To Florida, home of Mickey Mouse, retired New Yorkers and the world’s most bizarre anti-wind farm campaign.
Earlier this week, America’s top current affairs programme, The Daily Show, reported from the Florida Everglades, where proposals for a wind farm capable of providing energy for 35,000 homes have run into protests.
So far, so normal.
But where things get strange is that the protestors in question are not concerned about possible damage to the homes of alligators, or even disruption to the view of Florida’s great natural beauty spots, such as the Magic Kingdom and Universal Studios.
They are concerned about the turbines killing ducks – not because they are worried about the impact on local wildlife, but because they want to kill them first.
The United Wildfowlers of Florida might sound like a cuddly America cousin of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, but they are in fact an association of duck hunters. Although, as the association’s Newton Cook told the Daily Show’s peerless Aasif Mandvi, they prefer the word “harvesting” to “hunting”.
Wind farm developer Wind Capital Group has been at pains to point out that turbines actually kill an average of just three birds a year and every effort is made to avoid duck fatalities.
But the Wildfowlers remain unimpressed and, as Mandvi observed, they do not want to see a single duck die because of a turbine when they could shoot it with a shot gun.
He actually put it rather better than that, noting that the hunters were like “a serial killer who is mad at the drunk driver”.
And the Sceptic Tank thought British nimbys were a bit barmy – turns out they have nothing on their duck-hunting Florida counterparts.
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(Source: www.businessgreen.com )