The aesthetics of clean energy

My old employer, Maine Audubon, is a fairly conservative and patrician organization. It's not a strong leader on climate issues: its conservation programs are a lot more preoccupied with piping plovers (cute birds that just happen to live on the same beaches as the organization's plutocrat "major donors") than with ending Maine's self-destructive addiction to fossil fuels.

So I was encouraged and a little surprised to see, on a recent visit a few months ago, a large new array of solar panels planted in the meadows of Maine Audubon's headquarters.

Knowing what I know of Maine Audubon's constituency and its neighbors in the blue-blooded suburb of Falmouth,  I presume that this new addition to the meadows of Gilsland Farm didn't come without some controversy. Lots of Maine Audubon's members (and a number of its staff) frankly express opinions that wind farms and solar installations are ugly. They wouldn't disagree that climate change exists, or that we need to do something about it – they'd just prefer that clean energy be built someplace else, where they don't have to look at it.

Maine's community of environmentalists is strongly aligned with the back-to-the-land movement. And in the back-to-the-land narrative, rural Maine was a new frontier where a new, sustainable and allegedly self-sufficient society could be built far away from the problems of the cities.

There's a fatal flaw in this narrative, though. Rural back-to-the-landers were, and still are, cripplingly addicted to oil and private automobiles. As a rule, they don't like to be reminded of this contradiction.

I think that this is the key to what so many rural "environmentalists" find distasteful about wind farms and large-scale solar installations. What upsets them is the reminder, amidst pastoral landscapes, that we are living through a climate catastrophe.

But for those of us who will live with the consequences of that catastrophe, the reminder is overdue – and these small token efforts to avert it are welcome. 


Related: Exporting pollution to Dixie

We don't sit in trees any more

In Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, the hero, an adolescent 18th-century nobleman, renounces the earthbound life one evening when his sister serves him a dinner of snails. He spends the rest of his life living in the treetops, from where he falls in love, embraces radical politics, and participates in the political and cultural revolutions of the Age of Enlightenment.

Calvino's novel was written in 1957 — a novel about rebellion in a not-particularly-rebellious era. But a generation later, in April 1970, college students and politicians organized a "nationwide environmental teach-in" held mostly on college campuses. It would later become known as the first "Earth Day."

Historian Jared Farmer recounts one of the first Earth Day protests in his book Trees in Paradise, which I learned about recently on the Huntington Library's blog. A synopsis there recounts how "At Moorpark College, in Ventura County, 50 students laid their bodies down in front of bulldozers to protest the widening of a tree-lined road... By the time 10 students were arraigned in juvenile court on April 22, the first Earth Day, the trees were gone."

“What had been lost? Ancient redwoods? Historic oaks? No. They aren’t even native plants. Most of the trees in question are Australian eucalypts planted in the 19th century as ornamentals.”

With the benefit of 44 years' worth of hindsight, most Golden State environmentalists of 2014 would probably not risk arrest over some Australian eucalyptus trees. Today, they're generally considered an invasive species that sucks away scarce groundwater and fuels dangerous wildfires with their oily foliage and shedding bark.

Image: www.juliabutterfly.com

But trees — especially giant Californian trees — remained a powerful synecdoche for environmentalism. Tree protests reached a peak in the late 1990s when the charismatic Julia Butterfly Hill, with support from Humboldt County Earth First! activists, spent two years sitting in a 600 year-old redwood that she named Luna.

The immediate consequence of Hill's endurance tree-sit was the permanent protection of her tree and a 200 foot buffer zone from a logging operations.

But more generally, Hill's activism attracted national attention to the regional battles between loggers and environmentalists over the fate of the Pacific coast's old-growth forests. Thanks to stronger enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, West Coast logging was already in steep decline by the late 1990s. The activism of treesitting brought the additional accountability of publicity to logging operations.

In the years since Hill climbed down from Luna, living in trees in order to save trees has become rarer and rarer — in part because it has become less necessary. In the interest of avoiding controversy, logging businesses have committed to more sustainable forms of forestry, and conservation organizations have been able to protect most of what remains of the west's old growth trees. More ambiguously, more timber harvesting has moved overseas, away from the critical eyes of Californian idealists.

Today, treesitting feels like a bit of a 1990s anachronism. We're taught, as ecologists, to think about the complexity of global ecosystems. The idea of devoting months' or years' worth of activism to save a small grove of trees can seem like a lark in the context of the world's more pressing, global crises.

But under the apocalyptic threats of losing everything, any form of activism will feel inadequate. Before we throw up our hands, it's worth noting that Julia Butterfly Hill and her tree-sitting colleagues actually accomplished most of their goals, and leveraged influence far beyond their ambitions. It's the Butterfly effect: given enough time, repeated small actions will eventually generate big changes.

Back to the land... in outer space!

The peak of the American suburban impulse may well have been the year 1975, the year a group of earnest technocrats and back-to-the-land hippies converged to make the case for orbiting shopping plazas and ranch-style homes in deep space.

When I was a kid obsessed with astronomy, I spent hours staring at paintings by Don Davis, an American artist best known for his sci-fi illustrations. The works that I remember most vividly were his depictions of the space colonies advocated by Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill in the mid-1970s, which were brought to my attention recently by a recent blog post on The Atlantic's technology blog.

