000.”

This was how I had imagined the gringo sections of Mexico: surrounded by the good parts, insulated from the rest.

Five miles from San Carlos we picked up Rosa Keilholtz, a tiny, weathered Guaymas woman who was to be our translator. Rosa was married to David, a potbellied American with a bulbous nose, big glasses and an easy smile. They were both in their seventies. We asked Rosa about Fatima as we drove to the barrio.

Sometime near the end of the 1970s, she told us, poor residents of Guaymas who lived on a hillside overlooking the ocean were kicked out of their homes to make way for developments for wealthy Mexicans. With nowhere else to go, they went to the city dump and began assembling shacks from the detritus. Over the years, the growing number of shacks and buildings overtook the trash. By now, a second generation had grown up in the barrio, and the dump had moved across the street.

We entered Fatima via a side road and parked the car beside a chainlink fence. Many of the houses and buildings of Guaymas featured fences around the yards as well as iron bars on the windows, but the houses opposite the school had more fencing and iron than we’d yet seen. As we walked toward the school, a dusty white VW Beetle drove past, a loudspeaker strapped to its roof announcing a special at the taqueria.
Inside the fence, kids shrieked. Children between the ages of six and twelve blurred into flurried lines of motion. A vast steel roof sheltered a cracked concrete floor. Dozens of children chased a soccer ball on the concrete; in the dusty center of the schoolyard behind them, dozens more chased another ball toward netless goalposts.

Rebecca Silva, the principal, waited for us between two bright blue buildings with her hands clasped behind her back. She was five-foot-three, with thick, blowdried hair and an oblong face. She wore beige slacks above pointed black flats, and as she spoke and Rosa translated, I took notes.

We were in Fatima’s Vicente Guerrero de Guaymas Primary School, which hosted 500 children from first through sixth grade in two separate classes. At mid-day, the classes switched, and 300 schoolchildren from the morning gave way to 200 in the afternoon. I looked at the frenetic activity on the soccer field: kids hollered and ran and rode bikes down concrete steps in such a blur of motion it was difficult to focus on individuals. Was the entire school at recess?

Many of Fatima’s residents were fishermen in the ports or manual laborers in the maquilas, the factories created by NAFTA that made parts for American auto and aerospace companies at Mexican wages. Minimum wage in Sonora was eight dollars a day. “Most families here are lucky to have one wage earner,” said a robust-looking American woman at my side. Eight dollars a day, six days a week, added up to less than $2,500 a year. “When the kids turn twelve, the parents send them to work because secondary school costs 300 dollars a year. They can’t afford the tuition.”

The woman introduced herself as Terry Challis. She and her husband split their time between Phoenix and San Carlos, where they’d been for fourteen years. I was surprised to find American retirees this far from the bubble.

“Why are you here in Fatima?” I asked.

“Because of Mark Mulligan.”

Mark Mulligan, Terry explained, had come to Mexico in the early 1990s on a mission to teach, and his teaching had brought him to Fatima. Over the years his relationship with the barrio deepened: he met a local gal, married her, and became a part of the neighborhood itself.

As Mark became more familiar with Fatima, he found himself watching over a few underparented children who had been abandoned by their fathers and left at home while their mothers worked. His shepherding eventually became formal when he created an organization called Castaway Kids, which nurtured the children who slipped through the barrio’s support network.

Mark was also a singer and guitar player, and he played the gringo bars throughout the Guaymas area, including in San Carlos. During breaks between songs he began to mention Castaway Kids. Soon, he was working with people like Terry who volunteered.

Terry paused. “When I first got here and asked what I could do, they said just level a playing field in the back so the kids can play soccer. They said if they had that, the disciplinary problems would go down so much.”

The roofs of the school buildings were comprised of asphalt. We pointed out to the principal where we wanted to put the panels: on the southwest-facing roof, where the kids could best see them.

“If you could just use the solar panels for some secondary lights to keep the kids out of the schoolyard at night,” said Terry, “it would keep them from spraying graffiti on the walls.”

I broke away from the group and looked into an empty classroom. Fraction tables hung on the walls next to a dry erase board. A simple blue desk and wooden chair at the front of the room held a computer. In front of it the children’s desks—small metal chairs with wooden seats and wooden tabletops—stood in orderly rows. An overhead projector was fastened to the ceiling beside a fan.

