By Daniel de la Calle
Over twenty years ago I saw my first wind farm around the Gibraltar Strait. I was going with my parents and brothers to the town of Tarifa, on the Cádiz coast, “the windsurfing capital of the world” as they called it back then. Tarifa has a much higher suicide rate than the rest of the country; many blame its incessant winds for this. The mistral wind is considered an extenuating circumstance for murder trials in the South of France.
Driving along the Cádiz coast a couple days ago the original wind turbines that looked so futuristic back then seemed shrunk, small, decrepit, like old old radio antenna, rusty gray. Beside the few dozen there were hundreds and hundreds of the most gigantic, majestic white turbines, filling endless fields, in the middle of toro de lidia (a special breed of bull that is raised for bullfights) farms, outlining the tops of all the hills. They certainly take over a landscape and brake the natural scale of things, but I like seeing them because I like what they do and what they stand for. My neighbor in the village happens to be an engineer that works in a local farm. He tells me they break a lot and that the efficiency is sometimes low. I only half listen to him, I want to keep dreaming a bit. In a few days I will be going there again and promise to take some shots, but in the meantime here is a picture I took of “our” local ones, the ones my neighbor climbs up to fix.
A NEW APPOINTMENT IN THE U.S.
The White House has nominated Scott Doney to be NOAA’s chief scientist. Doney, a well respected marine biochemist, has done research on climate change, the global carbon cycle and ocean acidification. Here is a link to this news and to a letter by Jane Lubchenco, NOAA’s administrator.
I feel the scientific community and all matters environmental are treated with more respect and given more importance under this Administration.
POISONOUS CURRENTS
The internet is like a vast ocean, so it also holds quite a lot of poison. Some of what I have read on different blogs and sites goes like this: scientists are making all this talk about the environment up in order to get funding for their research and because they have some “hidden agenda”, they work for a third party with dubious interests.
What an insult to our intelligence. Almost all these women and men were the best and brightest students through elementary school, high school, college. They did not choose to go to business school, study economics, law, to go to the money-making career where they could pursue a fancy lifestyle. They are individuals with a thirst for knowledge, a passion for research and discovery, for exactitude and rigorousness, their jobs are almost a vocation or a call like that of religious priests. But the ongoing argument from the poisoned depths of the ocean yells that this was all planned in order to secure funding for false and biased research. This line of thought claims that the scientists did not want to do research after all, instead they wanted to fabricate lies, to convince us of them and to scare us with those carefully made up stories so they could get money, lots of money that they still do not see because they are stupid in the end and spend it in lab equipment, buoys, months of holidays in the Arctic. Por favor.
