Not in anybody's backyard

The Wind Energy Siting Reform Act, up for a vote this week in the Massachusetts House, seems to be taking dead aim on the NIMBY factor.

"Not in my backyard" was invented to discredit opposition by stigmatizing it as selfish. You want and need that halfway house, that nuclear-waste-disposal site, that 400-foot wind turbine, but not in your own backyard. You want it but prefer someone else to put up with the undesirable side effects.

After 10 years (and counting) of the Cape Wind debate, we should now have a more sophisticated perspective on this negative acronym, which has played such a key role. We should be more willing to see the opposition as more than just small-minded selfishness. We may or may not end up with the industrialization of Nantucket Sound, but we are certainly less naive about the real objections (aesthetic, spiritual, financial, ecological, etc.) to this ideal-sounding technology.

All the world is someone's backyard. And the people caring most for a backyard are those living in that backyard. The evaluation of a technology includes the costs as well as the benefits and if you want to know the costs, you need to consult those who will be living with that technology and paying the costs.

What's good about NIMBY is that it is only humane and logical to respect the experience and of those living in the relevant backyard. As Wellfleet, after an overwhelming, idealistic town meeting vote, developed second thoughts about three large turbines in its backyard, we were hearing stories of the Falmouth guinea pigs who were finding out the hard way the price of wind turbines in sleepless nights and emotional upset.

A member of the Wellfleet Energy Committee, although originally an advocate of wind turbines in Wellfleet, said of the Falmouth backyard: "I realize if you go there for a day it is hardly like living there ... the fact remains that they are living there and I am not. They have to listen to whatever the sounds are every day and I do not."

The actual experience of the Falmouth backyard has made many here in Wellfleet happy none of our citizens will have to pay that price.

What's not OK about NIMBY is assuming that those in other backyards will be happier paying the price that seems too high in your own backyard. Some of those who have not wanted Nantucket Sound spiked with all those turbines have suggested that this spiffy technology might work a lot better off a less cherished, less touristed shore. Or how about inland, since there's so much more of it than there is off our coast?

But it turns out that everywhere you look there are backyards with people living in them, many of whom don't want to pay the price for this so-called green technology: Harwich, Wellfleet, Falmouth. In villages in upstate New York there are a lot of people who don't want turbines on their mountaintops and ridges. There are, it turns out, treasured views from most places on Earth.

The humane, fair thing to do is to apply local backyard knowledge of the effects of wind turbines to all backyards. If the cost-benefit analysis doesn't work for here, it's likely not to work anywhere (unless for those who stand to make big bucks).

In other words, NIMBY with a golden rule twist: NIABY: Not in anybody's backyard. This is a flawed technology, with too high a quality-of-life price tag. We should put more emphasis on solar and conservation.

Local towns are right to fear a bill that will produce siting decisions from an overarching entity, which will force turbines on backyards. In World War II, governmental boards dictated sacrifices, such as rationing, war job assignments, and of course the draft. When and if we come to react to climate change as such an emergency, when every backyard on Earth is exploited for every sort of energy technology, the sacrifices associated with living cheek-by-jowl with large-scale wind turbines may come to look necessary and acceptable. We obviously aren't there with climate change.

Mr. Harold of Wellfleet is the author of "Wellfleet and the World."