Sears Island - Press Herald strains, but just doesn't get it out.

To shine a light, is to cast a shadow, it is said. Maybe it is a reluctance to illuminate those shadows that has kept the Portland Press Herald clinging so determinedly to its course of refusing to recognize public dissent to Governor Baldacci's Sears Island plan.

Even when it is playing out in the courts, the Maine Sunday Telegram is as silent as if it had lost its telegraphic code key that it taps out the news with. The Press Herald's voice is quite stopped up too, when it comes to news of those that would protect Wasumkeag , the beautiful wild island estuary complex.

Some of the editors and reporters there in the PPH/MST have grown old with their Sierran friends. Are Clubbers, themselves.

Questioning the partition of Sears Island? Why, that would be questioning the decision, of local Club leader Joan Saxe. One simply doesn't insult the honor, the decency and judgement of this Cape Elizabeth doyenne over the accusations of some wild riff raff from Rockland or worse.. Not in the pages of the Prtland Press Herald.

For it was Joan who sat through the many meetings of the Sears Island Joint Use Planning Committee as it wended its way through first its Joint use Plan, and then the line by line details of the perpetual conservation easement at meeting places in Searsport and occasionally in Augusta.

But it was a silent sitting, as Saxe peacefully dozed away the dreary hours of negotiations.

Meanwhile her henchperson Becky Bartovics -putatively representing the Penobscot Bay Alliance, but in actuality, given there IS no such Alliance, beyond a mailing list of donors and an executive director who occasionally pens the odd letter to an agency; in actuality, I say, Becky was effectively and hence inappropriately the voice of both her Alliance and the Sierra Club at the MDOT's Joint Use meetings. - while never consulting the thousands of members in the Maine Chapter of the Sierra Club -not once - during the years of negotiations with the MDOT's and industry's skilled negotiators.

Too much work. Too expensive, the Leadership intoned. Why harass Club members over a minor (MINOR?) thing like pi**ing on three decades of hard-fought Sierra Club precedents keeping the wild island whole and safe.

Like freely surrendering to the industrial hordes hundreds of acres of forest, meadow, cliffs, streams, beach, cobble & eelgrass.? Whatsa big deal?

Listen: do you hear that tiny hiss at the edge of hearing? It's the sounds of the late great John Muir, spinning, spinning, spinning in his grave.