From from "Space Colony Art from the 1970s," a NASA collection.

These paintings were, and still are, utterly bewildering. To simulate gravity by centrifugal force, the theoretical colonies generally had a cyclindrical or toroidal design, which meant that landscapes didn't recede to a vanishing point on a horizon, but instead curved up and overhead. Meanwhile, mirrors and shades on the exterior controlled night and day cycles, and blended scenes of clouds with the starry dark of deep space. All in all, trying to figure out the logic of perspective in these paintings is like puzzling through a complicated Escher print.

From from "Space Colony Art from the 1970s," a NASA collection.

But even weirder than all that were the pastoral scenes depicted, floating around in tubes through the vacuum of space. The picture above was intended to simulate the northern Californian coast, according to an autobiographical statement on Davis's website:

"It was painted this way under the direction of Gerard O'Neill himself, who related a recent impression of the vantage point from Sausalito being an excellent scale reference for a possible setting inside a later model cylindrical colony... I deliberately wanted to imply the challenge of trying to transplant a workable ecosystem to a giant terrarium in Space."

Many of these paintings came out of a NASA-sponsored summer camp for space theorists held at Ames research center in 1975. In that same year, Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, gave O'Neill several pages to make the case for space colonies in his new publication, the CoEvolution Quarterly.

From from "Space Colony Art from the 1970s," a NASA collection.

It's easy to ridicule these space suburbs now, with the benefit of hindsight. In 1975, though, the brand-new Space Shuttle was being designed and promoted as our cargo utility truck to the heavens, and the idea of space colonies resonated with at least a few back-to-the-land hippies (like Stewart Brand) who dreamed of a new frontier in which to escape the Earthbound troubles of energy shortages, nuclear war, and the decline of American cities.

Big-name environmentalists of the era mostly ridiculed the idea of space colonies - but they still took the idea seriously enough to send in responses to the idea for Brand's magazine, something that would be hard to imagine today.

Some, like Buckminster Fuller and Carl Sagan, doubled down on their faith in high technology and fully endorsed the concept. But most of Stewart Brand's readers and contemporaries were more skeptical. Steve Baer, a designer of off-grid houses, had this critique, which reads like a purloined passage from J. G. Ballard or Don Delillo:

"I don't see the landscape of Carmel by the Sea as Gerard O'Neill suggests... Instead, I see acres of air-conditioned Greyhound bus interior, glinting slightly greasy railings, old rivet heads needing paint - I don't hear the surf at Carmel and smell the ocean - I hear piped music and smell chewing gum. I anticipate a continuous vague low-key "airplane fear."

And Gary Snyder, the beat poet who practiced Zen Buddhism in the rural suburbs of the Sierra Nevada foothills, bemusedly shrugs off Brand's enthusiasm:

"Thanks for the invitation to comment on O'Neill's space colony. I'm sure you already suspect that I consider such projects frivolous, in the all-purpose light of Occam's Razor my big question about such notions is "why bother?" when there are so many things that can and should be done right here on earth. Like Confucius said, 'Don't ask me about life after death, I don't understand enough about life yet.' Anyway. I'm hopelessly backwards, I'm stuck in the Pleistocene. That is, seriously... I'm still mucking around in the paleo-ethno botany, which is a kind of zazen."

From from "Space Colony Art from the 1970s," a NASA collection.

While I agree with the substance of what Snyder and Baer say, I find their commentary ironic in light of the back-to-the-land lifestyles they practiced and advocated. Baer, after all, made his living by designing off-the-grid homes for communes like Drop City - space stations for the deserts of the southwest, in other words. And while I admire much of what Snyder wrote, I also regret that his political and environmental activism suffered from his self-imposed suburban exile in the Californian foothills. When he writes "there are so many things to be done right here on Earth," I want to shake him out of his meditation long enough to point out the racial and social iniquities in his own backyard.

In the end, isn't an idyllic sylvan landscape millions of miles away from the nearest city the logical extreme of the back-to-the-land movement that Baer, Snyder, and a million other Whole Earth Catalog readers dreamed of? Lewis Mumford, the famous champion of closely-knit urban neighborhoods, is a more reliable critic of space suburbs, and sure enough, his critique was the sharpest and most succinct of the bunch:

"I regard Space Colonies as another pathological manifestation of the culture that has spent all of its resources on expanding the nuclear means for exterminating the human race. Such proposals are only technological disguises for infantile fantasies."

Simply replace "Space Colonies" with "shopping centers" or "subprime mortgages", and it can still apply today in our post-space age.

The Braindead Megaphone and the Plague of Dead Critters

There's been a spike in worried reports over hundreds of dead blackbirds that fell from the sky in Arkansas on New Year's Eve, and hundreds more that fell from the skies over Louisiana a few days later.

Today, the internet is panicking over dead fish that are washing up by the thousands in Chesapeake Bay and Brazil. Some of the internet's more tabloid-inclined "news" sites are consolidating these local reports in fearsome stories that seem to imply a global pattern.

Not quite. The Arkansas blackbirds were probably done in by New Year's Eve fireworks. The other die-offs probably had more quotidian causes, like cold weather.

Mass wildlife deaths are nothing unusual. A cursory Google News search from 2010 locates similar stories about manatees (early last month in Florida), freshwater fish (in Vermont this past summer), and pelicans (in California last February).

