Jonathan Carter joins effort to curb wind farm siting atop peaks

HIGHLAND PLANTATION — Longtime environmental activist and wind-power supporter Jonathan Carter of Lexington Township joined forces this month with a grassroots coalition trying to stop sprawling industrial wind farms atop Maine's mountains.

Carter, a former Green Party gubernatorial candidate, is the director of the Forest Ecology Network, which was created to protect, preserve and defend Maine's native forest environment through public awareness, grassroots citizen activism and education, according to its Web site.

"We have a common goal," Carter said Thursday of FEN and The Citizens' Task Force on Wind Power, "and that's to make sure that Maine's energy policy will be executed in a way that will examine the issues from a science-based, and environmental and economical perspective."

Early Thursday night, Carter and task force members were to attend a meeting hosted by former Maine Gov. Angus King and former Maine Public Broadcasting Corp. Director Robert Gardiner at the Highland Plantation schoolhouse.

King and Gardiner, principals of wind power company Independence Wind of Brunswick, held the meeting with residents to discuss their proposed $250 million Highland Plantation Wind Power project permit application to put 48 wind turbines atop Burnt Hill, Briggs Hill, and Stewart and Bald mountains in Somerset County.

The turbines would be visible from Carter's farm and for miles around, he said.

"People come up here because they want to get away from their hectic urban environment," he said. "Seeing flashing strobe lights denoting wind turbines isn't Highland Plantation."

He said hikers on the Appalachian Trail through the Bigelow Mountain range would be able to see the turbines.  "They will be right in your face. I'm not against wind farms, but they've got to be placed right."

Carter, who has supported wind energy for more than 25 years, said he believes such farms belong offshore, or in a residential or community setting.

"That makes more sense, not these industrial wind farms that destroy the quality of place that Angus always talks about," he said of King.

"This isn't simply (not in my backyard)," Carter said. "These mountaintops are unique. They're rare. To destroy them is, in my thinking, extremely inappropriate and shortsighted."

That is also the opinion of task force co-chairs Monique Aniel of Mexico and Steve Thurston, a Roxbury Pond landowner affected by Independent Wind's Record Hill wind power project in that town. The task force has appealed the Maine Department of Environmental Protection's permitting in September of the project.

Aniel said the Highland project is the first in Land Use Regulation Commission jurisdiction being considered under Maine's Expedited Permit law, which allows projects to move forward with little oversight and reduced public comment.

"This law was passed behind closed doors without serious public input," Aniel said. "Wind developers — the very corporations who will reap huge profits from despoiling Maine's ridgelines and mountaintops — facilitated it."

She said the law needs to be repealed and replaced with an open and fair process that includes citizen participation.

"If the goals of the new wind law are realized, we will be confronted with 360 miles of ridgeline turbines and hundreds of miles of new roads and power lines," Thurston said.

Thurston and Carter claim that such work would involve clear-cutting 50,000 or more acres of forestland.

"It would completely alter Maine's quality of place," Carter said. "I don't think it makes sense to damage something environmentally for environmental good."

He said the wind projects were driven by money, not ecological sense.

"If this country can shut down some of its coal-fired and oil-fired plants because of wind power, I might be able to swallow this," he said.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com