Sandhill cranes and cows look for food in a corn field near Grand Island, NE.

The time between Christmas and New Year’s Day is traditionally a time of reflection. Sometimes you find things out during reflection that maybe you didn’t want to know. In my case? Blogging about happy community events is not something I can sustain.

So here’s a new post for a new year, about something controversial.

Tim McCoy at the Nebraska Game & Parks Commission has a great article at Prairie Fire about the need for balancing wind energy and wildlife considerations in Nebraska. Here’s a PowerPoint presentation of his on the same subject.

This topic is near and dear to my heart. About five years ago, I was one of two Sierra Club representatives at an uneasy conference where wind energy developers, scientists, government agency staff, and conservationists took the first steps toward creating guidelines to reduce wildlife deaths from wind power in California. Calling the conference tense would be an understatement. Some of that same tension underlies McCoy’s article.