"Conservation is the state of harmony between man and land."
-Aldo Leopold
"People would rather believe than know."
-Edward O. Wilson
"European countries are far ahead of the United States in not only wind power, but also its unhappy consequences."
-Ed Hiserodt, “Green Fairy Tales”, The New American
"Corporations are not legal “persons” with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control."
-Kalle Lasn
"The corporations don't have to lobby the government anymore. They are the government."
-Jim Hightower
"Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it."
-Andrew Young
"Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens."
-Derrick Jensen
"To whom is an international corporation answerable? Often they do not employ workers. They outsource manufacturing to places far away. If wages rise in one place, they can, almost instantly, transfer production to somewhere else. If a tax regime in one country becomes burdensome, they can relocate to another. To whom, then, are they accountable? By whom are they controllable? For whom are they responsible? To which group of people other than shareholders do they owe loyalty? The extreme mobility, not only of capital but also of manufacturing and servicing, is in danger of creating institutions that have power without responsibility, as well as a social class, the global elite, that has no organic connection with any group except itself."
-Jonathan Sacks
"Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations."
-Wendell Berry
"All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It's that simple."
-Michael Hureaux-Perez
"At the end of the day, no amount of investing, no amount of clean electrons, no amount of energy efficiency will save the natural world if we are not paying attention to it - if we are not paying attention to all the things that nature give us for free: clean air, clean water, breathtaking vistas, mountains for skiing, rivers for fishing, oceans for sailing, sunsets for poets, and landscapes for painters. What good is it to have wind-powered lights to brighten the night if you can't see anything green during the day? Just because we can't sell shares in nature doesn't mean it has no value."
-Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America
"We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly."
-T.S. Eliot
"If we humans are good at anything, it’s thinking we’ve got a terrific idea and going for it without acknowledging the potential consequences or our own ignorance."
-David Suzuki
"Wind’s unpredictability means it truly has no generating capacity value, and its construction will not displace building any new coal or natural gas generating capacity. Grid reserve margins require wind-backup, and the inefficiency of quickly firing up a natural gas unit to meet erratic wind generation output means any emissions displacement is minimal. Wind is simply an additional capital cost which proves to be more than twice as expensive for the ratepayer."
-Tom Hewson, “Calculating Wind Power’s Environmental Benefits”, Power Engineering
"Wind is one of the most difficult things to forecast ... If you’re expecting the wind to blow 25 mph all day and generate 1,000 MW, and that wind drops off or doesn’t occur, you have to make up for that with another plant, and that is expensive to throttle up those other, more traditional generation sources."
-Bill Mahoney, National Center for Atmospheric Research
"The fact of the matter is that today, stuff-selling mega-corporations have a huge influence on our daily lives. And because of the competitive nature of our global economy, these corporations are generally only concerned with one thing—the bottom line. That is, maximizing profit, regardless of the social or environmental costs."
-David Suzuki
"Certainly, wind energy is not green energy if it requires that we negatively impact special natural resources, including rare and endangered species and their habitats."
-John Pagels
"The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse."
-Herman E. Daly
"It’s well past time to stop considering what wind might do and to examine what it has done. It has not reduced fossil fuel use or emissions. It has only ruined a lot of landscapes and communities, fragmented habitat, and killed birds and bats."
-Eric Rosenbloom, VT
"If I were an investor and wanted to keep my green image intact, I would be deeply concerned about building turbines on forested ridgetops."
-Merlin Tuttle, Director, Bat Conservation International
"The pursuit of large-scale, ridgeline wind power in Vermont represents a terrible error of vision and planning and a misunderstanding of what a responsible society must do to slow the warming of our planet. It also represents a profound failure to understand the value of our landscape to our souls and our economic future in Vermont."
-Steve E. Wright, “The Not So Green Mountains”, New York Times
"There is an assumption that “wind energy can make an important contribution to tackling climate change” (as CPRE put it). But all evidence so far is that it can not. There is no balance between the minuscule benefits of wind and its negative impacts on landscape, wildlife, and human community."
-Eric Rosenbloom, VT
"There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the earth as if it were a business in liquidation."
-Herman E. Daly
"An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited."
-E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
"Wind is renewable. Turbines are not."
-Ozzie Zehner, Green Illusions
"Looking at the ridge lines, you’re looking at the same thing Ethan Allen and those people looked at. We’ve worked hard to keep billboards off the side of the roads. You can’t put up a billboard but you can put up a 400-foot tower? It doesn’t make sense."
