Thank you! Welcome back! I’d like to pick up right where we left off last week. We were in the midst of the completely organic, sustainable, zero-emissions, locally grown alternative to the mass-marketed awards shows: the Golden Carbon Sequestration Device Awards – formerly known as the Golden Tree Awards.
Before the break we had announced the winners in the emissions and energy categories. Now let’s move on to the nominees in –
And just like that it’s gone. Black. Quiet.
It may have been power lines knocked over in a storm or toppled in a forest fire. Maybe it was a terrorist attack or a disciple of Ted Kaczynski, or maybe it was just someone between here and Bonneville Dam with a half-flask of whiskey and a penchant for shooting high tension power line insulators.
Whatever the case, we have been cut off from the source of our electricity and now we have to make do for the next 800 words. Getting along without electricity is one thing if you’re camping, or otherwise deliberately separated from it. But it is a wholly different situation if you are cut off against your will.
The loss of electricity can be very isolating. Without our computers, televisions and radios to bring the world into our homes, we are cut off. In the ’80s, each time there was a blackout I would hypothesize that the electromagnetic pulse from Soviet bombs exploding on the U.S. Minuteman missile silos just north of my hometown had knocked out the power stations. How were we to know for sure, without broadcast radio and TV to tell us?
Losing power can also be very inconvenient. In an instant all the modern comforts of heating, cleaning, entertainment, cooking and refrigeration can be reduced to mocking irony – the heater will not comfort, the stove will not cook, the idiot box will not entertain, and the refrigerator will become the place you keep food to have it rot rather than to preserve it. In a worst-case scenario it can be life threatening. Sure, hospitals have emergency power, but for how long? And in my case, we have aquariums in our home and without filtration, the fish will either be poisoned or suffocate.
In the 1930s the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River was constructed as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration. Electricity was seen then not only as a way to ease the labor of rural life, but also as a marker of civilization and modernity. Though we may no longer think of the former so much, we certainly still consider the latter. Often a region or country without electricity is considered a backwater, a third world, or even a humanitarian disaster. We define our culture by its dependence upon electricity, and we have lived a fully electrified existence for more than three generations. However, we live on a precarious edge – we don’t know how to function if we lose power.
But a blackout is not all bad. If nothing else, it can provide an opportunity like this, to reflect upon the role of electricity in our lives, and the sense of civilization and modernity it brings to us. Very often we do not understand the subtle influences of electricity on our lives precisely because we don’t experience life without electricity.
When the electricity goes off in your home or office there is a different sort of silence. National Public Radio recently aired a story about how the appliances around us emit hums and buzzes of differing pitches. We are often not aware of them, but if you have a computer, television, refrigerator or other appliances around you, their sounds can combine into a very discordant symphony. Other times they are reminiscent of minor-key horror film music. The subtle cacophonous noise pollution actually affects your mood and the way you feel about your home and work environments.
These same sorts of effects are part of our larger modern environment as well. It’s hard to bring up without seeming to state the obvious, but all of our electricity comes from somewhere. Whether it’s hydroelectric, coal fired, nuclear, natural gas, wind or solar, there’s a facility somewhere that is churning out voltage. From the resistors in your computer, down the power cord, back through the wall, out onto the street, to a substation and out into the wilderness of electricity production and distribution, you have a direct connection to that anonymous facility. As such, the kilowatt hours that you pull from the nether of this infrastructure affects the source, ever so subtly. Whether it is from one of the Columbia River dams, the nuclear powered Columbia Generating Station near Richland, Wash., or from other hydropower, wind or gas generation facilities, the presence of those facilities in turn affects the environment in which they, and we, all coexist.
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council Web page addresses the discordant affects of hydropower on the Columbia River. It cites Nisqually Indian leader Billy Frank, Jr. as having said that when we turn on our light switches in the Pacific Northwest, “salmon come flying out.” It certainly may not be as dramatic as he suggests, but we do have to stop for a moment and consider the sources of our electricity, the sources of our modernity.
Next week I will do just that, with an investigation into the University’s and Eugene’s electric power sources.
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