Email: Big Wind Meets Small Town

Big Wind Meets Small Town
	Across the border in St Croix County, WI, Emerging Energies of Wisconsin, LLC and residents in the town of Forest are fighting over the proposed 41-turbine Highland Wind Project. Although studies have indicated that the area would be well suited for wind energy generation approaching 102 megawatts, residents fear the potential health impacts from close proximity to the turbines and strongly resist the permanent changes to the geographical landscape surrounding the town.

Some people might call this a classic case of NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard) and push forward with the project in the name of some greater cause (jobs, clean energy, free market, money, etc.). Personally, I am a staunch supporter of wind energy and consider the turbines I see while driving down the freeway to be elegant and beautiful. But how would I react if someone told me that my St. Paul neighborhood was soon to include a backdrop of unavoidably visible aluminum turbine blades?

Luckily I don’t have to answer that because St Paul doesn’t register too high on the wind potential scale. But fellow MN2020 Fellow Roopali Phadke at Macalester College has looked at the impacts on rural landscape identities due to physical landscape changes from wind energy development in great detail.

In a recent article Phadke discusses the “social gap” that separates the broad state and nation-wide calls for advancing renewable energy, from the local, rural and increasingly organized resistance to that advancement. In particular, she highlights an important historical dichotomy that has run throughout American history. We cherish and want to preserve the pastoral, bucolic and sometimes wild landscapes that have dominated the American rural identity; but at the same time we value industrial progress above all else. Not surprisingly we often want it both ways, but the nature and growth of wind energy generation is forcing these two views to directly confront each other more and more in wind-suitable yet cherished landscapes.

So can we have our cake and eat it too? Can we say ‘yes’ to the industrial advancement of “Big Wind” and say ‘no’ to the permanent alteration of our rural landscapes? To discredit the former as evil corporate greed and the latter as selfish hypocritical NIMBYism doesn’t move us toward any viable solutions. The issue requires early and effective communication between both sides at highly local levels to avoid the entrenched battles that can rage in small towns facing big development, to create mutually beneficial outcomes, and to determine if there are areas we simply consider too sacred, too cherished to develop.

The situation in Forest, WI is a microcosm of this confrontation that is worth watching (Phadke uses recent events in Searchlight, Nevada as another case study). Lawsuits have been threatened and the entire Forest Town Board was booted for backing the project. But both sides are talking and that's a good step towards progress where everybody wins.

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