HomeYour VoiceHerStoryYour MultimediaResource LibraryAbout WVMCode of ConductRegisterLog in

  • Latest Post
  • Post index
  • Archives
  • Categories
  • Latest comments
  • Contact
  • About Your Voice
  • Raise Your Voice
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • ...
  • 6
  • ...
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • ...
  • 61

How Community Solar Can Liberate You From Fossil Fuels

Posted by jj on May 21, 2025 in Health and Safety, Environment, Newsworthy
How Community Solar Can Liberate You From Fossil Fuels
How Community Solar Can Liberate You From Fossil Fuels

If you are as impressed with Michelle Moore, her work and ideas, as we are, you may want to see how she was recently treated by the orange idiot.  Read the whole story here.

https://alabamareflector.com/2025/04/05/trump-fires-clean-energy-leader-from-tva-board-without-publicly-providing-a-reason/

Trump fires clean energy leader from TVA board without publicly providing a reason

Michelle Moore's Article

Introduction

Energy is the lifeblood of opportunity and economic development and a pillar of human civilization in the 21st century. Even the most remote communities in rural America were welcomed into the industrial age when electricity was made available to them in the 1930s. This created an economic engine that attracted jobs and supported a quality of life previously unimaginable. However, challenges are now different in the information age and Anthropocene period. Our traditional energy choices are destroying the places we come from and love. But we can be better.

A different vision is possible: a future in which rural communities flourish. In this future, clean, resilient, and local energy, as well as the infrastructure investment required to build it, sustain good jobs in small towns as the abundant land in rural America is used to fulfill the energy needs of big cities. Farming families use unplanted fields for the “last crop,” earning a living from the power that’s freely and abundantly available in solar energy, thereby preserving generational wealth. And communities become more resilient, connecting local renewables with energy storage to improve energy futures for everyone.

Broadband—built and financed alongside the modern and secure power grid that it relies on—runs to every home, and its network is owned and governed by the communities it serves through rural and small-town public power utilities. These new high-speed networks also offer many educational options for kids who would otherwise rely on a much slower dial-up connection. Everyone has remote access to doctors, and no one has to drive hours for basic health care. Local businesses and startups can succeed because they’re finally connected to a global marketplace of people and companies that want to buy what they have to sell.

Rural and small-town utilities—the economic hearts of their hometowns—flourish because clean energy and the transportation sector’s electrification enable them to grow again. More revenue means more funding to support community development and pay for essential services, so residents thrive, too, because their utilities represent their needs and are governed in alignment with their democratic roots.

As a result, and perhaps most importantly, the 48 percent of Americans who want to live in a small town in the countryside can do so and have a good life there with jobs, affordable homes, and the possibility of an even better life for their kids.

How can we make this vision a reality? Community solar projects are unique in their ability to help neighbors within the same utility service territory share power from a solar project. Rural electric cooperatives, in particular, have long been leaders in community solar. The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association even published a “solar playbook” in 2016 to help local utilities develop business models and implementation plans for bringing community solar to their member-owners; though ironically, at the same time the playbook was being developed, NRECA was opposing clean energy legislation in Congress.

Because energy policies, natural and built infrastructures, community priorities, and market factors like energy pricing and price structures vary from place to place, there’s no one way to incorporate community solar into your local clean energy future. There are many great examples to look to for inspiration and guidance.

Six Great Examples of Community Solar Projects

1) Vernon Electric Cooperative

Vernon Electric Cooperative completed the first community solar project in Wisconsin in 2014, and it has been sold out ever since. Local member-owners were invited to purchase shares of the 1,001-panel array at VEC’s headquarters.

The electricity production from each member-owner’s panels is credited against their utility bill, and panels can be bought and sold among members. Its model has created a strong sense of community ownership among participating residents. When heavy snow blankets the solar farm, members regularly call the utility to make sure the panels get cleared so they can keep producing power.

