1) When he was clean his forehead always smelled like corn chips. So did the pads of his feet.

2) He hated any sharp cracking sound. This limited our use of the fireplace we had for four years in Richmond. Our next-door neighbor there had a pool table in his garage, and when he used it Zeke would shivver in the corner. At the previous place, in downtown Oakland, when people brought out their fireworks (and worse) on July 4, he’d hide in the bathtub.

3) I took him hiking once in the Marin Headlands and he almost ate a Mission Blue butterfly, which is critically endangered.

4) He needed to watch the road when I drove. On very long trips of more than a couple hours he’d eventually settle down in the back and snooze, but every time I’d use the turn signal he’d jump up again. He was never one of those dogs who loved to hang his head out the car window: he needed to watch straight ahead to see where we were going.

5) One day, offleash in Sunol Regional Park, he saw a ground squirrel a hundred yards away and covered that distance in about six seconds. He wasn’t even slowed down by the barbed wire fence between them, though he did yelp fairly loud as he passed through it. I never found any evidence of barbedwire-related cuts or bruises, but he only needed to learn that lesson once.

6) Also in Sunol: when he was about one year old we did a long hike off-trail down a canyon that in one spot was choked with poison oak, which he crashed right through. Past the poison oak there was a deep pool, and I pushed him into it to try to get at least a little of the oil off him. It may or may not have made a difference: neither of us got a rash. But it was a number of years before he ever got between me and a pool of water after that.

7) He didn’t swim. He liked to wade, and he liked to lie down in water, but he never wanted to get in water more than about a foot deep.

8) I came home from a week in the desert once and he wouldn’t let me in the house before he had thoroughly licked every square millimeter of my face. I don’t know whether that was reunion joy, or hygiene, or my campfire/salt-flavored skin. Probably some of each.

9) He was scared of some inanimate things, but he assumed almost every living thing he ever met would be his friend. (Exceptions included squirrels, which were for chasing, and rats and mice, which were for killing unless they were family members.) He loved horses and cats and dogs and coyotes and (often) small children, and he greeted strangers with joy all but once. On the two or three occasions when he met a dog who turned out to be unfriendly, he bore a heartrending expression of deep disappointment for an hour after.

10) A body memory: I can still feel his chest leaning against mine as he stood on the driver’s seat of my truck, peering out the window at whoever I was talking to: cops, drive-thru people, rangers at National PArk entrance kiosks, toll-takers, and various other people. It’s almost as if he’s only been gone a few minutes.

Okay, so maybe that’s a little over the top.

Those claims were made by the couple behind “FriedCranes.org,” and consisted of allegations that sodium and potassium nitrate, commonly known as saltpeter and Chilean saltpeter and proposed as media for thermal storage in concentrating solar facilities, are dangerous high explosives.

I countered this claim with references to the reasonably well established fact that neither substance is explosive or even flammable, which is easily confirmed with a moment’s research. And I said, in segueing to the real purpose of my post which was a criticism of the Pahrump newspaper that covered the allegations seriously,

So a couple of enviros get their science badly wrong. It happens far more frequently than I am comfortable with — you can google “chemtrails” for jaw-dropping examples of same. The friedcranes folks seem to be nice enough people, though clearly just a bit too non-discerning in their choice of trusted sources of information.

This morning I received a piece of email from the Fried Cranes people, and based on that message I am afraid I have to make a formal correction of my earlier post. They don’t seem to be nice people after all.  In fact, based on the last paragraph of the email, I’d have to amend that to something along the lines of “vicious, petty little asswipes.”

Dear Mr. Clark:[sic]

Your arrogant comments about “scientific illiteracy” in a recent blog exposed considerable illiteracy of your own. Apparently the Federal Departments of Homeland Security and Transportation are equally illiterate. We refer you to our illiterate editorial of January 23, 2012 where we cited their regulations pertaining to potassium and sodium nitrates:

http://www.friedcranes.org/comments/accessible/editorial_jan_23_12.html

Apparently Timothy McVeigh was equally “illiterate” when he detonated 2-1/2 tons of ammonium nitrate in Oklahoma City and a Norwegian farmer named Anders Breivik was also “illiterate” when he made this “perfectly safe” fertilizer go “boom” in the capitol city of Oslo just last summer.

It would be appropriate for you to acquaint yourself with all the facts before engaging in the name calling and demonization that are so prevalent from our esteemed administration these days.

