California Burning

I’m sure you’ve all been hearing about the wildfires blazing in California – some 1400 of them, last I heard.

Here’s what I didn’t realize until I arrived: The smoke is unruly. It wafts all over the state. You can be hundreds of miles from the actual fires but if the wind blows the wrong way, you’ll still be smoked out.

Last week, the air was miserable even where I’m vacationing in the Sierra Foothills east of Sacramento, though nary a fire burned nearby. The mountains apparently trapped the smoke. It was so thick that my nephew’s day camp had to keep the kids inside. You can imagine how much they loved that. But particulate levels were two or three times the maximum compatible with health, so the kids stayed locked up.

Here’s what the smoke looked like, hanging over the hills as we drove west from Sacramento yesterday on I-80. My sister snapped these photos through the windshield:




That’s not a second line of hills behind the first. That’s the smoke.

Today the whole family is blinking and tearing a lot, having spent yesterday inside that brown cloud during our trip to Discovery Kingdom. It seems that unless your lungs are seriously impaired, your eyes serve as a warning system.

I know there’s not really a political solution to this. Our Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has dispatched the National Guard to help fight the fires. There's not much more to be done (though arguably the Guard should have been deployed sooner). The fires result from a combo of dry conditions and hundreds of lightning strikes. For once, this is a problem that has little to do with human stupidity.

And yet, I can’t help thinking of the Governator’s immortal words: “Vere zere’s smoke, zere’s fire.” Oh, wait – Ahnold was talking about the sexual harassment allegations leveled at him during his gubernatorial campaign back in 2003. In fact, even though he then ‘fessed up to groping numerous women, that particular smokestorm blew over. Maybe he could repeat the trick?

Down by the Riverside

This is mostly a PSA for the benefit of my local readers, though the rest of you might check it out if you'd like to see what a pretty little town I'm lucky to call home.

A pseudonymous but obviously very, very bright fellow resident of Athens has started a blog called The Attention-Getting Device devoted to discussing local issues. It's thoughtful, smart, and worth visiting if you live here, too.

So far its author, the Watchdog, is dissecting the retirement community planned to be built at the end of my street along the banks of the Hocking River. The original development was to be a continuing care facility, which the community actually needs, albeit in a less stupid location. But the original plans have been scaled back because the state won't approve more nursing care beds. Now the plans foresee a relatively upscale project that will gobble up the last open green space in our neighborhood, continue the trend of paving over the river's banks, and create a traffic hazard along routes that kids use to walk to the elementary school. It will also constitute a major evacuation problem the next time Athens experiences major flooding, which will be sooner rather than later if we keep destroying the floodway.

But the Watchdog says this all way better than me, so check out his/her blog.

I will just say that when we had relatively minor flooding last March, this was the view from the site of the proposed development. That concrete strip leading into the river is part of the bike path. The project would be built next to that path, slightly behind where I was standing as I snapped this shot. 'Nuff said.

Those Bloomin' Taxes

I should be working on my tax return, but dang it, I haven't filed away any paperwork since last June, so I first have to sort through a foot-tall pile of paper. True to form, I'm procrastinating. Which is just how I got into this pickle in the first place.

One of the other annoyances of tax season is how it coincides with planting season. This morning I said to heck with the taxes and planted some sweet pea seeds. Then I came inside and read about a nifty proposal that would give tax breaks for gardening! Well, not necessarily for planting sweet peas (they're poisonous) but for growing food in our yards, similar to the Victory Gardens in WWI, except this time with a little tax incentive.

Writing in Alternet, Roger Doiron says:

I am proposing that home growers finally catch a break. Not from bugs, weather, or clunky garden shoes, but from taxes. It's not as silly an idea as it may sound. We give tax breaks to people to encourage them to put hybrid cars in their garages and solar panels on their roofs, so why not offer incentives for solar-powered, healthy food production in their backyard? ...

More home gardens would offer us victory not only over rising food and health care costs, but also foreign oil dependency and climate change. Researcher estimate that locally-grown foods use up to 17 times less climate-warming, fossil fuels than foods from away. And when it comes to local foods, it doesn’t get any “localer” than one’s own yard.

Doiron would have the government waive taxes on gardening supplies and - more significantly - offer an income tax deduction for a kitchen garden (or for rental of a community garden plot) similar to the break for a home office, based on square footage.

This is such a cool and clever idea. It won't save the earth all on its own. But as the price of oil climbs ever higher, it might help ease the transition to the more local world that we'll all be forced to inhabit in the future. Less lofty - but no less important - more people might discover the pleasures of perfectly fresh vegetables: tender-crisp baby lettuce, sun-warmed tomatoes, sweet buttery purple-podded beans.

