Cape & Islands News

This I believe

The Vision, not the View
Arrayed against this vision are many good, gifted and privileged people who use their influence, financial wherewithal, and political connections to try to scuttle the first off shore wind farm in the nation

By Bill Eddy, Falmouth 

In 1967, when I was twenty-one, I attended a party on Martha’s Vineyard where the band I was helping to manage was asked to play. For two hours I sat on a couch listening to the music, watching the people and occasionally scratching the neck of an English Springer Spaniel named Freckles. On the other side of Freckles sat Robert F. Kennedy, his owner. From time to time the two of us shared our thoughts about the music, about our lives, where we were headed.

A year later, on June 5th, 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy was shot.

Two months later, following my graduation from Yale, I moved to East Harlem in New York City. A group of laity and clergy had formed an organization called “The 100 Worst Buildings of New York City.” I joined their efforts. Our mission was simple: to restore the heat and hot water in buildings abandoned by their owners. Our goal was clear: to empower the tenants living in these buildings to take the buildings over and to restore them, to begin the rebuilding of their neighborhoods and their lives. The success of the work depended on the cooperation of committed people living in the buildings, people from many churches and synagogues, private developers, bankers, city, state and federal officials, even members of some street gangs. But mainly the effort was driven by the hopes and dreams of the least advantaged compelling the rest of us to listen and to act.

Now, almost thirty years later, as a parish priest, I look back and trace the beginnings of a career dedicated to a type of social change that evolves over time, a blending, if you will, of the urgency that arises within a political and social framework coupled with the patience and persistence of a spiritually driven vision. Words attributed to King Solomon, as found in the Book of Proverbs, have always held meaning for me: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

The vision I first received came through a man I sat with once while listening to a band at a home on Martha’s Vineyard. The vision as it has evolved has been shaped by the many thousands of people I have met along the way, mainly people in churches and community groups who have dedicated their lives to bringing about social change.

I now work with several hundred people to help build a wind farm off the shores of Cape Cod, the place where I live. In my mind’s eye I look out over Nantucket Sound and picture a flotilla of tall ships, their masts faintly etched on the edge of the horizon. The wind farm, when built, will absolutely and definitively change the way we live and how we view our world and ourselves.

The wind farm will have as much right to be on Nantucket Sound as any cruise ship lying off Oak Bluffs or any fishing boat plying the waters off Hyannis. Navigating in and around the wind farm will present less of a challenge than going through Woods Hole or docking in Vineyard Haven or visiting the beautiful harbors of Cotuit and Osterville. Birds will fly around it, and the fishing will still be good, perhaps even better. But most of all, it will be producing our power.

Arrayed against this vision are many good, gifted and privileged people who use their influence, financial wherewithal, and political connections to try to scuttle the first off shore wind farm in the nation. They mainly fear the view of a wind farm off their shores. They also fear the change such a project represents, even when many of them know, deep down, that this would be a change for the good on every level. They, who in the larger world are often the masters and agents of change, fear being changed themselves. Ironically, the fears, the lies and the distortions that they have spread have in fact caused them to become, themselves, spiritually paralyzed, distanced from their own values. They say, “We are for environmental responsibility, for wind farms even, but not here.”

Perhaps to justify their aversion to change, even change for the better and for the common good, I often hear sentiments like this: “I look out over the waters of Nantucket Sound. So much has changed in my life. So much has been lost. But this view remains unchanging. It is, for me, a source of peace.”

Is this what we mean by peace? Or is this sentiment really nostalgia, that most seductive of emotions that attempts to replace a challenging and present reality with an imagined past and a more comforting, private future? The real world is changing before our eyes: waters are rising, storm winds are intensifying, nations are reeling, whole communities are lying in disarray. Across the world people are anxious about their lives and about their common future. Who can afford to retreat to a place in one’s mind where all seems unchanged, under control, as it once maybe was?

Long ago, Robert F. Kennedy sought the truth about things. As a result he possessed the capacity to change his mind. He changed his mind about a war in southeast Asia. He changed his focus from working exclusively within and for the more secure and stable groups of a political establishment to working within broad movements of people seeking justice and inclusion and a better society for everyone.

It is thus with a sense of gratitude and not nostalgia that I think back to a summer’s night so long ago. I would like to think that were I to sit again with Robert F. Kennedy he would be quietly pleased to know how deeply within the hearts of so many thousands of people here on Cape Cod and across the Commonwealth we have taken on his way of viewing the world, most especially now, and in the very place where not only he and I, but so many others, once briefly met. His vision still represents an ongoing legacy to a whole generation of people. Why should the promise of his legacy not lie within our sight?

To build this wind farm, in Nantucket Sound, now, would seem as a profile in courage on the ocean’s edge.

William Eddy, an Episcopal priest, lives in Falmouth and works in Weymouth. He is the president of Cape & Islands Self-Reliance and a founding member of Clean Power Now.

He built his first wind generator in 1976 to celebrate the bicentennial of the nation.