So yes, it's a global pattern - one that's been going on for MILLIONS OF YEARS.

Unlike those other wildlife die-offs, though, this flock of Arkansas blackbirds had the misfortune of dying on New Year's Eve in the middle of the Bible Belt - a circumstance that destined them for celebrity among the merchants of end-times infotainment.

So when other wildlife die-offs occurred in Louisiana and Brazil and elsewhere in the following days, our global media culture didn't treat these relatively ordinary local phenomena as ordinary local phenomena - they treated them as pieces of a narrative from the book of Revelations.

Such is the pathetic state of environmental journalism, and environmental literacy, in the 21st century: instead of a nuanced discussion of our ecosystem's real threats and complex functions, CNN, the Huffington Post, and other braindead megaphone broadcasters prefer to give us a horror-movie plot that invents a fictional environmental disaster from insinuation (because, you know, real environmental disasters are so hard to come by these days).

"Environmentalism" fiddles while the planet burns

In case you missed it, the United States Senate has given up on trying to pass a law that would slow down the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. Even after the nation's worst oil spill in history and scorching heat waves worldwide, Democrats failed to gain any Republican support for their proposals.

So we'll just have to let the planet stew in its own juices and wait until the next time progressive lawmakers with a 60-vote majority in Washington might be compelled by a massive environmental emergency to do something. But who wants to bet that can happen before our modern society and political institutions melt away in the heat?

In the last few days, there's been a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing from pundits and politicians. But I think that one of the best responses came from David Roberts at Grist, in a post headlined 'Environmentalism' Can Never Address Climate Change.

Roberts writes:

Environmentalism has a well-defined socioeconomic niche in American life. There are distinct cultural markers; familiar tropes and debates; particular groups designated to lobby for change and economic interests accustomed to fighting it; conventional methods of litigation, regulation, and legislation. Environmental issues take a very specific shape.

The thing is, that shape doesn't fit climate change. Climate change -- or rather, the larger problem of which climate change is a symptom -- isn't like the issues that American environmentalism evolved to address.

He goes on to make the point that the environmental establishment had its genesis in, and grew from, its battles against industry. Early environmental activists shut down factories that were dumping sludge into rivers and lakes and rammed their boats against whaling ships. Later environmental activists took industry to court over more abstract environmental problems like mercury emissions and underground groundwater contamination.

Those big problems have been largely addressed: by most measures (if you leave out greenhouse gas pollution), our American physical environment has less pollution to deal with now than we've had since the industrial revolution took hold.

So: can the same environmental establishment that gave us the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts save us from global warming? The recent failure in Washington does not inspire confidence, and Roberts makes a compelling case for why that is:

The entry of the problem [climate change] into American politics via environmentalism has set it on a certain cultural and political trajectory that is both inadequate and extremely difficult to escape.

Addressing the climate challenge will crucially involve restraining industry emissions (the vaunted "cap"). But that is only one of myriad strategies and changes that will be necessary. The environmental advocacy community has tried, of late, to reshape itself to the contours of the problem before it. It has tried to act with a more singular focus, in a more unified way, and to bring other interest groups (military, religious, etc.) into the fold. It has tried to reorient around a more forward-thinking, positive agenda ("clean energy"). Contrary to a lot of the sniping you hear these days, the efforts of those involved have been heroic.

But it's an impossible task. There is no siloed progressive interest group that can engineer the wholesale reindustrialization of the United States. Period. No amount of clever framing or thoughtful policy proposals can overcome the basic limitations of interest group politics.

Many green leaders are now saying that what's missing is a climate movement. That's obviously true in some sense; this will be the work of generations. But the question is whether "the environmental movement" can catalyze a big enough movement to be effective on this problem.

What needs to happen is for concern over earth's biophysical limitations to transcend the environmental movement -- and movement politics, as handed down from the '60s, generally. It needs to take its place alongside the economy and national security as a priority concern of American elites across ideological and organizational lines. It needs to become a shared concern of every American citizen regardless of ideological orientation or level of political engagement. That is the only way we can ever hope to bring about the urgent necessary changes.

To put it another way: this can not be a traditional environmentalist battle against industry, because nearly everyone agrees that industry - and the entire economy - is what needs to be reinvented in order to stop burning fossil fuels and start finding more innovative, efficient forms of energy.

I have worked for years inside and in league with a number of old-line environmental groups, and from that perspective, I unfortunately have to agree with Roberts's diagnosis. "Environmentalism" carries too much baggage from the baby-boom generation whose suburban-back-to-the-land, materialist lifestyle has done so much climate damage.

For many people my age, it's extremely frustrating to see dominant "environmental" organizations behave as though the most productive thing we can do is to buy up lots of land for conservation reserves. Or worse, when we pour thousands of dollars' worth of nonprofit resources to file injunctions against the "scenic impacts" of clean energy projects.

Sure, these things satisfy the comfortable baby-boomers who want to have a nice view outside the picture windows of their ski condos.

But these kinds of actions, and their funders, are calcifying the environmental establishment into something that's demographically old and elite, and politically out-of-touch and ineffective.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned; the environmental establishment fiddles while the entire planet burns.

