“Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once stated that ‘The right to swing my fist end’s where the other fellow’s nose begins’. If the State of Ohio deems wind development a worthy prospect, then– at bare minimum — Ohio’s rural residents should first give consent and then receive compensation for the ‘bloodied noses’ from the loss of amenity pervasive wind development brings.”

“By creating siting guidelines that protect private property rights at the property line rather than forcibly donating unleased property to utility scale wind developers, each landowner can determine for themselves what their loss of amenity is worth to them…. Wind developers claim that such reasonable regulations raise the cost of wind energy. So be it.”

My name is Kevon Martis. I am the Executive Director of the Interstate Informed Citizens’ Coalition (IICC) of Blissfield MI.…

“This decision not only protects the Blanding’s turtle but also the staging area for millions of migrating birds and bats and the Monarch butterflies.” – Cheryl Anderson, PECFN 

In an unprecedented decision, Ontario’s Environmental Review Tribunal (ERT) ruled against the nine-turbine Ostrander Point project sited for a prime sensitive and environmentally rich area. Cheryl Anderson, the lead appellant on behalf of Prince Edward County’s Field Naturalists (PECFN), stated:

The Tribunal in the Ostrander Point ERT hearing has found that “the remedies proposed by Ostrander [Gilead] and the Director are not appropriate in the unique circumstances of this case.  The Tribunal finds that the appropriate remedy under s.145.2.1 (4) is to revoke (emphasis, Ms. Anderson) the Director’s decision to issue the REA [Renewable energy Approval]”.

The Tribunal decision says that no matter how important renewable energy is to our future it does not automatically override the public interest in protecting against other environmental harm such as the habitat of species at risk. 

“Bald and golden eagles are protected by state and federal laws. Slaughtering eagles is illegal, and nothing is ‘incidental’ or ‘unavoidable’ when it comes to enormous wind turbines.”

“Creating a vast imaginary population of eagles, avoiding true scientific research, falsely calculating an enormous, supposedly “sustainable” yearly harvest rate, and deliberately ignoring the huge eagle slaughter taking place around the wind farms really is fraud. The perpetrators should be prosecuted.”

[Editor note: This post completes Part I and Part II from last week.]

The word harvest connotes the reaping of editable crops to sustain humanity. As used by the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), “harvesting” is the killing of one of our most iconic species, one of our most magnificent raptors, by the “grim reaper” wind turbines.

Turbines supply some of our most expensive, unreliable, and heavily subsidized electricity, under blanket exemptions from the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws that are applied with unflinching severity to virtually every other industry. …

On May 6, 2016 the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and Department of the Interior announced a plan that would set massive industry “bag limits” (permission or license to kill) for an eagle population that in many areas of America no longer or barely exists. In the case of the golden eagle, most of this eagle harvest will come from migratory eagles that nest outside the Lower 48 U.S. states. This is Part II of a four-part series which began yesterday. 

Since 1997, when the Department of Interior’s Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) repository first disclosed that wind turbines were a major cause of eagle deaths, wind energy has increased its deadly footprint by more than tenfold into golden eagle habitats in the western United States.

The FWS’s Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (DPEIS) created for the Eagle Rule Revision completely ignored the many thousands of eagle carcasses and autopsy records that exist in the Denver repository. …