VIEWPOINTS
Saturday, February 26, 2022
East Oregonian
A5
Getting a natural workout at Mount Sinai
ANDREW
CLARK
A SLICE OF LIFE
M
ount Sinai, Egypt, 240 miles from
Cairo, is in the southern portion
of the Sinai Peninsula, which is
the land bridge between Asia and Africa.
The mountain is in a desolate area in the
southern interior of the peninsula and is
composed of large, rough, jagged boulders.
At its base is the isolated fourth century
Monastery of Saint Catherine, a UNESCO
World Heritage Site.
Mount Sinai, at 7,500 feet, is unique in
that it plays an important role in each of the
Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths. It is
thought to be where Moses brought down
the stone tablets inscribed with the Ten
Commandments.
I was working in Cairo and my wife,
Barbara, came to celebrate our 40th
wedding anniversary in Upper Egypt
where we could visit the Valley of the
Kings, Valley of the Queens and the
wondrous temples of Abu Simbel, Karnak,
Luxor. Egypt has many astonishing struc-
tures from far, far back into antiquity
designed and constructed in unimaginable
ways.
For example, the Great Pyramid of
Khufu, also known as Cheops, is estimated
to be built of about 2.4 million blocks and
weighs a total of 6,648,000 tons. All of that
rock had to be carefully quarried.
The limestone blocks came from nearby,
but the granite and others were carried
to the Nile River several hundred miles
upstream near Aswan, floated to the Giza
landing site, off-loaded and carried to
the site of construction of the pyramid.
There still is argument about how actual
construction was accomplished. You can
go inside the largest and the middle-sized
pyramids, and if you go to Egypt don’t
miss doing it. Inside the middle pyramid
(Pyramid of Khafre) you pass through
small tunnels deep into the center, and
there you end up in a beautifully polished
marble room with a large granite sarcoph-
agus where the coffin of the mummy was
placed. I remember sitting on the edge of
that sarcophagus in that sacred, peaceful
place of total silence, thinking, “There are
millions of tons of rock above my head, put
there as many as 5,000 years ago, and it is
utterly solid and secure.”
Back to Mount Sinai, we had been
snorkeling over in the Gulf of Aqaba on
the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula,
and we learned about the opportunity to
climb Mound Sinai. We signed up and were
driven late at night to begin the hike in the
dark at 2 a.m. A guide led us up and up a
long trail.
Part way up, Barbara, who loves camels,
got a chance to ride one to where the camel
trail ends. There, 750 irregular, roughly
carved steps in the rocks lead up to the
summit. We arrived at the top just as the
stars were giving way to daylight.
The sunrise shed light on several
hundred people from all around the world,
perched on the rocks and boulders, quietly
worshiping in various ways. Once the sun
was up, we began our descent to escape
the intense heat that would soon overtake
the peak. At the bottom of the 750 steps
we learned there was a shortcut of 3,000
more rocky steps back down to Saint Cath-
erine’s. I opted to take that route, while
Barbara decided to ride another camel the
2-mile trail down the mountain. She soon
found that riding downhill on a camel
saddle gives your pelvis a severe beating.
She ended up walking most of the way,
while I was focused on avoiding a nasty fall
on those 3,000 irregular stone steps often
called “God’s Stairmaster.” At the end, my
legs felt like spaghetti.
Climbing Mount Sinai is the sort of
activity you do once. And I must say, if
Moses carried two heavy stone tablets
down that mountain he was one ferociously
fit dude. And then, when he saw that golden
calf that his people had decided to worship,
he was so angry that he broke the tablets —
and a bit later had to do the whole climb-
up-and-carry down another set of them
again. What a man.
One up-and-down was sufficient for me.
———
Dr. Andrew Clark is a livestock veteri-
narian with both domestic and international
work experience who lives in Pendleton.
How Oregon can create a more clean and reliable electric grid
LISA COHN
ELISA WOOD
OTHER VIEWS
M
ore and more utility customers
are embracing the “prosumer”
revolution, purchasing and bring-
ing solar, energy storage, wind and other
clean energy resources onto the electric
grid.
Such action becomes important as
severe weather puts pressure on our power
supply. For example, a year ago, more
than 400,000 Oregon residents lost power
during a winter storm.
In some areas, Oregon utilities are
beginning to pay for prosumers’ resources,
technologies that can help green the grid
and even avert power emergencies. But
utilities need to do more.
Both Portland General Electric and
PacifiCorp offer their customers incentives
for purchasing solar or solar plus storage.
