Should the North Country be a working landscape or a scenic preserve?

NCPR’s David Sommerstein produced a fascinating piece for this morning’s broadcast on the battle over new wind farms in the North Country.

Environmental impacts — on birds and bats, for example — are a factor in this debate.

But increasingly, Americans are conflicted over what our iconic rural landscapes should look like.

Not so long ago, we took it for granted that rural areas would be defined by “working” landscapes.

Rivers would be dammed for power. Forests would be cleared for farming. Mountains would literally be moved to uncover natural resources.

It was a given that scenic views would be shaped, at least in part, by industrial structures — everything from silos and barns to mills and smokestacks.

But since WW 2, rural America has been steadily de-industrialized.

After the 1950s, a huge amount of economic development outside of cities and suburbs has come in the form of tourism and vacation home construction.

This “colonization” of small towns has meant an influx of people who expect the rural landscape to remain static.

Put bluntly, our communities have to keep matching the Norman Rockwell-agrarian vision that city folks see in television and movies.

Taken to an extreme, small towns become museum pieces, snow globe preserves.

But that nostalgia (and yes, the economic advantages that come with it) is being challenged.

We’re beginning to see the re-industrialization of places like the North Country.

For the first time in a generation, small towns in our part of the world have the opportunity to produce a high-value industrial product that people want to buy: namely, energy.

As world oil supplies dwindle, biomass, wind, nuclear, and hydro generation could emerge as the main economic engines driving rural America, perhaps even equaling agriculture in Rural Domestic Product.

So here’s the question:

Can we realize all (or at least some) of that potential without wrecking the very real aesthetic values of our region?

Obviously, it will be a balancing act.

But it will also likely emerge as a huge source of conflict.

Many local residents will yearn for the high-quality jobs and opportunities that come with green energy development.

But many visitors and second homeowners will likely see this evolution of rural viewscapes as the despoiling of something timeless.

Ironically, many of the things those visitors now take for granted — quaint farms, dammed lakes for boating, scenic railroads — are the product of a past industrial age.

Maybe someday those wind farms will be viewed as another iconic element of the North Country’s landscape, no more “out of place” than big red barns.