Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism by Ozzie Zehner

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 2 By the mid nineteenth century, it became one of the most common languages in the Pacific Northwest,spoken by Native people,Hawaiian and Scottish employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company,Chinese,andAmerican wagon train pioneers.The story of ChinookWawa has been toldmanytimesbylinguistsandhistorians,and Chinuk Wawa: As Our Elders Teach Us to Speak It is among the latest. The book was produced collaboratively with the ChinukWawa Dictionary Project of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. The Grand Ronde Tribe is ideally situated to offer a fresh perspective on Chinook Wawa. Established in the 1850s,the reservation became the home of Indian people from all over western Oregon,including speakers of Multnomah, Clackamas, Upper Chinook, Molala, at least three dialects of Kalapuyan, Athapaskan dialects from the Umpqua River, Takalma, many dialects of Oregon coast Penutian languages, Shastan,and several others.ChinookWawa was the lingua franca among those peoples,and for many generations has been a source of cultural continuity, strength, and identity. The book includes a short introduction, an extensive dictionary and grammar of Chinook Wawa with guides to pronunciation, and a series of transcriptions of tribal elders reciting stories in thelanguage.Therearebiographicalsketchesof the elders and their families,photographs,and discussions of the participation of linguists, such as Melville Jacobs and Henry Zenk, with Chinuk Wawa speakers at Grand Ronde over the years.The book is ideal for educational settings and is currently used in immersion classes on the Grand Ronde Reservation. The Chinook Wawa dictionary is clearly a labor of love and is a useful and accessible reference of the language and its context. The transcribed stories from the Hudson,Wacheno, Kenoyer, LaBonte, Riggs, and other families are particularly evocative, and range from adventures of Coyote to stories of daily life on the reservation to lullabies and love songs.Collectively , they capture some of the traditions, history, and aspirations of several generations of Grand Ronde people in a way unavailable in other historical,linguistic,or anthropological works. In this sense, the book channels the spirit of Chinuk Wawa as it facilitates communication between people across cultures, time, and geography. Mark Tveskov Southern Oregon University Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism by Ozzie Zehner University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2012. Illustrations, tables, notes, index. 464 pages. $29.95 paper. This audacious and rewarding book by University of California,Berkeley,researcher Ozzie Zehner takes direct aim at a durable narrative inthecontemporaryenvironmentalmovement that grants legitimacy and authority to alternative energy technologies: if only the developed world would switch to cleaner energies, then we would live in a more sustainable, less toxic, and more socially responsible world. In Green Illusions,Zehner makes a convincing argument that this kind of thinking is terribly misguided. After reading his book, I am inclined to agree with him. The book is divided into two roughly equal halves:the first deals with the litany of environmental problems associated with alternative energy solutions; the second with theoretical and practical suggestions for reducing our collective carbon footprint. Zehner goes over the important alternatives to fossil fuels and then eviscerates each one.Some of the author’s missivesin this“colonoscopyon theU.S.energy infrastructure”cover familiar ground and contain few new insights — such as pointing out the dangers associated with hydrofracking for natural gas;exposing the fantasy of“clean coal”  Reviews waste sequestration; explaining the carbon impact of producing biofuels; and describing the environmental nightmare that is nuclear waste (p. xviii). In the most interesting and provocative sections of part one,Zehner levels his sights on the technologies that the political Left adores,especially wind power,solar power,and hybrid and electric vehicles.Readers learn that the problem of scale dooms all wind power schemes, since it would take a line of turbines one hundred miles long to replace the capacity of a single coal-fired plant. And the photovoltaic cells used in solar panels, like most everything else in the manufactured world, come from finite mineral deposits that cannot be replenished in anything but a geologic timeframe. Green cars, such as the Toyota Prius and Chevy Volt, use batteries that deplete trace elements and become...