Something closer to home than the State of the Union

I did not watch the State of the Union address, and I'm really hoping talking about it falls out of the news cycle fairly quickly. Regardless of who the President is the State of the Union speech is pretty much a waste of time. The President stands there making a bunch of promises he will not keep (although he'd really really like to if only Congress would rubber stamp his wish list) and the  Congress critters sit there hoping the television cameras focus on them long enough for their constituents to believe they're actually worth re-electing. If the President is a Republican, the Republicans applaud wildly no matter what gets said while Democrats sit on their hands, and vice versa. It's all meaningless. It fulfills the Constitution's requirement that the President do an annual report to the Congress, but no one really cares in the long run what is said.

Well, almost no one. The pundits who make their living reading political tea leaves will spend the next 48 hours or so dissecting every phrase and speculating endlessly about what it all meant. No one else wants to talk about it for much longer than it takes for Kimmel, Colbert, et al. to mock it.

In short, Trump is not what I'm thinking about lately. What I'm thinking about are the plans being discussed locally for a wind farm in the Huron Mountains. You know what the primary opposition to it is? Aesthetics. Frelling aesthetics and how messing up the viewscape might make tourists on snow machines* less likely to spend a weekend in Baraga County. You got it. Having wind turbines in the hills might discourage FIPs and trolls and other forms of asshattery from visiting Arvon Township and dropping the mythical Big Bucks in Baraga County. OMG. The Finn's will sell a few less burgers, the Huron Bay Trading Post will have a few less customers desperate enough to pay their high prices for gasoline. Somewhere, at least on my planet, the world's tiniest violin is playing a sad song for all the people who think wind turbines are uglier than the alternatives.

We already have cell towers cluttering up high points in the county, but those are apparently okay. After all, we all use cell phones. Gotta have that cell service, right? But wind turbines? Not In My Backyard.

The same people bitching loudest about the wind towers are, of course, the same folks who bitch about clear cuts when one of the timber companies has the nerve to harvest the trees on the land it owns and who oppose any development that might make things less pretty or increase truck traffic on the highways. I have mentioned this before, but back in my graduate student days I did an analysis of local opposition to a proposed pulp mill. It would have been sited on the shore of Lake Superior (convenient source of water for mill operations) with US-41 running right next to it. An organization called Friends of the Land of Keweenaw** was formed to fight it. My research used content analysis of letters to the editor in local newspapers to see how opposition and support lined up in terms of existing stereotypes of tree huggers and their ilk.

I was really hoping to learn then that there was no clear line between the two groups (supporters and opponents). No such luck. It turned out that the difference really did fall along class lines -- the usual what time of day do you take a shower divider (before work or after? which is another way of saying "white collar or blue?") You know, "Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?" Mill opponents tended to be retirees, including a good percentage of trolls who had retired here because it's pretty and wanted it to stay that way, or white collar. Supporters were still working, usually at an hourly wage rather than for a salary, and were a lot more interested in permanent, year-round jobs than in keeping tourists happy.

So here we are almost 30 years later and a different sort of development is being proposed. I'll be honest. I do have a real problem with people who freak out about wind turbines. I love wind mills, both medieval and modern. There is something remarkably soothing about seeing a large modern wind farm in action -- one of my favorite stops along I-39 in northern Illinois is the Mendota Rest Area. There are wind turbines as far as the eye can see. They're beautiful. Ditto the wind farms in Minnesota along the Buffalo Ridge that runs through the town of Marshall. The turbines are so contradictory: humongous but graceful and, despite what some critics have claimed, remarkably quiet. I've been right under them just outside Marshall and could not hear a thing except the natural wind. I have been known to be a bit of a Luddite, but when it comes to wind power? Nope. I have yet to see a wind power development that hit me the wrong way.

I will concede that it would be nice to see some downsizing and decentralizing, more dispersed rooftop installations and improved designs that might not require a several acres of land for each tower. In my ideal world we'd all have a lot of individual power generation and far less dependence on an aging and vulnerable grid. However, there are people working in those areas and eventually we'll get there. But for now? I see no rational reason to oppose a wind farm in a rural area where the deer and moose (and squirrel) outnumber the people by quite a bit. If Weyerhauser or some of the other land owners in Arvon Township want to cooperate with wind power development, I think they should do so. If all of us living up here have to stare at cell towers on the horizon, I'd say the viewscape is no longer pristine. And if a couple of tourists happen to look up and decide they're unhappy, screw 'em. Given that when they're running around on their snow machines or ORVs they've got a pretty restricted field of vision anyway, I doubt that many will even notice the cell towers are no longer alone on the hill tops. Most of them never see anything other than the ass end of the machine in front of them on the trail.

People who use aesthetics as an argument or do the "please don't mess with my playground" (usually voiced by nonresidents) have always annoyed me. If you're going to argue against a development, use something concrete: possible negative effects on an aquifer, destruction of wetlands, pollution with heavy metals, whatever. But use something that is REAL, not just a totally subjective personal feeling.

*I occasionally hope for a special place in Hell for the inventors of machines that are noisy, spew pollution, travel in packs, and shit beer cans. The one good thing that's happened with snow machines in recent decades is they're now so over powered with such skinny tracks that they're stuck on trails. Back in the '70s asshats on snow machines used to cut through our place on a regular basis. They can't do that anymore because if they venture off a groomed trail they bury themselves in the loose snow.

**Also referred to as "Fucking Over Little Kids 'cause Daddy can't find a job" by mill supporters