2) Walton EMC

Walton EMC—the rural utility that won Facebook’s clean energy business—built its first one-megawatt community solar project in 2015. Member-owners can purchase up to two blocks of community solar at $25 per block, the production from which is credited to the member-owner’s utility bill.

Located on six acres next to its headquarters in Monroe, Georgia, Walton EMC’s first community solar project sold out, and the program quickly expanded to two additional sites. This early community positioned the company to become one of the Southeast’s leading utilities in solar development, attracting new businesses and investments to the area.

3) ACCESS Project

Building on this history of community solar leadership, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded NRECA a $1 million multiyear research award to study pathways for making solar energy more accessible and affordable for rural households with low and moderate incomes.

The resulting ACCESS Project, which stands for Achieving Cooperative Community Equitable Solar Sources, was led by Adaora Ifebigh, former NRECA program director for Energy Access. The body of knowledge the ACCESS Project is creating is a rich resource for understanding how rural cooperative utilities can use community solar to meet their unique, place-based needs.

4) Anza Electric Cooperative

The Anza Electric Cooperative’s SunAnza and Santa Rosa Solar projects are among those being studied. AEC was born in the 1950s, when local residents, frustrated with the high cost of power from California Electric, reached out to the Rural Electrification Administration and began the process of funding and forming their own local electric cooperative. Located in rural southwestern California, AEC serves about 5,200 residential member-owners and has a long-term agreement to provide power for the Santa Rosa Band of Cahuilla Indians.

The success of its first solar project, SunAnza, demonstrated how solar could help reduce peak electricity costs for the utility and its members. As a result, AEC began work on a second community solar project on tribal lands. By pairing community solar with a time-of-use tariff that charges less for electricity usage at off-peak hours, the Santa Rosa Solar project will share annual savings estimated at $600 to $1,000 per participating household.

5) Roanoke Electric Cooperative

Consistently among the vanguard, Roanoke Electric Cooperative takes a different approach. It uses philanthropic support and leverages other programs to deliver extra savings to member-owners through the Roanoke SolarShare program.

Philanthropic donations pay for no-cost community solar shares for low-income member-owners, reducing their utility bills. The first fruits of the savings are used to cover the costs of home repairs, like fixing leaky roofs. These are necessary to enable energy upgrades, such as insulation, which deliver even more savings through energy efficiency.

6) EnerWealth Solutions

Then there is the reparative and restorative approach to solar development pioneered by EnerWealth Solutions in North Carolina, which supports small and minority landowners with a unique profit-sharing model that channels some of the revenue into a local community development nonprofit controlled by member-owners.

An Abundance of Opportunities in Your Community

There are many opportunities to support your community’s vitality with solar power. You can begin locally by working with your state’s energy policy and market structure, changing regulations if necessary, using the land responsibly, working with partners who share your values, and choosing from various solar scales and models to match your and your neighbors’ needs.

This approach is liberating compared to the constraints of a scarce fossil fuel-powered energy system that takes resources from one place and burns them in another to create enough power to support new industries and opportunities.

As you’re building your solar strategy, don’t resort to what’s been done in the past when you have the chance to build a new system based on better values—a system whose benefits can be seen within your generation. Always keep in mind why rural cooperatives and public power utilities were created in the first place: to enable rural and small-town communities to come together to own their power generation. The field is wide open and the harvest is ripe. Take deep breaths, roll up your sleeves, and get ready for the joyful work.

As you do so, lead with love. Localizing your community’s energy system with clean power is an opportunity to achieve a healthier balance between the natural and built environments. Economically, such power production and delivery also benefit communities by sustaining them rather than extracting their wealth. Keeping our love for our hometowns and neighbors at the forefront will help us make decisions we can be proud of as we navigate the road ahead.

It will be hard. Sometimes, the people and companies that benefit from traditional power generation methods might resist you and fight for the status quo, and you may get tired. But as the Good Book says, “Let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” So don’t give up; you’ll see the results in your lifetime.