Noteworthy is the fact that SolarReserve® is rapidly creating liability layers for themselves as a result of our concerns. The Crescent Dunes Project in Tonopah, Nevada is now owned by an affiliate limited liability company named TonopahSolar®, LLC. Most multinational corporations form subsidiaries, not affiliates. Then the operation and management was further delegated to PIC Group, Inc. out of Marietta, Georgia. Similarly, SolarReserve® has formed an affiliate named SaguacheSolar, LLC, a Delaware corporation registered here in Colorado to own their proposed project here.

When you have published as many books as we have, we will then graciously bow very low and accede to your elite judgements about our intelligence and capabilities. How’s that first book of yours coming, by the way?

John and Erika Keyes
Editors
http://www.friedcranes.org/comments/index.html

I’d have consigned the email to the bitbucket if not for the really nasty swipe at the end there. If it was intended to get a rise out of me, it worked. So a few notes:

For those of you whose eyes glazed over in high school chemistry, it may be helpful for me to point out that comparing sodium and potassium nitrate to the highly explosive ammonium nitrate is roughly equivalent to comparing water and lye. Both water and lye consist of the highly corrosive hydroxyl ion bonded to something else, just as the saltpeters and ammonium nitrate consist of nitrate ions bonded to something else. Thus the Keyes’ reference to Timothy McVeigh is approximately as relevant as mentioning Drano in a discussion of drinking water.

The reference to the Departments of Homeland Security and Transportation involves a limitation on how much saltpeter you can carry on a passenger or cargo aircraft or by passenger rail. Turns out you can legally carry only five kilograms of saltpeter in your luggage on a domestic flight. [See edit, below.] Only 5kg! It must really be dangerous stuff! Five kilograms is a hair over 11 pounds, or about 176.4 ounces. That same body of regulations, incidentally restricts air passengers to carrying no more than 3 ounces of any personal care product. I’ll do the math for you: the departments of Homeland Security and Transportation apparently consider Johnson’s Baby Shampoo to be 60 times more dangerous than sodium or potassium nitrate!

!!!1!

[Edited to add: It’s worse than I’d imagined. That 5kg figure applies to mixed sodium and potassium nitrates. Either one on its own? The limit’s 25 kg, ir around 55 lb. Which means that shampoo is actually 300 times more dangerous. Or something.]

As for the whole issue of “liability layers,”  one need only point to the prevalence of the practice in other parts of the solar industry not using “highly explosive” saltpeter. NextEra Solar formed the corporate facade “Genesis Solar” to build the Genesis Solar project in California. Solar Millennium, builder of the mothballed Blythe Solar project, formed the shell Solar Trust of America. Stirling Energy and Tessera Solar were both part of an Irish firm named NTR. And so forth. Though it may be far more gratifying to imagine the corporate shell game as a response to one’s heroic expose of its Insanely! Dangerous! Molten Saltpeter!, it turns out to be pretty much standard operating procedure.

Finally: that first book of mine, published four years ago, is available at the link in the sidebar. It may not be as impressive as, say, this marvel of American literature, but I’m kind of proud of it nonetheless. Though perhaps the Keyes were referring to my book on Joshua trees, on which I’ve indeed been working for a frustratingly long time. What can I say? Research and factchecking take time compared to just making shit up on the fly.

Five years on Friday. Jesus Fucking Christ.

But mostly it’s because I decided this past year not to rent the sellouts space in my head. Better to write about the things I want to save, to build a fan base for them, than to spend time mired in negativity because a large organization doesn’t agree with me about those things’ value. I’d rather work to support things than oppose people. (F’rinstance: have you signed Desert Biodiversity’s petition to protect the Ivanpah Valley?)

But it’s one thing to disagree. It’s another to spread falsehoods.

I read this post on the Nevada Wilderness Project’s blog yesterday. The post itself is not particularly remarkable: it’s an update on renewable energy policy in Nevada vis-a-vis California’s repeatedly expressed intention to generate all its non-carbon power in-state. Nevada has been tying its plans to sell off its public lands wholesale to energy developers to meet Californian demand, and so the notion that California might not be buying has upset some people.

If you haven’t been following the desert solar Inside Baseball stats, you might think that the Nevada Wilderness Project would be applauding this development; it offers to lessen development pressure on the Silver State’s wildlands. As it happens, NWP has for some time been a cheerleader for remote industrial renewable development in Nevada. The group parallels in this regard its national colleagues at The Wilderness Society, but NWP has taken this support to rather absurd lengths, going so far as to sponsor a 501-mile hike along the proposed route of a huge transmission line, not to protest the line’s construction through the state of Nevada but in fact to cheer it on. IN NWP’s own words:

Adam hiked the path of the SWIP [SouthWest Intertie Project] line on foot, traveling north to south through high quality sage grouse habitat, large mammal travel corridors, canyons, valleys, along dirt roads, past ranches, and many other areas that will be changed by the construction of the line.