Organic labels

Via Wonder-Tonic.com, "a downloadable set of 16 stickers to let you label your favorite foods, books, and appliances as organic. Just print them out, stick them on, and start feeling good about yourself!"

Disaster and Responsibility

At the beginning of this week, Paul Krugman wrote about the Gulf's oil spill as an old-fashioned, photogenic environmental disaster, one that might finally spur America's leaders to grow a backbone and fight for clean energy:

Environmentalism began as a response to pollution that everyone could see. The spill in the gulf recalls the 1969 blowout that coated the beaches of Santa Barbara in oil. But 1969 was also the year the Cuyahoga River, which flows through Cleveland, caught fire. Meanwhile, Lake Erie was widely declared “dead,” its waters contaminated by algal blooms. And major U.S. cities — especially, but by no means only, Los Angeles — were often cloaked in thick, acrid smog.

It wasn’t that hard, under the circumstances, to mobilize political support for action... [yet] as visible pollution has diminished, so has public concern over environmental issues. According to a recent Gallup survey, “Americans are now less worried about a series of environmental problems than at any time in the past 20 years.”

This decline in concern would be fine if visible pollution were all that mattered — but it isn’t, of course. In particular, greenhouse gases pose a greater threat than smog or burning rivers ever did. But it’s hard to get the public focused on a form of pollution that’s invisible, and whose effects unfold over decades rather than days.

So suddenly we have a very visible reminder of why we need alternatives to oil. Some good could come of this, right?

But there's a big problem with this line of reasoning. As terrible as this oil spill has been, and will be, the scale and impacts of this disaster don't come anywhere near the scale and impacts of global climate change. They are separate problems.

True, oil has been a trigger for both problems, and therefore, Krugman reasons, they might share a common solution: generate more clean energy, burn less oil.

Oil rigs under construction in Galveston, Texas in spring 2008.
These are huge, tremendously complex and expensive machines. BP may have been the organization responsible for the Deepwater Horizon rig, but we - the American motoring public - were the financiers.

But the fact that global warming and this oil spill are very different problems also means that they don't necessarily have to share the same solution. In fact, the dominating conclusion that people on the left have been jumping to is one that actually won't do a damn bit of good for the climate in the long term.

That knee-jerk "solution" is to ban offshore drilling, without doing much of anything to reduce our energy use or develop alternatives. This addresses the visible part of the disaster - the part that Krugman sees as the biggest opportunity. But it doesn't do anything to address the more insidious, less visible threat of climate change.

Attendant with this has been a lot of facile political mockery of the "drill baby drill" contingent. This may be fun, but it's not especially productive. The oil spill is creating a political spectacle as well as an environmental one:



Lisa Margonelli, an expert on oil supplies, explained one of the big problems with these reactions in a thoughtful New York Times op-ed last weekend:

Whether this spill turns out to be the result of a freakish accident or a cascade of negligence, the likely political outcome will be a moratorium on offshore drilling. Emotionally, I love this idea. Who wants an oil drill in his park or on his coastline? Who doesn’t want to punish Big Oil on behalf of the birds?

Moratoriums have a moral problem, though. All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to drill for us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria — places without America’s strong environmental safeguards or the resources to enforce them.

It's worth noting that this disaster is happening in the Gulf Coast because the poorer states of the Deep South share a predilection for weak environmental laws, and therefore their coastlines are the only place in United States waters where drilling is allowed. Plenty of people who find drilling distasteful are only too happy to burn the fruits of the Gulf Coast's rigs and refineries: see "Exporting Pollution to Dixie," from December 2007.

Margonelli goes on to suggest that "we should throw our newfound political will behind a sweeping commitment to use less gas." But that, of course, would require more than political will: it would require environmentalists to set aside our Palin-bashing, "we told you so" grandstanding to actually accept our own personal responsibility for the oil we use, and do something foresighted and intelligent.

It would also require us all to share culpability for this oil spill, by acknowledging that everyone who burns gasoline shares responsibility for the thousands of oil rigs in the world's oceans, and the risks that those rigs create for our environment.

Personally, I'm not holding my breath for that outcome. Earlier in the same column, Margonelli notes that BP's ludicrous "Beyond Petroleum" slogan had been extremely successful, in part, because it "accurately reflect[s] drivers’ desire to buy unlimited gasoline while remaining 'beyond' all the mess" [side note: you may recall that BP was also the force behind Los Angeles's "green" gas station a few years ago].

The facile fantasies that banning offshore drilling will save our environment, or that it's all Sarah Palin's fault, are inextricably linked to the fantasy that driving hundreds of miles every week can ever be "sustainable" - the fantasy of the 20th-century American Dream.

Put another way: it's a lot easier to caricature evil corporations and score political points against stupid Republican slogans than to examine the lifestyle we take for granted, take personal responsibility for it, and work to change the economy that spends trillions of dollars to squeeze oil from our oceans.

It is "Commute Another Way" month, if anyone's interested in burning a little less oil.

Anyone?

Paramilitary Conservation

Last week's New Yorker has an exhaustively researched report on Mark and Delia Owens, two conservationists who worked for much of their life running a well-funded conservation foundation in eastern Zambia's North Luangwa National Park.

