 to promote alternatives to fossil fuels. But Mr. Boone, who wields a
botanist's trowel and a debater's knife with equal ease, wants to slow them
down with community activism, regulatory action and legal challenges.
His crusade harks back to
the campaigns against nuclear power plants, toxic-waste dumps and dams on
scenic rivers that were building blocks of the modern environmental movement.
But the times, and the climate, are changing. With fears of global
warming growing more acute, Mr. Boone and many other local activists
are finding themselves increasingly out of step with the priorities of the
National groups like Greenpeace
and the Sierra Club used to uniting against specific projects are now united
for renewable energy in general. And they are particularly high on wind power
with the caveat that a few, but only a few, special places should be
environmental movement knows we have this urgent need for renewable energy to
avert global warming," said John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace
U.S.A. "But we're still dealing with groups that can't get their
heads around global warming yet."
Indeed, the best winds,
especially in the East, tend to blow in places that are also ideal for hiking,
sailing, second homes and spirit-soothing views. These include the Green
Mountains, the Adirondacks, the Chesapeake Bay, Cape Cod and the ridges of northern
Appalachia. Local opposition to unwanted development remains a potent force.
So when it comes to wind,
the environmental movement is riven with dissonance and accusations of elitism.
F. Kennedy Jr.'s very public opposition to the 130-turbine
Cape Wind energy facility proposed off Nantucket Sound has driven a wedge
between activists. Dan Boone's circuit riding against wind projects, while not
attracting the same celebrity notice, has exasperated many Sierra Club
compatriots even more.
Like Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Boone
says the areas he wants to protect are uniquely vulnerable. His family owns
property near the proposed projects, just as Mr. Kennedy's does near the Cape
But Mr. Boone says that
wind supporters are the ones pursuing their own agenda at the expense of the
"I'm not sure that
wind turbines in this region will significantly reduce the outcome of global
climate change or actually have any role," Mr. Boone said. "The very
limited benefit doesn't justify the risk of wiping out a lot of interior forest
leaders reject this argument.
"There's no free
lunch," said Paul Hansen, executive director of the Izaak Walton
League of America, a venerable sportsmen's group. " 'Not in my
backyard' is not environmentalism."
The Alleghenies are a big
backyard, with views that are both spectacular and problematic. Flowering
shrubs like shadbush and preening flowers like trillium are framed by oaks,
maples and longleaf pines. But intermittent industrial tree farming has
repeatedly denuded some mountainsides. On both sides of the border near here in
far western Maryland, second-home development is booming. The air has often
been fouled by the Mount Storm coal-fired power plant.
If Ned Power,
a wind-energy development company, puts up 100 or so turbines along 14 miles of
ridgeline near Mount Storm, wind-energy supporters say, how much does that
further spoil the landscape?
Kevin Rackstraw, a regional
manager of Clipper Windpower whose proposed 40-turbine project
in western Maryland has drawn Mr. Boone's fire, said opponents lacked perspective.
"Dan looks at all the
impacts of a given wind project," Mr. Rackstraw said, "but doesn't
say: 'If we didn't have wind, what would we have?' Coal. Think of the impact of
acid rain and mountaintop removal."
The Ned Power project is
just one target of Mr. Boone, 49, a former state wildlife biologist who now
works as a consultant. In interviews, he said he first focused on the issue
when working as a botanist on a study related to an early wind power project.
The environmental-impact statements, he said, were grossly inadequate.
Now he drives from Highland
County in western Virginia (where 38 turbines are proposed on Tamarack Ridge)
to Bedford, Pa. (wher