True Confessions of a Citizen Scientist
Nine years ago, I visited London’s Natural History Museum, a massive building reminiscent of a cathedral with its fawn and blue-gray stone, arched windows, and pinnacles, but with the whimsical touch of animals molded and cast in terra cotta on every wall inside and out. At the time, I was doing research for a book on butterflies. With these credentials — knowing something about writing and little about butterflies — I was permitted entrance to the ground floor of the entomology department, an inner sanctum that went up and down six floors and contained 30 million insects in 120,000 drawers. For an afternoon, I walked dimly lit corridors and opened wooden cabinets to reveal the still-astonishing beauty of insects caught more than a hundred years ago: tiger swallowtails, red admirals, checkered whites, snouts, tortoiseshells. My guides at the museum were men and women working on such projects as the 18-volume series Moths of Borneo or tracking down the British Empire’s archenemies of collections everywhere: book lice and carpet beetles. Late in the day, I had an interview with the museum’s Keeper of Entomology, Dick Vane-Wright. We talked about serious matters like the deforestation of the Philippines and the declining numbers of butterflies in the world. We also chatted at length about eating insects. When the Natural History Museum reprinted the classic 1885 tract "Why Not Eat Insects?" ("Why not indeed!" asked the author. "I see every reason why cabbages should be thus served up, surrounded with a delicately flavored fringe of the caterpillars which feed upon them."), Vane-Wright went on a promotional tour as the quintessential good sport, crunching locusts over the radio and frying up mealworms on the BBC. During the course of our interview, he explained, "Eating insects is a challenge of social mores and cultural norms. It punctures people’s pomposity." At the end of our conversation, the Keeper of Entomology said something that has stayed with me for years: "There is so much we don’t know!" Vane-Wright sounded excited and distressed at the same time. "You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. Our ignorance is profound." Nodding wisely, I wrote the comment down in my notebook. I liked its humility. And I liked its challenge and implied sense of wonder — there is still so much to discover. Almost a decade later, the import of Vane-Wright’s words has only deepened. Certainly our humility has deepened. There is so much we don’t know about climate change, say, and about what life will be like without the polar ice caps or the Amazon rainforest. Our ignorance is more profound than we thought. At the same time, as we lose about a hundred species a day in the current mass extinction, the idea that there is still so much to discover strikes me as a kind of miracle. We think we’ve beaten the world flat, hammered out the creases, starched the collar, hung her up to dry. We’ve turned the earth into our private estate — a garden here, a junkyard there — and as such it feels no longer wild, no longer mysterious. And yet… You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet . It’s a strangely cheerful thought. Could it be true? Humans have managed to find and describe an estimated 1.9 million species, about a million of them insects. Every year about 2,400 beetles and 1,200 flies are added to the list. Most biologists believe there are more than 10 million animal species in the world still to discover. In the United States, some 73,000 animal and plant species are unnamed. Recently, in a book called Red Desert: The History of a Place , an entomologist wrote about spending 36 hours sampling insects in the Wyoming desert, making him the world’s leading expert on the area’s arthropods. Of the 5,000 insect species that live in the desert, he estimated that several dozen were not known to science. When the Keeper of Entomology at the Natural History Museum said "you" could spend a week studying some obscure insect and become a world authority, the you in that sentence was an entomologist. Only an entomologist could gain the necessary knowledge in such a short time, not someone like me who doesn’t know a beetle’s anterior apodemes from its mesonotal stridulatory file. Someone like me would take much longer. Someone like me would have to immerse herself in insect physiology as well as general principles of ecology, choose her obscure insect carefully (focusing on ease of collection and observation), and learn some basic field research and laboratory techniques. Someone like me would need to work her way up from rank amateur to professional amateur, often abbreviated to pro-am, also known as citizen scientist. For some time now, traditional research in entomology — how insects behave and where they live — has been the realm of the professional amateur. Partly this is because there are so many species to keep track of and so many good field guides. And then there are all the new Internet sites to help the amateur do this work. While there is some concern that amateurs aren’t rigorous or detailed enough, many scientists welcome the help, especially as climate change causes species to head north or south or disappear altogether. You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. I have always wanted to be a field biologist. I imagine Zen-like moments watching a leaf, hours and days that pass like a dream, sun-kissed, plant-besotted. I imagine a kind of rapture and loss of ego. John Burroughs, a nineteenth-century American naturalist, wrote that he went to nature "to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more." Burroughs captures exactly my own experience walking through the rural West. I enlarge in nature. I calm down. At the same time, eventually I get bored. Eventually I go home because my work (my writing, my students, my laundry) is elsewhere. But what if that employment, my engagement with the world, was right there, in the largeness and calm of nature? For Burroughs and other naturalists, a passion for what is obscure and unsung in nature is about passion itself. This is the herpetologist mad for a leopard frog, the botanist most happy parsing forbs. In some way, such unworldly love is about authenticity. To devote your life to crayfish? That’s authentic. Such love is also about competence and a vertical burrowing into knowledge. Vertical would be a new direction for me, since my understanding of the world is almost completely horizontal. I know a little bit about a lot. I stretch around the world knowing a little bit about state politics, national scandals, ocean chemistry, and Indonesia. My reach is long, but I don’t go deep. The woman (scientist, pro-am, or