The Owenses have long been minor celebrities of conservation, having written two successful books about their projects in Africa. One of the most interesting aspects of Jeffrey Goldberg's report is how it collects quotes and details from other public publications and broadcasts, from National Geographic to Sports Illustrated, in previous coverage of the Owens's work in Zambia. Much of the past coverage more or less portrays the Owenses as white saviors for the dark continent - a sort of Kipling fable where environmentalism has replaced the Anglican church. The Sports Illustrated story was even headlined "A Light in the Darkness" (as far as I can tell, Joseph Conrad didn't get any credit).

And just like a Kipling fable, it took the audience a little while to realize just how fucked up this seemingly-innocent story about wild animals in Africa really is.

When they first arrived in Zambia, there was a massive trade in ivory that was decimating elephant populations, and poaching inside the park became an early bête noir for the couple. At first, they focused on offering more productive and sustainable alternatives to local residents, with small agricultural industries that simultaneously provided jobs and alternative sources of protein to local residents. To their credit, the Owenses kept up this local economic aid throughout the duration of their work in Zambia, and supplemented it with medical care, schools, and other social programs.

But when these measures didn't produce the results they wanted, the couple turned to the small force of "scouts" that were charged with protecting park wildlife. Under their authority, and with funding from American conservation funders, these "scouts" evolved from a bedraggled and non-confrontational band of government employees into an intimidating paramilitary force. Goldberg makes a compelling case, based on dozens of personal accounts and writings from the Owenses themselves, that this force regularly operated outside the rule of law, with deadly results.

The central episode of the story is a literal hour-long episode of a 1996 ABC News documentary, broadcast on national television, about the Owenses and their work in Zambia. The program included a snuff film: footage of an alleged poacher getting shot and killed in the woods. The off-camera murderer was not identified in the program, and ABC's crew never notified Zambian authorities. It's hard to believe, but the televised killing seemed to have little effect on the Owens Foundation and their aggressive way of operating in Zambia.

These crimes, and the American media's permissive, even reverent attitude towards them, illustrate some uncomfortable truths about traditional environmentalism. First, it illustrates the arrogance of the myths we keep about an Edenic, pre-civilized nature, or of Nature as a place where there are no people. The truth is that people have lived in the wild for a million years, and they have important roles in natural ecosystems - we're part of nature, not above it.

Many of the alleged "poachers" in Zambia were recent descendants of natives who had hunted in North Luangwa for generations before British colonialists expelled them to create an artificially human-free "park" in the 19th century. Americans did the same thing to Blackfoot tribes in Glacier National Park and to the Nez Perce who lived in Yellowstone. The idea of a wild frontier without human neighbors is closely bound to the history of atrocities from American and European colonial ambitions.

Second, the Owens story reveals how, as with any important cause, environmentalism can sometimes grow to seem so important to its adherents that it supersedes their own sense of humanity. Mark Owens claimed to be sickened at the gunfire exchanged between his patrols and the poachers. But nevertheless he went out every night in his plane to do battle with them. For him, protecting (and perhaps avenging) the lives of the park's elephants was more important than human life - even if it ended up being his own.

I won't spoil it for you, but there's a substantial Maine connection to the story as well. Goldberg's report takes a taut 17,000 words to cover all the angles, and for such a complicated story - one that spans several decades and involves dozens of characters - the article maintains a tight sense of suspense throughout. I won't even bother linking to the online version - find or borrow a copy of the magazine and enjoy it over the course of a long evening.

Baggers

PBS has recently been broadcasting a long documentary series called National Parks: America's Best Idea. I haven't seen it, but apparently one of the co-producers, a fellow named Dayton Duncan, took it upon himself to visit every one of the nation's 58 national parks as a lifelong project. This effort was chronicled in an article headlined Collect 'Em All, published in the July-August edition of the Sierra Club's magazine.

"Collect 'Em All"?

In response, Utne Reader published a good critique by its senior environmental editor, Keith Goetzman. "Park bagging," the act of collecting visits to every park, requires a lot of gasoline and a lot of vacation time, he points out, which makes it an elite and environmentally-unfriendly pursuit.

But his last point is his best one: "The “collect ’em all” mentality goes against a better, nobler impulse, which is to get to know the land intimately," he writes.

When Jess and I worked in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, we encountered hundreds of "peak baggers" trying to collect all 46 of the state's 4000-foot mountains. Most of them were total douchebags, although, for the sake of full disclosure, I have to admit that I myself climbed the 46 peaks through the course of high school. But back then, I also thought that Ayn Rand was a good writer, so there you go.

Grand Canyon National Park, from Wikimedia Commons.

Anyhow, I have lots of stories about New Hampshire peak baggers. Like the crowd of 20 people that showed up at Zealand Falls Hut one bitterly cold and windy Saturday in January, dead-set on finishing a 20-mile loop to "bag" Guyot and Bondcliff mountains with their huge newfoundland dog, Brutus.

Brutus, they told me, was going to be the first dog to "bag" the 46 peaks in the winter season. This was very important to them. I responded that there were 60 mile an hour winds above treeline, which meant that their planned itinerary would leave them exposed to negative-50 degree windchills for several miles on the ridge. "Don't be stupid," to paraphrase.

They opted to be stupid, of course. They were too late coming back to stop by the hut again, but I heard later through the grapevine that they'd had a miserable trip, and they'd come quite close to leaving a big dog's frozen corpse on the ridge.

