Perpetuating Frank

On Monday, a hero to many of us died. Billy Frank Jr. was a veteran of the fish wars, and although his contributions were many, his efforts a big part of achievements in tribal fishing rights, protection of salmon, and environmental stewardship, he was fighting an uphill battle all the way.

Up until the day he died, it turns out, when his last installment of Being Frank (his column as head of the NW Indian Fisheries Council) was posted. In his 80's, he was getting up every day and working to improve the fisheries and the environment, benefitting not just the treaty tribes, but all of us. At an age when most of us would hope to be relaxing, he kept pushing.

His will be big shoes to fill. Maybe even too much for one person, but fortunately, Uncle Billy touched the lives of multitudes. Obituaries mentioned his associations with state and federal leaders, with presidents even, and included statements from leaders and luminaries, but he also talked with everyone else. Little school-kids, fishermen, members of many tribes, even the very bureaucrats who could make his life painful. He spoke out for what he knew to be right, for his people and for the rest of us, too.

So all of us should carry on for him. That last article of his I mentioned above was about the dangers of an oil terminal where trainloads of crude could load their cargo onto tankers at Grays Harbor. In addition to his, as always, well-reasoned arguments against permitting such nonsense, let me add my little voice: the dredging and construction required for the project would likely obliterate the ancient remains of fish weirs and other sites left by ancient people who managed fisheries successfuly.

You can add your voice by visiting his post, and heeding his call to comment against this oil terminal and other projects that put our environment at risk. His voice will reverberate for generations, but it is time for us to step up and add our own. 

Towers o Power

As Hawaiian Petroglyphs Foretold, These Forms Rise Above the Land

For whatever reason, this week offers multiple news stories about the risks of trainloads of oil, which brings up the risks of pipelines of oil, not to mention trainloads of coal. Transporting fossil energy, it turns out, requires the occasional sacrifice of life and lung.

Here in the Green Northwest, several of us have spoken out against trains and pipes full o petrochemicals crossing our turf, because we do not want to breathe the exhaust from Asians burning Occidental fossils, because we do not want to abet climate destruction, and because we are sometimes obstreperous. Meanwhile, our lands are criss-crossed by power lines originating from the not-yet-fossilized rivers where dams harness The Flow for our own energy needs, and harness the damned flow of salmon people and their human allies.

The path to this post

I've gone as far as to divest, to forsake fossil fuel, but that does not absolve me of the damage done by power lines and the fishes diced and birds sliced by dams and wind turbines. Dams don't blow up like a trainload o' crude, and turbines don't spew toxic clouds, but the power lines emanating from them speed up the invasion of thistle and blackberry into heretofore native ecologies, not to mention the arrivals of yahoomans who leave behind a trail of 4-wheeler ruts and garbage.

A hill just outside of Anytown, USA

Whether the web be of rails, or pipes, or copper, it has been joined in recent decades by another web of ether. Throughout the republic, eminences, peaks, knolls and knobs are topped by towers relaying sellphone cignals and who knows what else across the air.

It is hard to find a spot anymore where towers of power do not intrude on the landscape. It may sound superstitious, but it's hard to think of this and not recall the words of elders on some of the Hawaiian islands as they noted that something changed when electricity and poles arrived, that a richer (and sometimes scarier) night gave way to something more predictable, but less awesome and interesting. Outside of a very few areas (some of them, ironically, maintained by the same government so interested in snooping on everywhere else), it's impossible not to be in a grid traced by transmission towers wired and wirelessley knit together.

Forsake Fossil Fuel

Of all the energy sources powering the blogosphere, dissatisfaction with the status quo ranks pretty high. From carefully constructed criticism to ad hoc rants, blogs complain about where we are, where we were, and where we're headed. Often as not, the blogger thinks that by calling out some flaw, highlighting a problem, readers might be inspired to change their minds, maybe even take positive action. But the status quo is one hell of a grindstone, and while a brilliant critique may nick it, more often the critic is worn down. Once in a great while, some random or sudden event may lead to change, but more often it is action, collective and directed and occurring in the non-cyber world, that re-shapes the monolith.

The ways we power our society, by burning fossil fuel and by coaxing electrons from rivers or water, wind, and photons, has been a recurring subject here at Mojourner Truth. Sometimes, I've argued against continuing to rely on oil and coal, but of my small audience, I have a feeling that many agree already, and doubt that my words pulled anyone off the grid. Other times, I've extolled the virtues of renewable energy and low-tech efficiencies, but how many people have a heatilator? Blogging is impotence, published.

Recently, though, I actually took action that may make a real difference. For the past year, I've gotten a small block of my energy from renewables. The utility offers you the opportunity to purchase your energy just from wind, hydro, solar, and reclaimed methane, $4 at a time. A month or two ago, I switched to 100% renewable. It costs marginally more, but since I'm not much of a power consumer (no air conditioner, no TV, and a near-Ludditic reliance on muscle-powered gear rather than electro-gadgets), electricity overall is a minor part of my cost of living.

I am not quite so green as Ed Begley in that Simpsons episode where he speeds off in a car "powered by my own sense of self-satisfaction," but my 100% renewable electricity does have me feeling pretty smug. And the more people who do this, the less incentive industry has to drill and frack up the earth. I don't share many Americans' belief in the magic of The Market, but I do understand that changes in consumer choice affect what's for sale, and if we collectively choose renewable energy (imperfect as it may be), maybe a mountain in West Virginia doesn't get flattened, maybe a midwest aquifer won't be pumped full of frack-chemicals, maybe the climate will stabilize.

An extra 1.25 cents per kilowatt-hour buys me this non-fossil energy. The energy company says that for a typical house, the environmental benefit is equivalent to taking a car off the road. But there's also no military cost to using power that is 100% domestic. It's a small act, but it's meaningful, and in aggregate, it will help shift us away from our dangerous reliance on oil, gas, and coal that are killing us and ruining the earth for our progeny.

If you live on the Puget Sound Energy Company grid, the way to do this is here. Everywhere else, just do a search on "green power" plus your local utility.

Is This What We Want?

A dispute rolled into the Northwest a few years ago, and the rumblings grow louder. On one side, mining and railroad interests with some union support, advocating for ports where coal from the Powder River basin can be put onto boats headed to China. On the other, environmentalists and local residents who don't want the pollution and headaches that would come from a major coal port. 

