A blacksmith once mounted a sail on a wagon hoping the wind would blow him across Kansas. He was finished off by a dust devil shy of the Colorado line.

These days, people are thinking more practically about how to use the Kansas winds. Last year, Florida Power and Light established a 170-turbine windfarm southwest of Dodge City. Now there’s a bit of a windrush as companies scramble to lease Kansas land to put up more turbines.

Scott White, a Kansas University research assistant at the Kansas Geological Survey, says about half the state has wind speeds suitable for generating electricity. Southwest Kansas is plenty windy. And the Flint Hills are ideal because major power transmission lines and population centers are relatively close, White says.

The issue has brought nimbys out of the woodwork, White says. The acronym “nimby” stands for “not-in-my-backyard.” As in, “I don’t mind wind turbines. I just don’t want to look at them. How about we put them in the next county?”

The Flint Hills wind-turbine debate has created strange adversaries. Sierra Club leaders, for example, are for wind turbines, while Audubon Society leaders are opposed.

One issue is scenery. Some environmentalists believe our shared view of the Flint Hills should be turbine-free. They also worry about turbines reducing the mating grounds of prairie chickens and the acreage of tallgrass prairie. The other side argues turbines are small enough not to disturb much prairie. What’s more, they say, wind energy is clean as a whistle.

One wind-power advocacy group says a megawatt hour of wind-blown electricity spares the atmosphere of eight pounds of sulfur dioxide, five pounds of nitrogen oxide and 1,500 pounds of carbon dioxide that would result from fossil fuel combustion.

White says wind power is cleaner and cheaper than solar power. Moreover, a landowner can get $2,000 from a company for putting up a turbine. With a harsh drought in parts of Kansas in recent years years, that’s nothing to sniff at.

Of course the wind doesn’t always blow, so the juice isn’t always there when you need it.

“The turbines will never be perfect,” White says, “With technology, there’s no free lunch. But I’m skeptical of nimbyism.”

Me too. Not-in-my-backyard seems to me as selfish as I’ll-do-anything-I-please-with-my-land.

I don’t want the spare beauty of the Flint Hills cluttered. I show those hills off to my friends who visit Kansas. But we’ve got ourselves in a bind. If we want to continue to use energy at the current rate, then it’s fair that everybody should have to share the byproducts, including ugliness.

A report by 18 scientists in the Nov. 1 issue of the magazine Science talked about meeting energy needs 50 years from now without messing further with the Earth’s climate. The report said we’ll have to come up with three times the amount of energy being generated today from fossil fuels without creating any more greenhouse gases.

In other words, unless we develop some clean energy alternatives quickly or unless energy conservation becomes an idea with a pulse, the view from our back yards might someday be the least of our worries.

” Roger Martin is a research writer and editor for the Kansas University Center for Research and editor of Explore, KU’s research magazine Web site, which can be found at www.research.ku.edu. Martin’s e-mail address is rmartin@kucr.ku.edu.