June 4, 2020
Wind Turbines in Western Maryland: Property Rights, Power Politics, Public Process, NIMBYism and the Dual Environmental Threats
Statement by Bill of Rights
This essay is dedicated to all those suffering from a “Knee on their Necks,” from the dominant regimes of Inequality; in this essay the focus is upon Nature itself - which can’t breathe either.
Introduction:
I am a citizen and environmental veteran who supports alternative energy, especially solar and wind, to replace all fossil fuel sources. However, I am not in favor of the wind turbine project on Dan’s Mountain which has been on the policy table and in the courts for almost two decades. I did not testify in the “remote” public process before the Maryland Public Service Commission on May 20th though, because the legal issue before the Commission is a narrow one, and unfortunately, not based on environmental considerations. Nonetheless, the project, which the Commission has rejected by refusing to issue a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity in its decision of January 25, 2017, is still ripe with implications for future projects on the mountain ridges of Western Maryland. (That decision was made by the the Maryland Public Service Commission’s Chief Public Utility Law Judge Terry J. Romine, to distinguish it from a vote of the full Commission.)
My objections to this project rest on three grounds. First, there has been no thorough, independent environmental review of the project. The only environmental reviews have been carried out by the wind developer’s hired consultants, and the voices of Maryland’s professional environmental staff have been deliberately muted in the wake of a 2007 Maryland law passed on behalf the project developer himself. There has been episodic commentary by federal and state environmental personnel, much of it prior to that date, but not full reviews.
Second, if approved, the project threatens to signal that all the mountain ridges in western “Mountain Maryland” (the term popular with many citizens in the region) are open to wind development, left to the mercies of revised and weakened state laws since 2007.
As the policy landscape stands now, these wind turbine projects essentially become private deals between favorably inclined land owners and wind developers, with impaired property owners objecting – and intervening legally.
Third, those of us who are “lifers” in the environmental movement must be engaged on two vast fronts, to meet two different if at times overlapping threats: the first is atmospheric and weather related, the challenge of excessive greenhouse gases creating climate chaos; the second is the collapse of species and the natural systems of forests, wetlands, grasslands…the oceans, all pushing towards the human caused Sixth Extinction.
The years 2018 and 2019 were filled with the alarming inventories of crashing species and populations, reports from public and private sources, but all pointing in the same direction: catastrophe for natural systems and, not too far away, for we humans which depend upon those systems. In other words: existential level threats for Humanity and Nature.
One well informed citizen in Western Maryland put it this way:
This site and the surrounding regions are some of the last significantly intact forest habitats - acting as corridors for terrestrial and airborne species alike. Fragmentation in these forests would be detrimental to T&E species among others. The Dan’s Mountain area is a fall migration hot spot (and may well be a spring one as well.) Without proper environmental assessment these potential impacts will go undocumented. Additionally, as fallout from climate change increasingly impacts species, modeling shows that species, especially migrating ones, will increasingly rely on the habitats of this part of Appalachia. Essentially our area will serve as a biodiversity reservoir. No individual project, which may set precedent for others, is worth risking the current and future ecological benefits of the Dans Mountain area.
Editor’s Note: On the afternoon of June 10, 2020, the Maryland Public Service Commission voted 4-1 to approve the Dan’s Mountain Wind Turbine project. You can follow this link from the Save Dan’s Mountain Facebook page to the one hour discussion before the Commission, from about minute 27 of the video at You Tube to the conclusion at 1:27. www.facebook.com/... I regret to say that I heard nothing which really addressed the concerns made in my original posting and essay, addressed to the missing environmental analysis and the changed equation between them and the economics of the project. Indeed, the Commission, operating under the law achieved by the efforts of Senate President Miller, Gov. O’Malley and and Wayne L. Rogers, the project developer, in 2007, exempting wind projects under 70 MW’s in power from the usual full review, focused on the subsequent economic changes in the weighing exercise since the 2017 court ruling : Allegany Count now favored the project, the Luke paper mill has closed, and the Pandemic has pushed the economic distress to the foreground. The twin environmental crises I cite, especially the collapse of species and habitats due to economic induced slicing and dicing, played no role. All environmental concerns are said to be addressed by agency adjustments prior to construction by adjusting turbine locations and any construction and post construction problems by county and state inspections. And since my original posting I have now reviewed the 2007 law changes themselves, the testimony list in front of the Senate Finance Committee on Feb. 27, 2007 as well as the testimony of all the witnesses, and cumulatively they only reinforce the points I made in the original posting. The case record was sent to my by the Office of Legislative Services in Annapolis at 9:00 PM on the hearing date, June 10, just hours after my request. I may do a separate posting on what I found in the case record.
Background:
Yet after reading the long January 25, 2017 decision by the Chief Public Service Commission Law Judge Terry J. Romine, which denied the project its needed permit, it is clear the ruling’s turning points rested upon the view-shed and physical impacts to nearby property owners only, compared to what she termed to be meagre economic gains. Regrettably, the broader public’s concerns, which I have heard time and time again here in Mountain Maryland, were minimized if not disregarded.
Residents of Frostburg, for example, can see wind turbines on their horizons not just in Maryland, but those situated in Pennsylvania and West Virginia as well. Some are distant blurs; other loom out at us like giant white metal sculptures. In the handling of the more distant visual impacts, the project’s consultants dismissed them as mere smudges upon the landscape. Yet if the Dan’s Mountain Project were ever built, its giant wind turbines would be the most prominent visual impact from the City of Frostburg looking south, far more prominent than the cell towers next to Dan’s Rock, which the consultants said showed that the area was already visually compromised, as was the graffiti covered ground at the Dan’s Rock overlook, the highest point in Allegany County at just under 3,000 ft. In the current application before the Public Service Commission the height of the proposed 17 turbines would be just under 500 feet – 496 to be exact. Editor’s Note, June 7th: if the developer’s appeal to the PSC is successful there is uncertainty as to the height of the turbines...some close observers said they could be as high as 650’...
The process for siting such projects as it now stands is grossly indifferent to the general public, who will have to live with the visual impacts for 20-30 years. And the legal system behind the process is as well. No, the wind turbines are not as offensive as, let us say for comparison, the visual impacts (as well as pollutants) from the now silent Bethlehem Steel works along the Lehigh River in Bethlehem, PA, still there today as giant relics of the first great industrial age in America. Or the operating open face coal mines along State Rt. 36, two of them can be seen heading south from Frostburg to reach Dan’s Rock. However, it is only the property owners closest to the project who have the legal right or standing to object on the grounds of noise and visual impacts. Therefore it comes down to adjacent objecting property owners’ vs property owners with a financial contract in hand, and the general public is shut out. Just as they were in Western Maryland when turbine projects went up in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. And when I say shut out I mean they are free to comment, but with no legal standing inside the process as I understand it, and as I read it in the January 25, 2017 PSC court decision.
Is this the best we can do in a Democratic republic, deeply troubled as it now is, by racial, economic and environmental inequality? The visual impacts in Frostburg come from projects in three states. Where is the regional siting commission that will consider viewshed impacts in addition to environmental ones - and the best sites from the region’s wind “potential,” presumably the major factor that developers focus on?
Entirely absent from the Maryland debate is the question of how we can fairly make siting decisions without considering a much broader framework for wind power. Maryland is one small state in a vast regional electric grid, 13 states in all, managed by PJM, a private firm awarded public powers. Indeed, it is the nation’s largest power grid operator. There are five states west of Maryland in this grid and a good part of western Virginia too. Therefore it surely includes the tragedies from mountain top removal, those already leveled in West Virginia, which might make these tragic “plateaus” available for some form of environmental redemption. However, by keeping the focus so narrowly in Maryland, even well-intentioned environmental groups will tend to drive the process into some of Maryland’s best remaining habitat, such as that on Dan’s Mountain. It’s already happened in two other locations just west of there.
I would think that if we ever went to a state of “National Emergency” to match the challenge put out by the now famous October 8, IPCC 2018 report, then regional processes would have to be adopted for reasons of speed and fairness – and overall environmental protection. Although they are hardly popular topics in Western Maryland, there are good models not so far away. For example, the Delaware River Basin Commission manages the uses of the river’s waters for people and environmental impacts across the four states which drain into the watershed. Without such management, the River would run dry in the summer and bad drought years. The Pinelands Commission in New Jersey manages the Pinelands National Reserve, one million acres, across 7 counties and 56 municipalities, governing land use decisions, unique habitats and creatures, and the protection of a giant underground aquifer via a 15 member commission which represents local (county) and state interests, and one federal vote. Way back in 1979-1980, the Commission’s mission was framed in good part by this recognition:
Ecological theories derived from island biogeography suggest that isolating parts of a landscape decreases diversity by limiting genetic interchange between the isolated portions, and thus may change the character of a region. This theoretical consideration, as well as the strongly preservationist sense of the legislation, provided the basis for including in the sensitive area some of the partly developed east-west Philadelphia-to-Atlantic City corridor. (From Collins and Russell, editors: Protecting the New Jersey Pinelands, 1988, Rutgers University Press.)
Environmental Factors Minimized if not Ignored:
I was saddened to learn that environmental factors are either ignored or entirely minimized in the existing process, governmental and legal, which is now centered on Maryland’s Public Service Commission. These missing factors are the impacts of the project directly on the habitat and species on Dan’s Mountain, on the ground and in the air, as well as the fragmentation effects of the turbine pads and access roads,
The inadequate environmental reviews are due in good part to the law passed in the 2007 Annapolis session, at the urging of wind developers themselves, under the supposedly environmentally friendly administration of Martin O’Malley. Is that the reason for the short-weighting of environmental factors in the decision of the Public Service Commission judge? It appears to be so. And if so, it’s tragic - and not easily remedied. Under the best of interpretations of that 2007 law, it was passed to speed through alternative energy; viewed through different eyes, it was a power play for special interests that pushed environmental safeguards, and reviews themselves, out of the picture. The fact that the power play in Annapolis was a Democratic Party directed one at the expense of the western region of the state which votes 3:1 Republican has not been lost on the residents of the area, who see the environmental demerits, property and visual impacts, through a very different lens.
There is a noticeable difference between the pre-2007 and post 2007 commentary in the lengthy court record. For example, consider this one from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s G. Andrew Moses of its Chesapeake Bay Field Office in Annapolis, sent to the developer’s consultant Paul Kerlinger and dated October 22, 2004:
In summary, we are concerned about the potential risk that construction and operation of the Dan’s Mountain wind-power facility may pose to bat and bird species residing and migrating through western Maryland and the resultant cumulative impacts that could occur following operation of this and any additional wind power facilities on ridge tops in the Eastern United States. Again, we strongly recommend that three years of pre-construction studies be conducted at the proposed project site in order to identify any risks to federally-protected species and migratory bird species that may be associated with operation of Dan’s Mountain wind power facility and to investigate means of avoiding potential impacts.
It seems very strange in the “Information Age” to report that I could only find this one account from the Washington Post, dated July 23, 2007, presenting the major players in removing environmental protections for wind projects 70 Megawatts or less in size: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2007/07/23/with-close-contacts-md-wind-project-gets-boost/ The major players portrayed in the article are Wayne L. Rogers, the wind turbine developer; Martin O’Malley, the new governor; Senate President Mike Miller, who spoke mockingly of projects delayed by “ ‘bats, rats and owls’”; and lobbyist Gerard E. Evans.
Mr. Rogers was also the chair of the Democratic Party in Maryland in years prior to 2007, and remains a major player in international energy matters, in the Democratic Party, in Maryland and at the national level. He and former Governor O’Malley are still two of the top financial contributors in Annapolis party politics. (As to the realities behind Senator Mike Miller’s comments: the bat in question is the Indiana Bat which is state and federally listed as Endangered; much later commentary, in 2012, added the Small Footed Bat, now Endangered in Maryland, to the list of possibly impacted species; the rat is the Allegany Wood Rat, listed as a state Endangered Species and in the court record, it is noted that “a metapopulation of the globally rare species is located on the ridge area of Dan’s Mountain.” (From an Oct. 5, 2004 letter from MDNR to the developer’s consultant.) I’m not sure about the owl species the Senate President had in mind: maybe just the carryover from the much earlier northwest coast Spotted Owl vs Timbering conflicts.
As someone who prides himself on following politics and economics closely, I regret to report that despite living in the state since 2005, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone bring up Wayne L. Rogers name, or cite his impressive biographical “power.” I am far, far removed from being an insider, but still…it is rather disconcerting to come across the information vacuum around this power player and the events of 2007. And I will have more to say about the general political and environmental “climate” in Maryland later in this essay.
The Annapolis proceedings of 2007 which gutted environmental protections on siting wind turbine projects under 70 Megawatts in generating capacity matter because our western Maryland region has already heavily developed and cleared the valleys and hollows of forest, and filled in wetlands, and the best remaining habitats for all types of plants and wildlife tend to be on ridges and in elevated bogs.
Let me put the matter bluntly: Maryland is an old state, full of centuries of accumulated, cumulative destructive impacts on its original habitats. And from the impacts of many “not so bad” projects and exemptions. The best remaining ones must be preserved, in rural Southern and Bay shore Maryland, and here in the Western Mountains. These ecological gems should not be compromised even for alternative energy projects.
We have thousands of acres of impaired former coal mines: they need to be graded for environmental features and view-shed impairments (if developed) by scientists and public servants, not left to narrow insider games between income hungry land owners and energy developers. The broader citizenry of the region deserve better. Unfortunately many of these former coal mine sites are situated amidst what is our remaining best habitat, indeed Nature’s last stand.
In fact, two of the wind projects already built in Western Maryland were sited, in part, on former coal mine lands and yet still managed to raise serious environmental conflict issues, especially impacts on species. That ought to alert us to the fact that it is not wise to leave these abandoned sites out of a serious vetting and ranking process which should precede and head off the spectacle of the shamefully long and wasteful process (for all parties) that has engulfed the Dan’s Mountain project.
Maryland, according to a lengthy report by the Association of State Wildlife Agencies and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released in October of 2007, was well on its way to having some of the most protective regulations and protocols in the nation to prevent damage by the inappropriate siting wind turbine proposals. But they were upended by the law designed to block them and give a waiver to projects under 70 Megawatts in size. Here is the report from 2007: https://www.fws.gov/habitatconservation/windpower/AFWA%20Wind%20Power%20Final%20Report.pdf
I regret to say that leaving Nature’s protection to laws such as they presently exist, and in the hands of revenue hungry local governments, does not offer much protection at all. Allegany County Commission President Jake Shade has noted the potential annual tax contribution of the $110 million turbine project as $951,556 per year for ten years, making it potentially the third largest property tax contributor in the county. Here at: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2020/02/23/hearing-on-dans-mountain-wind-energy-project-scheduled-march-4/
Slow cumulative/fragmentation effects
The dual tragedy in Maryland, as well in most of the United States, is that our state and federal laws, much less local ones, do not reflect the systematic consideration of the climate crisis, or the wide ranging cumulative impacts upon Nature from human economic activity which are pointing us towards the Sixth Extinction. (The title of Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2014 book.) In Maryland we have laws which do not speak to each other. Much of the state’s environmental efforts are focused on driving the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) for alternative energy: how much solar and wind and by what deadlines, which are getting more ambitious year by year in terms of percentages generated and by earlier and earlier target dates.
But the program is not setting forth environmental protections for the siting of the two key types of alternative energy, solar and wind, now governed by the 2007 law and the guidelines left to the state Public Service Commission. And of course, the process of phasing out fossil fuel sources of power raises the antagonism level of displaced workers in Maryland because we have yet to pass a robust “Just Transition” law with adequate compensation assurances, training means and funds.
If the approaching Sixth Extinction sounds too abstract for readers, consider this recent NY Times article on the huge toll exacted by ordinary automobile traffic on just one part of Nature: salamanders and frogs during their narrow spring breeding periods, especially wet evenings when they are migrating between uplands and streams, vernal pools and even, on Dan’s Mountain, “puddles.” Here’s the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/science/salamanders-amphibians-wildlife-migration.html
And here’s my comment in the Times, from first-hand experience during a decade living on a mountain in New Jersey in a very similar habitat setting to that on Dan’s Mountain, and while serving as the Director of Conservation for NJ Audubon:
Yes, during my sojourn at Deer Path Farm in NJ, about 1,000 feet up on Musconetcong Mountain in north western NJ, it was a favorite time of year on wet spring nights to go out and see toads, frogs and salamanders on the roads, some living and some very dead as described in this article. This was near Asbury, NJ, not far from Phillipsburg on the Delaware River. I remember coming across a small country road which wound around a bend, a steep hill on one side and a large, wet meadow ending in a stream on the other. One year I was out walking on what must have been the "day after," because about 100-200 yards of the road were totally covered by these bodies, all squashed. I never saw anything like that density of death and never want to again. But it is a lesson that reminds us that beyond saving glamorous T & E species, nature's populations are collapsing from the sum total of human economic activity, incursions into rural habitats, and the slicing and dicing of habitat by roads, oil and gas pipelines, power lines, cell phone tower pads, construction roads, and yes auto traffic. In Cape May, NJ, the NJ Audubon Society would do morning tallies of the night time auto kills of owls & bats... and then other raptors would come out in the early morning to eat last night's kills. And get smashed. The numbers were staggering. Hence the cumulative impacts of many not so bad human activities. It's how we got to the calamitous reports of 2018 & 2019. Nature going under.
I will add a direct Dan’s Mountain note to that: on Saturday morning, May 23rd, just a quick visit, a walk of a couple of hundred yards along Old Dan’s Mountain Road, between the cell towers, showed the “toll” from a recent wet evening, probably the prior Friday night: four or five “Red Efts,” a stage of the Red-Spotted Newt, squashed, along with what were probably toads, although greater expertise than mine would be needed to be certain given their demolished state. And once again, in a puddle near the gate on the south side, leading to a cell tower, tadpoles swimming in a puddle, at the mercy of dry weather or vehicles squashing them. Oh yes: I left out the squashed millipedes, also very active in the spring and summer. At least a dozen of them squashed in just this short span of narrow roadway. (Should I add in the premature cutting last summer of the milkweed plants along the road, amidst the cell towers, which have harbored all the life stages of the “on the way out” famous icon for Nature – the Monarch Butterfly? Whoever did the cutting wasn’t informed to wait until late October or early November, this despite the fact of the famed organism, and the site, the same stretch of road with the squashed critters, being part of or directly adjacent to a state wildlife management area.
The broader point is that even during a low traffic period, with local college students gone and the weather problematic, even a dead end back road in good habitat takes its toll. So will access roads to build new energy facilities, and the construction of the pads. It’s not all T & E impacts, avoided or not. It’s the baseline of Nature that is being destroyed by the sheer breadth and relentlessness of our activity and many not so bad activities. It has to stop in the best of habitats that are left. Apparently, as outrageous as it seems, it’s all already “written off” under the official clichés out of Annapolis, even amidst this last best stand of Nature in Maryland.
NIMBYism:
When I first heard of wind projects in Western Maryland (not the Dan’s Mountain one) in 2007, I had much the same attitude as several major environmental groups do today in Maryland: we’re in a climate emergency, even if it isn’t a declared one, we’re all for alternative energy and don’t want “Not in My Backyard” (NIMBY) types stopping where we have to go.
Now on this Dan’s Mountain project, it is not the environmental factors that are leading to the project’s defeat in court; they’ve been deliberately and politically muted. Rather, it is the power of local citizens who are being directly impacted by the noise and visual impairments stemming from being too close to the project. They are winning their long fight, property owners’ vs a big property owner, the developer himself. So far their most powerful point is that the developer picked a site astride a high human population density cluster – (relatively speaking, of course, for Allegany County) – a site which surely would have been sifted out of a good in-state (or tri-state) siting process as just having too many adjacent residents.
The citizen’s group which has led the fight against this turbine project is called ANCHOR, which stands for Allegany Neighbors & Citizens for Homeowner Rights, Ltd. It is has been led by Darlene Park and I have had good exchanges of views with one of their attorneys, David A. Tibbetts. ANCHOR was founded in 2015.
My own experience in Montgomery County as an advocate for new mass rail transit, light and heavy rail, hasn’t exactly put me in debt to NIMBYs. They are a force to be reckoned with because in the DC Metro area, they are likely to include many professional specialists, including lawyers, and they are popping up to oppose solar projects as well, in semi-urban abandoned lots as well as on farmland.
I am a believer that a great nation facing great challenges must be able to get large things done, but not at any cost. On the whole, and this goes back to more than a decade in the environmental trenches (1988-2001) where NIMBYs had a open phone line to me on most days of my working career, I’m inclined to be skeptical of the value of this aspect of American life. But we can’t ignore them and live up to our own best values of good procedures and equal treatment under the law. Even the most single minded NIMBY may come up with valuable insights on the damages from a project that its advocates didn’t see – or simply refuse to recognize. Therefore we can learn from NIMBYs, even as we must appreciate the fact that large things, physical things, alternative energy projects, must be built. We are objectively in a race against time. But again, not at any cost and not at the expense of fragmenting the best of what’s left: our last reserves of intact Nature, from which any future replenishment must draw.
And who in Western Maryland wouldn’t look at that Washington Post article from 2007 and not be resentful: it’s a near perfect dramatization, in real life of the feelings about a “rigged” political system at the beck and call of the wealthy and powerful, in this instance in a somewhat better cause than is often the case. We need a better process than that though, to give all citizens a fair voice, and Nature too, in siting alternative energy projects. Wasting nearly two decades of everyone’s time and energy is a loud declaration that we currently have a deeply flawed process.
For these reasons I oppose the project on Dan's Mountain and look forward to working to strengthen local, state, and federal laws to bring them into the full reality of our dual environmental emergencies, ones that are here right now.
Politics, Science and the Dual Environmental Crises in Maryland
I would be negligent in my duties as a citizen of Maryland if I did not call public attention to a very disturbing set of realizations: time and time again since 2007 I have heard stories told first and second hand, whispered with fear in the voices “that these conversations never happened”: I’m referring to those voices of public servants and scientists who have been intimidated into silence, or into carefully muted incremental objections on development proposals with the implied threat of the loss of their jobs.
I first heard the outlines of political pressure brought to bear to silence public environmental employees in 2007, on my way to a meeting with Governor O’Malley at the Governor’s Mansion in Annapolis. Not an insider’s meeting, to be clear: I had served on his Transition Team for Planning and Smart Growth and had written a good portion of its report – my draft was heavily edited, I must add; (that was a clue to the “climate of the times.”) It was a disturbing twist to the familiar plot line, of NIMBY’s blocking alternative energy progress. When I moved to Western Maryland in August of 2014, I heard more details, from different sources, which confirmed what I heard seven years before. And since then I’ve had “strangers” come up to me after I’ve spoken out at environmental meetings on topics very relevant to the matters here at hand (Bill Hubick’s presentation on the Maryland Biodiversity Project for example: https://www.marylandbiodiversity.com/ ) and what I was told was this: “we’re reading your postings and essays, but we can’t raise our voices or our heads, or they’ll get chopped off. We can’t even acknowledge you by Email. But keep it up. ”
So here’s the big question before the public in Maryland. The reports are pouring in that Nature is everywhere in trouble: England, Germany, rain forests in the tropics…from Brazil to the remotest stretches of Pacific Islands…the Arctic and Antarctic, but in Maryland there is no alarm, indeed no public discussion of our state’s fate. Now I am in no position to proclaim as an expert that either Maryland’s species are in trouble too, or that no, we’re the “exceptional state” because of the great stewardship of both political parties. I will say though, that before I got to know Bill Hubick and the Maryland Diversity Project, I publicly challenged him to state which way the species he was documenting via this worthy project were headed…and he reluctantly admitted: down.
But the atmospherics around this issue are loaded, or preloaded, towards if not outright “official optimism,” then a reluctance to discuss in detail why Maryland would be the exception to the dramatic trends announced in the 2018-2019 reports. It parallels what I have noted and written about many times before: the broad discussions of the political economy are missing in Western Maryland, especially from the college forums where one would expect to hear dissent on that broad matter, which bears so directly on political power: who has it and who exerts it in what forms. I can’t think of a better example than the power exerted by an international entrepreneur to obtain special exemptions for his business priorities in 2007. Because the topic is so little written about, I would be more than happy to more fully informed, but until then, I must write that my sense is that public employees in many sensitive environmental positions are not free to voice their concerns or even their full findings.
It’s time then, in my view, for public service scientists to band together and step forward collectively and speak to the press and the public about these matters. Time for Nature, and the fate of our democracy, is running out. The hour is very, very late.
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD
Postscript: In the interests of transparency, I want to note that during the months I have worked on this issue of Wind Turbines on Dan’s Mountain, I have also served on the Executive Board of the Western Maryland Chapter of the Sierra Club, and as the delegate from them to the state chapter’s Executive Committee. The issue of the wind turbines came to us from concerned citizens, and the statement above represents my views as a private citizen.
My views have been formed by my environmental experience and by reading, simultaneously with the emergence of this issue, Thomas Piketty’s magisterial book, Capital and Ideology, published this year, 2020. I mention it because I think it will turn out to be the War and Peace of political economy, a fresh look over the centuries and across the continents focused on the elites who hold power in regimes of great inequality.
