Blast from the past

It must be fall, because we have bowls of tomatoes perched in various places around the kitchen and the mud room, in various states of ripeness and decomposition. They must be triaged almost daily – the intact ones set aside, and the badly wounded turned into sauce, minus the nasty bits (and crawling critters) that are fed to the chickens. We are the owners of a very cool Italian-made, hand-cranked pulper – but we haven’t used it in ages. We have read (somewhere!) that tomato skins and seeds are eminently nutritious, so the entire fruit gets chopped and chucked into the pot (except for those varieties with a coarse core that really must be removed).

This system of inspection and sorting is complicated by the fact that one of our cats has a thing for raw tomatoes. If any are left out in a feline-accessible place, she will, without fail, roll one onto the floor and feast upon it in the middle of the night, which is both noisy and messy. Maybe the texture of those beefsteaks resembles the flesh of a mouse. (At the risk of engaging in cat-chat, has anyone else had this problem?) Anyway, an overabundance of tomatoes is a good problem to have, and we’re not too worried about losing a few.

The hot, dry summer also benefited our tomatillos – a crop we hadn’t grown in a long time. About 15 years ago we had a run of good tomatillo harvests – to the point that we couldn’t keep up with them. This plant has invasive tendencies, readily self-seeding from drops, and ours proliferated like crazy. The volunteers were as robust and productive as any we planted, so we just embraced chaos theory and allowed them to reign over one section of the garden. After a few years they dwindled out, for no apparent reason.

This spring our local nursery was selling tomatillo seedlings, so we figured we’d give them another try. They performed well, and even in autumn, as the tomato plants have become quite wizened and scraggly, the tomatillos remain lush, still producing more of their pretty yellow flowers – as if they think they’re back home in Mexico or Guatemala. (A rude awakening is soon to come!) The glossy green fruit, which grows inside a lantern-like husk (calyx), is covered with a sticky film that provides an extra line of defense against infestation by insects.

There are many ways to prepare them – but for us, tomatillos are all about salsa verde, a tangy condiment that’s great on eggs or beans or chicken. They contain a lot of pectin, so they thicken up nicely. One year, when we were cooking a big batch, a minute’s inattention resulted in the mixture sticking to the bottom of the pot and burning a bit, acquiring some of the characteristics of salsa negra – though it was still delicious. This year’s crop, our first without the kids around to enjoy it, is tinged only with nostalgia.

ANACHRONISM

Just as the nights were growing cooler and many of us were thinking about our energy requirements for home heating, the Nova Scotia government announced that regular shifts were resuming at the Donkin Coal Mine in Cape Breton. Talk about a blast from the past!

This operation is the last underground coal mine in Nova Scotia – a province where the industry has a 300-year history. It was abandoned for a number of years, then restarted in March of 2017 by Kameron Coal Management Limited, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Cline Group. Over the next three years, provincial safety inspectors issued 152 warnings, 119 compliance orders, and 37 administrative penalties. Donkin was shut down again in 2020 due to recurring problems with roof falls – but those areas have been closed off, and apparently everything’s hunky-dory now.

Apart from concerns about the well-being of workers, there are unanswered questions about the well-being of our atmosphere. The Department of Environment and Climate Change has until Nov. 5 to make a decision on the company’s recent application for a renewed industrial approval. Whether operational or idled, coal mines emit great quantities of methane, which is, from a climate-change perspective, far more harmful than carbon dioxide.

Of course, there are additional emissions when coal is burned. Nova Scotia’s electrical grid remains heavily dependent on this dirtiest of fossil fuels – and until the province hits its 2030 deadline for kicking the habit, some would argue that it makes sense to buy local, displacing a portion of coal imports. I would suggest we focus on the transition, and get started on refining the technology to manage methane at decommissioned mine sites.

LEGACY

We like to think of the future as something shiny and new, but much depends on what we do with legacy infrastructure, which tends to be kind of crumbly and unstable. The industrial age brought huge disruptions of ecological systems; some of these impacts can be satisfactorily remediated, but in some cases our best option is a form of damage control.

Right now, Nova Scotia Power is working on refurbishing its Wreck Cove Generating Station, which is rated at 212 megawatts – enough to power about 30,000 homes. It’s the largest of the province’s 33 hydro stations, accounting for more than half of total hydro capacity. Built between 1975 and 1978, this project involved diverting seven headwater streams, building 11 major dams, and creating several new lakes, to collect drainage from a 216-square-kilometre watershed in the Cape Breton Highlands plateau. The crazy thing is the fact that the powerhouse is a cavern carved out of the granite 275 metres underground. (See the photo at the bottom page 32.) Accessed via a 620-metre tunnel, it resembles a Cold War nuclear bunker, or the lair of some villain from a James Bond flick. The vertical drop means this plant operates on the basis of high pressure rather than high volume.

It is unlikely that such a project could be approved today, given the impacts on hydrology and fish habitat. (Creating reservoirs also results in significant emissions of methane from inundated soils.) But it’s there now, and it’s extremely useful, specifically because it can be deployed rapidly as a backup for wind – an increasingly important energy source whose intermittency is beyond our control. So the provincial Utility and Review Board approved a $110-million upgrade that involves replacing many mechanical and electrical components at Wreck Cove, including the two turbines. (The plant will also get a new backup generator rated at 600 kilowatts, with a huge diesel engine.)

There’s no denying that hydro-electric facilities are awe-inspiring feats of engineering. The Hoover Dam, on the Colorado River, was built during the Depression (about 100 workers were killed in the process), and it still attracts several million visitors every year. The Three Gorges Dam, on China’s Yangtze River, is the world’s largest power station, at 22,500 megawatts. Backing up such a huge mass of water actually alters the speed at which our planet rotates – which sounds like an urban myth (or an astronomical myth), but it gives you a sense of our truly scary capacity for modifying natural systems.

In addition to the technical requirements, such projects involve the exertion of massive political power. The law of displacement applies not just to water, but to communities in the designated flood zone. In many instances, ecology and humanity alike have been sacrificed for the sake of electricity. Looking to the future, we should probably move past the age of mega-projects, and instead undertake coordinated efforts to build up decentralized capacity, for energy as for food production.

Harnessing tidal power by means of modest-sized floating platforms, as depicted on our cover and described in Emily Leeson’s story on page 10, seems like a pretty good solution – but time will tell. We’re also hearing more about the development of offshore wind, which might be workable, though the Atlantic provinces should be wary of wind projects geared toward exporting “green hydrogen” while we’re still a long way from achieving energy self-sufficiency.

These dying months of the year are expected to bring an energy crisis in Europe, and a hunger crisis in many other parts of the world. Count yourself fortunate if you have dry firewood stacked close at hand, or some other economical means of staying warm. Cozy up, and relish the bounty of this harvest season. DL