Warning: long
tl;dr: After forty years, I’m not re-offering to be on the board at the Solar Nova Scotia Annual General Meeting this evening. It's been a wonderful run.
Created in 1980 with the core concept that burning dead dinosaurs to heat your home was a really bad idea at best, and unsustainable at worst, and long before anyone had heard of carbon, the founders of Solar Nova Scotia wanted to build homes that used almost no energy to stay warm, and what little they did need could come from a tiny tiny woodstove -- homes that were more energy efficient, more beautiful, more functional, more belovéd than R2000 homes, twenty years before that.
So for a while we taught people how to build their own low-carbon-footprint homes. But you can’t build your own home any more so we switched to teaching people how to work with contractors, to build them.
How I got on the board is the goofiest story: Joanne Cook was working with Norval, and, blue-blood environmentalist that she is, an early member of Solar Nova Scotia. Believe it or not, *another* Norval was the chair of Solar Nova Scotia at the time, Norval Balch. I'll put a link to the Solar NS obituary I wrote, in the first comment.
Now, before the Internet, Solar Nova Scotia used to share ideas, information, and enthusiasm via weekly get togethers — every Friday night, without fail, at a Halifax pub. The pubs changed over the years - several downtown ones; we were at the last Friday night of some; my Norval got kicked out for being disruptive at The Double Deuce and we moved to a new bar, a long time at Maxwell’s Plum, and finally at The Lion’s Head - until Covid.
Anyway back in... whatever it was, mid-1980s, Joanne thought it would be fun for there to be TWO Norvals at the long table of 20, sometimes 30, solar enthusiasts on a Friday evening, so she suggested we attend.
We did, and got to like the people and the cause a lot and we joined and got on the board. I was Secretary and Norval was Chair for a while (probably the only organization that has had two different Norvals for chairs.)
And when the web came along in the late 1990s, I built an online society membership database and we imported 1980s data from Keith Robertson’s FoxPro database; he’d been Membership Director for the previous 20 years. There are now many instances of that membership database, all running different nonprofits.
At some point we stopped making and snail-mailing newsletters, and the extremely cool address label printing module of my database was never used again.
In 2000 we hosted the Canadian National Solar conference, becoming the first solar conference in Canada to break even. We had hundreds of people attending at the Lord Nelson. I remember our team of 20 people at Maxwell’s Plum stuffing and licking .. I think, four thousand invitations to be mailed out.
We taught thousands of people about solar homes; we organized a hundred tours of solar homes: beautiful finished ones, old ones, ones under construction. We published... three books I think, one of which (the Solar Shelter Manual) we sold thousands of copies of.
Solar Nova Scotia has shaped my career path: one Friday evening at the pub I was wailing that I was sick of sitting in a dusty windowless basement office and networks and databases, and Sandy Hines said, "Come work for me! We'll be out on ladders and roofs and making the world a better place." I did - installing, fixing, and even selling solar systems, and then heat pumps, and transforming my body from desk job flab to a lean, mean tradesman machine!
And that got me to my great gig of teaching people how to get solar on their roofs, a few years ago.
And, people: I have met the most wonderful, most witty, most eccentric, (sometimes all three in one package -- I don't have enough fingers to point fingers) most spectacular people in my life via Solar Nova Scotia.
Solar Nova Scotia’s path has changed: it is now time to be pushing for change with various levels of government, and while I know this legal and legislative work is necessary, my heart’s not in it. We very successfully pushed back against Nova Scotia Power’s tariff on solar panels a couple years ago and that catapulted the organization into the spotlight with the solar industry, the general public, the power utility, and the UARB. We are now equals with those, bringing ideas and demands to the table which are taken very seriously.
But, my heart is just not in the world of laws and policies and regulations so, after forty years, I’m not re-offering at the Annual General Meeting this evening.
And, you know what? Forty years on a society’s board is long enough!
It's been a wonderful run.