One Single Note of Opposition to the 765kV Power Line
I sure wouldn't want one in my backyard.
A power line, one hundred feet tall or more, a gleaming metal structure standing tall, above the tree line. Looping arcs of unnatural perfection slicing the sky, separating here from there, heaven from Earth.
If I woke up one day to a crew pouring footings for such a tower, in my own backyard, I would cry. And rightly so. Nobody wants to look at that. Nobody wants to. And is that not enough?
The vocal opponents of this line don't seem to think so. At community information meetings and online message boards, there are a dozen reasons given, maybe more, but each, it seems to me, is spurious. Convenient. Exaggerated. Cloaked in apocalyptic language and foreboding finality.
Farmland will not be destroyed. You can grow crops under those lines, graze cattle, but for a relatively small zone around the footings - and most of that is bombed out corn and beans anyway. Organic producers have a little more to complain about, given that their incredibly niche farming style and onerous transition rules make their land not quite so easily fungible with the neighbors’. But the number of such acres impacted, across these hundreds of miles - I would be surprised if it was more than one hundred, one thousand. Some small, small number in the grand scheme of things.
The fragile karst geology of the Driftless Area will not be destroyed. Yes, as with building a house, or cutting a road through these lands, care must be taken. I trust us more today to do it somewhat right than I might have in the past. And besides, this is not some novel intrusion into geology, as many well owners well know. We have provisionally accepted a truly massive impact on our groundwater already in the form of nitrate and chemical leaching from fertilizer and manure, all so some guy can raise a few more cows, make another buck. This is public benefit we're talking about.
The Driftless ecosystem will not be destroyed. Some may say the woods will be fragmented by these lines, and that is true, as they are fragmented by abundant roads and farm fields already. What's one more line? One of The Nature Conservancy's most treasured sites in this region is Baxter's Hollow, several thousand contiguous acres of deep woodland in the Baraboo Hills. There are birds and bees that require woods so deep, and they are found here. But in your average woods, off County Road Z, not so much. Those woods are likely not even a mile across. And they were almost certainly logged and regrown, or grazed and then abandoned, as recently as a century ago. What grows there now is a different ecosystem than the birds of the deep woods expect. It's mostly the standard mishmash of postmodern species around these parts, Maple, Walnut, Cherry, and not the towering Oak. These are not precious, priceless woods that hold a unique treasure, but woods, like all the rest, likely scheduled for a harsh cut to keep the local sawmills afloat through the Managed Forest Law program.
So with these arguments out the window, the statement and the question reassert themselves. I don't want to see it. Isn't that enough?
Why blight the land? This land, here in my own backyard? Is this just some towering monument to ourselves, flung by a fickle, formless power into the earth, Zeus's lightning bolt, sent from the heavens to pierce this very ground? “Why, God? Why?” asks Job. “Why must I suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?” asks Shakespeare. Is there some reason why I must suffer this affront?
The answer, it appears, is yes.
The answer comes in through the clarion call of our revealed preferences. I know of no one who has found themselves agitated, demanding, with raised voice, that a power line be placed, and here, no less. But I have demanded the power, the instant availability of one million light switches being turned on or off at any second. An exactly calibrated hum of generation and consumption, supply and demand, matched to a perfect pitch at every second through a densely interconnected root system, a fungal mass of wires.
It is an astonishing feat that the grid is, at this very moment, on. That in the time it takes me to say this sentence, exactly as many electrons were produced as were required. It's a miracle - and an aging one at that. Frail and flimsy in places. The human organism believes that another major artery, from here to there, will allow us to strengthen, upgrade, and adapt the whole network.
The revealed preference comes not just from the present, and its demand for reliability, but from the future, and its demand for more. A new age of electrification is upon us. It has been masked, the last 20 years, by basic increases in efficiency - swapping out the light bulbs, so to speak. But now, electricity use looks set to grow. Might there be more electric cars in 20 years than there are today? Perhaps quite a bit more? When that energy, currently moving through pipelines and tankers, must instead find its way through the magical grid, we will need more power lines, more power generation.
I say that first to remind people, that things you may want, require this. I may have cheered, in 2008, when Obama spoke, to thunderous applause, about the need to decarbonize our economy, invest in renewable power sources such as wind and solar, transition to electric vehicles, and modernize our electric grid, to meet the future with dignity. Yes, we can, he'd say - though we might not now agree that we should.
With the same dispassionate voice, I intone: AI data centers.
They really don’t use hardly any water - it's true, look it up. It's mostly embedded in the electricity, and therefore in the assumed electricity mix. There is one widely shared factoid, one bottle of water per AI prompt, let's say, that was based on one journalist’s embarrassing misreading of the units on a data set. It's one thousandth that amount, one ten thousandth. Essentially negligible. Eat one less hamburger, and use AI, guilt free, for a year.
And AI is coming, folks. It's here. It is not relevant whether that fact is good or bad. I merely need to say that it is here, that it is real. It is already useful for some tasks, seems to be improving rapidly, and could usher in a strange new era for humanity. We may come together to make some joint decision about this technology. But throwing rocks at a power line is not the site of that battle.
So, yes, the line will probably take power from the West and deliver it to the East, from the power plants and windfields of Iowa and Minnesota to the great teeming masses of people in Chicago and beyond. That's the general direction of flow, today. But remember, we're all on one big grid - at least those tens of millions of us living under the care and diligent protection of the Midwest Independent System Operator, which maintains the grid's perfection across ten or more states. The electrons that pass through this line, leapfrogging, tower to tower, will mostly not explode into light in our homes. Does a blood vessel in my finger resent an artery in my leg when my body invests its energy there?
So that is why, says God, says Shakespeare, in reply. Because you, all of you, in your millions, cry out for it. Not through word, but through deed. Am I to deny you?
But still, we must protest. We must return to our statement and our question. I don't want to see it. Isn't that enough?
Do aesthetics find any purchase here? For here is beautiful, and the power line is not. Build it instead in the ugly lands. Build it through the flat and featureless ground of corn and beans. Cross the river in some place where none care to go. Add a low hum over a cornfield, where no bird lives anyway, to have its song drowned out. And yes, there are people too, who live in the ugly lands - no doubt they believe them beautiful, preposterously. Compensate them well.
And as for we, in the lands of beauty, we must build more houses, that those aesthetically evicted from their homes might join us in Eden. For we who don the mantle of beauty must welcome in those from without, if we are to claim some special grace. Throw open the woods for walking. Make beds available for those who wish to walk them. To claim the virtue of aesthetics in the public sphere, to ask, cajole, demand, that that value be taken seriously, by those of us who live here, and those of us who do not, requires that we make this virtue available to all.
So build the power line. Take the long way round. Spend a little more, oh citizens of the grid, and impose instead upon those people in their ugly lands. Save me and my view. And in return, I must promise, that I will make it we, and our view.
In Conflict,
Twin Crix
