Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
A Man of the Earth Reaps the Good Life
Nancy Harmon Jenkins, New York Times
STANDING in the middle of his garden one sunny morning, Angelo Pellegrini leaned on his ever-present walking stick and cast a grave eye over a dozen transplants of Swiss chard that he had set out from a seedbed earlier in the day. As transplants often do, the chard looked weary, flopped over on its side in the dusty garden soil, and the old man shook his head as if reprimanding naughty students.
Dr. Pellegrini, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Washington who has written about food, wine and the good life, has been gardening with enthusiasm for a good number of his 86 years, but he was as chagrined as a novice at the misbehaving transplants. Nonetheless, he brightened as he showed a visitor around the rest of the 1,500-square-foot garden.
Despite the uncooperative chard, the garden was flourishing with an abundance of vegetables and herbs: carrots, beets and turnips in tidy rows; clumps of green lettuce and trailing cucumber vines; poles of climbing beans and low bush beans; sturdy onions, shallots and leeks; just a few tomato and pepper plants (”They don’t grow well here, you know”); lush thickets of raspberries and cascade berries, deep-purple berries that are native to the Pacific Northwest, and along the garden’s eastern edge, artichokes and cardoons, their big, feathery, silver-gray leaves forming a graceful border.
”I can feed five people right the year round from the produce of this garden,” Dr. Pellegrini said, referring to the time when his three children, now long since grown, were still living at home. ”Everything I need is right here, including 16 different culinary herbs.” With a sweep of his hand he included the paved terrace behind the house, where peach and fig trees shared space with an immense grapevine that extended in two directions to shade a dining area.
There are three places in the world where Dr. Pellegrini is happiest: this garden, his kitchen and the cellar below the kitchen where he makes and stores his wine. It is a small universe, but filled with friends and family, as it so often is, it contains everything he cherishes. An accomplished cook and gardener – and a wine maker of distinction – Dr. Pellegrini understands and articulates, as few others have been able to, the connection between what goes on the table and what grows in the soil.
…His goal in life, Dr. Pellegrini said, was to be ”the interpreter of the Italian immigrant experience in America,” but in his best-known books – especially ”The Unprejudiced Palate” and the newly reissued ”Food-Lover’s Garden,” (Lyons & Burford; $12.95) – he has gone beyond that to evoke what it means to be Italian, wherever Italians may find themselves in the world.
What comes through most strongly in his writing, above and beyond the intelligence and warmth of recollection, is a very Italian sense of the connection between the garden and the table, and of the way quality in food as well as in wine begins with attention to how the plant is grown.
(9 August 1989)
You can’t really call yourself a foodie, unless you’ve read Angelo Pellegrini — one of the pioneers of local food. I discovered his books in the remainders bin of a bookstore many years ago, and have been a fan ever since. He was born of a poor family in Tuscany, Italy, and moved to the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century. He writes movingly about the contrast between scrabbling for food in his native land, and the quality and abundance of food (and also the waste) in America.
I’m not sure how long this article from the New York Times archives will be outside the paywall, so you may want to look at it soon. Thank you, O spirits of the NY Times, for making this available to the public. -BA.
A Giant Passes: Dr. Paul MacCready (1925-2007)
EV World
Dr. Paul MacCready passed away in his sleep yesterday, 28 August 2007 from a recently diagnosed illness. He was a long-time supporter of EV World, as well as a pioneer in the development of energy efficient mobility technologies from the human-powered Gossamer Condor to the EV1 electric car. We here at EV World offer our condolences to his family, friends and colleagues. All of us will greatly miss him.
I clearly remember both the first and last times I met Paul MacCready, whom I had long admired since the exploits of the Gossamer Condor, the first human powered flight.
The first time was at an electric vehicle conference in Phoenix, Arizona. He graciously paused to talk and pose for a photography with one of his microlight aircraft models, which he’d been flying around the exhibition hall. Clearly, flight was his passion, and the financial pillar upon which the company he built, AeroVironment (AVinc) continues to prosper.
The last time was just outside his Monrovia, California offices as he was getting ready to drive home from work in his Toyota RAV4 electric car, which he was also indirectly responsible for helping create when his company developed the prototype of the electric car that would one day become the General Motors EV1. I took some more pictures of him and promised that we’d do a follow-up interview with him. Sadly, I didn’t keep my promise and now that interview will never happen.
