In honor of Banned Books week, I offer this memory of my daughter’s stand against book burning.
It would be difficult to find a neighborhood more concentrated with left-leaning intelligentsia than the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Which is not to say there are not conservatives, curmudgeons, and random people who think the world is going to hell in a handbag, but the traditional Person On The Street on the Upper West Side is likely, at the very least, to be four-square for the First Amendment.
Which is why my daughter burning a book on the sidewalk occasioned considerable outrage.
It was a perfectly gorgeous Saturday in spring; Julie, age 11 and at the tail end of 6th grade, had to do a multi-media report on a book of her choice, and the book of her choice was Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. She had discussed the project with her teacher, and decided to do a three dimensional collage representing the pile of books that are burned in the book; ringed round the pile would be text from the novel (one of the major discussions was which quote; the book is chock full of good lines).
If there’s one thing we have around the house, it’s books. Some of them so old and tattered they would probably go up in smoke at an incendiary glance; others still young and green enough that a match would be required. And I’m afraid I feel rather proprietary–nearly maternal–about all of them. It took us several hours to find a grocery-bag full of books that could be sacrificed in the name of education, and I insisted, for safety’s sake, that this all be done outside on the sidewalk, where nothing much could catch fire. A book-burning kit was added to the bag: matches, oven mitts, a bucket (to be filled with water just before we went downstairs), a couple of tired old dish towels which would be sacrificed if necessary to smothering flames. In my head I had moved beyond issues of censorship and was thinking of getting my kids through this alive.
Saturday morning Julie and her little sister and I went downstairs and found a nice clear patch of sidewalk on our quiet side street, and set up for business. I supervised and distracted Becca (who was six, and to whom this was Just Another Inexplicable Thing Her Sister Did) while Julie went to work.
The first book burned too fast. Kid didn’t want a pile of ashes; she wanted books in various stages of char. This was how we decided that old, worn paperbacks were a bad idea. She took up a book of actuarial tables and had better luck with that, although working out the routine of lighting the page, blocking the breeze, pulling on the oven mitt, and putting out the flame when just the right amount of book had been burnt, took a little work. About the time the third book had been lit, an elderly couple came down the street, moving urgently. The man was practically waving his cane. The woman yelled: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!”
Julie, to her credit, finished putting out the book before she turned around. “It’s for a class project,” she said.
“WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL ASSIGNS YOU TO BURN BOOKS?” (I was not sure if the woman was upset or deaf or both, but she was very loud.) “DON’T YOU KNOW WHO BURNED BOOKS?”
For a moment Julie looked a bit confused; in her mind at that moment, the answer would have been Montag, the “fireman” from Fahrenheit 451. “My school didn’t assign me to burn books; I’m doing an art project about a book about a man who–”
“BURNING BOOKS IS A TERRIBLE THING TO DO!”
“I know! That’s what the book is about.”
“WHAT BOOK IS THIS?”
Fortunately, we’d brought her copy of Fahrenheit 451 downstairs with us. Julie took off the oven mitt and showed the book. The woman reached for it, but the old man, whose caterpillar-like eyebrows had been working up and down with alarm, suddenly looked enlightened.
“Ahh,” he said. He turned to his companion. “She’s making art.”
“SHE’S BURNING BOOKS!”
He nodded. “I’ve read that book. It’s says that burning books is a terrible thing. She’s making art to show that.” He smiled at Julie. “Go ahead, sweetheart.” And he looped his arm through his companion’s and continued onward toward Amsterdam Avenue.
They weren’t the only ones to comment negatively on Julie’s project. By the time she had crisped the seven or eight books she required, four or five more people had come by and viewed with alarm. Each time she got a little better at explaining what she was doing, leading with “I’m doing an art project to demonstrate that burning books is bad.” She got into some interesting discussions. By the end of the hour or so it took her to get done, she was exhausted and a little annoyed at having had to explain what she was doing over and over again. From their accents, I think that the first couple were from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and likely immigrants from a formerly Communist country. The others who stopped were old and young, black and white. All were at least dismayed by what they saw happening. The protest I liked best came from a little kid who was out with his dad. “Don’t you like books?”
“I love them so much I don’t want anyone to do this. Ever. Plus, it’s for school.”
The little boy nodded and they went on. They’ll ask you to do anything if it’s for school.
