Clearcutting 40 acres of forest anywhere is a poor land choice to say the least, but the irony of it being done to create a place for a supposedly green energy system is extreme.

In addition, the land where this is being is proposed, located at the corner of Briggs Highway and Abromowitz Road, contains headwater wetlands that are kidneys of the Beer Kill, a high-quality trout stream that flows through Ellenville and meets the Rondout on the east side of the Village.

We as a community need to show up at our next town board meeting and express the irrationality of allowing 40 acres of clearcutting in the upland ecology of one of healthiest sub watersheds of the Rondout valley.

We need a community-wide plan for regional resilience, a better articulated vision of what we want for our local landscape and what we want future generations to inherit.

As a lifelong teacher of ecological design and planning, I find that starting from this long view will give us better results than letting the present market and existing ideas define what the goals of development are. We need a new model of growth – one based on greater local autonomy and independence that shapes our ideas for the future of our area and what happens with land use here over time.

A little background on solar and the placement of it: North of us, the Town of Rochester has a solar zoning law as does the Town of Marbletown, The Town of Wawarsing presently does not.

Here is an important section of the Marbletown solar zoning law, which they adopted;

“2) Large Scale Solar Energy Systems shall not be permitted to be constructed on areas of the first 4 prime farmland soil types as designated by the US Dept. of Agriculture. Ba, CnA, CnB, Te and Un.”

Like the Napanoch array was.

Right technology, in the right place, for the right reasons is what I want to outline.

First, we need an energy plan and an energy budget for the Rondout watershed and the municipalities within it, which is about 92,000 residents presently, spanning from Wurtsboro to Kingston.

How much energy do we use? Will the solar going in benefit us locally? We do not have an energy plan for local autonomy or grid independence – new terms in the American landscape.

If we allow 40 acres of ecological destruction in order to plop down solar panels on it, does it actually benefit us here? No, it does not, because all that electricity, which the panels will generate, is being sent into the centralized grid, which distributes that electricity throughout the entire northeastern corridor.

When Burlington, VT created their own public utility, as the state of NY is considering, and went 100% renewable with solar over the parking lot at the airport, small scale hydropower, steam-to-energy and bio-digestors, they did it so that they are grid independent. When the grid fails in the Northeastern U.S. Burlington, with 43,000 people living there, is still cranking free and clear with their own system.

Kingston is only about 24,000 and Ellenville only 4,200. It is easy for us to go grid-independent and actually enjoy a truly tangible benefit from the renewables we allow to come into our landscape.

If we allow the present proposal to go through to plop these maladaptive, tied to the centralized grid, heavy metal polluting panels, to be put where there once stood 40 acres of healthy, diverse, water cleaning, air providing, carbon storing, habitat creating, natural beauty forests and wetlands; future generations will not thank us. See you at the town board meeting April 17th, 108 Canal St., at 7 p.m. to air our concern about this project and request the town adopt a solar zoning law.

Join me this Friday 4/11 at Common Good for a film screening of Inhabit, a permaculture vision of what our future can look like. For further information: andrewfaust12@gmail.com, (917) 584-4588.