Posted by Tina
An environmental energy story had me shaking my head today. The scene is set in a sleepy town in New York State, Lowville, where farmers have scratched out a meager living for decades and not without hardships. But nothing in the challenges of the past decades prepared them for when the windmills came to town. The story focuses mainly on how the change effected relationships and families but I found other parts of the story much more interesting:
Windmills split town and families, by Helen ONeill AP
Signs for fresh raspberries are propped against a fence. Horses graze in a lower field. Amish buggies clatter down a nearby road. From the back porch are sweeping views of the distant Adirondacks. *** But the view changed dramatically in 2006. Now Yancey Road is surrounded by windmills. *** The Tug Hill plateau sits high above this village of about 4,000, a remote North Country wilderness of several thousand acres, where steady winds whip down from Lake Ontario and winter snowfalls are the heaviest in the state. *** For decades dairy farmers, Irish and German and Polish immigrants, and lately the Amish, have wrested a living from the Tug – accepting lives of wind-swept hardship with little prospect of much change. *** Then, a few years ago, change came to Tug Hill, and it arrived with such breathtaking speed that locals still marvel at the way their land and lives were utterly transformed. *** Overnight, it seemed, caravans of trucks trundled onto the plateau, laden with giant white towers. Concrete foundations were poured. Roads were built and for a couple of years the village was ablaze with activity. *** Today, 195 turbines soar above Tug Hill, 400 feet high, their 130-foot long blades spinning at 14 revolutions per minute. *** Lowville and the neighboring hamlets of Martinsburg and Harrisburg, which also host turbines, are at the forefront of a wind energy boom that T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore have hailed as the wave of the future.
Geeno concerns about habitats being destroyed or the blight on the landscape. No protestations about noise pollution or the encroachment into a wilderness area. No worries about what the noise and whirling blades will do to bird and insect populations or the migration patterns of various animals. It’s positively breathtaking how quickly this industry was able to build what with strict EPA standards and all that. And…by the way…how many acres of these wind farms (quaint little moniker) must be spread out across the fruited plain in order to generate sufficient electricity to light and heat our homes? Whatever the number of acres you can be certain its a lot more than that little patch of land commonly referred to as ANWR.
How do you spell hypocricy? Let us count the ways:
P-r-o-g-r-e-s-s-i-v-e
E-n-v-i-r-o-n-m-e-n-t-a-l-i-s-t
D-e-m-o-c-r-a-t-e