“If you see me waving at you from the middle of the pond, I’m not greeting you, I’m drowning,” she said with a dead serious smile.
If we were trees, we would grow slowly and help the trees around us grow. If we were water, we’d welcome the wind that prompts waves to flush the water on the bottom, like a spring cleaning. We would work in harmony with whatever surrounds us.
But we’re people. Loads of potential, loads of questions, loads of enthusiasm and wagonloads of discord.
We talked with a Midwest farmer last week who owns 1800 acres of dark, deep, rich land that has grown corn and soybeans for generations. She said she’s lucky that two of her grandchildren still want to farm.
“It makes me cry,” she said clouding up, “that so many families aren’t that lucky. Wind farms and solar farms, I can’t believe they call them farms, stretch all the way from Chicago to Springfield. Companies come in and offer landowners $20,000 an acre.
“The people are old, they have no family willing to continue farming, so they sell. They move to Florida or Texas, wherever, hoping warmer weather will improve their outlook and mend their hearts.
“Then the buyers scrape the topsoil off. That’s about eighteen inches of abundant, old-growth soil. They sell that to housing developments so people can have grass that crews will mow for them.
“Then they pour concrete on the best farmland in our country to put up miles of solar panels or wind turbines. The thing is, now that land is dead. If they would build their alternative energy solutions on rocky embankments, I wouldn’t care. But they don’t. If they would put solar panels on individual houses, I wouldn’t care. But they don’t. They do what’s easy for them, not what’s good for us. It’s all about making the most money no matter how devastating their business model is to ordinary good people who need to eat and are willing to provide the food. To me, these crazy wind and sun farms are as murderous as drilling or fracking, only more personal.
“These companies want it easy, and they have no regard for communities. I’m all for property rights, but not when it affects those who didn’t sell, those who want to continue farming. We can’t do much about raising food when our farmland is practically inaccessible or destroyed. When these companies abandon their moneymaking atrocities, we can’t create new topsoil.
“Of course we need alternative energy. Of course we need to stop percolating oil out of our inner planet to move and sell across the globe. Of course we need clean water and cleaner air. In Jamaica’s hurricane the only ones left with power were the houses that had solar panels. But they were put in place individually, not by companies with tax breaks for the owners, directors, stockholders. Those people are not even willing to support the country they live in. Outrageous.”
She said it better than we could. She knows she’s old and she tries to keep her blood pressure under control by not getting angry. She knows things will likely not improve in her lifetime.
But she’s trying. She’s thinking, talking, explaining. She’s acting like those kids on our front page who didn’t realize how much power raw emotion has.