rank amateur) who wants to understand the Canyon Rubyspot damselfly, however, must think differently. She must also know about canopied streams, insectivorous bats, and flycatchers. She must think vertical, burrowing into one place. I have always wanted to be John Burroughs, and I have also wanted to be a rock-and-roll musician. Here I am, a woman in her fifties, in good physical shape, with a lively mind, having zero chance of becoming so many things — an ER doctor or the creator of cool television shows. We are defined by our limits as much as our loves. At every point in life, there is a long list of what we will not ever be. You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. John Burroughs was one of those semi-annoying optimists. "If you think you can do it, you can," he wrote. "Leap and the net will appear." Could I take not a week but many weeks in my life and become what I was not: a "leading world authority" on some obscure species of mite or dragonfly in the Gila Valley of southwestern New Mexico, which also happens to be my own backyard? I am searching in my kitchen drawer for cheesecloth. Marriage is about balance. My husband is a saver. I am a purger. Just last week, I purged this kitchen drawer of a wad of cheesecloth that I pretended had gone stale. We never use cheesecloth! But now I need it for my tiny pink-orange eggs and tiny black larvae and somewhat larger black larvae and rather active Calligrapha serpentina adult beetles that I am keeping in a series of labeled jars. A square of cheesecloth secured with a rubber band would be the perfect lid, preventing escape while allowing in air. I have also been told to wet a wad of cheesecloth and leave it in the jar so the insects won’t desiccate. I feel a familiar stab: purger’s regret. In my efforts to become a leading world authority, I have already made my first big mistake. I did not choose Calligrapha serpentina for its obscurity. I went for beauty instead. This leaf beetle is a stunner, with shiny green-gold wings marked by a sinuous, symmetrical pattern of black dashes, swirls, and fillips. Even the name is beautiful, the name of the lover in a poem, "Oh, Calligrapha! Oh, Serpentina!" Typing just a description of this insect into Google gets me 10 photos on BugGuide.net. Fortunately, the life cycle of Calligrapha serpentina is not as celebrated or well known. As a member of the large and commonly encountered beetle family Chrysomelidae , in the genus Calligrapha (with more than 80 recognized species native to North and South America), this insect is not even noteworthy as a pest, unlike its cousins the potato, cucumber, asparagus, and bean leaf beetles. As one entomologist explained to me in an e-mail: "In spite of their showy appearance, little is known about the life history of most species of Calligrapha . Much of the information that you desire has never been published. If you carefully document and publish your observations, they would constitute valuable scientific contributions." That was exactly what I wanted to hear. Early in the summer of 2009, when I first dreamed of becoming a pro-am, dozens of these metallic green beetles were vigorously mating on the leaves of the globe mallow ( Sphaeralcea augustifolia ) growing in my yard. About one centimeter long, the insects clamored and humped on top of one another like so many miniature Volkswagen pileups. On the underside of globe mallow leaves, their eggs could be found massed irregularly in pink-orange groups, each cylindrical pink-orange egg about one millimeter long with smooth and shining ends. Although I never observed a beetle laying eggs, in 1908 the zoologist Robert Hegner watched a similar species and wrote one of the few descriptions. As the insect clings to the undersurface of a leaf, the tip of its abdomen "moves rhythmically up and down about fifteen times at intervals of a little less than one second," he wrote. Following a drop of colorless liquid, the egg emerges and is attached to the leaf by the fluid. The insect shifts slightly, and the process begins again. Hegner studied 54 pairs of beetles of three species, Calligrapha multipunctata , Calligrapha bigsbyana , and Calligrapha lunata , with host plants of willow and wild rose. The females, slightly larger than the males, each produced an average of 315 eggs from June 15 to August 27. The average time for hatching was about six days, and the small emerging larvae were gregarious, eating their host plant together, shedding their skins together as they grew larger, dropping to the soil to pupate at about the same time, and emerging together as adults. Hegner found the average larval stage to be 20 days and the average pupal stage 12 days — about 38 days from egg to beetle. My observations of Calligrapha serpentina were much the same, although I never had as many insects or watched their rhythmic movements quite so closely. I did raise a number of eggs to adults, cheering on as the squirming dots of black broke out of their egg cases, began to eat the leaf they stood on, and grew steadily into dark, hairy lumps with reddish-brown heads and six legs. As beetle larvae grow and shed their skin, each new stage is called an instar. Compared with its former miniatures, the final instar of Calligrapha serpentina seemed monstrous — a great galumphing fellow covered in long bristles, the head and front legs seeming to strain and heave their appendage of a body like Jabba the Hutt in the Star Wars series. In my role as voyeur, I was also a manipulator, a kind of God in the life of Calligrapha serpentina . Not all of my charges survived. In truth, the habitat I provided was hit or miss. Too much water, and a fungus could grow that would attack the eggs. Too little water, and the larvae dried up. I sometimes had to travel with my jars (who can you really trust to feed your larvae?) and wondered about the effect of the car’s motion. I knew that temperature could alter the timing of my beetles’ hatching and growing, and I worried that the jars were too much in the sun. Or in the shade? Some of my black dots may have been worried too. A surprising number of them escaped through the holes in the cheesecloth. In the end, these insects may have done better with me than in the wild, where they would have been constantly exposed to predators. Whenever I felt particularly inept, I went online. Sites such as buglifecycles.com and BugGuide.net offer all kinds of information and anecdotes. Asked nicely, professional entomologists readily send advice. One consoled me: "Freezing excess immatures is a painless (to them) and effective method of discarding insects you probably cannot and/or should not release locally. Alas, there is much death and