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Wind Farm Endangered By Dead Indians

Cape Wind, the Massachusetts pioneering and environmentally daring enterprise trying to build 130 turbines in Nantucket Bay, is now facing its last hurdle. Or breathing its last breath. All of this is in a fascinating dispatch by Beth Daley in the Boston Globe.

I've written about this undertaking several times as the initiative was put through the ropes of both privilege of the very rich and the antiquated technologies of protected corporations. The secretary of the interior, Ken Salazar, is now waiting for a judgment of the five person Council on Historic Preservation, a federal agency, before he will render his decisive opinion.

Former U.S. Senator John Warner had led congressional opposition to the initiative, and he enlisted (alas) Ted Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy in his efforts. Maybe you can trace the antagonism of the last pair to nostalgia for old Hyannis. Warner's efforts to enlist the military in defense of his family's ocean view ultimately came to naught.

Well, now that Brona Simon, the Bay State's top historic preservation official, has gotten into the act, we have also heard from the Mashpee Indian tribe, the Aquinnah tribe and Chappaquidick Tribe of the Wampanoag Indian Nation. The rub is that the proposed rotors clash with “an unobstructed view of Nantucket Sound (needed) to carry out spiritual sun greetings and that the waterway's seabed, which was exposed land thousands of years ago, is sacred ancestral land that would be disturbed by building turbines of it.”

I cannot believe that Salazar would rule for the tribes. But then there is the National Park Service which believes that the Sound is eligible to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Which would be another way to end the turbine project.

Which side are you on?