Dear Readers,
I wrote an article that some of you may be interested to read. It's a political piece—not my usual. I include as much of the Big Picture as possible. Waiting to hear from
rabble.ca's editor to see if they publish it. Fun!
With love, Sally
* * *
This article is
about one of my favorite subjects: water.
It is about living a human life on a water-bearing planet. It is also about being a British Columbian
and pertains to all British Columbians, with very few exceptions.
With very few
exceptions here in BC, we would all consider ourselves “BC Hydro customers.” (What percentage of us, exactly, live either
in the Kootenays, New West, or off-grid?)
We all depend upon this particular service provider for the delivery of
hydroelectric power from our precious river systems. Whether you are a BC Hydro customer working
for BC Hydro or not, the normal routines of your everyday living depend upon
the consumption of safe and efficient water power in the form of electricity. It brings light to our darkness, heat to our winters
and cold to our food preservation endeavours.
With it we grind our coffee beans and do internet research and cook
tonight’s supper. For electricity—among
the fulfillment of countless other basic needs, we all depend upon British
Columbia Water.
The water isn’t
ours, of course. There is no such thing
as British Columbia Water. We partake of
a mysterious and intelligent planetary biosphere, no less. A molecular miracle with the chemical code
H2O hydrates, and nourishes and grows, and feeds, and transports... life. The fact that life as we know it can inhabit
our Earth is due to an utterly mind-blowing complexity of symbiotic living
relationships, all made possible by the presence of water. What also makes this miracle molecule special
is that it is forever “on the move” and sharing itself everywhere. Because water moves, we can harness its
tremendous energy to create electricity.
You are reading this article in large part due to multiple electrical
processes; the downstream flow of a river is the source of each one.
The water that
makes up our bodies, too, never remains static.
All day, every day, we drink in water for hydration while simultaneously
releasing it through our excretory functions.
Both ends (beginnings?) of this intimate system represent the planetary
flow of water from one place to the next, in continual transformation. We have no choice in the matter. What creates us doesn’t belong to us. The fact that H20 is called water when it appears in its liquid form
is because of liquidity itself. Water
“runs.” It cannot remain static. Water cannot be owned.
The human brain
is 85% water. Our ability to think,
feel, and execute day-to-day life tasks is due almost exclusively to the
electrical (that’s right, electrical) wiring
of our brains. One of the main
responsibilities of our brainwater is to act as the beholder of electrical
potential shared between neurons.
Without a consistent supply of electrochemical signals dancing around
inside its skull, a human body cannot exist.
Let alone, thought.
Among these and
a million other reasons, water is life’s own miracle on our planetary home—as
far as we know the only cosmic body that is liquid water-bearing, and therefore
life-bearing, within at least a few long light years of distance from us. That makes Earth pretty special. Naturally, however, this bigger picture
within which our particular cosmic body sits makes us hardly a speck of dust
floating somewhere in endless galaxies.
So we needn’t
worry or get too worked up about how special we are.
* * *
Until recently,
I have remained happily ignorant and aloof in the midst of a major
transformation of the power grid system in our province. Having read something of the science about
our new smart meters, I felt put at ease by the fact that the amount of
wireless radiation from a home meter might be comparable to 30 minutes of time
spent on a cellular phone in one year.
For health as well as other concerns I choose not to use a cell phone,
though having to communicate via one of these devices for just 30 minutes in
the course of a year certainly would not give me cause for alarm that a health
risk was present.
A drop in the
bucket. No big deal.
I rent a ground
level suite in a neighbourhood of our province’s capital. A friend owns the house and lives
upstairs. In early January, he received a
letter from BC Hydro informing him that an installer would be visiting to “upgrade”
the meter that has effectively measured our home’s hydroelectric energy
consumption for 50 years. Previously, my
friend had contacted BC Hydro to decline our upgrade to the smart meter. His reasoning was not on the basis of a
health risk, but rather was out of some frustration that—from his
perspective—there was a glaring lack of invitation for public input and
engagement respecting a massive overhaul to our grid system throughout the
Province.
The letter we
received is not a personal issue, and I know nothing about the person who wrote
it except that his role at BC Hydro bears the title Chief Project Officer,
Smart Metering Program. With all due
respect, it would be remiss to not point out that the language he relied on to
write this letter reflects a style of leadership that is designed to deliberately
exclude its recipients from a due process of collective dialogue. Officers often work utilizing this communication
style; it comes with the legacy of the job title itself. What else could he do? Clearly, he was simply fulfilling his duty to
the crown corporation that employs him.
He was “just doing his job.”
As a British
Columbian wishing to participate wholeheartedly in advancing the possibility of
true health, well-being and equality for all people (and certainly not just
people—we are only one miraculous species among billions inhabiting this
Earth-speck-of-dust in endless galaxies), I feel it is my duty to ask some
well-conceived and relevant questions. I
feel it is my duty to reinvest the deeper intelligence of life that is the
source and possibility of all my thought and action in this Great Intelligence
itself, on a human scale, via inclusive organizing principles by which we can
live together, interact with one another, and share the preciousness of our world’s
resources for the benefit of All.
In reading the
January 4th letter from BC Hydro, my bucket became filled with
concerns and questions. Many of my
questions have been answered on the website (www.bchydro.com/smartmeters).