I walked out and looked into the room next door. Ten black computer monitors, five up one side of the room, five down the other, were perched above cubicled desks. It was the computer lab.

Computer lab?

This was not dirt poor. Dirt poor was no electricity, no running water, distended bellies, sunken eyes. The Vicente Guerrero primary school received running water two hours a day; it had desks, computers, ceiling fans, electricity, not to mention children who had the energy to scream around the soccer field seemingly without stop.

But it was poor enough. I remembered the three young women we had seen when we first drove into Fatima. They had walked toward us unselfconsciously, jutting their hips, their curves and bare midriffs protruding from tight t-shirts and skinny jeans. The young men watching them from cement walls wore gangsta jeans and backward-facing baseball caps. Sex was one of their only assets; soon enough, it too would be gone. In six years, their children would go to school at the primary school while their parents—or parent, as the fathers often left—struggled to keep them clothed and fed.

How much was our little electricity project going to change their lives? Realistically, I thought, not much. But by having the panels where the kids could see them, perhaps we could plant a seed in their minds. Maybe their teachers would refer to renewable energy in their lessons. The panels could become part of playground lore, lodged in the collective experience of the barrio. Maybe one student would tend to the panels, and through a combination of tenacity and luck and the Castaway Kids he or she might make it through secondary school and land a job. Maybe the panels could lead him or her to a future outside.
But as I walked past the barred-up windows toward the group, I had my doubts.

When the meeting with the principal broke up, we followed David’s white compact van deeper into the neighborhood where the broken pavement yielded to rutted dirt. The construction material began to shift: here the concrete gave way to loosely constructed walls of rough planed wood; now the iron fence broke down, revealing one wall of the house behind it—a rusting warped sheet of tin. Soon, even the iron fences disappeared. Concrete walls, where there were any, were broken; shacks were constructed entirely of warped tin and scraps of wood. In front of one shack, four young men in tattered basketball jerseys stood in the shade. One of them held a shovel.

I left the others and walked slowly down the dirt road. Here, the shacks were constructed less of concrete and more of sheet metal. I smelled shit. 7-Up and Sprite bottles lay collapsed in the dirt. Electricity hijacked from a leaning cement lamppost powered a stereo, from which mariachi music played. Splashes of colored walls—blue, yellow, teal—offset the monotony of the street.

To my right a dirt yard was set off by a thin line of bright green plants. At the head of the line a broken plastic pot held a single marigold. A boy, perhaps ten, squatted in the dirt at the edge of the road, absently twirling a piece of string in the dust. He looked up as I walked past, but his eyes were the only things that moved.

Rebecca had said that twenty percent of the students of her school would go on to higher education, but that number seemed improbably high to me. Looking around, I wondered how children like the boy with the string would get out of the barrio—and if they did, how far they would go before they were pulled back in.
We got in our cars and drove back through Guaymas toward our bubble.

Christian Beckwith, former editor of The Alpinist, is keeping us up to date on the Guaymas Project, the first project of Greenscool, a non-profit organization that installs renewable energy systems in impoverished schools around the world.

Photo credit: Kina Pickett

Greenscool, a non-profit organization that installs renewable energy systems in impoverished schools around the world, just launched its first project in Guaymas, Mexico. One of the primary goals of the Guaymas Project is to salvage solar panels in neighboring San Carlos, Mexico, and repurpose them to help power a primary school in Fatima. The blog post below, by Christian Beckwith, the Guaymas Project’s communications director, is the third post of an eight-post series on the project. You can see the rest at www.greenscool.org.

For years, I’ve been afflicted by the climbing bug, and it has taken me into poverty.

In Tibet, our approach march brought us to the yak-skin walls of a tent that housed a family of five who squatted around a fire while smoldering yak dung, the only fuel, heated a soot-covered teapot, their only metal possession. In Peru, the higher we went up the road into the Cordillera Blanca, the increasingly fragile the structures became, so that the houses in the highest villages were the least inclined to survive the storms that visited them seasonally. In Burma, a shard of moonlight illuminated movement at the bottom of the hole in the shitter. It took me a moment to realize it was maggots, festering in the effluvium that leached into the river below, where the villagers gathered their water.

