Energy Sprawl is Destroying our Natural Environment, Scenic Views, Wildlife, and Strategic Farmland
August 19, 2025
Now, nearly five years into an enormous government push for “renewable” energy sources, primarily wind and solar, and heavily subsidized by American taxpayers, the results are in: Solar and wind facilities are largely destroying the very natural environment that they were supposed to save.
From wind turbines that kill birds and bats by the thousands and destroy scenic vistas and mountaintops, to mis-named solar “farms” that eat up irreplaceable Class I to Class III soils critical to feeding Americans, in most cases the environmental costs of wind and solar outweigh their purported benefits.
“I clearly recall viewing a mountaintop array of wind turbines with a client nearly twenty years ago,” says ALCS president Josh First. “From our vantage point in a helicopter, we were able to view the asset from every angle. It was for sale, but half of the turbines were not turning, which made us question how much electricity and money the array was generating. Evaluating them from a land management perspective, my view was that these remote facilities would be difficult and expensive to maintain. Hence the broken turbines we were staring at. Long, steep roads requiring constant upkeep only successfully serve projects that financially justify them, like metal mines,” says First.
From a biodiversity perspective, wind turbines are among the most destructive facilities, because they are put in remote places, especially on mountaintops that have seen little human impact since the last glaciers receded, says First. These remote spots have the greatest assortments of relict populations of rare flora, whose colonies cannot withstand either the surface disruption from construction, nor the inevitable arrival of aggressive foreign invasives like Mile-a-Minute, Asian Bittersweet, Japanese Barberry, Autumn Olive, and others, he says.
“I recreate in Upstate New York a lot, and over the past few years it has been shocking to see enormous solar arrays sprawled out across what had been successful crop fields that fed East Coast Americans over the past 200 years,” says First.
“These are geographic areas that get relatively little sunlight, and very little strong sunshine at that, all year ‘round. It is hard to understand the economics of these facilities, whose eventual disposition remains undetermined,” he says, hinting at the looming question of what will eventually be done with all of the glass, metal, and chemicals in solar panels when they have ceased efficient functioning, and what pollution legacy they might leave in the rich farm soil that once fed people.
The cost-benefit analysis behind solar installations is easier to understand in sunshine-rich places like America’s southern and western coasts. But only below-cost dumping by foreign solar panel manufacturers and artificial taxpayer subsidies could justify the great expenditures and low financial returns in states like Pennsylvania and New York. Presently, wind and solar “energy sprawl” is imposing big costs on the Eastern U.S. environment, with at best uncertain benefits, says First.
“I think American environmental organizations have some explaining to do on this situation,” says First. “Particularly the land trusts and conservancies, whose sole mission used to be protecting open land like working forests and farms, but who seem to have largely bought into an untested and now disproven theory that high-impact commercial and industrial wind and solar installations were some kind of magic silver bullet for environmental quality. Whatever their benefits may be in some locations, here in the American East, wind and solar’s environmental costs are devastating. It is heartbreaking,” he says.
