Cruising with Currier

The plan for our "cruise" was to drive around, then make our way to the solar farm at Laurie and Bart's house. First, I should mention that I once stole Laurie's dog.

FEATURING LAURIE DAVID

Cruising AND HER 2021 NISSAN LEAF withCurrier

Story by Geoff Currier Photos byJeremy Driesen

For our second issue of Blue Dot Living, I’m taking a cruise with environmental activist Laurie David in her Nissan Leaf. Before working full-time on environmental and political issues, Laurie worked as a talent coordinator in the entertainment business, which is where she met her first husband, Larry David.

But her breakthrough moment came in 2006 when she was the executive producer for the film An Inconvenient Truth, starring Al Gore, for which she received an Academy Award.

“Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the film,” Laurie told me when we went for our ride. “Fifteen years ago, many people had not acknowledged that climate change was real, or that humans were causing it. Because of that movie, every magazine and newspaper was doing a story about it. It shifted the entire paradigm on the issue.”

More recently she’s produced social action documentaries including The Last Animals, Fed Up, and The Biggest Little Farm. She’s written two popular cookbooks, The Family DinnerandThe Family Cooks,and most recently she’s co-written Imagine It! A Handbook for a Happier Planet with Heather Reisman (excerpted in this magazine, on page TK). Laurie and her husband, Bart Thorpe, now live full-time on their regenerative farm in Chilmark.

I met Laurie at the Chilmark Store. She was wearing a pair of jeans, a striped pullover, and a stylish pair of green sunglasses.

Laurie wore a stylish pair of green sunglasses made from a dozen plastic water bottles from Flint, Mich. Right: The Nissan Leaf is an affordable $30,000. The plan for our “cruise” was to drive around upIsland a bit then make our way to the solar farm at Laurie and Bart’s house. But before we get to that, in the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I once stole David’s dog.

“The frames for these glasses,” she said, “are made from about a dozen plastic water bottles.” When Laurie was researching Imagine It! she met a woman in Flint, Mich., who was horrified that thousands and thousands of plastic water bottles were brought in because it was unsafe to drink the city water, but there was no good plan for disposing of the bottles.

“So the girl started making the bottles into frames,” Laurie said. “She started a company called Genusee, and she ended up hiring all these fantastic people.”

The plan for our “cruise” was to drive around up-Island a bit, then make our way to the solar farm at Laurie and Bart’s house. But before we get to that, in the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I once stole Laurie’s dog.

It was all innocent enough. I was driving down the road where I live, and saw a dog I mistook for my neighbor's dog, walking along the side of the road. It was cold and getting dark, so thinking I would do my neighbor a favor, I put the dog in the car and brought him to his house, only to be greeted by my neighbor's real dog barking at me from behind the door. So much for being a good Samaritan.

I had to run an errand, and my neighbor agreed to hold onto the dog until I got back. When I returned a half an hour later, my neighbor said, “I think this dog belongs to Laurie David, who was visiting some people up the street. And his name is Theo.” How my neighbor figured all this out will always remain a dark secret to me. But when I told Laurie and Bart that I was the guy who took her dog, we all had a good laugh.

On our way to the solar farm, Laurie told me how she

initially got involved as an environmentalist. “When I was pregnant, I became super-aware of what I was eating and what I should be drinking,” she said. “I was responsible for the child growing inside of me, and that’s when I had the ‘aha’ moment. I didn’t want to be exposed to chemicals, and wanted only nutritious food not laced with insecticide.”

Laurie’s car was a new Nissan Leaf, a sharp-looking, compact five-door hatchback. Laurie and Bart like it so much they got two of them, and are quick to proselytize about it to their friends. “It’s a great car, and it’s affordable,” Laurie said, “around $30,000. It saves people money, and it feels fantastic driving it.” While it’s not a rocket ship like Hasoni Pratts’ Tesla Model X that I wrote about last issue, it’s still fun to drive. “When you drive an electric car and then go back to an old internal-combustion car,” Laurie said, “it feels like you’re going back to the Fifties. This is the future! I love that I never have to go to the gas station, and,driving around the Island, I can go days without recharging.” Nissan claims that it can go up to 225 miles on a single charge.

“If you’re buying a new car, you have to consider getting an electric vehicle,” Laurie said. “They can do so much to help with the climate and keep emissions out of the air, and especially now that manufacturers like GM and Volvo are pledging to be all-electric in a few years, as customers we have to meet them halfway. It’s critically important.”

Driving around Chilmark, we had a chance to talk about Laurie's new book, Imagine It! A Handbook for a Happier Planet. I told Laurie that I really enjoyed her book. It covered all the different ways we’re leaving a carbon footprint, including plastics, clothing, food, chemicals, paper, water, and transportation. And I liked that at the end of each section, it gave the readers ways they could do something about climate change and become an advocate.

