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….
