A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to go to the Iowa Great Lakes area to spend the weekend with a group of friends. As many of you know, I spent a lot of time there in my youth, so being at "The Lake" as we always called it makes me nostalgic. On this particular trip however, I didn't even get close to the area before I started thinking.
I can remember when I was a child and traveling anywhere at night was amazing. A lot of this was because the sky was so dark and the stars were so bright. This was long enough ago, that we were just at the beginning of the electrification of Iowa's rural homes and farms. In those days, many times the only sign seen as to a farm having electricity was the single security light in the center of the yard. This made traveling in the night very overwhelming for a child. This amazing darkness was also compounded because automobiles weren't nearly as reliable as they are today, and everyone had stories of breakdowns where walking was required. I remember when a trip either to, or from my Aunt Dorothy Dean's house, north of Keswick, Iowa, seemed as challenging as going to the moon (which obviously we hadn't yet done at the time).
But the stars. Wow. I remember sitting in the back seat of my grandparent's car, a huge auto, and leaning my head back on the seat and looking out the back window and seeing all of the stars that the universe presented. It was amazing. The other piece of amazement was that from a distance, you could see the glow of big towns - like Sigourney (population 2300). And then change happened and with REC's, electricity became easy to get and inexpensive by comparison. The countryside became much more well lit. Security lights on barns, lights in workshops and out buildings, and of course, homes lit up. The countryside started to feel like one sparsely populated, extended suburb between larger towns.
When we lived in Humboldt, we started to see this go the other way. We were just at the beginning of the roll up of the smaller family farms into larger units. To be clear, it was still family farming and I believe that much of it still is today, but I'll leave that argument to others. Anyway, I remember going to work in the morning and driving by an abandoned farmstead, still in decent shape and driving by the same place in the evening and it was gone. Everything was gone except for the water wellhead, the land put back into production to help drive the productivity of the enterprise. The countryside started heading back the other direction.
This is what I noticed when we driving to Northwest Iowa in the darkness a few weeks ago.
With one really notable difference. In the early days when you saw a glow over the horizon, you knew that in the next few miles, you'd come across a city. Not anymore. Now, the glow that you see is one of two things. It is either the hub for one of the larger farms that has been created in the rollup of the smaller forms, or it is one of the many production facilities in the state that supports the agricultural industry, or uses the products from the farm as their inputs. This could be an ethanol plant or a production facility that produces farm equipment. Either way, they are usually the glowing lights that you see in the otherwise dark sky of rural Iowa. The other thing that you see, particularly as you go Northwest is all of the red lights at the top of the windmills so pilots know where they are. Otherwise, the night has gotten darker again and it is easier to see stars in the night sky.
The future will bring even more change. There was a very interesting article in Time magazine in the last couple of weeks talking about fusion. The fascinating thing is that they actually think it may be possible to accomplish in our lifetime. This has always been a bit of a pipe dream, but now with many of the world's most forward-thinking and wealthiest people getting into the middle of this, it would seem there really is a hope that this could happen, and if so it would be a game changer. It could well be the thing that changes the world, taking energy off the table as one of our biggest challenges. This would allow the reversal of climate change and would turn many industries on their heads.
I hope for two things with this. First, I hope that this discovery happens in a way that everyone will be able to participate in the change, and second, I hope that I am here to experience it.
Have a great week.
