GEOTHERMAL POWER
(Page 4 of 4)
A pleasure widely enjoyed all over Iceland is year-round
swimming in naturally heated water and guests at the Nature
Cure Sanatorium luxuriate in a refinement of this
geothermal gift: three pools (warm, hot and hotter) held at
constant temperature by mixing cooler water with the
magma-heated variety. Hot mud baths are also available at
the center.
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Sanatorium guests sample still another use for geothermal
heat when dough is placed in a can, sealed, put in a net
and lowered into the mouth of an active steam geyser. When
the container is pulled up 24 hours later, they have
steam-baked organic bread'.
Such random examples of Iceland's praiseworthy use of her
geothermal resources are all very well, of course, but they
tell only fragments of the whole story. And that story is
so obvious that it's sometimes easy to overlook. I know
that — even after several days in the country —
I still didn't realize just how intelligently and widely
the people of Iceland have substituted clean magma power
for polluting energy sources until I left Hverigerdi's
health center and returned to bustling Reykjavik Suddenly,
I realized that I hadn't started feeling rot ten again upon
my return to "civilization". Thanks to geothermal power,
the air in Iceland's capital is as sweet as that of the
countryside.
And that, to me, sums up what Iceland is all about . . . a
people who have built the most meager of natural resources
into a nation of which nature herself must be proud.
How tragic it will be if we — who have so much more
than Iceland — disregard this lesson. How tragic if
we insist on plundering Alaska for petroleum, spreading oil
slicks down the western seaboard, stripmining New Mexico
and choking the air of the southwest . . . to run electric
toothbrushes in Los Angeles. How tragic if we refuse to tap
the clean geothermal power in California's Imperial Valley
and wind up . . . in the end . . . with nothing.
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