This issue of Crossroads comes to you soon after a historic action of the Harrisonburg City Council to grant a 20-year 100 percent tax exemption for commercial solar projects. Our first solar array, on the roof of Sadie Hartzler Library, online since November, is producing 2 percent of our campus electric consumption. The action of [...]

AN ESSAY HEADLINED “A Climate-Change Activist Prepares for the Worst,” published in the Outlook section of the Washington Post one recent Sunday (Feb. 27, 2011), sparked 444 online comments before the Post closed the discussion. The essay also prompted more than 1,800 people to recommend it via Facebook. The writers of the 444 postings were [...]

AFTER CLAMBERING DOWN a rickety iron ladder and inching across a slippery concrete ledge, Hugh Stoll ’89 arrives at the business end of his latest brainchild: a new hydroelectric turbine for his dam on the Rocky River in Pittsboro, North Carolina. Unscrewing a metal cover to show off the guts of his new contraption – [...]

Upon their graduation from EMU, Jason ’99 and Janelle ’01 Myers-Benner knew that living sustainably would be an overarching priority in their lives. In the decade-plus since, this desire has grown into “a vast and consuming project … engaging and energizing, even while exhausting,” Jason writes. The Myers-Benners minimize their travel by vehicle, heat their [...]

Eating locally and in season wasn’t a fad during Mary Beth Lind’s childhood in rural West Virginia. It was just the way things worked. Her mother grew a large garden, and her father, a doctor, sometimes accepted vegetables as payment from his patients. “You just learned to live with what you have,” says Lind, who [...]

Lester ’71 and Mary Beth ’72 Lind were undergraduates at EMU when the environmental movement was taking off. They were on campus when the first Earth Day was celebrated. They took part when the college offered a January term focused on environmental issues. And they drew inspiration from a popular saying of the time – [...]

Sustainable doesn’t need to mean complicated. For many EMU alumni trying to live sustainably, little things really do add up to a lot. At the Landis Homes community in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Dr. Richard ’60 and Ruth Slabaugh ’63 Weaver were the first couple to move into one of nearly two dozen cottage homes built with [...]

Judging from the number of alumni who contacted Crossroads about living in, or building for others, “green” houses, the majority of graduates from EMU by 2021 will end up living in homes that consume dramatically less energy than their parents’ and grandparents’ homes, while being built with materials from one’s local area that pose few [...]

The house isn’t technically round, but with 20 sides, it’s close. And it looks unusual enough that strangers sometimes drop in just to ask about the place Elmer ’64 and Marianne Kennel built in 2007 a few miles outside of Harrisonburg, Virginia. Built with 20 prefabricated panels made by a company in North Carolina, the [...]

After being exposed to a variety of toxic substances while renovating his home in 1980, Clint Good, class of ’77, developed hypersensitivities to compounds in paints, adhesives and other building materials. He was just 27 years old. Good visited numerous doctors as he struggled to regain his health. He began paying close attention to the [...]