The group "Save Our Allegheny Ridges" (SOAR) meets in the pilots' lounge at the Mifflin County Airport.
I heard about the group when I attended a regional glider competition, just to watch them take off -- the competition itself is a week-long event with nothing much to see since the competitors are up in the sky and miles away, racing down the ridges to loop around and catch the wind back up to where they started. They have to return each day by sunset: that or ditch their gliders in a farmer's field and pay for damages. You can't land a glider in the dark.
I have a friend who's into gliding and invited me to come check it out. He's an older local hippie and Vietnam vet who's been fixing airplanes since Hanoi. A techy now for an international set of the flying elite, he's been flown to Europe numerous times to fix private jets, and is ground-crew and airstrip head master during the regular, regional gliding competitions. This place offers world class soaring. If you know what you're doing up there, you can catch updrafts and "cloud streets" from Central Pennsylvania to Knoxville and back in a single day without ever touching the ground.
The best conditions for soaring are in the spring and fall, when the migratory birds also take advantage of the Flyway in the wind that drops you off and picks you up in Tennessee. Glider pilots all have fond memories and fishing trip type stories of the raptors and waterfowl and other migrants they see joining them as they soar the Alleghenys. These guys do their annual bird count from the air.
I'd bet that all glider pilots are Airforce veterans. It takes a lot of skill and training to "read the airways" enough to get around up there without a motor. Gliding is expensive, too: $100,000 gets you started soaring on the cheap. Glider pilots are well-heeled Airforce veterans. And although soaring is relatively benign, having almost no carbon footprint at all, it’s a high risk or "extreme" sport. It has its fatalities from time to time.
The pilots' lounge at the airport is like a clubhouse. This is Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, you understand. It isn't posh; it’s more like VFW meets local Amish carpenters. It’s clean and it serves its purpose. There's a large kitchen and plenty of more or less comfortable places to stretch out and sleep. There's an office, and a conference room with a nice big table, where SOAR meetings are held. It looks like a retired colonel's idea of "no frills;" more like a barracks than a lounge.
About a dozen SOAR members meet in the conference room, a mix of upper-income Airforce veterans and your average local Sierra Club types. SOAR's activities so far have been centered on penning letters to the editor of the Lewistown Sentinel. They also take local hiking groups up onto the ridges now and then, to look at areas that are either threatened by or already developed for wind power. They keep an eye on things. They evaluate sites, talk to landowners in the planned path of and adjacent to and downhill from wind power installations, and seek cooperation from the companies building the turbines. SOAR would like to stop wind development permanently in our neck of the Allegheny ridges. But where wind power already exists in the Flyway or can't be stopped, they want to see it meet ideal specifications related to protection of wildlife and the local landscape.
The group and its issues are about as NIMBY as it gets. Many of us are against fossil fuels: oil, coal, natural gas. Nuclear power? No thank you. There are those against the stupidity of design and land-use in deciding to construct gigantic solar monocultural fields when there are so many new, ingenious ways to keep solar small and decentralized. Burning wood contributes to deforestation and fills the air with smoke. Now we’re against wind power too? We have to use something, right? Who decides these things?
A better question is, who decided NIMBY was so bad? Turns out, the term “NIMBY" was created by corporate propagandists, because it "chills community activism by debasing residents, as if they wanted all the benefits of our industrial society, but none of the costs. It also begs the question, 'In whose backyard, then, should it go?'.”
Several months after the evacuation of Love Canal, corporate flacks created a new phrase - NIMBY - an acronym for "Not In My Backyard." First appearing in the Christian Science Monitor in November, 1980, it was identified as a phase "used in the trade" of chemical companies.
SOAR and its issues are NIMBY, alright; but it has to be. The Allegheny Flyway is like no other place in the world. If local people won't work hard to protect the Flyway in our own backyard, no one else will.
Most of us know already that conventional wind turbines can be death traps for resident and migratory birds and especially, for bats. In 2012, wind turbines killed an estimated 573,000 birds and about 888,000 bats. How many were lost in the years before and after that? It adds up. It appears conventional wind turbines may even attract birds, bats, and especially raptors to their deaths. Placing turbines smack in the middle of a high-traffic migratory bird flyway is bound to kill some birds.
I knew this going into the meeting. What I didn't know were the NIMBY details of a landscape forever changed: the disruption of streams and storm water run-off; the loss of spring water access and well-water for private land owners down the slope; the disappearance of vernal pools that are crucial for amphibean reproduction and survival. As currently installed, wind power plantations (for lack of a better word) are like mountain-top removal lite; done on a much lesser scale, but still having long-term impacts on local ecosystems.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but the Allegheny Flyway is not even a great source-location for wind power.
For those who do not have hawk eyes to read the above map, white areas are poor wind sites. Yellow and gold are marginal to fair. The orange/gold areas (fair to good), are along the shoreline of Lake Erie and in the Allegheny Flyway. Looks like Pennsylvania is neither a red state (outstanding) nor a blue state (superb) -- it's not even purple (excellent) when it comes to wind power.
This is because those "cloud streets" and wind currents that make Pennsylvania such an awesome destination for soaring and create the "Allegheny Flyway" for migratory birds are variable, seasonal, and much higher than any existing wind turbine design could ever realistically harness.
