Letters to the Editor

Progress vs. rules

The oft cited rules of Cape Cod's many historical commissions always seem to rear their ugly head whenever progress appears inconvenient to some. The status quo ante becomes the standard, the baseline to which all new ideas have to conform. This approach to planning for our future flies in the face of everything this nation and this country has stood for and owes it greatness to. Far be it from me to advocate unbridled development of vast industrialized complexes on the Cape's sand dunes. But let's not kill every good idea for the next fifty years by subjecting it to the rules of the past fifty years.

What is the historical baseline to which Cape Cod must conform? What year in Cape Cod's history is year zero, the norm beyond which no one is permitted to transgress? Has it ever dawned on these commissioners that what they arbitrarily establish as the baseline for 2009 construction might have been considerred an abomination in 1809? The native American inhabitants of the Cape did not use Windmills, yet I am told that the Cape was full of them in the mid 1800's. It accompanied a population growth from a few thousand to 25,000. That technological progress was OK. Blacktopped highways were not exactly what I understood the Pilgrims to be traveling when they stopped here before settling in Plymouth. We have blacktopped every one of those cow paths of our ancestors here on the Cape for better or for worse. That too is technological progress not historical perversion. Meanwhile our population has grown from 25,000 to a quarter million and our living standards have multiplied by a similar ratio. And so, today's wind turbines are a bit taller than the old wind mills, and they generate 5000 HP not 3 or 5 Hp. But look at the telephone transmission towers which dot the landscape and seem to be quite acceptable replacements for the old forest department lookouts that we used to spot forest fires with in days of yore. Yes, we do like our cell phones to work wherever we go!

We have allowed our national technological progress to take care of our societal needs, population growth, energy, sanitation, communications, travel, largely without any hard and fast rules except for public safety. We have wisely excluded certain regions of the land from such development to preserve wild life and the ecology. But even in those regions we have not hesitated to permit non-destructive techology to take root. Meanwhile we have learned over the past hundred years how our environment is impacted by our technological advances and we are beginning to curb and rectrify some of the most glaring infractions that our past ignorance brought with it. That is why wind turbines and solar panels are becoming a necessity if we want to sanitize our air and curb our insatiable hunger for more fossil fuel energy.

That is why I salute both Mr. Jim Liedels and Mr. Matthew W. Keough's letters in Sundays's Cape Cod Times. That is till I re-read Mr.Keough's last sentence, his punch line, three or four times and concluded that your editorial or printing staff did its best to scuttle the whole message by omitting one little word "NOT": To whit: "CHANGE SHOULD NOT BE FEARED AND FOUGHT, BUT ENCOURAGED AND NUTURED". Thanks Mr. Keough, no thanks to the printers!

Hansjoerg Stern, PE, Brewster, MA 02631