NWP conceded that construction would “affect the natural landscape,” but crowed over the resulting “conservation opportunities.” Which to me reads kind of like OxFam mentioning a looming famine in glowing terms because of the resulting “relief opportunities.”

Wilderness groups working on climate issues point out that if we don’t do something about climate change, there will be no wilderness areas left—or at least, the damages to the biological systems in said wilderness areas will be irrevocably and dramatically changed.

This is undeniably a valid argument. It is an argument that would be every bit as valid for groups working to support women’s crisis centers, community gardens, public broadcasting, and food banks: each of them works to achieve goals that will be utterly undermined by catastrophic climate change. Somehow out of all these groups it’s only the wilderness organizations that have rewritten their charters.

A cynic might suggest that the current popularity of climate change as an issue among major granting organizations encourages groups dependent on such funding to shift their mission so as to maximize development potential.

An even greater cynic might speculate that wilderness groups have a special incentive to hop on board the Big Solar train: mitigation. Developers seeking to destroy public lands are often compelled to “mitigate” that destruction by buying and setting aside other land for protection. Of course, if out of 100 acres of prime desert a developer destroys 50 acres but graciously “mitigates” the other 50, what we have at the end of the day is half as much prime desert as we once had. But if that mitigation involves trading development on a piece of land for protecting some other land as wilderness, then the wilderness organization can count that as a victory in their fundraising material.

Or so that cynic might say. I have been that cynic fairly often. Wilderness groups seem to think little of consigning land without “wilderness characteristics” to destruction, as long as they can thereby save land that does have those characteristics. Never mind that the land destroyed might be the best habitat for a Threatened species in the entire state of Nevada. You can see a freeway from the old-growth desert, so it’s worthless.

But I’m used to all that from certain wilderness groups; all the disregard for the value of land shielded from their vision by their ideological blinders, all the backroom horsetrading, all of it.

That’s not what prompts this complaint. What prompts this complaint is a throwaway caption on a photo accompanying the post on the Nevada Wilderness Project’s blog, which reads:

A rendering of how heliostats will look at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the California desert. According to developer BrightSource, the technology design “allows the solar field to coexist with existing vegetation.”

As it happens, the design of the plant requires that the vegetation beneath the heliostats be kept at a height of no more than 18 inches. If you’re used to pruning shrubs in a garden, 18 inches seems like a reasonable height. Boxwood hedges can live through decades of pruning to 18 inches, for instance.

To my knowledge, based on my working familiarity with the Ivanpah Valley, boxwood hedges have been recorded from vanishingly few places within the footprint of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System. What does grow there? Creosote, Mojave yucca, buckhorn cholla, and barrel cacti are among the most common shrubs. Several of them can live to astonishing ages. None of them can withstand being sheared to 18 inches for very long. When they die, and when the desert pavement around them is destroyed, the soil around them will no longer be held in place. It will blow away or be carried off in floods, and with it the stored seeds of several dozen native annual plant species, some of them rare.

In actual point of fact, this is how the Ivanpah solar plant has been “coexisting” with native vegetation:

That Mojave yucca was around 700 years old.

Here’s the thing: the Nevada Wilderness Project knows all this. Or if they don’t, it’s because they have deliberately refused to acquire the knowledge. Yesterday morning, I asked NWP for clarification of that caption on Twitter. No reply was forthcoming.

A lot of anger here over a photo caption, you might say, and you’d be right. Except for this: They went out of their way to add it. The image doesn’t require it. And it is just a caption, but a caption here and a pullquote there and an offhand comment somewhere else and you bend your public’s perception of reality. Repeat a lie enough times and it becomes the truth. I forget who said that.

Despite my strong views on desert solar development, I still try to maintain respect for green groups that come down with different positions than mine. I have good friends that work within the Sierra Club, for instance, and continue to find the majority of the work of the Center for Biological Diversity of immense value, and hold its staff in quite high regard, despite the aching boneheadedness of their leadership on the renewables issue.

But functioning as a press release distribution arm for BrightSource goes beyond a good-faith difference of opinion. Casually spreading corporate-sponsored misinformation goes beyond agreeing to disagree.

It’s one thing to find the Ivanpah Valley not worth your time as an organization. It’s wrong-headed and ill-informed, but still: if you don’t care about endangered wildlife that doesn’t live in areas with “wilderness characteristics,” there’s not much one can really say to argue with you.

But to to spread blatant, easily debunked lies, in the service of advancing your organizational mission, even if it means collateral devastation of delicate ecosystems? That, my friends, is beyond the pale. That is not excusable.