Several locations from Oregon to British Columbia are vying to get the port. There will be jobs as it is constructed, and a smaller number of jobs to operate it once it is built. Industry never tires of pointing to these jobs, and unions have been hit hard enough that they chime in with support, but there is little evidence that ports--which are increasingly mechanized--will make much of a dent in long term unemployment. Advocates of any one location prey on citizens' fear that the jobs will go elsewhere if locals do not welcome this development; the NIMBY urge lives in tension with "Well, if it's gonna happen somewhere anyway..."

The question is whether the trade-off is worth it. Jobs and perhaps some revenue (if the local governments don't dangle too much tax relief as a lure) balanced against traffic delays, noise, and the local environmental effects of the development and operation. Coal dust and blaring horns will fill the local air, locals will spend more time idling as mile-long trains pass through, trees will be cleared and archaeological sites obliterated. A leading candidate, Cherry Point in Washington, has long been a herring fishery important to the Lummi and other tribes, including the salmon people who need forage fish; nobody expects the underwater residents to fare well with a massive increase in development, dust, and boat traffic. 

I've never lived by a coal port, and Olympia is too small to be in the race. But I do drive Route 14 up the Columbia from time to time, I have tried to sleep in Stevenson as the plains rumble through, horns blasting, and it's hard to imagine how a massive increase in traffic would be tolerable. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, where trainloads of Appalachian coal would pass by on their way to the port of Norfolk (location of these photos). The last time I saw that port was a decade ago, mountains of coal feet away from Chesapeake Bay, grime everywhere. 

And not just the immediate everywhere, because this issue reaches beyond the effects in Bellingham. All along the coal train tracks, localities will experience the dust, noise, and traffic. At the source, miles of earth ripped apart never to be the same. Carbon now in the ground, stable, not contributing to global warming, will be torn out and put on the market. Once in China, it will be burnt without even the weakened environmental controls that exist here. The smoke and pollution will move downwind to visit the US again, and the global atmosphere will get tauntingly dirtier, warmer. These consequences will visit the people who welcomed the port, yes, but they will hurt everyone else as well. If and when the Chinese plants burn all the US coal, they will fall back on their own reserves, and keep on burning.

If a coal port happens--and the relentlessness of North American capital suggests it will--the lucky winner will likely learn some hard lessons. Many of the construction jobs will go to outsiders, and operations won't generate the employment or revenue expected. At Cherry Point, we've already learned that the proponents' initial statements about the volume were a fraction of what they really plan, that there will be twice as much traffic and pollution. Friendly promises will be reneged. Coal, being a global commodity, may become more profitable (leading to increased shipping), or the bottom may drop out (causing jobs to disappear from time to time). Even if you support coal power, does it make sense to sell our reserves to China, whose import policy is partly to protect their own for the future?

Extinction of the Species

Most species were but are no more. Wiped out by vengeful gods or done in by inescapable facts. Knocked off by the competition, messed up by new world orders human and otherwise.


Most of the gone do not even live on in memory, but a few do. Dodos waddle through our lore trying to wag cautionary tails, but fail. Passenger pigeons do a little better, but their ghosts still topple out of the sky every time the enormity of their genocide occurs to them. 

We build dinosaur shrines in the world's great museums, more comfortable because we cannot be held responsible in their case. It's nice to believe that the forces that brought down these megafauna were maybe just culling the ungodly, that this kind of thing happened way before people walked the earth. Just how long before? Too many people have no clue, and I've met plenty who are unconvinced that humans and live dinosaurs don't overlap.


Such people are among those who remain unconvinced as well that there are any problems with human expansion, our appetites and wastes, and our vast creativity with chemicals and machines (unfortunately paired with a similarly vast disregard for the future of any other species). Much of the worst we apes have done has required that we burn the fossils of many species that if not extinct, have been dead for millions of years. A mass cremation of dead and buried plants and animals. A desecration? I've never heard people put it that way, but if it were my grandparents, I don't want them used for fuel.

Maybe I am not human enough, maybe I lack good old American invincibility. The kind that says we're the best breed, uniquely suited to rule the globe, unlikely to succumb like every other empire before us. When we are sure we cannot ever become extinct, that God chose us or we have a unique brain that will figure a way out of any jam, we're free do whatever we want, regardless of the cost. 

Like extinction of other species. We are now in the midst of a mass extinction so large that it will go down in geological history. People can argue, suddenly turn all scientific and demand to see solid unassailable proof, but really there's no denying that humans are partly to blame for the Holocene's (Anthropocene, if you're not orthodox) wave of extinctions. We may eat an entire species out of existence, or cut down its forest, cut off its river, fill up its swamp, take out its habitat. We may dump poop or dioxin until a place becomes unlivable, or pump the air so full of cow farts and smoke that we alter the ocean, atmosphere and climate. 

Many species become collateral damage in our campaign to cover the earth, but by and large we humans could care less. And we don't think it will ever happen to us. We humans can be cruel gods.

 

It's the Environment, Stupid

If history via film documentary is to be believed, ragin' Cajun James Carville's mantra lifted Clinton to victory in 1992, back when votes were counted in presidential elections. "It's the Economy, Stupid." Clinton hammered the GOP on their mismanagement of the economy, reminded voters of how poorly they'd fared after being trickled on, and swept into office.

In 2008, I suggested that things had changed a bit, and that now It's the War, Stupid. I was wrong, people don't actually care that much as long as the dead are foreigners or the poor and working class who fill our military's ranks. Not just that, but I was hilariously wrong in suggesting that the Mayday action by longshoremen--shutting down ports as a war protest--represented an awakening of the Boston Tea Party spirit, completely unaware that a couple of years later the Tea Party would have been hijacked by bitter, rusted wing-nuts.


2012 election coverage is heating up, with Great White Hope Mit Romney (a German phrase meaning "with gypsies") declaring his candidacy today, but I find it hard to get excited. I'll vote for the lesser of evils, sure, but to call me an Obama supporter when he has embraced Republican policy on the economy and wars would be an exaggeration.


The problem is more fundamental than US politics will ever manage to address, unless I am being blind again to a radical change just around the corner. It's the Environment, Stupid.