Category: nonfiction
Raised in a Barn: Breakfast in Space, and Other Cereals
When I was a kid we lived in New York City, but every weekend we commuted to our Barn in southern Massachusetts. This was a three hour drive (plus, on the trip north, a stop for dinner), and my brother and I were kids, which is to say, not always patient. We did not indulge in “are we there yet” because I think we had a sense of just how well (or poorly) that would have gone over. But we did get antsy. The radio was a distraction, but at some point the signal from NY would get too weak, and we clamored for something else. My parents would consent to play games–Geography mostly. But best of all was when my father told stories.
Some of his stories were autobiographical. Or pretended to be: I am pretty sure that the story he used to tell us about having been mistakenly rolled in a rug one year during spring cleaning and forgotten until the rug was unrolled months later was, shall we say, a metaphor for what it was like being the second youngest in a family with eight children.
And then there was “Breakfast in Space.” This was a story told in many parts, from one week to the next (it was a serial, thus the punny title). It chronicled the adventures of a pair of siblings named Madeleine and Clem who went to Little Red Space School (my brother and I went to a Greenwich Village school called Little Red School House). I don’t, at this remove, remember a whole lot of details except for a long sequence where the students were out in their spacesuits playing some variation on tag, when my brother discovered that he could cheat by farting, the afflatus being expelled through the exhaust ports and… (hey, this story was pitched to a 9- and a 7-year-old, and this detail delighted us).
The other tale was Little Red Riding Hood. In my father’s telling, Grandma was a famed courtesan (the sort who would have fit in nicely with Desiree Arnfeldt in A Little Night Music) named Rosamond Gemutlich. Rosamond spent all her time in a glass bathtub, drinking champagne and dictating her scandalous memoirs about her time with a Graustarkian Princeling with a long Germanic name which my father pronounced with relish exactly one time before explaining “but he was known as “Franzu.” Rosamond’s granddaughter, also named Rosamond but called Little Red, would come to visit. Little Red had a bit of a smart mouth, and occasionally Grannie would smack her in the chops with a frying pan. If Grannie got too enthusiastic this would require a trip to the ER to enlist the services of Robert M. Clydesdale, M.D. (aka Young Doctor Bob)*. I don’t recall much in the way of plot for this story, but the details were outrageous, and doubtless pleased my parents as much as they did my brother and me. And yes, we were raised on Warner Bros. cartoons, so the notion of a grandparent hitting her kid with a skillet–often!–did not phase us.
The fact that my father would come back to one of these stories, week after week, both amazes and exhausts me. I’ve told innumerable stories to kids, many of them made up on the fly (when I chaperoned school field trips my kids would offer me up as sacrificial entertainment). I may have placed more importance on plot and an ending than my father did. But it’s a serious effort and takes a nimble mind. Oddly, as my mother was acknowledged within the family to be “the writer,” it never occurred to me to wonder why she was never the storyteller. As an adult, I realized that there’s a difference between being a storyteller and being a writer. My father was the former, my mother the latter.
It’s probable that those storytelling sessions didn’t last more than half an hour (but that’s a long time to keep leaping from story point to story point, wisecracking all the way). Replete with my father’s invention, my brother would fall asleep for the rest of the drive, and I would stare out the window, committing it all to memory so I could relate the story to a couple of friends at school who demanded I report back each week.
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*A few years later my father had to get some No Trespassing signs made up for our property, because in winter hunters–some of them neither bright nor respectful of property rights–would crawl all over the mountain looking for deer, and there was a very real danger of a shot hitting an unintended target. As a joke, he had some of the signs made up in the name of Robert M. Clydesdale, M.D. (Young Doctor Bob). My father was always his own best audience.
Welcoming in the New Year
I had plans for today. Mainly I intended to tell you about books, including the ones I’m reading now. A confluence of circumstances undermined that. That’s my words masking the fact that I’m living one of the books I was going to tell you about. Do not live a book, it’s not nearly as much fun as novels suggest.
The book I’m living is a group of essays, Ruptured, edited by Lee Hofman and Tamar Paluch. Thirty-six Australians write about their lives in Australia since October 7. In every essay there’s something that also belongs in my life, even though most of them come from very different abckgrounds to me. We’re all Jewish. We’re all women. We’re all Australian. Most of us are in the Arts. And we are so very different.
How am I living this book right now?
