Nantucket Sound, photo by real00 (source: Flickr Creative Commons)
What would be the United States’ first offshore wind farm project – dubbed Cape Wind – may be in jeopardy due to an announcement by the National Park Service last week. The NPS stated that the site of the proposed wind farm, in Massachusetts’ Nantucket Sound, should be eligible for protection by being included in the National Register of Historic Places. Two Native American tribes, the Aquinnah and the Mashpee Wampanoag, are opposed to the project due to traditional and spiritual reasons:
‘The turbines would be clearly visible to both Aquinnah and Mashpee people and would degrade their essential view of the rising sun for ceremonies and of the ocean view shed necessary for other rituals. The shoal itself where the turbines would be erected was once dry land and contains sacred burial sites and other cultural patrimony.’
–Indian Country Today
Yet an article from the Boston Globe claims:
‘Their objections to Cape Wind did not keep the Martha’s Vineyard Wampanoags from planning their own wind project just a few hundred yards from the Vineyard’s Gay Head Cliffs, which have won designation as a National Historic Landmark.’
But spiritual traditions are seldom so pragmatic that one can simply assume that one site should have the same significance as another for an ethnic or religious group’s traditional practices. It may also partly be a case of the tribes knuckling down against what they understandably see as a continuation of hundreds of oppression by the United States government. An Indian Country Today article describes the tribes’ spokespersons as likening the federal government’s eventual decision to a test as to whether the Obama administration will take the rights of tribal nations seriously or if it will continue to be ‘business as usual’.
This is not the first time the Cape Wind Project has been opposed. Groups like Save Our Sound and NAWAG (the National Alliance of Wind Farm Action Groups) have attempted to block the construction of turbines around Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard – picturesque, wealthy vacation spots that value their pretty views. But Nantucket is also a very ‘green’ community and has given popular support to Cape Wind. A Mother Jones article suggests that the real backing for the opposition movement comes not from Native Americans or Massachusetts playboys, but from big oil and other ‘dirty energy’ interests:
‘At the forefront of the effort has been William Koch, who alone has spent more than a million to oppose the farm via a group called the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. […] Koch is the founder and president of the Oxbow Group, and has made his fortune off mining and marketing coal, natural gas, petroleum, and petroleum coke products.’
–Mother Jones
So against the sustainable energy Cape Wind project are Earth-revering Native American tribes, (now deceased) Senator and Democratic stalwart Ted Kennedy and some ultra rich right wing mega-polluters. Talk about a case of strange bedfellows, eh?
by Graham Land
anti wind farm protesters, photo by Phil LaCombe (source: Flickr Creative Commons)
New York Times – For Cape Cod Wind Farm, New Hurdle Is Spiritual