The Localized and Scaled Discourse of Conservation for Wind Power in Kittitas County, Washington

Abstract

Wind power is popularly understood as an environmentally progressive technology, yet such facilities face opposition during environmental review. While the impacts of a wind power facility will vary with its geographic context, conservation discourse refracts localized and capitalized landscape concerns through popular conservation tropes during permitting hearings. In Kittitas County, Washington, conservation discourse related to wildlife, fossil fuel, landscape aesthetic, and agricultural preservation charges commentary for three wind power projects. Local concerns about negative impacts to wildlife and visual aesthetics manifest less when wind turbines are proposed for remote landscapes, illustrating fluidity among locales for conservation discourse. Areas historically oriented to wildlife conservation through multiple-use paradigms have become favored sites for wind farms, because state mandates for conservation-as-energy-policy meet less opposition from local attitudes for conservation-as-land-management in such uninhabited landscapes. New understandings of wind as a resource necessitate careful state regulation of multiple-use landscapes as pressure to industrialize conservation areas increases.