Yorktown Town Board Must Change Solar Law to Protect Woodlands - TAPinto.net
Mark Lieberman is the co-chair of the Yorktown Democratic Committee.
Our energy bills are too high, as everyone knows, and we need clean new sources of power to lower those costs and to fight climate change. Solar farms can help by producing reliable, renewable energy that reduces our reliance upon carbon-based fuel.
But the promotion of solar power here in Yorktown has ironically come at a significant cost to the environment.
The Yorktown Town Board has been encouraging the clear-cutting of heavily wooded land for the establishment of solar farms. It doesn’t have to be this way and we deserve better from our elected officials as we approach Earth Day.
The Town Board should declare a moratorium on clear-cutting woodlands for solar energy farms until more research is done. In the meantime, we can go ahead with solar farm proposal applications on already cleared land, parking lots, rooftops, etc. Just proceeding with these projects while further research is performed doesn’t seem like a difficult “ask.”
We are blessed with lots of woodlands in and around Yorktown. They are a self-sustaining community of organisms, from the soil to the tree canopy that continually recycles nutrients and promotes biodiversity. Woodlands also suck carbon out of our community and purify the air we all breathe. They provide a very wide range of benefits and must be protected – and it costs us nothing.
A solar farm installation proposed on a woodland site is expensive on many levels. When a developer installs large-scale industrial ground-mounted solar on a woodlands site, it is not only about the trees that are being removed. The developer is also removing root stumps and grading the site by stripping existing topsoil and vegetation and many species rely on healthy woodlands for their survival.
The tree canopy affects wind velocity, creates ground and air warming once the shading is removed, and also affects nearby water temperatures. These changes can result in increased damage from storms and the displacement of species. Trees are often planted as a windbreak to prevent storm damage.
Trees collect water, which reduces the potential for flooding. Councilman Tom Diana’s answer to this at the March 22 Town Board meeting was that 100 years ago Yorktown was primarily farmland; there were not many trees then, so why worry about trees now? But the problem with his comparing Yorktown in 2022 with Yorktown in 1922 is that he doesn’t understand that the farmland and crops themselves (if done properly) absorbed rainwater and greenhouse gasses.
Additionally, this was before all the development in the 1950s and 1960s that turned Yorktown into a suburban community where most of the farmland was converted to housing development, strip malls, schools, and paved roads and parking lots have all created runoff and the need for sewers. We went from a pervious geography to an impervious one as the town grew.
When the rainwater is retained by the woodlands, so is the topsoil which filters the water as it enters the aquifer. Cutting woodland trees for solar farms eliminates this filtering and will contribute to water pollution. This causes leaching of nitrogen into groundwater supplies at higher concentrations and causes an overall loss of nitrogen from the system. As the topsoil washes into the streams and lakes this may contribute to algae blooms.
Trees not only absorb rainwater they anchor the soil. The soil contains bacteria, fungi, and worms that maintain forest soil and prevent harmful diseases. “Erosion increases the amount of dust carried by wind, which not only acts as an abrasive and air pollutant but also carries about 20 human infectious disease organisms, including anthrax and tuberculosis,” according to Cornell University research. According to the Lancet, trees help prevent asthma and other respiratory diseases by filtering particles out of the air we breathe, which decreases our risk of respiratory illnesses, including asthma. Soil degradation may also lead to the growth of invasive species, a favorite concern of the Town Board when justifying a new development.
If you read “The Lorax” by Dr. Seuss to your children, you know that clear-cutting causes habitat loss for animals that depend on trees for burrows, nests, food, security from predators and other uses. When their habitats are disrupted, they often move closer to our homes looking for shelter and food. One example is the creation of new breeding groups for mosquitoes (according to research presented at the National Center for Biotechnology Information in 2016). The same source stated that Lyme disease increased with “forest degradation since the subsequent ecological changes led to a larger mouse population, and ticks get the Lyme disease bacteria from mice.”
Renewable energy is critical. Our woodlands are critical. We can have both.
While you can mitigate the removal of individual trees, you can’t mitigate the destruction of a woodland. Can the Town Board even guarantee that all mitigation requirements are being enforced?
There are acres and acres of treeless property, parking lots, and rooftops ready for solar panels. Please contact the Town Board and request a moratorium on clear-cutting woodlands for solar energy farms before additional woodland properties are targeted for destruction and we suffer the consequences.
source: https://www.tapinto.net/towns/yorktown/categories/guest-column/articles/yorktown-town-board-must-change-solar-law-to-protect-woodlands
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