As I write this, the morning news is focusing on the economy. The Dow slipped 2% yesterday, the conventional wisdom being that this is due to the weakness of our recovery from the Great Recession. 


Look deeper, though. Why so weak? One factor is the weather. Violent storms lay waste to places, places where there had been jobs. Floods drown other jobs and stall even more as supply chains become clogged on riverways shut down while the Army Corps flounders amid disasters it created. I just heard from family in Virginia that temps climbed well into the 90s during May, reminding us all that summer will bring the kind of heat that slows everyone down, evaporates water supplies, and spawns hurricanes and tornadoes. We may get lucky again, and dodge a year of major storms hitting the Atlantic and Gulf seaboards, but if they do, look forward to more economic stall-outs.

Deeper still, the Japan earthquake and tsunami disrupted a major economy, one of the aftershocks being stilled production lines at American plants. The spectre of nuclear accidents is bound to dampen investment in more such plants here (despite generous corporate welfare having the Obama boost), and Germany has already made the choice--characterized in US media as an economic drag--to abandon that path in favor of more difficult routes to energy production (and, in a move utterly foreign to us, energy conservation as well). Meanwhile, Icelandic vulcanism disrupts air travel even of the leader of the free world again and again. 

Meanwhile, glaciers melt and sea level rises into our neighborhoods. Considering the portion of the global population residing and working in coastal areas, this has implications too enormous for us to want to consider, and so by and large we do nothing, waiting until a disaster forces action, by which time the remedies will cost far more. There will be casualties, human and economic. At the same time, the ocean grows more acidic as it ameliorates our pollution of the atmosphere. So acid that fish stocks are affected (not to mention krill, sweet sweet krill), and shipping firms must spend more time and money maintaining hulls. Many eyes are on the arctic, where the melting may finally open the Northwest Passage that Europeans searched for forever, but that will not eliminate the adversities wrought by stormier acidic oceans and drowned waterfronts. 


Sea and air trade has spread bugs and pathogens worldwide, causing damage to timber, agriculture, and other means of extracting GDP from the earth. Climate change, too, is not likely to be a positive in natural resource economies. The northwest has dodged firestorms for years now, but as the beetle-killed forests expand, we can be sure that La Nina or whatever has spared us thus far will not hold out forever, and vast tracts of timber will go up in smoke before they can provide jobs. Droughts do not just have it in for the former Communist lands, and will visit us in their own sweet time. 

In the meantime, the political minions of our corporate overlords work ceaselessly to avert any legislative or regulatory attempt to stop them from dumping toxins into the biosphere, and to thwart the lawsuits now required to enforce rules already on the books. Every year, more drinking water supplies are found to be contaminated, and the brownfields expand, often irreversibly poisoned--more land and water subtracted from our base for sustained human survival and culture. And it ain't gonna get cleaned up at this rate: the same politicians who prevent sensible regulation cite economic hardship to prevent funds from being used for environmental clean-up, or for jump-starting clean energy industry.

Increasingly desperate, we double down on all bets, hoping that technology will rescue us, that science will go messianic on us and bear miracles. Sounds crazy, right? Not so much to the hucksters hawking genetically engineered snake oil and fracking the hell out of mother earth; they'll make their money, spend lavishly, and die seven months into pacemaker number two,...before the cosmic repo man comes. Weeds in the field? Just buy this herbicide immune soybean seed and spray the hell out of your field. Water no good? Try our bottled water, we swear it's safe, and stats show that you'll never be able to pin your cancer on us. Drought stricken, fish all gone, locusts swarming? No prob, try new Soylent Green, made with sweet sweet krill,...sorta.

Coyote Pretty

Apparently, I do not tire of taking photos of wind turbines (see?). I finally noticed this one from my last up-Columbia drive. The contrail lines up with the wind, and tricks my eye into thinking that they're turning. You have not idea whether they were. Lots of times they aren't. Like when the wind ain't blowing. But many times I'll see some turning, others immobile, blades feathered. Sometimes, this is most of what you see. Out of service.

Like in this shot, which further tricks you into thinking the wind is blowing by angling the biggest turbine back, as if blown mightily.

Sneakier still, this shot messes with scale. The power line is big, not the country road poles you usually see. The turbines are ginormous. Look closely, and unless the internet pixillated it away you can see the lines are in front of all the turbine towers. I'm not even close to them. It looks like the power line should be heading off in the distance behind the windmills, but they're not. It's befuddling. Don't look too long, or it'll mesmerize you.

...

You did it didn't you? You went back and looked, lost track of time. Stared like shrinking Alice before the colossalizing towers. Thought you heard the roar of the wind, but it was only the jet. So wrapt up you didn't wonder: How were you hearing the jet? Then some chattery window popped up, crackled into your awareness, and snapped you out of it.

Never did read this bottom part of the post for a while, either. Admit it, the next time you stumbled across this entry, you scrolled back up again to look at the picture, but this time because you were stoned you fell in for 42 minutes before falling asleep. Again you had not the least suspiction that at post-bottom I awaited patiently.

How long did it take? (No, not you. I know you got it the first time. I mean those other people.)

Backroads: 14 Gorge Power Maximum

 A couple of entries ago, I got us on the road, climbing 14 upriver past cascades, through the Cascades.

The range took its modern name from the falls of the Columbia. As a whole, not as high as it's iconic volcano peaks: Tahoma (and its many spellings, including Rainier), Baker, Adams, Hood, and pre-blast Saint Helens. But it's still thousands of feet higher than the river, a mile of basalt to cut through to get to the lowlands and taste that sea.

Ergo gorge. Gashing into one of the world's largest lava flows, the big river relentlessly seeks sea, beating through rock to reach that salty embrace.

Route 14, rails, and trails all use the river's path. It's the flattest route, the furthest inland. My mind's blown, hundreds of miles inland, the river is still only hundreds of feet above sea level. In the last century, people dammed most of it, drowning the cascades, but also allowing boat traffic. Barges haul immense loads up and down the aquatic path.

The dams also harvest electricity, scraping electrons, smiling over spilt water. It beats burning coal (though plans are afoot to start shipping our coal to Asia, which is upwind,...brilliant), but the damns were pretty bad for the salmon people.

