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<br />. <br /> <br />presence of windfarms, while the variety of their experience may <br />be enhanced by a novel kind of slum adventure. <br /> <br />The adverse aethetic impacts of large windfarms can therefore be <br />almost completely mitigated by measures that will preserve in <br />other locations the aesthetic values preferred by people who may <br />find windfarms repulsive. <br /> <br />I believe also that the effect on an individual viewer will be <br />strongly affected by pre-established attitudes. Things thought <br />of as "good," for whatever reason, are likely to be seen as <br />beautiful or at least accceptable; things thought of as "bad" <br />will be seen as ugly. The report by ERDA that people interviewed <br />would be willing to pay as much as a 25 percent premium for <br />wind-generated power in preference to that generated from coal or <br />nuclear fuel points to a public attitude already likely to accept <br />wind machines as a visual enhanncement rather than as visual <br />pollution, especially if the setting in which they are seen is <br />compatible. <br /> <br />The greater likelihood is that most people will seek a variety of <br />experiences at different times and in different settings. Most <br />back-country hikers spend most of their lives in a more or less <br />congenial relationship with human artifacts of all sorts. In <br />this sense, large windfarms will increase the variety of human <br />experience without enforcing an adverse impact on more than a <br />trifling number of people. <br /> <br />The aesthetic impact may be affected by the distance between <br />machines. Even when a thousand or more are situated on a single <br />wi ndfarm they wi 11 be spaced so wi de1y apart that they can occupy <br />the foreground only one at a time. For the largest machines now <br />contemplated, a viewer who sees one machine in the immediate <br />foreground wi 11 see its nearest nl~i ghbor more than a ki 1 ometer <br />away and greater numbers at correspondingly greater distances. <br />Except for the machine in the foreground, the landscape will <br />appear very spars1ey occupied. <br /> <br />The situation will be quite different for a windfarm that occupies <br />the crest of a long ridgeline or a bluff shoreline. To make most <br />effective use of the site, the windpowered generators would then <br />be arrayed almost wingtip-to-wingtip along the crest of the ridge <br />or the brow of the bluff. Most of the inland ridgecrests identified <br />as prime windfarm candidates are in undeveloped areas and the <br />number of residents within sight of the machines would be small. <br />The impact would be greater, and more likely to be seen as <br />adverse, in the case of bluff shorelines since most such sites <br />are already relatively densely populated by residents, many of <br /> <br />i <br />~ <br />I <br /> <br />13 <br />