Don't You Know Who I Am?

Headline: Wind farm blows wrong note in cottage country: Anne Murray lashes out at 'imposing structures'.

Well, no - who are you? Someone who thinks obviously, they're sufficiently important to pull rank, I'd guess. Someone who obviously feels they have a great deal to say, and who doesn't mind saying it. Someone accustomed to saying what she thinks and feels, and who feels that she should be heard, that anything she says has a great deal of value to society. She is, after all, a celebrity, Canadian-style.

Anne Murray is angry and she simply will not stand for it. "It" being the perfect view from her Northumberland Strait cottage interfered with. Ditto for the scenic views available from the nearby golf course which she frequents. Quality of life, after all, is vitally important. Who could possibly argue with that? Certainly not the denizens of the area, representing the many wealthy residents living alongside Ms. Murray.

Most certainly not the elite of the nearby golf world whose use of the pristine grounds carefully tended by the Northumberland Links Golf Course would be irremediably sullied by the interruption of the groomed landscape through the installation of (shudder!) a proposed wind farm development hard by this ocean paradise.

The wind farm is scheduled to receive up to 27 units; 120-metre tall turbines. The turbines are planned to generate 30 megawatts, power sufficient for the needs of approximately 15,000 homes. To go on line in 2009. Ms. Murray protests the area's scenic beauty would be ruined for the fortunate individuals who have situated their 'dream homes' there.

"Her 'dream homes' will be the ruin of her precious coastline", retorts Jennifer Graham, coastal co-ordinator for Halifax-based Ecology Action Centre. For needless to say, as happens all too often, people with means have built their precious homes close to and upon environmentally sensitive areas.

And despite the pain of having to avert their aesthetic senses from the presence of those very installations meant to render a sustainable, environmental solution for the ongoing energy needs to power these homes, they should get accustomed to it, over time.

To halt their installation would halt progress in a local initiative to arrive at an integrated management strategy.

Ms. Murray: sorry, it's going to be in your backyard.