Hopefully, this will create more prosum-
ers who install and take advantage of clean
energy.
PGE now is offering a Smart Battery
Pilot under which it pays customers with
energy storage — Tesla Powerwalls, for
example — up to $40 a month for the
ability to manage the batteries to support
PGE’s system when needed.
Utilities need to offer more programs
such as PGE’s battery pilot under which
prosumers are paid to lend their clean
energy resources to the grid. This would be
especially helpful in Central Oregon, which
is blessed with plenty of sunshine that can
be converted to solar energy.
Oregon could look to California, where
San Diego Gas & Electric and the Marine
Corps Air Station Miramar inked a deal
under that Miramar would provide the util-
ity with generation from its clean energy
microgrid (consisting of solar and storage)
during September and October 2021. The
goal was to help avert electricity emergen-
cies due to hot weather.
When prosumers feed electricity to the
grid from their clean energy sources — or
use their home resources to separate from
the grid and reduce demand when utility
resources are strained — they’re helping
avoid blackouts. They’re ensuring utilities,
businesses and households don’t fire up
polluting fossil fuel generators.
With programs such as PGE’s Smart
Battery Pilot and, in California, the agree-
ment between SDG&E and Miramar, util-
ities have the opportunity to help keep the
grid from becoming overtaxed.
Prosumers who share their clean
resources with the grid also can help utili-
ties manage their “peak” or highest demand
periods without requiring utilities to invest
in building “peaker” plants, which are often
based on fossil fuels.
Energy storage batteries and electric
vehicle batteries often are sitting unused
in houses or businesses. Oregon utilities
need to take advantage of these and other
resources and help move the transition to
clean energy forward.
To achieve this goal, we need national
and state policies that alter archaic rules
and regulations. These policies were
created before technology advancements
began giving businesses and consum-
ers more control over their energy supply.
Many of these rules and regulations involve
utility requirements, rate structures and
territorial restrictions.
California policymakers are working
on enacting some measures that benefit
prosumers. For example, California Senate
Bill 379 calls for shortening local govern-
ments’ approval process for firing up home-
owners’ solar and storage systems. This
type of policy would be helpful in Oregon.
Also helpful would be measures requir-
ing utilities to approve the interconnection
of clean energy projects to utility systems
within a specific time frame. Too often,
homeowners and clean energy project
developers must wait months for intercon-
nection.
Prosumers can help ensure the grid is
clean, flexible and reliable, especially with
the aid of new policies. This becomes more
and more important as extreme weather
poses threats to the reliability of the grid.
———
Lisa Cohn and Elisa Wood are editors
of Microgrid Knowledge, a news site that
focuses on distributed energy and microg-
rids, www.MicrogridKnowledge.com.
The faces of February
ALEX
HOBBS
PASTURES OF PLENT Y
M
y sons are walking along
a path that winds through
old Douglas firs and dawn
redwoods. A cloudless Willamette
Valley sky is suddenly swallowed by a
canopy of green. The floor is spongy.
Twigs crackle and snap, and we are
at once surrounded by rich, loamy,
petrichor-laden earth. The dirt winds
through bare-branched rhododen-
dron up towards Moreland Hall — the
English department. I start to recite
the opening monologue from “Richard
III.”
“Now is the winter of our discon-
tent,” I sneer and give chase to the
boys who have broken into a sprint.
Their little footfalls make dull thuds
against the pavement, but I have
hunched myself like Shakespeare’s
antagonist and cannot catch them
before they make it to the foot of
the steps at the building’s entrance.
The shaded breeze is cool, and the
boys begin to climb over bike racks
and fire hydrants. I ask my older son
the contents of the next line, and he
knows. “Richard III” is his favorite.
“Made glorious summer by this sun
of York,” he says. He is hanging upside
down on a bike rack splattered with a
patina of paint and steel. I tell the boys
a story of Robert Schwarz, my old
Shakespeare professor, who made us
stand up and recite monologues.
“He was the first professor to ever
embarrass me in front of an entire
class,” I tell them. I join in bike rack
gymnastics.
“What happened?” My younger
son asks, hopping down the stoop. His
skinny legs seem scarcely big enough
to hold him up, and I am reminded of
cartoon fox Robin Hood masquerading
as a stork.
“I was reciting to the class and I
didn’t know how to pronounce the
word ‘indicted.’” An English language
Puck, a trickster word.
“How is it spelled?” My older
son asks. He is now watching a
wheeled-robot glide down the side-
walk.
