How One Woman Is Stalling Green Energy Projects in Oregon
Irene Gilbert is a 76-year-old retired state employee on a mission, fighting energy projects like large wind farms in Oregon’s rural communities. Renewable energy advocates and lawmakers treat activists like her as gadflies who should be stopped.
Decades ago, she’d married into a ranching and timber family, and a chunk of the forest she owned was bulldozed for a transmission line. She blamed the line when she couldn’t get the timber to grow as she wanted.
“It keeps my brain working,” she said with a laugh.
Proposals for new wind farms kept cropping up, and she contested as many as she could, even ones three hours from her home.
“She calls herself a redneck environmentalist,”
Fucking delusional idiot
Edit: As a note Oregon is in year 24ish of a drought. The transmission line is not causing her trees not to grow. Drought and soil degradation caused by logging is causing the trees to grow slower. It's an industry wide issue. The big players like Weyerhauser have responded by harvesting more at once and smaller trees.
And then you get this stupid shit as justification:
The company that owned Kinzua, the timber town where she grew up, razed it without a trace after shutting down operations in 1978.
So because a lumber mill company town that she lived in closed the town she's going to nuke rural jobs? First the mill closed because the company that owned it didn't want to pay to upgrade the mill to take in smaller trees. Mills are built to process trees of a certain size. That's what closed a lot of the mills in the 70s and 80s. Not the god damn spotted owl. Corporate greed that threw away small logging towns to save a buck shipping the logs to mills further away rather than upgrading the older mills to process smaller trees. Second does she think that these small towns are going survive with nothing? No she doesn't think because she's a geriatric dipshit with lead brain.
She seems happy and balanced.
Ignorance kills the wrong people
I bet she's compostable.
I think the article makes clear that she is not the real problem. She has every right to do this, and if the state doesn't like it, they should adjust the laws.
It's good that citizens and environmentalists make themselves heard against big business interests. If they have too much power, the legislature should correct that. But I'm not going to blame an old environmentalist for not choosing to shut up.
Do better, government.
I'm sick of seeing people abuse loopholes and act in bad faith while technically being in the confines of the law and deflect criticism with "well if people don't like it, they should just change the law!"
How about instead, the person abusing it crawls in a hole and fucking dies? If it's one person, the problem obviously isn't the law, it's the lack of morals, empathy, or reason from one, singular dipshit. And if you change the law, they'll just keep finding other ways to keep being a entitled waste of air. Nothing would be lost by this person becoming a rotten corpse.
Setting aside the whole ecofascistic bent of your writing...
There's nothing really actionable about that. Unless you are interested in literally unaliving someone for this, that just sounds like complaining on the internet.
Changning our laws is a plan. I'm not interested in just removed online: I think we should work to DO things. And for better or worse, your solution doesn't sound like one you're willing or interested in actually applying.
But I'm not going to blame an old environmentalist for not choosing to shut up.
Putting aside that there is no world in which this person can be reasonably called an "environmentalist", can we blame her for her shitty reasoning, ridiculous beliefs, and bad-faith motivations? If you change laws to neuter local government in order to protect against this sort of bullshit you will inevitably shift the balance of power in favour of corporations that will misuse it.
A functional society requires some sense of civil responsibility in its people. If every single undesirable behaviour must be legislated against then 1) this probably will fail and 2) if it succeeds your society will no longer be free. Americans have for a while now focused on their rights without any thought to how to exercise those rights responsibly. This is an example of that. That other commenters may be consumed with mindless anger but under it lies this exact point.
To be clear, I'm not saying the rules shouldn't be changed. I'm saying that what any such change will do is shift the trade-off.
Do better, government.
Only in the modern American mind, swimming in decades of rightwing ideology (yes, even among the left), is the government somehow a completely separate , disconnected thing from the people. It's not. Americans get the governments they deserve.
How about you actually take some interest in policy? What change do you want to make? Propose something, and remember that all the oil companies that want to frack in your backyard have rooms full of really smart people who get paid more than you ready to see how your policy change can be exploited to their ends.
Exactly the way industry treats regular protesters asking for change. Why is this news? We need less Irenes, and more clean energy projects.
That's because they are gadfliles who should be stopped.
Fucking reactionary crank.
Well she doesn't want power. Someone should disconnect her house I suppose.
