It seems selfish to me to not put up something like a windmill because someone thinks its loud or ugly, or because they think Maine is so beautiful and they don’t want to destroy that beauty (and it is beautiful by the way, my family has been in Maine from coast to mountains since the 1600s).

It’s selfish because windmills could literally mean the difference between life and death to future generations. Its also selfish I think to be against building a harmless dirt road in the woods (which the windmill companies have to do for construction), when consequentially if you don’t build that dirt road energy must come from other sources like ANWR (Artic National Wildlife Refuge) where entire communities are being destroyed from oil spills because the oil is driving fish out to other waters, endangered caribou herds’ migration routes are blocked, and oil leaks are abundant throughout pipelines that stretch for hundreds of miles. A dirt road seems a lot less harmless than that.

The world population is growing at an exponential rate. On a graph with the x-axis being time and the y-axis being population, it is pretty impressive how fast our population is growing. With the population growth of course comes energy use. With energy use comes the question of how we acquire our energy. In the near past, there had been a large amount of oil pumped out of the earth to create energy. The way I see it is us (humans) pumping oil out of the earth is analogous to the pumping of blood out of a living thing and it (the earth) could deflate or die, so to speak, over time. I know it seems like the earth is so big that we could never do such a thing but it isn’t so big if you compare its size to the earth’s population and more importantly the growth of the earth’s population. Oil is being used way faster than it can be replenished. In other words, we are pumping many gallons for every gallon that the earth is producing. The same idea holds true for fresh water but that’s a whole other story. If the earth were a well, it would have been dry a long time ago.

Building wind farms will keep Maine beautiful. I think the sacrifice of building roads and producing carbon temporarily in the atmosphere to build these impressive, durable, windmills which will produce energy for many, many, many years with little maintenance, is a sacrifice we should make.

I hold the western Maine mountains and the ocean very close to my heart to the point where I get angry when I see a piece of trash on a hiking trail or an out-of-stater treating the land or people in ways they shouldn’t. I boat around the coastline, fishing and exploring, and many of my friends and family make a living in the woods or on the water, farming for trees, fish or lobster, or general job markets in Maine just trying to make an honest living. Maine is beautiful and I understand people’s possessive tendencies for its land and waters.

I know that after the initial construction of things whether it be a road, house, windmill, or wise timber cutting, the forest in and around that construction regenerates rather quickly. I think the extension of existence on earth relies fully on us (human beings) treating the earth as a delicate entity instead of a tool for us to exploit to any degree. Wind is always blowing and there is no way that we could use the wind to the point that there is no more of it.

I think the traverse of oil pumping, coal mining and nuclear energy to wind, sun and wave force harnessing is one integral and necessary way we can treat earth as a delicate entity so we can live healthy lives and so can our children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children and their children’s children’s children and so on and so forth.

Thank you for listening (if you did).

Dana C. Herrick is a resident of Kingfield.