O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!

Then again!

It is quite obvious that our earth is warming and that there will be adverse consequences from this effect. Depending on who you talk to it is less clear that the warming is due to human action, nevertheless it is something we must deal with. However, in doing so, must we destroy the natural beauty of our landscape? A traditional generating station consumes two to three hundred acres of land, usually in a place not especially pristine. Such a station serves tens of thousands of homes and businesses. On the other hand, wind turbines and solar panel fields consume thousands upon thousands of acres of land in fields and deserts, on fruited plains and up mountain majesties and in our oceans.

We are destroying our precious scenery, the Columbia River Gorge, the deserts of Southern California, the hills of Maui, the waters of Cape Cod are being visually polluted with turbines. Great swaths of desert and heartland fields disappear under solar panels. We make strides in technology, we can miniaturize anything, make it more efficient, even invisible to the eye and yet when it comes to alternative energy, we seem to take the easy route of 16th century windmills. Solar panels are no less an eyesore than a roadway cluttered with bill boards.

Hopefully somewhere out there somebody is figuring out a better way, perhaps house paint with solar chips, roofing and siding for a house embedded with miniature solar panels invisible to the eye. Maybe we can capture wind without eighty foot behemoths defiling our landscape… let’s call that guy who makes bladeless fans. Better still, let’s find a way to use all this stuff from centrally located generation centers like today’s stations that do not take thousands of acres of land and scenery to produce energy for a few hundred homes.

I certainly don’t have the answers, but before we end up with a land polluted by whoosh, whoosh and corn growing between panels I sure hope we take the time to see what we are doing and the value we are gaining. And by the way NIMBY…please!