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Aside from an insatiable appetite for beefsteak and a reasoned skepticism regarding sunscreen and the threats posed by second-hand smoke, lead paint and amalgam fillings, I like to think of myself as a pretty green guy. After all, I was driving a Metro before Metros were cool, Mom practiced organic gardening before there was a name for it, and I find that spending too much time with too much air conditioning gives me chilblained feet and plugged up sinuses. I may not be Mister Natural, but I’m betting my carbon footprint is still several sizes smaller than Al Gore’s. I like to think of myself as a good friend of the earth, although on any given evening, I’d rather hug my wife than hug a tree.
But I’ve always figured that claiming to be a friend of the earth meant being a friend to the whole earth — not just the little patch of it you look at through the kitchen window. If the old Earth Day slogan “Think globally, act locally” still applies, a lot of folks who point proudly at their green bone fides are pretty bad actors on the local stage.
Look, anybody who’s ever tried to squeeze one more page out of an ink-jet cartridge hitting on empty knows they only put so much in and when it’s gone, no matter how hard you try, there’s no more to be sucked out. Well, when it comes to oil, earth is no different from that ink-jet cartridge, and every trip to the gas pump is another reminder that when it’s gone, no matter how hard Exxon-Mobil sucks, there’ll be no more to be sucked out.
As somebody who doesn’t much care for horses, I’d like to put that day off until we come up with a workable alternative.
That’s the big buzzword among my green-talking brethren — alternative — as in alternative energy. Energy from the wind, from the waves, from the sun that falls freely on the fields … energy from somewhere else.
Yeah, we like to talk the talk — but if that windmill is going up too close to home, odds are, somebody’s going to be looking for an alternative. Even Teddy Kennedy, bless him, became a disciple of local control when a proposed off-shore wind farm threatened to infringe on the ocean view from his Hyannis Port property and those of his well-heeled, well-connected neighbors. But before we get too smug about Teddy and those Eastern liberals, let’s remember that just across the creek folks in Trempealeau County, pretty much put the kibosh on turning the breeze into kilowatts as well.
But then, it may be just as well we don’t go to generating too much clean, green electricity until we have powerlines to send it skeedadling off to wherever somebody has something that needs plugging in. It would be funny if it weren’t so annoying: The big bad power companies — one of every professional greenie’s favorite villains — want to put in a high-voltage line across Minnesota and the Dakotas to transmit power from where the wind is and people aren’t to where the people, and presumably their fleets of Chevy Volts and other plug-in eco-friendly vehicles, are. But surprise, surprise — those wires-on-poles — a technology that pre-dates the Civil War — suddenly are a great threat to the local environment and the forces of ecological righteousness are rallying against them.
We really ought to be ashamed of ourselves. We’re quite willing to inconvenience SUV drivers, McMansion dwellers and NASCAR fans all in the name of preserving life on the planet — albeit not life as they know it. Yet no sooner have we issued the latest pronouncement on the evil of a fossil-fueled lifestyle somebody has to get all greener-than-thou and insist that powerlines can’t be built here because a misguided bird might fly into one; that windmills can’t be built here because the blades cast flickering shadows that will drive sensitive souls absolutely mad and that anyone who doesn’t agree is just a pawn of the rapacious plutocracy and ought to be ashamed.
Sorry folks, we can’t have it both ways. If we’re going to shrink our carbon footprint, odds are we’re going to have to stick a few poles in the ground, look at some wires and windmills and put up with a few things we’d prefer not to put up with. If we’re going to have clean, alternative energy we need to build the alternative infrastructure to support it — and, like it or not, some of that infrastructure is going to end up in our own backyards.
It could be worse … ever been downwind of an oil well?
Contact Jerome Christenson at (507) 453-3500 or jchristenson@winonadailynews.com. For Jerome’s comments on this, that and something else check out “Up on the wrong side of the bed” at www.rivervalleyblogs.com/jerome/ or go to www.winonadailynews.com.
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