As his summer vacation is wrapping up, Will McMahon of the University of Missouri – Columbia has a few thoughts about eco-activism.

It is my habit to take a vacation each summer to Northern Michigan in the hopes that the deep pine forests and vast, pure lakes will sooth my troubled soul and allow me to forget things like green energy or the Toyota Prius. I was not so lucky this year. Somewhere north of Luddington, I came across something that wasn’t there last year. The beautiful and serene countryside was marred by something artificial and unnatural. I had entered what I now know to be the Mason County wind farm, whose 56 large turbines did more to mar the aesthetic purity of the countryside than one hundred factories could have.

I was hardly the only one not to celebrate the imposition of these machines on the landscape. A group of 17 local residents who live in the area have sued Consumers Energy, the company which owns the wind farm, complaining of noise, dizziness, headaches and nausea (to name a few of the complaints) resulting from the presence of the turbines. Such complaints have arisen elsewhere in the country but have fallen on contemptuously deaf ears. Environmentalist pundits have even gone so far as to compare those who complain of of “Wind Turbine Syndrome” to people who believe that the flu vaccine causes mental retardation in children.

Doubtless, some claims of turbine generated illness are exaggerated, but the very audible noise from the turbines is less than easy to ignore. That is, unless you’re on the city council. Mark McKeever of Scituate, Massachusetts, invited town officials to come to his home and see for themselves what the nearby wind turbine had done to his quality of life. Not one of them took him up on the offer.

….Much of the urgency surrounding environmental issues is well intentioned, as there are real threats to our environment that should not be ignored. But we should ignore neither the practicality of potential solutions nor, more importantly, their impact on people’s lives and freedoms. The same political culture which questions any encroachment on peoples’ privacy done in the name of fighting terrorism, should similarly question encroachment on peoples’ everyday lives done in the name of fighting climate change.