But I never cared: I was always there to climb.

As the plane began the descent toward Guaymas, the wrinkle of the Sonoran hills expanded into broader folds. I knew Mike and Khyber from home, and loved them dearly. Mike’s a smooth-talking, generous bon vivant, who accepts a friendship without conditions. Khyber’s burgeoning hormones mean that every young person of the opposite sex precipitates a storm of powerful emotions, but he’s sweet and gentle and inclined to drape an enormous arm around my shoulder and then just stand there, not talking.
But in a short while I’d be joining a ragtag group that included four other people I didn’t know. We were going to be working together as well as with the schoolchildren of a Mexican barrio, installing solar panels, introducing the children to the concept of renewable energy and documenting the project with video and blogging. All of this was new to me. I had more than a little apprehension as I exited the main room of the open-aired airport lounge and looked for the group in the adjoining foyer.

“Hey man,” said Kina, all black eyes and blue shirt and hipster jeans and open-aired sandals. “Glad you could make it.” Kina’s famous in Jackson for his skiing; from what my wife tells me (girls talk about this stuff), he’s also famous for his effect on women, who seem to go a bit wobbly in his presence.
A camera zoomed in toward my face. “Bienvenidos a Mexico,” said Mike from behind the lens, amber glasses perched atop his closely-cropped head. It seemed to have grown a quarter inch since I had last seen him, forty-eight hours earlier.

Khyber towered over me, beaming.

“Are you the famous cb?” a pixie asked. She gleamed in the desert air, brown eyes sparkling, short bobbed hair pulled back by a silk scarf. A few errant tendrils offset her round face. Mati stood behind her, tussle-headed, broad-cheeked, a male version of the same genes. He was as handsome as his sister was beautiful.

“You must be Jennie,” I said.

The members of the group moved in and out, laying hands on me as I stood in the rental car line. (Seven people, a big project, one van: do the math.) Outside, the light deepened on the Sonoran hills. A warmth that had been absent when I left Jackson began to loosen the skin on my face.

We eased onto the street, Jennie driving, Mati in the back, me in the front, the van ahead of us. Upthrusts of red volcanic rock glowed in the sunset. A ten-year-old Chrysler with Nevada plates honked once, then shot past us as we followed the van toward town. The smell of exhaust wafted in through the open window; for a moment, conversation stopped, as if we were all inhaling.

This was going to be an expedition of a different sort.

Every good project needs a connection. The Guaymas Project had El Presidente.

Mike had made the acquaintance of Antonio Astiazaran, the mayor of Guaymas—El Presidente, as he was known here—a month earlier during his trip to Mexico to install a wind turbine. El Presidente had solicited the project, which erected the turbine over a busy highway between Guaymas and a nearby gringo retirement community called San Carlos. Mike had been the installer, and after a Tecate-heavy lunch or two, the pair had hit it off. El Presidente was young and ambitious and smart, and he was one of the few people in the state driving renewable energy.

We pulled up outside the Palacio Municipal, a colonial building from the early 1800s that opened around an airy central courtyard. Soaring wooden doors opened to interior offices. El Presidente’s office was through the largest of the doors. He watched us with a perfunctory smile from behind his desk as we gathered in a semicircle around him.

As Mike talked, outlining the objectives of the project, El Presidente sat forward in his chair, his chin bridged on his steepled fingers. He was young, younger than I would have expected for the mayor of a city of 200,000 on the Sonoran coast, his neatly coiffed black hair slicked back on his head.
In the streets of San Carlos seventy-five solar panels sat atop streetlight posts. They had been designed to power the lights, but the systems had been poorly engineered, and the batteries had corroded.
Mike was convinced the panel systems would still work. Many of the original seventy-five had been stolen, but twenty-five still remained. If we could salvage them (a task that would be made easier with the help of El Presidente, who had commandeered a bucket loader and two electricians for our service), we’d repurpose them on the roof of an elementary school in Fatima. Mike finished, and a moment passed. What, one of our group asked, did El Presidente want from this project?