It is, in fact, what we are supposed to be fighting against.

Apparently not often enough.

He weighed three pounds seven ounces on Monday, down four ounces from October. I can glide my finger between his shoulder blades.

A twentieth of a milliliter of buprenorphine twice a day for pain, and a third of a milliliter of enrofloxacin along with it, the latter one with vitamins and foul flavor mixed in. I pick him up beneath the armpits, cradle him lying on his back in my left arm, wait until he relaxes, then wave each syringe ineffectually in the general vicinity of his mouth as he flinches. Eventually I win. The enrofloxacin is supposed to kill off the deleterious gut flora his vet thinks is keeping him on the razor edge of GI stasis, and the buprenorphine is to ease his pain. Pain from GI stasis causes GI stasis. It’s a bit of a problem.

A rabbit is an abundantly self-replicating machine designed to turn plant material into turds. It’s what they do, except when they don’t and then they die instead. Shut down a rabbit’s digestive tract for more than a couple days and it’ll never start up again. It is my job to keep that fire lit, and to that end I have been shoveling fuel into him like a locomotive fireman with a pile of cilantro-flavored coal.

I can feel every one of his vertebrae when I pet him. When he’s lying supine on my arm his hipbones press into my flesh. He’s about ten years old, and there are any number of reasons he might be losing the weight. None of them are uplifting reasons that give me hope for many future years of companionship.

PZ left a comment here a long time ago, not long after I met Thistle, that has stayed in my mind since. He referred to rabbits, from his perspective as an habitue of biology labs, as “friable… Crumbly and fragile.” I’ve kept Thistle alive for seven years since he made the comment, and yet I have to agree.

He used to be an asshole, this rabbit. One day not long after Zeke died I was lying on the papasan cushion I’d bought him to comfort his old dog bones, and Thistle walked into the room. He’d grown to like sitting on the papasan cushion, looking for all the world like a raisin on a slice of pita bread, and he wanted to do it some more, but I was in the way. He grunted at me from the edge of the cushion. I petted him and said something insufficiently submissive. He turned, walked to the far side of the room, then pivoted and leapt at me, biting me on my septum. It hurt like hell, especially when I laughed. Which I couldn’t not do.

Maybe it was his aging that mellowed him, or maybe it was my going away for a year and a half with no explanation, and then showing up again. He is sweet now and spends most of each day with me in his cage next to my desk. Even when he’s feeling well, he sometimes fails to eat if I’m not sitting next to him. For someone that once had the run of an entire house and his own expensively planted garden, he now shows little interest in leaving his cage. He’s happier if I take him out once a day and fuss over him, but sitting next to me in his cage as I work is enough. He’s good company.

Exercise works to get the gut moving, so I’ve been making him run around the house anyway. After loading each dose of painkiller and antibiotic into him, I put him on the hardwood floor and he ambles slipperily off to see what the cat is up to. The cat only outweighs Thistle by a factor of five and thus is easily pushed around. Yesterday morning the front door was open and desert sunlight streamed in through the metal security door. Thistle headed straight for it, gazed out across the apartment complex’s patio with cloudy eyes. Annette questioned whether his memory was good enough, but I’m certain I know what he wanted on the other side of that door. Though he might have been confused about where it had gotten to.

1)a: squee.

2) At about the same time I became not-employed by the Desert Protective Council, by my choice. The DPC ate up about 1/2 my time and about 5/3 of my emotional energy, so it was a necessary decision. Nonetheless, the money that came in as a result of the job was, for the last three or four months, just enough to keep us from sliding farther into debt. I need to replace that. Therefore, the job hunt starts now. I’m accepting offers of employment either piecemeal-short-term editing and web design jobs, as well as leads for longer term payrolly kinda deals. Also, if you’ve been putting off tossing a five-spot into the ol’ PayPal jar, or buying a copy of the Zeke book, now would be an okay time for that.

3) In the meantime, I am pleased to announce that Desert Biodiversity has a website, and we are busily assembling an impressive Board of Advisors and will subsequently apply to some 501(c)3 for non-profit status. You can check out the site, sign up, and even toss some cash in toward expenses if you like. (Of course since we’re not a 501 (c)3 yet any donations are not tax-deductible. But they will be much appreciated, and help keep my current cash flow problems from stunting the organization’s growth.)

I’ll have more news on Desert Biodiversity here shortly. Even with a full-time job search I’ll still end up having more time and emotional energy now that I’ve left that job referenced up there.

Oh, and confidential to Sven DiMilo: tried to send you email. Don’t know if I have a good address for you. Ping me if you didn’t get it. Thanks.

