I went to protest Governor Shumlin’s ribbon cutting of the Deerfield wind project in Searsburg. Our public land was given over to a foreign corporation to frack and blast a mountain apart. Four miles of continuous blasting with an average cut of 5 feet deep; a road as wide as a two lane interstate on the ridge top and blasting as deep as 31 feet in the areas that will hold the turbine pads. These pads will require up to a million lbs. of concrete and steel. It will forever change the eco-system, all wildlife habitat, the very hydrology of the mountain and surrounding watersheds.  A irrevocable mountaintop alteration that will change the micro climates on the ridge. It has pitted neighbor against neighbor and the U.S. Forest Service is complicit.
It will destroy more land for the transmission of a power that not only relies on unreliable wind, but on fossil fuels itself. It’ll do nothing to stem global warming.
Dhyan Nirmegh
Starksboro