The Wind in the Bur Oaks

I have to admit that I couldn’t come up with a more poetic sounding tree than “bur oak” to sub for “willow” in this post’s title. I thought about “hackberry” or “live oak,” or “cedar elm” or even “box elder” in an effort to find a native tree—especially one that implied less resource-dependence than willows do around here. In fact, willows are an emblem of inappropriate excess here in drought-ridden north Texas. They only grow well near streams, and although graceful, they look curiously out of place in most local landscapes. So I chose my favorite native species, with its big frowzy acorns the size of boules, and its craggy, almost lithic bark. I have one growing next to my garage (that's it, in the photo, looking up into the leaves), and will soon have to attend to the wild grapes growing up into its branches in order to assure its survival. But this is a hardy tree, and lovely to look at, even if it isn't all that prevalent out on the remnants of west Texas prairie, where the wind farms are.

Energy is much on my mind these days, for a number of reasons. A recent run-in with the local electrical service company, Oncor (not my provider, Green Mountain) got me going about deregulation and incompetence, and then several news articles about NIMBY issues related to wind energy prompted me to continue ranting about energy dependence in general, and alternative energy sources in particular.

This summer has been relatively mild, with temperature rising to 100 or better only about five times in three months. We were also blessed with abundant rain early in the season, which means that the ambient temperature around our house has been cooled by greener grass and healthier trees (drought restrictions in this area allowed only once-per-week lawn irrigation last summer, and with little rain, my lawn suffered pitiably because I can’t bear to waste water on impractical landscaping). Since we haven’t had the time or the money to convert our St. Augustine lawn to something more useful, it suffers when the rains don’t come. But this year it’s pretty healthy, and helps cool the house. This is especially welcome, because for the last month we have eschewed air conditioning entirely, and had used it sparingly before that. So when I received a notice from the electricity folks that I was going to be shot at dawn for not having an accessible meter, I was a bit put out.

Of course, I exaggerate, but the tone of the letter was rather snotty, and so I called Oncor to find out what was up. I have a completely accessible meter; it’s on the side of my house, visible from the bloody street. The letter said something about a locked gate. I thought it might have had something to do with the fact that my dogs bark loudly and nastily when people even walk by the house, but they’re kept indoors when we’re not home. At any rate, there is a gate, but it’s not locked, and you have to walk by the meter to get to it. I’ve also lived in this house for seven years, and no one has ever before had trouble locating my meter. I told this to the company representative, and mused that perhaps the teenagers they hired during the summer weren’t as astute as the usual crew. She assured me, snippily, that they were using the same “technicians” they always had, but that she’d send someone out to check.

A few days later I got a second bill from Green Mountain for an additional $27 (I’m amused that they had actually underestimated the original bill). I put the bill aside, planning to pay it at the beginning of the month along with the new bill—until I got an e-mail note from them asking me to call, because they needed to discuss something with me. When I called, I told the nice lady that I was pretty sure I knew what this was all about, and recounted the above story. She laughed and acknowledged that the local service companies don’t always have the same perspective, and said it would be fine for me to pay at my usual time. She also mentioned that Oncor had been having trouble filling positions, and that the “same technicians” line was a lot of hooey.

Vindicated, I paid my bill and got on with my life. But the energy question persists, and in the last week I’ve come across a couple of articles that point to the problems that attend alternative energy use. Sure we all want to lessen our dependence on foreign oil (I’d like to eliminate it, along with our dependence on domestic oil), but we’re not really happy about the alternatives. And when environmentalists start talking about nukes as the only practical clean alternative to fossil fuels, my stomach turns. Don’t any of these guys remember Chernobyl? Solar power is becoming more accessible and affordable, but impracticable in many situations (we can’t have panels that show from the street because we live in an historic district). So, many of us choose wind when it's available, even though the rates are slightly higher.

Now, if you live in a state like Texas, with vast expanses of unoccupied semi-desert, wind turbines provide clean energy with relatively little environmental impact. But the turbines themselves are large, tall, ungainly, noisy, and not particularly attractive (although I think they look kind of cool, from a distance). So the idea of erecting these things in Maine or off the east coast doesn’t particularly appeal to those who have paid big money to live in lovely surroundings with gorgeous views—like Sen. Ted Kennedy, whose family environmental credentials are pretty solid. Froma Harrop’s column, “A Sad Coda to Kennedy Career” nicely summarizes the quandary of wealthy liberals who really don’t want those noisy turbines in their back yards, their neighborhoods, or where they sail on weekends.

