Rural Virginia’s Solar Gold Rush
Is solar energy destroying the soil it was meant to save?
Fields of Chinese-made solar panels and giant corporate data centers replace farms in Mecklenburg County while electricity prices climb
‘I see God’s beauty everywhere’
There’s a reason the American pastoral has endured in art as it has, tenuously, in life. Paint me a landscape with rolling hills, with cattle grazing in distant fields and a black horse with his white-streaked nose looking curiously up at the fences. Paint in the foreground a woman who spent her life here, who worked this land with her mother and father and then with her husband and sons, who has seen the county change with the crops, and who is thinking now about what world will be left to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What will they see when they look out over the open pastures? What will they remember? I am spending an afternoon with Mrs. Betty Upton at her cattle farm in Virginia’s Mecklenburg County. It’s early in the day, just after church, and she is still wearing a black dress embroidered with white flowers and a red woolen jacket with a broad black lapel. The Southern lady is to my mind among the last remaining great American folk heroes, and Mrs. Upton is a …
