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The wind turbines spun in the wind, minding their own business as they turned like never-ending wheels, over and over. They really had no idea that they were part of anything larger or part of any controversy. They didn't know about green revolutions or global warming or anything else. Any debate over them was something that their creators, meaning people, waged war over them like gods in the heavens. Oblivious to all of the turbulence, the turbines worked with the wind, as the wind worked with them. This was a local example of the revolution that now seeped its way into public consciousness. Harness the wind, go green. Oil, a commodity something that had been complained about when the price of it was too high, was now something to be avoided, like a victim of some deadly plague. At least to some: to others, oil was in perfect health. The wind turbines here were an example of the dyslexic and confused perspective of what we were going to be doing about that oil problem and that little thing called climate change. These particular turbines were located on U.S. 20, along the borderline of Oneida, Madison and Otsego Counties in central New York State. They appeared like apparitions when I drove westward toward them, high upon the hills and far away from the busy civilization that it supposedly powered. Most of the time when I whizzed by with my greenhouse gases, it seemed to me that only one or two spun at any given time. So far as I could see from where I sped past them on a highway that stretched from sea to shining sea, there seemed to be about four or five of them, maybe six. I didn't know much about them, which county or town managed them, or how long they had even been there. When they spun there in the distance with the wind, they seemed to be as natural to the landscape as the distant houses that made their home on the top of hills or scrunched in the woods of the mountains. From time to time, my husband and I would drive past them and do the usual thing when one drives by something that he or she doesn't have time to go and see. Let's go and see those wind turbines one day. Each time as we made our way back and forth on the highway, we would wonder exactly where these things were, if they were on someone's property, and if it were possible to see them up close. I was somewhat surprised to see them fully operational in this area. That wasn't based on some prejudiced assumption that everyone around here was a redneck who thought global warming was some kind of Commie conspiracy to get the United States to sign Kyoto and get Hillary Clinton elected president. The objections that I had found seemed to be along the lines of the whole NIMBY thing: turbines are nice, but Not In My Back Yard. See, they were a blight to views, so says NIMBY, and various residents in various locales didn't want to be responsible for damages to birds who crashed into them during migrations. We need to change to nonrenewable sources, true. But not many people had ever grown up with an oil or natural gas drilling site obstructing the view of the mountains. Those places generally were far away from residential viewing, or in places where only those really radical people wanted to live anyway, places like remote desert villages or former testing sites for nuclear bombs where NIMBY would never live anyway. NIMBY's idea of a pastoral scene with green hills and cows and sheep didn't quite include Don Quixote's nemesis. Besides, these turbines, they were noisy. If everyone had wanted to hear noise, they'd either have stayed in the city, or go there, depending on who made the complaint. Because of NIMBY's laundry list of reasons, proposals to build turbines were constantly being blocked by local governments and residents. It seemed like one of the best ideas that had little chance of getting off the ground, or even on it. So with all that in mind, it did surprise me to see these contraptions up and running. Not being all that familiar with the technology, I wasn't sure how much power these things were putting out. The whole wind deal was something I heard about on television, newspapers and websites that usually ended in .org. It would be a nice idea to see these things up close and personal, if at all possible, to see what these things were about, if they were as noisy as I heard, and if they seemed obstructive to wildlife. Taking the lamentation of let's do it one day and turning it into a plan of, what the heck, let's do it today, we turned off the highway to the back roads that would most likely lead us to where the turbines spun.
For about a half an hour, it was like playing hide and seek. We seemed like we were getting closer, but then we would take some back road that at first seemed to guide us to the right place, but then landed us in a place where we'd overshot the mark by a road, mile, or hamlet. So we would turn around and head back to the starting point on U.S. 20. We'd cruise around until we saw the turbines again, and try another route. Several attempts later, the turbines appeared, getting larger and larger, and we had finally found our road. There were the turbines, right there. Part of me was surprised; this kind of close public access to a utility was not what I expected. But here we were, right in front of it. We pulled over to the side of the road and shut off our vehicle to get a better sense of the turbines. As far as actually walking up to them, we decided against doing that, not knowing for sure whether the land was private or not, as it most likely was. The road we were on was a long stretch of silent country road, grasses and trees being the only visible life forms for what seemed like miles. Scattered along a field of open grasses like grain were several turbines. They looked as natural to me as seeing a tractor or silos. Which, admittedly, was not very natural, but our modern life was so out of touch with nature that there were nature movements that prided themselves in such unnatural practices as organic agriculture and called it "getting back to nature". Sure. Like perfect rows of corn and tomatoes would somehow just sprout from the earth in a perfect square like back in the good old Stone Age. This analogy in mind, the turbines didn't seem too disruptive to nature, at least to me. As far as noise, the turbines sounded like planes taking off in the distant background. It was pretty quiet otherwise; my garbage truck coming down the road every week made more noise. Granted, we were some distance away; perhaps the length of a football field or two. But it was less noisy than a highway or an active quarry. It probably was louder than the traditional electric line; in my experience, I had to stand practically underneath those plants in order to hear anything. But the railroad that was eight miles from my house made more noise than these turbines that were less than a tenth of a mile from me in a straight line with no trees, hills or buildings to buffer the noise. Seeing that it was January, we didn't see flocks of birds dotting the sky. Since there was some noise coming from the turbines, I suppose this could be some kind of warning system to alert the birds, but maybe it could act like some kind of beacon luring them in. I really didn't know enough about birds to really be decisive about it. The turbines seemed low enough that the typical bird in flight would probably be at a higher altitude. I didn't know enough about the dynamics of flight to really know if that meant anything; like for example, maybe the turbines spinning would disturb and confuse the wind currents enough for birds to be lured toward the pinwheels. I really didn't know. What birds I did see seemed to be able to float above them without any problem. Not that I was any expert, but as a consumer of electricity, learning about these things had to start somewhere. We stayed there a little while longer, watching and listening to the hypnosis and buzzing of the spinning wheels that were trying to power the modern life that we had come to know. The debate would go on when we left, and debate was something that humans seemed to do very well. The turbines, in the meantime, would spin so that this electronic life of debating, rhetoric and hyperbole would continue. It was an agent of our times. |