I perceive here a dedicated, comprehensive attempt to fill in the gaps
for people who, like myself, wish to be better educated about how our utility
provider works for us and to avoid reacting from a stance of personal opinion,
fear or NIMBYism. In a phone
conversation with a Hydro representative I learned that by January 11th
approximately 93% of the upgrade was completed, which had involved installing
1.73 million meters. While my bucket is
still overflowing, at this stage of the grid upgrade it doesn’t interest me to
make a fuss about the installation of our home’s smart meter. The massive overhaul is nearing
completion. The officers have fulfilled
their duty. Almost all British
Columbians have already been converted.
That’s all she
wrote.
The letter
presented a number of convincing arguments on behalf of the smart meters we
bought from Itron Inc. for a base contract value of $270 million (www.bchydro.com/news/press_centre/press_releases/2011/itron_selected_smart_meters.html), including the statement: “The old
meters are becoming obsolete and require us to manually perform services that
have now been automated by smart meters.”
Any informed reader can attest to the fact that this kind of statement
is being made all over the world in the name of new, “advanced and smarter”
technology. In the name of
modernization. Automation. Wherever and in whatever context such statements
are being made, it remains surprisingly rare that we humans acknowledge and
give voice to the elephant in the room: our well-practiced mantra that new, advanced and smarter always means better.
Healthier. Safer. Happier.
(Which most of us will agree, ultimately, the word better comes down to, at the core.)
It begs the question of the degree to which our obsession with
automation is currently helping us achieve these basic human ends. It begs the question of why we so desperately
avoid public conversations that allow us to unpack and freshly review our
assumptions in an open, inclusive, mutually respectful way.
What makes us
resist a dialogue in which we humbly concede with our whole human intelligence
that we can never know or understand the full impacts of allowing automated
technology to replace our ability to “manually perform services”? What makes us embarrassed to confess that
automation cannot provide any ultimate guarantees? What keeps us always looking elsewhere so we can consume the next
shiny-modern-zippy-trendy thing
instead of working creatively and collaboratively with the material legacies we
have already created for ourselves,
prioritizing before newer things more
engaged people— their work, their natural skills and talents, their
creativity, their questions? Why do we
continue to deny ourselves the (yes, often challenging, yes, sometimes
frustrating, and no, probably not nearly as expedient as we would all like) learning
and enrichment that such conversations would afford us?
If the biggest
proponents for automating manual services succeeded in automating “manual”
right out of the equation, what could we possibly agree, then, is left to bring
hope of greater health, safety and happiness?
Where are we in this equation?
Which brings me
back to water.
Collectively, as
a species, if we do not learn to love our water—to demand less of it and stop
polluting it and clean it up and reduce our tampering with its natural flows
and ensure people around the world have enough of it to meet their basic
needs—we perish. It’s that simple. You, the reader, know this. We don’t need statistical data or longitudinal
academic research studies to “know.” It
only takes the normal circuitry of the brain in its electric dance of deductive
logic and a well-functioning limbic system.
We know it because we feel it. When we make our water sick, we are sick; the
two go hand in hand. Water makes us what
we are. Water makes us life.
As an informed
reader, you may know that the intensive industrial production of information
technologies is a highly water-consumptive and water-polluting endeavour. If you are reading this article on a wireless
device or some other form of computer technology, you can be quite certain you
purchased a device whose production leeched toxic chemicals into a waterway
somewhere. You can be quite certain that
the mining, manufacturing and assembly of the 1.73 million+ wireless smart
meters we purchased has had a significant impact on water and its ecosystems. This is something we cannot take back. We have unleashed this impact long before
measuring any of the purported environmental benefits of our upgrade to the
smart metering system. Likely, the
impact was more than just a drop in the bucket.
Or, if it really was only a drop in the bucket, the drop fell in a
bucket that is already bursting at the seams here on Planet Earth.
The cracks and
leaks are quite evident. Like a dam
ready to break.
I imagine that
this particular issue, among many others, would have arisen in an atmosphere of
public consultation and dialogue, had one been created prior to July 2011 when
the grid upgrade began. How would BC
Hydro customers be served under the direction of a “Chief Project
Collaborator,” or a team of Project Collaborators? How would we, in turn, serve? Under this style of leadership, would
customers participate with more conscious responsibility for the complex and
intricate systems we inhabit, making our primary role as consumers of
hydroelectric power one of stewardship, precaution and care? Would we have an opportunity to become better at not taking for granted what we
are so apt to take for granted?
Having not been
able to raise my hand before the deed was done, I’m hoping I’ll one day be able
to take for granted that the production of two million shiny new meters was
just a drop in the bucket...
* * *
One of the most
obvious saving graces of the smart metering system is standardization. All our meters look the same now, across the province! Thank goodness we have officers at BC
Hydro. Thank goodness the Crown took
care of that for us. An obsolete grid
system would have required far too many manually performed services to maintain...
more people working creatively with old stuff.
In the case of a power outage, I would have continued to rely on my
landline to make a phone call to a real person about what’s happening in real
time—using my own power of observation via the hydroelectric technology that
sits on top of my shoulders.
Non-standardized
analog metering is messy and unwieldy, and it requires the wielding of a whole
lot of wrenches and hammers. Best we
don’t depend too heavily on those gadgets, or invest our public money in them. Especially when the people wielding such
devices have to come to my house. I used
to engage in conversation with people like that, and sometimes I would learn
something. I would get to ask
questions. But now I don’t have to worry
about these inefficiencies, and my privacy is better protected. Everything is sure to work for me much faster
and better, with less effort on my part.
In respect to the
provision of this essential service, standardization is no doubt much
better. The alternative was becoming
impossible to predict and control, like a bucket coming apart at the
seams. Like a dam ready to break.
Like
water. Like life.