Clean energy offers us a future; many different futures, in fact. The possibilities are as diverse as the places we live, the ways we make decisions, and the renewable resources we share. Let’s use this gift, and this moment of transformation, to build the kinds of energy futures that will enable us all to thrive.

This excerpt is from the book Rural Renaissance: Revitalizing America’s Hometowns through Clean Power. Copyright © 2022 by L. Michelle Moore. Reproduced with permission from Island Press, Washington, D.C. Edited and produced for the web by Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
“How Community Solar Can Liberate You From Fossil Fuels” by L. Michelle Moore is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). For permissions requests beyond the scope of this license, please see Observatory.wiki’s Reuse and Reprint Rights guidance.  Last edited: February 20, 2025
**************************************

If you are as impressed with Michelle Moore, her work and ideas, as we are, you may want to see how she was recently treated by the orange idiot.  Read the whole story here.

https://alabamareflector.com/202https://alabamareflector.com/2025/04/05/trump-fires-clean-energy-leader-from-tva-board-without-publicly-providing-a-reason/5/04/05/trump-fires-clean-energy-leader-from-tva-board-without-publicly-providing-a-reason/

Trump fires clean energy leader from TVA board without publicly providing a reason

 
https://alabamareflector.com/2025/04/05/trump-fires-clean-energy-leader-from-tva-board-without-publicly-providing-a-reason/
Leave a comment

TRUMP and CHAOS - THAT IS THE PLAN

Posted by jj on May 15, 2025 in Newsworthy, Politics & Elections, Background, Intersectional Issues
TRUMP and CHAOS - THAT IS THE PLAN
TRUMP  and  CHAOS - THAT  IS  THE  PLAN

James Greenberg

They say Trump governs by chaos. That he acts impulsively, erratically, without a plan. But what if that is the plan? What if the chaos is the cover? What if the daily spectacle—the tariffs, the purges, the budget cuts, the Twitter feuds—isn’t just noise, but a smokescreen for something colder, more calculated?
Because behind the outrage lies a pattern. Not of leadership, but of looting.
When institutions are gutted, when rules are rewritten, when the lights go out in the agencies that protect the public—who steps in? Not the small farmer. Not the corner shop. Not the family clinging to a mortgage. It’s the well-connected, the well-capitalized, the politically protected. The ones who know how to turn wreckage into wealth.
That’s the real game. And it’s happening in plain sight.
Take tariffs. Pitched as a punch to China, they’ve hammered small manufacturers and family farms here at home—people who can’t absorb the costs or reroute their supply chains overnight. Many go under. And when they do? Hedge funds, multinationals, and campaign donors are waiting, checkbooks in hand.
It’s not protectionism. It’s predation.
And it doesn’t stop at trade. In his second term, Trump is gutting the civil service—replacing experienced professionals with loyalists. Not to drain the swamp, but to drain the brakes. Environmental protections? Scrapped. Watchdogs? Fired. Procurement rules? Bypassed. With no one left to say no, federal agencies become pipelines for favors, land grabs, and sweetheart deals.
This isn’t deregulation. It’s a hostile takeover of the state itself.
Housing follows the same script. With tenant protections stripped and public housing defunded, eviction becomes policy. Neighborhoods are emptied. Then come the “Opportunity Zones”—tax shelters wrapped in the language of renewal. The public loses homes. Developers get subsidies.
And education? It’s being slowly bled out. Public schools are starved, then slandered, then sold off. Vouchers and charters vacuum up resources, while billionaires move in on school buildings, test contracts, and real estate.
Even disaster has become a business model.
COVID shuttered small businesses by the thousands. Many got nothing. But big tech, logistics giants, and private equity firms made a killing. Now Trump is back to the same script—slashing Medicaid, defunding science, gutting the safety net. Because every crisis is a chance to clear the field. And when the dust settles, only the powerful remain.
We’ve seen this before. In Mexico, where public cooperatives were crushed by debt, then sold off to cronies. In Russia, where state assets became oligarch fortunes overnight. In New Orleans, where homes, schools, and lives were swept away—only to be rebuilt for someone else.
Trump doesn’t need a governing vision. He just needs the wreckage. Because in the wreckage, rules disappear. Oversight vanishes. And billionaires buy what’s left.
This isn’t governance. It’s liquidation.
So don’t be fooled by the chaos. It’s not a distraction. It’s the business model.
And if we don’t call it what it is—organized looting, sanctioned by the state—it won’t just continue.
It will become the future.
https://substack.com/@jamesbgreenberg
(c)James B. Greenberg
 
