Turco: Legacy lost
Times Argus | September 23, 2016 | timesargus.com
I hate industrial wind. Today is a sad day. With great pride Governor Shumlin and a small group of people way more important than me will make their way to the edge of the National Forest to cut a ribbon and dig a celebratory shovel of dirt. But there will be no celebration in my house. This is the end of a decade-long fight against the desecration of a black bear-filled wilderness in the Green Mountain National Forest. The place where 28,000 bear-clawed beech trees were found. The last of the best places. Quiet, remote and untrodden by the feet and wheels of man. The place where clean air and water are made and then gently flow down the ravine, over the mossy dripping rocks and through the stand of hemlock to the drainage below. Where once a heavy-horned whitetail buck crept, now, the first charges of the half-million pounds of dynamite will be detonated. It’s the only way into the land we set aside to be forever wild. These woods, non-renewable. Excavators, concrete, 18-wheelers and steel will make sure of that. The army of regulars have lost a very significant battle in a war. Our arms drop to our sides. Shoulders slump and faces cast downward. We were never silent, we were never just a few, this is not a case of too-little-too-late, but we were never important in the “approved to fast-track” world of industrial profit from dominating the planet. A small amount of satisfaction comes knowing that for a while there will still be people who remember a time when the common man had a place he could go to find peace, build his strength, and with rifle, fish pole and trap, feed his family from the land. Too bad generations that follow will look at the place and never know what was once there, their values and connection to Vermont shallow and broken. Just a bit-part of a whole nation speeding faster by the second to a state of existence where every lousy idea of the moment is quickly jumped into. Governor Shumlin, I’ve watched you lie and exaggerate your way along with regard to all this. Not one honest fact and zero science on your side. You carefully and deliberately fooled people blindly following and created a smooth path for you and your cronies to crush people like us who were in the way of the windfall of wealth. So you go right ahead and celebrate that thought today, but know this, what is being lost meant way more to us than the money and the pride you got from getting what you wanted meant to you.
Justin Turco
Ira, Vermont
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2016/09/24/turco-legacy-lost/