Editorial: Resolve tribal objections over wind project

Opinion

Thursday, January 7, 2010

"The Obama administration will risk forfeiting any claim to leadership in green energy if Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar does not quickly resolve the last sticking point in the Cape Wind plan: the poorly grounded finding by an Interior official that the wind turbines’ site on Nantucket Sound is significant enough to local Wampanoag tribes to be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.

On Monday, Salazar said he would meet next week with those involved to find “a common sense agreement’’ addressing the project’s impact on “historic and cultural resources.’’ A dose of common sense would be welcome indeed. It has been notably lacking from the moment last fall when Massachusetts’ historic preservation officer first agreed with the Wampanoags that more than 500 square miles of the sound should be eligible for national register designation. The new finding by a National Park Service official that the site is eligible for this status casts a shadow over new pipelines, dredging, trawling, oil rigs, or harbor construction anywhere in federal coastal waters.

The tribes complained that the wind turbines would interfere with their welcoming of the rising sun and might disturb prehistoric sites, now underwater, where tribe members might have once lived. 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."

Get the Story:
Editorial: Salazar should quickly resolve tribal objections to Cape Wind (The Boston Globe 1/7)

Also Today:
Officials push project along in bid for subsidies (The Boston Herald 1/7)