Thank you Dave for a clear, concise presentation that helps point out the
multiple problems facing us in choosing how we want to live. Ultimate value
choices may not be agreed upon by everyone, though. And that has been apparent
in these posts. Thanks for being honest about how birds can be affected by each
form of energy's procurement / usage. That perspective helps to "round out" the
information needed for each person's decision-making. In the end, each of us is
required to make our own choices, and perhaps to enter into the public, or
political, arena to stand up for those choices. It has been good to voice our
thoughts and to encourage one another to keep perspective. For now I am
planning to continue to point out the beauties of nature to those around me and
to educate young people (and older ones, too) to appreciate and understand our
responsibility to care for and about this world that we have been blessed with.
Colleen Richards
---------- Original Message ----------
From: Dave Nutter <nutter.d...@me.com>
To: CayugaBirds-L b <cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu>
Subject: Re: [cayugabirds-l] Conservation vs Ecology
Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2023 17:43:26 -0400
Carl makes a valid point about the destructiveness to flora and fauna of
large scale solar arrays. Solar panels which cover huge fields should be called
mines, not farms. The arrays’ extraction of energy is industrial,
not biological, and it is done while trying to overcome natural systems, so the
solar arrays disrupt biology. By contrast, a farm harnesses biology using our
soil and rain, and it diverts some of the biological products to human purposes
in a repeatable annual process. When agriculture is practiced on the scale of a
family farm, it can do so in concert with plants and wildlife in hedgerows,
along streams, and around ponds, and agriculture’s incidental
waste products can be more easily absorbed and used by nature along all those
edges. Factory farms differ from traditional farms because with
“efficiency� of scale, they eliminate nature and
nature’s ability to handle agriculture’s side
effects. At large scale, the waste is no longer incidental and absorbed, it is
toxic. If farm land is abandoned, it can be reclaimed by plants and animals.
When the solar panels wear out in a couple decades, will the regulations make
it worth the effort and expense to recycle the old ones and install new ones?
Or will it be cheaper to abandon those arrays? On my daily walks I see metal
playground equipment in the woods because the City of Ithaca took it from where
the Children’s Garden was being built, and chucked it alongside
the old railroad grade, which became the Black Diamond Trail. I imagine
hundreds of acres of metal of a big solar array, but overgrown among trees,
vines and shrubs. For a solar array to work in our climate, vegetation must
suppressed. This can be done by pasturing sheep among them, which makes cute
advertising video, but how often is this practice used? How often is plant
suppression done instead by covering and/or poisoning the soil? This has
effects of heating the ground and speeding rain runoff. How often is plant
suppression among solar arrays done with fossil-fuel powered machinery which
also wastes the plant material? Maybe folks think that’s no big
deal because so much land area is already mown, wasting both plants and fossil
fuel, but I think mowing should be drastically scaled back. A reasonable sized
personal lawn is the area a person can keep mowed with a reel mower pushed by
hand without using fossil fuel. It’s not worth adding to the
destruction of the natural climate, flora, and fauna in order to have a bigger
lawn than one actually uses. So, yes, I agree, big solar arrays are poor for
plants & animals. I also see at least 3 other parts to the equation as we
evaluate the harm and benefit of solar arrays. What did the solar arrays
replace on the landscape? What were the solar arrays built instead of for
energy? How much energy do we need? In our moist temperate region, the land
was mostly forested until being cleared for agriculture, which was a big
investment. Abandoned agricultural land can, through succession, become
meadows, shrub fields, and secondary forest, all of which harbor a wide variety
of birds, but that’s a value we take for granted, not one with a
price tag on it. People generally like and are uplifted by wild birds, and some
of us are passionate about them. But abandoned farmland is considered
“unproductive� by those who tax the land, and therefore
also by those who own the land, so this habitat is apt to be shredded and
converted to a large scale solar array. I’ve certainly seen that
happen. If we as a society can literally value land which supports a diversity
of birds, then less will be turned into long-term non-bird-habitat. My
impression is that most agricultural land around here is for corn, and
I’ve also seen some cornfields replaced by solar arrays.
What’s the impact on birds? What do we lose when a cornfield is
replaced by a solar array? Cornfields are lousy habitat for breeding birds, but
blackbirds feed there in spring and autumn, and waterfowl may feed there in
winter. If old-fashioned manure is spread, then Horned Larks, Snow Buntings,
and a few Lapland Longspurs may visit to feed. And if they are quick about it,
Horned Larks might nest on the bare dirt before farmers get too active there.
