• Share this story
  • Digg this story
  • Mark in Ma.gnolia
  • Tag with del.icio.us
  • Seed Newsvine
  • Post to Google
  • Add to Yahoo!
  • Share on Facebook
  • Submit to Reddit
  • Related at Technorati

Dick Cheney gave Jeff Barrie his latest job.

"I didn't really envision this project becoming my full-time job when I started it," Barrie said into his cellphone a few hours before he took a stage in Nashville, Tenn.

Barrie wasn't in Music City looking for a record contract. He was promoting his film, "Kilowatt Ours," and its message about the connection between your light switch and the coal that makes it work.

Nearly five years ago, Barrie heard the vice president say the United States needed to build one power plant each week until 2020 to meet rising demand for electricity. In the same speech, Cheney declared energy conservation a personal virtue, not a national energy policy.

"It seemed a bit presumptuous," Barrie said, "to say conservation won't work when we haven't really tried it."

So Barrie tried it.

He went through his apartment looking for ways to save energy. He found them. "Kilowatt Ours" shares those ways.

On Feb. 22, Barrie and "Kilowatt Ours" will be in Blacksburg as part of the Mountain Justice Film Festival.

The festival, a co-production of Virginia Tech's Appalachian Studies Program and the environmental group Mountain Justice, began this week. The first film, an installment of the three-part series "The Appalachians," was intended as a primer on the region's people, culture and environment. The rest of the films will concentrate on the effects coal mining has had on the region.

Darren Riedlinger, a graduate student and Mountain Justice member, told the 28 people who gathered Wednesday for the first film that the issues are not just environmental. They are cultural and historical as well. Appalachian people have traditionally been marginalized, he said. They weren't treated as people and citizens, he said. They were just hillbillies.

"The Sago disaster and other disasters in West Virginia have really put the spotlight on mining," Emily Satterwhite, an Appalachian studies professor, told the group. "Fixing underground mining accidents aren't the only things we need to worry about."

The Mountain Justice series' films will concentrate on strip mining's effect on mountains and the people who live in the hollows below. Three of the films are built around West Virginia floods caused by mining practices and the collapse of a dam that held billions of gallons of coal sludge, which is the toxic waste of coal processing.

Another focuses on a resistance movement that opposed strip mining in Kentucky.

The final film in the series documents the growth of strip mining and the popular movement against it.

Barrie's film shows the connections among home energy consumption, environmental degradation, cultural upheaval and respiratory disease. And it offers examples of houses that produce as much energy as they consume and a school system that saves $1 million a year in energy costs.

"It seems like we can do a lot better in this country," said Barrie, who's been taking his film around the country. "I want to do something about it."

His film offers practical ways to affect the amount of electricity used and, indirectly, the amount of land that's strip mined and the amount of coal-generated pollution in the air.

After the showings of his film, Barrie offers audiences a step-by-step guide to save $600 a year on their energy bills. He also peddles "Kilowatt Ours" DVDs and conducts question-and-answer sessions.

Many of the people at the shows decide to do something simple and direct, like the folks who e-mail him to say they stopped on the way home from "Kilowatt Ours" to buy energy-saving light bulbs.

Others, such as the man who developed what he claims is a more efficient design for electricity-generating windmills, get more involved.

"I can really hear it in people's voices that they want to get involved," Barrie said. "They want to do something."