Another thing that likes to travel the gorge is the air. Cold air sinking across the winter plateau drops into a creek, a river, and finally the river. Oceanic storms push wet air into that Cascadian gap. The winds are legendary. Chinook winds bring spring, thaw the land. Gorge winds suck in world-wide windsurfers, fill the sails of tourism entrepreneurs, and all manner of metaphoricity.



Meanwhile, back in the real world, people discovered that they could scrape electrons off the wind. Oh, and make money. Turbines have sprouted rapidly, lately, and scouts scour the land, anonemeters in hand, looking for the next place to plant a wind farm. The ones in the photo here were cranking. 130-foot blades, tips moving 200 feet per second. They do a number on unlucky birds, and it takes a lot of bulldozed roads to erect and service these things. No energy is pure green, but like hydro, this one doesn't require overseas warfare. 

Wind and water flowed through the gorge as long as it existed, flowed so it could exist. Tales of raven and the other animal people tell how long ago they deciedd that the river should only flow one way, but river road Route 14 lets you go either way. Not quite as fast as the windmill tip, but a heck of a lot faster than the first 15 millenia of human travel in this ancient path.

Divest

Liberals almost never win in America. It's gotten so bad that they're trying a name change, but I don't see Progressives faring much better. Obama's agenda was either shut down or turned into exactly what the chamber of commerce republicans wanted. 

Maybe the most notable success the left has had during my lifetime was in fighting South African Apartheid. There were demonstrations, attempts at media blitzes, celebrity endorsements, but in the end what sprung Mandela and crumbled the Afrikaan regime was money. Or specifically, the lack thereof. 

Divestiture drained the apart-hate elite of the global infusions of capital they needed, and they caved.

So, could a similar approach knock Goldman Sachs out of power in the US, is there any hope that conscientious objection to the power of multinational corporations could get our own country back?

Not if it depends on the investment portfolio of modern serfs like me. Too much cash has been bled from the working and middle classes through the series of scams and extortion wrought by the Bush Dynasty (S-and-L crisis, tech and housing bubbles, massive corporate bailouts to the FIRE sector), and the wealth disparity is too stark already. It was not for want of investment from the township dwellers that Botha had to cut back in the Department of Opression, and it won't be 21st Century American proles who starve their overlords, either.

I'd like to think that the Germans and maybe the whole EU could help out, but I'm not holding my breath. South America could surprise us, but we've been so vindictive to any economy with a hint of socialism that they're in no shape to pull it off alone. And the Chinese, well why the hell would they want to mess around with a market so large and gullible?

The odds of preventing the oligarchy from owning the US of A disappear over the horizon of a dark northern land when you consider that most of the people who share my predicament (being robbed at every turn by people who cannot ever seem to amass enough money) have no idea why and how they've been screwed. Thanks Ronald Reagan, for the kicking off the decline in federal Education policy. We now have a country that doesn't necessarily believe in evolution, whose Osama or Obama fear can be counted on to fuel a brick-headed patriotism. They don't have the money to divest the oligarchs to death anyway, and if it ever came down to a real revolution, they'd start shooting liberals, or progressives, or whatever epithet you choose: left-of-center, college educated, pinko, Jew, commie,...they got a million of 'em.

So maybe an outbreak of socially conscious investment is not in the offing. But I can go at it the other way around, by decreasing the portion of what I buy that can be traced back to the people screwing me. It won't put them out of business, but it'll keep me out of theirs. 

Bouts of poverty, a growing environmental awareness, recurrent ludditis, and a richly burled iconoclasm [RIP, Carla] mean I'm already a little divested. Driving little in a 1997 4-cylinder car), eating mostly local food (and planting some), wearing thrift store clothes, buying from local merchants, and living in a house mortgaged no further than my local credit union. This winter I bought a cord of wood from a neighbor and cut the utility bill by more than a third.

If I weren't so shiftless and procrastinatory, I'd've done more. Grow more food, burn less oil, no plastic,...it's a long road, and then a path, and then maybe a hermitageous grotto. I dunno how far I'll get, but the less vested I am in enterprises I despises, the happier I'll be.

You Searched "Heatilator"

For some reason, it took me a long time to realize that a blogger can find out how many pageviews there are, which sites are funneling innocent netizens this way, and so on. The saddest thing was learning that almost nobody is arriving on a Mac. After a month or two of this, the thing I find interesting is that people searching for information on their heatilator end up here.



I said something before about why this might be, and after an exhaustive data collection process (I get exhausted easily, and get exasperated with ads, sooo. . .OK, there's no data) came to the conclusion that heatilators are neither antique nor cutting edge enough to be of internet interest.

So, here's what you need to know about heatilators. First, if it is some kind of insert that goes in your fireplace, something that has a fan, this is not the blog for you. I am a hardcore traditionalist heatilator devotee. Don't know about the electric kind, and don't care to learn. The beauty of the heatilator is the fact that it works without a motor, it's passive and green, it uses no electricity.

The heatilator works on a very basic principle: hot air rises. Typically, the heatilator consists of an airspace surrounding the firebox. You build the fire in there, and the heavy metal walls keep the fire from spreading, but conduct heat into the airspace. There are vents at the top and bottom. So in the photo above, the area behind all those openings is full of heated air. Cool air from the room moves in through the bottom, is heated, and comes out the top to warm the room. Convection.

Different styles exist, and I guess some work better than others. What they have in common is that there are made of brick or stone, and there's not much you can do to change them. The openings are where they are, the airspace is what it is. Each has its peculiarities. Like in this one, the five vents across the top center rarely have much air coming out of them. There is about twice as much area in the top openings as in the bottom. More on the fix later.

One thing you should check is whether the convection airspace is airtight. I looked back and saw a few gaps. If you can reach back and insert non-flammable insulation or mortar into any gaps, you keep hot air from escaping, increasing efficiency. Just remember that whatever you drop back there is going to be difficult or impossible to retrieve. Oh, and don't try this fix while a fire is burning.

Air flow is important. If you put things in front of any of the vents, the system stops working. Convection is gentle, and won't blow past things. Use this knowledge to keep your partner from putting "decor" on the hearth. Tell them a scientist said it is very, very bad.

