The Sound: A precious place

When members of the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation came to the Tilden Arts Center at Cape Cod Community College in West Barnstable to receive public comment regarding the impact on historic sites that the development of a wind farm in Nantucket Sound might have, I sat for more than an hour and listened. The project, which, if approved, would lead to the construction of 130 wind turbines, each 440 feet high, on Horseshoe Shoal, has been the subject of controversy for a decade on the Cape - and last week's meeting was no exception.

At first, I felt paralyzed by what seemed to me the truly surreal nature of the endeavor.

Here we all were, sitting in a big room on a rainy Cape afternoon, practicing the human audacity of imagining the future of the sea and trying to argue for one destiny over another, as though we own or control it.

The focus of the day was historical preservation, and it struck me as odd in the extreme that no one laid down a basic definition of what that meant, so that we could weigh opinions in the light of com­mon language. I kept thinking of an historian at Mount Holy­oke College in South Hadley who had once put it to me in this way:"History is the record of human activity in the con­text of time."

In that light, preservation of place based on historical sig­nificance is not a line or arc but a great circle, and asks that we look not just backward but also forward, and inward and out.

There is the history we know which needs to be preserved - the presence and spiritual significance of native peoples, the contributions and con­quests of our forbears, the lives and"nations"of other creatures - bivalves and birds, marine mammals and mollusks, fish and the smallest of flies.

With that history we rei­magine the origins of the land and how the sea shaped it, and molded us - the earliest human inhabitants, the later Euro­pean transplants, the origins of a nation that would become the richest on earth, with an appetite for seemingly endless consumption based not on just on need but increasingly for entertainment and distraction.

From that vantage, historical preservation discloses human intention for the future as much as human experience and impact in the past.The debate last week over Cape Wind had to do with at least two different visions of interpreting history and extending intention into the future - one that maintains that our need for forms of energy other than petroleum outweighs everything else; the other a belief that Nantucket Sound ought to be to the greatest degree possible held inviolable, even sacred.

But ultimately the afternoon was not as much a debate over historical preservation as it was a contest between two human activities. It was a competition between industry and commerce on the one hand and memory and continuity on the other.

Cape Wind supporters point to potential energy savings, though whether those cost benefits will materialize as promised has been challenged.

Those who want to preserve the Sound point to its histori­cal significance, the perceived aesthetic, spiritual and environ­mental threats of the project and the questionable viability of its completion, though their resis­tance has been criticized, too.

The debate represents two sides that will never be made one - no matter what deci­sion the federal government reaches. For at its heart the irresolvable conflict arises out of two different approaches to history, not to mention two different experiences of what Nantucket Sound is and means. The Cape Wind project presents the Sound as mere location, the locus of a resource to be exploited for commercial and industrial purposes.Those who want the Sound reserved from development hold it as "place,"a living presence that carries the authority of indi­vidual and collective memory.

It is simple enough to see this as true for the Indians and for those who are focused on the origins of the colonies and the nation, but this power also is the fuel for the passionate work of individuals for whom the Sound represents the core of living memory - of family, of legacy, of a transcendent nature that is made manifest in the water, wind, sand and sun, and all the creatures who abide there.

In this way Nantucket Sound is to many Cape Codders what Appalachia is to those who watched the coal industry tear the mountaintops down and the loggers the forests, or what the Great Plains mean to those family farmers who watched agribusiness drag the topsoil away by overworking the megafarms, farmers who themselves had been convinced by industry of the value of working the ground to dust only to learn that it would take a century to undo the damage.

To these farmers, the land is life and identity, come what may.To many in Appalachia, the mountains are the contours of a living body of history and family. To fishermen and all those who cherish this strip of sand that defines the edge of the continent, the ocean and the Sound are embryonic in its importance.

For the human species, the seas are where memory begins and epiphany dawns.

The revelation is this: These waters are where we live and move and find our being, over and over, from one generation to the next.This is the precious place that nature has given us as grace.

This space, those unpre­dictable shoals, these waters - sometimes seemingly trans­formed to diamonds under sun and wind, only to turn on us, dangerous in dark hours and ominous storms - should be kept unobstructed and clean, because the epiphany of his­tory here remains: The Sound is more than commerce, larger than industry and greater even than innovative human edifice.

The Sound represents the his­tory that memory enlivens and love of place holds dear.These waters cradle the gifts we owe to the history of our children, the past that is yet to be.

North Cairn's Nature column runs every Sunday. She can be reached at ncairn@capecodonline.com.