I was at a loss for how to illustrate this piece, and decided to use butterfly photographs to brighten it up. If you find the text obtuse at least you have pretty pictures to look at. All were taken in my garden during the last few weeks.
Eastern tiger swallowtail
In the seventies I witnessed enormous changes in my small hometown as subdivisions and strip malls spread outward. Even as a child I understood that land was finite and I worried about where it all would end. What would happen when all the towns simply grew together and there was no more land in which to expand?
Development slowed a little as buildable sites were filled up and steep and low-lying tracts were mostly left alone. Farther out of town, national forest land remained mostly unscathed, and farmland was preserved by those who were able to hold on to their property. This was often made possible by sending one spouse out to earn a wage in town, or simply because the land was too far out dirt roads to be threatened by development yet.
While sprawl continued to slowly claim land on the perimeter of town, in the 2000’s a new threat arrived, unconventional gas wells. Oil and gas wells already dotted the region, but their small footprints and short, vertical bores meant they were usually unobtrusive and unremarked upon. The new wells went much deeper, employed horizontal drilling techniques, and required a much larger piece of land. The area immediately to the northeast of here was drilled so extensively it became known as Frackistan. I recently found out the region in general is referred to as Frackalachia, an apt term I heard on soon-to-be-extinct public radio.
Hackberry emperor
While in the active drilling process the wells spoiled more than just the land on which they sat with their noise, lights, and the dust clouds from brine trucks speeding along narrow country roads. After the drilling was finished the frack pads subsided into merely being eyesores and occasionally exploding and sending massive methane plumes skyward.
Now it is 2025 and the fracking boom has slowed, but there is a new threat on the horizon: renewable energy development. A few months back I received a disturbing text that alerted me to the danger. I'm used to solicitations, usually from people who want to buy my land, but this one was different. It was from Sarah at Farm-to-Power, a “non-profit focused on uplifting farmer and rural landowner voices,” wondering if I would like to chat.
I looked up the organization and found it has a staff of 17 and a website quick to state that it is not affiliated with any for-profit land developers. According to the site, it is funded by grants from rural clean energy groups for the purpose of “advocating for clean energy projects at the state and local level.” What exactly this means, and who these people are, I do not know, but it calls up a sick feeling in my gut despite all the pretty phrases about empowering farmers. The testimonials from landowners notwithstanding, I don't believe for a second that these folks care about me or my land.
At this time, there are no solar or wind projects in my corner of Ohio, but I fear this is set to change. After all, there are fortunes to be made. A tsunami of industrial energy development is breaking over rural areas and it will take a lot to stop it, especially now that data centers have entered the picture. The pressures are strong and the amount of money involved is enormous.
Silvery checkerspot
I oppose so-called clean energy development on Ohio farmland, and if you buy into the mainstream narrative this fact might have you pegging me as a right-wing knuckle-dragger or an oil company hireling. I'm neither. This portrayal of solar farm opponents as ignorant pawns isn’t just offensive, it's backwards. From my perspective, young progressives like Sarah at Farm-to-Power are the stooges who have been convinced of the righteousness of renewable build-outs, and accept pay to do outreach to further such projects. They see themselves as the good guys because they believe that a transition from a fossil fuels to wind and solar is not only possible but mandatory. Once we acknowledge that it is neither, the narrative falls apart.
It is possible that some groups opposing industrial-scale renewable projects receive help from oil companies, but in most cases this accusation seems preposterous. It is probable that many are Trump-voting climate change deniers seeking to preserve their pastoral views and property values, but so what? At least they are fighting for something near and dear. Those working to further renewable development are merely greasing the rails for capital to roll in and industrialize places that mean nothing to them beyond profit potential.
My judgement of who the goodies and baddies are in this story rests on the assumption that eventually fulfilling energy needs — or even a significant portion of those needs — using solely renewables is impossible. There is plenty of evidence that a transition to clean energy without a significant concomitant reduction in energy use is pure fantasy. Because I think solar farms are the more immediate threat locally, I looked into the issues surrounding such projects, and what I learned strengthened my belief that they are destructive boondoggles.
I found that at this point in development the tech just isn't that great. Large tracts of land are needed to produce relatively small amounts of energy, and solar panels only last about 30 years before efficiency wanes significantly. It’s not unrealistic to imagine a second wave of new and improved solar arrays being deployed as technology advances, in the way interstate highways parallel the two lane roads they replaced, and unconventional drilling followed old-style gas wells.
Wild indigo duskywing
Solar farms affect more than just the land they sit on. Manufacture and disposal of photovoltaics must be included in any realistic assessment. Enormous amounts of raw materials are extracted and transported elsewhere (using energy from fossil fuels) for the panels themselves and for battery storage, so that not one but two or more localities are negatively affected. Large amounts of water are also used to mine, manufacture, and maintain solar panels. Recycling the materials when panels age out is expensive and difficult, and toxic waste is already a problem in countries with early adoption. All told, the energy return on investment is vanishingly small if cradle-to-grave costs are calculated honestly.
Here's the real kicker, which is apparently a taboo subject for wind and solar cheerleaders: Even as the proportion of energy supplied by renewables grows (it’s at about 15%) the overall demand for energy also increases, so that we are in a race in which the finish line is continually shifting. More coal, oil, and natural gas are burned each year. What is the plan for renewables to replace diesel, jet fuel, and heavy fuel oil? How will they fill the unfathomably large energy demands of industry? It's only possible to believe that renewables can eventually replace other energy sources because we are continually bombarded with the message that they must.
