backtalk
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
red, blue, and green I enjoyed “Renewable Energy
Catches On in Red America,” by Michael Behar (Spring 2010), but I am puzzled by people’s continuing tendency to think of one issue at a time, rather than to mobilize multipronged efforts for conservation. When choosing appropriate sites for solar panels, step one should be to ensure that no endangered species or critical habitat will be violated, and step two should be to consider local water needs, not just electricity. In areas around Tucson, where we expect to have significant water-supply issues in a few years, many people are beginning to harvest rainwater for various uses, while others are single-mindedly thinking about setting up large arrays of solar panels. If water people and power people would communicate with one another, they would realize that they could put gutters on solar panels and pipe off the rain to storage areas. In Tucson, which gets about 12 inches of rain a year, a square mile of solar panels could collect 208,529,432 gallons of water. —charles j. cole
Tucson, Arizona
FUEL FOR THOUGHT There are a couple of points that could stand correction in “Driven,” by Craig Canine (Spring 2010). Honda’s first automobile was not the N600 of 1970 (its first to be exported to the United States) but rather the S500 of 1964, a tiny sports car. And Honda’s 1984 CRX-HF was by no means the first mass-produced car capable of 50 miles per gallon. There was a raft of tiny cars available in Europe and Japan, some of which were exported in small quantities to the United States. Some of these two-cylinder, air-cooled cars could approach 60 miles per gallon under the right conditions. —JIM EMERSON Portland, Oregon
LEFTOVERS I’m amazed that Laura Wright, the author of “How to Wage War on Food Waste” (Spring 2010), and her husband, Peter, apparently do not possess a freezer! What’s left from our Thanksgiving bird (organic, free-range) gets segregated into white meat, dark meat, and carcass for soup, then dated
onearth@nrdc.org
and frozen in freezer bags whose crossed-out labels attest to their six or seven previous uses, ranging from blanched snow peas to leftover corn cut off the cobs from last summer’s garden to three-month-old spaghetti sauce. Likewise the whipped mashed potatoes, even though they’re not as good as the freshly made portion. The wilting greens and vegetables, once sautéed with onion and garlic, could thriftily serve as a soup base. I can’t speak to the half-used tubs of hummus; my heart is broken. But I too would toss the sour milk unless I was on the cusp of making corn bread. Anyway, the illustration is arresting. And I know the putative waste was to make a point. —MAXINE KUMIN Warner, New Hampshire
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To Garden
1 4 onearth
SUMMER 2010
development to a study of the cumulative impacts of all of the wind and solar energy projects in the county on birds, bats, and other biological resources as well as to a plan that can mitigate those effects. We need renewable energy, but not at any cost. We need it properly sited to minimize the impacts on wildlife. —GARRY GEORGE Chapter Network Director Audubon California Los Angeles, California
It’s this bottom-of-the-garden fierce democracy of leaf and branch—all the tall green things competing for the light—you have to hack at, trying to let the mountain in, something big to reckon with at last, beyond brittle fuchsia branches and the awful blood-drawing, beyond-argument persistence of briars: how they bow to the blade, then come back.
—By Eamon Grennan
illustration by blair thornley
Although master planner Lorelei Oviatt correctly states that no condor has been killed by a wind farm, these birds are rapidly expanding their range toward the wind projects in Kern County, and the current fast pace of permitting turbines, especially on ridges and in condor habitat, increases the risk of this unfortunate event occurring. Audubon California urges Oviatt and Kern County to dedicate a portion of the tax resources from renewable energy