Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [94]
Photovoltaics were and are high-technology electronic devices. They did need to be constantly “new and improved,” and they are unlikely to be repaired with vise-grip pliers or anything else that you could find in an 1850s shop. It was much easier for tool freaks to deal with wind energy, where an excellent wind machine had already been created: the Jacobs wind generator. Marcellus Jacobs had manufactured the small wind-electric generators in the 1930s and 1940s before the backcountry was electrified.14 Enthusiasts rediscovered the machines in the 1960s and 1970s and began to speak of them as embodying gospel technological truth.15 They were seen as the best small-scale wind generator. “At this writing, the Jacobs wind machines remain the best available despite the 40-year old design,” Baldwin avowed.
THE SOLAR AGE
“There are elements of a religious revival in Appropriate Technology,” wrote Witold Rybcynski, a thinker who was both part of the movement and harshly critical of it. “It is a strange mélange of Marxism, Puritanism, and something called Buddhist Economics.”16 Rybcynski highlighted that appropriate technologists supported the energy sources they did primarily because of the ideas they held about them working rather than because they worked. If solar technologies were a bit more expensive or required more time and effort, it didn’t matter because they would help set society back on the right course. The occasional hassle of living in a solar heated home or fixing up an old wind generator was part of the point. These technologies were as much a social statement as an engineering ethos.
In the late 1960s eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin argued for a “liberatory technology.” Innovation paired with ecological imagination would allow people to “regain the sense of oneness with nature that existed in humans from primordial times. Nature and the organic modes of thought it always fosters will become an integral part of human culture,” he wrote. “It will reappear with a fresh spirit in man’s paintings, literature, philosophy, dances, architecture, domestic furnishings, and in his very gestures and day-to-day activities.”17 It was a powerful vision for environmental types who were getting tired of apocalyptic rhetoric about pollution, pesticides, and population growth.
Certainly, there are shades of solar transcendentalism, but radical solar advocates like Steve Baer, founder of the legendary company Zomeworks, saw solar technology as a powerful force for social—not just personal—change. Baer dramatized the power of solar power to change America with a fictional vignette in his fascinating book of solar facts and stories, Sunspots. In this story, at a demonstration in an unnamed town a large van pulls up and begins handing out mirrors to the protesters with the invocation, “Give ‘em some sunshine.” The protesters then proceed to use the combined heat of eight hundred–foot square mirrors to burn a police car and start one hundred fires during the Sun Riots. “The lower offices of city hall and the police department have been gutted by fire. Black streaks surround the windows which are now shiny with aluminum foil,” Baer wrote. “The police unable to confiscate mirrors; the matter is in the courts.”18
Weaponized solar supporters breaking the government’s monopoly on violence is merely the most extreme of the visions harbored by appropriate technologists. “They thought that a decentralized society, relying on solar power, would be a more just society, promoting self-reliance, and reducing the income gap,” historian Frank Laird has shown.19 Many were determinists, figuring that technologies change people and not the other way around. As the historian Kirk summarized their thinking, “Technology used amorally and unecologicaly created the social and environmental problems of industrial capitalism;