-Michael Klopchin, Select Board Chairman, Clarendon, VT
"...as a Vermonter, I’m for preserving our ridgelines (as Act 250 was designed to do) and our natural landscapes. The integrity of our environment is not only a source of our strength and pride it is also critical to our economic well-being. It makes no sense to sacrifice who and what we are and what we have for no useful purpose."
-Hugh Kemper, VT
"Really, if it weren’t wind, the environmental groups would be out there screaming their heads off about the destruction that’s going on."
-Stephanie Kaplan, VPR
"The solution to our energy needs must go through a show of respect for nature, not, once again, a policy that does violence to our hills."
-George Lorimer, St. Andrews, Scotland
-Ronald Wright
-George Monbiot
-David R. Brower
-Joseph Wood Krutch
"I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?"
-Robert Redford
"The closer you get to the facts about wind energy, the worse wind power appears."
-Scott Darling, wildlife biologist, Vt. Dept. of Fish & Wildlife, Middlebury, VT
"It (wind power) is a waste of money because it is ineffective. And because it is ineffective its negative impacts are unacceptable."
-Eric Rosenbloom, VT
"Wind power is an idea that is appealing to the imagination. It sounds like a ‘free’ source of energy that would be non-polluting and stable in cost. I am an optimist, and I love technology. If I thought for one moment that windmills would be a source of low cost energy, I would be building them. The reality is quite the contrary — wind power is wasteful of human and natural resources."
-Fergus Smith, VT
"They’ll present all the reasons why they think that denuding 60 acres of high elevation forest land is not going to cause erosion and degradation of the streams. And we are going to be opposing that, and trying to show the court that indeed it’s impossible to do a project like this in such an environment without degrading the water quality."
-Stephanie Kaplan, VPR
"Wind power does not respond to demand. It may or may not be there when needed. ... We will therefore need as much other electricity sources with wind as we would without. ... It is not just unnecessary but offensive to entertain industrial-scale development of the ridgelines, with strobe lights and noise and ecological degradation that far surpasses anything now on the mountains, for such obvious nonsense."
-Eric Rosenbloom, VT
"God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation."
-Francis Bacon
"Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we'll soon be in trouble."
-Roger Tory Peterson
Treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.
-Native American Proverb
Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.
-Cree Indian Proverb
"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."
-John Muir
"The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations."
-Pope John Paul II
"The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature – nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man’s passing."
-Loudon Wainwright
"Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it."
-Henry David Thoreau
When you defile the pleasant streams
And the wild bird's abiding place,
You massacre a million dreams
And cast your spittle in God's face.
-John Drinkwater
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed."
-Gandhi
"A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
"For the power that would be generated from them [large wind turbines], it's that change in our ridgelines that most Vermonters don't support."
-Gov. Jim Douglas, VT
"Leave it as it is... The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it."
–Theodore Roosevelt
"I don’t believe it is in the state’s interest to industrialize our ridge lines."
-Jim Douglas, Governor, VT
“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.”
-Theodore Roosevelt
"If we were to put an industrial turbine on every (suitable) location it doesn't add up to enough energy to justify impairment of our ridgelines. We need to maintain our tourist economy and our quality of life."
-Gov. Jim Douglas, VT
"It's going to mean a lot to people you'll never get to meet."
"This is the kind of thing we need, it is what Vermont is."
-Gov. Howard Dean (Center Pond Preservation Ceremony, Newark, 1995)
"It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures."
-Vincent van Gogh
"Land really is the best art."
-Andy Warhol
"To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature."
-August Rodin
"Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more." -Vincent van Gogh
"Nature is the art of God."
-Dante Alighieri
"The richness I achieve comes from Nature, the source of my inspiration."
-Claude Monet
"Things perfected by nature are better than those finished by art."
-Cicero
"For art may err, but nature cannot miss."
-John Dryden
"Art is a harmony parallel with nature."
-Paul Cézanne
"Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty, if only we have the eyes to see them."
-John Ruskin
"Since the wind developers consider us "hosts", I suppose it would be appropriate to regard them as parasites."
-Joan King, Newark Resident
"Gov. Howard Dean came to Newark in 1995 to celebrate the preservation of some 700 acres along Center Pond for future generations. Now, that preserved, pristine area is in jeopardy. Governor Shumlin, an advocate of wind power, may end up being known for destroying Vermont's mountains."
-Vincent Matteis, Newark Landowner
"I think we have to stop calling them 'wind farms', I'm a farmer and they're not farms, they're factories!"
-Ben Bangs, Newark Farmer
"Experience is the best teacher; I think the whole group of industrial wind proponents should be required to spend an entire week living within 3 miles of an industrial wind installation!"
-Joan King, Newark Resident
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