Safety and common sense aside, what's really problematic about the baggers' attitude is how it reduces these places - mountain peaks or national parks - to petty consumption items, things to be ticked off on a list, like beanie babies.

This is entirely antithetical to environmentalism, which requires a nuanced and thoughtful understanding of the natural resources and landscapes that surround us.

The National Parks themselves are fetish objects for most environmentalists. Sure, I like them too. Their spectacular landscapes really do inspire a lot of people, including a lot of legendary environmental thinkers like John Muir.

But the National Parks are a lousy place to understand our modern society's real relationship with nature. They don't really offer any lessons about where we get our electricity, or our drinking water, or the raw materials that the Chinese use to forge our consumer goods. Instead, the National Parks offer us an unrealistic vision of the way environmentalists wish things were - a pretty backdrop without any people in it. At their worst (as when the federal army forcefully exiled native tribes like the Blackfoot from parks like Yellowstone and Glacier), the parks themselves could be thought of as costly consumption items tailor-made for "environmentalists."

Organizations like the Nature Conservancy are focused on acquiring land for the cause of environmentalism; hikers acquire mountain climbs; RVers acquire National Park passport stamps. But an environmentalist ethic that's focused on acquisition is an ethic that can not and will not address the fundamental environmental crises of our times.

Alternative energy FAIL

Below is a photo of an electric-scooter rental station located on Commercial Street, in Portland's waterfront tourist district. Apologies for the low photo quality, but the trailer says, "Go Green, Save Gas."

To drive the "green" point home, there is a solar panel. Presumably it's there to recharge the electric scooters. But I can say with some confidence that this solar panel is not charging much of anything, because it's tilted towards the northwest, and here in the northern hemisphere, most of our sunlight comes at us from the south.

I took this photo about two weeks ago and gave Scoot USA the benefit of the doubt for a while. Surely the owner or manager would notice that their expensive alternative-energy investment wasn't pointing towards the sun, right? But after considerable time, the panels haven't budged.

I suspect that the owners are pointing them towards the northwest because that's where the street is: if the panels were actually pointed towards the south, how would tourists walking past be able to tell what they were?

As far north as we are, solar panels generally don't perform very well as a source of electricity. But as billboards selling green snake oil, they're apparently worth the investment.

This is what self-reliance looks like: Maine's Fox Islands will become entirely wind-powered

Via today's Bangor Daily News: the member-customers of the Fox Islands Electric Cooperative, which provides power to the islands of North Haven and Vinalhaven in Penobscot Bay, have overwhelmingly voted to go ahead with a wind power project that will provide enough electricity for the islands' 1500 permanent residents.

The islands currently import their electricity via an undersea cable. That cable will continue to provide back-up power during calm periods, but over the course of the year, the Cooperative expects to export 10,000 surplus megawatt-hours of electricity to the mainland - enough to pay for the project and reduce local electric rates. You can learn more about the complete proposal from the Fox Islands Electric Cooperative website.

It's interesting to compare this project with last year's Black Nubble proposal in Carrabasset Valley. That project was larger, with more turbines, but also further away from homes and less visible than the Fox Islands project will be. Why such overwhelming support for a project on Maine's prized coastline, and such bitter opposition for a project in one of Maine's poorest regions?

I was at one of the public hearings for the Carrabassett Valley project. The people opposing it were classical Jackass Environmentalists: dregs of the baby-boom, the Crummiest Generation, who had for decades fetishized a fantasy idea of "wild nature," and in their retirement sought out their dream of living in an isolated little cabin next to a huge ski resort. Wide, permanent clearcuts on Maine's second-tallest mountain don't bother them (because that's where they ski!), but a few wind turbines on the horizon would have been an unforgivable blight on the landscape. These are people who love quoting Thoreau but hate the actual practice of self-reliance.

Living on an island, on the other hand, does require real sacrifices and independence. The Fox Islands are a 75 minute ferry ride - in fair weather - from the mainland and its conveniences. Many islanders still make their living by harvesting the ocean's natural resources. These are people whom Thoreau would admire, even if they themselves would be more likely to judge Henry David as an insufferable Masshole.

I guess Fox Island residents just have more spine and less whine than the Quixotes of Carrabassett Valley. Thank goodness for that.

"The American people are called upon to not sacrifice."

With ethanol, "we can break our addiction to fossil fuels without sacrificing our dependence on fossil fuels."

Energy crisis? Let them burn cake.

Another day, another food riot. Today, the Economist is reporting on food riots in Haiti, which could lead to the collapse of government in the western hemisphere's poorest nation. The Guardian has plotted a map of recent global food riots, from last fall's "pasta riots" in Milan to the cluster of recent violence over food prices in western Africa.

The Wall Street Journal reports that global food prices have increased 83% in the past three years. Until recently, worldwide economic growth kept incomes rising fast enough to keep pace with rising food prices. But that's not the case anymore, as even first-world residents are discovering.

I've written before about agflation and its relationship to Congress's decision to use a fifth of the country's corn for biofuels instead of for food. Global food prices were already on the rise before the Energy Bill passed in Washington, but new subsidies for ethanol caused farmers to convert more land to biofuels production and constrain the supply of other food crops further, just as an economic downturn, a weak dollar, and rising energy prices conspired to increase demand for food relative to other goods.

