O! Give me a home, where the beefalo roam....

Click for another view!

"Windmill farm... Tucker County, W.Va....

"Vincent Collins... has been vacationing in this scenic area for 35 years. A few years ago, he bought a 1.2-acre lot near here and planned to build a house on it. But once he saw the windmills, and learned of plans for more, he scrapped that dream.... 'When you hear the word "windmill," you think Holland and Don Quixote. That's wrong. They look like alien monsters coming out of the ground'....

"Windmill farms must be large to be financially viable.... [Each turbine can be up to '488 feet high'.] Critics worry that beyond the blemish on the natural landscape, these industrial-sized towers can chop up migratory birds. One farm in California was dubbed the 'condor Cuisinart'....

"Charles Komanoff, a longtime economic consultant to environmental groups, said the opposition by 'well-heeled environmentalists,' stoked the preconception that they were more concerned about their own backyards than about the common good. 'They want to have it all and they won't brook any trade-off, especially a trade-off that sacrifices their own comfort,' said Mr. Komanoff...." (Katharine Q. Seelye, photo by Stephen Crowley, NYT on the Web, 05May03)

"Jessica Kerns thought her survey of new power-generating wind turbines on a mountaintop in West Virginia would yield the standard result: a smattering of dead birds that were whacked by the whirring blades. But the University of Maryland doctoral student turned up something unexpected... hundreds of bat carcasses, some with battered wings and bloodied faces....

"The deaths appear to violate no federal laws... Albert M. Manville II, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service... said, but the threat is serious. Unless a solution is found, he said, the turbines could get a reputation as being 'bat Veg-o-matics.'...

"Bats serve an important role in nature, and their populations are believed to be in decline, scientists said. The bats getting killed in Appalachia devour insects that pose grave threats to crops such as corn and cotton. They also feast on pests that can spread disease, such as mosquitoes." (Justin Blum, "Researchers Alarmed by Bat Deaths From Wind Turbines", The Washington Post, 01Jan05, p.A01)

		"Over the hills and far away, Teletubbies come to play." Anyone who has watched the BBC Teletubbies television series for pre-toddlers (ca. 12 mos), will surely recognize a resemblence between the windmills in Teletubbyland, and the windmills in Tucker County. They will perhaps also recall the periscopes in Teletubbyland, which rise up from time to time out of the ground, and look around (these periscopes are one item in Teletubbies that reminds me of Patrick McGoohan's "The Prisoner" TV series).
		Are the Teletubbies living in a world of total -- but benign -- surveillance? An ultimate high tech welfare state utopia, where every citizen's every need is nurturingly met by the government watching everyone all the time to see when they need anything? As the windmills turn, they often sprinkle waves of silvery particles in an expanding pinwheel pattern: mass media enchantment?
Would a "pacified nature", everywhere enhanced through advanced technology to be responsive in depth to human needs and aspirations, necessarily take the form of a manicured landscape (why not Astroturf?) with windmill farms extending in all directions as far as the eye could see, and here and there, surveillance periscopes popping up and looking around -- so that no one could ever again look out upon a landscape without having to see such "improvements" in it? [See alternative]

 

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Email me your ideas about the future!
 

Visit the future, today, in Montenegro! See a 12 year old middle-class girl's apocalyptic vision of the future.   The 20th Century: "The century of barbed wire". Read Garrett Hardin's classic essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons".   Leisure is the basis of culture. See 12th C. Tuscan country house I find evocative of time and eternity. See Tuscan landscape (Leonardo da Vinci drawing).

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http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/future.html Copyright © 2003 Brad McCormick, Ed.D. bradmcc@cloud9.net 16 March 2006CE (2006-03-17 ISO 8601) v02.03