In Emmet County, a baker has found a nearby farmer to grow bread-quality wheat. Schools are serving more locally grown food. The Traverse Bay Area Intermediate School District is supporting teachers in farm-to-school and school-garden curriculum so that students learn reading, math and science while learning to love eating healthy food. These were just a few of the stories shared recently at the seventh annual Northwest Michigan Food & Farming Network Summit.
Michigan’s roads and bridges are in desperate need of repair, yet the funding structure for transportation is broken. The measure on the ballot this May 5 attempts to remedy that. While Proposal 1 is not a perfect fix, the Michigan Land Use Institute firmly believes that the positive changes it would have for our infrastructure far outweigh the negatives.
Power plants waste a lot of energy-most of it as heat fleeing up their smokestacks. But what if the plants captured that wasted heat and put it to good use-producing more electricity, warming nearby buildings, or assisting industrial processes?
The work to bring passenger rail to Traverse City is off to a good start thanks to a quick crowdfunding effort that raised almost $19,000 in ten days.
We’ll always need a rock-solid, unshakably constant supply of power. But today there are other ways to do that besides merely burning more fossil fuel.
New distributed energy technologies, new grid control systems, and new demand-side energy services should be part of what has been an under-informed, truncated conversation about meeting Michigan’s future electricity needs.
Gov. Rick Snyder recently unveiled his long-awaited energy policy goals, and they are good ones. But with the most conservative Republicans in Lansing pointed in a different direction, success requires party moderates to work with Democrats, who back a platform resembling the governor’s.