Russian roulette, Cape Wind style

There is a face-off brewing between two federal agencies over the fate of birds in Nantucket Sound, centering on the Cape Wind energy project. At issue is whether the U.S. Minerals Management Service defers to the cautionary advice of its expert peer, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, or will it ramrod the Cape Wind project forward, driven by political considerations?

Cape Cod sits like a net across a primary migratory route for many birds. This route accounts for the rich variety of species that visit the Cape and Islands. Fish & Wildlife's strong recommendation to halt the Cape Wind review until critical missing information is provided was spot on. That agency's highly unfavorable report card on Cape Wind's potential effect on birds surfaced earlier this year in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the massive project.

In calling on Minerals Management to suspend its review, Fish & Wildlife said the information Cape Wind has collected on birds is "totally insufficient." The agency has repeatedly said there should be at least three years of continuous monitoring to understand how birds use Horseshoe Shoal, the site where Cape Wind wants to put 130 wind turbine skyscrapers. For six years, Cape Wind has refused to collect the information, insisting that token snapshots in time can stand in for scientific diligence.

Meanwhile, Minerals Management seems to have reached the absurd conclusion that the lack of bird data translates to a lack of bird impacts. The limited data that do exist, however, raise real concerns about the wind plant's effects on birds, particularly endangered species. Roseate terns are at exceptional risk. They exist in dangerously low numbers, and most of them breed in the narrow coastal area between Long Island and Monomoy Island off Chatham.

Cape Wind's industrial proposal courts violation of both the federal Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Some in Congress have noticed. Congressman Nick Rahall, D-WV, chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources, sent a strongly worded letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, noting that, "concerns have been raised that the draft EIS on the Cape Wind Energy Project may be deficient in its consideration of the effect of the project on bird and bat species."

So why would Minerals Management, the agency in charge of the Cape Wind permit decision, ignore what Fish & Wildlife has been saying since 2002? Perhaps Minerals Management, in its haste to approve an offshore alternative energy project, will try an end run around the shortage of data by taking a "build-it-now, fix-it-later" approach. MMS plans to depend on 'adaptive management' in the event that Cape Wind kills too many birds. This term is bureaucratese for trying to clean up later after creating an environmental mess.

The fallacy of adaptive management in remedying bird kill is evident. At California's Altamont Pass, thousands of birds are slaughtered by spinning wind turbine blades every year, despite efforts at adaptive management. If this technique does not work for land-based wind, how could it work for an offshore project like Cape Wind? Considering there would be no way to accurately count how many and what kind of birds collide with turbines, there would not even be a rudimentary basis for an adaptive management plan, assuming it were feasible at all.

Perhaps Minerals Management plans to fall back on "habitat restoration" to make up for Cape Wind's bird kill, and is assuming that larger numbers of replacement birds can be hatched elsewhere. Cape Wind will pay a portion of the cost to restore Bird Island in Buzzards Bay for tern nesting, but this project has been slated for years, well before 'compensatory mitigation' plans for Cape Wind emerged. Isn't Cape Wind's late-comer involvement simply a convenient excuse to turn a blind eye to the terns that will be killed by Cape Wind's turbines?

And what about piping plovers? Even less is being done to ensure the safety of these birds, another "species on the edge" that nests in large numbers on the nearest land mass to Cape Wind - Popponesset Spit.

In the apparent hurry to permit the Cape Wind project this year, Minerals Management seems poised to ignore the Fish & Wildlife Service. Citizen action is needed to get the message across to Minerals Management: "Proceed with caution. Do not play 'wind turbine Russian Roulette' with endangered species. Move Cape Wind elsewhere, out of harm's way!"

Minerals Management should act now to select an alternative site for Cape Wind outside of Nantucket Sound through a process that involves the purest of citizen action - consensus. Make your voice heard today by e-mailing C. Stephen Allred, assistant Interior Secretary for Land and Minerals Management, at C_StephenAllred@ios.doi.gov.

Susan Nickerson is executive director of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.