So back to the five holes in the pictured heatilator. When procrastination gets boring, I will probably plug them up, either as part of a mantle, or maybe just mortaring in some bricks. Bernoulli or Venturi or one of those Italian fluid dynamics geniuses figured out that if you restrict the size of an outflow, velocity increases. So if I cut the total area of the upper vent array, the air coming out should be moving faster. I'll let you know how that goes...

Another thing that makes the heatilator work better is having a long-running fire. If you are starting with a cold house and start a fire, it takes a while for the heatilator to really get pumping. You've got to warm the firebox and the convection air space to get it moving at all. The longer the fire burns, the more you heat up the masonry around the fireplace, and the better the heatilator works.

Not just that, but heating up the ton of masonry stores heat that will radiate for hours after the fire dies down. If you are trying to heat your house with the fire, you are way better off with a long, steady fire than with building a roaring fire, letting it die, and repeating the process. The direct heat from the flame is a passing thing, while the convection from the heatilator and radiation from the heated masonry keep working.

What else?

Queries that landed people here include concerns about having a TV mounted above a heatilator. The best solution is to kill your TV. Watch the fire. It's more interesting and has no commercials. Or, hang a thermometer where the TV will go. I doubt the heatilator is pumping out so much heat that it would damage anything, but if you are going to stress out about it, just put the TV somewhere else.

Oh, and the heatilator can be used to make your room smell nice. Get a scented candle and put it in a glass holder big anough to contain ALL the wax. Place it in one of the upper vents, and the heat will melt the whole thing, slowly vaporizing it and sending the scent into the room.

Is there more?

Umm. Maybe not. It's pretty simple. Stop wasting time on the internet and build a fire.

The Fire Inside

This title must already have been used on a bunch of crappy books about sports, self-published memoirs of entrepreneurs, self-help compendiums of snippets wrung form the experience of Winners, and all manner of motivational junk.

My post is about fires, inside. Also about heatilators, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Or maybe not, because I am shiftless, or maybe shiftful. Or just full of shift. In any case, not driven by some internal fire, an unflickering force, or some burning yearning. (Maybe one, but hell if I'm gonna admit to that on the internet.)

Although it's the time of year when my pyromania is confined to the den, I still enjoy a good fire. Right now is nice, the family all tucked in bed, me sitting here with the dog, writing. Me, that is. The dog is no help at all in composition, being more of a sculptor.

Morning fires may be my favorite, though. My 5-year-old has been helping me some this year, placing some of the kindling before the lighting, but for the most part this is another solo domain. If I happened to be motivated enough top bring in more wood the night before, or not motivated enough to brun the evening's supply of wood, there will be enough sitting there under the cantilevered hearth to get going. But more often than not, the first task is fetching wood. On good days that means brisk air under a crisp sky, or even a nice foggy blanket. Other times, it's a dash through the rain.

Then the ritual of turning castoffs into tinder and kindling. I've been working through the yellow pages this year. There was a thing on the news lately about Seattle levying a fee on phonebook publishers, the logic being that they dump these things on every doorstep, and almost all of them end up unused, part of the solid waste stream. Seattle obviously is wanting for pyros. As for the kindling, I've used everything from broken drawers to failed carvings (only actual wood though). This season it has all been the last of the leftover fence boards, sawed and split pieces that were so short or damaged they could not even make a birdhouse floor, snap-crackling cedar, unfailing faggots of flame waiting to be unleashed.

Then the building, setting everything so that a single match of flicked bic can set the tongues a-licking and flames a-rising. Despite being inside, I still set it up like a campfire. I have about the most primitive fireplace possible in a 20th Century house,  with the exception of the heatilator (which I still intend to address later, though I can feel my resolve getting bored and threatening to walk off). So it's a teepee in the corner, usually, cedar and paper with bigger wood erected over it, bigger wood still at the ready. 

Then, flame. Keeping an eye on it, ripping another page from the phonebook if the fire stalls, placing larger pieces where they will catch best. Feeding those hungry tongues with good wood, letting them lick higher, and piling on more. 

I grew up in a house where fires in the fireplace consisted of 3-4 logs, parallel, on a grate. Now that I am in charge, they look more random, and change shape as the conflagration progresses. Lately, I've been into stacking them so they look vaguely (or maybe exactly, for all I know) like Korean characters: black-charred strokes hovering on an orange background. I love that every fire is different, and every moment of each fire unlike the one before.

The new fire roars and cracks. Flames grow higher and whiter with intensity, threatening to climb the chimney. The heat begins to shoulder cold aside. As I add big logs, mixing in hard maple to mate with the flaming fir, I let things subside, and shift my attention from getring things going to building a bed of coals. The big flames having blasted a perimeter of warm air, the task now is to heat up the ton of masonry, which eventually helps heat the whole house.

Along with the heatilator.  Like I've said before, this house has a passive convection system mortared into the fireplace itself, simple and unbreakable, dependent on nothing more than a fire to start pumping air. The state of the art has long since passed this by, what with inserts and fans and pellet-stoves, gas logs, fake electric fires, and all that crap. I know this not only because big box hardware stores have relegated wood grates to some dark corner while new "systems" take front and center, but because of the "stats" feature of this blog.

It turns out that the "Heatilator" post is one of the most viewed. Not so much because there are other aficionados out there, but because there are confused people out there searching for "heatilator air velocity" or "tv over heatilator." That they should end up on a blog with the rantings and ramblings herein is sad for them, and evidence that the web is pretty damn hard up for information on a technology that is not old enough to have developed an antiquarian patina, and not new enough to be a catalogued and well-cached component of the computer age.

But I digress, which is possible when a fire has reached its mature stage. Sizzling slowly, a few logs feeding each other, sustaining a happy glow and an occasional outburst of flame, maple releasing its heat slow and steady: the lifelong love in a warm bed of embers following the passionate flames of the outset. Asking only for the occasional log to keep heating the house. Nothing spectacular, but these long slow burns have more to do with lower utility bills than the big flames.

So I hope that if you were searching for useful information on those holes in yourt fireplace masonry and ended up here instead (the TV will be fine if there is a mantle between it and the outlet vents, by the way, and probably would be otherwise), I hope that this found you sitting by a fire, enjoying the shifting of the flames, the diversion of attention.

But I think you need to go poke those logs to keep the fire breathing, and maybe add another log.

Good night.

