Offshore wind is a desirable, green source of power needed to replace fossil fuel.

But wait. Green is only as green as what it does. Searsport is being considered as a port for assembling Goliath floating wind turbines. The logical place in the harbor is Mack Point, a post-industrial site with a loading dock. An alternative site, Sears Island, is an unspoiled 900-acre island of forests, moss-carpeted woods and wetlands, coyotes and deer, surrounded by a shoreline walk and submerged eel grass beds, nurseries for juvenile fish and shellfish. To date, 224 species of birds have been documented on the island, 47% of all bird species recorded in Maine.

It makes no sense to even consider Sears Island as a place to develop. The port would require clear-cutting forest and removing yards of soil to build a long peninsula into the bay for loading barges. Dumping all that soil would destroy the marine nurseries, not to mention unhinge the balanced ecosystem of a darn nice island.

Birds would avoid the island for nesting and raising young. Destroying a luxuriant Garden of Eden will not reduce harmful carbon pollution. Those same trees remove carbon from the atmosphere. If we cut down the forest, we are sawing off the limb we cling to.

Mack Point is superior for a wind assembly port. It would turn a brown space into a green energy port. A win-win.

Cloe Chunn
Waldo

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