South Mountain Company

Martha’s Vineyard’s integrated design/build company

This blog provides up-to-date news of goings on at South Mountain Company and occasional musings from John Abrams (and others).

In Praise of Carpenters

In Praise of Carpenters

This soulful piece of writing comes from SMCo Production Manager Newell Isbell Shinn. I'm proud to share it. - JA
A carpenter’s intimacy with a building is particular and visceral. They know, for instance, how every material in a house smells when it is cut, what kind of dust it makes. They know how many pieces of each thing they can lift by themselves, how many with help, and the ratio of pieces moved today to tomorrow’s aches and pains. When they walk away they know a building with their body in a way other occupants probably never will.

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Local Sustainable Economies…And Way More Than That

My colleagues and fellow owners Deirdre, Rob, Siobhán and I just returned from a conference in Boston called Local Sustainable Economies. It was a national gathering, hosted by the Sustainable Business Network of Massachusetts, of people and organizations working to localize economic activity and encourage the long haul shift from the extractive economy of the present to a generative economy of the future.

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Earth Day SunPower & SMCo Series Conclusion

SunPower’s final blog post about its collaboration with SMCo is focused on our commercial and affordable housing solar projects.

That’s it for this series, just in time for Earth Day 2017, which comes just in time for the planet. In “How The Active Many Can Overcome the Ruthless Few,” Bill McKibben says “We’ll either save or doom the planet during the Trump administration.” Today scientists will march on the National Mall. A week later, on Trump’s 100th day, there will be another major Climate Change march in Washington. Scientists are angry. People are angry. McKibben says, “Trump has pissed people off, and pissed-off people don’t ask for small and easy progress. They demand the shifts that reality requires.”

Now is the time. As the SunPower series demonstrates, we can effectively do what we have been unable to do in the past. The shift to renewables is underway, un-stoppable and irreversible, but time is the big variable. How fast, how soon, how much?

Link to the SunPower blog post here. Onward.

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SunPower: There’s More

For the Earth Day campaign mentioned in the last post, SunPower created two videos and three blog posts. This link will take you to their second video and second blog post. Please take the journey to explore the SunPower/South Mountain relationship further. This one is about the connection between our devotion to craft and our passion for solar. The two go hand in hand.

We’ll send out another reminder when the 3rd SunPower blog post is up. Thanks for listening!

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SunPower Features South Mountain & Vineyard for Earth Day

To honor Earth day this year, SunPower, the manufacturer of the solar panels we install, decided to do a campaign about South Mountain here on the Vineyard. They put a ton of effort into this. They spent time here with us last Fall, did several videos and photo shoots, and wrote extensively about our company and our work. We’re honored by their decision to feature us, and we appreciate their beautiful work. We also appreciate our relationship with SunPower, an American company that makes the best solar panels in the world. If you’d like to see what they’re up to with this, click here.

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An Exceptional Danish Woodworker

An Exceptional Danish Woodworker

My cousin Peter Lazes was in Copenhagen on business. He was having dinner alone in a restaurant. Next to him were a man and his daughter. She got up to go to the restroom. While she was gone Peter and the man made small talk. Turned out the daughter is a woodworker, just done with four intense years of school and yearning for an internship in the U.S. My cousin suggested she might want to talk to me. He gave her my contact information.

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