The view from the Coastal Resources Management Council hearing room was clear, even if the logic presented was anything but. As I sat through the latest public discussion regarding the proposed cross-state submarine cables destined to tear through the floor of the Sakonnet River, a familiar, unsettling irony hung in the air.

We are told that these massive industrial installations — the undersea arteries of the offshore wind push — are the necessary price of progress. We are told this is how we save the climate. Yet, in that room, the very people who have spent lifetimes preaching the gospel of conservation, especially Save The Bay, found themselves in a contorted posture: justifying the mechanical destruction of vital benthic habitat in the name of “environmental protection.”

It is a paradox that is becoming difficult to ignore. The seafloor is not a blank canvas waiting for infrastructure. It is a living, complex ecosystem, the engine room of our coastal productivity. To support the systematic scarring of this habitat for high-voltage transmission is to engage in a form of ecological cognitive dissonance. It is, quite literally, the act of destroying the environment to save it.

During the hearing, I offered my own perspective on the sheer foolishness of Rhode Islanders allowing this destruction to proceed. We are facing the ruin of the Sakonnet River bottom for a project that, at least right now, will deliver not a single watt of energy to Rhode Island.

Even more alarming is the regulatory vacuum surrounding the proposal. There is no guarantee of meaningful remediation, no bond, and effectively zero accountability for the developer. Meanwhile, our local fishermen are left vulnerable, forced to stand by as their livelihoods remain susceptible to an industrial undertaking completely out of their control.

Watching so-called climate activists blindly support this project is, frankly, embarrassing. It reveals a dangerous narrowness in our current environmental movement — a tendency to prioritize global, abstract metrics while remaining willfully blind to the immediate, tangible destruction of the local ecosystems right under our keels.

When the “dog catches the car,” the thrill of the chase usually evaporates, replaced by the jarring reality of the collision. We have reached that moment. Our reliance on the “green energy” narrative has become so absolute that we are willing to sacrifice the integrity of the very places we claim to love. We are trading the health of our local estuaries for the optics of a global transition.

If we are truly environmentalists, our stewardship must be holistic. We cannot selectively ignore the devastation of benthic habitats just because the project arrives wrapped in the right rhetoric. If we continue to sacrifice the foundation of our coastal life to feed the infrastructure of tomorrow, we will eventually find that we have built a “clean” future on the ruins of a destroyed past.

The Sakonnet is a living ecosystem, not a utility corridor. It is time for those who claim to speak for the environment to decide whether they are truly protecting it, or merely rebranding its destruction.

John Travassos is a retired professional wetlands scientist and creator of The Invisible Handshake Project. Though currently residing in Warren, R.I., he grew up sailing, fishing, and swimming in the Sakonnet River as a resident of Tiverton.