DAN’S PAPERS
January 18, 2013 Page 23
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How to Stop Global Warming It’s Now or Never, but the Wind and the Sea Say We Win By Dan Rattiner
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riving through Amagansett on a windy morning, I happened to look up and see, just behind the Amagansett Farmers Market, this great metal windmill looming 60 feet up above the landscape. Its blades turned grandly in the wind, providing power to the farmers market, I suppose, and, in that indirect way where excess electricity is backed up to the power grid, to the rest of the community. Free electric power, I thought. Is that windmill new? How come I haven’t noticed it before? Oh, I know, I said to myself. It’s because I wear a hat. I don’t usually look up. So I drove on. This encounter with this great windmill, however, got me thinking about what is slowly becoming the most riveting problem of this next generation—the polluting of the atmosphere and the attempt to provide clean power so
people like me (and you) can drive by in our cars and get to where we’re going. About 10 years ago, I recall, it was announced that a solution to the polluting of the atmosphere was at hand, because some scientist had just developed a car grille that could gobble up pollutants as you drove along and convert them into harmless material. It was an astonishing development. You’d blow carbon and smoke out the back of your car. But the car behind you would gobble it up. This would save the earth. And it surely would have, if it had ever been heard from again. It wasn’t, though. Apparently there was a flaw. This was 15 years after the amazing discovery by some scientists in Utah that energy could be created from nuclear fusion. Unlike nuclear fission, no harmful radiation was created. Also, it was cheap. It was the answer to nuclear power. We were saved. Well, it turned out,
there was a flaw in their mathematics, so that didn’t work out either. It was also 15 years after scientists began warning us that carbon in the atmosphere was increasing, that the Industrial Revolution was what had caused it, and that temperatures were rising. I thought at that time I heard about the car grille, well, thank goodness, everybody is on the case. Somewhere along the line here there is going to be a solution to this problem. It will come along. After that, however, no further announcements were made. It was as if our governments and research laboratories had simply turned their backs on this problem. We needed this one thing. But now nobody was looking for it. Why is this? We have our heads in the sand. Well, I think I have (Continued on next page )
A Conversation with Bill Pickens, Activist By joan baum
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artin Luther King Day? Black History Month? “In my house,” says Bill Pickens, “black history’s 365 days of the year.” And not just in his house but wherever he has an audience to hear about his illustrious forebears. Such places include The Golden Pear in Sag Harbor, where Pickens recently held forth during our interview. Unknown to him, he’d attracted an interested eavesdropper who gushingly said hello on her way out and thanked him for all that she had heard. To say that William Pickens III is an institution on the East End is an understatement—he’s a walking history lesson who, if he knows he’ll be talking
about his family’s over-300-year history in this country, carries with him samples for show and tell—first editions, documents, photographs. Just a couple of weeks ago he participated in a panel discussion at the Southampton Historical Museum’s “Bells Are Ringing” 150th anniversary celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. The speakers’ table was covered with Pickens memorabilia and, needless to say, he spoke without notes, going over once again, with pride and enthusiasm, some of the highlights of his ancestors’ careers. The list includes Aunt Ida, “an honors graduate of Smith,” he beams, who became the first black WAVE officer, thus integrating the Navy. So many in his family were “the first African American to…” a phrase that
easily applies to Pickens himself. A 1954 graduate of Franklin Lane High School in Queens, he says he was always active in school politics and encountered no racial problems. The times were different, then, he points out, no drugs, no poverty, no gang warfare. Because he wanted to go away to college, he enrolled at the University of Vermont, “a liberal college in a liberal state.” He majored in history and political science and thought about pursuing a law degree. When he was elected president of the student body, he recalls that the school newspaper wrote: “Pickens is the first black president, let us hope he’s not the last.” He was also president of the senior men’s honor (Continued on next page )