It would be a lot easier to choose up sides in the Columbia Gorge wind farm disputes if the capitalists wanted to dig open pit mines or put up oil derricks and extract resources from the land and then truck or pipe them away for decades to come, risking erosion, spills or explosions.

If that were the case, it would be easier to spew venom and spread fear about money-grubbing, land-raping operations planned along the border of the nation's first national scenic area.

But the proposed Saddleback Mountain wind farm in eastern Skamania County just north of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area is something else again. As with the proposed Seven Mile Hill project farther east, near the little town of Mosier, Ore., it's not so easy to say the project shouldn't be allowed.

That's because we're talking here about renewable energy on private property outside of the national scenic area. Wind farms don't turn rivers into reservoirs, displace towns or impede fish runs. There is no major scarring of the land and there is no extracting and hauling of minerals.

What's more, we're talking about the will of Washington voters, who in 2006 approved Initiative 937 requiring utilities to get 15 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020. In Oregon, large utilities must generate 25 percent of their electricity from renewable resources by 2025. We have to get that energy somewhere.

But at the same time, the scenic area was created almost 22 years ago, and by now its protection ought to be a sacred duty and universal desire. We should be beyond the point of nibbling around the edges of the law and violating its spirit. Erecting giant towers, seven of which would be partly visible from parts of the gorge floor, seems a violation of that spirit.

Yes, the 360-foot-high windmills proposed by SDS Lumber Co., of Bingen, Wash., would be on private property. And, yes, the 1986 federal law exempts structures and activities outside of the scenic area boundaries from restrictions. But that provision, it can be argued, was primarily to protect then-existing facilities and structures. Congress had no idea in 1986 that wind farming near the gorge, with giant turbines visible to passing motorists, would be at issue in 2008.

It might be too much to ask SDS to build a wind farm that is not visible to gorge residents on the hills high above the river who live in line of sight with the SDS property. But that is what a group of residents from the Underwood area in the gorge seek.

As The Columbian's Erik Robinson reported Friday, they are suing Skamania County in an effort to block SDS from developing the 44-turbine wind farm above and north of the Columbia River. SDS President Jason Spadero said Friday he is "baffled" by the suit because his firm hasn't even filed an application yet.

But it is not too much to mitigate those views as much as is reasonable and to protect the magnificent views of hills, cliffs and forests that we have from the highways and viewpoints in rural areas on the gorge floor.