Back in the mid 19th century American’s got drunk on Manifest Destiny and stormed westward to claim the savage wilds in the name of American democracy. Little did they know or understand that the interior of the nation was inhabited by people for thousands of years already. But that didn’t seem to phase them. Nor were they phased by the fact that the endless sea of grasslands, savannas, prairies, and woodlands and the people who inhabited them weren’t necessarily compatible with European agricultural and civil sensibilities. Oh well. By god and by country the west was to be tamed, surveyed, plotted out, and ultimately eradicated and destroyed.
This is a history of our nation that is sort of swept under the rug. Sure its acknowledged and every child studies our westward expansion to some degree in school, but the reality sort of sits there in the corner like the creepy 
guy at an office party. It’s there, but nobody is going to engage it. The reality is a rich and ancient history of both Native American Peoples and an ecology unique to this continent were systematically destroyed and plowed under fields of grain, corn, and beans.
How or why this happened? Well that’s a huge undertaking to explain, one that is in untold volumes of books that most American’s will never read. But if there was anything that could take the blame for it, it would be the railroad companies. The conventional story is that America was an unbridled force ever-moving westward. That her citizens had an intrinsic drive to settle the continent and claim it for the fledgling democratic experiment we know as the Untied States of America. It sounds romantic, elicits national pride, and seems as though it was an inevitable benign soft ooze slowly blanketing the land. Well no. It was ruthless entrepreneurialism driven by the railroads and supported by politicians with good intentions that 
probably didn’t know any better or were paid off.
At the outset, the railroad industry was the beneficiary of massive land grants from the federal government to subsidize their development westward. Most likely this public policy was lobbied for by the railroads themselves, but needless to say they were given the keys to the west. Millions of acres of land were simply given to the railroad companies to lay the tracks to settle the west (again totally neglecting that it was already settled by native people). In reality the railroads laid the tracks and then brought men to kill all the bison, armies to kill all the natives, and people to buy their lands from them and plow over the native habitats. A key distinction was that this was not a bi-product of the railroad expanding westward, but it was policy of the railroad companies to increase their massive profits.
At the time, the great bison herds were so large that it would take days for them to pass a single spot. Millions of head of bison that were 50 miles deep were the chief resource of the native people and their hides commanded a good price in the eastern and European markets. So as the railroads hired men to slaughter bison for their hides, and they brought other independent men to do the same, the bison was completely eradicated from the west in the matter of a mere decade or so.
Native American’s fought back as their lively hood was being taken from them. Hostilities that existed since Europeans first began colonizing this continent flamed up to the point of all out war. The United States Army was conducting full-fledged campaigns against Natives, largely at the behest of the railroads, to clear the land of conflict for more markets and trade. A war that the Natives had no chance at winning because of the loss of the bison.
Once the railroads had taken much of the land with the governments blessing, killed off the bison and made a killing on their hides, eliminated the threat of violence from the Native Peoples, they then railroads were able to start shipping in droves of people to buy back their lands and begin plowing. This was the end of the massive grasslands, savannas, and woodlands that covered the majority of the country. Manifest Destiny was that of the plow and the disappearance of an entire ecosystem so rich in diversity and beauty that it was never fully understood before it was gone.
Flash forward a century or so. Today we’re faced with a peculiarly similar situation. The oil industry is largely supported by our federal government much in the way the railroads were in the 19th century. They possess large swaths of land and sea and are given free rein to develop their dirty business under the guise of energy. The railroads were given carte blanche under the guise of American expansion. The oil industry pollutes and destroys ecosystems the world over, arguably killing off an entire sea last summer just as the railroads killed off the bison and prairies.
The parallels are easily drawn and more alarming is our failure to learn from history. After the rise of big railroad power during the expansion westward, it took decades of strife to wrestle economic and political power from the railroad tycoons. Really, the main reason why their hegemony over the US political and actual landscape was mitigated was the invention of the automobile and the rise to power of petroleum. Under which we are now ruled.
Remember this? Its still an ongoing horrific disastor.
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The fact is that large renewable energy sources like wind farms are impressive but have their drawbacks. They take up a lot of land and they need to be far from the users. This means a lot of time and energy spent transferring the power to the communities their supposed to feed. There’s also the fundamental question of does the cost of the land, construction, maintenance, and transportation of the power add up for the megawatts they produce?
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