There’s always a rise in antisemitism just before big Jewish festivals. At least there is in Australia. And by ‘always’ I mean the last decade. October 7 put the rise on strange drugs and made it bigger and nastier, but it’s been happening for a while. And Rosh Hashanah has always been difficult in other respects. There was the year I wasn’t even allowed to take a single day off for it, even though the union had negotiated for moments exactly like that. The Federal public service let me know back then, in 1989, that being Jewish was not acceptable and that microaggressions would be the norm and punishment for wanting to take a day off for my new year was acceptable. I was on flextime back then. I had heaps of hours on my flextime, but had not even been allowed to take two hours off using those hours, in the morning. I did what every Gillian should do at moments like these. I brought a great deal of honeycake into work and everyone kept dropping by my desk to be fed. I worked the fewest hours I could, with the latest start and the longest lunch. I was on the computer maybe for 10 minutes, to sign in and out and check that I wasn’t missing anything urgent (I wasn’t going to let my sulk actually hurt anyone) and … I made my point. I was allowed to take Yom Kippur off, when it arrived. These days I am not allowed in places to begin with and feel like a child who has been sent to their room and can hear the other children play. I am lucky. I’m not banned from some things – in fact, I’m a welcome friend. This means I lose Rosh Hashanah this year for some things, but still get Yom Kippur and even Sukkot. Ironically, I first discovered this problem when someone destroyed my Yom Kippur a couple of years ago. I am alert this time of year these days. Always.
This year is better and worse. I have friends watching out for me. I’m not alone. Some years I have been very alone. The worse is that the public ferment is already worse and is going to get worse still.
The amount of work I have to do is immense, but VICFA (the organisation running a conference just before) has made sure that everything will be done several hours before Rosh Hashanah begins. And I have deadlines galore, but I’m used to that. This early in third term in Australia and the rest of the country does a lot of work in September and October so that things can be finished for the big shutdown from December. Rosh Hashanah was not planned with Christmas in mind, nor the Australian summer.
Why does this feel as if I’m in Ruptured? The essays show women having to do everything to the schedules and needs of the non-Jewish community, while fielding antisemitism, and having to be Jewish and do family stuff and remember that ordinary life still exists.
I spend a lot of my time thinking about what this means for Gaza. In fact, I just typed a very long paragraph on the politics and my concern about following slogans rather than seeking the human needs that the slogans are supposed to address. But even saying what I have just said may enough – in this ungentle year – to provoke anger and threats if the right person reads it. Free speech is not part of my new year. Not free speech for me, anyhow. I’m too Jewish. And that is something every woman who wrote an essay documented. A silencing. Even if our opinions are similar to the person speaking, we can’t speak safely unless we use the right words. And the right words are terrifying. My secret historical linguist (historical linguistics is a part of being an ethnohistorian, but I’m not a specialist in the field) analyses how words are shifting and… the new meanings of some of the words and phrases we’re told we must use imply that Jews are evil, by nature, and that a country with no Jews is an improved country. My secret historical linguist wants someone other than me to do a really, really good study into changing political language and protest language in 2025. I want to be proven wrong.
This new year, when I dip apple in honey and say “To a Good and Sweet Year” I will mean it fervently, for all of us.
The Last Ones Standing
My beautiful, funny, brilliant Aunt Julie died last month. She was 99 1/2, and in the last weeks of her life she was clearly ready to go. I have been, I think, mourning her loss for the last six years, as age and dementia took her ship further and further out and away from the shore where I watched. In the end it was more about relief, and managing the sorrow of the rest of my family. There will be Aunt Julie stories told for years, and she will live on with us.
But this leaves my brother and me as the last ones standing in our family. No one else in the world knew our parents the way we did (and even we are not immune to the parallax effect). We were there when my parents were at their best, we had an unparalleled series of adventures in their wake, and we had a front row seat for the slow, unhappy decline of their marriage and my mother’s health. My brother and I were there for all that. But more than knowing our parents, my brother and I grew up in the family that they created. And no one else knows the lore and culture of that family. Just us.*
I was thinking about all this because of a piece in the New York Times about sibling estrangement. It’s about the pain of being estranged from someone you spent the first part of your life with. In the article, some of the siblings could not understand what had happened. Others viewed being estranged from a sibling as the only way they could protect themselves. The causes? Wildly various: In some cases a dispute over inheritance. In other cases behaviors that once seemed small grow greater until one sib simply cannot cope. Sometimes there is a history of abuse–by a parent or by one of the siblings–that has made it impossible to reconcile. I cannot quarrel with any of the choices these siblings make. They know what they know, and they are taking care of themselves and their families.
