South Mountain Company

Martha’s Vineyard’s integrated design/build company

Dear Reader,
This blog is now an archive. John Abrams (Founder of South Mountain, author of this blog, and a book of the same name) retired on December 31, 2022. All posts published up until this date are preserved below.

For updates on John's next chapter, visit abramsangell.com.

For updates on South Mountain's second act, subscribe to our newsletter using the form below.

The Great Disruption

Victory at Hand

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Spring has sprung.  It’s a good time for good news.

When Paul Gilding’s book The Great Disruption was published in 2011 it had a profound impact on me.  In September of that year I wrote that it was, for me, the most accessible and full-bodied treatment to date of the effects of climate change on our planet, our economies, our lives.

Still is – although Gus Speth’s superb new book America the Possible is a knock-out that in many ways expands the vision further.

Gilding has a blog called “The Cockatoo Chronicles.”  It has been inactive for some months, but recently he made up for lost time when he posted a 2500 word essay that argues for a new reality:  the economy is now aligned with the environment and there is evidence that we can – and will – win the climate change battle.

That’s a big thing to say.

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BE 12 Meets TED Talks

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Two weeks ago several of my SMCo colleagues and I spent two days at Building Energy 12, the annual conference of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA).  My involvement in NESEA goes back 30 years.  For me this annual meeting is truly a tribal gathering.

This year’s conference was particularly thrilling. The highlight for me was experiencing the emerging youth contingent which has brought great new vitality into the organization the past few years. It makes me feel like we have greater capacity than ever before. I feel this at NESEA, and at South Mountain too. I like us. I like who we are now. While we are more empowered as individuals than ever before, we are people who know, with conviction, that all of us are smarter than any of us.

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Catching With A Summer Gone By

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I’ve been neglecting to write.  Time to get back to it.

Interesting summer.  July was all sunshine. Hammock weather.

Lying in mine I read a provocative new book about our future — The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding, an Australian who is the former head of Greenpeace International and more recently sustainability advisor to corporations and NGOs.  He is now on the faculty at Cambridge University’s Program for Sustainable Leadership.  As I read this book I came to see it as the most accessible and full-bodied treatment to date of the effects of climate change on our planet, our economies, our lives.

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Asparagus, Solar, & SMCo

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The thing that intrigues me most, right now, is my semi-pathetic asparagus bed.  I’ve been wanting to plant asparagus for years, but until this spring I didn’t manage to get around to it.  I love the idea of a vegetable that you plant once and harvest for decades.  Are there others?  Well. . . sort of.  Rhubarb, but is that a vegetable or a fruit or just something else entirely?  Horseradish, but who eats much of that?  There may be others, but asparagus is the main one.  When I finally got  around to it, most of the crowns made plants, but it’s still a work in progress.

A few weeks ago I was wondering – at the same time that I was watching my colleagues, Phil and Jon, cover the roof of our house with solar electric panels – why I’m so psyched about the asparagus bed.

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