Harold R. Hay: Solar Pioneer
(Page 15 of 17)
September/October 1976
By Mother Earth News Editors
PLOWBOY: So the agriculturalists lost.
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HAY: Oh, I suppose they're still coming up with new reasons for the peasants not to burn that straw. It's interesting, though, that those guys with all the ideas haven't asked themselves whether or not burning the straw does any good. And I think it does. For both a cool black and a hot black reason.
Forget what's fashionable and what others are doing. Find out what you want to do, then prepare yourself... and do it.
See, what happens when those peasants burn that straw is—first—there's a layer of insulating black ash left on top of the soil.
PLOWBOY: A cool black.
HAY: Right. A cool black. The sun's rays hit the surface of that ash and are immediately changed to heat energy which rapidly dissipates into the atmosphere. And the fluffy layer of ash between that top surface and the soil underneath keeps the heat from reaching the earth. As a result, the soil stays cool and retains its moisture ... which is an important advantage in that relatively dry climate.
But then, in the late fall and winter when the seasonal rains fall, that fluffy black ash is broken down into nothing but a black pigment. It loses its insulating value. And once it's just a black coating stuck directly to the earth's surface, it becomes a hot black. It helps the soil absorb the sun's rays and stay warm. This allows the next year's crops to come up earlier and grow much faster. So maybe those peasants know what they're doing after all.
PLOWBOY: Well, as you said a little while ago . . . there's no arguing with something that works. On the other hand, the agriculturalists you just mentioned and an awful lot of other self-proclaimed "experts" seem to have wiggled their way into positions of power. And even though they don't know what they're talking about most of the time, they seem to have the funds and the authority to ram their pet theories down the throats of all us poor peasants.
HAY: Yes, I know. This is a special peeve of mine. Perhaps because I left school before I received my Ph.D. which, in the minds of some of the bureaucrats I've dealt with since then, somehow seems to taint any idea I might work with.
But this whole business of Ph.D.'s and other fancy titles and bureaucratic credentials of all kinds is vastly overrated. The whole field of research has become institutionalized. It's become a chummy club of back-scratchers who publicize each other and recommend each other for government and foundation grants and name each other to special commissions.
This is one, of the big problems in the field of solar energy. Certain people have come to dominate "the club". They've gotten themselves associated with the U.S. Government or the U.N. or a big university and now they have big public relations organizations working to see that they get all the publicity and the funds, and they decide which forms of solar energy will be developed and which will be ignored. And, of course, since Big Government and Big Business and Big Organizations finance them, the projects that generally get worked on the satellites in the sky and the 100-square-mile collectors with the transmission lines running off to a city somewhere—are the projects that will mainly benefit those groups.
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