Photo by Ellen Miller

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Forests, fishing and now wind!


It just never ends…

After living through the exploitation of the spotted owl as a surrogate for stopping scientifically sound management of first Federal, and then private and state-owned forest lands, I should not be surprised that 20 years later, anti-everything activists would rule the day.

Recently three wind energy projects in the Pacific Northwest were cancelled due to the developers’ frustration with wildlife officials’ demands to protect species, not to mention the millions of dollars wasted on preliminary wind farm activities.  Southwest Washington Wind Energy

In Southwest Washington, four public utilities cancelled a 32-turbine wind farm on state-owned forestland due to requirements to shut the windmills down during daylight hours for six months to protect the marbled murrelet, a seabird listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. 

Environmental concerns also led developers to cancel two wind farms on private land in the Steens Mt. area of Southeastern Oregon.  Steens Mountain

Environmental activists used the marbled murrelet and the spotted owl to shut down forest management on Federal forest lands in the 1990s.  A large spoonful of sugar is definitely needed to buy into the plight of the murrelet and the need to stop forest management or windmills.

See, the marbled murrelet is a seabird.  That means the birds spend most of their life at sea.  They only come ashore to nest and reproduce.  However, the murrelet doesn’t just come to the beach, these birds fly 60-70 miles inland looking for a suitable nest site.

That means murrelets fly over roads, industrial development and metropolitan areas up and down the I-5 corridor.  Renewable (so-called clean) energy developers have to accept the theory that although, murrelets fly over all sorts of human progress, they will shrivel up and go extinct if they have to fly over a windmill in the daytime.   We won’t even mention the hundreds of thousands of marbled murrelets in Canada and SE Alaska…



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