In his Feb. 24 article, Mr. Petermann stated that I was at the front of the wind turbine project issue. If I am, it is a position I have never sought and do not relish. Those who know me, most assuredly know that to be true.

I have, however, had several opportunities to express my thoughts in a public forum. While I have availed myself of those opportunities, I have never made a personal comment about any single individual. I have, as has every other objector to these wind turbines, made it imperative to speak to what we perceive to be genuine concerns with these power plant projects and not comment about the individual players. My wife and I have lived in rural Stephenson County for the last 24 1/2 years. We have lived next door to grain and dairy farms, and just down the road from a large hot operation. We have gladly accepted the smells, the dust, the noise and the manure without complaint because we know these things to be an integral part of what Mr. Jones describes as “commercial business areas.” Not once in their arguments have the developers of these wind power plants, the many supporters of them on the Stephenson County Board, or those speaking in support at public meetings used the phrase “commercial business areas.”

Mr. Jones is the first proponent of the Lancaster wind turbine project to correctly call it a non-farming operation. Placing a 399-foot machine that produces no legitimate farm products on farm land taken out of legitimate farm production does not make that machine a “farm.” A wind turbine produces energy, which makes it a power plant. Neither the ethanol plant outside Lena, nor the biodiesel plant proposed for Stephenson County have ever been called farms. And yet, their product, which is made from legitimate farm products, will produce energy.

So, those of us who purchased our property from a farmer, at his price, and who were warned by the county zoning board to never complain about the smell, or the dust, or the noise, or the manure that are inherent in “farm” operations, have every right to object to these enormous machines that will loom over their homes forever. The board never forbade us to complain about non-farm business conducted on farm land.

I have never met Mr. Jones. So he obviously does not know me. It is convenient to use a broad stroke, as he has, when attempting to discredit someone. My belief in the value of this country begins, as it should for every citizen, with the knowledge that dissent is an inalienable right. Fear of progress is a tired song that has been used time and time again to describe people who have been forced into circumstances not of their making, and who mount the only defense available to them ... public dissent.