If you’re housebound or colorblind, here’s a news flash: The dandelions won.
About a dozen years ago, the science people warned us of invasive weeds making their way toward town. Bad players like dandelions, hawkweed, and Himalayan balsam would take over our lawns and roadsides, strangling out our shooting stars, fireweed and forget-me-nots.
This was back during the Obama administration, before we had the Plague and an attempted presidential coup to worry about, when foreign weeds were a bigger threat than Vlad Putin. We read news stories and learned how to identify these interlopers and fought back against the first waves of the invasion.
Year after year a dozen foot soldiers armed with pullers and vicious-looking trowels established a beachhead at the Haines Borough Public Library, defending one of the town’s truly landscaped properties against the yellow marauders.
A look at the library this week tells you the battle is over.
Dandelions have turned our open spaces into an obnoxious, golden carpet. Two friends who for years kept meticulous lawns have surrendered. One filled up 10 five-gallon buckets with dandelion flowers and petals this spring while acknowledging her campaign was futile. A dandelion is about impossible to uproot fatally.
The science people were right.
On another science front, speculation caused oil prices to spiral in 2008 to $149 per barrel, leading to exorbitant fuel prices and the theory of “peak oil,” that the world was perilously low on fossil fuel. The upshot in Haines was creation of a “Peak Oil Task Force” intended to buffer the town from an oncoming crisis.
Stephanie Scott, who staffed the group, went on to become Haines Borough mayor, where she led a campaign to transition borough buildings to wood-pellet heat. The borough brought Juneau’s Jim Rehfeldt, a heating engineer, to town to bounce the idea off him at a public meeting.
Hold your horses, Rehfeldt said. If wood pellets were the silver bullet to the high cost of heating, everyone within a 10-mile radius of a pellet plant would be burning them and they aren’t. Wood pellets, he said, came with their own costs, including boiler maintenance and pellet quality and storage.
Scott was undaunted, saying that even if the costs were even, at least a shipwreck of pellets wouldn’t destroy the ocean.
The borough went ahead with a “pilot project” of pellets at its Senior Center, despite early calculations by the center board that pellets didn’t pencil out so neatly. Some local businesses transitioned to pellets and a local tribe even studied the option of building a pellet-manufacturing plant. By the time the senior center board’s math was borne out, the borough had built a pellet silo and removed from the center a soapstone woodstove that it fed for years with free, donated firewood.
The pellet idea died but before the concept entirely flickered out, the state Division of Forestry made a push for wood-chip heat, which appeared more feasible, as we could at least create the fuel here.
There’s a lot more to this story, including the borough’s incomplete explanation of its decision to abandon wood heat systems, but it appears the science people – in the person of engineer Jim Rehfeldt – were right.
Rewind to a news story about a dozen years ago: A science person predicted that warming of the earth’s atmosphere meant that folks in the northern hemisphere would inherit the weather of the region about 100 miles south.
Draw a line 100 miles directly south of downtown Haines and you’re in downtown Tenakee Springs, annual rainfall 83 inches. The historic annual rainfall in Haines is 54 inches.
The late town historian Lib Hakkinen used to say that one day of Haines sunshine could wipe out the memory of a whole month of cloudy weather. If you put stock in the science people, it appears we’ll be putting Lib’s theory to the test.