The Sky We Were Told Not to See
I can still see the road.
Ted and I were traveling east on Texas State Highway 100 toward Port Isabel. Near Laguna Vista, where Highway 100 meets FM 510, the turbines took the landscape. There were thirty-one of them, each on an 87.5-meter tower with a rotor 125 meters across. That was the San Román Wind Farm.¹
Beside that corridor lies the Bahia Grande unit of Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge. Laguna Atascosa was established chiefly as wintering ground for waterfowl, redhead ducks in particular. More than four hundred bird species have been recorded there.²
I understood the engineering. Wind comes off the Gulf of America. An engineer knows why someone would want to catch it.
What I could not understand was the environmental claim.
The developer says the project followed detailed studies of wildlife and habitat. That belongs in the record. So does the refuge. So does what Ted and I saw: an industrial blade field rising beside land set apart for birds.
I am not pinning a dead bird on a particular turbine without evidence. I am saying that machines of that scale beside nationally protected bird habitat, sold as an unquestionable environmental good, was absolute idiocy.
These are not the iconic windmills of the Texas ranch. My daughter gave me a little decorative windmill for the garden. It calls to mind the old working mill that pumped water and belonged to the scale of the place. An industrial turbine is another animal. One can stand hundreds of feet high. Rank after rank does not ornament the Texas sky. It occupies it.
Years ago a West Texas ranching family told me what landowners had been promised. They declined to put turbines on their own ground. The machines went up around them anyway. They had said no and still had to live inside the changed sky. I leave them unnamed. Their experience is witness, not exposure.
I kept putting the questions in the Fides et Ratio archive: turbines collapsing, offshore talk near Galveston, solar and birds, equipment freezing, blades piling up in Sweetwater. Not every item was an original scientific study. Together they are an archive of attention. I was watching what followed after the word green had been fastened to an industrial project and questions were treated as disloyalty.
The same discipline applies offshore. Underwater noise, vessel traffic, disturbance, and collision risk are proper subjects of review. That does not prove a particular wind project killed a particular whale. In 2024 I shared an article that asked exactly where the evidence was.³ Environmental claims deserve scrutiny. So do accusations made against environmental projects.
Now, driving rural Texas, I see another message on acreage and fence lines: No to the data centers.
It would be easy to call that ignorance. I will not. Rural Texans have heard an industrial promise before. They were told what it would produce. They can see what it took from the sky.
The old failure is not a verdict on every data hall. It is a warning that the burden of proof now sits with the developer.
A constitutional republic needs citizens who remember what happened, examine what is proposed, and speak before the decision is made for them.
In Part Two we leave the sky and drive to Sweetwater, where the industrial promise acquired a body.
Featured image is a conceptual editorial illustration; it does not depict a single actual Texas location.
Notes
- ACCIONA identifies the San Román Wind Farm as a 93-megawatt Cameron County facility with thirty-one turbines. Contemporary local reporting placed the project on private properties along Highway 100 and FM 510. See Dina Arévalo, “County, State Leaders Welcome Wind Farm,” Port Isabel–South Padre Press, April 28, 2017.
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge.”
- Karen Early, “US Protesters Turn Ire on Wind Farms to Explain Whale Deaths, but Where’s the Evidence?” Fides et Ratio, November 15, 2024.