But it’s not simply a question of “them” vs. “us.” Wind farms can disrupt the environment, they are noisy, and they do compromise wilderness (see the Appalachian Trail Conservancy’s article on the controversy about a Maine wind farm). The trouble is, we’re not really thinking small enough. We’re too caught up in the big energy model that we can’t seem to think more minimalistically (I think I made that word up). For example, I’ve often wondered why we couldn’t just have little windmills or other energy sources in our back yards, just as many now generate some of their own power from solar panels. When I looked into it, I discovered that something called “micro wind turbines” actually are available. So my question now is this: why can’t we just rethink how we get our energy in the first place? Why can’t we consider appropriate local sources (wind, water, solar) and start producing our own, in our own towns, for our own citizens, as much as possible. Think of it: no big-ass power poles emitting electromagnetic fields; no Oncor “arborists” chopping the guts out of lovely trees to accommodate their power lines; no grid—or if there is one, it’s small, and local. Break up the grid so that every building that houses a home, a school, or a business, produces at least part of what it needs to run its machines and lights.

More important, however, is the fundamental necessity to reduce our dependence on energy itself. I personally love the idea of having to ride a bicycle every time I want to watch television, but I’m too old to do anything about it now. I can, however, just turn the damned thing off. And I’m perfectly willing to crank up what I need to run this computer, a la Nicholas Negroponte’s units for his One Laptop Per Child initiative. Although I’m not quite ready to buy into the notion that giving children laptops is going to solve any global education crisis, I admire the practicality of his machine.

Our efforts in this house have been modest, by my standards, although giving up air conditioning is looked upon by my friends as both noble and insane. We’ve dutifully replaced about 95% of our light bulbs with compact fluorescents (I balk at getting rid of functioning bulbs, especially when they’re used infrequently), and have bought energy-efficient appliances when we’ve needed new ones, or done without. The next time a coffeemaker conks out on me, I’m going back to using my old Chemex.

We can’t really do much to insulate the house (no spaces between walls), and have a gas furnace, but we’ve added curtains and roman shades to the windows, and portiers between the rooms so that we can keep the thermostat down at 60 degrees in winter (a new, programmable unit will be installed before the coming winter). The computers and peripherals come on only when we’re using them, even though it’s annoying to wait for things to boot up. We use a small convection/microwave oven or the narrow top oven of our dual-fuel range to cook (both use considerably less energy than a standard gas or electric oven), and eat salads and cold meals during most of the summer to reduce even that amount of use. All of this has been accomplished with relatively little sacrifice on our part, and even the animals seem to be fine, as long as there’s air flow.

The point is that it’s not difficult. But this country is so conditioned to constant consumption and convenience that we think we’re entitled to the kind of extravagance that has led us to “need” big, expensive, polluting, ugly energy. We wouldn’t have to worry about wind farms at all if we didn’t accede to the idea that we can’t live without all this stuff.

And I wouldn’t have to argue with energy service providers about whether or not my meter is accessible, because I wouldn’t even need one.

Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa

The papers are full of disaster this week, some apparently natural, some caused by human agency: wildfires in one of the cradles of Western civilization; hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico; bombs everywhere. But even the “natural” disasters arise because of human activity, either accidental or deliberate.

At least some of the “wild” fires in Greece may have been deliberately set by greedy developers who cannot legally build on forest land. If developer-arsonists were to succeed in clearing these areas and build what they want, the people who would buy housing constructed on burnt-out areas are not the villagers who now live adjacent to them. Those who occupy these lands today would be replaced by rich Athenians looking for vacation homes, or rich foreigners. Greece, like other chronically dry regions—such as the Owens valley—is subject to periodic wildfires. Fire is actually necessary for the regeneration of certain forest species (like the Jack pines on Long Island). But persistent drought and human greed can over-burden the forest’s ability to “fix” itself. The irony here, as it is with any concept of razing existing spaces for new construction, is that what makes the area desirable in the first place (nature, neighborhood) is destroyed in the process.

The presence of human beings in the world, with their big, active, inventive, restless brains, has initiated such a complex web of actions, reactions, and interactions, that the only way to ameliorate the consequences is to stop. Period.

If we want to save the world, it’s pretty clear that we’d better stop doing most of what we’re doing, and quickly. We need to slow down, breathe, think, ponder, deliberate, talk. I was going to add “do” to that list, but “doing” needs to be curtailed. Thinking before doing—and not just paying lip service to the thinking part—is something we really must do more of.

