One of the most exciting events of the century is now taking place in the Heart of Roanoke.

Ed & Katherine Walker have focused their resources on developing am exciting new role for the center of our appalachian community. This sold out conference with international attention marks what we hope is a new beginning for our beloved home as a model for replication of a renewed future vision for our local communities world-wide.

On this blog, I have been entirely too focused  upon the greed and other negative aspects driving a quest of a currently proposed industrial wind turbine installation of 15 -18 behemoth turbines on Poor Mountain. This indeed is a threat to the magnificent vistas of the Blue Ridge through out Virginia as well as a long term environmental degradation driven by our own unrelenting demand for more energy.

To effectively respond to such threats, we can take a cue from the Walkers and focus more upon positive solutions to defining our future as opposed to giving more credibility to unproven schemes to capitalize upon our weaknesses.

This brings me back to the idea of the PACE program that I have described an earlier post:

 http://bentmountain.blogspot.com/#!/2010/12/how-long-will-it-be-before-we-see-that.html 

This represents exactly the type of idea that can and will have a vastly more far-reaching impact in clearly definable terms and funding than the grid based proposal of "renewable" wind energy. How? We need to educate and promote to ourselves the real benefits of such highly feasible and economically viable ideas particularly in relation to beneficial expenditure of our hard-earned federal tax contributions. Unfortunately, our elected representatives do not exhibit due diligence regarding the indiscriminate spending of our tax revenues, they only respond to that which they perceive to be in the public interest.