Survival: The stakes / the price

The line of turbines dotting a ridge in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom sparked outrage and protests: The giant blades are despoiling the land and views, they cried, devastating the already decimated bird population, and the wop-wop noise is driving people mad or at least making them really really angry. 

In the painting at the Met, myriad electrical towers, like armies of aliens, invade the serene beauty of China's traditional mountain landscape, bringing a nightmare of progress.

Oil wells and refineries are of course far more ugly and their environmental costs far more devastating, perhaps even existentially so. But they are largely confined to discreet areas often occupied by politically marginalized populations, like the residents of Louisiana's Cancer Alley, people of color whose voices are drowned by the ka-ching of corporate profit and the soft growl of out car engines.

Nobody wants to see the unbeautiful energy apparatus that fuels our convenience, warms our homes, gentles our lives. No one wants fields of solar panels next door. Neighbors become apoplectic over a string of turbines on a mountain top, or stretched out in the ocean interrupting a pristine (and exceedingly expensive) view. Each of these energy strategies comes with an aesthetic cost, and some with considerable impact on wildlife and environment as well.

But what are we to do, short of giving up our cars, our hamburgers or far more importantly forcing government to regulate, and corporations to rein in their greed in service to averting disaster.

We all agree something has to give or the planet itself will. And we all also agree, someone else should pay the price.