There are lots of articles that attempt put a rosy glow around current energy statistics. They proclaim things like “last year the growth in demand for oil slowed” and that “energy from renewables accounted for the largest share of the growth in total energy supply.” The first quote means that the world burned more oil in 2024 than 2023, just not quite as much more as was expected. The second quote tells us that renewable energy now makes up slightly expanded portion of an ever burgeoning whole. The key word in all the verbiage is “growth,” which is always to be celebrated, even when something is both growing and slowing!
Common buckeye
There is substantial evidence that renewable energy development will not solve the problem it purports solve — emissions will continue to rise — and in the process of failing it will destroy wild land, farmland, and the special character of rural areas (plus the places hidden to us where mining, manufacture, and disposal take place.) I predict that wherever solar and wind farms appear, the promised jobs will be mostly temporary (as with the fracking boom.) A few landowners will make lots of money while the rest of us merely observe (just like the fracking boom.) A period of rapid and much celebrated installations will be followed by a bust (just like all booms ever.) I predict that in 30 years we will have fields of junk in the way that we now have orphan oil wells that are abandoned and leaking with no one held responsible for clean up. Then the next big thing will arrive with all the same promises and the cycle will begin again.
Belief in industrial scale renewable energy is like a religious faith, and its proponents are in the grip of climate fundamentalism.
explains climate fundamentalism is this way in an 2018 article in Utne Reader:If we agree that the survival of humanity is at stake, then any means is justified, and any other cause–say reforming the prisons, housing the homeless, caring for the autistic, rescuing abused animals, or visiting your grandmother–becomes an unjustifiable distraction from the only important thing. Taken to its extreme, it requires that we harden our hearts to the needs in front of our faces. There is no time to waste! Everything is at stake! It’s do or die! How similar to the logic of war.
Climate fundamentalism says that even if there is validity to the issues discussed above, they must be suffered because in the end we will be delivered to a glorious future of clean and abundant energy. Then we can all shake hands and tackle the other bugaboos. Renewables proponents are apparently able to harden their hearts when it comes to the destruction of rural places, though many no doubt consider themselves conservationists. Climate fundamentalism demands that sacrifices be made. It says if we're going to make the omelet of solving climate change, we’ll need to break some eggs. Sacrificing things that we love will be necessary, but it won't be SUVs and vacations in Mallorca that are given up, at least not yet. It will be rural land.
Zabulon skipper
How much easier it is for a distant urban population to sacrifice the faraway fields of flyover country! It's only empty land after all, where domesticated animals are no doubt tortured and exploited for human profit. How much better a use for this wasteland is transforming it into acres of clean, renewable energy, where sheep photogenically graze in the shade of solar panels and return at the end of the day to their spacious sanctuary barns to live out their natural lives in peace and harmony.
Perhaps believers in the promise of renewable energy engage in this type of fantasy, or perhaps not. There is an obvious and extremely dangerous fantasy that our so-called leaders treat as reality: the belief in infinite growth. Just as I knew as a kid watching neighborhoods spread like petri dish cultures, we all understand that growth cannot be endless, but live as if it can be. It will end someday, but meanwhile there are many square miles of rural land still to be filled with frack pads and solar arrays, turbines and lithium mines, pipeline right-of-ways and battery energy storage systems. Will it end before every square inch of space has been spoiled? I've arrived at the belief that the only sane response to the situation is wishing for the collapse of industrial society while there is still something left unruined.
Monarch
Bleak stuff and unfortuately, maybe, I agree with you. There’s going to be over a billion solar panels to recycle in the next decade or so and still no large scale techniques to do it. Here in the UK government grants have meant tens of thousands of ASHPs are going in, all requiring electricity plus increasing numbers of e-cars needing charging yet there’s no money to upgrade the power grid…Meanwhile newer, bigger wind farms are going up because overseas companies can rake in the dosh. Small scale, local renewables, local grids and living within the energy means of your environment would seem like a good idea but who is really interested in good ideas? Too many companies just want to make the easy money and when it dries up, cut and run. A courageous piece Lynncady. Thanks.
On the other hand, I am extremely jealous of your beautiful butterflies! However, this year, for some reason, has been really good for ours and we do have some equally lovely ones- peacocks, brimstones, red admiral (my favourite as a kid).
I question whether "the right direction" or a sane response is to wish for the destruction of industrial society, an event that would cause billions of agonizing deaths while itself inflicting cataclysmic ecological damage, when it isn't clear that industrial society is the problem.
The first inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere probably hunted the native megafauna to extinction, slaughtering millions of innocent creatures and wiping whole species from existence, without any help from industrial society. There are other examples from the pre-industrial world, at varying scales, throughout history. Waste and tragedy are human characteristics, not industrial ones.
Wishing for mass death to punish industrial humans won't change the basic human tendency at work. It will just condemn people today to living in nihilistic despair and pointless guilt.
The human capacity for destruction and violence toward all life is real. It used to be known as "evil." It demands a response. The reality is that most of us won't be able to affect the direction of the future in any way that's noticeable to us in our lifetime. We do have the power to speak and act in our little private circles of meaning, in ways that will make those circles more loving, more brave, more just, more willing to surrender to the insane but essential hope that more is going on for something good and beautiful than we will ever know.