Blue Hill on the hill, and other sustainability activities

Here's Unity College professor John "Z" Zavodny planting tomatoes under the strict supervision of former Unity College student and current Community Garden manager Sara Trunzo.

Planting tomatoes is good for the soul. John is a very soulful guy.

Then there's a couple shots of our local wind farm. Several folks from a prospective community wind cooperative from the Blue Hill peninsula came to visit, to learn about wind power anemometry and planning, and to see for themselves the scale and impact of these huge GE 1.5 MW machines.

It was a breezy day and the 1.5's were running at their regulated rpm of 12. They were almost certainly putting out a full 1.5 MW. They were also putting out about 2/3 of the maximum noise they put out. Paradoxically, if the wind increases a bit, the noise increases too, but after a while the wind in the trees and leaves will make more noise than the turbine. Turbines on relatively low wind sites may actually make more noise disamenity than those on high wind sites.

Good planning can help mitigate the primary impacts, which are this noise disamenity and the shadow flicker. You also have to remember that more than one turbine on a site makes more noise, and that the majority of the noise will be felt downwind of the turbine. The prevailing wind on any site is likely to be out of a different quarter than the wind that is strong enough to spin the turbine, so the noise may show up in an unexpected place. On this site the wind that is above 4.5 meters/second, above the cut-in speed of the turbine, is almost certainly out of the northeast while the prevailing wind is from the southwest. That northeast wind will drive the turbine noise downwind to the southwest.

All this is predictable and plan-able. You can anticipate the noise impact, and either put the turbine in a different place, or offer a stream of income compensation to the most impacted residents. But if you are foolish enough, or in too much of a hurry to get your turbine up, you can make a family or householder who lives downwind very miserable.

I think our Blue Hill folks have already learned a good deal about how these things work, and will plan out a good, useful development that minimizes the impacts and makes money and green power. In addition, because this is a locally-owned and locally controlled development, much of the money they make will stay in the community and circulate. This is the economic multiplier theory: Every dollar-making unit of locally actuated and owned productive capital can make five or six dollars of local and regional economic multiplier.

Here they are doing their homework. Some very smart, very publicly-minded Mainers. We could use a few more folks like them.

Derrida on an airplane, or Real Climate reality

A new post at RealClimate, along with reading Matthew B. Crawford's new book "Shop Work as Soulcraft," has got me thinking about perceptions of reality and their importance.

Engineers, natural scientists, farmers, gardeners, and mechanics have something important in common: We daily experience the natural world in its purely physical manifestation, and by trial and error, otherwise known as scientific method, we make it conform to human needs.

This gives us a fairly rare perspective -- rare in today's rarified world, that is -- of having a physical yardstick against which to measure ourselves and our competence. Essentially, you can't make it up, as you often can in the post-modern bureaucracies that host most "professional" level jobs. There's no boss to fool. The motorcycle, or rototiller, or airplane, is either working or not working, and the consequences are direct and in the case of my former career as an airplane technician, they can be deadly.

For several decades now, in philosophy, social science, in some westernized eastern religions, and certain of the arts, it has been trendy and popular to express the countervailing view that reality is made up by individuals and societies using cultural construction, and that, in fact, there is no such thing.

The reductio ad absurdum is easy enough to find: whenever a physical or mechanical device on which we depend breaks down, a car, an air conditioner, an airplane over the Atlantic ocean, we don't call for a postmodern philosopher to change our perception of the thing, but instead for a mechanic or handyman or engineer to come make it work again. In the case of the airplane, we may not be able to get that engineer, but we're definitely in a very immediate reality.

As a former medic and rescue troop, and a current SAR leader, I often see folks in this kind of situation. The immediate and hugely physical shock of the reality of a lost loved one, say a child, or a spouse, in the Maine woods, is a life-changing feeling for most close relatives of the victim of an SAR incident. And for the rescuer, the person is either found or still lost, either alive or dead. There's no room for reconstructing or deconstructing perceptions, no room for negotiation about what the reality means. Lost, found, live, dead, are physical states, easily measured, by which you judge the competence of the rescue team.

(If it's my rescue team, it had better be a good one, tough, fit, hard-working, high morale, no bullshit.)

I wonder how much the lack of such physical yardsticks has caused the recent recession. Derivitive holdings, for instance, or hedge funds, are yet further abstractions of the physical economic process. One huge factor in the recent bidding down of the stock price of what were otherwise still productive companies that were still turning out goods that people still wanted to buy, albeit in reduced numbers, was that the hedge fund managers and stock jobbers in the short market were controlling the perceptions of traders for their own short-term ends. The physical reality of still-turning assembly lines was ignored as short sellers ran down the market on purely speculative visions of doom. The great physical capital of the western world, the product of decades of engineering prowess and labor, was rapidly devalued on paper or electronically. But what had really changed? In the physical manifestation of those stocks and shares, the factories and machines, nothing was being altered while the ticker was falling.

No wonder that when the market turned around, it regained so quickly.

And of course, we of the science persuasion are terribly worried about climate change. But it's very hard to explain to ordinary folks how the climate works and how hugely devastating to civilization a climate tipping point, such as the methane feedback, may be. While the solution, reducing climate emissions, is conducive to direct measurement and verification. But we keep having to explain ourselves again and again, while the naysayers and denialists peddle the same old lies. As RealClimate says in this most recent blog post, "the concept of an objective reality against which one should measure claims and judge arguments is not something that is universally shared."

No s**t, Sherlock.

For anyone who is interested, a nice long essay by Crawford is available here. But I recommend buying the whole book too.

China's "green power revolution"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/09/china-green-energy-solar-wind

New David Orr essay: Mitigation vs. adaptation

Orr is a major environmental education guru.

Sent in by the Mitch-ster

http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2158

Rocky Mountain National Park

Here's outgoing Sustainability Coordinator Aaron Witham in a possibly damp situation. Aaron accompanied the UC delegation to this RMI- hosted meeting in Denver to discuss accelerating our campus climate efforts.

I was pleased that we were able to get up to the mountains, even only for a few hours.

There was some nature to be seen even in downtown Denver. Here's a shot of an old friend, some sagebrush, growing somewhat wild in Denver's Riverfront Park. The smell brought back many memories.

We were able to see three different species of sage in one day yesterday.

That made me very happy.

Green campus/climate wonking

I'm on a trip to Colorado, although I won't get to see much. I'm sequestered with (yet) another bunch of energy wonks, scientists, architects, planners, finance folks, plotting again how to save the world through climate emissions reductions. This time we're hosted by the fabled Rocky Mountain Institute, so I'm very happy, in energy geek heaven of a sorts, as we figure out how to accelerate campus climate emissions reductions.

This time the finance people are starting to gather, sensing finally that there's money to be made. And there is. Oil is going up in price again, and, in Congress, we're beginning to see the glimmers of real cost pricing for the deleterious effects of carbon.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Unity, the firm that built our new president's residence, dubbed the Unity House, has begun marketing it as a modular house for less than $200,000, quite the bargain when you realize it has no power or heat energy consumption.

That would be, say, between $1,000 - $1,500/month for the mortgage, depending on your site and interest rate, but you'd save on electricity, hot water, and heating, which might be as much as $600/month over the course of the year.

Sounds like a half-price house to me.

Excellent new Yale study on public perceptions of cliamte change

http://environment.yale.edu/uploads/6Americas2009.pdf