“Everything I know is in Imagine It!” Laurie said, “If you want to know what I know, read the book … it’s the way to have a healthier life.” I asked Laurie if she had fun writing the book.

“I learned so much writing it, it was fun because I feel compelled to share what I know with people. It was also a lot of work because my co-writer, Heather Reisman, who founded and owns Indigo Books, lives in Canada and was only available to work at night, so that’s when we did it. It’s pretty much how I spent the pandemic.”

At this point we were approaching Laurie’s house, and she told me a little about her farm. “You know, I never imagined myself living on a regenerative farm,” she said. “It’s a small farm, we’re just lady and gentleman farmers, but the ultimate is to have a place to grow our own food, and of course that’s also all tied in with composting. Nothing is wasted.”

Bart does the farming, and each year they’re able to donate food to Island schools and the Food Pantry. “We grow tons of food,” Laurie said. They also have a fair amount of livestock, chickens (Laurie gave me some organic eggs), cattle, sheep, a goat, and three Sicilian donkeys.

We turned into a dirt road that led up to Laurie’s house, and took a left to what Laurie told me was the solar farm. Spread across the field were 24 big solar panels which had enough output to support the electricity needs for about 50 houses. “We donate to people who would like to use solar power but don’t have their own panels,” David said.

All in all, it was a rather surreal experience. I was surrounded by a whole lot of solar panels slowly and silently tracking the sun. There was the buzz of several beehives clustered in the corner of the field. And I could have sworn I heard the wistful bark of a dog in the distance.

“Could that be you, Theo?” I thought to myself.

The 24 solar panels provide enough electricity for about 50 houses; they donate to people who would like to use solar power but don’t have their own.

Book excerpt: Imagine It!

A Handbook for a Happier Planet

From the chapter “Our Transportation Footprint” by Laurie David and Heather Reisman, published by Penguin Random House

FACT: One gas-powered car emits, on average, five tons of carbon dioxide per year. That’s equivalent to burning 5,500 pounds of coal. FACT: A container ship can outpollute 50 million cars. FACT: Almost 30 percent of all greenhouse gases are created by transportation. FACT: Traffic areas around schools — where vehicles are often left idling — [contribute to] significantly higher pollution inside school buildings.

Transportation is a major contributor to carbon emissions, and reducing them is essential to tackling our climate crisis. Cars, trucks, planes, and ships ... now produce more planet-warming pollution than power plants.

Governments can help by developing smarter and cleaner public transit infrastructure (i.e., trains and buses that quickly and conveniently connect people with their destinations, enhanced walking and biking paths) and by incentivizing the adoption of electric vehicles; but individuals also have an important role to play in reducing transportation-based carbon emissions ...

Cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions … People in communities of color are, once again, disproportionately exposed to higher levels of this air pollution where they live or work.

The sooner we transition to clean-fuel cars and trucks, the better for our planet and all its people …

It was inspiring in the midst of the loss and grief wrought by the pandemic to see the skies clearing, hear the songbirds, see fishes and dolphins swimming in rivers and estuaries they had abandoned. So, imagine replacing parking lots, bumper-tobumper traffic, and exposure to climate- and people-harming air pollution with more pocket parks, green spaces, bike lanes, farmers markets, and pedestrian paths.

Find Imagine It! at Bunch of Grapes, Edgartown Books, Grey Barn, and Lennox and Harvey.

Continued from page 14

or absence and overwinter survival of this species at monitoring sites around Martha’s Vineyard. Early in 2021, we learned that several research trials attempted to infect big brown bats with COVID-19 and failed, offering some scientific support for moving forward with a 2021 field season for bat research. By late April 2021, our staff were fully vaccinated against COVID-19, which allowed us to launch our spring mist-netting efforts.

We captured three Northern long-eared bats in May, and all showed signs of the fungus on their wings, but were otherwise healthy. The male and two females likely recovered as the May weather warmed and they began roosting behind the bark of trees exposed to the sun and warm temperatures. The Pd fungus does not survive in hot, dry environments, which is what female bats seek for pup rearing.

By August, the bat pups born in May and June will be flying, and more bats will be feeding heavily on beetles, moths, mosquitoes, and other insects in our forests and night skies than were feeding this spring. Northern long-eared bats have only one pup a year, so it will be decades before their populations recover.

We continue to search for any basements or crawlspaces under homes on Martha’s Vineyard where bats were seen in winter, or found in the spring. Because hibernating bats do not leave excrement, nor do they chew wiring or insulation, they are good tenants, but difficult to find. Bluedot readers who have old cinderblock or stone foundations with dirt-floor crawlspaces, or a damp basement that has a bulkhead door entrance are urged to reach out if they will allow us to investigate for potential bat occupancy. Email info@biodiversityworksmv.org or call 800-690-0993.

A Northern long-eared bat.