On the Radio Now

Lucas is playing a sound quilt on KAOS:

Contemporary pow wow music, a trippy interlude, and up pops what sounds like John Lennon and Dick Cavett talking about Indians, over and then followed by a drum riff... Now a guy talking about native cultural and language loss and preservation.
The airwaves of Olympia oxygenate our local culture. People think that computers and webs can connect freedom lovers, and that the System is vulnerable to leaking into the same net damning data, inspiring even our rulers to be honest and peaceful.

Of course the web ain't that way. Some govbot is at this moment getting antsy at my mention of such things. The internet requires connection, plugging in, and for all the supposed privacy measures, you have to assume that the spies and big brother have better software than the average citizen. Are you connected to the web, or just trapped on it, waiting on the spider?


Radio lives in the air, not just in the stone's throw radius of a wireless hub. You send nothing back; the station just transmits. So yeah, you do not affect the programming of the broadcaster, but nor are they subject to denial of service attacks, viruses, or being kicked off the server. Low power stations can be mobile, off the power grid, and received by people similarly unplugged. Both ends can function without petrochemical infusions if they want, and if we ever get to the point of civil, martial, or natural disturbance on such a scale that the fragile cyber world becomes disconnected, radio is likely to survive. Mad Max's ride, the last of the V-8 Interceptors, had a radio.


The listener can turn the radio on or off. There are no packets telling NSA what she's listening to, and she has in her arm the strength to generate enough power to tune in on crank-it-up machines costing 20 bucks. The airwaves can be breathed in at will.


Democracy requires radio. TV was just about the death of freedom, and computer connectivity's ability to disperse information far and wide is more than offset by its susceptibility to secret monitoring, pinpoint location of users, data mining for phrases and patterns that mark a man as a rebel. Again, I feel Admiral Poindexter's cold gaze on these words.


The airwaves can be jammed, but not form a single location in a West Virginia bunker. Given the security industry's fetishization of technology, I'd venture to guess that they've been bored with radio broadcasts for decades now, and have grown lax in paying attention. The town I live in has pirate stations that don't even bother to hide, low power broadcasters that regularly venture into opinions and news that make the supposed liberal media look grand and old. In many areas of the country, NPR is on the left, but here they are outflanked by KAOS, who are outflanked by Radio Free Olympia, who are probably outflanked by stations I have yet to encounter.


Freedom is on the line, but it is not online. It is in the air.

Abyssal Vent

*

In an effort to educate my deprived children--they have no broadcast or cable TV to tell them what's what--I recently introduced them to the 20th Century nature show, complete with the voice of David Attenborough. Regrettably, it was just his voice, no shots of his cavorting about the globe in old-school high tops.

I say 20th Century, although Blue Planet was aired in 2001, and I may as well address that discrepancy before some bored and bitter internerd acts like he noticed it first. To begin with, a year or two off ain't nothing in the scheme of things, and for an archaeologist it's dead-on. Second, the images you see on there are 20th Century, you only watched it later, you moron; editing and all the post production takes time. Third, and really the only important point in the bunch: Blue Planet is a decent nature show, a species that arose and flourished in the last century, but is in grave danger of extinction now.

And even if they make their way to a house or hotel with cable TV, the kids aren't likely to run across a similar beast. In the doddering final quarter of the last millenium, demigods like Attenborough and Page narrated masterpieces of the nature show genre while the rest of civilization fell, finally landing in the ilk of shark week, cryptozoology, and extreme animals. They read scripts laden with actual information founded in science, scripts with the confidence to sit silent while clever editing and sublime photography (itself patient and informed enough to be at the right place at the right time) conspired to tell the tales.

Anyway, we sat there watching the episode on the deep, dwellers in the dark zone. Benthic beasties beyond the reach of the sun, subsisting on the droppings of the well-lit seas above. Browsing the drifts of marine snow, filtering morsels and motes flung down toward them by currents, ambushing and hunting each other. But ultimately, or so we though and were taught through most of the last century, ultimately all life depended on the sun. Critters with no notion of the sun depended on its by-products for life, and when its flame faltered, all would perish.

Wrong.

If you got National Geographic you knew by 1980, if you were a marine biologist you knew earlier (maybe), but the glacial pace of textbook revision in the age of paper made sure that nobody else knew about this fact for many more years: along the great oceanic rift zones occurred some vents spewing hydrogen sulfide that were teeming with life. Polychaete worms, vast mats of bacteria, mussel beds, weird crabs (which is saying a lot),...all of these freaks living off of chemical energy. No sun, no photosynthesis, no herbivores, a food chain completely unlinked from all the others.

Then, a few years later, abyssal surveys in the Gulf of Mexico found "cold seeps," chemicals oozing up through the ocean floor to form lakes, their shores lined with communities of extremophiles, creatures capable of sucking life from methane, which I hope you will pronounce in the Attenboroughian way, "MEE-thane." [And yeah, I said 'lake' and 'methane,' o ignant internerd, because at that depth, the gases stay liquid.]

I have not yet heard how these unique ecosystems, having freed themselves from the vagaries of topside weather and the thousand other risks up there, have coped with the Deepwater Horizon Spill. Just when you've perfected the art of living off one kind of poison, along come a river of something else. Damn, evolution used to be easier before the humans got out of hand.

Anyway, as I am sure you can all see by now, the point of this whole entry is of course this: Life can arise where the sun don't shine, it can live on farts alone. And if sulfurous exhudations and mee-thane are all it takes to support a rich community of creatures, then long after the sun goes cold, life will hang on tenaciously around my own abyssal vent. There is hope beyond that most frightening of ends.

Assuming my supply of beans holds out.

* Oh, and since I don't get down there much myself, I lifted the photo of some extremophiles from:
(2005) Tubeworm May Live Longer by Cycling Its Sulfur Downward. PLoS Biol 3(3): e108. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030108

Heatilator

Do you know what a heatilator is?

I found out when we got this house, and I saw the brickwork cattycorner in the den. Openings beside and above the fireplace form a passive convection heater. Warm, yet cool in a late 70s kind of groove. I dig it.

Of course, our fireplace is the laughing stock of the great Northwest. When we moved in there proved to be a rodent passage into the house through the hulk of hollow tile and mortar holding up the chimney. The damper long gone to install an insert that had been outserted at some point. Inside the masonry of the chimney is a big metal firebox, so the heatilator doesn't become the smokilator. And only a crappy trifold screen.

