Places – Page 5 – GEORGE ROTHERT

Seattle’s Vanishing Landmarks

Fifty years ago, Congress voted against funding supersonic aircraft. The result was massive layoffs at Boeing and the not-so-tongue-in-cheek billboard adjacent to I-5 on the way out of Seattle.

Things are different now. Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon—along with Nirvana and grunge—changed the Queen/Jet City’s image. The working-class town became hip and synonymous with tech.

Seattle’s metamorphosis continues in the twenty-first century. With a median home price of $750,000 and median household income above $150,000, the city has become a place for the well-off and not-so-well-off/homeless with not-so-much in between.

Boeing is contracting again, shutting down 787 Dreamliner production. Amazon is giving mixed messages about continued growth in Seattle.

And another Seattle landmark is about to disappear. Elephant Car Wash, the first automated car wash in the city, announced it was closing after seventy years at the triangular block bordered by Denny Way and Battery Street. Soon to disappear is its iconic garishly-pink neon elephant sign. The company will continue to operate its fourteen other car washes in the Puget Sound area. The property owner has not announced any plans for the property that’s now surrounded by high-rise condominiums and office towers that may or may not be occupied by Amazonians.

An earlier victim of urban progress was the Lincoln Towing Company’s landmark truck—also pink—on Mercer Avenue. In the age of GPS smart phones, nobody needs directions anyway: “Take the Mercer exit from five and turn right at the toe truck.”

The Bundy Chronicles

Remember Cliven Bundy and his boy Ammon? They faced off with the Bureau of Land Management—the other B.L.M.—in 2014 because they didn’t want to pay rent for federal land. They said their livestock should graze for free, that U.S. taxpayers should subsidize their ranching business. When B.L.M. came to impound Bundy’s cattle, they recruited the right-wing Oath Keepers “militia” to join them in a stand-off with the B.L.M.

On the second day of 2016, Ammon led an armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon. The takeover was to support father-and-son arsonists Dwight and Steve Hammond. They had been convicted of torching more than a hundred acres of federal grazing land to get rid of juniper and sagebrush, so more grass for their grazing cattle would grow. (They were recently pardoned by the current occupant of the White House.)

The months-long occupation resulted in property damage totaling millions of dollars to the Refuge’s headquarters.

Since that time, Ammon has distinguished himself by declaring the Mormon church had been infiltrated by socialists, globalists and environmentalists. He has criticized the current president’s immigration policy regarding Central Americans seeking asylum, expressed support for Black Lives Matter and said the United States is like Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

During August of 2020, he led mask-less demonstrations at the Idaho state capitol protesting COVID 19 restrictions and disrupted legislative sessions. State police handcuffed him to a chair and wheeled him out.

Last week Ammon Bundy attended his son’s high-school football game, but was refused admission because he was not wearing a mask. Watching the game from behind the end zone, he refused to comply with requirement to wear a mask on school property. When he wouldn’t leave, the game was cancelled at half time. “I don’t give two shits what you have to say, you’ve ruined it for everybody!” a woman told him on her way out.

The Boeing Follies

The Boeing Company has come a long way since 1916, when Bill Boeing began building airplanes in his Seattle barn. Looking to the future, the company is hopeful that its 737 MAX will soon be certified to fly again. The aircraft has been grounded since March 2019, after two crashes killed 346 passengers.

Boeing has been accused of withholding information from the F.A.A. during the 737 MAX certification process and the F.A.A. accused of not carrying out its regulatory duties when it originally okayed the aircraft.

Annals of Bi-Partisanship

What started out as a child-molestation case ended with the Supreme Court ruling that much of eastern Oklahoma belongs to the people who there first: Native Americans.

The convicted child molester brought suit contending that because he was a member of the Creek Nation and the offense occurred on reservation land, the state of Oklahoma did not have jurisdiction. The state countered that because the treaties going back to the 1830s had been ignored in practice all along, and officially ignored since Oklahoma became a state in 1907, the reservation had no authority on its own land. The Supreme Court said otherwise.

Solving the Wild Peeing Problem

It’s been a problem as long as guys have been drinking beer. There’s not always a nearby place to relieve one’s self. The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the problem. Fewer public rest rooms are open. Many businesses although open, have closed their facilities, even to customers.

Public urination causes problems and not just of decorum. Urine has a corrosive effect on buildings and other structures. (In my urban neighborhood, it’s mostly dogs leaving their stains and aroma on building corners, pillars and posts.) In the city of Amsterdam, fifteen people a year fall in and drown when pissing into canals. But the city is doing something about what they call the “wild peeing.”

A Dutch company is marketing “GreenPee,” a stand-alone urinal that requires no plumbing or sewer connection. GreenPee is a planter with vegetation growing out if it. On the side is an opening with a target zone for a person to aim at. Inside the planter is hemp which captures the urine. Amsterdam says that since they began installing GreenPee planters in 2018, wild peeing has been reduced by half. (They have also installed a few retractable urinals for women.) The hemp-urine mixture is composted and becomes a phosphate-rich organic fertilizer.

The GreenPee has a reservoir to collect rainwater for the greenery at the top of the unit. The planters also attract bees and other insects that are necessary for a healthy ecosystem.

GreenPee not only gives people something to aim at, but also converts that urine into something useful. A few of these could be helpful in our cities’ tent encampments.

Heating the Planet with Cooling

Good news about the COVID-19 pandemic: it will kill fewer people than will die as a result of the changing climate.

Scientists are sounding alarms that the planet is heating up much faster than predicted. Our environment is changing more quickly than plant and animal species can adapt. The coronavirus affects mostly humans, but a warming planet affects all life.

Fortunately for first-world humans and their pets, air conditioning will protect them from an overheated earth. Or will it?

(Richard M. Nixon liked to have wood crackling in his fireplace. When the room became uncomfortably warm, he cranked up the air conditioning.)

More than 3.6 billion refrigerators, freezers, and air conditioning units are in use around the world, keeping our bodies comfortably cool, our food and beer cold and our pizzas frozen. In days of extreme heat, air conditioning keeps the most vulnerable of us alive. Those that don’t have AC want it and many will get it. Air-conditioning use increases at the rate of ten percent a year.

The problem is that all this cooling contributes to heating up our atmosphere. Cooling units use hydrofluorocarbon (HFC), the replacement for hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC), which the Environmental Protection Agency banned in 2010. (Who knows, the current E.P.A. may bring them back.) HFC is not as bad as HCFC, but it’s still a greenhouse gas being diffused into the atmosphere.

Cooling equipment uses electricity, a lot of it, and not very efficiently. Most equipment sold today is only one-half to one-third as efficient as what is available today. And as we know, most methods of electricity production releases greenhouse gases. Clean coal, anyone?

As with most everything, there are no simple solutions.