The fight over a windswept landscape

DAVID SAKURA WAS 6 years old when the U.S. government imprisoned his family at the Minidoka incarceration camp in the high desert of south-central Idaho. He remembers his mother attempting to create a sense of normality for her children by taking him and his brothers for walks — through sagebrush and past rattlesnakes, armed guards and barbed wire — to picnic in the shade cast by a guard tower.

Now, energy developers are eying those same windy plains. Magic Valley Energy, an affiliate of LS Power, wants to build the 400-turbine Lava Ridge Wind Project, along with associated substations, roads and transmission lines, within and adjacent to Minidoka’s historic footprint. The facility would more than double Idaho’s wind-generating capacity, producing enough power for about 300,000 homes.

But survivors of Minidoka and their