[at-l] Maine Wind turbines

[ellen at clinic.net (Bob C)]

I've spent several days trying to devise the words needed to alert people people of the tragedy that is facing the Appalachian Trail in Maine.

The following, with special thanks to Jim B. for his help, is the best I've come up with so far.

As supplies of fossil fuels run out and as the threat of global warming increases, this nation and the world needs to find alternative energy sources. Among these energy sources will be wind. 

But this truism doesn't mean that 30 giant wind turbines should necessarily be approved for the Western Maine Mountains within a mile of the Appalachian Trail. This is among the wildest and most remote sections of the entire 2,175 mile trail that connects Springer Mountain in Georgia with Katahdin in Maine.

>From Shelburne, NH to the Bigelow Preserve and beyond the only signs of civilization are occasional road crossings and an occasional building or corner of a town located deep in the valleys. Through hikers, those who walk the trail from beginning to end are nearly unanimous in their praise of the trail in Maine. It is this same feeling of wildness that brings thousands of children from all over the east to the trail each summer to be guided by camp counselors. Scout troops, church groups, and a great variety of visitors, as well as residents of the western mountain region, join them in exploring these largely unknown and unsung jewels of inland Maine.

Last month came an intruder. Maine Mountain Power, a new company created by Endless Energy of Yarmouth and a subsidiary of huge Edison International of California, has filed with the Land Use Regulation Commission an application to install 12 giant turbines on Redington Mountain, less than a mile from the Appalachian Trail, and 18 on Black Nubble Mountain, located a couple of miles to the west.

If approved by LURC, which functions as planning board, zoning board and building inspector for the half of Maine with no municipal governments,  the nature of the western mountains will be changed forever.

Proposed are not the tiny wind machines that blossomed in backyards across the state during the OPEC oil boycott of three decades ago. No. These are giant 260-foot towers, many of which will be lighted, each topped by 150 foot blades reaching 410 feet in the air. These machines are twice the height of the State House in Augusta; nearly five times higher than the Portland Observatory atop Munjoy Hill and four and a half times higher than Portland Head Light.
 
Wind turbines perched on the summit ridge of Redington would be the highest structures in the state of Maine. Among Maine natural features, only the Katahdin massive in Baxter State Park rises higher.

The impetus for such a disastrous change? Tax shelters. The rapid depreciation allowances that apply to capital investments in wind plants, for example. And especially the federal production tax credits for wind energy - a credit of 1.9 cents per kilowatt hour! These and other federal tax gimmicks allow investors in wind to avoid paying taxes on immense profits, whether wind related or not, even profits that come from polluting sources of electric generation.

Edison was needed because small companies only rarely have enough profits to take maximum advantage of the available tax shelters. And Endless Energy certainly qualifies as small. Until recently anyway Endless consisted of three people, President Harley Lee of Yarmouth, a PR operative, and a "technical specialist." The three in 10 years of effort have succeeded only in erecting a lone wind power generator in an eastern Maine blueberry field. 
They now dream of managing a $130 million project. It won't be easy. LURC was created in 1970 to keep the wildlands of Maine wild. Any new developments, the law says, must fit "harmoniously into the natural environment." 

Fitting 410-foot high electrical generators harmoniously into the wildest mountains in the east may be a tough job.  Lee and his new investors pin their hopes in part on a survey of hikers conducted over the past decade. Each was shown photographs with images of the wind towers as they allegedly would look like from the Appalachian Trail. Lee says 51% of the first batch of hikers saw no problem. Later when a "more accurate" simulation was shown the approval rate rose to 79 percent.

Though trail groups, probably foolishly, participated in designing the questionnaire used by Lee to measure hiker response, such simulations are in no way accurate measures of the true impact of development on a landscape. Even accurate simulations fail to show the scene as the human eye, coupled to the human brain, perceives it.
 
The eye seeks out the dominate feature of a landscape, large or small. This is why most simple photos of mountain peaks and mountain ranges disappoint. The camera rarely captures what the human eye sees. Professional photographers know this. That's why they invest in telephoto lenses, and seek to focus the photo viewer's eye by framing their mountain scenes with branches and trunks of trees and other natural elements.

We don't see with our eyes, we see with our brains. The brain latches on to the most significant parts of what we see, things that move, things that are bright and things that flash. If this wind complex is built, it will dominate the scene for miles around. Huge towers, spinning blades, blinking lights will be the things that future hikers in these mountains will remember - not the beauty of a wild mountain landscape.

More convincing than polls of casual hikers shown doctored photos is the unanimous opposition voiced by Maine Appalachian Trail Club directors when they voted to expend $25,000 in hard earned reserves to fight Lee's proposal. Lee has argued the MATC leadership, is out of touch with its members. But these are the volunteers who go out month after month, year after year, building the trails, keeping them free of brush and blowdowns, and begging for the money needed to hire shelter caretakers and trail crews.

These folks have intimate knowledge of the western Maine Mountains and the trail that runs through them. They, far more than the casual hiker often passing through for the first time, know full well the damage these towers will do to what most hikers see as the most spectacular region of the entire 2,175-mile Appalachian Trail. They are not fooled by doctored photos.

We all desire cleaner energy sources. But the wiser among us know that it is not necessary and terribly unwise to critically damage the best of our last wild places in that quest.
 
A few wild hills must remain free of human changes. We must again remember Henry Thoreau's conclusion after a lifetime of exploring the woods and hills of New England:  "In wildness is the preservation of the world."

Weary http://www.matlt.org