The flooding this past summer pulled back the curtain on the vulnerability of our local farmland resources and viability. Responding to what was deemed a crisis, the community, local lawmakers and the governor’s office swiftly responded with more than $20 million of relief aid for our farmers.

Meanwhile in Northfield, some of the most valuable farmland in Massachusetts, or the world for that matter, that incidentally did not have much flood damage, also will get a lot of state-sanctioned money. Acres of our most prime farmland will be converted to solar panels that will significantly reduce its agricultural usefulness, and after the panels are removed, the land will have been permanently damaged.

In another town, Wendell citizens are fighting to save forested land from a gigantic battery storage project that will pull energy off the grid from power lines fed by gas or nukes. The Healey administration and her agencies sanction the project to such an extent that it calls this green energy, and is bullying Wendell via the attorney general’s office by using an archaic part of the state’s zoning law to shut down attempts by the town to protect itself as it sees fit.

Soon the Department of Public Utilities will lower the boom and say that the project should go forward because it can be called a “public utility” — a term that will morph into anything the agency needs it to — and force Wendell to come to the “aid” of the environment because we are, after all, in a crisis.

What do these developments have in common? We are watching a power grab by the governor and her agencies to push a green, but not so green, agenda. In the name of saving the planet, our government is hell-bent on destroying our natural resources all across the commonwealth.

Small towns in western Massachusetts are especially poor financially and especially rich in natural resources, leaving us as perfect targets for greedy developers. Have we seen this before?

The recently released Carbon Forest Report offers a little glimmer of hope. The governor tasked a 12-person committee of forest experts to recommend actions that would employ our forests to help with the very same problem that the green energy push is supposed to help with: climate change. Acknowledging that intact forests left unmanaged are best for carbon storage, ecological integrity and soil health, the committee has called for leaving forests as forests. The committee wrote that we should:

“Reduce unnecessary forest land conversion via collaboration across state agencies and complementary policies, infrastructure investments, and other actions (e.g., solar facilities, power lines, highways, housing, or other development). Forest conversion on any given acre results in more carbon loss than harvesting on average, is more permanent, and also results in the loss of all other forest benefits.”

In particular, this paragraph also reflects the recent report by Massachusetts Audubon and Harvard Forest that concluded that we can get more than our goals for a solar buildout on rooftops, over parking lots, and on the already built landscape.

For solar and battery storage developers in Shutesbury, Amherst, Wendell and elsewhere, I hope this is bad news. Given that this was Healey’s handpicked panel, dominated by foresters, with a few climate scientists and forest ecologists, I certainly hope that she will take the recommendation and stop funding these unnecessary forest land takings.

What would be really great is if Beacon Hill would also see the ridiculousness of the photo ops, front page news articles of the sad stories of struggling farmers, and giving money to farm flood victims on the one hand, while paying to destroy other farm and forestland in the same county.

Gloria Kegeles is a resident of Wendell, and a member of the No Assault & Batteries United group opposing a battery storage system.