High Voltage, High Tension

"Talking about property values around here without the view is like talking about property values on Cape Cod if you take away the ocean," says Til Hazel, the legendary developer.

Moreover, while heartfelt pleas regarding the sanctity of nature are all well and good, hey, this is Washington. Some significant portion of this land was paid for the old-fashioned way -- by lobbying, consulting, advising and deal-making. Thus, the area is full of people who can fight Dominion on its own ground, with data, science and law. In January, hardly a week went by without yet another highly researched opposition report landing in the in-box from somebody like Mitchell S. Diamond, a Loudoun County resident who for years was vice president in charge of an energy group at Booz Allen Hamilton, the global strategy and technology consulting firm.

The Deep Battle

Early last month, a new computer model arrived at Dominion, reports John Smatlak. It produced startling results. "We got the latest update on the annual transmission load flow. The difference was very significant." All of a sudden, a route longer than the one initially sparking the resounding clash with the people of the Piedmont showed up as being "electrically comparable." It is shaped like a fishhook, dipping well south along the Rappahannock River, not straight across the Northern Piedmont. And the new proposal largely traces existing transmission lines. "The areas are already damaged somewhat," Smatlak notes . So it now has become Dominion's "preferred" route.

As before, Dominion has splendid reason for optimism that it will prevail. Key decisions will be made by the State Corporation Commission in Richmond or the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In the name of allowing these bodies to consider the broad greater good, both are well-insulated from popular opinion or direct voter intervention.

Yet there is no reason to think the battle has ended.

The new path goes across the dairy farm of Ken and Pam Smith of Remington, who help other working farmers join them in putting land in conservation easement. When they take you to a high point of the 2,300 acres they work, 520 acres of which they own, they talk about the time they thought about building a new house for themselves right by the cherry tree on this ridge.

He: "But we couldn't bring ourselves . . . " She: " . . . to disrupt it . . . " He: " . . . to desecrate this land with a house."

They are furious that Dominion wants to add additional power lines to this land they couldn't even see disfiguring with a new house.

They are not alone. "This is a fight to the death!," Fauquier Supervisor Ray Graham last week told a Piedmont Environmental Council informational rally.

"We still don't understand what this power line is for," says Miller of the PEC, which serves nine counties in the Piedmont and has vowed to stay the course. The PEC has long argued that Virginia land is being sacrificed to Dominion's real agenda of finding ways to route its cheap energy to lucrative markets in the Northeast. Dominion replies that it wants to prevent rolling blackouts in Northern Virginia by 2011.

That's why, if past is prologue, this clash is not going away.

As the renowned cultural analyst Leo Marx noted in "The Machine in the Garden," it is about "a strong urge to believe in the rural myth along with an awareness of industrialization as counterforce to the myth." We believe that "access to undefiled, bountiful, sublime Nature is what accounts for the virtue and special good fortune of Americans," he writes.

We are bound up in this conflict to this day. Our most fashionable foods and fibers are ones that are "natural." Our deepest concerns about advanced technologies such as cloning, genetic modification and stem cells revolve around what is "natural."

On top of this, how you feel about the abrupt appearance of any Machine -- like a power line -- in any Garden -- like the Piedmont -- is based on whether you believe change inevitably equals progress. Our most knock-down, drag-out, hair-pulling fights are over competing visions of a Promised Land.

The problem is the way the armies in this millennial battle fail to recognize its outline in the arguments of the opposition. This failure is why environmentalists and preservationists are stigmatized as elitists who assign no value to car-dependent young families who see their Loudoun County townhouses as a crucial step up the ladder to their own progress and promised land.

It is also why the spreadsheet warriors have historically been blindsided when the debate over their seemingly rational proposal moves out to a far larger and, they believe, grossly unfair arena -- one that takes into consideration calculations of the heart.