🚀 go-pugleaf

John M. wrote:
> On Sep 7, 9:19 am, Ron House <rho...@smartchat.net.au> wrote:

>> http://peacelegacy.org/articles/wind-farms-do-they-kill-birds
> 
> A very thoughtful piece, Ron, even though you rate increased animal
> suffering much higher than loss of biodiversity, and you are to be
> commended for taking the trouble to think the windfarm problem
> through.

Thanks John. To some extent, biodiversity is yet another human-centred 
thing, but real individual lives lived by sentient beings, that is 
in-the-small concrete reality. Just a week or so ago a bird deliberately 
flew down from its tree and warned me of a deadly snake I was about to 
tread on, thus saving my life. It did that because I feed it in harsh 
winters, I ask after her babies, I involve myself in their community. 
And she remembers. I am 'one of the gang'. My wife has also had her life 
saved similarly and we have had snakes repelled from our house often. 
Photos here:

http://wingedhearts.org/minnie-miner-saves-me-from-snake

Due to what I have learned about the wisdom, intelligence, care, and 
other higher qualities of birds coming from my personal involvement, I 
have to treat individual birds as separate, invaluable lives, not to be 
subsumed into 'bulk' considerations like diversity.

> The answer has always been small is beautiful, and small turbines on
> the roof, perhaps with solar panels additionally, has always appealed
> to me. But the needed materials to manufacture these may be the crunch
> that stops this solution. A new design of windmill with rare-earth
> elements used in magnets on the tips of the rotors and fixed coils for
> electrical generation and collection will likely founder because of
> the shortage of materials. They're not called rare-earth for nothing.
> Similar problems can be encountered for the latest super-efficient
> designs for battery storage of electricity and likely will exist for
> solar panels.

Good point. I don't give up on technology though. The impractical has a 
way of becoming practical.

> Meanwhile my local Golden Eagles have gone the same way my local
> Bonelli's Eagles did eight years ago. It took just two years from the
> installation of a mountain ridge string of 12 "aeolien" above our
> village in Languedoc-Roussillon before they disappeared. How long I
> wonder before I see my last local Short-toed Eagle?

That is shocking. You must feel so frustrated watching this destruction. 
The pointlessness of it is the worst part. Wind is set up to minimise 
fossil fuel usage, and then 40% more fossil fuel is used in nutty 
schemes to bury ('sequester') CO2 (which is plant food, and thus 
indirectly animal and human food, not pollution). I saw a target of 20% 
wind mentioned somewhere a few days ago. Big Coal is laughing all the 
way to the bank. Promote the global warming hoax, sell 40% more coal to 
80% of the previous market, and end up about 15% ahead of the game. And 
of course they know the 20% figure is itself fantasy.

I believe humans need to admit something clearly to themselves: saving 
on fossil fuel is a human-centred activity. No animal 'cares' whether 
coal and oil is left in the ground. We humans care because we want some 
still there for a rainy century sometime. But it doesn't benefit any 
other creature on Earth. They are benefited by the CO2 plant food; they 
are benefited by burning fossil fuel. What are we humans thinking? - 
depriving them of the plant food and killing them with wind farms in the 
bargain. What is in it for wildlife - indeed, for the rest of the planet 
apart from ourselves?

-- 
Ron House
Building Peace: http://peacelegacy.org
Australian Birds: http://wingedhearts.org
Principle of Goodness academic site: http://principleofgoodness.net