"The walls of brass contract around us"

The wind-farming industry's mechanization of great tracts of countryside is a profound tragedy, whether or not it is necessitated by the onset of global warming. Like any other extractive industry, mining the wind produces spoil heaps; in them lie foregone landscapes of fenced-off hillsides, closed paths, culverted steams, plant life bulldozed aside. This is a sudden additional encroachment of the machine world on the natural world. Ever increasingly, the old, wild, weird places become inaccessible except to the imagination. And now the sea is not inviolable. The desert isle becomes a factory in which the wind itself, no longer the spirit of freedom, is condemned to drudge like Caliban. Experience and the imagination can no longer accompany one another on the voyage to Ogygia, and both suffer and decline, the latter starved of sensory detail, the former chilled by its own indifference.

--Tim Robinson, Connemara: Listening to the Wind, 2006
(thanks to Angela Kelly of Country Guardian)

tags: wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism, ecoanarchism, human rights