Before the Schwarzenegger sex scandal restored order to the media universe, national news coverage had been dominated by images and stories from the Mississippi Delta, where poor, rural communities were being sacrificed so that Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and the oil refineries in between them could be saved. Heavy snowmelt and the wettest April on record caused the river to rise to unprecedented levels that would have swamped metropolitan areas; as an emergency measure, levees were broken and the water allowed to spill into rural counties. Some towns will recover, others probably won’t.
What was amazing to me about the coverage was how selfless the people with the flooded homes seemed to be. At least through the national lens of CBS news, the consensus among the victims seemed to be: “yup, it’s heartbreaking, but what are you going to do?” There was no whiff of class envy (nine of the 11 counties that touch the Mississippi River in Mississippi have poverty rates at least double the national average of 13.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; this grinding poverty stands in sharp contrast to the more affluent, riverfront urban areas that were saved by blowing the levees). There was no rural/urban rift; nobody was wondering aloud why their farm was less important than a riverfront casino downstream.
Now I’m not suggesting that there should have been controversy. I think most of us, had we been charged with making this decision, would have looked at millions of dollars versus billions of dollars in damage, thousands of people versus hundreds of thousands of people displaced, and made the same call. Flooding the farms and forests and small towns to save metropolitan centers was the common sense thing to do.
But I couldn’t help but wonder if rural people in the Northeast (myself included) would have been so selfless. And I guess what’s making me wonder about this is the alternative energy debates that are going on all around our region.
Environmentalists tell us that unless we act to reduce our energy consumption and transition towards greener forms of energy, the planet is going to be irrevocably harmed. Some of the harm is projected – i.e. the ubiquitous global warming models we’re all familiar with – some is very real in the here and now, as in the mercury contamination of our lakes and acid deposition on our ridgetops from imported Midwestern coal smog.
Where I’m from in southern Vermont, you can pretty much throw a stone and you’ll hit someone who’s simultaneously anti coal, anti Vermont Yankee (our nuclear power plant) and anti large-scale-biomass, as opposition to the Beaver Wood Energy plant in Pownal attests. When asked to pick their poison, most of these folks hold up wind and solar as the answer. When pushed on the fact that neither of these sources are baseload forms of electricity, or cost effective, the default answer is usually to throw hydro into the mix. Not local hydro, of course (we like our salmonids), but Hydro-Quebec hydro. The James Bay is very far away, and while we may be peripherally aware that there are some Indians up there somewhere who didn’t/don’t like the idea of their land being flooded and their ecosystems altered, we think: well, there’s a greater good to consider here; there’s simply more of us down here in settled areas and WE NEED CHEAP POWER. In an abstract way, it’s the same story that’s being played out in Mississippi and Louisiana, just different players, different politics, a different scale.
While the native peoples in Quebec and their flooded forests are the direct analogy to what’s going on in Mississippi, some folks in the northern tier of our readership area may see some similarities here with regards to the Northern Pass transmission line project. All of that power from Canada has to get to us somehow, and some groups in New Hampshire are actively fighting a new proposed power line that would run through the northern half of that state. In northern Vermont and Maine, windmill developers are facing similar opposition to their green energy projects. What makes this opposition different from normal NIMBYism in both cases is the rural/urban resentment that I hear in the arguments. People in these areas resent the fact that their landscape is being scarred so that people in urban population centers in southern New England can have cheap electricity. As one post on a Northern Pass forum put it: “I don’t want someone taking my land so that people in southern New England can run their dishwasher for less money.”
And so I ask you to weigh in. What do you think about all this? Am I off base here in my comparisons? Do you live near the Northern Pass project, or near a proposed windmill site? (You New Yorkers in the Marcellus shale region weigh in, too.) If so, do you feel that your sacrifices are a part of our nation’s “green energy future” and part of a greater societal good? Or do you feel like your farms are being flooded so that Boston might continue to prosper? And if the later, is it realistic to think that alternative energy projects will ever be sited on a large enough scale to make a difference in the big picture?
Discussion *