Pesticides used on corn affects insects, birds, and aquatic animals beyond the
fields. What is the corn used for? Regulations require ethanol to be added to
gasoline. Ethanol is easy to make from corn, so lots of corn goes there, which
helps keep corn prices high and lots of land in corn, even though corn takes so
much energy to produce, what with pesticides & fertilizers & machines, that
adding ethanol from corn increases the carbon footprint of the gasoline. Maybe
the sway of corn-producing states, especially Iowa with its early caucus, is
some of the politics Carl mentioned. Another big use of corn is for
high-fructose corn syrup, a cheap sweetener which is a big ingredient of many
processed foods and beverages, and which has been implicated in our epidemics
of obesity and diabetes. Again, politics may sway how health is studied and the
public is informed. Another big use of corn is feed for livestock. While I
enjoy eating meat, cheese, yogurt, butter, ice cream, and eggs, I also know
that foods which are higher on the food chain, especially cattle, take an awful
lot of energy and water to produce, and in many cases produce a lot of
pollution. I don’t need lots of meat, not every day. And what I
eat doesn’t need to be totally dependent on corn. I can eat local
pork and eggs which are produced with less negative impact on wildlife, the
environment, and the climate. And if you eat dairy, wouldn’t you
prefer to support a farm where the family appreciates birds, practices farming
in a way that allows them to accrue a yard list of over 200 species, and
welcomes the birding public to appreciate the rarities such as the
Say’s Phoebe, Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, and Yellow Rail that
chose to visit? I’m talking about the Troyers’
Birdsong Meadow Farm in Candor. They have pastures and hayfields, where they
reserve space for a thriving colony of Bobolinks, but they don’t
feed their cows corn at all. The Troyer farm’s milk goes to
Organic Valley, in case you want to support conscientious bird-friendly
farming. But if a corn field, which uses lots of energy, and depletes topsoil,
and often results in erosion, and produces plenty of pesticide pollution, and
has dubious societal benefit, gets taken out of corn production, should it also
be taken out of biology by installing a huge solar array? Seneca Meadows shows
that, with effort, corn fields can return to exceptional wildlife habitat.
Similarly, Montezuma Wetlands Complex is on land that was once the vast
Montezuma Marshes which were a big barrier to building the Erie Canal, then
were drained and used as farm land (potatoes, then corn in my memory) with
dikes & channels to deliberately flood & drain the fields. Former corn fields
still have potential for birds. What are the solar arrays erected instead of,
in terms of energy sources? If it’s burning coal or petroleum, or
gas from the ground, those energy sources add greenhouse gases to the
atmosphere directly at large scale through burning. There is tremendous land
destruction and water pollution and air pollution from mining and washing coal,
and dealing with the leftover ash and the mining wastes. It turns out that
newly exposed rock is not benign; it has elements exposed and chemicals
produced which are toxic. Likewise, be happy you don’t live where
petroleum is produced, or shipped, or refined, because those places are toxic.
Much petroleum nowadays, like much gas mining, is extracted by fracking, which
involves pumping chemicals into the ground at high pressure in order fracture
the rock. Those liquids come back up even more toxic, saline, and radioactive
but must be “disposed of� somewhere. Dumped? Spread on
roads to melt ice? Sent to a wastewater treatment plant that was designed only
for digesting human feces? Some of the fracking chemicals make the groundwater
unsafe to drink. And some of the gases being mined leak into the groundwater or
out of the ground or leak out of systems designed to collect and contain them.
In some cases those gases are not what is being sought, so they are
deliberately vented or burned. Problem is, those gases are themselves
greenhouse gases, particularly methane, which is over 80 times stronger of a
greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So, what advertisers quaintly named
“natural� gas is anathema to nature. We know that the
addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere has caused the rising
atmospheric temperature, among other deleterious effects too numerous to list
here (but Alicia made a good start!), and those effects are in the process of
moving and removing bird habitats at an unprecedented pace. So,
we’re trying to weigh big negative consequences of large-scale,
popular fossil fuel use, consequences which are easy to overlook, because they
are either in someone else’s backyard, or they are everywhere but
gradual. Other energy sources include nuclear. I think the same PR people who
coined the lie “clean coal� also were hired by the nuclear
industry. Technically, a nuclear power plant isn’t spewing carbon
dioxide as it’s main product, but it uses plenty of energy, much
of which does spew CO2, and it has radioactive waste which, in the time scale
of human civilization, never goes away. The trail of radioactive waste starts
when & where uranium is mined. The Native Americans who were
“given� the apparent wasteland where that mining later
occurred now have pollution on their land, in their air, and in their desert
water, and they have a high cancer rate. Natural uranium is only 0.72% U-235,
the rest being U-238, but it must be 2% to 5% U-235 to be used in a typical
nuclear power plant (and much higher for weapons). This means that the great
majority of the mined uranium, (the U-238 which has been
“depleted� of some of it’s accompanying U-235)
would be waste. As of 2020 about 2 million tons of it had accumulated. But the
