Working with wind was once valuable when Wisconsin was a western wilderness, but that was a while ago in the 1800s when things were a little different.

Serving as a way to pump water and reduce manual labor for many a household, windmills littered farms and countryside throughout the Wisconsin landscape in the very early days of European settlement. In fact, windmills became a fixture for many early Wisconsinites, and even today, venerable windmills still dot the landscape of old country farms.

But time passed, and the rudimentary windmills were forgotten as relics of yore while all sorts of new technological innovations came to be, things ranging from indoor plumbing to super-speedy computers and the list goes on.

Lots of these technologies were pretty nifty inventions, but lots of these also required massive amounts of energy. To meet these energy needs, Wisconsin turned to coal. It was cheap and easy, and so long as the coal plants were built far enough away from residential areas, Cheeseheads across the land were happy.

Unfortunately, it turns out that coal is not as great as it originally appeared. Yet today, it still accounts for about 75 percent of Wisconsin’s energy source. While it’s still cheap, the nominal cost does not reflect many of coal burning’s negative externalities.

These plants puff out black clouds of smoke and other toxins on a daily basis, enough, in fact, to cause almost 12,000 asthma attacks and 500 premature deaths in Wisconsin alone. These plants also contribute large amounts of carbon dioxide, one of the leading gases in global warming; sulfur dioxide, a big component of acid rain; and nitrogen oxides, another set of gases which increase smog and acid rain, in addition to producing 40 percent of Wisconsin’s mercury emissions (which eventually wander in to many of our renowned lakes and rivers and contaminate fish and other aquatic life).

In the face of these serious and irreversible consequences, it seems blasphemous to risk our health and environment in the name of coal power. Yet we still need energy to fuel our current lifestyles. While this may appear to be an incurable dilemma, the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

Taking a hint from the windmill landscapes of old, wind power offers a clean energy solution with few negative side effects. While wind power is often assumed to be a costly, inefficient, unreliable and generally insufficient replacement for coal, these musings prove to be completely unfounded.

While solar power might not be feasible in the high latitudes of Wisconsin, our vast fields combine with relatively strong westerly winds to offer quite a fertile landscape for windmill farms. Projected to be able to produce 58 billion kWhs of energy per year, Wisconsin’s winds would be almost capable of powering the entire state alone.

In addition, shifting to windmill power would be an excellent economic stimulus for the state, creating around 14,000 jobs. And moreover, because windmills can be added relatively easily to open spaces like agriculture fields (each windmill requires only about a half an acre of land), they could help supplement incomes to the tune of $2,000 per windmill.

With increasing popularity in wind power options and technological innovations, its cost likewise decreases. Currently, wind energy is only slightly more expensive than other forms of conventional energy and as the technology becomes more advanced, this minimal extra cost will diminish even further.

Few obstacles, it seems, are left to this wind power euphoria. Indeed, wind’s greatest nemesis surfaces as aesthetic displeasure and hesitancy to deviate from the tried and true path of conventional nonrenewable energies. This tried and true path, however, is quickly going up in black smoke as the costs of coal weigh heavier and heavier on the society of today and especially that of tomorrow.

While Wisconsin is currently taking small steps towards creating greater amounts of wind energy, a long road lies ahead. Clearly, few gains come from hanging onto the old coal antagonist that proves so detrimental to both human and ecological health. If we disband the false stigmas of infeasibility, costliness, inefficiency, etc., which shroud wind power in an uncertain light and thus have the power to stop the wind initiative in its tracks, we could take advantage of the clear alternative solution wind power would create for a real win-win in Wisconsin’s economy, environment and communities.

Kate Flick ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in sociology.