As is often true, the screen stands now over by the tv. It's a pain in the ass to keep moving it all the time. So when I have an eye on the situation, ready to pounce on the embers that pop out now and then, I don't bother. And don't worry, I put the screen up when I leave the room.

And meanwhile, the heatilator pumps out warm air enough to keep the house warm. The brickface and hearth exudes for hours. The den-fire draws us in to play games and draw, talk, nuzzle up to the internet, tend fire, dry herbs, dance, watch a show, knit, carve,...and become proficient at picking up embers bare-handed.

So, let's review. Doorless, bare-bones fireplace in a damperless chimney pumping CO2 and heat into the atmosphere. On the other hand, it's really easy to keep a fire going that keeps the house warm down into the 30s, and the heatilator is a pretty green thing with no requirement for a gas or electric grid.

The damperless chimney would be a problem, but there's a rain guard over the top opf the chimney that keeps the fire from being doused, and when we don't have a fire there's a piece of foamcore insulation with Hawaiian cloth over it to close out the cold air.

The cloth matches our tropical blue bricks, which were a sick gray-brown. I wanted to work the heatilator vents into a Mayan pyramid scene, but was vetoed.

Besides having arts and crafts style metal and glass screen doors custom made for the opening, I'd like to do an improvement that I could afford. That is, make a mantle. I'd use some of the top vents as mortises for some hefty tenoned brackets that would hold up a massive slab of wood. Blocking those vents would also increase velocity in the hot air being forced out of the remaining vents. Plus, a mantle would give me a place to hang chilis or whatever for drying, stockings for stuffing, and of course a shelf for miscellaneous stuff that will subvert whatever architectural charm may be achieved by the mantle. [If it is a horizontal surface, stuff piles up on it. Without that, archaeology would be less abundant. Also it's equally important corrolary: if it's not a horizontal surface, stuff may roll off of it and into some corner where only an archaeologist will find it.]

The heatilator has a horizontal surface in each vent-niche. I have no idea what has passed through them to the hidden corner of our house, that dead space surrounding the fireplace, but would bet on that to be a hotspot for archaeologists digging up this place. And that, my friends, is enough to come down on the pro-heatilator side, as if I hadn't already made that clear.

Energy Smorgasbord

I've written about windmills and what-not energies before, but a recent trip up the Columbia got that train of thought rolling again.

The picture's train is hauling a load of coal, probably that high sulphur western washington stuff, seeing as 'twas headed upriver with a sick yellow tinge to it. The two engines burn diesel--you can see the exhaust blurrippling the center windmills. Then there's the fender telling us that good old gasoline is represented, so you can pretty well say you got your fossil fuels covered.

For that matter, I drove while I shot that photo, gaining east on Route 14 at a solid 60-per and holding the camera as far riight as possible. For a shot when I was forced to pay at least some attention to vehicles ahead and behind on 2 lanes with-a-tunnel-approaching,...I'm happy.

With the wind in the picture, as it is in the Northwest, 'alternative energy' contributes more than a token, though not nearly as much as back when wind was 'standard energy' that powered sailing cultures and global commerce. Wind doesn't emit gas or ash or trash or carcinogens, much less stuff that stays radioactive for thousands of generations (as it does upriver). Seeing the wind corkscrew through a line of them all in synch is pretty. On the other hand, it most definitely intrudes on the landscape, and sometimes slices birds in half. Ain't nothing free.

What you don't see in the photo is most important: the Columbia. Navigable by boat, plane, train, automobile, and bikes. Windy as all get-out. Flowing mightily. The Columbia, dammed by glacier and landslide alike for eons, and then by man as well, mostly for the cheap electricity. Since the water wheel of antiquity we've helped ourselves to the power of flow, and in the 20th Century we went hog-wild, resulting in fairly cheap NW power. Dams don't emit bad stuff either, unless you count the turbined fish going down or the poop-plume when sea-lions feast on fish that cannot swim up. Dams do drown entire ecosystems and towns, though, which ain't good.

Nothing's perfect, but a heck of a lot of things beat burning fossil fuel. I only hope to live to the day when I can be like Ed Begley on an episode of The Simpsons, and drive a car "Powered by my own sense of self-satisfaction."

Kill the Leaf Blowers!

I have a new all-purpose policy that will benefit the nation's security, environment, public health, and education. It's simple. Get rid of the leaf-blowers.

In the past couple of decades, leaf-blowers have supplanted rakes. Archaeologists hundreds of years from now will attest to this fact, especially since most of the consumer models don't last much longer than a rake, and will be among the diagnostic artifacts of late 20th and early 21st century strata of landfills. The era that the Bush Dynasty would have had historians term the New World Order, but which will more likely be known as the American Twilight.

And if I have anything to do with it, leaf-blowers will cease to appear in the not-distant future, their vile presence will end, and humanity will be the better for it.

Why?

A lot of it has to do with reliance on crappy little combustion engines, the kind that are churned out cheaply enough to be commodities, not durable capital. Because it takes a cheap engine to power a tool that must find its way into every house with an SUV as well as every grounds maintenance crew, leaf-blowers are low quality things with no attention to efficient design. They are made by and for corporations who thwart attempts to regulate the emissions, efficiency, noise, or anything beyond shielding the populace from the most negligent and grievous bodily harm. Because in our era the consumption economy rules, leaf-blowers use too much fuel and spew too much noise and exhaust. They degrade the world we live in.

Maybe they are just little things, and I'll grant that the typical user burns only a few gallons of gas a year using them. But there are millions of them, and grounds crews fire them up daily to move grass clippings, leaves, and litter at residences, businesses, office and school campuses, and government facilities. Meanwhile, our government sends men and women (many of whom ran leaf-blowers until they signed up with the military seeking a better life) to die in foreign countries, protecting the crude flow so that Americans will have the freedom to waste. Leaf-blowers, like other conveniences that run on fossil fuel, are a security threat.

And did I mention that the noise and stink are annoying? No, beyond annoying. Indefensible assaults on the environment, or on God's creation if you think of the earth that way.

