For a week in early summer, when the world was making its way to the mecca of Cape Cod, we found ourselves in the middle of nowhere, the lush folds of farmland west of the Catskills. Our host said, “You’ve got to see the Hanford mill” and took us to downtown East Meredith, NY, to check it out.
The Hanford mill started operating in the 1820s and is still going, now as a museum. I was prepared to be bored. Since early in life I had had water power filed under hopelessly ancient and feeble, if picturesque. But I had never seen a mill actually work before.
Getting the tour, we learn first of all that the technology starts not with sticking a wheel in a waterfall, as I had thought, but with the diversion of a small part of a stream to create a mill pond with a sluiceway to control the flow over the waterwheel.
As we approach the mill building I hear a high- pitched whine and then see the large circular saw blade making short work of ripping tree trunks into boards. Aha, I think, no way that’s water- power–they’re using electricity.
Inside the building, someone raises a board to allow water from the mill pond to trickle over a large, wide, barrel shaped wheel, filling narrow troughs on its surface. It’s just a small flow, but as the troughs fill, the wheel picks up speed, putting gears and wheels and belts into motion, all of which is translated into the ferocious turning of the blade I had assumed was running with electricity. All that power, to reduce trees to lumber, from just a stream of water diverted from a small creek. Amazing.
And then it hits me: it’s not just about what it is; it’s about what it isn’t. No fracking involved (a big issue in that part of upstate New York which we had been discussing with our friends), no guys risking their lives in holes in the ground so we can have coal-fired electric plants, no oil leak disasters, no wars fought over oil. No damoclean sword of nuclear power hanging over the world—over Cape Cod. Such a big portion of the world’s woes is just our energy troubles.
In all that 19th century energy world, just this bit of stream and this clever machinery.
What a quantum leap of efficiency and labor-saving was such hydro power over the previous technology, two guys wearing themselves out at either end of a long saw. You can easily appreciate the logic of the new technology. What isn’t so clear, when you get thinking about it: why exactly did we go on from here? or at least how did we get from there to here?
Until recently this would have seemed a laughably romantic question. Of course historians can trace all the compelling reasons why our energy history developed as it did. And part of that history is the idea deeply ingrained in our culture that newer is better; if we can come up with a new technology we ought to employ it. If you build it they will (with a little help from advertising) use it.
But it has become possible, with certain cutting-edge technologies to wonder whether (with genetic modification, say ) we really want to go down that road, or (with nukes) what if we hadn’t.
Nuclear fission was one of the great products of human ingenuity. But given all the misery in its wake, the seeming insoluble waste disposal problem, Fukushima a running sore of radiation, Germany and Japan trying desperately to reverse nuclear course, the several plant closings in the US within the last year, it is not unreasonable to ask whether on balance Pandora’s box (as even its advocates admit it is) should ever have been opened.
It’s still a radical thought, but one that’s becomingthinkable: sometimes the most important part of a technology is the wisdom to know how or even whether to employ it.
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