OF ALL THE gimmicks that opponents of Cape Wind have resorted to, working with the Wampanoag tribes to protect all of Nantucket Sound for cultural reasons wins the prize for sheer cynicism. The ploy seems intended to drag out the approval process long enough for some other tactic to emerge. But the opponents will have to work hard to find a mechanism for delay as laugh-out-loud bogus as this one.
The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, which opposes the wind-power project, must know full well that the federal government would never designate the sound as a tribal “traditional cultural property.’’ Nor should the government do so. Such a precedent could cast a legal shadow over any new pipeline, oil rig, or harbor reconstruction on any US coastline.
But opponents also know that their current effort to have the sound declared eligible for such protection could set off a lengthy new bureaucratic review process. This would add further months of delay to the biggest offshore wind project in US waters, one that has already passed muster in two extensive federal reviews of its impact on the environment.
The Wampanoag tribes say they want the entire sound placed on the National Register of Historic Places because they say their spiritual greetings of the sun require unobstructed views; Cape Wind’s proposed 130 wind turbines would get in the way. They also say the turbines could disturb the ancestral burying grounds that might be under the shallow waters of the sound. This concern has not kept one of the Wampanoag tribes, the Aquinnah, from proposing its own wind-turbine project on tribal land on Martha’s Vineyard - just a few hundred yards from the Gay Head Cliffs that have won designation as a National Historic Landmark.
The state official who has the power to remove this 11th-hour monkey wrench is the state’s historic preservation officer, Brona Simon, in the office of Secretary of State William Galvin. She should do so as quickly as possible.
Under the law, if Simon finds the Wampanoag claim eligible for designation, it goes to the National Park Service for further review. She should consider the motives behind it, and rule it off limits. This joint venture of the tribes and the anti-Cape Wind forces offers an unobstructed view of the lengths to which opponents will go to contrive a reason to block a project that offends them.
