About the header image: April 10, 2013

Last September a friend let me know that there was a walking tour of the Battle of Wyoming coming up soon, and wanted to know if I was interested. I was, and we went. While I knew the story of the event - also known as "The Wyoming Massacre" both for the one-sidedness of the battle and the gruesome fate of the captives taken by Butler's Rangers and their Iroquois allies - it was fascinating to see the spots where these events had unfolded, places I have driven past hundreds of times with only a vague curiosity as to their history.

Along the way we stopped to get our bearings at an electrical tower in Exeter, and I noticed the composition of the scene to our right. The wires that stretched over our heads extended to another tower a few hundred yards away, on the shore of the Susquehanna river. Beyond that tower were some trees, and behind the trees were culm banks, and what appears to be a coal breaker. In the far distance - more than six miles away - was a line of wind turbines. I found the juxtaposition of renewable energy with fossil fuels to be striking, and appreciated the way the electrical lines knitted everything together. As a friend pointed out recently, before the days "When Coal was King," Pennsylvania was ruthlessly stripped of another energy resource - its trees. The forests of "Penn's Woods" were only restored through many decades of dedicated effort by people like Gifford Pinchot. And of course, another energy resource - natural gas - may be buried deep underground in this region, and some folks will stop at nothing to extract and exploit it, regardless of the impact on the environment or the long-term value of the land.

You can read more about this image, and see close-ups of the various components, here:

http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2012/09/energy-in-nepa-past-present-and-future.html


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