Posted on by Californiacontrarian

It’s All About How You Look At It

My wife and I recently took three of our grandkids to Chicago – yes, I still go back to Chicago, but no longer in winter, as I have become allergic to winter! On this most recent visit we spent all of our time either downtown in the Loop or along Michigan Avenue. I no longer go back to my old neighborhood on the west side of the city, as I am also allergic to getting shot! One day we happened onto “The Picasso.”  For those of you not familiar with Chicago, “The Picasso”is an untitled monumental Picasso sculpture dedicated on August 15, 1967, in Daley Plaza in the Chicago Loop, which is not actually a loop, but rather a rectangle.(“The Rectangle” does not have much of a ring to it, so it is called the Loop!) Those of us who lived in Chicago when it was unveiled merely refer to it as “The Picasso,” as back then it was unclear what it was a sculpture of.

One of the three grandkids asked, “What is it supposed to be, Gpa?” I told them to spread out at different spots around the perimeter, study the sculpture, and then come back and tell me what they each thought. One of the amazing things about “The Picasso” back in 1967 was that from different angles and to different people it appeared  to be something completely different. (FYI: Picasso never told anyone what it was supposed to be!) Kerri checked it out from around the back and said,”It’s his girlfriend.”Paige from the right side said, “No doubt about it. It’s an Afghan dog.” P.J. just laughed at these suggestions and from the left side said,”Obviously, it’s the head of a baboon!” From the front my wife chimed in, “It’s a bird.” Back in the day, in fact, one of the most popular descriptive interpretations of that sculpture was that it was a bird.

 It has always been interesting to me that two people can look at the same thing, at the same time, one from the left and one from the right and come up with different interpretations. That caused me to think about something I read in today’s paper.
The headline, from the New York Times read: North America Sees 29% Decline in Birds. The sub-headline read: “Habitat loss, use of pesticides, among possible culprits.” Apparently the number of birds has decreased significantly since 1970, according to an article published the journal Science. David Yarnold, President of the Audubon Society called the findings, “a full-blown crisis.” The writer of this NYT’s article then postulated that the most important causes are habitat loss and use of pesticides. What was interesting to me was that no other possible causes for this decrease were mentioned. The following day in Townhall, the same Science article was referenced, another possible cause for the significant decrease in the North American bird population was considered. This Townhall article pointed out that since 1969 wind turbines and solar panels have been going up at record rates. Could some of the “habitat loss” be due to the the vast amounts of land now taken up by solar farms and wind farms? Mark Zuckerberg is building six solar projects – each the size of four football fields – in the New Mexico desert, and Ivanpah, the solar thermal project along the California-Nevada border took over 4,000 acres of desert land. Speaking of Ivanpah, bird scientist Shawn Smallwood testified that one large solar farm alone—the Ivanpah solar panel project in California—likely kills 28,380 birds annually. This is nothing compared to numbers of birds that are killed by wind turbines. In 2014, Yahoo! News reported that wind turbines are responsible for killing over 573,000 birds annually. That’s over 600,000 birds that have been killed annually . . . for how many years?

Again I find it interesting that the left-leaning NYT did not even mention the bird carnage caused by solar farms and by wind turbines in their article. Of course when one thinks about it, it would be akin to heresy for the NYT to cast any aspersions on green energy! Here as with Picasso, two different observers, one from the left-side and one from the right see the bird-crisis entirely differently.

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