It was less than a year ago that a hue and cry went up among Baldwin County property owners concerning the Horizon 2025 comprehensive land use plan. The county commission meeting during which the $280,000 study went on the scrap heap was a true Southern religio-political experience.

Those against the plan said it smacked of fascism, socialism and communism; that the plan ran counter to the U.S. Constitution; was influenced by dark forces of the United Nations taking dead aim at repealing the right of Americans to own guns; and transgressed the Old Testament, specifically, the Ten Commandments.

American flags were waved by some and others sang “God Bless America” as the quarter million dollar study was voted down, the victim of one of the tried and true barriers to change, namely, the rights of property owners. Since the Eisenhower post-World War II era the rights of property owners have been used in America to thwart any and everything that might bring about “dangerous” tendencies. It’s part of our Southern “code” in particular, this property rights mantra; property rights are all about liberty and liberty is certainly all about democracy and democracy is about God and guns and making certain that “dangerous” tendencies never get a foothold down here in our Zion.

Property rights trump just about everything except, oddly enough, the dangers of change itself, which is the 400-pound gorilla in any Southern sittin’ room. I mention property rights and the demise of Horizon 2025 only because I was reminded of them in connection with a proposed wind farm the Baldwin County Planning & Zoning Commission is currently considering for south Baldwin County. Sixty years of conservative political maneuverings in connection with property rights carries with it a corollary: A property owner ought to be able to do what he or she pleases with their property and profit from it if they so choose without interference, even if a property owner wants to open a school for mimes (heaven forbid). Amen; property rights right on; world without end, those presiding over the funeral of Horizon 2025 essentially chanted last year.

But the property owner who wants a wind farm on his south Baldwin property is facing an uphill battle with the county over rules and regulations and getting such an endeavor permitted. I look at this situation and see one or two reasons for this particular paradox in property rights.

One, we’re not exactly “green” by nature in this neck of the woods. We’re about as keen on alternative energy sources down here as we are on alternative lifestyles. We pretty much have global warming on the same level as Bigfoot. Energy should be about utility companies, gas and oil rigs and coal. Wind ... well, it’s kind of unnatural in that regard. A wind farm is a little too Washington, D.C.-ish. Thus a property owner who wants to introduce something new — that is, unnatural — will just have to forego his property rights because those big ol’ wind turbine blades could wipe out a bunch of dove some adjoining property owner wants to kill at his annual October dove hunt, a cherished local tradition as sacrosanct as property rights.

Now, the reason we can tolerate such dichotomies or disconnects is what makes us southerners such colorful characters and helps us produce such magnificent writers as Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers and William Faulkner. We can be green one second, anything but the next. We’ll invoke property rights with the solemnity of a Blue Angels’ flyover today and dispense with the whole kit and caboodle tomorrow if the other fellow’s trying to put the wind to unnatural use. Again, it makes for great literature, this Southern gene of ours.

Speaking of fiction, the second reason I see as a possibility for the paradox surrounding the wind farm permit has to do with the county going all out to protect us from ourselves. County leaders might possibly have figured that once you permit a bunch of wind turbines in a field it’s just a matter of time before some guy in a pickup truck mistakes them for windmills and goes all Don Quixote on them. What such a guy might do confronted with the threat of unnatural windmill monsters is anybody’s guess. It could happen to any of us, this tilting after windmills in a moment of craziness; charging across some tract of land in a cloud of dust straight at some towering giants that threaten our order. We’d do it to save the birds; to curtail the droning of engines and the swish-swish from ever reaching and violating sweet Dulcinea’s scalloped ear; and we’d do it to protect the past which, if something new never takes place, we’re safe.

Bob Morgan is a retired, award-winning journalist and an author.