“This is for the children,” he said. His English was clipped, with a slight Spanish accent. “In a place like Fatima, they are just beginning to think about things like energy. Having the solar panels on the roof will affect their consciousness.”

He paused to see if we understood.

Sometimes reality is less important than a symbol. The wind turbine that Mike had installed on the highway from Guaymas to San Carlos spun day and night, but it had run into difficulty: the state energy company refused to allow it to be tied back into the grid. Renewable energy was outside the energy’s company comfort zone, and they were worried that if everyone put up solar panels it would cut into their profits. But despite the ongoing battle to get the turbine tied in, it still spun, and every car that drove the popular highway saw it outlined against the pale blue sky and thought of El Presidente.

As I watched the mayor watching us, I realized the Guaymas Project was going to have its share of reality, but it was also going to be symbolic. The panel systems, once installed, would generate roughly 1800 watts per hour—enough energy to power a number of the school’s electrical needs, but not enough to get the school off the grid. Its true value lay in its position above the schoolyard: for the schoolchildren, it would be the first time they’d ever heard of renewable energy or seen solar panels. The panels would stay on the roof, year in year out, teaching each incoming class of students an idea they had never previously considered.

El Presidente stood; the meeting was over. Seven ceremonial handshakes later, we piled into the van and began driving toward the house where we’d be staying for the trip. As we drove, the night air whistled through a crack in the window, colder than expected.

“There it is,” said Mike, pointing at the median. Our lights flashed quickly over a dark object. “The wind turbine.”

I’m pretty sure I caught a glimpse of it, spinning silently in the dark above the highway.

Christian Beckwith, former editor of The Alpinist, is keeping us up to date on the Guaymas Project, the first project of Greenscool, a non-profit organization that installs renewable energy systems in impoverished schools around the world.

Photo credit: Kina Pickett

Greenscool, a non-profit organization that installs renewable energy systems in impoverished schools around the world, just launched its first project in Guaymas, Mexico. One of the primary goals of the Guaymas Project is to salvage solar panels in neighboring San Carlos, Mexico, and repurpose them to help power a primary school in Fatima. The blog post below, by Christian Beckwith, the Guaymas Project’s communications director, is the second post of an eight-post series on the project. You can see the rest at www.greenscool.org.

Drive. Drive. Drive. At a certain point, when dark has settled in and the comfort of the night closes against the sides of the car, a heaviness lures you to sleep, and you want nothing more than to pull over, get your bag out of the back and let the vibration of the last ten hours ease into the sleeping mat beneath you. But that time had come and gone, and we were still driving. It was one in the morning, we were somewhere in northwestern Nevada and I was drifting in and out of sleep.

The full moon illuminated everything: the road in front of us, the deer watching from the shadows, the snow-covered mountains outside Wells, then Elko, then Reno. I’d wake from a dream and the snow would surprise me, glistening in the moonlight outside the window at 75. Ahead of us Mati and Kina and Khyber and Mike Chase and Mike’s dogs Deuce and Molly and Mati’s dog Squirrel and the petri dish of smells that had worn itself into the shag rug of the van rolled ahead, toward California and the group’s destination in Healdsburg. “I’ll stop when they pull off,” I thought, “get a hotel room, sleep for five hours.” This was ridiculous. This was stupid. I’d been driving for fifteen hours straight; they planned to have a meeting with a renewable energy CEO at 8 that morning, load up a few more solar panels and keep driving.

I should have said no, gotten a hotel room in Elko, and done this in two days like I had planned.

Flat dull glare of a gas station somewhere near the California border at 3 a.m. I shuffled around to the passenger side with the arthritis of an eighty-year-old.

When I woke, we were off the interstate. The clock on the dash said 7:04; it was an hour earlier out here then it was in Wyoming where the clock had been set. Ahead of us, the road wound through a canopy of trees.

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know,” said Khyber. “I’m just following the van.”

Live oak. We were in northern California. It was 6 a.m. and I was two hours north of my fucking destination.

Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck a trip with these guys. I was supposed to be in San Francisco. They couldn’t even get me to my destination—how were they going to get to Guaymas, and me with them, thirty-five hours of driving away?

