From her century-old home, Susan Burns has watched the sun set over her cousin’s field every day for 75 years. Now her cousin has agreed to have solar panels installed on the field, and an unhappy Burns finds herself in a fight.
Huge solar farms are being planned in this corner of Missouri, and as in other rural areas of the United States, residents sometimes are yanking the welcome mat.
Foreseeing vast expanses of solar farms replacing cropland, Burns began raising the issue with other community members at the Baptist church across the road.
She fears much may be at stake: “(I) lose my view. I lose my health. I lose my safety.”
A group has formed around Fulton to fight the solar installations, as has happened in rural areas across the country. And this emerging grassroots movement is slowing the transition to low-carbon electricity in the world’s largest economy.
“I want to live and take care of my farmland. And the idea that my cousin, who lives across the road, would be turning his farmland into an industrial area was very disturbing to me,” Burns told AFP from her country home.
With a dozen other volunteers, Burns organized a public meeting to sound an alarm. As people walked in, a petition awaited their signatures, and activists invited the curious to study a land registry map with three areas highlighted showing proposed solar farms.
“If we unite, we can stop this,” said Joe Burns, Susan Burns’s son, before a crowd of about 100 in Fulton, the county seat.
The US electricity grid generates 60 percent of its power from fossil fuels. The administration of President Joe Biden is trying to turn the tide toward renewable energy.
But grassroots protests against solar projects “will significantly delay America’s commitment toward getting to net zero,” said Jungwoo Chun, a lecturer on climate and sustainability at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Like other academics interviewed by AFP, Chun insisted that it would be an oversimplification to see the opposition as a simple matter of the NIMBY — or “not in my backyard” — dynamic.
Source: AFP