By that way, that sweet feline pansy pictured above, taunting those of you who are still digging out from winter? It survived from last fall, along with most of its companions, under layers of snow and discouragement. And since it's a pansy, it's edible - though this particular specimen probably has too much dirt-and-oil grime from the street in front of my house.

Oil in Them Thar Badlands

Anyone who grew up in North Dakota perks up when their home state makes national headlines. So this week, when I saw that there may be massive oil fields in the wild western half of the state, I got excited even though I haven't lived there in nearly three decades.

According to Andrew Leonard at Salon, earlier estimates ranged as high as 500 billion barrels in the Bakken shale formation, which extends from North Dakota into Montana and Canada. (I hope this doesn't mean we'll have to invade Canada.) Even if that figure were correct, no more than half would be recoverable in the best-case scenario.

Now, with the release of a United States Geological Survey report on Thursday, the amount of technically recoverable oil there has been estimated between 3.0 and 4.3 billion barrels, as Leonard reported. (See his post for links to the actual report.) Note that this is technically recoverable, which still doesn't tell us if or when it'll make economic sense. As Leonard further notes, the extraction process for shale oil usually involves pulverizing mountains. Here, companies would likely use "horizontal drilling," which the AP described as follows:

Oil companies began sharing technology about two years ago on how to recover the oil. The technology involves drilling vertically to about 10,000 feet, then "kicking out" for as many feet horizontally, while fracturing the rock to release the oil trapped in microscopic pores in the area known as the "middle" Bakken.

If it seems like there ought to be a better way, I've got a fine idea. North Dakota has another major resource that's never been a secret to its sons and daughters: wind.

Way back in 2000, the New York Times reported:

Together, South Dakota, North Dakota and Texas have sufficient wind resources to provide electricity for the entire United States, according to studies cited by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.

Being a good North Dakotan, I read that piece. And then I saw dollar signs. My dad still owns six quarter sections of land. It's not prime farmland, but wind? Boy, have we got it!

What we don't have is transmission capacity to move all that electricity out of the Dakotas and into the rest of this energy-greedy country. We also don't have clever ways of storing really massive amounts of electricity. Those are the the two things that would lay the groundwork for large-scale exploitation of wind power.

Of course, revamping our transmission grid and reinventing the battery would require huge investments. It'd take a major public initiative. But it might still be cheaper than pulverizing or drilling under the western half of North Dakota. It would certainly be cheaper than invading any more countries for their oil - yes, even cheaper than attacking Canada, never mind Iran.

Photo of the North Dakotan Badlands by Flickr user zanzibar, used under a Creative Commons license.

Disaster Tourism without Even Leaving Home

Today we had the cheap thrill of being disaster tourists here in my little town in Southeast Ohio, which like much of the state is watching the water rise. Our local flooding has been pretty harmless thus far. So my family and I are enjoying the excitement of watching a slow-mo disaster that - fortunately - isn't one.

Here's where the bike path merges with the Hocking River. A developer, National Church Residences, wants to build a retirement center just a few feet away from here. We hope they're prepared to supply a fleet of lifeboats for the residents.

This is the bike path diving into the Hocking again, here right next to the sewage treatment plant. (Too bad there's no scratch-and-sniff feature on the Web.)


The marker shows the water level next to the sewage plant at 11 a.m. ...


... and again at 7 p.m. Note that the volleyball net is now low enough even for a klutz like me.


That's not a puddle, folks. That's the Hocking River. When our Wal-Mart moved in a few years ago, part of the local opposition centered on its location in the floodplain. And now, here's what happens when you pave over the area where nature intended the river to naturally escape its banks. If you drive through this little tributary fast enough, you provide fabulous entertainment for the children in the backseat. As a bonus you get what a friend of mine called an "Appalachian car wash." Which in our case actually left the car cleaner.


The Tiger likes to play here when it's not threatening to become a new water park. (The city pool is conveniently located just a few feet to the right of the photo.)


Here's why one of the elementary schools closed down yesterday and today.


This is actually not a lake, no matter what your eyes tell you. It's not even a river. It's just a creek. Or it was, anyway.


And here's how you get to work if you live next to that creek, assuming you're prepared for this sort of thing, as these folks evidently did.

We're grateful that everyone's safe here, so far. Any basement flooding is coming from our oversaturated soil, not from the river. The Hocking River was expected to crest this evening, though more rain is in the forecast; we're hoping it passes us by. At the risk of sounding preachy: I hope developers might take this as a reminder that we need to preserve the precious remnants of our floodplain, and not just pave paradise, put up a parking lot.