I grabbed my phone and called Mike in the van ahead. “Stop the van. I’ve got to go south.”

A few minutes later, their tail lights receded from my rearview mirror. There were few items to collect from either car; we hadn’t been driving together long. And really, somewhere over Nevada, I had realized Mexico wasn’t in the cards. I had to get to my meeting, and they were just going to keep driving, driving, driving, until they got to Guaymas, less than two days from now. By the time I got out of my meeting, they’d be nearly at the border.

Bon voyage, gents.

By Sunday morning, when I called Mike, the van had stopped in Flagstaff, Arizona, at Jennie’s (Mati’s sister’s) house. The team had gotten five hours of nonmoving sleep, then continued on at four a.m., with Jennie in the van. By the time I got Mike on the phone, my meeting was about to begin.

But in the past day, I hadn’t been able to get Guaymas out of my mind. I was a few hours away from going climbing again, once the meeting was done, but they were on an adventure, the outcome unknown. Kina was going to make video clips of the work in the barrio, Mati was going to teach the children, Mike was going to install the video panels. Who knew what would come of it? The feeling had been growing in me that I was about to miss out.

“Where you at?”

“San Fran. Hey, what airport would you fly into if you were to fly into Guaymas?”

“Guaymas. You fly into Guaymas.”

I’d never even heard of Guaymas before this trip.

“If I look into tickets, could you help with airfare?”

“Let me call you right back.”

Ten minutes later, Mike called back. “I can throw in $400.”

I checked tickets on my mobile phone: $746 to Guaymas, leaving SFO at 9 a.m. the next morning. Sold.

“See you in Guaymas tomorrow afternoon.”

[Photo: Kina Pickett]

Greenscool, a non-profit organization that installs renewable energy systems in impoverished schools around the world, just launched its first project in Guaymas, Mexico. One of the primary goals of the Guaymas Project is to salvage solar panels in neighboring San Carlos, Mexico, and repurpose them to help power a primary school in Fatima. The blog post below, by Christian Beckwith, the Guaymas Project’s communications director, is the first post of an eight-post series on the project. You can see the rest at www.greenscool.org.

So I get a call from Mike.

“Where you at?”

“Just left Jackson. Headed to San Franciso. Where are you?”

“Heigerman, getting the van ready. Everyone’s here. You should come.”

“Come where?”

“Mexico. Guaymas. I told you about it: Greenscool—we’re getting it going.”

He had told me—drive to Northern California, interview the CEO of a renewable energy company, pick up a solar panel system, drive it thirty-five hours south and install it in a neighboring barrio school along with other solar panels harvested from a nearby gringo retirement community—but I had had other things on my mind. Besides, 2,500 miles of driving in three days didn’t appeal to me.

“I’ve got a meeting in the Bay area Sunday morning, Mike. I can’t go to Mexico.”

“Then come to Heigerman and we’ll caravan. We’ll drive all night. You’ll be in San Franciso in the morning.”

“You’re crazy,” is what I wanted to say; but I didn’t. I continued driving instead, and at Twin Falls, Idaho, instead of heading south down Highway 93, I exited the interstate, followed Mike’s directions, and drove into the late afternoon sun toward the Snake River and Mike’s family’s place in Heigerman. My company had collapsed three months earlier, and I was just starting out on the first leg of my third roadtrip since its close. Apart from the meeting in SF, all I had lined up was more climbing. What the hell did I have to lose?

Mike Miller—or Michael, as he prefers to be called—is charming and handsome and improvisational and ADD, a visionary chasing images of entrepreneurship and social responsibility only he can see. He moved to Jackson, Wyoming, six years ago, and in 2005 he began creating his dream: a power company that focused on renewable sources of energy. A year later Teton Power, which sells and installs wind turbines across the country, had been born.

Mike, however, is afflicted with a restless mind, and early one morning in 2008 he woke with another vision. This one took the energy systems he was creating to schools where there was no electricity, only poverty, the common denominator of third-world countries around the globe.