I would love to have asked him his views today on the future of electric cars now that we appear to have the battery chemistry to make them happen, which we didn’t have back when he and his team, led by Alec Brooks and Wally Rippel first tackled the problem of a modern electric vehicle. Those two gentlemen have since moved over to Tesla to continue their passionate pursuit of EVs.
When I interviewed him back nearly 10 years ago now, he made an interesting comment about not thinking the electric car alone was the answer to the challenges facing personal mobility in the 21st century. When I asked him what he would design differently on the EV1, he remarked that he wasn’t sure he’d even build the car today. Here’s what he said to me back then.
The one great thing this whole electric car mandate in California has done,” MacCready observed, “it’s got people to start… thinking more broadly about what is mobility and what do we need. Gee, adding a zero emission car that maybe doesn’t take any energy to the car fleet of California, doesn’t do anything for pollution. Getting rid of an old car that’s polluting a lot, that helps. But one more nice car just adds to traffic and parking problems. We have to look at the whole system of mobility rather than just a vehicle.
(29 August 2007)
LibDems’ green proposals show up the paucity of the Labour and Tory visions
Ashley Seager, Guardian
—
At last someone in the mainstream of politics is taking climate change seriously. So it is a surprise that the Liberal Democrats’ weighty new document on how it would achieve a carbon-neutral, non-nuclear Britain by 2050 received so little attention when it was published last week.
One reason was that it had appeared a few days earlier on the party’s website, making many journalists think it was somehow old news. The odd one did a story about how we’d all have to stop using cars with internal combustion engines one day, as if clean air in towns and cities was not a valid aim. But otherwise there was little coverage.
But when one of the main parties comes up with a coherent strategy for dealing with climate change, both at home and abroad, it deserves close attention, particularly as the Guardian has exposed in recent weeks that Labour has made very little progress in moving to a sustainable energy economy, and knows it.
The Tories, too, although talking about taxing flights, will duck serious policy changes when their Quality of Life report emerges later this month.
The LibDem document makes for fascinating reading. It suggests a huge improvement in energy efficiency through a mix of measures such as insulation, renewable generation methods such as wind, tidal and solar, and the strengthening of international carbon-trading schemes.
(3 September 2007)
Press release from Liberal Democrats: Liberal Democrats reveal plans for zero carbon Britain
Zero Carbon Britain – Taking a Global Lead (46-page PDF of the full report)
Against the grain: Richard Hawkins on alternative energy technologies
scenta
Although technologies like solar and wind power may have entered the mainstream, it’s questionable whether the spirit that guided their development – a fully sustainable future – has. Despite the amount of ‘green noise’, campaigners claim, not enough solid change is taking place….and time is running out.
We spoke to Richard Hawkins, a leading voice in alternative energy technologies.
Q: Can you tell us a little about yourself?
A: I work for a Public Interest Research Centre. We’ve published a report with The Centre for Alternative Technology [CAT] called Zero Carbon Britain, which is an alternative energy strategy for Britain.
I am heavily involved with climate change policy. This includes current Government policy as well as the better options that are out there that the government aren’t pursuing.
Q: What do you mean by alternative technology?
A: It [the phrase] has lost a lot of its value as the mainstream has caught up. Windfarms and solar energy aren’t alternative any more – they’re becoming much more mainstream.
From the subtitle of our report [an alternative energy strategy] we meant for it to tie in to CAT but also to provide a counterpoint to the government strategy.
… Q: One of the currently ‘in vogue’ sustainable energy ideas is that of carbon capture, how do you feel about it?
A: Within our report we ran an ‘energy model’ over 20 years to see if Britain could become totally fossil-fuel-free with the right policies in place. Within that, we saw a place for carbon capture and storage in the interim, if it can come in quicker than the current estimation.
But it is only a maximum of 85 per cent efficient, though there are some people working on theoretical models that are 100 per cent efficient. If you factor in peak oil and energy security it is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. It just makes us more dependent on something that is finite and will run out.
Where we do see it being useful is if it is used with biomass (wood chips, wood pellets, etc). If you use carbon capture and storage on a smaller plant there, you’ve potentially got a carbon negative technology. When we’ve looked at the climate science numbers it looks as if we’ve a need for those as well to help us out.
It does have a place and it needs to be researched. It could have a place as an interim technology but we don’t see it being a long term technology, certainly on fossil fuels.
(3 September 2007)