But you lose something when you cut a sibling out of your life. My brother and I are in as different as two humans can be, politically, philosophically, attitudinally. And yet we get along pretty well. This is deliberate. No one else was in the room where it happened, as it were (it being our childhood). There are lots of things we remember very differently (that parallax effect), but the thing is, we remember. And we can talk about them. Sometimes we will run aground on some point where one of us looks at the other in wonderment: “don’t you remember that?” or “no, that’s not the way it happened.” But it doesn’t become a fighting issue for us, because aside from valuing each other as interesting humans, we value each other as the last witnesses.
When my brother and I are gone no one will know what my mother’s voice sounded like, or the odd tuck my father would get in his jaw when he was trying not to laugh. I remember things from the vantage point of being the older one, and a girl, and to some extent his guide through the world. Clem remembers things from being the younger one (he remembers things I told him about TV shows we watched that I have no memory of; he appears to remember me being a far better Big Sister than I do). And for every one of my “Raised in a Barn” anecdotes I’m sure he has one that I don’t recall, or that is told from his very different vantage point. Which is, in fact, great.
But we’re the last ones standing. My impulse to tell those stories probably comes, a little bit, from the fact that when we’re gone, all that lore and culture will at best be second hand stories our kids tell. If they tell them. Of course, my kids already have their own stories about the lore and culture of the family they grew up in. And someday the two of them will be the last ones standing.
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*My husband and I rewatched A Hard Day’s Night the other evening, and it occurred to me again that whatever sometime interpersonal issues those four guys from Liverpool might have had, no one else in the world could understand what it was like, being in the center of the huge creative and cultural maelstrom that they created. Just them. I think that even before John Lennon’s death they had begun to realize how unique that relationship was, and I believe the two remaining Beatles recognize it now.
The Everyday
I had plans to introduce a book today, but … maybe next week. Some books have to be read a few pages at a time, and this is one. Also, today I have a profound envy of everyone who doesn’t have chronic fatigue. Why this week? Because the energy other people spend on planning and adjusting plans and making their daily lives work is energy I do not have. More than once recently I’ve had to skip events I wanted to attend or cancel dinner parties because someone had to check something with me and changed this or that and, in spending energy in these small discussions… I ran out of spoons.
I do that a lot right now. I know the triggers and I’m handling everything almost well enough. The trick is in the ‘almost.’ Even typing this is exhausting. Several friends have given me advice, because they know it will help. The thing is, I’ve had chronic fatigue for around 40 years. At this point, advice does not help. I have a list of things that must be done… these things help. And some friends listen, but most, right now, don’t. So… bed.
The moral of this week’s very short post is, “If you know anyone who handles chronic fatigue, when they say they’re not dealing, keep things simple.”
Next week, however, I should have some comments on a book where I feel seen. Very, very seen.
How Feminism Killed Cooking
Once again, this week got away from me. Here’s a piece from 2018.
I read an article on Salon a few years ago: “Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?” by a writer named Emily Matchar. The title is, of course, very tongue in cheek; the article is about the omnivore/ locavore/ femivore movements, and about the myths we make up about the past. In this case, the past in question is the good ol’ days of cookery from the writers’ childhoods, and how much better everything was in the days before feminism led us to processed food.
Now, all things being equal I like to make my food from scratch, I love the farmer’s market, I do read labels, and I attempt not to buy things that I can make myself. But I do these things because I’d just as soon know what I’m eating, because I have family members with nasty allergies. I don’t do them as a political statement. I’m fortunate that I can afford to buy organic at least some of the time, that I have the time and the leisure to cook the way I prefer to. And oh yeah: I like to cook. Not everyone does. Not everyone likes to eat, for that matter. There are people who regard food as fuel, something they have to be prodded to remember. (I know: bizarre, right?)
Full disclosure: for a potluck at the time I made a chocolate tart with gingersnap crust, and a jam tart, and (possibly) some truffles made with leftover ganache. Because I am insane, but also because doing this stuff is fun. For me. As it is for many people in the “femivore” movement, which started out about making food (or raising chickens, or gardening or baking bread) as craft or art. But an awful lot of the omnivore/locavore/femivore rhetoric is distinctly anti-Feminist (seriously, go read the article, particularly the quotes from the like of Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, and Marguerite Manteau-Rao). In looking for a more “authentic” diet are these writers valorizing a time that never was?
