Opinion: Your presence matters for Fearing Hill Vote

To the editor,

Stopping at a garden plant stand for tomatoes and black eyed susan, I followed the sign to the back door to pay. Lucky me — past the gate, a small lush garden brimmed with feeders bustling with all happy wildlife. 

The good couple and I chatted while carefully loading plants atop my signs reading, “Don’t Kill Fearing Hill.”

“Funny,” the gentleman said, “I just asked my buddy about Fearing Hill. The fellow said, ‘Oh, that’s all over’.”

NO.

“It’s not all over,” I said.

The final Planning Board vote on Monday, June 24 looms over Fearing Hill, threatening another barren solar field of steel and metal, twice the size of Tobey Road. New owners, RWE, a goliath coal mining/burning corporation, polluted Europe for 100 years. Now greenwashing North America, RWE typically erects 100 to 150 megawatt solar utilities. But for 5 megawatts, RWE will cut Fearing Hill in half, installing 14,000 panels up against our Land Trust’s forest walking trails. 

Beloved Fearing Hill habitat took 10,00 years to transform from a 92 feet high mound of glacial grind into a rich forestland watershed distributing pure filtered, mineralized waters to the Weweantic and Sippican Rivers, surrounding meadows and wetlands, critically supplying our household wells. RWE will engineer-erase glacial contours, including the still visible Wampanoag Ancient Way. Once forest-filtered rainwater will run over panels coated with hydrophobic and anti-reflective chemicals that years of direct sun and increasingly intense storms will likely degrade. Now or then, RWE won’t test panel run-off or soil for dangerous nanoparticles reaching our water.

Water is life. Vote No.

Annie Hayes