Trip to Princeton

That would be Princeton, North Carolina. Down in the eastern part of the state. Past the Raleigh-Garner sprawl. Beyond the Outer Beltline. Past the prison.

I want to avoid calling it a “One Piggly Wiggly town,” since there appears to be significantly more going on in Princeton than in Moncure.

I was asked to address Ms. Logan’s 8th Grade Science Class. I loaded some samples into Tami’s Jetta, and took the gig. We have a bunch of these sorts of opportunities lying before us.

Someone needs to go address the NC Truckers. And there is the Montessori School in Raleigh. And the Urban Redvelopment crowd in Durham. It’s sort of like the “Rubber Chicken Circuit,” without the rubber chicken.

The road into Princeton is lined with crepe myrtles, which are not in bloom at this late date. I grabbed a lunch at a local pizza place with a laser printed sign by the bathroom which read something like: “We can feed your body, but only Jesus can feed your soul.”

The whole place was lined with crucifixion art, with the exception of the Bush-Cheney poster pasted by the till. It felt like Jesse Helms country. It felt like Eastern North Carolina. The juke box was hard core country selections. George Jones and the like. I wondered if my service would be refused if I dropped a quarter on the Dixie Chicks.

The school was gorgeous. Huge and spotless and new. It’s a K-12 with a public library attached. I passed the drug-sniffing dog sign and found my way to Ms. Logan’s class.

Her students were amazing. They nailed me on all of the standard questions: efficiency vs. petroleum diesel. Power equivalents. Lubricity even came up. I was impressed by their attentiveness, and by their questions.

One girl’s father was a soybean grower, and she put it all together quickly. A shift to biodiesel could increase the value of her family’s farm output, and she was jazzed.

We covered subsidies and BTUs and went off into renewables of all types and touched on every alternative fuel we could think of. We covered the carbon cycle and distillation columns and fossil inputs.

It turns out they are an “Earth Sciences” class, which means despite the periodic table on the wall, they don’t do laboratory experiments. Too bad. I’m not sure “Science” is in the North Carolina Public School vocabulary right now. Sort of like the absence of the word “Biodiesel.”

I was stumped at one point, when it came to the idea of a “return to the pioneer lifestyle.”
We talked about horsepower, and about how the City of New York was excited about the introduction of the Horseless Carriage as a method to reduce pollution.

But I was left with a puzzling problem for this semester’s Energy Class. Which has a lower ecological footprint: The 45 horsepower biodiesel powered tractor at the refinery, or 45 horses?

And then there were the bananas.

Some background here: John is a master gardener who is growing a banana tree in our zone. He has asked for some of our wash water (which is heavy in potassium) mixed with vermiculite, mixed into compost for his banana tree.

His request has inspired some at Piedmont Biofuels to start talking about the impending banana patch. I need to say at the outset, that I am not a part of the banana contingent. Piedmont Biofuels is a giant jigsaw puzzle, and lots of people take on lots of different pieces. If anyone wants to sit down at our card table and start working on the banana patch, I’ll welcome them. I’ll toss them any banana-colored pieces I encounter. But I am not V.P. Banana.

One kid distilled the making of biodiesel to the following: “So if I have some vegetable oil, and some methanol, and a banana, I can make biodiesel.”

Not quite. We talked about bananas. I tried to explain catalysts. It’s hard to describe catalysts to a group that has limited lab time.

And I took a stab at the banana project. I was wearing a banana colored Piedmont Biofuels golf shirt, and I could not shake their interest. They wanted to know about growing zones and potassium uptake and why they don’t see banana trees on the side of the road.

They were amazing kids. Smart and advanced in their thinking. They were alert and engaged and we spent the afternoon skimming across everything from how biodiesel would be safer to siphon from a tank to why Uncle Sam keeps military bases in the Middle East.

I was impressed by Ms. Logan’s Earth Sciences class in Princeton. And it made me wonder who should be doing this type of outreach and education.

On my way home I noticed the fields of soy that I had missed on the way there. Part of me wished that Big Soy would step up and address the hundreds of curious eighth graders in North Carolina. Sam Lee is no longer with the Grain Growers Cooperative, but I couldn’t help but think this was Sam Lee and Jim Wilder country. I believe Jim Wilder is the first person to ever introduce biodiesel to NCDOT, our state’s largest consumer. And I believe he is down east somewhere.
Then I thought that the NBB should do it. Why on earth would anyone charge me, a self-taught biodieselist with leftist leanings (recall that this blog has been deemed “Leftist” by at least one important reader) to travel to Princeton to inject biodiesel into their thinking?
The creators of “Soydiesel” should be raising their own without me.

At one point I heard that the NC Solar Center had people who were paid to do this type of work, and I wondered why they were not filling classrooms with sustainability curriculums. I have a call in to enquire about that.

We are overwhelmed with requests from a variety of groups for days like this. And I think we will shovel through them all.

At the end of the day, it was a good day. Unlike days when I have traveled to Raleigh to move the legislative agenda along a notch, I would not characterize today as a waste of a tankful of perfectly good homemade fuel.

Somehow, we need to keep the education and outreach going. If it falls to us, it falls to us. At the end of it all I was given a coffee mug with the image of the Princeton Bulldogs on it. Inside was a gift certificate to Lowe’s. I’ll toss that the Leif. He’s our resident Lowe’s junky, and it will go into the project nicely.

It was a good trip to Princeton.

Posted by Lyle at September 21, 2004 09:36 PM