* The gaybar-cum-Chinese restaurant is, naturally, called “Wang’s.”

So I’ve bumped the price up by five bucks to 22.99 to cover the cost of priority mailing a padded envelope of the correct size, which is—not at all coincidentally—4.95.

Presumably people who buy the book here are mainly interested in supporting writers, because you can get it used online for less, so this is probably a completely wise marketing strategy that won’t deter potential buyers in the slightest.

But if you were planning to buy the book at the previous price of 17.99, you have a bit of time: I’ll keep the price there until I get back from my birthday trip to Tucson, which should be January 6 or so.

Of course it’s worth noting that one Amazon reseller has a used copy in “like new” condition listed at around thirty bucks. So 23 bucks for an “IS new” book, signed by the author, turns out the be a pretty good bargain, all things considered.

- Deep-Thinking Hebephage

A: Whenever society screams about cannibalism, it’s probably just caught an especially alarming sight of itself in the crockpot. There are few among us who aren’t the direct descendents of those who were roasted in a fine honey glaze. Naturally I abhor the notion of killing or eating anyone without their consent, and I want to make that clear at the outset. That being said, A humanitarian diet certainly isn’t rare, and as I’ve argued previously, there’s some reason to believe that a cannibalistic orientation would have been biologically adaptive in the ancestral past. Killing and eating the young of a rival male is well-documented mammal behavior, in species ranging from Ursus arctos to the Felis domesticus that lived in my uncle’s dairy barn. Even our nearest relatives the bonobos, Pan promiscuous, have been known to kill and eat the young of others in their troop. Of course, it was a rival female in the one documented case of which I’m aware, and the killer was also a female, but this nonetheless provides support to your assertion in some unspecified way.

As you very likely live in a jurisdiction in which the kind of behavior you wish to practice is frowned upon, I would advise you to have your girlfriend hide her young in the highest, most inaccessible part of my uncle’s hayloft. Most of the kittens that grew up there survived. Though my telling you might have made that plan less effective. Thanks for writing!

Q: Dear Jesse: I spend most of my time in my basement by myself, and I’m generally just perfectly content with that arrangement. I think most men are. Every now and then, though, I feel a powerful urge to go out and find female humans. I have done this in the past by finding potential mates and explaining to them why it is in their best interests to engage in carnal relations with me. This approach, however, has been less than successful. Is there an evolutionary explanation for why they react improperly to my importuning?

—Deep-Dwelling Herb

A: Herb: Though I officially find your behavior a phenomenon to be met with merciless fury and disdain, it would seem you are on solid ground in an evolutionary sense. Consider the genus Magicicada, the well-known periodic cicadas of eastern North America. Every 13 or 17 years, depending on species, males of this species emerge from the ground and start making incredibly annoying sounds in an attempt to attract willing females.

Of course, Magicicada females also spend that long period underground and emerge at the same time. It may be in your best interests to look for female humans who share your periodic-emergence lifestyle. Joining Mensa or the Society for Creative Anachronism might do the trick.

Q: Dear Jesse: I am a woman of childbearing years with a gratifying sex life and a loving family, but I find myself fighting the urge to enslave thousands of adult females in some sort of celibate warrior caste that exists only to bring me sweet, sweet plant materials, while finding a like number of males who wish only to serve and impregnate me. I think most men do. Is this wrong?

- Deep-Packed Chirpra

A: You are, of course, describing the social structure of quite a number of species of ants, and our even closer relatives, the bees. Some psychologists have challenged the popular notion that being enslaved into armies of drones to serve a single absolute despotic ruler is uniformly negative for all in such relationships.

Q: Dear Jesse: Whenever I see a heterosexual couple making love, I kind of want to stab the man in the scrotal area and ejaculate into the wound, thus increasing my chances of passing on my genes by impregnating his mate to his detriment. I think most men do. My question is, do you have plans for Friday next?

- Derp-Hurfing Evo-Psycho

A: Traumatic insemination is widely practiced in the invertebrate world, so evolution certainly doesn’t argue against it. In most species of bedbugs, however, the traumatic insemination does not involve a male intermediary, but rather a strictly diadic pairing between male and female. In short, you should do what your conscience tells you to.

Q: Dear Jesse: I am a 45-year-old man married to a woman two years older. My spouse and I struggle against what would seem to be generations’ worth of social programming, which programming constricts each of us in this society into performing stereotyped roles, keeping each of us from truly attaining the fully realized human being we each deserve to be. My question is, does evolution really prescribe any kind of moral evaluation of our behavior? We aren’t blank slates, of course, but how do we tease out the genetic from the ingrained social strictures? Isn’t the real lesson of human history that cultural evolution produces change at a much more rapid pace than does Darwinian evolution, and that as a result we are free to guide that cultural evolution—to the extent we can—to make the society we would most like our grandchildren to live in?

