Maine is at a crossroads

To the Editor;
    I attended the First Wind Bingham Wind Project public informational meeting on Feb. 12. Commissioner Aho of the Maine Department Of Environmental Protection was “taking commentary.”

However, this meeting was not a publicly mandated legal hearing with sworn testimony because of new state laws to “fast track” wind development that excludes legal public hearings.
    At this meeting, a petition was submitted by a Somerset County resident to the MDEP with a qualified number of signatures to request a legal State public hearing on this project. Around 150 people were in attendance of which 40 of them approached the mic … many who opposed the project and many in favor.
    It seemed evident that some were asked to be there by the applicant of the project (Sky West/First Wind) and were from organizations that admittedly had recently received tens of thousands of dollars of gift money from that corporation.
    As a person who has paid close attention these past two years to all the corporate plans in this region since the Cianbro “East-West Transportation, Utility and Communications Corridor” was trotted out before the state legislators and public, it seems the situation has progressed rapidly to something that is beginning to look like a vast and coordinated corporate land grab partly by means of expedited easements helped pay for with tax credits through federal stimulus funds.
    The instance of concern here is industrial wind power that is to be connected into the Northeast grid to be sold to metropolises south of Maine. This plan only makes sense in the context of a corporate land grab for easements in every direction, but particularly east and west through Maine for serving mega-projects owned and operated by multinational corporations as detailed in Cianbro’s own feasibility study of 2008 conducted by the Lewis Berger Corporation. When observing the “wind harvest” electric transmission line of this Bingham Project, it is extremely curious that it just happens to be parallel or more or less line up with the Cianbro Plan.
    Once these right-of-ways are corporate, they will almost certainly remain corporate … which means none of us residents of Maine and no Maine legislature will have any control of their usage ever again once the permits are OK’d by the DEP behind the scenes.
    When a wind turbine catches fire and is destroyed, the industry does not replace it. Why, we ask? Their answer: It is too costly and not worth the trouble. Turns out that, chances are, most wind turbines, over time, have such a high risk of fire that most will become non-functional. If the industry has decided it is not worth replacing them, that indicates that these projects are so inefficient and flawed they cannot function without stimulus or other federal money and that there is an underlying purpose to these invasive strings of easements that represent a huge investment of our “green technology” tax dollars here in Maine.
    We are putting all our eggs in one boondoggle basket. These industrial-scale wind turbine “farms” are an inappropriate application of alternative energy technology. Energy technologists report that what makes sense is that every town have their own wind mill for its own intermittent power feed to satisfy a percentage of the energy needs of each town — and that would contribute to energy self-reliance for our vulnerable outlying communities.
    The arithmetic reveals to us that these wind farm systems do not offset our oil consumption and the net loss to our state’s economy will prove to be extreme. And the true way to utilize wind power is lost to us because all the public funds to support it go to the energy industry’s control of wind that is connected to a grid that does not serve us.
    Maine is at a crossroads. We can, as an electorate, decide that Maine become a jewel of the Northeast that supports resilient local economies based on the best small-scale practices of managed forestry, organic agriculture of marginal lands nestled amid forest and the wet high and low ground of lakes, ponds, streams, and rivers that these forests create … and the preservation of our most precious clean water fisheries, wetlands, uplands and moose and deer, bald and golden eagle, lynx, and maybe even wolf habitats. That choice allows for a long-term quality tourist and recreational industry that is a boon to all residents of the eastern seaboard and beyond.
    Or we can relinquish this State of Maine to the Big Oil-Big Mining hegemony that will leave us with a wasteland similar to those all over the world upon which these profiteering megaliths have done their business.
    We should have Maine self-governed by the people who live here because it is still a remnant (with potential for recovery and self-restoration) of what was once a beautiful and continuous natural landscape that abundantly supported its people … or we can give up and join Everywhere USA that does not provide livelihoods of authentic economy for the ordinary population.
    We can exercise our democratic rights or allow the global corporate hegemony to rule us to the end of our days. We choose.
Sidney Mitchell
Dover-Foxcroft