Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [54]
Schlesinger was not a radical man. A Republican with a pipesmoking clubbiness about him, he had headed the Central Intelligence Agency before moving into energy. Thus, the appointment of Hayes seems downright mystifying. Hayes explained it like this:23 Shortly after being appointed by Jimmy Carter, Schlesinger paid a trip to the oilproducing nations of the Middle East. The 1970s were a tense time for U.S.–Middle Eastern relations. In the wake of the Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries exercised their economic might, led by Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Ahmed Zaki Yamani. The OPEC actions dramatically raised the price of oil for Americans and touched off the energy crisis of the 1970s.
As Schlesinger awaited an audience with Yamani, he was seated in a rather dull room with few magazines or newspapers. A key exception, though, was a paperbook book with a sun on the cover. It was Rays of Hope: The Transition to a Post-Petroleum World, a book on renewable energy that Hayes had authored that year.
As it just so happened, Hayes had interviewed Yamani and, to thank him, had sent a copy of the work with a rather florid inscription (something that began like, “To my dear friend Ahmed,” as Hayes recalled recently). Picking up the book and reading this chummy note to the Arab power player, Schlesinger turned to his friend James Bishop and wondered aloud, “Who the fuck is Denis Hayes?”24 Bishop, who had been Newsweek’s DC bureau chief, happened to know and like Hayes, so good things ensued.
Still, Schlesinger asked a good question. Hayes is an unusual environmentalist. Though he loved blue jeans and sitting cross-legged as much as the next guy, he was not a trust fund vagabond or an urbanite who was ignorant of the chunks of the country covered with industrial infrastructure. He grew up in Camas, Washington, a working-class town in the southwest corner of the state along the banks of the Columbia River. His family never lived more than twelve blocks from the paper mill that dominated the small town. Their home wasn’t extravagant, just solid brick and comfortable, with three bedrooms and a squat detached garage.25
Portland, Oregon’s free spirit might have been forty minutes to the southwest, but Camas was a mill town, not a suburb. The local high school mascot was the Papermaker, and 75 percent of the city’s tax receipts in the 1960s came from Crown Zellerbach’s towering mill. Until the mid-60s, the mill’s management and workers worked without too much discord. The local union was strong and run by a surprising mix of old southern Europeans, Greeks mostly, who’d been strikebreakers in the early twentieth century.26
The town had a complex relationship with the mill. It was one of the first mills that used the chemical intensive “Kraft” process in the Northwest. The paper got whiter, but the odor got much worse. Sulfur that was cooked out of the trees and added to the slurry during the papermaking process produced a sickly sweet smell that permeated the entire region.
Some local residents were furious at the changes to the new process. A local hotelier even won a lawsuit in the early 1930s for damages he sustained as a result of the Kraft process .27 But the town’s relationship to the mill was more complex than it might have seemed. One newcomer who moved to the town during Hayes’s high school years summed up what many seemed to feel: “The attitude was, ‘Well, that’s the smell of money.’ Because, as long as the mill was working and paying salaries and taxes, it is a good thing for Camas. There would have been no town without the mill.”28
Camas was practically defined by its smell. At