Your Thoughts: Our future in wind energy needs more stewardship, honesty & consideration

TO THE EDITOR:

Wyoming has always been defined by its open horizons, its wildlife, and the feeling that you can stand on a ridge and see a world shaped more by nature than by industry. That sense of wildness isn’t just scenery. It’s an identity, an economy, and a legacy that generations before us protected, and one we now risk losing in ways that are subtle at first, then permanent.

I grew up watching that ethic take shape. My dad worked on some of the first coal leases in the Powder River Basin and later around Hanna. Back then, before a single shovel hit the ground, the process required months of extensive environmental impact studies. Real boots-on-the-ground studies, not paperwork exercises. Hydrology, wildlife, soils, reclamation plans, long term liabilities, all of it had to be understood before a lease was written. It wasn’t perfect, but it was serious. It reflected a belief that if you were going to change the land, you owed it the respect of understanding what that change meant.

Somewhere along the way, that ethic slipped.

Wind development has accelerated across the state, and with it comes a responsibility to look honestly at what we’re gaining and what we’re giving up. Turbines aren’t inherently bad. But industrializing entire landscapes without the kind of rigorous review we once demanded from coal is a choice with real costs, and those costs are already showing up on the ground.

Anyone who spends time in Wyoming’s open country has seen the changes. Fewer golden eagles and ferruginous hawks. Sage grouse abandoning leks that once held dozens of birds. Pronghorn migration routes carved up by roads and infrastructure. These aren’t abstract environmental talking points. They’re lived observations, and the kind you only get from people who have watched these landscapes for decades.

Wildlife is part of our viewshed. When it disappears, the horizon changes just as surely as if you’d built a tower on it.

The changes aren’t limited to wildlife. Many longtime residents have noticed shifts in weather patterns that don’t match the Wyoming they grew up with, and don’t fall under the umbrella of “climate change.” Stronger, more persistent winds. Fewer winter inversions. Seasons that feel thinner, shorter, or simply off. While scientists continue to study the full picture, it’s clear that large scale wind development interacts with the atmosphere in ways we don’t yet fully understand. When you place thousands of turbines in a channelized wind corridor, you’re altering a sensitive system, and we should be honest about that.

Yet when concerns are raised, the same phrase gets repeated: “fiduciary responsibility.” As if approving every project with a lease check attached is the same thing as protecting the long term value of the land.

A fiduciary’s duty is not to maximize short term revenue. It’s to safeguard the trust asset, the land itself. That means weighing development against degradation, revenue against reclamation, and today’s check against tomorrow’s losses. When the State Board of Land Commissioners approves wind farms without fully accounting for habitat fragmentation, avian mortality, long term reclamation liabilities, or cumulative impacts, it isn’t meeting that duty. It’s sidestepping it.

Wyoming doesn’t need an all or nothing approach to energy. It never has. We can blend what we already have; coal, gas, oil, and the infrastructure built around them, with a gradual, deliberate introduction of renewable sources. But that transition must be grounded in reality. It must be paced. It must be regulated. And it must protect the landscapes and wildlife that make this state worth living in.

The Board’s duty is not to developers. It’s to the land, the beneficiaries, and the future. That means sometimes saying no. It means asking harder questions. It means requiring better siting studies, stronger reclamation guarantees, and honest evaluations of cumulative impacts instead of treating each project as if it exists in a vacuum.

Wyoming’s wildness is not a renewable resource. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

If we want to preserve the Wyoming we know, the one with open horizons, healthy wildlife, and trust lands that retain their value, then we need leadership willing to act like a fiduciary, not a formality. And we need a public willing to speak up before the baseline shifts so far that no one remembers what was lost.

Mark Coy,

Converse County