Wind power has all the
ingredients of a good brain-buster. The energy that windmills
produce helps to preserve the environment, but the giant wind
generators themselves have to be added to the environment.
Wind power is making us redefine what we consider
pollution. Windmills may not billow black smoke that require
scrubbing or leak hazardous radiation, but they make a lot of noise
and can change a scenic horizon or ridgeline into a jumble of
tinker-toy technology. Like dams in rivers, they interrupt the free
flow of natural settings.
This not to say that non-wind
power plants don’t do this or worse, but so far, we’ve been
able to hide some of the biggest coal-fired plants around the West
so that most of us don’t notice them. Wind power is less easy
to hide. You need several hundred windmills to equal the power
output of a small coal or natural-gas fired power plant, and often
the best places to catch this wind are some of the most scenic.
But wind power is a good thing, right?
I love
moral ambiguity. It makes for great literature and films. It causes
people to talk, debate, argue and eventually shoot things at each
other. Wind power is so morally ambiguous that I predict it will
make even rational peoples’ heads explode.
It wasn’t long
ago that protesters in Western towns were chaining themselves to
trees to block the installation of cellphone towers. For the most
part, it wasn’t because they thought people shouldn’t use
cellphones; they just deemed the towers a visual blight. We love
our mountains here in the West. Except for the giant school letters
and ski lift towers that decorate them, we revere our mountain
ranges and uncluttered vistas as much as Floridians do their
beaches. Just think what protests would erupt over any plan to line
a Rocky Mountain ridge with 2,000 windmills.
Wind power
may be to energy conservation what homeless people are to social
responsibility. We want homeless shelters, but we don’t want
homeless people over for dinner every night. Utah’s liberal
community radio station and the Moab Folk Festival claim to be
powered by wind, yet I don’t see any 100-foot towers anywhere near
either of those enterprises. What’s wrong with putting these
pesky turbines “somewhere out there” in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado or
Nevada? One answer is that this is the same thinking led Easterners
to test nuclear bombs and store nerve gas and radioactive waste in
the rural West.
Wind farming can sound downright bucolic,
but it’s also possible that windfarms will come to resemble company
mining towns. “Wind ghettos” will be built in
low-income areas desperate for jobs and income, and residents will
have to live an industrial nightmare so urbanites can tune into
local public radio powered by an environmentally friendly source
that can be bragged about.
It’s also quite possible that
the perceived panacea of environmentally friendly energy will
distract people from actually reducing energy use. I’m sure you all
know a Toyota Prius owner who acts as if driving a hybrid car isn’t
really driving; it’s more like planting a tree every time the
ignition key is turned. Sweet perfumes come out of the exhaust pipe
and normal cars pull off to the side of the road and weep in shame
as the hybrid car pulls up to the farmers’ market. Similarly,
powering your espresso machine with wind power may only open up new
rationalizations for not cutting back on energy. Really, if we
would all just eat coffee right out of the bag in its natural
crunchy state, think of the amount of energy — not to mention
water — we could save!
The downsides — real or imagined
— may make our heads throb a little, but isn’t wind power a
natural substitute for some of the fossil fuels we’re
exploiting at a rapid rate? We are all people of the wind. Unless
you can trace your ancestry to indigenous people who walked over to
North America from Siberia back when there was an exposed land
bridge, or who wandered up through South America and Mexico, you
are here only because wind blew your ancestors’ ships over here.
Those “amber waves of grain” in America the Beautiful are
windblown.
We have been given a gift: Wind power can make
us some energy. Wind power can blow our minds.
Dennis Hinkamp is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service
of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He writes in
Logan, Utah.
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