long gray blades slowly
revolving in the sunset,
reaping the wind
East of the Mississippi near Bishop Hill, we pass a huge wind farm, hundreds of giant turbines spread out for miles south of the interstate highway, slowly revolving like a troupe of ballerinas all doing arabesque pirouettes. Like a three-bladed scythe, the long blades reap wind instead of grass. The kinetic energy garnered from the motion of the wind is converted into mechanical energy, which is then used to produce electricity, an alternative to coal-generated electricity. Seeing all these turbines reminds me of the wind farms we saw in many parts of the UK, like this one in Cumbria. Of course, as with anything new, controversy blows hot around wind farms, ranging from spoiling the view to the environmental impact of producing massive amounts of concrete for the footings. As a child, I remember driving from St. Louis to grandma's house in southern Illinois past mile after mile of oil derricks bobbing up and down like demented ducks, and no one objected to spoiling the view in order to suck oil out of the ground, or to the endless lines of railroad cars carrying coal from the mines out west to the cities out east.
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