One Percent grows valley organizations

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

By Henry Sweets

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-The environmental treasures of Jackson Hole and Teton Valley will always lure new people to live in their midst. The more people these treasures attract, the more pressure is put on them.

A Jackson based nonprofit, One Percent for the Tetons, was started two years ago to channel a small percentage of the valleys’ robust economies into a fund that could support grassroots sustainability efforts on both sides of the Tetons.
 “We take so very much from [the natural landscape] and the question that was raised for me and for the others who founded [One Percent for the Tetons] was, is there a way that we can give back more?” said Jonathan Schecter, a founder and director for the organization.

The program has awarded a quarter of a million dollars to sustainability efforts in the valleys in the last two years. Below are descriptions of three organizations awarded grant money last week.

Turning Garbage into Horticultural Gold
Tons of food and paper waste are shipped to the Sublette County landfill every day from Jackson. All of that “garbage” could stay in Teton County and be turned into dirt, according to Terra Firma Organics owner Dane Buk. It would save thousands of gallons of fuel, benefit the regions needy soils and prevent a significant amount of leachate and methane at the Sublette County Landfill, he said.

Last year Buk won a One Percent grant to begin a pilot food-waste recycling program that takes pre-consumer food and paper waste from seven area businesses including the Whole Grocer, and the Four Seasons. This year he won a second grant to continue taking a bigger bite out of Teton County’s waste stream.
Penny McBride, a consultant for Terra Firma, said the first-year program saw an overwhelming, and almost frustrating success.

“Everybody was producing more than they thought,” McBride said. “And so many others were calling to participate in the program, but we couldn’t take them. The systems just aren’t in place right now to take more.”

The new grant money, she said, will help solve “bottlenecks” discovered in the first year of operation.

Buk said it will take the county government and community members to get involved and help take the food waste recycling program to the next level, and beyond.

Buk’s vision is to eventually consolidate Teton County’s waste into a “single stream,” from which up to 70 percent can be recycled or composted.

Live water in Victor
During some hot summers Trail Creek in Victor, Idaho, runs dry. Like many streams and rivers across the West, certain landowners have water rights to a percentage of Trail Creek’s flow, and in years of low snowfall or spring drought, landowner water use causes the creek to run dry by late summer.

A dry streambed also makes it impossible for Yellowstone Cutthroat trout to spawn there without their fry shriveling in the sun, Ann Lindstedt from Friends of Teton River said.

Friends of Teton River is embarking on a program to keep live water flowing year round in Trail Creek, from its source to the Teton River. This will require working with irrigators, government agencies, conservationists and local leaders to solve the problem. The grant money will help host meetings between those different stakeholders.

“It became this huge puzzle where you’re looking at all these different water rights and who is willing to do what,” Lindstedt said. “Who has extra water, who is willing to lease it downstream, and who they could lease it to.”

The project is important, Lindstedt said, because if it is successful, it could set the stage for future water deals in other “priority” watersheds.

Energy efficiency online
Pursue Balance JH will launch a website this fall where people can create a personal database of energy use habits, and also receive professional guidance to make simple reductions in the amount of energy they use.

“It’s a web experience that people can plug into and create a picture of what their energy use is today, and what a ten percent reduction would look like in the year 2010,” said Sarah Mitchell, Executive Director of Pursue Balance JH.

Mitchell said that every household and business would have a unique energy profile that allows different users to save their information online and have a personal guide as they track their energy use reductions.

The goal of Pursue Balance’s website is to get ten percent of Teton County meters on board, and have ten percent of those meters each see a ten percent reduction. That comes to be about one percent, which might not seem big, but comes to about 217,500 kilowatt/hours per month, Mitchell said.


PERMALINK:
One Percent grows valley organizations | Planet JH News Article: General Environment

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