Why I am for Wind Power

We can dismantle wind turbines when better technology comes along, but we can never put back the tops of our mountains, or uncover the streams that have been covered, or unpoison our babies.

As far as I know, wind turbines don’t poison unborn children with mercury the way coal does. The air that comes out of a wind turbine is as clean as the air that goes into a wind turbine. And a wind turbine doesn’t emit global warming causing CO2.

Anti- wind people are insulting to the people that actually suffer for so -called cheap electricity. The anti- wind people are in reality anti-clean energy people. This fight is really about class and privlege. As the anti-clean energy/ wind people have no problem using the coal fired electricity that comes from the blood, sweat and tears of my people in West Virginia, but they just don’t want to look at wind turbines. I’ll trade them any day.

As a matter of fact, the anti- wind people need to come live in the coal fields and send their children to our schools and breathe some of the coal dust and travel on our narrow mountain roads with huge coal and log trucks. Come walk in our shoes and look at our viewshed. Come spend a sleepless night during rain storms beneath a huge coal waste sludge dam and be afraid of that dams failure.

Come experience the effects of the three million pounds of explosives that are used daily to blast our mountains and homes away.

Yes, come to coal country, where we have to use dust masks just to sit on the porch or cut the grass.

Come walk in our shoes before you reject wind farms.

Judy Bonds is a 2003 recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize and the director of Coal River Mountain Watch.