But SOAR supporters also have a litany of other issues as expressed in their own words:
"The character and charm of local places would be permanently disrupted to the financial benefit of outside companies, to the detriment of local quality of life and the local tourism concerns [fly fishing, hunting, hiking, caving (spelunking), mountain biking, canoeing and kayaking, soaring]."
"Pilots come every year from all over the country to enjoy the beautiful scenery and amazing soaring conditions. The turbines are an air navigation hazard that will put an end to these activities forever."
"Wind energy will never be cost competitive with dispatchable, base load forms of generation. In the end you are stuck with capacity that is expensive and unreliable - and having to pay for the extra capital and operating costs out of tax dollars so you can subsidize it enough that people will buy it."
"Transmission losses make remote siting of wind farms questionable."
"Wind turbines break all the time, and the cost per MWh rises continually after installation until they're no longer economically feasible to operate after 12-15yrs due to maintenance costs. After that, new ones will have to be built. "
"They will destroy the mountain to put the turbines on. I have property up there that would be destroyed if they go up."
"I think if we look to our [Amish and Mennonite] neighbors and learn how to live with less, we will be gaining an energy perspective that can give us hope for a future with pristine mountains and unspoiled state parks. If we choose not to use the energy or products from corporate giants they will have to go away. Dreams do come true, please vote NO!"
Of course, with any NIMBI "Save the
___ (fill-in-the-blank)" cause, there'll be a certain amount of grasping at straws. Some opponents of wind power also complain of deteriorating health from the "flash effects" or strobe-light type intermittent shade and sunshine as windmill blades spin in the wind, and from the incessant noise of the churning turbines, causing
headaches, sleeplessness, anxiety, tintinitus and vertigo.
Proponents of wind energy tend to focus in on the fringe arguments, characterizing the entire anti-wind movement as batty and for the birds.
Still, one ought to keep in mind that the type of person who lives up in the woods on the ridgetop in the middle of nowhere does so because they are the silent type. If you've never lived "off the grid," you've probably never experienced the startled awareness of just how loud the constant hum of a refrigerator motor is. If a refrigerator motor can seem loud in the quiet of the woods, imagine a set of towering turbines stretching across the ridge near your bedroom window. And while not all landowners up at Jack's Mountain and elsewhere in the region where wind power has been developed live "off the grid," there's a large local population of Amish folks, who do. Adverse health effects may be purely psychological, but they are real enough to the people who live on lands adjacent to or even within a mile of the turbines, no matter how highly or lowly one considers the regional "Happiness Index."
Other local activists in the region, however, can be frustrated and impatient with SOAR.
"I wish those people would just go away," the president of a local chapter of a prominent environemental group (who wishes to remain anonymous) said. "They're crazy. [The president of SOAR] keeps bringing up this vertigo argument, which has no scientific proof whatsoever." It can annoy local activists working hard to stop fracking and fossil fuel investment that SOAR exists at all, when the fact remains that "we have to use something."
But it's not "crazy" to point out that siting turbines in the Flyway is not at all ideal even from a MWh-generating point of view; that long-distance transmission of energy is notoriously wasteful; that other alternatives, including solar, exist; and that regional revenue streams from outdoor sporting and leisure activities are a big deal around here.
And then, there are the birds. That wind turbines in the Allegheny ridges of Central Pennsylvania might chop up birds and bats unfortunately is of little concern and seems to many people like a "silly" excuse for halting progress in "green energy." Not to me; I'm an unabashed naturalist and wildlife lover. (I also often wonder if anyone has ever heard the word "decentralized" when it comes to power supply?) If it were only the turbines threatening the birds and bats, the argument to "sacrifice" wildlife to wind energy might carry a bit more weight. But the birds - and bats - are confronting a good deal more than wind turbines as they migrate seasonally north and south and try to feed and breed in the Allegheny ridges.
In Central Pennsylvania, our bats are already hard hit by a fatal and apparently, quite painful fungal disease, white nose syndrome. As for birds, each year the migrants are fewer and the agressive "nuisance" birds like cowbirds and grackles increase. Ornothologists have been sounding the alarm about declining populations of migratory birds since the early 1990s, from deforestation and loss of other breeding-grounds to agricultural, industrial, and residential development in all areas along migratory routes north and south of the border; from navigational hazards such as reflective glass; and, as suburban development continues to sprawl, from predation by domestic and stray cats. Cats alone kill roughly 3,000,000 birds annually. So what's another 300,000 or so more deaths per year? [numbers according to treehugger.com.]
Enough is enough, I say. I'm not against wind power, per se. But I am opposed to buidling conventional turbines in the Allegheny Flyway when bird-friendly turbine design alternatives already exist and new innovations continue to advance the industry. If not in the middle of a major Flyway, where else should these bird-friendly techniques be implemented? So far, we're not seeing it here in the Allegheny ridges. NIMBY, I say. NIMBY.
As for SOAR, their message seems to be getting through to local people and government. An email from just last week informs me:
Some good news to share: A sharp-eyed observer reported to me that E.ON’s test tower on Stone Mountain is finally gone! Yeah!
Volkswind’s FAA permit expires on 5/26/15. I’ll be checking to see if it gets renewed.
I stand with them. Rock on, good people of the Allegheny ridges, rock on. Honor and protect the landscape around you and the Flyway above you and NIMBY all the way!
See you at the pilots' lounge.
Don't miss
this year's regional Glider Competition from May 17 - May 23.
Yinz all come on out now once, ya hear?
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