Doing One Good Thing

A week or so ago we had solar panels installed on top of our garage.

The decision was a "no-brainer": 40% of the cost will be deducted from our federal (30%) and state (10%) taxes; we will not pay electricity bills; and El Paso Electric will effectively pay us 12 cents per kilowatt hour for the electricity we generate; and that 12-cent price is guaranteed for twelve years.

The system will pay for itself within eight years.

More importantly, we are contributing, in our small way, to solving one of this country’s many serious problems – and to a cleaner, healthier environment.

A recent opinion piece in the Sun-News, by a lady sympathetic to big energy interests, urged New Mexicans to repeal the program entirely. She trumpeted that coal and nuclear power are cheaper in the short-run, implying those are the direction New Mexicans should go. Coal is as dirty as power gets, and increasing our use of it would cost far more, in health and dollars, in the long run. Increasing use of nuclear power is simply idiotic.

Nuclear power plants are dangerous, as recent events in Japan should suggest. Further, their waste must be contained for tens of thousands of years. When we build and operate a nuclear power plant we undertake to safeguard its waste for several times the number of years (2011) since the death of Jesus Christ. No government or company has lasted even a small fraction of that time. A safety "guarantee" by the U.S., New Mexico, or the nuclear industry may sound good, but will any of them be around another ten or twenty thousand years? As our economy tanks and governments and companies cut corners, how can we have faith that either will continue to try their best? Even with the best intentions and careful planning, events (an unprecedented tidal wave in Japan; perhaps an unprecedented tornado in the U.S., terrorism, or a strong earthquake in a region that hasn’t had one for thousands of years?) happen.

New Mexico desperately needs to increase its use of clean and renewable energy.

Several points are unarguable:
1. The country must find energy alternatives that are safe, clean, and do not need to be purchased from other countries. With energy so critical to both our economy and our security, we need greater control over our supply of it.
2. We’re at a critical stage in human contribution to global warming and environmental pollution, and urgently need to be burning less and less oil and gas if we hope to bequeath our children and grandchildren a liveable world.
3. New Mexico is one of the two finest states in the nation for solar energy.

4. Most of the citizens of Doña Ana County could use the kind of financial break you get with solar panels – and, since loans are available if needed, most homeowners can do as we did. (The tax credits can be used over several years.)

However, if you are thinking of going solar, think fast.

If you go solar this year, you get a better deal than you will next year – and El Paso Electric is fighting tooth and nail to get the New Mexico Public Regulatory Commission to weaken the incentives for solar energy.
The case for solar is simple: it’s efficient, particularly in New Mexico; sunlight won’t run out this century, and the sun doesn’t charge us $100 or $200 every month for using its rays; and there’s little or no harm to the environment.

El Paso Electric is asking the PRC to reduce the price paid for solar energy to 10 cents per kilowatt hour (and to two cents for some) and reduce the term of the contracts from twelve years to eight. Last year, in a similar effort that failed, EPE provided figures indicating that their requested reduction would save the average customer . . . less than a penny month. Asked about that, an EPE witness testified that this was highly significant to people on fixed incomes – as if that, rather than its own business interest, motivated EPE.
Meanwhile, El Paso Electric also just announced a 43% increase in profits, comparing the second quarter of this year with the second quarter of 2010. EPE correctly points out that profits spiked partly because of the weather; but EPE, whose stock continues to rise and survived the recent stock-market madness, is in very good shape.

The PRC should resist EPE’s efforts to weaken the solar initiative in order to maximize already healthy profits. The New Mexico Legislature should act to strengthen a program that is proving quite successful. New Mexico can be a model for the nation – unlike Texas, where the oil and gas industry is paramount.

We’re in an unfortunate corner of the world as far as mounting political opposition to EPE: in northern New Mexico rate cases, the Renewable Energy Industry Association and other groups routinely intervene; in Texas, El Paso Electric serves a larger population than it does in southern New Mexico; but since only a small part of New Mexico buys electricity from EPE, we’re under the public-interest radar. Last year only one intervenor – Mark Westbrock of Positive Energy, a New Mexico solar power company – filed testimony and other documents with the PRC.

You can help. Write the Commissioners. Their addresses are readily available on the PRC’s web-site, www.nmprc.state.nm.us - just click on each commissioner’s picture.. (So are the parties’ briefs – you don’t have to take my word for anything!) "Our" commissioner is Ben J. Hall, but you should send all five commissioners a copy of your letter or e-mail.

[The above column appeared in today's Las Cruces Sun-News]

couple of other things for which there wasn't space in the column:

-- Ideally, you should visit with two or three local solar installation companies; we did, and learned a lot and felt all the more comfortable with our decisions; there are some issues and differences of opinion, and after hearing three perspectives we felt confident in our read on the issues and the people.