Look at many of the cookbooks from the 30s, 40s, and 50s (never mind the 60s, when I, and many of the writers, were kids) and they’re full of short-cuts: use canned soup, top your casserole with deep-fried onion strings, use prepared ketchup or mayonnaise or Jell-O™ or corn flakes or instant oats. Use instant pudding. Use frozen spinach (or, even scarier, canned spinach. Have you ever had canned spinach? It’s like eating soggy green tissues). A decade before Betty Friedan put pen to paper to discuss the feminine mystique, ads in womens’ magazines touted wash-day miracles and labor-saving devices and wonderful, wonderful processed food. Because doing this stuff wasn’t a creative outlet. It was work.
There used to be a rhyme that outlined a woman’s work week: Monday (when you were rested up from your day of rest and going to church on Sunday) was laundry day. Laundry was a brutal task, involving boiling and stirring or wringing and hanging of an entire household’s clothes and linens. Tuesday was ironing day (yes, you put the iron on the stove to heat it, or on the coals of your fire if you didn’t have a stove, and yes, those irons were made of iron and weighed a young ton). Wednesday: sewing day, making your own clothes and clothes for your family, repairing, darning, stitching new sheets (yes, women hemmed and darned their sheets). Thursday: marketing, getting all the things that you couldn’t make, to last you a week. Friday: cleaning. Scrubbing on your hands and knees, polishing, beating rugs, dusting, scouring. Finally, Saturday, baking–for the week. All those pies and cake and breads–which explains a lot of recipes using “stale bread,” since by the end of the week whatever bread was left was likely to be rock-hard. And Sunday, like every day, three times a day: feed the family.
Whatever the rhetoric of feminism, women didn’t want frozen food, store-bought bread, and labor-saving devices because feminism told them they were being oppressed. They wanted these things because their work was really, really difficult and time consuming and exhausting. If these things freed some women up to do other things–run Hewlett Packard or become Secretary of State or write science fiction, that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out from under all that backbreaking, repetitive work.
Valorization of a better, simpler, more wholesome time drives me nuts. Because it’s fantasy. I love the gorgeous, candy-colored rendition of small-town turn of the last century Iowa in The Music Man, but I don’t confuse that with real life, which included diptheria, weevil-ly flour, bedbugs, and food that often teetered on the edge of spoiled. Taking on some of the tasks of yesterday, while using some of the tools of today to avoid the nastier work, and disdaining people who cannot or don’t want to do the same, is a mug’s game. It makes it all about aesthetics, when what most people 100 years ago, and many people today, are worrying about is survival.
Eat what you love, eat what is healthy, eat what you can afford and what you feel good about. Cook or eat out or call for a pizza. Grow tomatoes, spin flax, make poetry or pottery or raise llamas for the wool. It’s all good. But don’t blame Betty Friedan if you don’t like what’s for dinner.
Too much vampire, too little common sense
I suspect that some of the stuff I experience everyday is about to go into my fiction. A part of this is intentional: how can I not use the hateful things people send my way because I’m Jewish and use them as triggers for vampire attacks? What vampire wouldn’t react to a really wrong insult that tells them who and what they are and gets it entirely wrong? What vampire wouldn’t get bloodlust and rage and remember how much, how very much they will always hate Bram Stoker?
And then there is the “If you don’t think like me, you do not belong.” This is hidden under other words, but it’s the useful subtext. And it explains why we do not clearly identity the vampires and werewolves in our midst, because why would they self-identity when we’ve already told them they don’t belong if we do?
The concept behind this is not new at all. It’s much easier to address the hate we experience everyday when we have vampires and werewolves and fae and other beings to act as a channel.
And that’s all I have to say this week, because this week is one of those weeks when I have a solid amount of despite targeted at me and, if I were a vampire, I would be both triggered and well-fed.
Fortunately, I am not a vampire. Why fortunately? I’m so glad you asked.
Have you ever wondered how a Jewish vampire would explain to a rabbi that they live on blood?
Reprint: California Farms Solar Power
This article is reprinted from The Conversation.
California farmers identify a hot new cash crop: Solar power
George Rose/Getty Images
Jacob Stid, Michigan State University; Annick Anctil, Michigan State University, and Anthony Kendall, Michigan State University
Imagine that you own a small, 20-acre farm in California’s Central Valley. You and your family have cultivated this land for decades, but drought, increasing costs and decreasing water availability are making each year more difficult.
