THE ALTERNATIVE ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL CENTER: AN INVITATION

In 1975, a group of Ramapo students and faculty set out to build a model for thinking about how humans can live sustainably on this earth. Over the past decades, hundreds of students have had a hand in nurturing and developing the AEEC and thousands have toured and learned there. Collectively, they have created a special place, where the land and human activity are woven together in a different pattern than what we see elsewhere around us. While our normal patterns of land use and production destroy the environment, at the AEEC we catch a glimpse of a different approach to living, one that inspires a sense of purpose, responsibility and hope for the future. It is a model for reflection, understanding and action---personal and collective.

Your tour of the AEEC will begin in the intensive raised-bed gardens, where techniques of organic gardening use diversity and reclaimed nutrients to create the conditions for prolific plant growth across three seasons without pesticides, fertilizers or powered machines. Here, students can learn about gardening, develop a closer understand of nature’s interrelationships, and work off the stresses of daily student life. In the rich dark soil of the garden beds is revealed the wisdom needed to produce food in a way that preserves natures’s health while conserving resources. The garden’s health depends upon the cycles of nature, as illustrated in the next stop.

The garden demands replenished soil nutrients if it is to sustain plant growth. The garden also generates a large amount of plant wastes. Fortunately, nature provides a brilliant alternative for simultaneously addressing these issues. At the compost facility, you can see where plant wastes and other organic materials decompose to produce a new “crop” of rich nutrient-rich humus to be placed back into the garden. This decomposition is hardly passive; rather, a colony of aerobic bacteria makes its home in the compost pile, munching away so feverishly that the resulting waste heat can make the pile hot to the touch and give off steam on a cold day.

Adjacent to the garden is the renewably powered water pumping station. From a well more than 100' under ground, water is pulled upward by the power either of the wind or the sun and stored in a cedar cask raised on a platform high enough to allow gravity to feed the water to all corners of the AEEC as it is needed. Eggheads should also check out Rodney the Rooster and his harem of hens.

The solar greenhouse is the original building on site. Illustrating just how hot a technology passive solar energy is, the greenhouse faces south, emits sunlight through its angled glazing, and stores much of the resulting heat in its mass to be released against the chill of the night. The resulting temperatures support the growth of food crops year round without the use of any fuel but the sun, although a wood stove provides insurance against a true cold spell. It is here that seedlings are started for the garden. Around back, check out the composting privy, where human wastes are collected without wasting water and reclaimed as a soil amendment for non- food crops.

Although a modern high efficiency windmill now turns on its tower, the grandfather windmill, a “Jacobs Generator” still commands the site of the AEEC’s electric generating station. A veteran of rural electrification from the 1920s and 1930s, before “the grid” stretched out to the countryside, the Jacobs was pulled from a barn during the energy crises of the 1970s, refurbished, and given a new life at Ramapo.

Also retired is the model community recycling shed, made obsolete by New Jersey’s decision to require towns to take responsibility for collecting recyclables. Like the rest of the center, the recycling shed was designed and built by students. For more than a decade, it collected a large variety of recyclables, including glass, aluminum, plastics, and even motor oil. Students processed these materials and delivered them to recycling markets, using the funds to underwrite new construction projects for the AEEC. In fact, the AEEC served for a time in Mahwah’s effort to build its recycling capacity.

Tired and inspired from your tour, you now approach the last facility at the AEEC, the solar school house. Oriented toward the south, this building employs several forms of passive solar energy for space heating, water heating and cooking. Photovoltaic solar/electric units and a small windmill provide electricity for lighting. The comfy classroom space is the nicest learning environment on campus, well lit with natural light. A wood stove provides back up heat. It is seated here that you and your classmates can compare the AEEC to the other buildings found on campus and in your home communities. You can ponder the “clothesline dilemma,” namely, if we can dry our clothes free in the warmth of the sun, why would we instead use expensive, energy intensive, polluting, noisy, bulky, ugly and short-lived machines to do this work? Indeed, we have important choices to make if human and other forms of life is to be sustained on our planet. Your tour of the AEEC raises such questions and points to an alternative path worthy of your careful consideration.

For information about how to arrange an AEEC tour, contact .