 

-- if you decide to go solar this year, do it soon; the solar installation companies aren't necessarily so backed up -- yet -- but the process isn't necessarily instantaneous: unless you are quite knowledgeable, a good company will want to analyze your past couple of electricity bills and talk with you before recommending a specific number of panels; then it can take a week or two to get El Paso Electric's signature on the contract, and you defnitely want that before you go forward.  In short, waiting until December could make it tough to get this done this year.

-- among the issues are:

a central inverter vs. micro-inverters, or a compromise (micro-inverters of some sort are definitely wave of the future, but they're also quite new, and produced by companies without much track record; and some of the apparent disadvantages of a central inverter are not as significant in our area as they might be elsewhere);

panels on your roof or on a free-standing array [free-standing allows for panels that track the sun, and are thus marginally more effective, but for most of us the roof is the better choice, since it doesn't screw up your view or take up space you could be using for garden or terrace or trees);

-- whether to get more panels than you need (beyond the number of panels that produces approximately the amount of electricity you need each month, you can still get paid for sending electrcity to EPE, but you get paid a good deal less; on the other hand, getting more panels than you need could, depending on your situation and roof space, (a) provide for future expansion, (b) be a reasonable investment on which there'll be a respectable return and which is highly "green."

An issue that -- regrettably -- wasn't much of a choice was whether to construct a system that would allow you to keep producing and using electricity even if El Paso Electric Company were completely disabled for weeks or months by some natural or other disaster.  For example, my friend Bud, who lives on our land just North of Doña  Ana County, has used a completely stand-alone solar energy system for more than a quarter-century, since his retirement as a professor at NMSU.  We're just too far from the nearest electric lines.  In thinking about getting solar here, I'd have liked, even at slightly more cost, to have a system that, if EPE went down, could function that way for as long as need be, with batteries; but it turns out that such a "dual" system just isn't cost-effective.  Rather than adding another ten or twenty per cent to your overall cost, it adds more like seventy-five or ninety.  This was my one disappointment in getting into solar energy, but was clearly true of all three companies we talked with.  I hope there's some change on this within the next few years; but I suspect there's not so much demand for it. 

-- It takes a couple of days for the actual installation, which may include making sure of the condition of your roof where the panels will be.  The folks who did our installation were businesslike, competent, and unobtrusive.   They were a pleasure to have around; and while I'm a complete idiot about such things, a neighbor who's more knowledgeable came by and took a look at their work and was impressed.

Seasons

To most of the world, the desert’s seasons are a secret. That’s why a few human visitors each year, relying on the obvious dryness of arroyos that look as if they hadn’t seen water for decades, park in them and lose their car, or their lives.

As everyone in Doña Ana County knows, the seasons this year have been even more extreme than usual: a record freeze in February that killed plants that had been around for decades; a record drought; and some violent rainstorms of late. It’s been cheering to watch the revival of various plants that appeared dead from the freeze.

Meanwhile, Dael and I begin learning more about the rhythm of the desert.

Our friend Bud, who has lived on our land just north of Dona Ana county for more than a quarter-century now, records everything. All summer dozens of hummingbirds buzz and battle around his place .  (After all, for migrating birds the Rio Grande is the Interstate, and our land borders the river.)  Every year but one they have returned on the same day. Only once in all those years, he says, have they failed to appear on April 1^st. They were two days late this year, perhaps because of that freeze..

Among our friends is this fellow I photographed behind the house a year ago, when we were just visiting.

We were quite taken with him. Dael discovered him under a datura leaf. Datura plants are poison to us and many other creatures, but he loves ‘em.   He also felt safe in them from predators:

He’s a sphinx moth caterpillar, I’m told.   Manduca sexta.

To the thrasher, he’s delicious.

To our neighbor, he’s the enemy.

He’s also known as a tobacco hornworm in South Carolina, and mistakenly called a tomato hornworm elsewhere; because along with datura he likes, and destroys, tomato and tobacco plants.

We were happy to see him – or, more precisely, one of his descendants – again this year. We photographed him hanging upside down from a tomato plant; and here (at right) he looks as if he’s peering over a wall, looking for more plants to destroy. He has a neat face. (It took me quite awhile, actually, to realize that the end with the red horn -- green in young ones -- is the rear.)

This year, now that we live here and have our own tomato plants, he did us a good deal of damage. His green is so indistinguishable from the curved leaves of a tomato plant that you can look right at him a while without seeing him. Rather than killing him and his brethren, we carry them around back to various datura plants.

