After years of feeling unheard and overlooked, the county majority opposed to the project are soon to get an objective, meaningful review of their position. It’s a shame it took a lawsuit to get here, but that’s where we are.

If there’s anyone left in Highland who still believes in our county supervisors’ power to control wind utility development, this is your wake up call.

The issue of reliability is brushed aside. Cape Wind proposes to replace (Greenpeace citation) 75 percent of now-fossil-produced power to the area. Imagine what happens if the wind stops or becomes too brisk. In the former case, you had better have a source of standby power available immediately. In the case of too much wind, the effect is the same. The turbines are designed to "feather" to self-protect, but the result is the same as no wind at all.

I would like to think that the eagle was staking out its territory and, symbolically, making a statement, to wit: 'Don't tread on me!'

Uncertainty rules in windfarm politics. What is clear is that opponents come from the left and from the right -- and that neither side knows the true effects of 400-foot turbines built on 4,000-foot Appalachian ridges.

What are we in Highland to make of these statements and actions? Clearly, these men have a stake in seeing turbines on Highland’s ridges. Rather than responsibly considering the bird and bat impacts in any sort of serious way, they go to great lengths to stifle or belittle credible research recommending that wind turbines be put on hold until bat mortality can be understood and mitigated and until bird impacts can be studied.

No matter how much tax revenue the utility might add to county coffers, money cannot replace the hard-to-quantify scenic landscapes and cumulative effects of such projects in the Appalachian highlands.

Two of the three Highland County supervisors seem to have dismissed one of life's cardinal rules: There's no free lunch.

It raises a question Virginia and the nation must face: Should the wind industry continue to enjoy generous subsidies?

This sounds good, but he falls far short of meeting this standard when he assigns the NIMBY label to those who are raising questions about environmental harm. Apparently he feels there is no need to deal with specific issues when a sweeping ad hominem dismissal will suffice.

..modern commercial wind projects present their own set of environmental problems due to the massive scale and numbers of the turbines, the high wind-energy potential of our ecologically sensitive mountain ridges and coastal waters, and the absence of any reliable pre-development assessment process.