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Texas provides 28 percent of the nation’s wind-generated electricity. Most of the state’s wind turbines are located in West Texas, where the wind blows almost constantly. Anyone driving across the plains of Texas has seen thousands of giant wind turbines dotting the mesas and buttes. If you drive west on Interstate 20 or Highway 287 at night, you’ll see thousands of lights blinking on top of what I believe are windmills to warn plane pilots that they’re flying over a dangerous area Will give
Some Texans are concerned about the proliferation of wind turbines on the Great Plains. Those who live in the plains are assaulted daily by the visual pollution of giant windmills that litter the skyline. Bills have been introduced in the Texas legislature to regulate the wind power business and to assess its environmental impact on Texans living near wind farms.
Froma Harropa newspaper columnist and East Coast liberal, Criticized Texas political leaders Those who want to get better control over wind energy business. Texas Republicans are opposed to government regulation, she argues, so it is inconsistent for the Republican-dominated Texas legislature to have greater regulatory control over windmills that pollute the landscape of the High Plains and Llano Estacado.
Harrop does not live in West Texas. She lives in New York City and Providence, Rhode Island. He’s not bothered by the ugliness of wind turbines blighting the West Texas landscape. After all, he doesn’t need to see them.
I’ve driven to West Texas dozens of times and seen giant wind farms destroying the plains. Texas is producing more than a quarter of the nation’s wind-generated electricity. Is it not enough?
Nearly everyone supports renewable energy development, especially liberals on the East and West Coasts. If they looked out their living room windows at thousands of wind turbines, they might have a different feeling.
Scott Momode, a Kiowa and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, grew up in southwestern Oklahoma, at the very edge of the Great Plains. He wrote about the landscape of the West from a Native American perspective and he believed that the landscape included many sacred places:
to face the holy [Momoday wrote] At the deepest core of human existence is survival. The sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; They stand up for the earth immediately and forever; They are his flags and shields. If you really want to know the earth about it, know it through its holy places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; You feel its breath on you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.
Scott Momode and I grew up on the same landscape of western Oklahoma, a land of majestic scenery, blue skies, bloody sunsets, and the Wichita Mountains glimmering improbably on the horizon. I agree with Momode that there are many sacred places in this landscape. Thus, to deface it or make it ugly is a profanity.
For Froma Harrop, he must live for a few years in Snyder, Texas, among the thousands of wind turbines polluting the Great Plains. Let’s see how she likes it, and when she finishes her stay in West Texas, I’d love to see her return to Providence, Rhode Island, and watch thousands of wind turbines blur the view of the ocean.
Texans should allow no more wind turbines in West Texas until comparable numbers are placed off the coasts of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons. Let the coastal elite pollute their own visual environment before asking Texans to further defile the High Plains.
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