A Delicate Balancing Act: Renewable Energy and Cultural Values
What if life imitated art, or in this case Avatar? In the Academy Award-nominated, Golden Globe-winning blockbuster, catastrophic threats to a distant planet’s natural and cultural resources are repelled, and most of the cherished heritage is saved. (The audience at the screening I attended vigorously applauded the outcome).
Here on earth, specifically Nantucket Sound, momentum seems to be heading toward an opposite result. Approval of the proposed Cape Wind farm off the coast of Nantucket could fundamentally alter a unique cultural resource, and establish a threshold for the development of alternative energy facilities with significant, national implications.
News coverage last month in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe indicated that a decision by Secretary of the Interior Kenneth Salazar about the project’s future was promised by this coming April. The article noted that Salazar was trying to balance the interests of the project developers (a private corporation), numerous advocacy groups, and the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag tribes (for whom the affected area is a sacred ritual and burial site).
The elements of that balancing act are at the core of the Historic Landscape Initiative (HLI), a part of the National Park Service, which is a division of the Interior Department. As part of its mission, the HLI “promotes responsible preservation practices that protect our nation’s irreplaceable legacy of cultural landscapes.” The HLI was created in 1989 to work with communities across the United States that have significant cultural landscapes that are not national parks. As HLI’s Coordinator (1992-2008), I worked with probably thousands of people and organizations to help them find that balance in diverse locations throughout the nation. However, HLI’s most important undertaking was creation of the Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes, issued in 1996. The Guidelines establish standards for the treatment of landscapes comparable to those we’ve applied for decades to historic buildings and archaeological sites, and include criteria relevant to this debate. (As a side note, the HLI Coordinator position still remains unfilled).
One key aspect concerns spatial relationship, in this case open space. As the Guidelines note: “allowing spatial organization and land patterns to be altered through incompatible development or neglect is not recommended.” The value of open space, sky and skyline has been lauded in the writings of New York Central Park co-designer Calvert Vaux, inspired that most American of 19th century art movements, the Hudson River School, and is today captured in the intoxicatingly beautiful and poetic seascape photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto. Cape Wind would include 130 turbines, each rising 440 feet above sea level, significantly altering the sound’s spatial organization – does that qualify as compatible development?
In Avatar, the characters fought to protect what the Guidelines would label traditional cultural properties; and, in the case of both Avatar and Cape Wind, those contested traditional cultural properties have ethnographic values encompassing culturally defining spiritual associations – how do we value those things and determine whether and/or how to protect them?
Let me be clear, this is not an anti-wind farm screed. It is critical that we develop alternative forms of energy. It is equally critical that we protect irreplaceable cultural resources. I am strongly suggesting the need to think more holistically about how the visual impact of wind turbines and other energy structures are integrated into important, iconic and irreplaceable landscapes, and those structures’ affect on natural, scenic, and cultural resources. This is also a recommendation for policy and decision makers, advocacy groups, energy developers and other parties to utilize the Guidelines as part of their planning to better inform the process, limit the contentiousness and get us closer to energy independence.