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Tilting at Windmills

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I was discussing renewable energy a while back with a neighbor.  His politics are a bit more to starboard than mine, but he’s a thoughtful fellow and has reached the conclusion, as have I, that climate change is a significant threat.  We both agreed on the need to develop a portfolio of non-fossil energy sources.  As we enumerated the costs and benefits of each type, we got to wind.

“Now there’s a technology that has a lot of promise.  Cheap, clean, and plenty of it to go around.  But I read the other day that there’s a noisy lobby against it.  Seems there’ s a bunch of people afraid that windmills are going to kill too many………” he paused dramatically and then his face contorted into a look of astonished disbelief   “……birds!   Can you imagine?  Holding America’s energy needs hostage because windmills may knock off some…….birds!”

Here was a tough choice.  Take on a set of values very different from mine and risk ruining the conversation, or move on to solar.  Coward that I am, I chose the sun.  But it got me thinking.

What is it, after all, that made the tradeoff such a no-brainer for my neighbor.  Was he unaware of the mountainous havoc our species is inflicting on Earth’s biodiversity?  Should I tactfully suggest he might enjoy reading  The Sixth Extinction in which Elizabeth Kolbert makes a powerful argument that our impact on the planet’s flora and fauna  is comparable to the asteroid collision of the Cretaceous–Paleogene era which wiped out three quarters of earth’s species and, irony of ironies, allowed Homo sapiens to evolve and flourish in the resultant vacuum?  Might information like this shift his values?

Or is it more a matter of religion?  Is he following his God’s directive to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”  If that’s the case, I should have steered the conversation towards what “having dominion” means.  Common parlance would have us think of mankind lording it over the rest of creation but there is clearly an element of husbandry and protection in that word.  After all, if rulers fail in their responsibility to keep their charges safe they don’t remain rulers for very long.

Or perhaps an economic argument would have appeal.  One of the things taken for granted about birds – bats as well – is the prodigious amount of pest control they perform – at no cost to farmers and no increase in the health risk or the price of food to the consumer.   An article in the March 2013 issue of the Wildlife Society Bulletin, researcher K. Shawn Smallwood estimates the number of birds killed by wind turbines in the US in 2012 at 573,000.  And in the December 2013 issue of the Journal BioScience researcher Mark Hays, in a peer reviewed article, calculates current bat deaths from wind turbines in the US to be between 600,000 to 900,000 individuals.  That translates into a lot of boll weevils, corn borers and fat green tomato hornworms still munching away.

And then there’s  the contribution to the national economy of all those birdwatchers buying binoculars, birdhouses, spotting scopes and sunflower seeds.  That might have some sway, especially if my neighbor has some stock in Nikon or Bushnell

Of course none of these pragmatic considerations gets at the heart of what bothers me about  those half million plus birds getting smacked out of the sky each year.  For me and, I think, a good many similarly-wired folks, it’s a bit as if a bunch of Van Gogh paintings were tossed in the dump, or copies of The Sun Also Rises got burned, or the Olympics got cancelled one cycle, or TV programming was reduced by a couple of hours a week – stuff like that.  If one of those batted birds happened to be the brilliantly sun-struck black and gold oriole whose bell-clear note sails down at me from a tall tree as I walk out my door in May,  my world would definitely lose some of its richness and beauty.  In fact, now that I think of it, I’d even be willing to pay a couple of cents more on my electric bill each month so long as that oriole keeps coming back.

There’s an interesting difference between the paintings, the books, the sports accomplishments, the programming coming from a big flat screen TV and that oriole.  Those first four things are all creations by us, and their subjects, for the most part, happen to be……us.  The oriole, on the other hand……. but that’s a subject for another blog.

Thoughts on Catching a Fish

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In a reflective moment I asked a close friend why we so loved to hunt and fish. “It’s just anachronistic,” he said, as though that explained it.

Both of us relish our time out of doors – away from cement, asphalt, glass and steel – and especially those priceless moments of intimacy with a fellow creature not of the human race.  The partridge bursting from brush beneath our feet.  The hare zigzagging away at full speed.   And not just during hunting or fishing seasons. The school of bluefish brushing our legs as we swim in the surf also thrills.

He’d rather row the boat while I cast, provided I hand him the rod every other time a fish is hooked.  Once on the line, we are connected to that other being, that beautiful product of evolution, or design – whatever.  And the connection is as intangible as it is material.

The fish has beaten the odds – floating as a defenseless egg on a hostile sea, schooling as a fingerling, evading sharks and gillnets for years in adulthood. It has plumbed dark depths, migrated in response to mysterious forces, felt the draw of mates.  It has a will, to survive.  We feel it directly in each jump and run. We too have a will,  however redundant or anachronistic, to bring it home to feed ourselves and our families in a way so much richer, at least to us, than the finest meal at the finest four star.  And in so doing the fish becomes us, at least in a materialistic sense. That fact, however, does not brings us any closer to the Great Mystery, though our perhaps-wiser forebears thought it did.

Bringing home a piece of plastic-wrapped chicken from the supermarket has none of that.  Eating it, we sustain ourselves with a nearly synthetic product of our civilized economy.  Hens bred with breasts so huge that their legs give out, raised in warehouses with manufactured food delivered by conveyor, mass slaughtered with Henry Ford stainless technology, quick chilled, aseptically wrapped, transported, presented with Madison Avenue-designed aesthetic.  Is that what we become?

Let me gut my fish barehanded on a rock and toss its roe to the hungering gulls, knowing that in doing so I have sacrificed some of the next generation of bass.  Let me keep fresh in my mind the will that fueled its jumps and runs, and wonder if that spirit is now no more or has instead returned to some larger source from which it was simply borrowed or shared.  Let me ask if my own will may not come from and eventually return to a similar source or maybe the same.  Meanwhile, all those ineffable drives and desires and even thoughts are translated into concrete action by the sparkling synaptic machinery laid out by our DNA.

Anachronistic, yes, but there’s more to it than that.