Unfortunately, deliberation can be debilitating, in the sense that thinking things through, weighing consequences, and choosing alternatives can lead to inaction. When faced with a multitude of possibilities, how does one choose the correct path? How does one choose, in the end, what to do?

Thinking things through is tough enough on a personal level, but nigh impossible on even a local level. In small-scale, face-to-face communities, with a relatively homogeneous citizenry (homogeneous not necessarily in the sense of ethnicity, race, or even religious affiliation; but in the sense of philosophical orientation, as in many of the “alternative” communities set up in the sixties and seventies), such deliberation might be possible, and even promise some success. But we don’t breathe local air.

And therein lies the rub. What everybody else does on this planet affects us down to the level of individual entities. So coal-mine fires in India and China may be polluting the air and warming the atmosphere to an extent similar to that of the car-loving, energy-hogging West. Nobody escapes guilt, because even the peasant farmers who aspire to what we have will do what they can to achieve our level of “civilization.” So, we try to do what we can to reduce our impact, our carbon footprint, our level of consumption—and we end up feeling angry and frustrated with our puny efforts.

Sometimes I really do want to live on another planet: one we haven’t messed up beyond repair. It’s pretty obvious to me that there’s nowhere on this formerly-green earth in which to start over—to stop doing what we’re doing and go back to considering the consequences of our actions before we actually take action. Not going to happen. Everybody breathes the same air, and there are few places left that are isolated enough to avoid political confrontation with neighbors. But that doesn’t mean we can’t conduct thought experiments designed to consider alternatives--and that might help us over the hump of despair.

In the current issue of Orion magazine, “Altar Call for True Believers: Are we being change, or are we just talking about change?” Janisse Ray exhorts the already-faithful to start making more significant changes in our lives. But we’re awfully comfortable, some of us believers who are well-educated, reasonably well-healed, and well-informed. Each small step we take toward lowering our dependency on fossil fuels and other exploitative technologies is just that: small. We’re part of the group Stanley Fish mentions in his blog for the New York Times yesterday, “Blowin' in the Wind,” in which he describes the fallacy of relying on “renewable” energy. In his experience, wind-generated power is so intrusive that his neighbors (many of whom fit the description of True Believers) don’t want any part of it. And I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t feel nearly as smug about getting my energy from Green Mountain (with its wind-farms in west Texas and other areas) if its turbines were next door.

The solution is, quite simply, to vastly decrease our dependence on energy of any kind. The thought experiment that might help us solve the problem goes something like this: What if we were to give up electricity? What kind of life could we imagine that relied completely on the sun, animals (see the article on “Horse Power,” also in this issue of Orion), and other natural sources? Of course we’re not going to do this (I wouldn’t be able to write this blog, were it not for the highly exploitative computer technology at my fingertips), but thinking about it might help with the education of desire: How much of this do we really need? How much of it could we reasonably do without?

The very small attempts in my household include the minimization of air conditioning. Last night, despite the fact that yesterday’s temperature reached the mid- to high-90s in our area, we slept without turning on the small window unit in our bedroom. We did cool the room where the (heavily furred) dogs sleep, although the thermostat is set at 80. In fact, for most of this summer, we’ve relied on the two attic fans, one atop the other, in the center of the house, which had been the only source of cooling in the house (built in 1922) for most of its existence. The summer here in north Texas has been relatively mild, with only four days in which the temperature hit 100 (last year the total number was more like forty), and (except for the mosquitoes brought on by the early summer rains) pretty tolerable. At my age I’m not sure how much heat I could stand before caving in, but we don’t have central air conditioning and make do with window units to cool the three rooms we use most. But before freon-based air conditioning was invented, people used the attic fans and the designs of their houses (solid timber on pier-and-beam foundations) to make it through the prairie summers. Janisse Ray’s article has renewed my effort to think even more carefully—beyond the recycle/eat organic food/seek humanely-raised food sources efforts most of us already practice—about how I live in the world. As long as all this deliberation doesn’t lead to immobility (sometimes I do just want to give up and go live in a cave) or complete lassitude, there are probably plenty of small choices we can make that, while not exactly saving the world, might help change it. But we have to choose more of these.

Try the electricity thought experiment. If nothing else, it’ll make you aware of how much you rely on this one technology. And then maybe you can find ways to minimize that reliance.