Green Drinks comes to Lenox

LENOX – It may have been $9 taco night, but that is not what drew in the crowd to Firefly on Church Street. Many of the folks gathered there were environmentally-minded citizens, interested in issues ranging from renewable energy to wetlands conservation.

They were in attendance for the inaugural Green Drinks event in Lenox, hosted by Scott Laugenour of the Lenox Green-Rainbow Committee, along with Erik Hoffner from Orion magazine and Jane and Bruce Winn of Berkshire Environmental Action Team (BEAT).

Green Drinks, the popular networking event for people in the environmental community, traces its origins in Berkshire County back to 2006, when Orion began hosting a meet-up at the Barrington Brewery. Great Barrington was one of a handful of communities around the globe hosting a Green Drinks event at that point, sharing the honor with renowned cities like Paris, Berlin and Stockholm.

Mr. and Mrs. Winn, the directors of BEAT, then started co-hosting a Pittsfield Green Drinks along with the Center for EcoTechnology (CET) in 2007. Soon afterwards, people from north county started requesting a Green Drinks in their area, so BEAT, along with Northern Berkshire Transition, began hosting a Green Drinks in North Adams.

And now Green Drinks has finally come to Lenox.

“[We’re] really thrilled to have Lenox holding down yet another zip code in Berkshire County,” Erik Hoffner remarked.

He pointed out The Berkshires is the “greenest county in the whole state,” as there is now something going on every week for people interested in environmental networking.

Indeed, Berkshire County now offers a Green Drinks event every week of the month. The Great Barrington event is the first Thursday of the month at Route 7 Grill. North Adams hosts on the second Wednesday at the Freight Yard Pub, while Pittsfield Green Drinks is every third Tuesday at Mad Jacks BBQ. The Lenox Green Drinks will be every fourth Tuesday at Firefly.

“Green Drinks is 98 or 99 percent social,” Mr. Laugenour mentioned during the welcoming address.

“[It’s about] bringing people together, because we’re interested in some of the same things, and just having conversations,” added Mr. Hoffner.

Typically, there is a speaker who presents on some environmental topic, but for this first Green Drinks in Lenox, the organizers decided to have the hosts of the other events in the county do introductions.

Mr. Winn mentioned Mr. Laugenour came to him with the idea of hosting a fourth Green Drinks in Lenox, and soon that idea got put into action. Rather than “stepping on our toes,” as Mr. Winn put it, the multiple gatherings work together to “reinforce each other.”

“It’s not often we get people with a real interest in the environment actually coming in and meeting other people who have a real interest in the environment,” Mr. Winn said. “Without Green Drinks, it’s almost like we’re little islands and we don’t know about each other. Green Drinks is a way to bring everybody in together.”

Posted by Dana Drugmand on January 31, 2013. Filed under Community Events,News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry