Letter from the Editor: Summer 2007

Let the Wind Carry You

I suggest you begin with our story "Appalachian Apocalypse," then turn to "Falling in Love With Wind." Go ahead; I'll wait.

The stark contrast speaks volumes, doesn't it, about the choices that lie ahead.

J. Henry Fair's photograph of Kayford Mountain in West Virginia as it's being demolished offers a grim view of our energy hunger. Nearly 500 mountains in Appalachia have been similarly dynamited and bulldozed into oblivion to get at their coal seams. Erik Reece's accompanying essay offers a visceral account of what it's like to watch a mountain range, once visible from your porch, get blown to smithereens. Reece, author of The Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness, still finds it hard to believe that destruction on this scale can go on in plain view. California mudslides and wildfires make headlines, yet an entire landscape is vanishing with barely a murmur.

Coal represents the past: old and dirty, the relic of a heedless era of industrialization, whose legacy of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is transforming the planet into a place increasingly unfamiliar to man and beast.

The future, on the other hand, is described by Joseph D'Agnese in his cover story on a small farming community in upstate New York. Bill Moore, an entrepreneur and relentless advocate for wind power, courted the skeptical residents of Lowville, hoping to persuade them to erect towering wind turbines in their pastures and backyards. This is an instructional tale for all of us: In a perfect world, few of us would long for giant, whooshing turbines, each taller than the Statue of Liberty, to be built behind our house or high on a ridge we have hiked our whole life in order to take in the view. And yet similar choices confront us all, not just the families of Lowville. When we switch on a light in our home, we're revving up a bulldozer somewhere in America. Trace the path traveled by a lump of coal and it leads to our front door. We stoke the fires in hundreds of power plants, sending hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 annually shooting into the air. If we say no to wind -- however imperfect the solution may be -- then we are, by default, saying yes to coal, which still powers about half of the nation's electricity needs.

When I think of wind turbines, I can't help thinking of other, analogous alterations to the land. From the 1950s on, we laid down 46,000 miles of interstate highway, across plains and deserts, through farms and mountains, for the sake of travel and commerce. Decades before, we strung power lines and telephone wires across the landscape -- again, for commerce and convenience. We undertook these massive projects in the name of progress, aided by huge infusions of government cash. Leaders gave voice to these aspirations, then helped us realize them. (President Eisenhower is famously credited with building our interstate system.) Lately, we've tolerated the installation of tens of thousands of cell phone towers; we just hate those dropped calls.

So we've made roughly similar choices before, intent on a particular vision of the future. But the truth is: Here and now, in the year 2007, we don't really have a choice anymore. Either we catch the wind -- and the sun, and the many other sensible, economical, renewable forms of energy -- or we hurtle backward toward a destiny no truly rational being would desire.

Douglas S. Barasch

Photo: Justin Steele