Besides that, leaf-blowers grease the skids for the American slide down to fat stupidity. The rake is a work-out tool, and when operated by someone with a sense of the world around them--the wind patterns, terrain, vegetation--functions as fast as the blow-hard machine. The leaf-blower disconnects the user from their place, reduces the clean-up process to point and shoot, absent any deft flicks of wrist or awareness of mind. Watch most leaf-blowers in operation, and you see idiots blowing the same leaves over and over, often fighting a wind that funnels through their neighborhood most every day. I've seen people blow and blow at a soggy or twig-entangled leaf for minutes without thinking to let go of the trigger and use their hand for a second. These guys get fatter and stupider as they forget what a rake can do, and I don't think the fumes are helping much.

And it's not just that they play into individual laziness of mind and body. Leaf-blowers give whining, droning voice to sociopathy. People who would never rake a pile of leaves into their neighbor's yard seem to have no compunction  about blowing them just over the property line. This goes double for blowing leaves into streets, and where I live, that means getting rid of leaves into bike lanes, where a mat of slippery leaves is not just an inconvenience, but a hazard. (And a word to you assholes who do this: the cyclists will veer into the road, impeding your SUV.) And of course the noise and stink. The most obnoxious thing a rake can do is scrape on some concrete, but I had to listen to the on-and-off buzz of a neighbor's leaf-blower for hours today. And if his inconsideration doesn't rise to the level of sociopathy in your estimation, how about the assault I would've unleashed had it lasted another hour?

When the blow-hards aren't putting their leaves where they will be someone else's problem, what they usually do is bag them up (often needing a rake in the process) and have them taken away. These folks are not usually the composting type. Members of that vast suburban nation whose reverence of consumerism and spotless lawns led them to buy the blower in the first place tend to put leaves in plastic bags (more petrochemicals), treating this biomass like trash, maybe hauled to a greenwaste facility if their suburb is affluent and educated enough, but still something offensive, needing to be taken out of their site. For some reason, they cannot enjoy the beauty of colorful leaves on a green lawn, and feel compelled to blow away leaves until they can gaze on an expanse of what could be astro-turf. They may be good church-goers, but complain incessantly about god's leaves that fall on god's green earth. These same people will then buy compost, soil amendments, and of course fertilizer (more petrochemicals!), oblivious to the irony their inartful stupidity hath wrought.

So that's why the leaf-blower is a tool whose time has come to disappear. It lessens the ecological and aesthetic value of the place where it is used. It keeps us tethered to a fuel source (and often as not an overseas factory) that undermine our political and economic security. It makes us less healthy, more stupid, and decreasingly connected to our patch of earth and to each other. So pick up a rake (which works just as well, and costs way less), rebuild your muscles, enjoy the smell of leaves and grass, hear the birds sing, and bask in freedom from that stinking, droning blow-hard.

Ford Fuel

Another fuel post. Mostly because it is a pain to put more than one photo in a post.

Anyway, here we have it. The fuel of the present. I saw windmills from Missouri to Oregon, but not too many, and less than half were moving.
In WV or KY, I saw a prominently located alternative energy center where there was a much smaller windmill twirling furiously. The plants around the place were decidedly stationary, and it would seem that the wind was not making the windmill turn, but a motor. Brilliant! Somewhere in the basement of the place, a strapping scots-irish lad shoveled coal into the power plant. Someone should tell him his indenture is up.

And grain ethanol? It won't disappear anytime soon, but nor will it supplant oil. Corn barely creates more fuel than it uses, and is in-bred to a degree that would make even the Mountbattens blanche and evolution smack its grinning, bloodthirsty chops. One hand of the market pushes farmers into increasingly unwise efforts to grow corn above all else, while the other stirs up a new bowl of dust.

Wheat Power

Last post began corny and then got a bit wind-baggy.

After leaving corn country, I entered the Wheat Republic. Corn waits in a crib, while wheat rides the elevator into a row of skyscrapers visible from a dozen miles away, places where trains drive up and load up. A place like this. You cannot tell exactly, but those silos are miles away and 3,000 feet tall.

Maybe I exaggerate, but the point is that these kind of things don't just sprout up on every farm. As far west as the Mo-state, I would see farmhouses not so far apart, each with its corn crib, lots with some animals. Late 20th Century farming certainly didn't condone it, but you could imagine making a farm like that into something self-sufficient.

In the vast flat of Kansas, though, they pool the crop. My uncle lived in eastern Colorado wheat country, and like everybody else there, put his grain in the co-op. Farms there are rarely self-sufficient, and maybe it doesn't make sense to be. You and a few other people are out there all winter exposed to arctic winds slowed only by a couple of barbed-wire fences, coyotes making off with your farm cats now and then. And in the summer everybody's crop may fall to drought (or a bad global market), or an unlucky few may get hit by hail; either way, pulling together works better than every man for himself. Same for marketing wheat. Nobody really wants to drive to Kansas to buy just a ton, so everybody congregates grain by the train. And buyers get product from the co-op. Farmers hold or sell their share according to their needs and nerves, but the market is so big and the costs so persistent that nobody really can hold on indefinitely until the prices skyrocket, and most everybody ends up in a similar boat.

The other side of the pooled grain game is that there is social pressure on the supply side. You don't make sure you have combines at harvest time, or you pull up to the elevator with grain that's not dry enough, or you otherwise do something out of line and harm the product, and you don't last. You try to go it alone in the plains, and you will die miserably. People have known that for millenia.

Fuel. Corn and Wind

Driving coast to coast with a 6-cylinder F150 towing a trailer-load o books and other heavy necessities consumed a fearsome sum of fuel. Not that I've looked at the satchel o receipts yet, but it had to be around a kilobuck, and that was back before the geniuses who brought us mortgage-derived securities re-directed their clients' money into $100/barrel oil and ran it up further.

And sure enough, it seemed like I was seeing
corn-stubbled fields further west than customary, not to mention in Virginia and Kentucky, and the two level fields in West Virginia. For my mountain cousins to be growing corn that doesn't turn into ham or hooch, why it's a shame.
I took a picture of some giant corn cribs somewhere in the multi-state run of corn on Day 3, but it was blurry.
I did get this shot of some alternative energy in Missouri, where most corn cribs are hidden behind giant billboards, all of which advertise websites, all of which have "mo" somewhere in them. Great state.