retractions

well, as often happens, my romantic proclivities got the better of me. Instead of doing the research that I know I need to do, I got all lost in reverie thinking about the Erie Canal. The Canal did, in fact run right through the center of Syracuse at one time, but its route is now filled in and called "Erie Boulevard." It now no more flows past the Warehouse than the Suez Canal does.

I hate it when reality trumps poetry.

The water flowing past the Warehouse is, it turns out, the Onondaga creek, which feeds the intensely polluted Onondaga Lake that is in Syracuse. This creek flows past and is contaminated by (at last count) about 40 combined sewer overflow structures and contributes greatly to the mudboil situation in the Lake.

Ah well.

Good news, though, is that this does not negatively impact our ability to get a water wheel there. On Tuesday afternoon I went to an amazing lecture on biomimicry that just blew me away. There was a reception afterwards at which I met the head of an organisation called the Syracuse Center of Excellence, whose mission is to "create innovations in environmental and energy technologies that improve human health and productivity, security, and sustainability in urban and built environments." Their website is http://www.syracusecoe.org/. Pretty good group of folk, and COLAB, which is who I have been working for, has a few projects going on with them.

So I met the guy who runs it, and he is super excited about the water wheel. He was standing there talking to this architect, a fellow Syracusian (Syracusite? Syracusino?) and they started talking about how the Haudenosaunee tribe (which translates into something like "people who build long houses") were the ones who stood there on the sore of that lake a long long time ago and laid forth the idea that they must live so that the land and water and forests and skies would be untouched for their descendants of the seventh generation from then. That is where Seventh Generation came from you know. Those folk standing there on the shores of that now-polluted lake. It was the clan martiarch that spoke. The company that sells toilet paper or whatever the hell they sell got their name from that moment.

Anyway, I am standing there talking to these two guys, and they are all excited about my little project, and the C of E guy says "next time you are up here, come to my office and we will get things figured out and start moving forward." Then he turned around and called this very nice woman in a blue jacket over. "He says this is Dean ________, she is the Dean of the College of Engineering. We need to get her involved. She can tell us how big a generator we need." Turns out her father was a labor organiser, and we started talking about old IWW hymns and organising songs, all of which she grew up with. So she is all right in my book.

The point being, even though it is not the Canal, it may be a reality. And if this can really happen, if we can get all the rights and forms signed in triplicate, and construction documents and environmental impact statements and public safety authorisations and everything else that we need, if it can happen here, there is no reason it can not happen somewhere else. And then somewhere else. And somewhere else again. As Arlo said, "then friends, it'll be a movement!" The Learn-From-Your-Elders Anti-Petroleum Power-Generation Movement.

T-shirts and stickers to come.