To add insult to injury, since the energy bill passed, several new studies on the topic have shown that biofuels production could actually be worse for the climate than simply using fossil fuels. Corn production and distribution consumes a tremendous amount of transportation fuels, typically oil. If we're going to swear off foreign oil by embracing biofuels, we'd need to refine and burn a whole lot of our national corn production just to continue producing corn, to say nothing of feeding or fueling the rest of the nation. It's as though our lawmakers are trying to repeal the laws of thermodynamics.

Biofuels were innocent enough when it was just hippies raiding fryolators to power their VW buses. But telling a nation that we can keep on truckin' by burning our next meal is a particularly harrowing example of jackass environmentalism. People in the global south are starving, and entire governments are tottering, just so we can keep on joyriding our pickups down the steepening back slope of Hubbert's Peak.

All this bears an uncomfortable similarity to old frontier stories of desperate subsistence farmers eating their seed crops to survive for the winter. Except this time, we're not even feeding ourselves - we're feeding our motor vehicles.

WhoFooMa: "It's Vegas with organic, gluten-free scones."

Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the LA Times, has written a great critique of WhoFooMa as "the grocery store version of a hybrid SUV made by Lexus or a 12,000-square-foot 'green' house with a swimming pool and six-car garage accompanying its solar panels and sustainably harvested decking."

WhoFooMa shoppers and employees enjoying the atmosphere of self-righteousness and organic nitrous oxide. Image courtesy of Trusted Places blog.

Hawthorne notes the parallels between green architecture and organic foods as movements that have been co-opted by jackass environmentalist impulses:

"Somewhere along the way, for both organic grocers and the corporate patrons of green architecture, the line between planet-saving and aggressive marketing became blurred. Companies realized that promoting themselves as eco-friendly could be a powerful sales tool...

The genius of the Whole Foods approach, under hard-driving Chief Executive John Mackey, has been to realize that many American consumers have a vague desire to buy organic and live healthier but have no interest in dispensing with selection or comfort.

Read Hawthorne's full column here.

Preserving real estate, not nature

Maine's in the middle of a midwinter thaw, and yesterday, after a day of rain, I went with Jess and two other friends for a walk through the fog in a wildlife preserve in Cape Elizabeth, the fancy oceanside suburb just south of Portland. I had a great time: it was just what I needed after a frustrating day in front of the computer, we saw a big barred owl, and we got to play with a really fun dog.

That said, in the next two posts I write, I'm going to be really critical of land trusts that preserve property in upper-class enclaves like Cape Elizabeth. As nice as the place is, I can be fairly certain that its main purpose is in preserving neighbors' real estate values, not nature.

Much like Portland's other wealthy suburban neighbor, Falmouth, the wealthy residents of Cape Elizabeth spend lots of their money on their conservation land trust. The land trust is a nonprofit organization which buys up forests and farm fields, the last vestiges of the town's rural roots. Residents can donate easements or outright gifts of land to the trust, which ensures that the scenic landscape will be preserved in perpetuity and returns, in exchange, substantial tax benefits to the donors.

Ostensibly, the trusts exist to preserve ecological functions, wildlife habitat, and, in some cases, working farmland, a historical connection to a rural heritage in a suburban era. And to give fair credit, many land trusts do manage to accomplish these things. In close-in suburbs like Falmouth and Cape Elizabeth, though, the ecological wastelands of suburban backyards crowd up against the fringes of the conservation land, and the preserves are usually too small and too disjointed to provide significant wildlife habitat. Here's a satellite view of one Cape Elizabeth "preserve":


View Larger Map
Above: Cul-de-sacs and Cape Elizabeth Land Trust's Stonegate preserve.

To speak frankly, the real function of many of these preserves is to conserve scenic picture-window views of woods and fields, and to preserve residents' illusions that their town is still a wild, rural community. These places assure well-paid white-collar professionals that the place where they live (if you can call sleeping and lawnmowing "living") is still tied to the land, even if its residents are chained to desks downtown.

There are several big problems with this kind of "conservation". First and foremost: it's elitist. Conserving lots of land in Cape Elizabeth and Falmouth is effectively a form of exclusionary zoning that prevents other people from building their own houses there. This raises existing residents' property values even more and is a big reason why Cape Elizabeth and Falmouth are essentially unaffordable to anyone who hasn't spent at least eight years in a university.

There are also tremendous environmental costs hidden in those pastoral meadows: because the close-in suburbs are unaffordable, the hoi polloi must move further out to places like Scarborough or Windham (which were, until recently, actual rural communities) in search of affordable housing, with the net result being more pollution everywhere. By any measure, putting ten houses on two acres of a Falmouth "preserve" is better than ten houses on a thirty-acre ex-pasture in Gray.

Finally, I'm concerned the illusion of wilderness that these "preserves" maintain in a suburban community doesn't just shield their neighbors from consorting with the working classes: I suspect that they also shield suburbanites from thinking seriously about the environmental consequences of their own hyperactive consumption. Seeing a forest or a pastoral meadow out the window seems like a good way to buy falsely rosy assurances about the world's condition. Cloistered in the woods at the end of a long driveway, you can avoid environmental responsibility almost as effectively as you can avoid your neighbors.

