I have been struck by a poignant struggle going on right now on the shores of Denmark’s Limfjord, home of the 1970′s wind-power revolution. Back then, the Danish government was all but resigned to the seeming necessity of building nuclear power plants, but a group of “hippies” had another idea and built the world’s largest windmill on the windy north-Jutland coast. They formed a company, used volunteer talent, and proved that wind power could outperform nuclear on a cost-benefit basis. They put their innovative design into the public domain so that wind-power startups could thrive in Denmark and elsewhere without paying to “re-invent the wheel”. Denmark never built a nuclear power plant and has gone on to be the world leader in wind-power innovation and manufacture (until recently).
![The Tvind Windmill By Anders Kjeldsen (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/Tvindm%C3%B8llen.jpg/240px-Tvindm%C3%B8llen.jpg "The Tvind Windmill By Anders Kjeldsen (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons")
The Tvind Windmill
The grove itself, a tree plantation or “plantage” was an early effort at environmental reclamation of sand dunes that had formed due to overgrazing and were threatening farm land and oyster beds in the 19th century. Danish courts have ruled that the felling of the trees may begin in two weeks, but nonviolent direct action forced the skidders back into their garage last week ( http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Indland/2011/07/16/100526.htm ), and protests continue ( http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Indland/2011/07/17/110648.htm ).
New windmill research is both exciting and vital, but preservation of nature itself (even the altered nature of the plantation) pulls at our heartstrings in ways that rational thought can’t. We humans really don’t know what to do in this new Eaarth we are living on. David Rovics has told the story of Tvind in his song “The Biggest Windmill”.
