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Fifty years ago many of the “Back-to-nature” magazines opposed nukes, coal and hydro. They came up with quite a few hare brained schemes to replace them with “natural renewable sources.” They sounded so good on paper one magazine paid $10,000 out of it’s own account to build a small updated version of a “perpetual motion” machine. It didn’t work.

Now they just tell you what you “need to do” but will not put up the cash to prove it.

I lived in Hendersonville NC for a while in the late 1970s. At that time, a magazine called Mother Earth News was published in Hendersonville. They rented a building in the downtown area, not on the main street, but one street off the main street I think.

The parking lot behind their building was fenced off, but inside there were all kinds of weird looking machines with large wheels, bicycle chains, flaps and prop blades and various geometries of wind turbines and water turbines. I think they had erected a Darrieus type turbine, but I never saw it turning.

It all looked like the product of a brief burst of constructive activity that had taken place a few years before I got there, and had stopped soon after. I never saw anyone there, in the rear lot or otherwise, and I never saw any of the contraptions moving.

This would have been in 1978 or 1979.