The baby boomers are going to love this.

The nexus of ridiculous wealth and ridiculous immaturity in this second gilded age has had its share of problems - broken marriages, Hummer sales, SEC investigations, and global environmental destruction, among them - but if you're willing to do the heavy lifting to assuage bourgeois guilt pangs (case study: WhoFooMa), there are some tremendous business opportunities. Like this one:

Want to make a purchase? Visit cheatneutral.com.

Previously on The Vigorous North: Carbon Indulgences

Comic relief

I've you've been reading this blog for two years now, you know that I used to work in the Appalachian Mountain Club's huts in northern New Hampshire (here's the archive from those days). Now, an old boss of mine is managing the construction of a new string of huts in northern Maine. An article in today's Kennebec Journal describes the project's long permitting process. I almost never waste my time reading the comments on Maine newspapers' web sites, but I did happen to see this one and I'm glad I did, because it seems to have accidentally stumbled on comic gold:

Brian of West Gardiner, ME
Jan 4, 2008 8:52 AM
Yaknow...it's funny that as soon as the liberal democrat granola environmental whako hikers with walking sticks and backpacks who are trying to find themselves in the woods and become one with nature want to improve property by building on trails for their own personal comfort,they feel that is ok!

However they vehemently oppose any other property improvements for the rest of us normal people!

Case in point, the opposition to plum creek!

Lets see, liberal democrat granolas want to construct...$11 million project, 12 "huts", 4,500-square-foot structures would provide a total of 400 beds and would each accommodate 35 to 40 guests and staff!

How can you call these buildings HUTS?! These are not HUTS but GRANOLA HOTELS!

These people talk out of both sides of their mouth! This project should not be allowed to go through! It hurts the wildlife and places too many treehuggers in the woods!

Never...Ever...elect democrats!

Brian makes some very cutting points on the contradictions and elitism inherent in old-guard environmentalism. Too bad he assumes that all hikers are "democrat liberal granola environmental whakos [sic]". That's a lot of baggage for our backpacks.

I also think that "GRANOLA HOTEL!" is a great description of the AMC huts.

Ruined views

George H.W. Bush's compound at Walker's Point recently sprouted a 33-foot wind turbine to take advantage of coastal winds. And, possibly, to try to postpone the coastal flooding that will ruin the property sometime within the next century.

Here's a photo from the Portland Press Herald (click the link for their news story):


It's a bit hard to see - look closely on the left side of the photo. In spite of its coastal location and super-rich neighbors, the only view that's really been ruined is the one that pegs the family Bush as petro-pyromaniacs who don't believe in global warming. So we can expect the kid to follow Dad's example in his professional capacity any day now, right?
Meanwhile, down in Nantucket, another patrician political dynasty continues its long slide into jackass environmentalist irrelevance. This Daily Show clip is a few months old, but even if you've already seen it, enjoy another scenic viewing:



Related: The Tragedy of the Commons

Welcome to Squaresville, Pops

"Hey Dad, I want you to drop me off a block from the theater."

Here's some commentary to this funny ad from Brad Aaron, a writer on New York City's Streetsblog:

"At first you think that, considering dad's expanding waistline, she's looking to get some exercise. But it turns out she's embarrassed to be seen in an SUV, since 'people in that [presumably urban] part of town are riding bikes and have hybrids and stuff.'"

Which makes sense. If her friends saw this guy driving up in an SUV, they'd draw the perfectly obvious conclusion that this is just another chubby, mid-life-critical condition who needs a big car to help him feel better about his emasculating suburban existence. Seeing a dude reduced to this is terribly embarrassing for everyone involved. I mean, check out this guy I saw in a Burger King drive-thru a few years ago:


He thinks he's the Burger King himself. I know this photo isn't easy to look at, but these people are out there, and it's tragic.

But wait! Objects Pop. This overpriced vehicle for fantasies of superiority IS a hybrid. "Like a hybrid hybrid?" asks daughter. "I don't know what a 'hybrid hybrid' is, but yes," answers Pops smugly.

They drive off. Pop's fantasy of responsible masculinity deflates slightly as he spies his receding hairline in the rear-view mirror, and a voiceover proclaims their car to be the most fuel-efficient SUV in the world. Brad Aaron speculates on the inaudible continuation of the father-daughter conversation:

"The daughter, now inaudible, explains that an anemic 34 miles-per-gallon hardly qualifies the Escape as a "hybrid hybrid" -- any more than the Chevy Tahoe is the 'Green Car of the Year' -- and asks dad why the family can't move closer to the theater so he and mom might stave off heart disease and she wouldn't have to be ferried around in 'the greenwashing machine.'"

OK, that's about enough jackass environmentalism from the auto industry, and lunch break is over. I could go on for ages, but it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Apologies for the editorial laziness.

Salvation, American-Made

Some outfit called the "Green Car Journal" named the hybrid Chevy Tahoe the "Green Car of the Year" at the Los Angeles Auto Show last week. Here's what the "Green Car of the Year" looks like:



Maybe this is some cynical sarcasm from the "Green Car Journal," a biting commentary on the failure of American car companies to address the climate crisis. Whether it's sincere or not, anyone who believes that this obesity wagon is actually a "green car" is suffering from advanced symptoms of Jackass Environmentalism.