While the image here is striking and beautiful, in a way (posted a third time—it is so beautiful! photo credit, again, to Lori Stiles, for this sight of the windmills in Tucker County, West Virginia), I must confess I was unhappy when I first saw the windmills. It was as though they’d chopped off part of the mountain top to put them there. And, just as mountain-top removal is damaging the aquifers and livelihoods of people in southern West Virginia, I viewed this installation as damaging of the aesthetic value of the view. It was a different aesthetic, at the very least. Can those nearby, in sight of, handle it? Accept it?
These are questions that need to be asked as we begin to “re-localise”—if that is what we as a society choose to do. Some thoughts on the implications of this process in terms of food can be had by reading Elisabeth Barham’s 2003 article, “Translating terroir: the global challenge of French AOC labeling,” in the Journal of Rural Studies 19:127-138.
In my most recent trip to Europe, in the Netherlands, I caught another glimpse of the changing landscape of climate change, frugality in the realm of energy savings: huge, and I do mean HUGE, wind turbines lining the bus route from the ferry terminal to the train station. All a sudden my eye was taken upward, skyward, and I no longer was seeing the landscape of the dykelands, the reminders of sea and human ingenuity, of Holland, but instead simply the work of humans. It was a humbling sight.
Now, these huge wind machines had been put in an industrial “zone,” a place that already has been “industrialised” to the extent that it would appear no one would object to power being gathered from these sites and being used to help supply the (perhaps larger, more than local) grid.
But it was a significant alteration; and as battles rage at present in Atlantic Canada over the placement of these not-your-historical-little-Dutch-wooden windmill structures, it behooves us all to think about the intangible, psychic costs to putting these human-made structures in places where, previously, they had not been, and where there is not the industrial-scape already being accommodated. These discussions need to be had, most especially in North America, where efforts to first cut down on energy use need really to be made more a part of the discourse, and policy, before people are asked to give up the health benefits of natural landscapes, or seascapes, view unimpeded.
There is another issue, here, too, connected to the history of the expropriation of natural resources. Most of us know the story of the New England and New York capitalists who came “from away” and made a lot of money in a previous century off the use and abuse of both human and natural capital. There, the “local” was subsumed to the “national” and we had the growth of particular areas (cities like Montreal, Boston) at the cost of the people and places of the marginalized places, and, to a large degree, of rural peoples. We need to be sure that this doesn’t happen again with green energy. I was dismayed when I learned from a reputable source that the “locals”—the people of Tucker County, whose winds were being employed to work this turbine—were not benefiting very much economically at all from these windmills (Florida company). Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, West Virginia, and other places where coal mining and timbering have been allowed to work their damage historically, have lost natural beauty in exchange for providing resources to a population outside of the region, for the most part. It is this population “from away” who in turn insist on certain natural places being preserved for use by them as “playground”... This is an unhealthy dynamic, an unhealthy polarization, and it needs to be challenged at all levels.
By buying local, though....by consciously looking at where the goods and foods were produced that one buys (from start to finish!)-- especially those entrepreneurs who, like my jam-makers and bread-bakers, are doing small-scale things as a labour of love for the most part... we will be, to use a cliché, part of the solution, and not part of the problem.
These are questions that need to be asked as we begin to “re-localise”—if that is what we as a society choose to do. Some thoughts on the implications of this process in terms of food can be had by reading Elisabeth Barham’s 2003 article, “Translating terroir: the global challenge of French AOC labeling,” in the Journal of Rural Studies 19:127-138.
In my most recent trip to Europe, in the Netherlands, I caught another glimpse of the changing landscape of climate change, frugality in the realm of energy savings: huge, and I do mean HUGE, wind turbines lining the bus route from the ferry terminal to the train station. All a sudden my eye was taken upward, skyward, and I no longer was seeing the landscape of the dykelands, the reminders of sea and human ingenuity, of Holland, but instead simply the work of humans. It was a humbling sight.
Now, these huge wind machines had been put in an industrial “zone,” a place that already has been “industrialised” to the extent that it would appear no one would object to power being gathered from these sites and being used to help supply the (perhaps larger, more than local) grid.
But it was a significant alteration; and as battles rage at present in Atlantic Canada over the placement of these not-your-historical-little-Dutch-wooden windmill structures, it behooves us all to think about the intangible, psychic costs to putting these human-made structures in places where, previously, they had not been, and where there is not the industrial-scape already being accommodated. These discussions need to be had, most especially in North America, where efforts to first cut down on energy use need really to be made more a part of the discourse, and policy, before people are asked to give up the health benefits of natural landscapes, or seascapes, view unimpeded.
There is another issue, here, too, connected to the history of the expropriation of natural resources. Most of us know the story of the New England and New York capitalists who came “from away” and made a lot of money in a previous century off the use and abuse of both human and natural capital. There, the “local” was subsumed to the “national” and we had the growth of particular areas (cities like Montreal, Boston) at the cost of the people and places of the marginalized places, and, to a large degree, of rural peoples. We need to be sure that this doesn’t happen again with green energy. I was dismayed when I learned from a reputable source that the “locals”—the people of Tucker County, whose winds were being employed to work this turbine—were not benefiting very much economically at all from these windmills (Florida company). Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, West Virginia, and other places where coal mining and timbering have been allowed to work their damage historically, have lost natural beauty in exchange for providing resources to a population outside of the region, for the most part. It is this population “from away” who in turn insist on certain natural places being preserved for use by them as “playground”... This is an unhealthy dynamic, an unhealthy polarization, and it needs to be challenged at all levels.
By buying local, though....by consciously looking at where the goods and foods were produced that one buys (from start to finish!)-- especially those entrepreneurs who, like my jam-makers and bread-bakers, are doing small-scale things as a labour of love for the most part... we will be, to use a cliché, part of the solution, and not part of the problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment