http://www.sightings.com/general3/dsff.htm
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50,000 New Cell Phone Towers For America's Wilderness Areas
By Alex Beam - Boston Globe Staff
The Boston Globe (8-30-00 pg F1)
Here is a different kind of summer hiking story: Not so long ago a group of
friends and I were ascending Mount Kearsarge, a not particularly challenging
2,900-foot peak in central New Hampshire. It was rainy and foggy. We had a
bunch of children with us and were planning to picnic on the summit, which
was obscured from view.
Imagine our surprise when we discovered who had arrived there first -- US
Cellular Corp., with a 180-foot-tall cellphone antenna tower. The
otherworldly forest of high-tech geegaws was footed firmly in concrete
blocks, otherwise we might have been tempted to cut it down.
The story of what happened to Mount Kearsarge is quite astonishing, and it is
one that is being repeated all around the country. The cellphone industry has
wired most urban areas and the nation's most-traveled highways so that Muffy
always can reach husband, Ralph, in his Jeep Explorer and remind him to bring
home that fresh arugula for supper.
Now the industry is adding 50,000 new sites to "fill in" the uncovered
tracts, which is why cellphone towers are becoming a common sight in state
parks and wilderness areas. Mountaintops all over New England are fair game.
In Massachusetts, the Department of Environmental Management has leased out
15 of its summit fire towers for cellular transmissions. On Mount Mansfield,
Vermont's highest peak, a summit trail has been closed for several years
because of excessive microwave radiation from a communications tower.
When it comes to siting one of these ungainly monsters, underhanded behavior
is the order of the day. The Society for the Protection of New Hampshire
Forests deeded the Kearsarge mountaintop to the state "upon the express
condition that the state will maintain said tract as a forestry and
recreation reservation for public use and benefit." But in 1997, in the
proverbial dead of night, New Hampshire's Department of Resources and
Economic Development let US Cellular throw up its gargantuan tower. One state
bureaucrat counseled that the tower be built without "a general public notice
and notification."
Soon after the tower went up, 1,000 local residents petitioned Gore
administration wannabe Governor Jeanne Shaheen for its removal. She blew them
off. Concord Monitor columnist John Skow, who lives near Kearsarge, calls the
tower "a huge, glittering one-finger salute from business greedsters and our
own state officials." (An un-gelded columnist at a serious American
newspaper? That's a story in itself....) Two citizens groups and the SPNHF
itself have filed lawsuits seeking to tear down the tower. They've lost in
lower courts, and the impeachment-depleted New Hampshire Supreme Court is in
no condition to hear their appeals.
Prodded by the Federal Communications Commission, the telecom industry last
year agreed to inform the Appalachian Trail Conference when it planned to
site a tower within a mile of the historic Georgia-to-Maine hiking path. But
at least seven such towers have been sited, and only one was reported to the
ATC. "There is a legal document requiring notification, but the industry
associations are not getting the word out," says David Reus of the ATC.
Thanks to the Republican Congress and the telecom-friendly Clinton
Administration, cell tower opponents hardly have a leg on which to stand. The
Telecommunications Act of 1996 says local authorities can review, but not
reject, cellphone tower proposals -- quite a dandy present for the wireless
industry. So far, attempts to strengthen local autonomy in tower siting have
failed.
Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative James Jeffords proposed
legislation in Congress that died. The Massachusetts Legislature passed a
similar bill that was not enacted. A proposed moratorium on the development
of Mount Kearsarge languishes in the New Hampshire Legislature.
The broad anti-community wording of the Telecom Act has provided a field day
for lawyers, and suits opposing cell towers have sprung up in almost every
jurisdiction in America. But no precedent-setting case has yet made its way
to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the towers keep going up. "They really are
changing these mountaintops," says Eleanor Tillinghast, an environmental
activist in the town of Mount Washington. "And once they change, they're
changed forever."
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