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actually, this is the third Herald editorial I've read today that I've agreed with!
Cape contradiction doesn't hold water
By Thomas Keane Jr.
Friday, December 19, 2003
There's a whiff of environmental dissembling in the salt air of Cape Cod.
The mightily aggrieved Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound tells us that Cape Wind's plans to install 130 wind turbines would destroy the fragile coastal environment, ruining views, damaging property values and depressing the Cape's tourist industry. At the same time, many of the same aggrieved citizens protest plans for a flyover bridge to replace the Sagamore Rotary, fearing a new influx of tourists would overwhelm the Cape's limited resources.
Note the contradiction: Opponents claim to want tourists on the Cape but apparently don't want them to have a way to get there.
More importantly, note how both arguments have been framed in environmental terms.
There's a good reason for that. Not only is being green axiomatically a good thing in today's world, but federal and state environmental regulations are so strong that they can be easily exploited to delay and stop.
In fact, though, the environmental merits of both projects run the opposite way.
Indeed, one would think a proposal to generate 420 megawatts of electricity from wind would be an environmental slam-dunk. Wind doesn't cause global warming, it doesn't create air pollution and it doesn't consume non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels. And this isn't some trivial project: Once in place, Cape Wind would supply electricity for three-quarters of the Cape.
The Sagamore project is also an environmental boon. Anyone who visits the Cape knows the problem the rotary creates. Since Massachusetts law requires those entering a rotary to yield, traffic backs up, waiting for an opening. Jams are a constant virtually any time during the summer, and at certain times, such as weekends and evenings, they are horrendous, with stopped traffic stretching five or six miles back. It is so nightmarish that those going on or off Cape plan their entire trip around the commute. The cost - in time, wasted fuel and pollution from idling cars - is enormous. With $15 billion recently spent to improve things a bit on the Central Artery in Boston, the $35 million flyover seems a bargain.
So what's really at issue here? Sure, some opponents have raised reasonable - and addressable - concerns. But to a troubling degree, there seems to be another agenda at play: It's a battle of the rich against the hoi polloi, those who got vs. those who want.
A wind farm makes eminent good sense if you think of the Cape as a place in which to live. Increasingly, that is what it is becoming. Where once the year-round population was small - only 70,000 in 1960 - now it is over 220,000.
And a Sagamore flyover also makes eminent sense if you want to make the Cape open and accessible to all, a place that can be easily reached by ordinary folks who enjoy the beauty and pleasures of the peninsula: its slower pace, stunning views, and the quaint towns and villages that dot its length.
But neither makes sense if your mission is to keep the place as your own personal playground.
Much of the recent history of the Cape can be seen as a battle between a moneyed leisure class and everyone else. That was true in the 1960s, with the controversial creation of the Cape Cod National Seashore.
The new park wiped out commercial and residential use of large stretches of land for the benefit of a leisure class - notably the Kennedys - who were already there.
And that same leisure class, with ever more money and ever more expensive homes along the coast, is what drives efforts today to keep others out.
Listen to some of those with second homes on the Cape and you can hear the real worry: The riff-raff is moving in.
Good.
One of the most extraordinary and positive changes in American society has been the rise of its middle class.
That middle class has the wealth and income to live a life that a generation or two ago was only available to the rich. It is that middle class which now descends upon the Cape, rubbing shoulders with the wealthy.
None of this is to deny that the Cape faces some significant infrastructure issues.
Most of the Cape relies on groundwater aquifers which face depletion. Many of the secondary roads throughout its many miles are antiquated, producing nightmarish jams all because one car can't find space to make a left turn.
The proper role of environmentalism, however, should be to solve these problems by improving infrastructure and encouraging sensible development, not by shutting people out.
True, a few of the rich may find their solitude disturbed.
But the rest of us are sick of being told we should go to Disney World for our vacations.
From The Boston Herald