Now imagine that a solar-electricity developer approaches you and presents three options:
- You can lease the developer 10 acres of otherwise productive cropland, on which the developer will build an array of solar panels and sell electricity to the local power company.
- You can select 1 or 2 acres of your land on which to build and operate your own solar array, using some electricity for your farm and selling the rest to the utility.
- Or you can keep going as you have been, hoping your farm can somehow survive.
Thousands of farmers across the country, including in the Central Valley, are choosing one of the first two options. A 2022 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that roughly 117,000 U.S. farm operations have some type of solar device. Our own work has identified over 6,500 solar arrays currently located on U.S. farmland.
Our study of nearly 1,000 solar arrays built on 10,000 acres of the Central Valley over the past two decades found that solar power and farming are complementing each other in farmers’ business operations. As a result, farmers are making and saving more money while using less water – helping them keep their land and livelihood.
A hotter, drier and more built-up future
Perhaps nowhere in the U.S. is farmland more valuable or more productive than California’s Central Valley. The region grows a vast array of crops, including nearly all of the nation’s production of almonds, olives and sweet rice. Using less than 1% of all farmland in the country, the Central Valley supplies a quarter of the nation’s food, including 40% of its fruits, nuts and other fresh foods.
The food, fuel and fiber that these farms produce are a bedrock of the nation’s economy, food system and way of life.
But decades of intense cultivation, urban development and climate change are squeezing farmers. Water is limited, and getting more so: A state law passed in 2014 requires farmers to further reduce their water usage by the mid-2040s.
Citizen of the Planet/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The trade-offs of installing solar on agricultural land
When the solar arrays we studied were installed, California state solar energy policy and incentives gave farm landowners new ways to diversify their income by either leasing their land for solar arrays or building their own.
There was an obvious trade-off: Turning land used for crops to land used for solar usually means losing agricultural production. We estimated that over the 25-year life of the solar arrays, this land would have produced enough food to feed 86,000 people a year, assuming they eat 2,000 calories a day.
There was an obvious benefit, too, of clean energy: These arrays produced enough renewable electricity to power 470,000 U.S. households every year.
But the result we were hoping to identify and measure was the economic effect of shifting that land from agricultural farming to solar farming. We found that farmers who installed solar were dramatically better off than those who did not.
They were better off in two ways, the first being financially. All the farmers, whether they owned their own arrays or leased their land to others, saved money on seeds, fertilizer and other costs associated with growing and harvesting crops. They also earned money from leasing the land, offsetting farm energy bills, and selling their excess electricity.
Farmers who owned their own arrays had to pay for the panels, equipment and installation, and maintenance. But even after covering those costs, their savings and earnings added up to US$50,000 per acre of profits every year, 25 times the amount they would have earned by planting that acre.
Farmers who leased their land made much less money but still avoided costs for irrigation water and operations on that part of their farm, gaining $1,100 per acre per year – with no up-front costs.
The farmers also conserved water, which in turn supported compliance with the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act water use reduction requirements. Most of the solar arrays were installed on land that had previously been irrigated. We calculated that turning off irrigation on this land saved enough water every year to supply about 27 million people with drinking water or irrigate 7,500 acres of orchards. Following solar array installation, some farmers also fallowed surrounding land, perhaps enabled by the new stable income stream, which further reduced water use.
Citizen of the Planet/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Changes to food and energy production
Farmers in the Central Valley and elsewhere are now cultivating both food and energy. This shift can offer long-term security for farmland owners, particularly for those who install and run their own arrays.
Recent estimates suggest that converting between 1.1% and 2.4% of the country’s farmland to solar arrays would, along with other clean energy sources, generate enough electricity to eliminate the nation’s need for fossil fuel power plants.
Though many crops are part of a global market that can adjust to changes in supply, losing this farmland could affect the availability of some crops. Fortunately, farmers and landowners are finding new ways to protect farmland and food security while supporting clean energy.
One such approach is agrivoltaics, where farmers install solar designed for grazing livestock or growing crops beneath the panels. Solar can also be sited on less productive farmland or on farmland that is used for biofuels rather than food production.
Even in these areas, arrays can be designed and managed to benefit local agriculture and natural ecosystems. With thoughtful design, siting and management, solar can give back to the land and the ecosystems it touches.