—Deke Henson

A: I’m sorry, but there really is no evolutionary rationale for you to be involved with a woman in her late forties with diminishing mate value in the throes of intense intrasexual competition with potential rivals for a desirable mate. You say she’s two years older than you are? EW.

We’ll be delivering the signatures to a number of different people in early 2012.  And very importantly: once you’ve signed, tell your friends. We need more signatures.

Solar Done Right Call To Action for Energy Democracy

Whereas,

We must take rapid, effective, innovative action to change the ways we generate and use energy;

Renewable energy is ubiquitous, offering a new model of energy generation that is local, democratic, and free from the abuses of a centralized monopoly;

The US government’s current renewable-energy policy and the policies of most US states push industrial solar and wind development onto public lands;

This industrial development is proposed for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of acres of our public lands—much of that acreage consisting of intact ecosystems which provide habitat for rare and endangered plants and animals, sequester carbon, and offer the chance for ecosystem adaptation to climate change;

The utility-scale solar and wind generating plants now proposed, most with footprints of several thousand acres, would transform these ecologically-rich, multiple-use lands to single use industrial facilities, in effect privatizing vast areas of public lands;

Once developed, those lands cannot be returned to their previous state after the life of a project – conversion is total and permanent, even though most such projects will generate power for only 15 to 30 years;

The thousands of miles of new transmission infrastructure necessary to carry power from remote solar and wind electric generating plants to urban demand centers drastically inflates the cost of renewable energy, while imposing its own serious environmental impacts;

The federal government has provided tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in cash grants, loans and loan guarantees for remote industrial-scale solar and wind development to many of the same corporations that have dominated the Fossil Fuel Era, created the problems renewable energy is designed to rectify, and helped hasten the recession, while states and local governments have incurred substantial costs to expedite these for-profit projects;

Efficiency upgrades and “distributed generation”—point-of-use energy generation on rooftops, in parking lots and highway medians, brownfields, and throughout the built environment—are cost-effective, efficient, clean, and democratic strategies that are quick to implement, and would serve communities, ratepayers, and taxpayers by improving local economies and adding to home values, and creating millions of local jobs;

Efficiency and distributed generation further have far less environmental impact than industrial scale solar or wind power on intact ecosystems, while making our electrical power grid far less prone to catastrophic failure;

Feed-In Tariffs (FITs) and true net metering programs, in which utilities purchase democratically produced, decentralized renewable energy at a fair price, have been proven a cost-effective way of stimulating rapid deployment of local solar and other distributed generation, while providing economic stimulus to communities rather than multinational corporations, even in cloudy countries like Germany;

The Environmental Protection Agency’s “Re-Powering America’s Lands” program has identified 15 million acres of degraded or contaminated land potentially suitable for renewable energy development, and is committed to working with renewable energy developers to remediate these lands for use as utility-scale renewable energy generation sites where large projects may be desirable.

THEREFORE, WE DEMAND:

That the Federal and state governments abandon their current path of industrialization and destruction of our public lands;

That any large-scale solar or wind installations be restricted to degraded, contaminated, or already-developed lands, including those identified by the EPA;

That Federal, state, and local governments facilitate a massive deployment of efficiency
upgrades and point-of-use solar power;

That no new large, long-distance electrical transmission projects be approved to serve remote solar or wind projects until distributed power generation and energy efficiency are maximized;

That the Federal Housing Finance Agency immediately lift its de facto freeze on property assessed clean energy (PACE) loans, which provide critical low-risk financing for efficiency upgrades and home energy retrofits;

That Federal and state funding and other incentives be made available to help states establish and expand generous Feed in Tariffs (FITs) modeled after successful programs like Germany’s, and improve net metering policies, and that Congress work to establish the proven solutions of German-style FITs and less-restrictive net metering at a national scale.
————————

Sincerely,

[Your name]

I’m starting to work on a new project to do pretty much what it says in the image here: to help people explore, respect and defend our irreplaceable desert biodiversity. Oddly, this is a gaping hole in the range of topics environmental groups work on. There are several groups with desert agendas, and some of them are fine indeed, but none work on all living things throughout the desert.

If you’re interested, you can sign up for the Desert Biodiversity email list using this form — if the form actually works here. If not and you’re seeing this text, I’m scurrying to fix it and edit the text RIGHT NOW.

