Russ Lanoie: Remembering the ESP

Back in the mid 1970s, several of us local hippie, back-to-the-land types got together to tackle some of the issues that faced our society at the time. We’d just been through the lean petroleum years that made many people more conscious of energy efficiency for both their homes and cars. Electric vehicles and electricity producing solar panels had not yet made into the mainstream thinking, but there were enough other issues that we activists wanted to tackle.

We were a rag-tag group that met on a very irregular basis, usually around a pot luck supper at someone’s home. No one paid dues and we had no charter but what we lacked in organization we had in enthusiasm. A Resource Conservation & Development agent from the UNH Extension Office Service was helpful in getting the word out and was an enthusiastic supporter of our goals. We eventually called ourselves the Environmental Service Project, or ESP for short, because all of the issues that we sought to address had to do with our environment.