Producers and Consumers

Wherever you go, you will meet people that are either producers or consumers. Depending on the situation, we all play both roles at different times. For example, a farm produces food but also consumes petroleum. A person that works at the refinery produces petroleum but consumes food.

In Scouting, we mostly produce and consume knowledge, experience, and skills. Experienced scouts produce the skills education that is consumed by less skilled scouts. As they become more skilled scouts of fine character, they migrate from being consumers to being producers.
If you have only experienced scouts, you have too many chiefs and not enough indians. If you have only new scouts, you have skills starvation. For the program to function, we need both producers and consumers. Each individual's scouting trail should take him from consuming more to producing more, with the hope he will continue to produce more than he consumes throughout his life

Being a producer rather than consumer pertains to all of life. That is the essence of leaving the place better than we found it. In general, we're not doing that great of a job these days. Our country consumes much more than our fair share, and more than we are producing. But, we can make steps to change things and I did just that this month.

Our house is now a solar power producer. Our two solar arrays went into production last week and we've produced 224kWh so far. We are producing more electricity than we consume - the surplus goes back into the grid and is consumed by our neighbors.

The system is quite expensive (by this thrifty person's standards), but there are currently rebates from the energy company and federal tax credits which cover almost 2/3 of the cost - so it's a good time to get started. I expect our cost to be recovered in 8 years and the panels have a 25 year warranty. They should produce power much longer than that.

You can view my power production on this page - it's pretty cool. And, it feels good to think I'm a producer now - at least in this small bit.

Scout On