Thursday, August 5, 2010

We share a sky that does not recognize national borders and therefore we share both its beauty and its corruption.

This is a series of woodcuts that grew out of my outrage at a local green washing campaign sponsored by Portland General Electric. PGE has a media campaign that extols their wind power and green energy while in realty, wind is only a small percentage of the electricity is generated and 40% is comes from a coal plant, Boardman. This antiquated plant was grandfathered in before the Clean Air Act and produces an astonishing array of pollutants that create a haze that hovers over the Columbia River. A miasma containing unsafe levels of mercury, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and tons of particulate matter is continually released contributing to global warming and public health concerns.

Boardman is not just an individual power plant, it is also a symbol of the national and international implications of coal power. Cheap energy is often very expensive.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Linda,

    I posted a link to your blog on my FB page!

    I hope you get lots of followers!

    Looks great!

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  2. It is difficult to appreciate the dangers of that which is invisible and surrounds us at the same time. The 3 mile high bubble surrounding our planet is a sealed envelope inside which all humans and most other critters live. Whatever is released into it is largely trapped there - to be recycled via the living things (and some non-living processes)inside the bubble. The word recycling sounds so friendly, but recycling mercury through living things isn't a benign process.

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