This is one occasion when it’s okay to play with fire. Actually, members of the Nantucket Heathlands Partnership will be handling the flames and controlling their effects west of Miacomet Pond in an area called Smooth Hummocks.

Students from the Lighthouse School will be spectators only. But earlier this week, students in the Upper Primary and Primary Five classes joined the Nantucket Islands Land Bank’s Jeff Pollock for a morning of identifying and cataloging grasses, shrubs and flowers in potential prescribed burn areas.

In early November, these students will return to these plots of land to watch the Heathlands Partnership perform a prescribed burn. Then in the spring, the Lighthouse School students will return to the burn site to look for signs of the vegetation they logged prior to the burn.

Working specifically with the Land Bank, the Lighthouse School is trying to enrich its students’ learning experience by forming a relationship between the children and the natural island world around them.

COMPANY LEASES 11,000 ACRES FOR WIND FARM

Texas has sold a lease for an 11,000-acre tract in the Gulf of Mexico that backers believe could become the first wind energy farm along the U.S. coast.

The wind turbines planned by Galveston Offshore Wind, a subsidiary of Louisiana-based Wind Energy Systems Technologies, would be seven miles off Galveston Island and could provide 40,000 homes with power.

“This could be the Spindletop of this century,” Texas General Land Office Commissioner Jerry Patterson said in a story published Sunday in the Houston Chronicle. Spindletop was the oil strike that launched Texas’ energy boom a century ago.

Galveston Offshore Wind purchased a 30-year lease for $10,000 a year, for the first five years. The company estimated production to begin between 2010 and 2012. The state will then receive a minimum of $4.9 million in royalties, growing to at least $14.9 million in years 17 to 30. All the money will go to a fund that pays for schools statewide.

Two other offshore wind turbine farms have been proposed along the coast of the United States, one about four miles off the south shore of New York's Long Island, the other in Nantucket Sound.

The New York project, backed by environmentalists, is awaiting approval by the Army Corps of Engineers. Cape Wind’s Nantucket Sound proposal, also in federally controlled water, faces opposition on several fronts.

The Texas proposal would face fewer obstacles. The Texas General Land Office oversees territory up to 10 miles from the coast, limiting federal involvement. And the state's coastline already is home to industry, with oil and gas platforms visible from beaches.

“Texans will be receptive. We know energy,” Patterson said.

IT’S A BURNING SENSATION

The Nantucket Heathlands Partnership is burning again. The prescribed burn crews comprised of members of the island’s conservation organizations, will be burning various plots of open space all over the island from now through Nov. 18.

Ernie Steinauer, plant ecologist and property manager of the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s two sanctuaries on the island, said burn crews are planning controlled burns at Smooth Hummock, Head of the Plains, in the Middle Moors near Altar Rock, in the eastern moors between the Nantucket and Sankaty Head golf clubs, and just south of the airport near Madaquecham Valley.

Steinauer said the crews plan to burn on Sunday, Oct. 30, weather permitting. To find out where and when, you can call Steinauer at 228-9208.

TAKING COMMENTS, WRITING PLANS

With harbor planners, citizen and hired, on hiatus while a rough draft of their efforts is manufactured, some of you may feel left out. Fret not! There are still two more Chapter 41-81D public input meetings to attend.

On Oct. 27, the Planning Board is holding a joint meeting on Natural & Cultural Resources and Services & Facilities. The final meeting, Economic Development, is on Nov. 3.

All 41-81D master plan meetings are at 7 p.m. in the cafeteria of the Cyrus Peirce middle school. Check out www.ackmasterplan.org for more details on both plans.

The 1993 Nantucket and Madaket Harbors Action Plan lurches into administrative mode on Nov. 17 at the Board of Selectmen’s meeting at 7 p.m. when the board is expected to choose between adopting the plan on the state level or through a Town Meeting or selectmen adoption process.

A state-adopted harbor plan would take the state a minimum of one to two years to review and approve, and a locally adopted harbor plan could become an article on the 2006 Town Meeting warrant and be implemented as early as this spring. This selectmen’s meeting is on the second floor of the Town & County Building at 16 Broad St.

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