It’s hard to know how to recap a year in which you wrote a book proposal, sold a book, started a blog, and worked a full-time job. So much of my brain space is dedicated to writing that most of the time, I can’t remember my own name or tie my shoes. Still, I wanted to commemorate the year it’s been on Inventing Green.

I found the quick-and-dirty solution in Tim Maly’s borrowing from LiveJournal:

One of my favourite traditions from LiveJournal is the automatic year-in-review post. Here’s how it works: You go to each month, take the first post of the month, take the first sentence of that post and transcribe it. The result is a cut-up-technique overview of how your year went. It doesn’t get your best posts, or your most popular posts, or your most important ones. But it can offer unexpected glimpses and for that, I love it.

So, that’s what I did. Here you are, my cut-up review of the year.

JANUARY
American Green Tech History Map and Timeline
“You’ll soon be able to cruise around a map of green tech history in America and scroll through a timeline of the major events in the history of the industry.”

FEBRUARY
Hawthorne, 1851: Hyperbolic and the Functional Views of Electricity
“Electricity wasn’t always the mundane, ho-hum, flip-the-light-switch power that we go searching coffee shop walls for.”

MARCH
After the First Solar Thermal Crash
“Excitement over solar thermal built throughout the late 1970s , reaching its peak in 1984 when 17.2 million square feet of solar collectors were manufactured.”

APRIL
A Brief History of Boise Geothermal
“People are catching on that all kinds of places have deep local history around renewable energy usage.”

MAY
Quick Update: Adding Items to the Greentech Map and Timeline
“When I have time, I toss things onto the green tech map and timeline, both of which you can access in the left bar.”

JUNE
A Mini-Course in Understanding Money and Technology
“The deeper I get into the history of energy in America, the more I realize that it’s impossible to examine energy (or green tech) alone.”

JULY
The Windmill Atop the Parisian Taxi Cab – 1952
“See that fan on the roof of this Paris cab? It’s actually a windmill, we read in Popular Science, that charges a battery that “helps operate lights and radio, runs a refrigerator in summer.”"

AUGUST
The Postal Service and Thermonuclear War
“I’m a post-nuke baby.”

SEPTEMBER
“Let Them Eat Growth!”
“Today, I traced the history of the phrase “Let Them Eat Growth!” from Amory Lovins backwards to Herman Daly and forward to The Challenge of Coevolution by Leslie Paul Thiele.”

OCTOBER
The Nucleon, Ford’s Reactor-Powered Concept Car
“Wow. Take a look at The Ford Nucleon, the fission-powered concept car from a future that really never came to be.”

NOVEMBER
When The Whole World Needs To Be Quarantined: Fantasy Architecture and Nuclear War
“In poking around the Atomic Energy Commission’s technical reports archive, you come across some stupendous documents about how the world was going to deal with nuclear war.”

DECEMBER
The Energy Innovators Google Is Listening To
“$15 billion. Get used to that number because you’re going to hear it a lot in energy circles.”