Rights of Way

I’m in the middle of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and I have to say I’m intrigued. It was published in 1962 (the year I was born), and while I have heard it referenced again and again over the years, this is my first time reading it.

I’m intrigued because of how different the world appears to have been before it was written. Before I was a kid. My relationship to chemicals, whether they are pesticides or herbicides is markedly different from the audience she was writing to.

And I’m intrigued by the overlaps I see between my experiences and the ones she so vividly describes. The first of which is Clear Lake, California, which she uses as an example of the biological concentration of poisons. They set out to kill a gnat, and end up poisoning a lake. Fascinating.

I’ve never been to Clear Lake, but my guess is that some of the folks at the Shadow Conference are from that area, and some may know all about the scenario of which Rachel Carson writes. I believe Kumar mentions Clear Lake in his blog Fueled for Thought.

I wonder what Rachel Carson would say to a county that passes a law forbidding the introduction of genetically modified crops.

Even more intriguing to me is her descriptions of the chemical treatment of Rights of Way.
She doesn’t bother arguing, in 1962, that we have no right to appropriate a “right of way” from nature in the first place. While I think that could readily be debated now, she didn’t dare. She wanted to make her point, and “radical” thinking would not have helped her.

I have some experience with rights of way. In my brief stint as a real estate developer, I cased surrounding developments and borrowed and stole as many good ideas as I could.
One which I borrowed was the concept of “buried electric.” I have made many trips to Wally Kaufmann’s Saralyn, and each time the spectacular apple trees are overshadowed by overhead lines.

For me, buried electric was an aesthetic consideration. I wanted to see woods, not poles and wires. And “nature” as I have found it, is rather different, I suspect, than it was from the way Rachel Carson found it.

From a human health perspective, burying the electric lines moves the harmful electro-magnetic radiation closer to the humans. Better thirty feet in the air than three feet in the ground. I was willing to take that trade-off in the name of more enticing scenes, and I must say I was somewhat amazed at how no one has ever asked or cared about electro-magnetic radiation on any of the real estate projects I have participated in.

My guess is that she would be astonished to hear people even talking about electro-magnetic radiation. She successfully linked nuclear radiation to chemical fallout in an era in which folks understood the former, and had never considered the latter. My guess is that power lines were not on her radar screen.

While she decries the wholesale spraying of roadside right of ways and the work of “agricultural engineers “who “speak blithely of “chemical plowing” in a world that is urged to beat its plowshares into spray guns,” she may not have imagined increased rates of leukemia found in residents beneath high voltage power lines.

Reading Silent Spring I was reminded of a conversation my neighbor Joe once had with the crew who came to mow his power line. To put this in perspective I should say that the work of bush-hogging power lines in North Carolina often falls to Nascar loving, Mountain Dew drinking, Neanderthals who leave nothing but litter and destruction in their wake.

Joe rightfully pointed out that the Dogwoods do not grow anywhere near high enough to impede the overhead lines, and that he would like them to remain.

“So you don’t want us to cut the Dogwoods?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s OK. We don’t cut the Dogwoods. Besides, there are no Dogwoods this time of year.”

While I cannot encapsulate my experiences with these crews any better than this, I have gone to considerable expense to bury lines such that the grid is no longer their jurisdiction.
I suppose we can thank Rachel Carson for the mere fact that they now use mowers and chainsaws rather than lethal and inexact sprays—although I do remember Tami painting some “No Spray” signs for my brother Glen when he lived on a farm near Fergus, Ontario.

Surely the issues surrounding rights of way go way beyond this. When it comes to trail easements, there are suddenly humans (not just Mother Nature) involved. She might tell you about where you can cross a creek, but the humans are happy to squabble about what line you may walk on the other side.

And I have found that wildlife readily adapts to the rights of way which we decide upon. I have seen owls and hawks modify their flight patterns to follow the trails or buried electric lines. And why wouldn’t they? My guess is that the flying is easier, and the prey have decided to take the same easy route that the humans have laid out.

Posted by Lyle at March 22, 2004 04:51 AM