death-dealing in this work." This same entomologist concluded: "Please remember, specimens are worthless without data. THIS IS ALL ABOUT THE DATA. And it’s about sharing your data through publication for the entertainment and education of others. I assign a specimen number to every animal or series of like animals when I collect them. These numbers go on their jars, written on masking tape. So a monarch larva gets the number 9856, say, and a series of pyralid caterpillars in their communal webbing initially gets the number 9857, with each caterpillar getting a letter code when they are isolated, as 9857-A, 9857-B, etc. Thus when I get two parasitoids, different wasp species, from jar 9857-M, I know that both wasps developed inside A SINGLE CATERPILLAR, which is high quality information." One day, in my own jars, a number of the monstrous black instars of Calligrapha serpentina started turning pinkish-orange and then became wholly pinkish-orange and finally could be seen writhing and thrusting out their abdomens in what appeared to be a painful and desperate act. It could be that this is how instars bury themselves in the dirt in order to pupate. I don’t know. I couldn’t watch for long because I had to go to work (a fact that instantly labels me Not a Real Naturalist). Later I would find the pupae motionless in the soil that I had put in the bottom of the jar. Beetles often pupate naked, without a cocoon or protective casing. Under my hand magnifier, each pink-orange oval seemed to contain a curled-up, mummylike creature beneath a translucent coating — although there may have been no actual coating, only the shiny surface of the half-forming beetle. Days later still, the miracle: metamorphosis, the great spiritual metaphor and enactment of myth. Sometimes I could see the patterned wings under what still looked like a thin covering and then the legs were distinct and then the beetle quivered and was there, moving as if dazed, fumbling in the dirt. In a few moments the wings had dried and the miracle began to lumber across the bottom of the jar toward a globe mallow leaf. Now — and again and again as the beetles pupated and emerged — I saw that the resulting insect was beautifully colored red and black, not green and black. Had I raised up the wrong species? Was I a kind of anti-naturalist? Particularly gifted in doing the wrong thing? Was this some effect of an artificial environment? Or, since some beetles are known to hybridize, perhaps this represented a cross between species? As my jars filled up with pure red and black beetles, all looking alike, I theorized that red was a juvenile stage — a possibility no one had mentioned to me or discussed in the scientific literature. In about a week, the red beetles turned green. Testable question. Hypothesis. Conclusion. I felt like a kid who had just won first prize at the science fair. Okay, this was not the first of many "valuable scientific contributions." I never could determine how many instars the larvae went through. My examination of the pupae was hardly thorough and did not include dissection. As important, I am not sure how the beetle overwinters. I think the last adult generation of the season goes dormant once the temperature drops. (By the first of September, I could not find any beetles outside on my globe mallow.) But I wouldn’t bet my life on it. I also never became comfortable with beetle anatomy. In volume 2 of American Beetles, when I am faced with a description of Chrysomelidae in which the dorsum is "usually glabrous, vestiture when present sparse to dense and consisting of simple hairs," I can only murmur back, " ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe…" I do believe, however — and I am proud of this — that I have a fairly complete collection of all the papers ever written on Calligrapha serpentina , including the 1897 "Biological Notes on Some Coleoptera From New Mexico," the heavily illustrated 1941 "Relationships Within the Family Chrysomelidae as Indicated by the Male Genitalia of Certain Species," and the 2006 "The Evolution of Unisexuality in Calligrapha Leaf Beetles." It is a small personal library my friends are welcome to peruse on any weekday from 9 a.m. to noon. Unfortunately, my own documentation was essentially confined to notes on my desk calendar, with "eggs in Jar #2 hatched" sandwiched between "call optometrist" and "potluck at Madge’s, make salad." I have no plans to publish, only to e-mail a few entomologists ("I think the red coloring of Calligrapha serpentina is the juvenile phase! I’m so excited!") and tell my new friends on buglifecycles.com and BugGuide.net . I did not, did not, become a leading world authority on Calligrapha serpentina . And, yes, I feel bad about withholding that information until near the end of this essay. Sorry. What I did do was add my voice to a chorus, standing shoulder to shoulder in that growing crowd of citizen scientists who rarely become individual experts but who contribute to the collective expertise. We send our observations to the real experts who can then make them part of their research and publication. Moreover, for the citizen scientist, this is not really about publishing data, as important as that is. The further job of the citizen scientist is to mesh the world of science with, well, the world of citizenry. We trumpet the beauty of Calligrapha serpentina to friends, co-workers, relatives, real estate developers, and politicians. The more we fall in love with our own backyard — with the marvel and complexity of life — the more committed we are to protecting its diversity. In my case, once I started looking for one beautiful green and black beetle, I found so much more: many more eggs, brown or white, red or yellow, and many more larvae, some that deceive by looking like bird droppings and some that hide by rolling up in leaves. In a single morning, I might find a marbled orb weaver like some aproned, plump grandma, 1,675 ants, and the grace of a pipevine swallowtail. I saw that Dick Vane-Wright was truly right when he said, "There is so much we don’t know," and that lots of things I don’t know are outside my front door, the theater of insects playing all summer long. Nor is my infatuation with Calligrapha serpentina over. I have learned that I am not really made for the exacting work of a scientist, the tedium of 9857-A, 9857-B, 9857-C. A leading world authority needs many more jars and would label them better. But I do have plans next fall for a large outdoor terrarium filled with the larvae and beetles of Calligrapha serpentina and their host plant. As cold weather approaches and the globe mallow dies, I can watch and observe. How do these beetles overwinter? I hope to find out.