Farms are much more than the land they occupy and the goods they produce. Farms are run by people with families, whose well-being depends on essential and variable resources such as water, fertilizer, fuel, electricity and crop sales. Farmers often borrow money during the planting season in hopes of making enough at harvest time to pay off the debt and keep a little profit.
Installing solar on their land can give farmers a diversified income, help them save water, and reduce the risk of bad years. That can make solar an asset to farming, not a threat to the food supply.
Jacob Stid, Ph.D. student in Hydrogeology, Michigan State University; Annick Anctil, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Michigan State University, and Anthony Kendall, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Michigan State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Lateness
I’m late with this post because I’ve been wrangling antisemitism again. It’s become worse… again. And so I’m behind on things… again. The good news is that the book I’m writing on how a bunch of people see and share the Jewish history of Germany from before 1700 is reaching the end of a first draft. It may be difficult to find a publisher because things Jewish are not popular right now, but I’ve been exploring how museums and tourist places, and books, and strangers, and community presentative, and historians and archaeologists and even occasional random antisemites are part of how we see the past.
In one way, this is Gillian as she always is. My life revolves around story and history, after all.
In another way, it’s a new path, because I’ve not had the confidence to question some of our big assumptions about who we are and how we came to be. Just today I saw a comment about Ashkenazi Jews not being actually European. I want to revolt when people say things like this, because it shows how very little they know about Jewish history. Most of us were first brought into Europe by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago. Some came earlier, some came later. If we’re not European, then there are a lot of other people counted as European who are not.
The heart of Ashkenazi Jewish culture was formed in what’s now France and Germany in the Middle Ages. Our religion is from the Levant and our religious culture is from the Levant, but our popular culture and how we shape our world is European. yet there are many people who question this and yet accept eastern and central Europeans whose ancestors arrived in Europe far more recently. And I know why this is.
What I haven’t understood is how deeply I and all my teachers accepted the othering. I’m now de-accepting it and discovering that the reason I’m so comfortable analysing English and French and German history is because the heart of Ashkenaz is not only in Germany (I was there last year, exploring for the book) but even Ashkenazi Jewish educational teaching has a French and German heart.
We are both Levantine and European in equal amounts. They’re not separate things, either. There’s not a section of my European ancestral cultures that’s European and another section that is from Jerusalem. There’s a wonderful integration. Maybe I’ll explore this hen I’m finished the five big projects I’m currently engaged in. Or maybe I’ll just sit back and think, “This explains so much.” Last night I explained how much and why to a friend who is a chazan and he was mindboggled because … once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
There are so many reasons I adore research. Being mindboggled is definitely one of them. Also, it’s such a very Jewish thing to experience more and more hate and to turn to learning for comfort.
Xeno’s Ending
I’m traveling this week, so here’s something from 2020…
So there I was, working on a short story that took over my brain, right when I ought to be working on the book that took over my brain when I was supposed to be working on the new Sarah Tolerance book. (For those following along at home: 1) Sarah Tolerance Book < 2) Urban Fantasy Thing < 3) Short Story. This is why Madeleine cannot have nice things.)
So I want to finish this story. When its finished I can go back to #2, so I can return to #1. In aid of these goals, I’ve been writing on the train home from work. Because that means I’m writing by hand, it also means there are gaps. There are also gaps where I cannot quite figure out how to get from point A to point B (trust me, this is part of my process. Assuming I have a process). This weekend I’ve been trying to fill up the gaps, knit the thing together so I can start doing the really important stuff of going through and making all the words stack up into story order. I’ve actually written the last scene of the story–yea, even the last sentence–yet I still have this vertiginous feeling that the ending is constantly receding into the distance, as if it were trying to enact one of Xeno’s paradoxes (the one where you keep halving the distance between you and your objective, and therefore never quite reach the objective itself).
In my imagination, the ending just keeps getting up from its seat, taking ten steps back, and sitting down again. And there am I, adding more and more words to get the middle part done, and watching the ending of my story recede from sight. In my imagination, my story is taunting me each time it gets up and moves away from me. Malicious story: it’s not a happy thing to imagine.
Fortunately, I’ve been here before. At some point in almost every piece of fiction I’ve ever written, it seems the book will never end, that bits will keep appending themselves in different places, and that the whole concern will simply fall over from its sheer ungainly largeness and lie on the metaphorical floor like a dead thing.
Part of writing (or any creative process) is persevering even when every iota of your diminishing brainpower is insisting that you should have listened to your Uncle Larry and taken up air conditioning repair. Go forth and persevere.