He soon had a partner. Kina Pickett, a dreadlocked mountain athlete with dark freckles, an easy grace and a model’s demeanor, is a black man from Vermont, the whitest state in the union. An upbringing on the hard blue slopes of Stowe lent his ski turn a precision that powder skiers from the Rockies rarely acquire, and an education in an elite New England college honed his intelligence with an acuity belied by his Ray Bans and worn cotton shirts. By the time he got to Jackson he was ready for deeper turns, and carving lines on the peaks of the Teton range led to ever more adventurous trips abroad.

About the time Mike was woken by his vision, Kina was putting the final touches on a school he had helped build in Peru. When he got back to the States, he found four messages on his cell phone from Mike, all of them focused on the same thing: renewable energy systems in third-world countries. Serendipitously, he had been thinking along similar lines in Peru. A conversation later, Greenscool had taken form.

Mike had known Mattie Gershater, a stocky, disheveled thirty-year-old with a penchant for upside-down handstands and ebullient laughs, for five years when he departed the Sun Valley area for Jackson. Mattie had grown up in Flagstaff but moved to Hailey, Idaho, to pursue his passion: outdoor education that teaches children through the medium of nature. A decade of friendship between the two meant they were in regular conversation even after Mike’s move. During a visit to Jackson, Mattie listened as Mike described Greenscool. Mattie had always wanted to expand his teaching experiences to the formal classroom. Now he had his chance.

By the time I got to Heigerman, the three men had been joined by Khyber, Mike’s 17-year-old son, a six-foot-four man-child with the demeanor of a violin player (which he is). With alternative parents, his frustration with traditional education found a ready solution: quit, and get your schooling from the world. His next lesson was to be held in Guaymas.

Mattie had driven down from the Sun Valley area with Mike Chase, an amiable, compact bear of a man with white hair and a place in his eyes that reacted slowly to the light. He had lost his father two months earlier. Now, he was headed down to San Carlos, outside Guaymas, to work on the family house. He had accepted the offer of a ride from Mattie. “We were supposed to leave on Tuesday,” he told me after we shook hands.“It’s Friday. It’s a good thing I’m a patient man, because I’ve been waiting for three days.”

Why was I in Heigerman? Well, why not? I had to drive to San Francisco anyway, and if they were going to drive all night, I could caravan and save myself the cost of a hotel room in Elko, Nevada. But Mexico? For a philanthropic renewable energy project with a loosely connected group of wanderers? I’m a climber: my car was filled with rock shoes, ice tools, ropes—not to mention skis, boots and skins in case I ended up in Canada. There wasn’t a pair of flip-flops or a sun hat to be found.

The van was headed to Healsburg, an hour and a half north of San Francisco. ETD: one hour. ETA: fourteen hours hence. Our route was the same for most of the way. “I’ll go with you as far as Reno,” I said to Mike. The full moon popped up above the basalt cliffs on the other side of the river, a pale yellow orb over the January snows. “After that, we’ll see.”

Mike just looked at me and smiled.

Pushing for renewable energy to help fight the battle against climate change in the United States and the rest of the Western world is important, but doing so in the developing world is equally so. In fact, according to the United Nations Development Program:

Developing countries, and the poorest people who live in them, are the most vulnerable to climate change. Yet it is also they who are most in need of expanded energy services to meet their growth and development needs.

In the US we’re used to environmental groups and lobbyists working to change government policies regarding energy, small businesses that focus on renewable energies like solar and wind, and various individuals taking personal steps like installing solar panels, but in the areas of the world that are truly vulnerable to climate change, what does pushing for renewable energy look like?

To help answer that questions, we’re happy to welcome the team at Greenscool. A non-profit organization that installs renewable energy systems in impoverished schools around the world, not only does Greenscool work with the technicalities of installing renewable energy systems, but it also focuses on education, teaching students and teachers about the renewable energy sources so that they have a better understanding of them and their potential.

Greenscool just launched its first project in Guaymas, Mexico. One of the primary goals of the Guaymas Project is to salvage solar panels in neighboring San Carlos, Mexico, and repurpose them to help power a primary school in Fatima. Greenery will be fortunate enough to feature frequent blog and video updates from Christian Beckwith, one of the members of the current project.

We hope that his updates will give an in-depth view of what bringing renewable energy to the developing world really looks like, and how that can help us in return push for change in our own communities.

We look forward to the posts.