More here: True Confessions of a Citizen Scientist
Renewable Energy Catches on in Red America
On a crisp, cloudless morning in November 2002, Susan Hansen stood atop California’s Cache Peak clutching a satchel containing the ashes of her husband, Homer. Susan, now 75, had reached the summit on a rock-strewn trail, climbing for an hour through scrub oak, bull pine, and juniper. The 6,676-foot-high Cache Peak, which protrudes from the Tehachapi Range about 40 miles east of Bakersfield, is situated almost wholly within the Hansen ranch. Susan’s in-laws are also buried on the mountain. In 1946 they purchased the property — more than 50 square miles — from the Southern Pacific Railroad. "The first one up was my father-in-law," Susan tells me when I visit her in December. "It took 12 people to carry his casket to the top, and we had to dynamite a hole in the rock for the grave." After that fiasco, the family decided cremation would be easier. Once her in-laws had passed away, the Hansens divided up the property and sold their shares, except for Susan and Homer, who kept an 11,000-acre plot. There they started a cow-calf operation that at its peak had 1,000 head of cattle. Susan recounts the story as we stand on a natural terrace below Cache Peak in Jawbone Canyon, an arid moonscape at the eastern edge of Kern County. With one notable difference, the clear and cool weather is identical to what it was on the day she scaled the peak to scatter her husband’s ashes. "Normally it’s windy, very windy," she says. Hot updrafts rising from the sun-baked Mojave Desert create low pressure at the surface, which sucks in cold, dense air from the Pacific Ocean to fill the void. This thermal effect is one of the most ferocious wind machines on earth. "In the 1980s, our interest rates went to 24 percent and the bank started looking [to foreclose on] our land," Susan recalls. "So my husband started searching for ways to make the property earn its keep, and that’s when he taught himself about wind power." There were lots of ups and downs along the way — inadequate transmission lines, a burst of new deals with the dot-com boom, another slowdown when that bubble burst — but eventually Homer forged a partnership with a company called Zilkha (now Horizon Wind Energy). "He signed the option three days before he died," she says. The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power later took over the lease and the project went online last year with 80 turbines, each generating 1.5 megawatts of electricity. I first heard about the Hansen ranch from Lorelei Oviatt, the special projects division chief for the Kern County planning department. At 8,202 square miles, Kern, with a population of 800,458, is roughly the size of New Jersey and encompasses several disparate ecosystems — the Central Valley, Sierra Nevada, and Mojave Desert. Oviatt wanted me to see firsthand one of her county’s celebrated successes: a 120-megawatt wind farm that enriched its landowner (Susan won’t say exactly how much she earns but made it clear that her family would never have to worry about money) while helping bring new jobs to a region that has a 15.1 percent unemployment rate. Oil, agriculture, and aerospace have been the economic mainstays in Kern for nearly a century. Petroleum still chugs along. But cheap imported produce has decimated local agriculture; severe water shortages are shuttering what farms remain; the once-thriving dairy industry struggles to profit; and the military is downsizing (the advanced F-22 and F-35 fighters are tested at China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station and Edwards Air Force Base, both of which spill into the county, but President Obama has slashed these programs). To combat the downturn, Oviatt has been on a mission to attract renewable investment and transform Kern into what she calls "ground zero" for green energy. Doing so means fostering alliances between competing interests, and this, she admits, can be a nightmare. While the Hansen project was being put together, environmentalists complained it would disrupt wildlife habitats, specifically those of the Mojave ground squirrel and the desert tortoise. Indians feared desecration of sacred burial sites. Neighbors complained that the soaring towers would spoil alpine views. The U.S. Department of Defense claimed that the turbines would be a hazard to pilots who fly high-speed maneuvers in the area, often at near-ground level. The "bird people," as Susan calls them, filed suit, arguing that spinning rotor blades are an avian hazard. One of their concerns was that the Sierra Nevada transects a major flyway, so turbines pose a threat to migratory species. Another concern is the endangered California condor, although Oviatt says no report exists of the condor ever being killed or maimed by a wind turbine. Oviatt ultimately got the project approved. But if you think she did it to save the planet, you’d be only partly correct. She concedes that promoting green power is terrific, and AB-32, California’s aggressive legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions, is fueling frenzied interest in wind and solar. But she considers her pursuit of renewable energy a civic duty to help Kern prosper in the long term. "This is a red, conservative-based county," she says. "We are not Berkeley. We are embracing renewables because they’re practical." What is essential to Oviatt — and to her bosses, the five elected members of the county board of supervisors — is that renewable energy investments create jobs and boost tax revenue. If the icing is green, she says, well, all the better. Despite Kern’s political conservatism, county planners have largely escaped a knee-jerk backlash against anything green by pushing for projects on private property rather than on public lands. Where landowners have raised objections, they tend to be very specific and are usually couched in terms of qualified support. ("Look, don’t get me wrong here — I think this is a good thing; I’m just worried that…") In Kern, as elsewhere in the United States, most wind and solar resources are located in rural areas, where landowners frequently lean right. Targeting private property, Oviatt says, is an easier sell. Energy projects almost always raise land values and therefore generate more property tax revenue. The developer covers the increased taxes for the landowners and pays them annual royalties based on how much energy their properties produce. Some landowners also get signing bonuses, leasing income, or one-time cash settlements if they sell their property outright. At the same time, the projects don’t rile those who covet public lands — not just conservationists, but also hunters, anglers, off-roaders, and mining and military interests. "Here, if you put an environmentalist label on something," says Oviatt, "you can actually damage the idea." It’s a few minutes before 7 a.m. in downtown Bakersfield, and the public services building seems deserted. I apologize to the security guard for being early and explain that I’m waiting for Oviatt to arrive. "Oh, she’s already in her office," the guard informs me. "She’s always the first one here." (This is impressive, considering that Oviatt commutes 75 miles each way from her home in Rosamond.) Oviatt appears with a big, toothy grin from around a corner and flitters across the tiled floor. She is wearing a scarlet blazer adorned with an intricate gold poinsettia