buying and supporting all that is the oil industry, government entanglements, and turmoil in the Middle East is extremely appealing to us."

I thought of the Halldorson family when watching the recent news coverage of Powershift 2011, an environmental summit that drew a crowd of 10,000 students to Washington, D.C. in late April.

Some reports from the annual event lauded participants like the 55 Appalachian State University students who made the 400-mile trip to the nation's capitol in a bus powered by 100 percent vegetable oil. Other reporters went in search of (and found) the embarrassing anomalies--the earnest attendees who had no idea who keynote speaker Van "Mother Nature Has Human Rights Too" Jones was, or the guys caught skipping Al Gore's talk because they'd rather be hitting on hippie chicks at the bar, or the girl who seemed to believe the sun stores up extra energy for us on cloudy days to make it up to solar collectors when the weather improves.

Yet what struck me most about the summit was not the conflicting coverage it inspired. It was the image on the WeArePowerShift networking site's homepage: a close-up shot of raised fists with the caption, "This is what democracy looks like."

Really? To me, the photograph looks like aggression, anger, and force--especially in conjunction with the event's overall theme of power.

Contrast this attitude with the quiet self-reliance of people like Jeff and Kelly Halldorson, for whom the very notion of coercion is anathema.

Morphing their yellow bus into a green vehicle as they take their kids on an educational journey from the woods of New England to the shores of the Keys to the expanse of the Southwest and beyond is all about independent choices and personal responsibility--two of the cornerstones of democracy.

How fitting then that Kelly Halldorson signs almost every note she sends or posts, not with an in-your-face symbol of activism, but with the simple word Peace.

Photographs courtesy of Kelly Halldorson.

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