In 1974, in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis that had exposed the United States' dangerous dependence on imported petroleum, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) was founded to promote wind power as a domestic renewable energy source and advocate for supportive federal policy. The AWEA's founding marked the moment when wind energy transitioned from a peripheral interest of back-to-the-land idealists to an organised political and economic lobby in Washington, D.C. The organisation played a crucial role in securing the federal tax credits that fuelled the California wind boom of the early 1980s and the subsequent growth of the American wind industry.

The 1974 founding of the AWEA coincided with the explosion of American environmental poetry inspired by the first Earth Day (1970) and the energy crisis — poets including Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, and Wendell Berry were articulating a vision of human society in right relationship with natural energy cycles that the wind energy movement shared in practical terms. Snyder's Turtle Island (1974), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry the following year, engaged directly with questions of renewable energy and sustainable culture that the AWEA was simultaneously addressing in policy terms. Wind energy and environmental poetry thus emerged as parallel cultural responses to the same crisis.