brooch, black blouse and skirt, and silver-framed glasses. "I’m glad you could come now," she says, "because we have back-to-back holiday parties all day, and then I’m going caroling." Though she’s been with the county for 13 years, her office appears as if she’s still moving in (or out). Transparent plastic storage containers, stacked three high and two rows deep, are shoved against the walls. "Those are projects awaiting approval," she explains. Oviatt, a native of South Florida, attended Baldwin-Wallace College, a small liberal arts school in Berea, Ohio, earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and sociology. Her first job was for a manufacturing company buying up warehouse space in Los Angeles; later she worked for a housing developer. "I have a very unusual background for government," she says. "Most people go into it straight from school. People of my generation have been here 30 years and are already retiring." But Oviatt got her master’s in public administration just three years ago, taking night courses at California State University in Bakersfield. "I was going to go into academics," she says. "But I realized what I truly enjoyed was figuring out how we make decisions in society, how people come to an agreement in this messy business we call democracy." Most planners enter the profession because they are "fascinated by the future," Oviatt says. "They lose that fascination when they get beaten down by reality. But I am an idealist — that’s why I get up in the morning — and I tell younger planners never to doubt someone’s dream, even if it sounds fanciful." To underscore her point, she tells me about the time she put together the permit application for the Mojave Air & Space Port. "When they first came in and told me they wanted to create a space port, I thought, ‘Well, now I’ve heard it all.’ But then I said, ‘Okay, I’m game.’" The project won Oviatt a national award for planning design, and today the port has become a global hotbed for private space entrepreneurs. "I am a synthesizer," she says, "and I try to stay ahead of the curve, always thinking about what kind of community we will have in 50 years if we make this or that decision today." At the moment, however, the focus of the nine-member special projects team she leads is to wade through an avalanche of applications for renewable energy projects. A critical component of the process is navigating the stringent conditions of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). "On the one hand, we’ve had all these wonderful places saved [by CEQA]," says Oviatt. "On the other hand, our state is bankrupt and businesses are fleeing." Not wanting this to happen in Kern, Oviatt studied CEQA until she could quote it from memory. Many say she’s become the leading CEQA expert in the county, and in doing so has turned something that developers elsewhere in California have abhorred and feared into just another step toward getting their projects approved. "Her base knowledge of the CEQA process is huge," says Linda Parker, executive director of the Kern Wind Energy Association. "But she goes further and tries to understand our industry, and understand everybody else’s concerns. That’s what unique about her. She has a 360-degree view." In addition to wind, solar power is another big priority. "I spend three days a week meeting with solar proponents," Oviatt says. "There is a solar rush going on because of the money Washington has put together in tax credits." To qualify for the federal credit, a solar project has to be under construction by the end of 2010. Yet the flood of applications didn’t show up in Oviatt’s office until late 2009. "The industry is a little disorganized," she complains. "They don’t understand that an environmental impact review [required by CEQA] takes up to 24 months." Oviatt has met with more than 65 developers interested in new solar projects. But she didn’t want the tough environmental standards to scare off investors. "So we decided to do all the reviews simultaneously, rather than stacking people based on when their application came in. It’s a monumental task that I’m not sure we can pull off, but we’re going to try." To further speed things up, Oviatt steers solar firms away from public lands: "I tell them I’m not confident I can move it as fast because I have to coordinate with the [federal] Bureau of Land Management, which is already overwhelmed." But there are multiple motives at play. "We believe the purpose of public land is the conservation of species," she says. "Our board of supervisors doesn’t want to see the entire desert paved over with solar projects. Instead, our strategy is that we should use marginal private lands, lands that can’t be farmed and haven’t been turned into habitat. This is a way to recoup some use of the property without building a 5,000-unit subdivision on it. And if you use up all your public land for renewable energy, species conservation is going to move to private land, and then those private lands will be taken off the tax roll and unavailable for development." Jeff Roberts is a solar developer for a company called Granville Homes, which owns land in Kern County. He has applied for a permit to create a 6,000-acre photovoltaic installation in the southwest corner of the San Joaquin Valley. If completed, it would generate between 500 and 700 megawatts. This would make it one of the largest solar farms in the world, generating enough power for more than 100,000 homes. "We’ve scratched our heads about what to do with this land," Roberts says. "We’ve had it for five years and never grown anything on it because there is no water. Kern County has been very aggressive to move us through the process. They’ve been very smart and up to speed, more so than other counties I’ve worked with." While Oviatt loves lucrative renewable projects, she also staunchly protects Kern’s long-established sources of revenue. She reminds me that oil is a $10 billion industry in Kern County, which has more oil than any other in California, churning out one-tenth of all U.S. production from three of the five largest fields in the country. On the top shelf behind her desk is a sample of Kern crude encased in Lucite. She hands it to me to inspect. "We have a number of ordinances to protect oil. There are billions of gallons of oil underneath Los Angeles that can never be recovered because it’s been paved over. We haven’t done that here. You can drive into the parking lot of the Rosarito restaurant and there is an oil well, appropriately sited and pumping away." In Kern, oil is king, but the military is a hardy second. "The Department of Defense is a $3 billion industry," Oviatt says. "A few years ago, the wind industry wanted to build towers over 400 feet. So we said, ‘Time out.’ We didn’t want to permit a wind project that would destroy a flight test corridor." Her department uses a color-coded map system to aid wind developers in choosing appropriate sites. Within a red zone, the DOD has to sign off on any turbine more than 80 feet tall. Yellow areas can have towers up to 500 feet. Green means anything goes. When Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office published a handbook on how to protect military interests that compete with other types of development, it identified the red/yellow/green system as an exceptional example of innovative planning policy. "It’s been nationally recognized by the Department of Defense," says Oviatt. "We’ve also commented to the Department of the Interior, and they put provisions in their environmental impact studies for energy development to take the military into account." "In most jurisdictions, a developer rolls into town and takes out a big ol’ topo map and just goes out to get leases," she says. "They never talk to the planners. I didn’t want that happening here. So now I spend a lot of time in pre-application meetings where I sit down with people and explain how the process works, and I tell them, ‘Follow these constraints and it’ll roll along much faster.’" Befuddling potential investors with a barrage of intractable and byzantine bureaucratic hurdles is counterproductive, she says. "We think of ourselves as facilitators, not regulators. The developers financing these projects want certainty — they want to know what the rules are — and they get pretty upset when they get a year into a project only to find out they picked the wrong piece of property." The point is to attract wealth to Kern County, not repel it. While in Bakersfield, I attend a county board of supervisors meeting where Oviatt presents the members with a formal request to approve a 720-megawatt wind power project. It involves 17 landowners and 320 turbines, built on 9,300 acres at a cost of $1 billion. It could net the county $1 billion in revenue, 230 temporary construction jobs, and 30 permanent positions. The developer, Terra-Gen Power, is based in San Diego. Its vice president for lands and development, Ken Wagner, tells me, "From a regulatory side, Kern County has evolved quickly and is well suited for wind development, more so than other counties." The meeting begins promptly at 2 p.m. in the board chambers, a stately room paneled in cherrywood. Wagner, who has driven from San Diego to attend, takes a seat in the back row. The audience, about 90 people, is a mishmash that includes overalled ranchers, dark-suited investors, octogenarian landowners, reporters, engineers, and consultants. Oviatt launches into a polished and highly orchestrated 45-minute presentation that she tells me later took her more than a year to prepare. On an overhead projector she unveils maps and diagrams and aerial photos. When she’s finished, a sundry parade of citizens approaches a central lectern to profess their support or voice their objections. When the detractors talk, Oviatt rummages frantically through file folders, yanking out various documents and transparencies. She is formulating her rebuttal. Several landowners who live near the proposed turbines fear that ice will form on the rotor blades and rain a lethal volley of frozen spears onto their property. A nervous mother says that sun glinting off spinning rotors creates a strobe effect that will be detrimental to her epileptic daughter. A retiree wants to know if the turbines will spook the jackrabbits he enjoys hunting. One couple asks if two towers can be relocated to preserve their backyard view; another pair is worried about noise pollution from humming turbine motors. And this drags on for hours. Oviatt is cunning and whip smart, and to watch her in action is a lesson in tenacity. She politely but methodically addresses each concern with an arsenal of data — environmental reports, expert testimony, geologic surveys, wildlife habitat studies, even a last-minute stick-figure drawing she scribbles on a legal pad to illustrate the positioning of three towers under dispute. Not everybody is satisfied, and the board doesn’t want to steamroll its constituents. A recess is called, and Oviatt disappears, with posse in tow, to hash out a deal between contentious landowners and representatives from Terra-Gen. An hour later she emerges with an agreement, and the board approves the project unanimously. Wagner is thrilled. "We should be able to begin construction in early 2010," he says. Also pleased is Bruce Shafer, plant manager for CalPortland, which makes cement and construction materials. His company is the largest private landowner in the Terra-Gen project and will earn hefty royalties from the more than 150 turbines planned for its 5,500-acre property. And like the majority of these contracts, this one costs the landowner nothing. The Terra-Gen agreement is just one of dozens Oviatt and her staff have helped craft since 2006, when she became chief of the special projects division. In the late 1980s, the county created a "wind energy zoning" (WEZ) ordinance to streamline the siting of turbines. Oviatt has learned to leverage the WEZ rules deftly. "Within the next 10 years we will see a 40 percent increase in installed wind power," says Linda Parker. "We are going to go up to between 4,500 and 6,000 megawatts of capacity. New wind energy development is expected to be worth about $4.5 billion, which will increase property tax assessments by over $45 million. It’s like free money to the county." Until recently, wind energy investment in Kern was stagnant because its aging transmission lines were maxed out. But Kern’s special projects group worked with Southern California Edison to secure a $2 billion upgrade to transmission infrastructure. By 2013 nearly 250 miles of new high-voltage lines will deliver electricity from wind farms in Kern County to three million homes in the Los Angeles basin. Lorelei epitomizes the kind of person we’re going to depend on to make the transition from oil to renewables," says Johanna Wald, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Wald is impressed by how Oviatt "innovatively encourages the use of private lands, going to degraded properties that have a lower habitat value and are close to the transmission infrastructure." "For me it’s all about the big picture — it’s jobs for solar installers, jobs for energy efficiency," Oviatt says. And jobs for oil, too. During my conversations with her, I repeatedly try to peg Oviatt as an environmentalist on a mission to green her county, but she won’t have it: "Sure, it’s true we want to lessen our effect on the planet. I hate plastic bags, and if I can’t find Kern County grapes, I go without. But I live in a practical world where there have to be trade-offs. And on the front lines of my job, I watch and participate in these hard trade-offs." She goes on, "I have been offered jobs in a lot of other places with more money and more prestige. But I think that Kern County is one of the most fascinating places to work because of these opportunities to come up with innovative and creative ways to do good land planning." A chief ambition is "to bring prosperity to the county and still get greenhouse gas reductions." Her focus on renewables is especially savvy because it secures payback over the long haul. The infrastructure — grid connections, wind and solar installations, gas pipelines — demands large-scale capital investments that can’t be uprooted and relocated if the business climate suddenly sours. Meanwhile, what continues to excite her about her job is balancing the demands of a society rooted in private property rights — "where you can still buy the American dream, a half-acre lot with a picket fence" — with the need to protect a greater public trust. "What I try to get [landowners] to understand is this: ‘You give up some of the rights on your land so we can breathe clean air; I give up some of the rights on my land so my kids can see a kit fox or California condor.’ I am always trying to find that balance where everything can coexist." Touring the county, I find plenty of examples of the kind of renewable-friendly policy making that has made Oviatt and Kern legendary among green energy developers: the conversion of a 44-megawatt coal-fired power plant to biomass gasification; a pilot project for sequestering two million tons of CO2 in depleted oil fields; the state’s largest bio-diesel manufacturing plant; and a string of small methane operations on dairy farms, which feed directly into Pacific Gas & Electric’s existing natural gas pipelines. The innovation here, typical of Oviatt, is obtaining a CEQA exemption that allows local connections to the PG&E pipeline to be laid beneath roads, across private property, and through existing county easements. "Lorelei was instrumental in drafting legislation that would grant the exemption," says David Albers, founder of BioEnergy Solutions, which is building the bovine methane facilities in Kern. "As an environmental lawyer who has practiced CEQA throughout the state for 10 years, this is the only time I have seen a planner take such huge steps for a particular type of project." Planners in other California counties — San Bernardino, Solano, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara — have sought Oviatt’s advice. "They want to know how we’ve streamlined our permitting process," she says. And she is frequently tapped to speak at national industry conferences. "In local government there is a lot of talk about renewables but not a lot of action," she says. "It’s hard to turn the ship fast. So they’re often looking for examples of what works and what doesn’t." The sun has dipped behind Cache Peak and the sky begins its nocturnal shift from cerulean blue to ruby red to dusky violet. That afternoon, while driving through Jawbone Canyon, I watch construction crews assemble turbine towers in the "lay-down" area. In a clearing, 125-foot-long rotor blades are aligned like giant icicles. "I’ve always tried to be a good steward of the land," Susan Hansen tells me. "And you won’t find a better steward of the land than a rancher, because we depend on it for our livelihood, and we like utilizing Mother Nature without hurting it, destroying it, or using it up." Without Kern County’s progressive WEZ rules, or the red/yellow/green mapping system, or the extensive upgrades to transmission lines, or a mandate to encourage renewable energy investment on private property, Susan might have lost her land to foreclosure long ago. Today, however, her daughter maintains a small cow operation on the ranch, while the Hansens enjoy the financial benefits from the wind. With the extra cash, the family, now in its fifth generation on the property, is building a 1,600-square-foot cabin for weekend and holiday getaways. It’s set in a wide saddle with a panoramic view of Cache Peak, where a plaque near the top commemorates her husband’s life. "Now more of our land is being developed for wind energy — five more turbines are being erected," Susan says, "and I can just feel him up there approving."
More here: Renewable Energy Catches on in Red America
Driven
Water’s Edge
Photographs by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, text by Robert Sullivan To know New York, or at least to experience it, the tourists often start at Times Square, with its theaters and shows and chain restaurants that offer out-of-towners what they expect (and pay) to be surprised by — the hot dog, the bagel, the Broadway spectacle, in the intersection of glass and stone-covered skyscrapers. The native starts at the water. Because if you want to get to the physical, historical, and even, I would argue, emotional essence of the city that is packed with eight million people, you head to the water’s edge, or edges — all 578 miles of them, all as close as they are far away. These are the places where New York, even if you think you know it, changes before your eyes, where the city seems less concrete and more dynamic, where you are never sure what is flora and what is fauna, or what is natural and what is not. As is well known, the shoreline of New York City is back. Where did it go? A quick synopsis: in the mid-1800s the waters of New York become a place where swimming involves navigating trash and dead animals, primarily horses, which are tossed in whole. The shoreline is the place for docks, obviously, as well as sail makers, oystermen, printers, tanners, sailors, and the refuges of sailors. Sewage treatment begins around 1900, but the pace of sewage production (i.e., urban life) increases. Sewage treatment can’t keep up and is then overwhelmed by all the other things we begin to pump into the water, especially after World War II — namely, chemicals. At this point the water gets really bad, and the people who deal with it directly are those who have no choice: the powerless, the poor, and the marine industry, which begins to struggle, then nearly dies off. In the 1960s comes, first, the idea that the river is polluted and, second, that it does not have to be. In the 1970s comes the Clean Water Act. In the 1980s, in response to the act, comes clean water. In the 1990s little creatures begin to jeopardize the wood in the old piers, a good problem as far as water quality goes, and the bigger creatures (i.e., us) begin to turn around and face the rivers and the harbor, the kills and the bay. It is a long and tortured story, but Westway, which was once to be the great modern interstate along the Hudson, on the West Side of Manhattan, became instead the Hudson River Greenway. And yet still, to this day, no one really knows exactly what is on the water. No one has really explored all of the 578 miles, not even the Shorewalkers, who walk the watery circumferences of the city, who see a lot of the shore. (Their motto: "See New York at 3 m.p.h.") Even the people who tell us about the edges in various official capacities and subsequently make bold plans for them may not be certain about what is there. In fact, the 578 miles themselves are not a certainty. Municipal legend has it that it was Mayor John Lindsay who, in groping for the precise number of shore miles at some harried moment in the 1970s, asked his staff, who took string to map to come up with — quick — 578! Into the breach of visual, statistical, and other, more visceral awareness jumped Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, photographers who went, in some cases, where few New Yorkers had gone before. Cook and Jenshel are married, and although they have separate careers, they have worked together on many projects: photographing aquariums, volcanic hot spots, and, most recently, glaciers, floating on water, ethereal portraits of what, despite their solidity, seem like about-to-vanish ghosts. Jenshel works in color and was a pioneer in what is sometimes called the New Color Revolution of the 1970s. Cook works in black and white. They met in 1979; the story involves cannoli and an Italian pastry shop in Poughkeepsie, New York. They married in 1983 and began collaborating in 1991. Cook was born in New York City but grew up in Indiana, spending summers on the beach back in New York. Jenshel was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens. In 2002, Cook and Jenshel received a grant from the Design Trust for Public Space to document the city shoreline. They came away from their initial forays feeling as if they had just seen new-found land. "When we first started the project," says Cook, looking through work prints one afternoon in the Flatiron District of New York, "we would show the pictures to friends who have lived their whole lives in New York, and they would say, ‘Where is this?’ " "They would also say, ‘Where are the people?’" Jenshel adds. "So that convinced us to do this," Cook says. This is a full-blown exploration of the city shorelines, and the result is a series of photographs that remind us of the importance of what we can’t see, of the importance of the edge, of those places that are not quite water and not quite land, that are not inhabited but are not uninhabited either — places in between. In a time of binary operations, of developed or not developed, of land that is deemed either good or bad by the powers that decide, these photos taken together are a tonic of mesmerizing ambiguity, celebrations of the borders between New York City’s land and sea. The urban waterfront often seems dilapidated, but it is also being vigorously reinvented, in some cases by view-greedy developers and by politicians hoping to fund their campaigns with the money that, until the crash, was associated with builders of luxury condos and pricey hotels. But in other cases the landscape is being redeveloped by people who want to create sustainable futures, and the water’s edge is the place to see the importance of the relationship between cities and sustainable ecologies. In a context of cities, nature is portrayed as the green shoot breaking through the concrete. The shoreline is a good place to see things reversed: humans are the living thing that always turns up on a shore, to fish, to drink, to stand and ponder. The sustainable future is in the reimagination of urban spaces, with special attention paid to the urban wilderness, or wildness, to use a Thoreauvian term. The place where the water meets the land is always wild. A few words on the methods of the photographers in filming the city’s terra incognita, on their littoral trials and tribulations. There were suspicions to deal with, of course, immediately following 9/11, when anyone out alone might be reported to the authorities, many of whom are not as interested in documentary photography as they perhaps should be. Being a photographer on the water in New York almost by definition means you are close to a bridge or marine facility; whereas standing on the water’s edge once could mean contemplation, now it is seen as suspect. Cook and Jenshel were eternal suspects. While working during the 2004 Republican convention, they were watched especially. "People followed us around talking into their wrists," Jenshel says. "We developed this super-nice persona to take the edge off the hostile situations," recalls Cook. The police weren’t the only hazards. Newtown Creek is the tidal creek that separates Brooklyn and Queens and is emblematic of much of the waterfront: once rural, then overdeveloped, now regaining a foregone wildness that is as much about neglect as it is about the relentlessness of what we refer to as nature. This tidal creek was named for the town in the first settlements of Queens that was "new" around 1652. More recently, it has become known as the site of one of the world’s largest underground oil spills, about 17 million gallons, which is 6 million more than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. (Even more recently, New York State has seen the return of a Colonial-era apple species, the Newtown pippin; Erik Baard, an author and environmental activist, identified its pedigree.) Jenshel and Cook photographed the creek after a rainstorm, or what is euphemistically called a stormwater event, which means the water slicks with chemicals, street runoff, and the stuff from household sewers. The result was a beautiful color test of a photo by Jenshel, and three weeks of subsequent sickness. Despite the health risks and wrist talkers, Cook and Jenshel’s results are celebrations of a mystical emptiness, painterly studies of the awkward but ultimately hopeful intersections between the man made and the non–man made. Taken as a whole, their work depicts a sometimes tropical waterfront, a place of interpersonal engagement as well as overgrown complexity. The waterfront of the husband-and-wife team is a place that disputes, in other words, the seemingly overwhelming rush of cement-fueled box store and parking lot sameness, the race to clean and park-ify all that is shore. Their work is a portfolio of secrets. There are quarantine stations, sites long abandoned, islands commandeered by vines. Like the photographs themselves, the vistas from Staten Island are a balm: it is an island which performs the valuable service of providing New Yorkers with perspective on the rest of the city, lest we forget that New York is a port, is an island chain, is (even before global warming raises the sea level) nearly at sea. In highlighting broken reeds (the wetlands-destroying phragmites) and seemingly discarded vessels, their photos give a sense of the intimacy of these places, the spiritual importance of entropy. Broad Channel is the only inhabited island in Jamaica Bay, a wildlife refuge within the Gateway National Recreation Area. Houses are built on stilts. The feel of the place is, like the feel of City Island in the Bronx, more like Maine, or a fishing village on some other part of the New England coast. Broad Channel and City Island are not fancy places. On City Island, the restaurant once owned by the late Tito Puente, timbales player extraordinaire, takes the place of a Starbucks. It is true that murders and innumerable other crimes have happened in our marshlands, but then so have untold moments of personal reflection, of stillness — moments of water- and sky-draped unmomentousness that purify the emotional watershed. Cook and Jenshel give us the ubiquity of sky from shore and the joy of ruins, which take on the significance of religious artifacts in a city and a country that are wondering how to proceed industrially. In fact, plans for the waterfront were part of the reason they went to particular places to photograph. At the beginning of the decade past, New York’s shoreline was full of places that had been marked for large-scale Olympic development. These were places that the Olympic hopefuls considered useless and dead and of little or no value. (The Olympics plan is currently dead itself.) "Some of what drew us to certain places was, okay, this is going to be, say, an Olympic rowing place — well, what is there now?" Cook recalls. "It was annexation," Jenshel says. In the end, this is what Cook and Jenshel’s photos do. They assert a public ownership and denote the valueless as valuable. The photographers are like explorers who, rather than claim the land for the king or queen, claim it for all, claim it for its trodden but still unspoiled beauty, claim it for reconsideration, perhaps, by you or me. Oftentimes the people who are already in the area don’t need much help in this regard. You don’t need a degree in urban planning to know that value is not necessarily added with nice hotels or ballfields made with plastic grass and black rubber dirt. "At one of the meetings," Jenshel says, "someone got up and they said, ‘You know, sometimes we just want to walk out on a patch of dust and sit out under a tree and that’s enough.’ And that really struck us." "I find those places beautiful," Cook says. "And transformational," says Jenshel.
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Water’s Edge