Desert Biodiversity also has a Facebook page here and a Googleplux page here. Both are slightly sketchy at the moment but growing. They’ll grow faster if you share them and comment on them.

Finally, at some point Desert Biodiversity will ask you for money, but until we get the accounting set up if you’d like to offer a little financial and promotional support we do have T-shirts and other gear available. Check it out.

Join the Desert Biodiversity Email List:

What jumps out at you first? Possibly the amazing auroras, a near-solid layer in the atmosphere that fluoresces like a raver’s plastic jewelry. Or maybe it’s the flashes of lightning dancing across whole regions of the dark side of the Earth.

But I’m guessing the amazing degree to which we’ve made our mark on the night-side of our planet is in the top three. Perhaps you even picked out a place you know at night by the patterns of the lights, as I did with the area around Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto and Buffalo at time 00:20-00:21.

Twinkly lights at night can be pretty, though the objections of astronomers and others concerned about the loss of our dark skies are gaining increasing support. When you spend as much time out in the desert as I do, the tiny vestiges of dark sky become increasingly precious. One of the things I’ll miss about where we live: you can actually see more than a handful of stars in the sky from downtown.

There’s a bigger problem, though.

Light is energy. Every single artificial light you see shining from the night-time side of the earth means we are broadcasting a staggering amount of energy out into space, enough energy that the light can be seen shining brightly from 220 miles up,  which is approximately the distance between the ISS and the Earth’s surface. Imagine how powerful a light would have to be for you to see it from 220 miles away, and then imagine the energy used by continents full of those lights. To a first approximation, all of that light is generated with electrical power — though open flames here and there may add a few lumens to the total, it wouldn’t be much. Assuming figures from a couple of years ago are still accurate, half that electricity in the United States comes from burning coal, another fifth from burning natural gas, with nukes, hydro, diesel and a few other sources making up the remainder.

Those lights you see, in other words, come mainly from burning fossil fuels.

This isn’t news, really. But think about what we use those lights for: safety and security, comfort, productivity, reading at night and deterring crime and reading the street number of the house to which you’re delivering the pizza, and a thousand other things.

None of those arguably worthwhile goals are accomplished by shining light into space, but that’s what we’re doing. We want to fill our local, nighttime environments with enough light to be comfortable and secure, but aside from those lights intended to direct aircraft, we end up wasting every single photon directed skyward. That’s about 30 percent of a typical unshielded outdoor lightsource.

Tracking down the source of that glare of light being seen from the ISS is complex. There’s stationary outdoor lighting such as streetlamps, traffic signals and other such fixtures, which accounts for about eight percent of the energy used in lighting. There are household and industrial exterior lights, generally not tracked as a distinct subsection of each location’s total lighting budget. There’s glare through windows from brightly lit building interiors. There’s vehicular lighting. But just that first category — streetlights, stoplights, etc. — consumes the output of more than 15 gigawatts of electrical generating capacity in the US, which means the energy just that category of outdoor lighting wastes into space is a little more than 5 gigawatts’ worth of generating capacity. Half that mix comes from coal, which works out to 7 million tons of coal burned to illuminate the underside of the ISS as it flies over the US each year.

According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, there’s a low-tech way around this issue:

If 30 percent or more of the light from a typical outdoor source is wasted into space, as shown on the left side of the above envelope, then simply putting a reflective cover over that bulb (as seen on right) would bounce those ISS_bound photons back down onto the sidewalk where we could use them. This would mean that we could swap out that 100W bulb on left for a 30 percent dimmer one, keep our sidewalks just as well illuminated, and burn less coal and oil while keeping our night skies darker.

For perspective, that 5 gigawatts of generating capacity wasted just by stationary outdoor lights and not counting private homes’ and businesses’ outdoor lighting, fugitive indoor lighting, or lighting from vehicles? That’s about 40 times the generating capacity of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System. Not that Ivanpah will power streetlights: they go on at night when solar doesn’t work. But still. We could retire that much fossil fuel burning by killing 148,000 acres of desert, or we could put hats on streetlights and cut down their wattage a bit. And like I said, that’s not counting the 1000-watt floodlight over your neighbor’s deck that shines into your bedroom window.

So when I look at the video here, my glee at seeing aurorae in the Van Allen Belt is tempered a bit by the reminder of just how profligately we waste electrical power. If it’s such a scarce and dangerous commodity, threatening to bake our planet, so that we have to kill native deserts for industrial solar and wind, why are we flinging terawatts of it into space where we’ll never get it back?

