• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 982 0

to the energy crisis of the time but also to the growing separateness from nature of modern life, with its inevitable interconnections. Poet Baron Wormser, along with his family, lived "off the grid" in the rural Maine woods for more than twenty years. As Wormser experienced it, the light of his kerosene lamps belonged to a different time, a different kind of evening. "Night's coming was so profound, so transfixing, so soft yet indelible that I was startled and lulled in the same awed moment," he wrote. "I remember very clearly feeling how, second by tiny second it was getting dark, how the dark was creeping in, how it was inexorable and delicate."

He acknowledged that he romanticized the same lamp that had been so eagerly buried by rural folks in the 1930s:

A few guests over the years found the stench appalling and the light feeble. As much as they wanted to be charmed, they weren't. I loved lying in bed and reading by the light of a small kerosene lamp. I was reading in the presence of an actual flame.... Time was steady, but in the flame's movements it varied.... It was a romantic glow.... The trembling light is quietly breathtaking. It causes soot and stench; it came from the hard work of mining, processing and trucking.... All true, but the feeling remains. Touch the glass chimney—it is hot with the heat that signals light.

However much he romanticized lamplight, Wormser also came to understand some of its costs and effort, which modern society at large would have to acknowledge sooner or later. "Light did not materialize itself," he wrote. "Our efforts each day made it happen. A match had to be struck. Our heedlessness had a limit."

Although Middle Eastern oil producers eventually lifted their embargo in March 1974, after Israel agreed to pull its troops out of the Sinai Peninsula, the price of oil remained higher than before the embargo, and the stability of fuel supplies fluctuated for years afterward. When President Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, he made energy independence a major goal of his administration. Carter, in a time before the widespread recognition of the effects of fossil fuels on climate, imagined exploiting the known coal reserves of the United States in order to alleviate the country's dependence on foreign oil. He also stressed conservation, appearing on television in a cardigan sweater and urging people to turn their thermostats down to 55 degrees at night, and he planned legislation that would foster the development of cleaner, more efficient energy generation.

"We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources," insisted Carter in an address to the nation in April 1977.

By acting now we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.... Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war"—except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.... The 1973 gasoline lines are gone, and our homes are warm again. But our energy problem is worse tonight than it was in 1973 or a few weeks ago in the dead of winter. It is worse because more waste has occurred, and more time has passed by without our planning for the future. And it will get worse every day until we act.... The world has not prepared for the future. During the 1950s, people used twice as much oil as during the 1940s. During the 1960s, we used twice as much as during the 1950s. And in each of those decades, more oil was consumed than in all of mankind's previous history.

As part of this effort, Carter signed the National Energy Act into law, a component of which, the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA), marked the first significant legislation to affect the power grid since the New Deal. PURPA permitted independent power producers that met strict fuel efficiency standards to enter the electricity market—previously the sole domain of the utility companies. Carter hoped that such legislation—and the competition it might