With the election results finally in after months of wondering what the future held, and four more years of conservative political agendas (read: poor environmental policy) on the horizon, many Americans are asking how they can help safeguard the environment and promote sustainable values. One answer is to turn to the new resource guide What Can I Do? An Alphabet for Living (Chelsea Green, 2004), by Lisa Harrow, a native New Zealander and actress living in "the other Woodstock," in Vermont. As Harrow states in her first alphabetical entry, Action: "Everything in this book is aimed at encouraging us to look at the way we live and how we might change it to embrace a more environmentally friendly lifestyle." The book's vast array of contents—including Web sites from A to Z and occasional stories of "People Who Did"—not only belies its diminutive suitable-for-pocketing size but casts a bright, twinkling eye at what many progressives perceived immediately post-election to be a foggy gloom.

"I am amazed at your country," Harrow told me over the phone in mid-November. "The whole world looks up to America so much. How could people be so backward? It's completely astonishing to me." Although Harrow found New Zealand to be a fairly conservative country while she was growing up there, she says she realizes in retrospect that her community was actually quite progressive. "My mum always saved wrapping paper and used it again. We recycled and kept a compost bin like mad."

Today, says Harrow, "every environmentalist is in despair," including her husband, Roger Payne, one of the world's leading experts on hump-backed whales. "People are asking, 'Isn't there something we can do together?'"

Yes, there is, says Harrow, despite the fact that "mostly our lives aren't connected."

What Can I Do? is actually the outgrowth of a environmentalist performance piece co-written and still being developed by Harrow and Payne called "Lessons in Copernicus," in which, Harrow explains, "he speaks to environmental issues in terms of science and I speak to it in terms of poetry." When Harrow debuted the piece at Cornell University, she and Payne were surprised at how many students approached her afterwards. "These were very aware kids, studying science, and they came up and asked me afterwards, 'What can I do to help?' It was amazing. So we began to do talk-back afterwards, to allow the audience to connect with the performers, as it should be."

Harrow was so taken aback by audiences' reactions to "Copernicus" that she couldn't stop thinking about it, not even in the midst of subsequently playing a 1,000-year-old fairy in a production of "Sleeping Beauty" in La Jolla, California. "I kept seeing in my mind a little book that could fit right into people's pockets, that would answer their questions," she says. "It's the responsibility, really, of the performer, the speaker, anybody who gets up and says what we say, which is 'The world is in a terrible state, we are the ones who are responsible for it, and we've got to get it together or else we're fucked,' to talk to the audience, to give them something to do. You can't just say, thank you, and goodbye. I wanted to point out to people that bacteria will survive, some life might survive, but we won't, unless we act. Human beings have spent less time on this planet than any other living species, but we've made the most impact. And you can't say that without giving people something. Otherwise people will go away saying, 'Oh god, it's too complicated, it's too depressing, I can't do anything about it,' and they'll drop the ball. And the last thing we need right now is for anyone to drop the ball."

What Can I Do? first appeared as a hand-stapled pamphlet list of resources for sustainable living, "simple steps you could take toward energy efficiency and green living," says Harrow. "It's designed to be dipped into, so that you can use it to pursue your own interests in a sustainable way. For instance, you could use it to look into green building materials, or read how to use less electricity to do laundry, or to find out which fish are safe to eat. We began giving it away as a tool after performances of 'Copernicus,' something people could walk away holding in their hands. And people kept asking for more copies, everywhere I went, people would say, 'Oh, have you got a few more copies of that book so I can give it away to some people?'"

Being "a practical New Zealand girl," Harrow says it was only natural for her to visit Chelsea Green Publishing in the next town to turn her pamphlet into a "practical New Zealand-style tool," which she expanded before it went to print last summer. What's next for What Can I Do? The book, which Roger Payne calls "the 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth for the Internet Age," has been such a hit with readers that Harrow is now preparing New Zealand and Australian versions for publication, as well as building an interactive Web site, www.whatcanidousa.org, to feature ongoing updates of facts and resources for sustainable living and blogs, which will be launched in time for the new year.

On November 9, Kenneth Darmstadt, proprietor of the family-owned and -operated Kingston business, Darmstadt Overhead Doors, Inc., held a ribbon-cutting ceremony  to celebrate the installation of the area's first commercial application of a 13.2KW Solar PV Interconnection system at his Cornell Street warehouse.

"I'd been considering going solar for about three years, but I always thought it was too expensive," says Darmstadt. That is until he read "Buying into the Sun," this column's entry in the March 2004 edition of Chronogram. "I was really happy to see it could be done," Darmstadt adds, "so I called John Wright at Hudson Valley Clean Energy [featured in the article] right away, and said 'Okay, let's do it.'"

Since then, Darmstadt hasn't looked back, although his electricity meter frequently does. With a $75,000 grant from New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and an additional $42,000 of his own, Darmstadt funded HVCE's installation of eight inverters at his shop, producing 1.5 kilowatts of electricity on the 5,000-square-feet roof of his 14,000-square-feet factory. So far, during the first few months of the PV system's operation this fall, Darmstadt has saved 75 to 85 percent per day on electricity. "Even on cloudy, gray days, the meter's running backwards," he says. "Savings may drop to 50 percent during the winter, but it'll still cut my bill in half."

Attendance at Darmstadt's celebration was high, including Senator Bill Larkin, NYSERDA officials, representatives of HVCE, Central Hudson, and Sunwise, as well as the entire environmental technology class from Kingston High School. That night, Regional News Network featured the event in its TV news coverage.

Darmstadt someday hopes to double his use of solar energy. "If everyone put solar panels on their roofs, that would be one less power plant we'd have to build, one less transformer scar through the mountains, and one less war we'd have to fight, because nobody's going to fight over solar panels," he says. "Companies like Sunwise are growing at 30 percent a year, which proves this thing is just in its infancy."