As I understand it, humans have a great capacity for imagination, to envision what’s not yet happened, to dream about a potential occurrence. Bear with me—this bird brain is rather limited in its capacity to imagine much of a potential future.
Am I wrong then in surmising that the ability to imagine also gives you humans greater capacity for fears? I hear it in your letters to the editor and in your public comments at local meetings. So many of you people are afraid of changes that haven’t happened yet, and you’re imagining the worst, which feeds the “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) mentality.
Yes, there are facts that aid this imaginative process, facts based on things that have happened so they could likely happen again. But there are other pieces of evidence that paint a picture of some bad things that could happen if the status quo remains. It’s complicated, I get that. But nothing is the same as it ever was, is it?
Most recently, despite the vocal concerns and appeals of one neighbor and several groups, the county Board of Supervisors approved the Strauss Wind Energy Project on Jan. 28. That means 29 roughly 500-foot-tall wind turbines could be built in a largely undeveloped area about 5 miles south of Lompoc.
Based on existing technology, those turbines could provide clean, green power to the equivalent of 43,000 homes. Sounds like a good thing.
Based on history and data, this Earth is changing; lots of people say (and loudly) that clean, green power is a must if any of us want to have anything positive to imagine in the future.
Yet—and I’ve said this before (“For the birds,” Nov. 28, 2019)—based on turbines vs. birds issues elsewhere, and based on studies of my migrating feathered friends, 227 birds could be at risk of death by ginormous blades. (I rarely fly higher than 500 feet, so yeah, those things would get in my way.)
And then George Bedford, who lives about 2,000 feet from where these turbines are proposed to go, shared this with the Board of Supervisors: “It’s just frustrating when my wife and I bought that ranch in 1994 … I didn’t know if I built my house I’d have to listen to 29 wind turbines circling around.”
I don’t think anyone, when building their dream home, would have to imagine the whooshing of nearly 35-story blades turning the equivalent of a few city blocks away.
And yet there’s so much we don’t know every time we take a step forward, amirite? It sucks that Bedford could lose his surrounding peace—he didn’t see that coming. It also sucks that we’re facing an uncertain future if we don’t move forward with cleaner energy—maybe we should have seen this coming.
So the project moves forward, against what First District Supervisor Das Williams calls environmental hypocrisy.
“Most people in the county agree about the values of local generation, agree about renewable energy, and it’s all sort of in theoretical concept, but then they force people in inland counties to actually do something about it, and that’s environmental hypocrisy,” he said.
So maybe we can imagine that this approved project might lead to something better than what we have right now.
The canary’s flying higher from now on. Send rumors and more to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 6-13, 2020.