As the book mainly concerns gardening and related activities and subjects in the San Francisco Bay Area — though I suspect many of the themes and topics therein will be universal enough that people in New Jersey might find the book worthwhile — I’ve stolen taken inspiration from a fragment of song from the Ohlone people, native to the Bay Area, for the working title: Gardening on the Edge of The World.

The book consists of essays and articles I wrote between 1990 and 2008 or so, a few of them on this blog, but most in print publications both regional and not.

Here’s an example, first written for the Contra Costa Times.

Helen

My ferns seem to have made it through the winter outside. There are three of them. The two birds’ nest ferns are sending up new flat fronds through a nest of winter-killed foliage. The third, a staghorn, barely hangs on in its favored spot on the fence beneath the juniper. Houseplants all, I exiled them to the elements in October.

This was tough love. A few months of careful cleaning had failed to rid the ferns of their infestation of scale. Small armored relatives of aphids and mealy bugs, scale are one of a fern grower’s worst enemies. Insecticides capable of killing the insects are often dangerous to ferns’ tender foliage. Besides, I don’t particularly want to breathe the stuff in. So out they went, in the hope that one of California’s many scale-eating insects would do the job.

We acquired the ancestors of our current crop of scale five years ago, in an Aglaonema — a so-called “Chinese evergreen.” The plant was a memento of a former neighbor. When we took it, we didn’t know about the stowaways beneath the leaf stems.

We were a little distracted.

Our neighbor Helen was in her thirties, lithe, blonde, and compassionate. She’d moved in after a string of noisy tenants. Her tranquillity was a relief.

We never became best friends, but in the year and a half we knew her, we appreciated the kindness she showed and did our best to return it. Sometimes our dog Zeke would howl in anguish in our absence; Helen would speak comfort to him through the wall. When she felt too ill to go out, we’d bring back groceries for her. She never asked for much, in errands or in the rest of life. The last time I talked to her we talked about unattainable wishes. Hers brought me up short: simply to live with her daughter in a real home.

Helen was not our neighbor’s real name. AIDS is an unpopular disease, and the families of its victims still contend with public fear. Helen’s mother, when we’d meet her dropping off her toddler granddaughter for a short visit, was self-conscious and uncomfortable. When Helen died, she spent no more than a day sorting her daughter’s things, taking a few heirlooms for the toddler, then asked a few neighbors to take what we wanted before the trash people came. Becky took a plain white bowl and the Aglaonema.

I once bought a blue VW beetle from a friend, a law school graduate heading overseas. The car ran perfectly until he handed me the key and left, at which point the engine welded together. Friends said the car died of grief over John leaving for Tibet. So it was with that Aglaonema.  They’re among the easiest houseplants to maintain, as long as you don’t let their feet stay wet. But once Helen was gone, this plant was done for. Over the next three years I tried my hardest to keep that thing alive, but to no avail. Each new green leaf would bring a surge of hope, which withered as the new leaf yellowed from the base. Eventually, I hardened my heart, told myself the memories were what mattered, and tossed the plant on the compost heap.

In the meantime, the scale had jumped from the Aglaonema to various other houseplants.

Scale are tenacious insects. Like their more vulnerable aphid cousins, they live by inserting a tube into a plant’s leaves or stems and drinking sap. They look, to the untrained eye, like drops of wax. Small and mobile when young, they find likely spots on a plant, insert their feeding tubes, and secrete a waxy shell that protects them from most enemies. It also cements them in place.

This is no hindrance to reproduction: scale reproduce parthenogenetically, without males. Every so often, baby scales will crawl out from under their mother’s armor, and begin life on their own.

Plants generally have sap to spare, and a few scale should pose no particular threat to a healthy Aglaonema. It’s the volume that makes a difference. Each adult scale can produce hundreds of offspring. Under such an onslaught, even a healthy plant will suffer and die.

A simile looms, but I’ll resist it. Scale spreads far more easily than AIDS, and to far less effect. No need to trivialize people’s suffering with cheap literary devices. Besides, contagion is what life does. Living things find places to live, and do their best to live there. There’s no real insight in that statement: it’s essentially a tautology.

The problems arise when one side wins permanently.

By the time I tossed Helen’s plant, the scale had killed a previous staghorn fern, several Pelargoniums and a Philodendron. I battled them with rubbing alcohol, which strips the wax and dehydrates the insects, and with brute force, crushing them with my fingernails. I’d win long campaigns, only to be surprised when reinforcements appeared from beneath the leaves of my ferns. Eventually, I sent the ferns out into the yard.

They’ve survived. And they’re not the only things that have survived. Among the bright green fiddleheads are bright tan scale, looking tanned and rested after a long dormant season. We have another year of combat to look forward to.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.