People who move to island communities from elsewhere often imagine their new lives will be simpler and more peaceful than in those places–usually an urban or suburban community–they have left behind. But nothing could be further from the truth. To be a hermit, you need your own island; the last place you should go to go to get away from your neighbors is an island community. City folk can choose to be anonymous and invisible; island folk never can. There is much heartache that could be avoided if newcomers to islands better understood this simple fact of island life.
I was reminded of this reality when the drama over the Fox Islands Wind farm on Vinalhaven took an unexpected turn recently. Most readers are probably familiar with the controversy over noise from this wind project, since news stories have appeared on the front pages of the Maine Sunday Telegram, Boston Globe and New York Times during the last year. But a little context might be helpful. The Fox Islands wind project, consisting of three 1.5 MW General Electric turbines is located on the second highest hill on Vinalhaven on a 73-acre parcel bought by a pair of islanders whose goal was to reduce Vinalhaven’s and North Haven’s dependence on fossil-fuel generated electric power, which the local electric coop had been buying on the spot market in yearly increments. The Fox Islands Electric Coop backed the project after experiencing big spikes in electricity costs between 2005-2007, and after George Baker, a seasonal resident of Frenchboro and Harvard Business School professor laid out a strategy whereby the Coop could finance and control the project locally without having to rely on the term required an outside investor.
As soon as the project began generating power in November 2009, some nearby residents complained about the noise from the turbines. The exact decibel level coming from the turbines is a matter of divided opinion from the experts in a proceeding currently pending before the DEP. But it is accurate to say that the neighbors who have banded together under Fox Islands Wind Neighbors group are sincerely and deeply aggrieved. Their peace and quiet has been impaired, their retirements have been interrupted, their property values, they believe, have been compromised and the overall community is deriving benefits at their expense.
At a recent Fox Islands Electric Coop board meeting, the most bitterly aggrieved opponent of the wind project had just delivered a 50-minute presentation on the noise issue to the directors of the Coop when he slumped over in his seat and quickly turned blue from a heart attack. One of the coop board members leapt up and began administering CPR chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to this neighbor and within a few minutes, got the opponent’s heart beating and undoubtedly saved his life. You could not make this kind of drama up.
This is quite literally a heart-warming story. But different people have drawn quite different lessons from this real life drama. To many of the network of wind power opponents, both on and off island, the lesson is that the controversy around wind power risks the health–indeed the very lives–of those who live near the turbines. The blogosphere fired up quickly with a post from the heart attack victim’s wife, “I feel that (he) gave his life the other night. He died for these issues, for trying to bring light to the truth. It was luck and grace that the efforts to bring him back were successful.”
But others draw the exact opposite conclusion from the story. To many islanders, the very nearly tragic heart attack at the Coop meeting reinforces the lesson islanders know in their bones: that an island community is like a lifeboat and no matter who your worst enemies might currently be, community members are all in the lifeboat together and have to make accommodations in tight circumstances. Your bitterest opponent aboard might have to save your life, so it is important to keep things in perspective.
We always hope that stories of this sort have a warm ending; that people on the lifeboat will all pull together to save each other. But we are complicated creatures. How do the individual needs of a few people in a lifeboat weigh against the collective needs of all the others on board? The small minority on a lifeboat that requires the rest of their ship mates to make a sacrifice for their well being might logically fear that the majority will decide to throw them overboard with or without a life ring and their fear may make them even more unreasonable. Those pulling the oars to bring the lifeboat into a safe harbor would undoubtedly never countenance such an extreme response in ordinary circumstances, but everyone’s patience is tested during the long days at sea–especially in March. In the meantime, the remaining passengers onboard scan the horizon for any hopeful sign before onboard civility is compromised further.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute in Rockland, Maine.