In the early 1980s, the Altamont Pass Wind Farm in Alameda County, California, USA, became the world's first large-scale wind farm, with thousands of small turbines installed across the windy coastal hills east of San Francisco. Driven by federal tax credits and the energy crisis of the 1970s, California's wind boom attracted massive investment and made Altamont Pass the largest concentration of wind turbines on Earth by the mid-1980s. The farm demonstrated that utility-scale wind electricity generation was commercially feasible, establishing the template for the global wind energy industry.

The California wind farm emerged from the same counterculture and environmental movement that had profoundly shaped West Coast American poetry from the San Francisco Renaissance through the ecology-focused verse of Gary Snyder and Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers, writing from his stone tower at Carmel-by-the-Sea overlooking the Pacific, had long made the wind of the California coast central to his poetry of geological and ecological time; the wind farm represented the industrialisation of the natural force his poetry had celebrated and mourned. Contemporary eco-poets including Forrest Gander engaged with wind energy's contradictions between green ambition and landscape impact.