The Great Sheep Wrangle of 2010, or, Karmically Paying For What You Consume

Exhausted from hours of wading through sheep doo and arduous wrangling, I sat on a generations-old lava wall and snapped a large flake of dried cod from my salty filet. I crammed the stiff meat into my maw and allowed my saliva to soften the fish until I could switch from sucking to chewing. Some blueberries, picked minutes ago on a nearby hillside, rinse the fish down my throat. This is the Icelandic way, and I've learned to enjoy it for reasons beyond the acquired tastes. Earning that food is delicious too.

One of my missions here in Husavik, should I choose to accept it, is to translate the expansive control panel at the power plant from Icelandic to English before an American company assumes proprietorship and operation of the facility. But I don't speak Icelandic.

My landlord, Ditta, is fluent in English and Icelandic. She has agreed to assist me in exchange for an equivalent amount of labor in gathering berries, moss, and sheep. I deemed this a fair trade. In fact, I replicated it with a different housemate who helped me translate French technical drawings in exchange for my services as her personal chef.

So, to win the favor of my power-plant building mentors I must first indulge in the Icelandic tradition of living from the land. I picked four trash bags of moss, which we will cook into breads, sauces, and soups. I hand picked a full bucket of blackberries. Most recently, I wrangled three sheep in the annual "rettir," the event where all local farmers go to reclaim their sheep after a summer of carefree wandering and fattening in the verdant summery pastures of Husavik's outskirts.

Each farm dispatched a group of horsemen numbered proportionally to the farm's number of sheep. These horseback herders joined forces last Thursday. They rode hard for three days to gather sheep from all the hills and dales in the area, and on the fourth morning they came blasting over a ridgeline with about 2,500 sheep bleating and stampeding their way into a massive corral of basaltic lava brick. The walls have been built and maintained by generations of farmers here. Each farm dedicates two days per year to the maintenance of this large and intricate pen.

Our horsemen, dressed in white shirt, red tie, and black pants, signal the event's inception with yells and whistles. Hundreds of farmers, friends and families all began marching in lines to send sheep flooding from one large area into a smaller area where they were identified by ear tags and hauled into the corresponding farm's section in the lava structure.


After Ditta's family found its 60 sheep, we marched them about three miles by foot along a country road. Two sheep collapsed of exhaustion, so we put them in the car. We finally deposited our sheep on a big green pasture, and retired to the farm house for waffles and jam (from the very berries I picked).

I offered many solutions to the inefficiency I saw at the rettir:

Why don't you tag their ears with colors so that you can find them faster? Couldn't we just use one of your tractors and trailers to haul the sheep instead of getting six people to walk the sheep back to the farm? Why not keep the sheep from mixing each summer by leaving them in separate parts of the countryside and building a few fences? The lava structure needs so much work - why not use metal fences that won't need so much repair work?

Each suggestion, despite its economic sensibility, seemed to upset or offend my host (below, middle). I slowly realized that the point of the rettir is not to efficiently aggregate sheep, but to aggregate culture. Historically, the rettir was the grandest social day of the year, and it remains so in many ways. I saw dancing, singing, local foods, old friendships, authentic costumes, traditional back-to-the-earth activities, and so much rich culture. Building the walls is a right, not a duty. The same goes for riding three days to collect the sheep - I've never seen such pride.

"You need to learn what real value is"

After the event, I ate the best waffles of my life. I saw the farm where the cream came from, I picked the berries myself, and we mixed our hearty batter by hand (side bar).

The tea steeped in the moss I harvested, and the cheese came from just down the road.

Sorting moss...

I recalled fishing for my cod and wrangling my mutton. Without thinking I exclaimed "this is the life!" and everyone agreed.

I never say that. I never cavalierly scream "this is the life!" in some stranger's house. I swilled strong coffee and listened to indecipherable Icelandic conversations and I felt completely content.

But how can this be? I've done all these things that I considered to be "the life," so how can this stinking, sore, famished, sheep-crap-covered experience rank among the best? I used to tell stories about sitting with Lindsay Lohan in shi-shi night clubs or rubbing elbows in the swankery of London's Whiskey Mist lounge or New York's Masa. I reveled in that stuff because it was the most exclusive, because I got access and you didn't. But I'm quickly learning how shallow those experiences were.

My currency of satisfaction has been wrong. I never really earned those experiences. I never knew value - not like this value of really and truly earning my bread. Hard-earned dignity and quality experiences always trump cheap thrills.

Excuse me for taking this rant towards energy, but I'm paid to do so.

This all has implications for electrons. Not all of them are created equal, or rather, the consumption of one energy source is not equal to another. All energy sources have their problems and their advantages, but we aren't measuring them properly are we?

You don't pay the same for the corn-fed, steroid-pumped, factory slaughtered cow as you do for the pasture grazing, organic, natural beef, do you? We discern between hand-wrangled, heather-munching mutton and industrially processed mutton, don't we? So why do we pay the same utility bill for coal power as we do for solar power?

Dollars don't measure the political weapon of oil that Venezuela or Saudi Arabia can turn on us. Dollars don't measure the high mercury levels in American fish from coal emissions. Dollars don't measure the burdens our resource-depleted future will inherit. Dollars don't measure the hazards of a nuclear waste dump, or the potential for terrorist attacks on reactors.

Dollars do well at measuring the quantity of energy we produce, but dollars do very little to measure the quality. As a consumer, you can't pay more for energy that you deem to be of a higher quality (a few utilities actually now offer the option to pay more for wind or solar power, but most do not).

Just as my initial preference for efficient and streamlined herding would have destroyed the rettir's true value, our economic system's preference for low-cost energy output perversely incentivizes some bad energy choices. We currently operate the tractor delivered, metal pen enclosed, automatically sorted, and industrially butchered sheep herds of the electron world. Only in this case, we don't forfeit culture, but resource security, environmental quality, and sustainability.

Investors dictate the energy sources, but consumers have little ability to affect investment. "Low-cost" trumps all. Investors look at our alternative energy options and say that they are "too expensive," which I've come to learn simply means that they don't pay back fast enough. What about the value - I'd argue the very real value - of not feeling like a jackass because your energy source just flattened 20% of West Virginia? I can't tell you how good it feels to turn on the lights and take long showers in Iceland and know that every single joule is clean and renewable. I'd honestly pay more for this feeling back home, but there aren't any established avenues for me to pay that premium.

Robert Kennedy said in a very poetic speech that "GDP measures everything except that which makes life worth living," and I finally know what he meant. He was absolutely right. The type of output also matters in addition to the volume of output.

If we want to make any progress on our energy system, then we may want to consider how to value quality. Hand-wrangled power plants (clean, domestic and sustainable) will cost a little more in terms of dollars, but does the satisfaction of paying the full karmic price of our energy have no merit?

Producing food by hand, even if it's economically inefficient, makes it taste better because you know you didn't cut any corners and you can take pride in the meal. I'd argue that electricity can be a lot like jam or sheep - people will pay for energy that doesn't cut the corners of sustainability, cleanliness, and security.

In fact, we already monetize those fuzzy feelings. We've branded them "green," and our government has placed a regulatory premium on them through feed in tariffs, RPS standards, and poisonous emissions regulations. Perhaps the next step is to launch the Whole Foods of electricity - giving people the option to volitionally and proactively choose their energy source. I have a few ideas percolating on that front.

This will be my last post for a couple weeks as I wrap up here in Husavik, move to Reykjavik, and buckle down on a few time-constrained research projects. Thanks very much for reading, please share the link, and check back in about 10-15 days for more physical and mental ramblings...