Texas supplies 28 p.c of the nation’s wind-generated electrical energy. Many of the state’s wind generators are positioned in West Texas, the place the wind blows nearly consistently. Anybody driving throughout the Texas plains has seen 1000’s of huge wind generators dotting the mesas and buttes. When you go west on Interstate 20 or Freeway 287 at night time, you will notice 1000’s of lights blinking atop the ceaselessly turning windmills, put in, I suppose, to warn plane pilots that they’re flying over a hazardous space.
Some Texans are alarmed by the proliferation of wind generators on the Nice Plains. Individuals who stay on the plains are assaulted every day by the visible air pollution of large windmills that litter the horizon. Payments have been launched within the Texas legislature to manage the wind power enterprise and to evaluate its environmental affect on the Texans who stay close to wind farms.
Froma Harrop, a newspaper columnist and East Coast liberal, criticized Texas political leaders who wish to get higher management of the wind power enterprise. Texas Republicans are against authorities regulation, she argues, so it’s inconsistent for the Republican-dominated Texas legislature to place extra regulatory controls on the windmills that pollute the panorama of the Excessive Plains and the Llano Estacado.
Harrop doesn’t stay in West Texas. She lives in New York Metropolis and Windfall, Rhode Island. She’s not bothered by the ugliness of wind generators that scar the panorama of West Texas. In any case, she doesn’t have to take a look at them.
I’ve pushed throughout West Texas dozens of instances and have seen the enormous wind farms that blight the plains. Texas is producing greater than 1 / 4 of the nation’s wind-generated electrical energy. Isn’t that sufficient?
Nearly everybody favors renewable power growth, notably the liberals on the East and West Coasts. They could really feel otherwise in the event that they noticed 1000’s of wind generators from their lounge home windows.
Scott Momoday, a Kiowa and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in literature, grew up in southwestern Oklahoma, on the very fringe of the Nice Plains. He wrote concerning the panorama of the West from a Native American perspective and believed that this panorama incorporates many sacred locations:
To come across the sacred [Momoday wrote] is to be alive on the deepest heart of human existence. Sacred locations are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth instantly and endlessly; they’re its flags and shields. When you would know the earth for what it truly is, be taught it via its sacred locations. At Satan’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you contact the heartbeat of the dwelling planet; you’re feeling its breath upon you. You develop into one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and area.
Scott Momoday and I grew up on the identical panorama of western Oklahoma, a land of majestic views, blue skies, bloodred sunsets, and the Wichita Mountains shimmering improbably on the horizon. I agree with Momoday that this panorama incorporates many sacred locations. Thus, it’s a sacrilege to deface it or make it ugly.
As for Froma Harrop, she ought to stay for a few years in Snyder, Texas, among the many 1000’s of wind generators polluting the Nice Plains. Let’s see how she likes it, and when she’s accomplished her sojourn in West Texas, I want to see her return to Windfall, Rhode Island, and discover 1000’s of wind generators blotting out the seascape.
Texans mustn’t allow extra wind generators in West Texas till a comparable quantity are positioned off the coasts of Cape Cod, Martha’s Winery, and the Hamptons. Let the coastal elites pollute their very own visible surroundings earlier than asking Texans to additional desecrate the Excessive Plains.
