Sustainability’s trendiness suits the North Country, the region north of the Adirondack Mountains, just fine.

But it doesn’t really matter what the rest of the world thinks — local food and business never went out of style there in the first place. The North Country is satisfied with regional self-reliance and embraces that the outside world has given it a name and taken notice.

The North Country is defined as the portion of New York north of the Adirondack Park that borders Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence Seaway and Lake Champlain. This is an agricultural area with a smattering of colleges and universities like Clarkson University, St. Lawrence University and State University of New York Potsdam.

This past weekend at the Local Living Festival in Canton, N.Y., SUNY schools lamented being tied into the SUNY system, which buys energy for their campuses and hinders their ability to make greener purchases. In contrast, the locals live independently of many of the economic pressures that control most of the state due to geographic isolation. They make do with the resources on hand because they cannot afford anything fancy, fueling folksy ingenuity.

At the festival, I witnessed a man who embodies this cultural phenomenon — self-titled ‘Crazy Jerry.’ His house is entirely off the electricity grid, and he commutes to work on an electric-assist bike that he built himself. The bike has a bumblebee color scheme and looks like something the yellow Power Ranger would drive. It is a covered, recumbent tricycle with lithium batteries and an impressive amount of wiring. There are holes to put your feet through to the pavement and push the bike backward, Flintstone-style.

It was amazing to see him stand proudly by his bike as farmers old enough to be my grandfather bombarded him with technical questions informed by years of fighting with their own tractors and generators. He answered with the speed and confidence of a tennis player returning volleys. His habit of belittling the elegant simplicity of his designs by using his favorite adjective — stupid — was paired with explaining concepts I learned in Physics 211: ‘Electromagnetism’ with a layman’s vocabulary.

Although I did not get the opportunity to take his home tour, he seeks out people to question and challenge his current system. He uses a combination of photovoltaic (solar) panels, a wind turbine, a bicycle-powered generator and Lister Slow Speed Generator that runs on diesel. As whimsical as it seemed, it was all very practical with payback periods calculated for each project. This brand of sustainability was about taking care of yourself.

His solar-heated shower sits in his front yard because unusual lawn décor and little nudity never hurt anybody out in the country. He improved on a friend’s design by attaching a hose to a solar thermal panel that feeds hot water into the bottom of the main tank and forces the cold water at the bottom of the tank to the surface, where it is heated by the sun. This thermal siphon is passive with no moving parts to break.

Using a patchwork of sources and more efficient practices, tackling his home appliance by appliance, Crazy Jerry has successfully undermined National Grid’s monopoly on energy. He is a little proud of himself and the North Country is little proud of him, too.

Leanna Mulvihill is a senior forest engineering major and environmental writing and rhetoric minor. Her column usually appears every Tuesday. She can be reached at lpmulvih@syr.edu. 

Published on September 25, 2011 at 12:00 pm