Back to the discussion -
For those of you that have been to Burkholder's grocery store in Millheim - those are solar panels that cover their parking lot. That makes so much sense on so many levels - Cooler parking lot in the summer, a little bit of shelter from rain or snow when it's stormy. And provides electricity when the sun shines, to boot. That should be replicated across all the huge parking lots and warehouses that cover so much of our developed land.
And I totally agree that cutting down a forest to install a solar farm is a travesty. But what's the difference between crop fields and solar fields? It's a landowner deciding what they want to do with their land. For that matter, how much damage has agriculture done to our streams? I would argue that it's the single biggest contributor to stream degradation nationwide. Yet solar is pilloried and agriculture is to be preserved and protected. The main difference I see is that solar isn't going to be actually continuing to till the soil and cause runoff and allow grazing animals to defecate in and trample streams. This has gotten better from the old days for sure, but the amount of degradation to our streams has been staggering. In the long run, solar will certainly be a lot less harmful than agriculture. And it has a huge ecological benefit.
And if you have a problem with solar farms looking ugly, I hope to also hear you complain about power lines, highways, office parks, factories, warehouses, cell towers, dams, bridges, oil/gas wells, etc, etc. For that matter, houses and particularly housing developments replace huge tracts of farmland or forest land every year.
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