The sun settles behind the mountains and stains the underside of the clouds orange, while the sky above them is still deep blue. The fields run on like a patchwork of green paddies and turned brown soil, and a white farm road cuts between them and races toward the back of the frame. The nearest wind turbine plants its column in the middle of a paddy, and behind it columns of the same shape stand in a row all the way to the misty foot of the mountains.
What stands out is that these machines have not emptied the land. The spot the column stands on is just one small circle, and around it the paddies still take in water and push up green. Unlike the way power plants were built by moving villages and cutting into mountains, here rice and electricity share the same fields.
The wind used to simply pass over these fields. The flow of air created by the temperature difference between the mountains and the sea belongs to no one, does not have to be burned, and does not need to be dug up. While the three blades catch that flow and turn, no smokestack goes up and no ash is left behind.
Of course those blades will reach the end of their life someday, and how to recover the huge parts left over then is the next task. Still, the direction this photograph shows is clear. It is a question of how to take in what is already flowing, rather than what to dig up next.
Looking at the photograph again, you notice that the shadow of the frontmost column does not lie long across the paddy. At this hour when the light lies low, in those fields the evening meal and the lamps lean on the same wind.