Author Bio:  James Greenberg is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Founding Editor of the Journal of Political Ecology, and past president of the Political Ecology Society.
 
Leave a comment

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!

Posted by jj on May 08, 2025 in Economic Justice, My Voice
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!
KNOWLEDGE  IS  POWER!

I strongly urge you to take up a task which, at first, may seem quite daunting - the veiwing of over twenty videos.  Produced by Robert Reich and his team at Inequality Media Civic Action, each one is actually no more than a few minutes long but are extremely informative.  As Robert explains, "We'll look at how the richest Americans actually got so rich, and how the tax system is rigged in their favor.  We'll hear an actual billionaire, Tom Steyer, explain why tax cuts for the rich are so misguided."

Each short video explains another aspect of what is going on in Washington and steps we can take to fight back.

It's time the rich pay their fair share.

View all the videos as you have time.  Go to https://www.inequalitymediacivicaction.org/explainers 

You won't be sorry you did.

Leave a comment

Nationwide Economic 'Blackout' Continues

Posted by jj on May 05, 2025 in Economic Justice, Newsworthy, Social Justice, Background
Nationwide Economic 'Blackout' Continues
Nationwide Economic 'Blackout' Continues
  • Amazon Boycott 2 – May 6-12
  • Walmart Boycott 2 - May 20 to 26
  • Target Boycott - June 3 to 9
  • McDonald's Boycott - June 24 to 30
  • Independence Day Boycott – July 4

"It's simple: stop spending," The People's Action USA says on its website. "On blackout days, avoid shopping, streaming, online orders, fast food, and everything in between. If you absolutely need something, buy it from a small, local business.

"This is about discipline and awareness. The less we give them, the more power we take back."

In the same vein as Walmart, companies like Target and McDonald's have also reversed their DEI policies. A 40-day boycott of Target began the first week of March and remains ongoing. Reverend Jamal Bryant, a Georgia pastor, spurred the boycott.

Leave a comment

Marge Piercy's poem "Right to Life"

Posted by jj on Apr 27, 2025 in Reproductive Rights, Newsworthy, Social Justice, Background
Marge Piercy's poem "Right to Life"
Marge Piercy's poem "Right to Life"

Marge Piercy's poem "Right to Life," remains painfully relevant, touching on themes of reproductive justice and women's bodily autonomy.

Marge Piercy wrote this poem in 1980; it matters even more today than it did forty-five years ago.
 
Marge Piercy: Right To Life
 
A woman is not a basket you place
your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood
hen you can slip duck eggs under.
Not the purse holding the coins of your
descendants till you spend them in wars.
Not a bank where your genes gather interest
and interesting mutations in the tainted
rain, any more than you are.
 
You plant corn and you harvest
it to eat or sell. You put the lamb
in the pasture to fatten and haul it in to
butcher for chops. You slice the mountain
in two for a road and gouge the high plains
for coal and the waters run muddy for
miles and years. Fish die but you do not
call them yours unless you wished to eat them.
 
Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.
You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,
fields for growing babies like iceberg
lettuce. You value children so dearly
that none ever go hungry, none weep
with no one to tend them when mothers
work, none lack fresh fruit,
none chew lead or cough to death and your
orphanages are empty. Every noon the best
restaurants serve poor children steaks.
At this moment at nine o’clock a partera
is performing a table top abortion on an
unwed mother in Texas who can’t get
Medicaid any longer. In five days she will die
of tetanus and her little daughter will cry
and be taken away. Next door a husband
and wife are sticking pins in the son
they did not want. They will explain
for hours how wicked he is,
how he wants discipline.
 
We are all born of woman, in the rose
of the womb we suckled our mother’s blood
and every baby born has a right to love
like a seedling to sun. Every baby born
unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come
due in twenty years with interest, an anger
that must find a target, a pain that will
beget pain. A decade downstream a child
screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad is summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns.
 
I will choose what enters me, what becomes
of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,
no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,
not your uranium mine, not your calf
for fattening, not your cow for milking.
You may not use me as your factory.
Priests and legislators do not hold shares
in my womb or my mind.
This is my body. If I give it to you
I want it back. My life
is a non-negotiable demand.
Leave a comment
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • ...
  • 6
  • ...
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • ...
  • 61

Women's Voices Media - Newsletter

Powered by follow.it

Search

Act Now!

  • THE BOYCOTTS CONTINUE: Walmart - May 20 to 26
  • HAVE YOU CONTACTED YOUR SENATORS AND/OR YOUR HOUSE REP TODAY?

Recent Posts

  • How Community Solar Can Liberate You From Fossil Fuels
  • TRUMP and CHAOS - THAT IS THE PLAN
  • KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!
  • Nationwide Economic 'Blackout' Continues
  • Marge Piercy's poem "Right to Life"
  • Unchecked Human Activity Is Pushing Ecosystems Toward the Brink
  • What We Can Learn Fom Gen Z Workers
  • BEING A PRESIDENT WORTHY OF HIS TITLE
  • I WILL NOT "WORK TOGETHER" TO........
  • BLACK MATERNAL HEALTH AWARENESS WEEK
  • A Reformist Program on Immigration
  • Let's hope Kamala Harris wil run for 2026
  • How to Make Recyclable Plastics Out of CO2 to Slow Climate Change
  • COMMENTARY FROM A BADASS WOMAN
  • Outdated Narratives Have Humanity in a Downward Spiral—It’s Time to Tell ‘Stories for Life’
  • A CALL TO ACTION
  • THE REAL “WELFARE QUEENS” ARE CORPORATE CEO’s
  • ARE YOU READY TO RISE UP TOGETHER?
  • Now Is The Time For "Everything You Have"
  • MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD APRIL 5th

Recent Comments

  • chandlerbaxter on BURN THE BARBIES, PAUSE THE PINK
  • dracorouge on FROM RI TO WI: MORE PRO-CHOICE AND PRO-ERA CANDIDATES
  • jj on OPINION: FEMINISM HAS BECOME TOO EXTREME
  • jj on OPINION: FEMINISM HAS BECOME TOO EXTREME
  • admin on THE 2ND IMPEACHMENT OF TRUMP!
  • andreajoy on VOTE!
  • marthaburk on STAND UP & SPEAK OUT!
  • admin on VOTE!
  • urbancat on VOTE!
  • marthaburk on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) Responds to Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL)
  • armandolibertad on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) Responds to Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL)
  • armandolibertad on DON'T EXPRESS OUTRAGE WITHOUT ACTION!
  • allegra22 on GET SMART AMERICA!
  • admin on My Personal Response To Trump by Lisa Wilson Berkowitz‎
  • admin on THE REAL “WELFARE QUEENS” ARE CORPORATE CEO’s

Wit & Wisdom

Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children.
Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Lakota
May 2025
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
        1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
 << <   > >>

Search

XML Feeds

  • RSS 2.0: Posts
  • Atom: Posts
What is RSS?

Your Voice
This collection 2025 by Janice Jochum
Copyright 2019 United Activision Media, LLC
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
• Contact • Help • CMS + user community

b2
Cookies are required to enable core site functionality.