Let's Talk about Birds and Bees

I, Arnold Leitner , was born in Austria but grew up in Germany, right in the middle of the country. Summers were aspirational when I was a kid. If the mercury hit 72 F, we could go to the public pool.

Before coming to the United States at age 23, I spent ten years in wildlife conservation. I am the first-lifetime member of my state’s conservation group, HGON. In the years I returned, I noticed that the wildlife was changing. One evening, I saw tens of thousands of fireflies under the warm canopy of a beech forest. There were no fireflies when I was a kid, not one.?

Last week, YouSolar co-founder Christian Ruebesam sent me a photo of a bee-eater bird he had taken near my hometown. I was shocked. The bee-eater is a tropical and subtropical bird whose historic range was 500 miles south.

The photo did not show a single bird, but four! This was not an aberration, not a specimen blown north by wind. These four birds are most likely breeding in my county. The bee-eater is a gorgeous bird. We welcome it.

Finely calibrated thermometers are no longer the only thing that detects increasing global temperatures. That news is fifty years old.

Now, plants and birds are moving with the climate. Shockingly, a species, the bee-eater, moved 500 miles north in the 30 years during which I have lived in the U.S.

Colourful birds singing in front of my house would be welcome, but it is a firebird, too because something else has changed. We now have wildfires in Germany. Unimaginable when I was a child. Damage from fires has been limited, but the forest is drying. The oaks behind my family’s house are dying of thirst. Much worse is in the offing.

We are in the business of saving the planet. A system like the PowerBloc can play a key role in decarbonizing power and building resilient infrastructure. Paraphrasing JFK, we choose to build the PowerBloc, not because it is easy but because it is hard.

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