Getting to Hanover
Editor’s Note: I invited Alex Torpey, Hanover’s new Town Manager, to make contribution to this issue of the Newsletter. Here it is and welcome Alex!
One of my favorite spots, dispersed camping in the Custer Gallatin National Forest - Montana.
Maybe it was somewhere between riding through the crowded traffic highways in Southern California without air conditioning in 120 degree record-breaking heat, or seeing massive development playing out in the deserts of Utah and Arizona with no water in sight. Or maybe it was learning about wildfires that had ripped through valleys I was camping in at the Custer Gallatin National Forest in Montana, or maybe getting lost in the kinds of woods that used to blanket the East Coast before it was logged. Or maybe it was camping near dozens of springs, brooks and streams that lull you to sleep at night, watching the "seasons" of each day, as Thoreau would describe, change from night (winter) to morning (spring) to noon (summer) to afternoon/evening (fall) or staring out at the Milky Way at night.
Either way, somewhere along the 15,000 miles that I traveled across the country last year, I had a lot of time to reflect and I made a few decisions about what I wanted to prioritize in my life, and, importantly, a few things that I no longer felt like I should have to compromise on. One of those things was working in a community or organization whose leadership values public engagement and participation, and runs things with an empathetic and ethical outlook. One was having a work/life balance that would allow me to sustain my energy and creative passions. And another was to live and work in a way much more connected to the natural world.
I came to Hanover in part to plug directly into sustainability issues. I've worked on these in the past, installing electric vehicle charges in South Orange way back in 2013, creating plastic bag recycling programs, reducing energy usage in buildings, greening fleets and so much more. Now, Hanover has gone well above and beyond what most communities have done, especially from an energy standpoint. But now I have to make a decision: where will I put my energy (sorry, bad jokes come with me) on sustainability issues in Hanover?
One that really has stuck out for me, after seeing a municipal food waste program fail that had a lot promise because it wasn't managed properly, and then after a year of composting nearly 100% of my food waste (even the stuff people recommend you can't compost), is getting food OUT of our waste stream. Ideally, putting it back into our local soils where its nutrients can do what they did presumably for the millions of years before modern humans came along and somehow turned nutrient dense material into expensive, smelly, and costly waste material. How have we gotten so far away and out of line with how the rest of the living world works?
In some ways, my environmental outlook is turning back the clock - learning from what our ancestors and what other living things do and taking lessons from them, them who have lived in a regenerative balance with their ecosystem far longer than our species has existed on the planet. I think we can learn a lot from the natural world around us, and I hope to put some of those values into practice here in Hanover, not just on sustainability issues.
I look forward to working with Sustainable Hanover and welcome the chance to brainstorm ways we can maximize our impact together!