More specifically, Piketty looks at them as property holding elites, where the top 1-10% own astounding levels of property and wealth, sometimes between 70-90% of the societies’ totals, and the bottom 50% own little to nothing. Going further, historically the right to vote was linked to property ownership (and gender), only being delinked fully in the late 19th and early 20th century in the West. Since the rise of Thatcher and Reagan in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, inequality has grown again, by leaps and bounds in some countries, piling up wealth in elite corners to heights not seen since the last decades of the 19th century, and prior to World War I.
The state of Maryland before my eyes fits very well into Piketty’s impressive schema: it’s a battle between the “mercantile elites” in the Republican Party vs. the “Brahmin (educated) elites of the Democratic party, with some overlap in ideology. For example, Governor Larry’s Hogan’s business holdings put him in the same shared corner of property rights, and power, as the Democrat’s Wayne L. Rogers in the drama of Dan’s Mountain. And Roger’s impressive biography carries him further into Piketty’s realm of globalized economic power, alienating working class voters all over the Western (and now Eastern democracies) by their home base parties’ shift away from their earlier post WWII egalitarian fiscal policies. It’s a shift to a form of technocratic elitism which left bankers high and prospering after the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 – and ten million American families foreclosed upon. Is a repeat or worse in the cards in the Pandemic world?
The way to bring Piketty’s insights home to Maryland, and NJ environmental history as well, is to consider my above comments on the NJ Pinelands Commission, which for once looked at the natural resources of the 1 million acres Pinelands, the largest undeveloped tract on the Eastern seaboard in 1979 (and still with that claim) not as real estate, property, but first as habitat, constrained, of course by the “takings clause” of the US Constitution. I hope to do some future writing looking at the Pinelands achievement as “Social Democracy for the Land”…that novel view (I’m not sure the Commission would see it that way itself) came under attack in the 1990’s, and the attacks are still going strong, as the Neoliberalism of both parties tries to dismantle the regulatory state and, using Piketty’s insights, create a view of property rights that borders on “sacralization.” That’s important for economic inequality as well as “Nature’s” inequality, because it also means the once high progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes which tempered the property elites from 1945-1980 are under assault; the low property tax rates (a flat tax, no matter the circumstances in most of the US) are enshrined...these dynamics now serve as a crucial part of the status quo of a “sacralized” property regime of vast inequality.
In Maryland, forests are in trouble, as are all remaining good habitats under the sway of local jurisdictions, because in our economic system, despite the environmental events and reports of 2018-2019, land and habitats are all still just real estate, and that powerful industry (add the builders and engineering firms) wants to keep it that way, and so far, in the power corridors of Annapolis, they look certain to succeed.
Editor’s Note from Sunday, June 7th: I sent the following note on additional research to some Western Maryland individuals on Saturday, the 6th:
This morning I have reviewed online the bios of all five of the current sitting MD Public Service Commissioners, all appointees of Governor Larry Hogan which began at the crack of dawn, his new administration Jan. 2016. My sense is all but one have good Republican biographies but are experienced in the field, not political hacks. Most are professionals in energy law and politics and public and private agencies, tilting towards private law firms and energy companies.Here's the thing: I cannot find a single bio of the five here who clearly mark themselves as on the environmental side or the general public interest side of energy...as opposed to the private power views of such matters. Simply not there. Disturbing. Two have a lot of experience with the nuclear industry.
Here are the names of the five Commissioners and a contact number: Chairman Jason M. Stanek (410-767-8073) ; Commissioner Michael T. Richard (410-767-8017); Commissioner Anthony J. O’Donnell(410-767-8072); Commissioner Odogwu Obi Linton(410-767-8710); Commissioner Mindy L. Herman(410-767-8027).
I recommend giving them a call and if you agree with my analysis tell them why the Dan’s Mountain Wind Turbine project is a poor location. And how the law was bent in 2007 with scientific testimony muffled or pushed aside. You’ll be breaking the protocol of how the PSC in MD does its “listening” to its citizens; if you get that, I would answer that our democracy was broken in 2007 by the intervention of power financial and political figures who got what they wanted and very quickly. We’re still living with the broken system of siting.
A Brief Reader’s Guide to the “Reports of 2018-2019.”
The IPCC Report from October, 2018: Climate Urgency
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate-report-2040.html
Insects in Trouble:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html
Birds in Trouble:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/2018-global-report-40-of-worlds-birds-are-in-decline/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/science/bird-populations-america-canada.html
Forests in Trouble