More recently we have found a several more, including some young ones, on a bush near the house.   Here’s a shot from this morning.  It suggests how effective her camouflage is.

At the same time, her elder brother whose photographs we took only two or three weeks ago, is no longer a caterpillar. At dusk and sometimes dawn, we seem him fluttering about. He still favors the datura plants, but also likes bird of paradise, the desert willow, and even . . . the hummingbird feeder:

He’s a colorful fellow, and big for a moth.

I hope to get a better shot of him soon, without some ugly man-made feeder in it.

Meanwhile, here’s a quick video bit in which he visits the desert willow (the other night) and the feeder (this morning). Unfortunately, the feeder remains of interest to others:

Dael says these critters live just 30-50 days.  They "wander" in search of a good spot, then pupate underground.  (They spend 18 days in their tiny burrows.)  As with hummingbirds and orioles and much of the natural world, the males are more colorful than the females.  There's even a word for that, I just learned: sexually dimorphic.

I'd like to say something profound about the brevity of their lives and ours, but it's dusk, and perhaps I can improve on that video right now.

Desert Photography

In the Desert

We live in the desert, a world so quiet and calm that folks passing through briefly on the way from their cars to their houses might think it was peaceful. In fact, it’s a constant battle for survival.

In early afternoon I spot an unusually large bird flying low down an arroyo behind our house. Dael says it’s one of the golden eagles who nest higher in the foothills of the Organs. As we watch, the eagle dives suddenly and comes up with a rabbit. The rabbit is heavy enough that the eagle lands to enjoy his meal, so I wander out that way with my camera. 

I don’t get any particularly good shots of the eagle, but on the way toward him I spot a desert tortoise, upside down and long dead in the arroyo, so close to the house I’m surprised I haven’t seen him before. On the way back I turn him over, and look closely. The shell is intact, and rather an appealing pattern; and his head still stares out from the front of it, though the eyes are now just huge holes, like the eyes of the mummies in Guanajuato.

It has been a difficult year: record drought more than 200 rainless days surrounding a near-record freeze. Did the turtle die of thirst? Heat? Cold? Did a coyote toss him around in a vain effort to break through his shell? (I don’t think so.) In any case, he has a certain dignity, in death. Most of his body has dried out, or been consumed by ants; but those eye-holes keep on staring.

Hours later I’m standing on the old wooden deck out back, watching the late afternoon light catch Scott’s Orioles and make the yellow parts of them explode with brightness. Just below I spot a rabbit, just lounging around like a cat or a dog. The light’s lousy, except for the way the late sunlight back-lights the rabbit’s thin ears. But I’m laughing as I shoot the picture.

Next I pass the hummingbird feeder just as one of the birds pauses to fuel up.

The sun, even lower now but still bright, turns the bird’s throat a bright purple. As I walk, I glance at the screen on the back of the camera to see how the focus was.

Suddenly there’s someone else just in front of me, looking at me, motionless:

a snake, seven or eight feet of snake. He isn’t the young rattler I saw a couple of weeks go. I think he’s the local bullsnake. After a startled moment, we just stare at each other. He flicks his tongue, I flick my camera, and we both know neither means the other any harm. (Bull-snakes, it turns out, are among the continent’s largest. They sometimes use their similarities to rattlesnakes as a defense mechanism, beating the ground with their tails to simulate the sound of rattles; but sometimes people shoot them out of fear that they’re rattlers.)

I call to Dael, and tell her to join me but not pass me. The two of us stare at the snake. He’s beautiful and strong. He stares straight ahead, not much caring that we’re there, and then I realize why: hardly a foot in front of him, so still that I’ve been standing here a couple of minutes without seeing it, a baby bunny stands beside a small cactus. Apparently he hopes his stillness will deceive the snake. It ain’t working too well.

We watch awhile, wondering how it will turn out. Finally the bunny, afraid of us or the snake or both, jumps and tries to run, but bumps into the rocks, and the snake strikes and misses. The bunny, scampers away along the bottom of the rock pile. The snake turns and follows, but it’s not a close race.

We follow too. The snake slithers along through the rocks in the direction of the bunny. His sinewy form catches the reddish late-afternoon light. We feel glad the prey escaped – but apologetic for the snake’s disappointment. Maybe our presence distracted him at the critical moment.

We’re also grateful. It’s too bad something usually has to die, in order for something else to live; but it’s a fact of life, and – as with most facts of life – it’s better to see it clearly than turn away.

The deer eat the leaves off the pomegranate tree for which we dug a hole in this difficult terrain just a couple of weeks earlier. The coyotes’ nocturnal howling and the occasional scat of bobcat remind us to keep our cat inside. The occasional scorpion, tarantula, or black widow reminds us to pay a little attention even in the house. But these inconveniences also remind us we’re a part of something.

P.S. Below is a 47 second video of the bull snake on his search for the escaped baby rabbit:

Coming Home

New Mexico has felt like home for a long time, although I’ve been elsewhere too long.

In August 1969 I was a New York City cabdriver. I’d dropped out of college in 1967 to work with kids in Harlem, and then started driving the cab to make money. Earlier in 1969 I’d delivered a drive-away car to someone in Arizona. Initially I drove 48 straight hours, on plenty of coffee and cigarettes. At sunset on that second day I hit Albuquerque. The sun was setting. It was beautiful. When I got back to New York, I kept thinking about New Mexico. I decided the best way to move here would be to go back to college. UNM wanted a $10 deposit with an application, but NMSU only demanded $6. Easy call.

I thought I’d be here a year, but stayed until August 1977. I wrote poems and fiction, shot photographs and movies, worked on a Hollywood film, lived out on a farm in Brazito, advocated an end to the Viet Nam War, camped in the Gila, and eventually worked as a full-time journalist, starting a Las Cruces Bureau for the El Paso Times in February 1974. I loved it here. When I left, I figured I’d be back in three years. It was home.

It took a long time to get back, by way of Massachusetts, San Francisco, China and Tibet, Washington-D.C., Perú, and other stops. I’ve worked on films in Kuwait, been a trial lawyer in San Francisco, wandered around various countries on the cheap with a camera, published a few poems, and ridden a lot of miles on motorcycles. For decades I visited New Mexico frequently, always planning to move back here. I only managed it when I finally met Dael. When I returned from Perú in late 2008, we went out together and realized, pretty much instantly, that we wanted to be together ‘til death parts us. She fell in love with New Mexico, too, and is of stronger character than I, so all my babbling about getting back to New Mexico finally got real.

Home is the oldest and probably the smallest home out in Talavera, a stretch of desert I used to dirt bike on my way up to Soledad or Ackenbach Canyon or Cuevas. There wasn’t anything out here then but a few dirt roads and, hidden up in the hills, the Cox Ranch. Now there’s a string of often obscenely showy mansions. It’s sad.

But in late 2009, when we were looking at houses in town, Kevin Wilson showed us this place, and it seemed like us. Small. Unpretentious. Open to the four acres of desert land around it. Breezy. Quiet. And, we could afford it.

We find it hard to drag our asses into town. There is too much to do at home. Besides planting a few trees and just watching the world go by and trying to write the occasional poem, there’s a surprisingly varied world of flora and fauna to keep up with. It’s a full-time job just watching (and, yeah, photographing and videotaping) the comings and goings of hummingbirds, road-runners, woodpeckers, various kinds of birds and snakes, vinegaroons and scorpions, deer, coyote, and the pair of golden eagles we see at a distance now and then.  I find it endlessly fascinating – but will mercilessly edit whatever I write about it here, I promise!

Being back in Las Cruces has engendered a mix of feelings. Of course I’m appalled at how much bigger it is, even as I enjoy some of the benefits of that growth, notably a greater variety of restaurants, a minor league baseball team, a greater selection of food (at the Mountain View Co-Op, Toucan, and the Farmers’ Market), and the extension of water-lines and electricity out to our stretch of desert.

People I drank with or argued with (or both) have become names on buildings or street-signs. Bob Munson, Jake Hands, and others.

The hot spring in the Gila we used to backpack to and camp at for days without seeing anyone has a name, and the Sun-News recently printed a detailed set of directions to it.

A guy I wrote about during perhaps his first trial, when he was a visibly green young lawyer, has been a judge for years.

The Fountain Theater, where I acted in a couple of plays, is now home to a great film society that shows excellent and relatively new films that otherwise wouldn’t make it to town.

Much more, though, is familiar. Particularly the intimacy with some old friends, and the quickness with which new friends sprout and grow out here.

This blog will share, with friends and strangers, some political and cultural observations, as well as notes (and photographs) on the wars and habits of the various creatures that surround us out here – and perhaps other matters, as well.

In a general way, the new blog results from the move. Home again. More specifically, I’m starting it today because I’ll also be starting a column soon in the Sun-News, a fortnightly Sunday column. In a sense, it’s like coming full circle: when I was the Las Cruces Bureau Chief for the El Paso Times (a fancy title that initially referred to just me and my dog – we lived in a school bus and didn’t even have a telephone until the Times paid to install a telephone pole next to the bus - but eventually included a staff and a small office on Water Street) I wrote a column three days a week; so maybe I’m back where I started.