http://www.vpr.net//audio/programs/56/2013/02/Luskin-0208.mp3
(Host) For years, novelist, essayist and educator Deborah Lee Luskin has been listening to her neighbors complain about the near total lack of cell service in her town; now that there are proposals to bring two towers to Newfane, she's been listening to neighbors complain about what they'll look like.
(Luskin) I own a smart phone, and I use it for all sorts of things, from snapping photos to playing solitaire as well as for texting my kids, finding directions, checking email - and when I have service - even making phone calls. My cell is also my business phone, which I use from my home office. Even though there's no cell service outside my house, I have service inside thanks to a microcell booster, a small appliance that uses a combination of our DSL connection, our wireless network, and GPS, to route calls via a satellite.
Aside from being able to use my cell phone for work, one of the best things about this arrangement is that it also allows my children to use their phones when they're home. Before we had this service, their friends would start calling on the landline just about the time Tim and I go to bed. Kids.
Well, mine are now all in their twenties. And they've all come of age with cell phones. They've also signed leases and paid utility bills for apartments they've rented,but none of them has ever owned a landline. Unless they settle in Vermont, it's unlikely any of them ever will.
There's very little cell service in the town where I live. To have service, we need towers. And there are currently proposals for two, but both have met with opposition. Everyone wants service, but no one wants towers.
I wonder if there was similar opposition to telephone poles back in the thirties, when electricity was first brought up the valley? Now, they just seem part of the landscape. And what about the wide swaths where high voltage towers cut across the hills? I pass such a cut every time I drive into town, but I hardly notice it anymore. More often, what I notice are grazing deer.
I wonder if the same wouldn't happen with windmills, which I find much more attractive than the power lines and industrial steel girders I've grown used to. I would favor the strategic placement of windmills as a happy alternative to Vermont Yankee. In fact, I favor the kind of decentralized, small generation concept that's prevalent throughout Germany - even though it would mean more windmills, more solar panels, more change.
Maybe such visual evidence of how our electricity is generated could help remind us to use it more wisely. Or maybe we'd just get used to seeing the turbines spin in the wind.
It seems to me that often, we humans are hard-wired to resist change - at first. Certainly, whenever a new building goes up - or an old one washes away in a flood - it takes a while to adjust.
But inevitably, we do.