“In-dick-ted,” I say. I emphasize
the hard ‘K’ sound. “But the ‘C’ is
silent when you pronounce it.” I can
remember the heat as it took root in my
cheeks that day and the annoyance on
professor Schwarz’s face as that word
stumbled from my mouth.
“Well, don’t feel bad,” he says in
between upside down and right side
up. “That’s a stupid word.” He says
this with such nonchalance, such
self-assuredness. I think of him in that
orange chair in the room with conden-
sation on the windows, in place of me,
and understand that whatever I am
doing, I am doing something right.
Beavers and streams
A few weeks ago I tucked myself
into bed and cozied up to an hour and a
half long seminar on beavers and their
role in riparian ecosystems. As one
does.
Our collective definition of a stream
might entail swift-moving water,
steep-banked sides, white bubbles
steadily flowing downstream. What is
really happening, however, is a cycle
of degradation and erosion. Scar tissue
left behind by the absence of beavers.
Incised streams mean a reduced water
table, reduced vegetation, reduced
sediment, reduced beaver food — a
cycle that will continue in perpetuity
without restoration efforts.
In the weeks following the view-
ing, I still am thinking of the dichot-
omy of the incised stream versus the
meandering gentleness of a healthy
one. With our post-settler goggles,
we see a stream’s intended state as
stagnant and sluggish. It is easy to
see why we mistakenly equate these
fast, unnatural streams as better. The
water is getting from point A to point
B faster, without hindrance. After all,
this seems to be our collective attitude
in general: fitter, faster, stronger more
productive.
The lure of falling into the swifter
stream is so strong, and wading
through the murky waters of a beaver
meadow seems so unpleasant. We are
tempted to make rash decisions pred-
icated upon the eradication of some-
thing more beautiful and more natural.
Entrusting the wandering over the
linear takes time.
So we go to sleep, and in the morn-
ing, we’ll plant willow and hope Castor
canadensis returns.
———
Alex Hobbs is a former educator
turned full-time homeschooling mom.
She has a degree in political science from
Oregon State University.
Tuition transparency makes higher
education more inclusive and accessible
WILLIAM
MULLEN
OTHER VIEWS
I
f we truly want to make higher educa-
tion more equitable and accessible, then
colleges and universities need to change
how they think about affordability and the
actual price of a college degree.
Too many institutions hide the true cost
of attendance behind a high sticker price that
is then offset with deep discounts thanks to
financial aid and merit awards. The outdated
high-cost, high-discount approach, combined
with rising tuition prices year after year, has
widened the gap between what families think
they’ll pay and what they ultimately do pay for
college.
It prompts some college-bound students to
steer clear of schools — particularly private
institutions — where they would thrive.
Low-income students might think those insti-
tutions are out of their reach because it is not
immediately clear how much financial aid is
available to them to help set off the steep cost.
As tuition gets more expensive, it becomes less
feasible for middle- and upper-middle-class
students to afford higher education because
they qualify for less financial aid.
But prospective students and their fami-
lies shouldn’t overlook private colleges and
universities simply based on the sticker price,
which tends to be higher than their public
counterparts. A private college education is
more affordable than you think, especially
because some institutions, including Willa-
mette University, are making intentional deci-
sions to be more transparent about their tuition
and making education at their institution more
affordable for all.
Willamette University recently reset its
tuition and made the landmark decision to
lower its undergraduate tuition by about 20%
this academic year. And following a record
fundraising year, Willamette is offering $12
million to new students in 2022, up $1.5
million from last year, directly serving our
goal of making a Willamette education afford-
able for all.
Students and their families deserve a
straightforward approach to tuition rates and
financial aid, and we hope more elite institu-
tions make similar changes. In the meantime,
it’s important that students don’t overlook
private colleges and universities because they
think they’re out of reach financially.
Get in touch with the financial aid office
at the institution you are considering. This
process seems complicated and daunting, and
it can be overwhelming. Most institutions have
teams of people who are willing to help. At
Willamette, our staff has helped thousands of
students fill out their applications, understand
financial aid and access the resources they
need to make the process easier.
The confusing tuition and financial aid
policies at many intuitions can lead to “sticker
shock,” sometimes prompting families to
simply give up on the prospect of a private
university. We think it serves students and
families better to make costs and financial aid
more transparent. We have already taken steps
towards this goal at Willamette. And we hope
other colleges will also follow our example.
———
William Mullen is the vice president for enroll-
ment management at Willamette University.