Not many people can combine downright poetic writing with clear arguments about justice and economics. Radio broadcaster Bob Lonsberry did it today on his blog, “To the Metal Beasts on the Hilltop.” Here’s the start:
Why do you think wind and solar projects in New York invariably end up in the poorest, most rural and politically powerless communities?
Seriously.
In this day and age, are we going to look the other way as community after community across upstate New York is stuck with alternate-energy monstrosities that destroy ancient vistas and oppress local interests?
Do we not see the injustice of far-away companies using government subsidies to force whole communities into the shadow of desecrations that salve the conscience of big-city progressives and enrich distant corporations but scar the birthright and psyche of rural New York?
One generation of elites forced open-pit mining onto southern Appalachia, and another is forcing grotesque wind turbines onto northern Appalachia. The connection is powerlessness, and the belief of one group of people that they have the right to destroy the homeland of another group of people.
We are a dumping ground, and no one will hear our voice.
We are upstate New York, and the city sends us its trash and its convicts.
Its prisons dot our countryside, and its garbage dumps befoul our highways, air and water.
And now its windmills stand watch on our ridges, like alien invaders, colonizers sent upstate by politicians, activists and profiteers to keep us in line.
To forever scar the wooded horizons which have been our home for two centuries, and home to our Iroquois predecessors for millennia untold before that. The way it has always been is no longer to be. The landscape carved by God and glaciers is scarred now by motionless turbine towers, slapped across our home like the mark of a dog that has pissed against a tree.
The rest is just as good—and just as sad.
Of course you don’t mention the fact that because of global warming the farm on the left may soon cease to exist.