military found a use for the incredibly dense metallic form. Ask the folks in
Iraq about living where depleted uranium shells and bullets were used. When
they impact, they damage what they hit, then the shattered uranium
spontaneously burns when the bits are exposed to air, and being a heavy metal,
its oxide is toxic. And the process for “enriching� the
uranium for use in power plants uses a quarter of the energy that the power
plant would make (much more for weapons), and uses fluorine, whose compounds
are highly toxic and very powerful greenhouse gases. Everything used during
every step becomes radioactive waste. What’s left over after use
in a power plant is a much more diverse mess that we haven’t
figured out what to do with, so it accumulates in pools of water on site at
power plants. Hydropower sounds cool unless you live in the valley that is
being flooded or care about the fish who breed there or streamside habitats. I
happen to think wind turbines are beautiful, and one can farm among them, but I
don’t live next to one, and I’ve heard that many
people don’t want to. Certainly the idea of a blade flying off is
scary. Do wind turbines kill birds? Yes. How many? Hard to tell. I once tried
to help Bill Evans look for dead birds below a tall radio tower after a foggy
night during migration. If you think seeing a warbler in a leafy tree is hard,
try looking for it when you have no clues from sound, movement, habitat, shape,
color, or pattern. The dead birds had fallen randomly in the weeds below the
guy wires. They looked like bits of fluff because their contour feathers were
completely disheveled in odd positions that often obscured the wings & head. We
arrived early in the morning, hoping to find them before the knowledgeable
local scavengers, such as skunks, foxes, and crows. Some wind turbines are
erected in the ocean. I doubt that the remains of long-lived, slow-reproducing
birds such Puffins would be found below a wind turbine at sea. My point is
that, while fossil fuel use is rapidly wrecking the climate in numerous ways
for people and for birds and for lots more things which we care about, at the
same time all energy sources when scaled up have scaled up downsides, and few
of us would want to live where any one of those energy sources was about to be
added. Furthermore, just adding solar arrays doesn’t actually help
the fight against climate change. To fight climate change we need to stop using
fossil fuels. And we haven’t been doing that. Look at the Keeling
Curve. That’s the continuous record of atmospheric CO2 since 1958.
It records the biosphere breathing. The CO2 level falls a few parts per million
every year in spring and summer as the plants in the northern hemisphere
photosynthesize, then the CO2 level rises in autumn and winter as decay takes
over. But every single year the rise has been a little more than the drop. The
yearly averages form a smooth upward curve. It was below 320ppm in 1958 and
this year it’s poised to cross 420ppm. The amount of atmospheric
CO2 has risen by over 50% since the start of the Industrial Revolution and mass
coal use, but it’s risen by about a third just in my lifetime.
We’ve had at least 35 years of public awareness of fossil fuels,
greenhouse gases, climate change, and predictions of problems becoming reality,
alongside a steady disinformation campaign by the fossil fuel industry, who
still rake in record profits, despite renewable energy now being less expensive
than fossil fuels. What’s our current situation? According to a
report from NOAA last November, we have barely slowed the *increase* in the
emissions of CO2.
https://research.noaa.gov/2022/11/15/no-sign-of-significant-decrease-in-global-co2-emissions/#:~:text=The%20projection%20of%2040.6%20billion,highest%20annual%20total%20ever%20recorded.
According to that report, “Land use changes, especially
deforestation, are a significant source of CO2 emissions - equivalent to about
a tenth of the amount of CO2 coming from fossil fuel emissions.� In this
annual carbon accounting, “Planting new forests counterbalances
half the deforestation.� So, while planting trees is good, we are a very
long way from addressing the CO2 emissions from fossil fuels by planting trees.
We would need to increase that effort twenty-fold. The ocean will only absorb
a fraction of atmospheric CO2, and the report says, “the
ocean’s capacity to be a sink is finite�. Furthermore, it
says that warming of the water is reducing its ability to absorb CO2. Because
all types of large scale energy production are destructive, I think we should
do all we can, both personally, by encouraging others, and by promoting
policies, to increase energy efficiency, and to reduce energy use. And because
fossil fuels are driving climate change, we need to stop using them. So, yes,
solar arrays are ugly, and I’d rather there be land that housed a
diversity of birds. But all the other non-fossil-fuel options seemed worse, so
I get my electricity from a local solar array. At least my energy use is solar
on a net basis. And I conserve, with a well-insulated house that
doesn’t even connect to gas. My car uses fossil fuel, but it is
very efficient, and I rarely use it. I bicycle and walk for local trips. My
birding by car is limited. I drove to Troyer’s to see the
spectacular Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, rationalizing that I may never go to its
home in Texas, despite how attractive Texas birds are to me. Otherwise most of
my limited car-birding is also car-pooling. It’s good to get to
know the local neighborhood birds well. And to appreciate that traveling longer
distances is a luxury with costs to the things we would travel for. Keep
checking and eventually a rare or novel bird will come to you, like that Little
Gull I found by the Red Lighthouse, or a new year-yard bird like the Eastern
Kingbird that distracted me while I was writing this.
- - Dave Nutter
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