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by Matthew Silber, CT Mirror
September 1, 2026
Anyone who’s walked through Connecticut’s woods has seen them: the seemingly random stone walls that zigzag through the trees. Most of us don’t give them a second thought, but take a moment to ponder: why on earth would someone build a stone wall in the middle of the forest?
No one would, because those woods used to be farms. If you took a time machine to 1826, those groves of oak, birch, and maple would dissolve into fields of barley, oats and corn —separated by the same stone walls. Two hundred years ago fewer than 10% of Americans lived in urban areas —almost everyone survived through subsistence agriculture. As planters dredged rocks from the soil, the stones provided ready-made construction material for property markers: the walls you can still see to this day.
Many Nutmeggers perceive our forest cover to be eternal, edenic —the natural order of things. In actuality, less than 0.00007% of our state’s land area actually consists of old-growth forest. In 1826, three quarters of state land was used for agriculture, but today, more than half of it is forested. What happened?
Industrialization happened. Innovations in agricultural efficiency, Midwestern competition, and new jobs in factories pushed Connecticut farmers into the cities. Little by little, over decades and centuries, our forests crept back and now thrive.
This history lesson illuminates a fundamental truth: we interact with our landscape in different ways when there are new social and economic developments, and these changes can actually be quite beneficial.
The most pressing development of the 21st century is climate change. Electric power generation accounts for about one-quarter of American greenhouse gas emissions. It is time to take our climate goals seriously, and we can do that by expanding Connecticut’s renewable energy sources. Solar has emerged as one of the cheapest, most efficient options on the market.
Despite rising energy costs and climate-related health threats, many Nutmeggers still mistrust solar power, and oppose the construction and expansion of solar farms across the state. Some raise concerns regarding environmental or aesthetic impacts, while others suspect malfeasance on the part of energy companies. I sympathize with these concerns, but believe them to be misguided and ultimately dangerous.
Some fear that as solar panels age, the heavy metals in their components will leach into the soil and surrounding water table, poisoning neighbors. There is little evidence to support such catastrophizing, and while challenges certainly exist regarding panel disposal, they are surmountable. When we evaluate these concerns related to solar power, they must be contextualized by the alternative: right now, millions are killed by fossil fuels every year.
Some support solar energy in the abstract, but believe its infrastructure should only be installed on existing structures, rather than in open spaces. Many of our cities are already making tremendous progress in this area, but unfortunately, the process of retrofitting stores and parking lots with solar panels is expensive and time-consuming. I unequivocally support an expansion of solar capacity in urban areas, but rooftop solar alone will not get us to net-zero.
I am most troubled by the argument that solar farms threaten our agricultural heritage. As fields give way to arrays, some believe that farmers are being ‘pushed out’ by predatory energy companies. This misrepresents reality. Solar leases are voluntary agreements made by landowners who, facing challenging economic times, are leveraging their assets to preserve their finances. It is the same economic calculus that convinced Connecticut farmers in 1826 to abandon their plows and stand on the assembly line. Green energy opponents believe they are protecting farmers—are they willing to let farmers make their own decisions about how they utilize their land?
There is great beauty in the bucolic. It has inspired poets for millennia, from Virgil to Tim McGraw. I understand the distress one may feel, seeing family farms replaced by sterile scaffolding. But every decision we make has an opportunity cost. Whatever we wish to preserve, we have to consider what our preservation forces us to give up in return.
When we demand solar moratoriums in order to protect croplands and woodlands, we are still putting them in harm’s way. When we say ‘no’ to a 50-acre solar array in the Connecticut River Valley, we are saying ‘yes’ to poisonous smog from Canadian wildfires, and inviting the flames to creep closer and closer to our own borders. When we focus too much on the local, we begin to lose sight of the bigger, global picture.
Many of us have a vision in our head of what Connecticut ‘should’ look like, but our landscape has already changed greatly over the past few centuries. Paradoxically, this fact is so self-evident that most of us forget it entirely. It sits in plain sight but unrecognized, like a mysterious stone wall puncturing a silent wood.
Matthew Silber is a resident of Norwalk.
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