No Trafficking in Mockery Today

OK—the good news first, since I have spent several hours looking for anything, anything that might resemble a ray of hope. So here it is: the five black-crowned night heron chicks that were felled from their tree are fine, despite one of them having a broken mandible, And you can see them—when they’re not sleeping, which I think shows a really sweet sensibility, don’t you?—right here.

Well, maybe you can see them there, since when I checked, I got a notification that “we’re working on the bird cam;” according to The New York Times, demand for the site was so great that it crashed.

It all started when the U.S. Postal Service in Oakland, California, decided to trim some ficus trees, since they were harboring some birds who were doing what birds do; that is, going to the bathroom and not going to the bathroom. So they went out and found some hapless Mexican guy, Ernesto Pulido, who started hacking away at the trees. And one of the hacks brought down the nest with the herons, which brought Cat Callaway and Lisa Owens Viani to the rescue. One of them recorded the whole thing on her cell phone; the other scooped up the birds and took them to an avian shelter.

The best thing? Well, you can argue that most of us know that birds build nests in the spring, and that once built, the logical thing to do is to raise chicks. So wouldn’t you expect a tree trimmer…?

But we may have to excuse Pulido, who was raised in Mexico, and says he loves animals. At any rate, he’s visited the center, spoken with the staff, and, well, here’s the San Francisco Chronicle:

Pulido, a Bay Point resident, offered to pay $2,700 toward the birds' care: the $2,200 he earned from the U.S. Postal Service for the tree-trimming job plus an additional $500. He's already paid the $500 and is awaiting payment from the post office to pay the rest, said International Bird Rescue spokesman Andrew Harmon.

But that wasn't enough for Pulido. He wanted to learn more about night herons, what the center does to save them, and what the public can do to help.

He was full of questions Thursday. What's the likelihood the injured birds will survive? How long can they live in a city? What's the difference between "endangered" and "protected"? 

And in a remarkable change of the bureaucratic heart, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service let him off the hook. So Pulido, who had been reviled a week ago, is now a hero! Nice, hunh? This kind of stuff happens out there in California.

Right, then it was time to turn to Idaho, since a couple out there have come up with a tremendous idea: repave the entire highway system with solar panels. Here, from Indiegogo, is a description of their project:

Solar Roadways is a modular paving system of solar panels that can withstand the heaviest of trucks (250,000 pounds). These Solar Road Panels can be installed on roads, parking lots, driveways, sidewalks, bike paths, playgrounds... literally any surface under the sun. They pay for themselves primarily through the generation of electricity, which can power homes and businesses connected via driveways and parking lots. A nationwide system could produce more clean renewable energy than a country uses as a whole (http://solarroadways.com/numbers.shtml). They have many other features as well, including: heating elements to stay snow/ice free, LEDs to make road lines and signage, and attached Cable Corridor to store and treat stormwater and provide a "home" for power and data cables. EVs will be able to charge with energy from the sun (instead of fossil fuels) from parking lots and driveways and after a roadway system is in place, mutual induction technology will allow for charging while driving. 

Son of a newspaper man that I am, I had to check this out, which was easily done by scrolling down the first page of the Google search on “solar roadways.” And yes, the 28-minute video debunking the solar roads was considerably less cool than the 7-minute video bunking (just did it to get a rise out of you, computer!) the idea. Certainly, there are significant costs to the project, and who knows if the idea is economically possible?

A more balanced view was offered by John Aziz, who pointed out that it’s easy to shoot down good ideas, but once in the while a crazy idea works. Want an example? Aziz points to the Wright brothers, and all the people who told them they were crazy. Here’s a bit of what he wrote:

In August 1901, after a difficult month testing their glider in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur Wright was inclined to give up. On the train back to Dayton, Ohio, he told his brother Orville that "not within a thousand years would man ever fly."

The Wright brothers' critics were hugely skeptical of them, too. After all, the notion that humans might take to the skies seemed fantastical and utopian at the time. Critics cried "Icarus!" European newspapers were derisive; a French one called the brothers "bluffeurs" (bluffers). 

Ouch—getting called a bluffeur by the French really hurts!

And as Aziz points out, we have the technology, which is more than the Wright brothers did. So reading Aziz made me remember Yeats, in his poem Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen:

Come let us mock at the great

That had such burdens on the mind

And toiled so hard and late

To leave some monument behind,

Nor thought of the levelling wind.

Come let us mock at the wise;

With all those calendars whereon

They fixed old aching eyes,

They never saw how seasons run,

And now but gape at the sun.

Come let us mock at the good

That fancied goodness might be gay,

And sick of solitude

Might proclaim a holiday:

Wind shrieked -- and where are they?

Mock mockers after that

That would not lift a hand maybe

To help good, wise or great

To bar that foul storm out, for we

Traffic in mockery.

Well, some of the people who are not trafficking in mockery are those good folk up in Oregon, who decided to put together a far more manageable scheme to install solar panels on the side of a highway. During the day, sunlight is converted to electric power, which is sold to the electric company. At night, the electric company sells power to the road for its lights. Here, check this out from Oregon.gov ’s Office of Innovative Partnerships and Alternative Funding (sigh—if Oregon were a man, I’d marry him….):

In December 19, 2008, the nation’s first solar highway project started feeding clean, renewable energy into the electricity grid, and the Oregon Solar Highway has been operating seamlessly ever since. The 104 kilowatt (dc) ground-mounted solar array, made up of 594 solar panels, is situated at the interchange of Interstate 5 and Interstate 205 south of Portland, Oregon, and offsets over one-third of the energy needed for freeway illumination at the site.

There’s something else as well, because have you ever been to Oregon? I have, and my umbrella rotted after three days. In fact, I’ve seen more sun in London than I have in Portland. So how much energy could we generate, down here, in sunny Puerto Rico, if every house had solar panels powering the power company while we worked, and that power company powered us while we watched TV and slept? Oh, and even if we just reduced our electric bill by just a third, well, raise your hands, out there, all of you against the idea?

“Can we do that,” I asked my friend Tony, when we were talking about the idea.

And the next question?

“Well, why not?”

I don’t remember the answer, all I remember was thinking that it was the old story: something like ‘we can’t do it because we’ve never done it so we’ve all found a way to make money on one scheme, why should we find a way to save money on a new scheme?’

Something else to consider—the sun is not the only thing out there. Try standing, as I did for seven years, at a bus stop next to a highway, in this case road number one north of Caguas, Puerto Rico. News flash to you guys out there—it’s hard even to talk on your cell phone, the noise from the roar of the air pushed aside by the trucks hurling past is near to deafening. So here—from five long years ago—is The New York Times on combining solar and wind power next to our highways:

Auction documents suggest that each 10-mile stretch of the Green Roadway system could generate enough energy to power up to 2,000 homes. The installed cost would be about $2.6 million for the solar components and $4.2 million for wind, but up to 65 percent could be knocked off if federal, state and local subsidies and tax credits are factored in, the documents suggest. 

You know, we could have done this years ago, but we didn’t. So now we’re in Iraq and Afghanistan, blowing the local population away, and the rest of the world hates us. Grrrrr….

Oh well, at least the herons are OK….