“17 Reviews” — wind turbine noise and human health

[Now 45 reviews! Go to wndfo.net/revs for just the non-government, non-industry reviews.]

In January 2012, Australian anti-tobacco/pro-wind public health activist Simon Chapman compiled a “Summary of main conclusions reached in 17 reviews of the research literature on wind farms and health”. His list, which not surprisingly ignores many reviews and commentaries that support health concern, and which misinterprets even these 17 to support his and the industry’s determination to dismiss health concerns, has since been used tirelessly (and tiresomely) as a rhetorical cudgel by the wind industry.

In December 2012, Wayne Gulden in Ontario examined Chapman’s “17 reviews”: He found that: 3 of the reviews didn’t even discuss wind turbines; only 4, maybe 5, were peer reviewed, including one of the reviews that didn’t mention wind turbines; only 1 was independent from pro-wind interests (but was not peer reviewed); and the majority based their conclusions on only 4 studies, added to which Gulden suggests a 5th, published after most of the reviews in Chapman’s list:

• Nissenbaum, Michael; Aramini, Jeffery; and Hanning, Christopher. Effects of industrial wind turbine noise on sleep and health. Noise & Health, September-October 2012, 14:60, 237-43.
• Shepherd, Daniel; McBride, David; Welch, David; Dirks, Kim; and Hill, Erin. Evaluating the impact of wind turbine noise on health-related quality of life. Noise & Health, September-October 2011, 13:54, 333-9.
• van den Berg, Frits; Pedersen, Eja; Bouma, Jelte; and Bakker, Roel. Visual and acoustic impact of wind turbine farms on residents. Project WINDFARMPerception, University of Groningen and Göteberg University, June 3, 2008.
• Pedersen, Eja; and Persson Waye, Kerstin. Wind turbine noise, annoyance and self-reported health and well-being in different living environments. Occupational and Environmental Medicine. 2007 Jul;64(7):480-6.
• Pedersen, Eja; and Persson Waye, Kerstin. Perception and annoyance due to wind turbine noise — a dose-response relationship. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 2004 Dec;116(6):3460-70.

(Update, October 7, 2013: Do your own review:  Click here for access to 21 published studies (2003–2012) of health effects of industrial wind turbine noise.)

By using the “17 reviews” as a cudgel against its perceived enemies, the industry hopes nobody actually looks at them for themselves. The fact is, they express uncertainty more than anything and generally recognize the validity of and need for more study of the health effects of wind turbine noise. They certainly do not claim that there are no adverse health effects from wind turbines (because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence). Here are quotes from each of the 17 reviews that serve the opposite of Chapman’s aim (most of them by courtesy of Gulden’s summary, where links are provided):

1. Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection: Wind turbine health impact study: report of independent expert panel: “it is possible that noise from some wind turbines can cause sleep disruption” (critiques of the Mass. DEP review can be seen here, here, here, and here) (update: In June 2013, based on continuing collection of information Mass. DEP convened a Wind Turbine and Noise Technical Advisory Group to assess and regulate noise impacts)
2. Oregon wind energy health impact assessment: “people who reported annoyance outdoors were more likely to report sleep interruption, feeling tense and stressed, and feeling irritable. Annoyance indoors was positively associated with sleep interruption.”
3. Fiumicelli D: Windfarm noise dose-response: a literature review (Acoustics Bulletin): “uncertainty about human response to wind turbine noise”
4. Bolin K et al: Infrasound and low frequency noise from wind turbines: exposure and health effects (Environmental Res Let): “statistically significant association between wind turbine noise and self-reported sleep disturbance”
5. Knopper LD, Ollson CA: Health effects and wind turbines: a review of the literature (Environmental Health): “wind turbines can be a source of annoyance for some people”
6. UK Health Protection Agency: Report on the health effects of infrasound: “Artificial sources of infrasound include ... wind turbines”
7. Australia National Health and Medical Research Council: Wind turbines and health: a rapid review of the evidence: “any potential impact on humans can be minimised by following existing planning guidelines” (this is the only review that thus completely denies the problem [Simon Chapman himself, who is not a physician nor an acoustician, was one of the ‘peer reviewers’]; nevertheless, the same group, ie, the National Health and Medical Research Council [NHMRC] of Australia, stated regarding this “rapid review” that “relevant authorities should take a precautionary approach”, and their own study is ongoing).  Update, February 25, 2014: Chapman has added the NHMRC consultation draft report, Evidence on Wind Farms and Human Health, to his list. It concludes: “Further high quality research is needed.”
8. King, A (Chief Medical Officer of Health, Ontario): The potential health impact of wind turbines: “sound measurements at residential areas around wind turbines and comparisons with sound levels around other rural and urban areas, to assess actual ambient noise levels prevalent in Ontario, is a key data gap that could be addressed. An assessment of noise levels around wind power developments and other residential environments, including monitoring for sound level compliance, is an important prerequisite to making an informed decision on whether epidemiological studies looking at health outcomes will be useful.”
9. UK Health Protection Agency: Environmental noise and health in the UK: “noise from wind farms ... these are all subjects that are in need of study”
10. Minnesota Department of Health, Environmental Health Division: Public health impacts of wind turbines: “Sleeplessness and headache are the most common health complaints and are highly correlated (but not perfectly correlated) with annoyance complaints.”
11. Canadian Wind Energy Association: Addressing concerns with wind turbines and human health: “CanWEA is a non-profit trade association”
12. Colby et al: Wind turbine sound and health effects: an expert panel review: “Prepared for: American Wind Energy Association and Canadian Wind Energy Association”
13. Colby D, Chatham-Kent Public Health Unit: The health impact of wind turbines: a review of the current white, grey and published literature: precursor of the above
14. US National Research Council: Impact of wind energy development on humans (in: Environmental impacts of wind-energy projects: “In the absence of extensive data, this report focuses mainly on appropriate methods for analysis and assessment and on recommended practices in the face of uncertainty. ... Low-frequency vibration and its effects on humans are not well understood. Sensitivity to such vibration resulting from wind-turbine noise is highly variable among humans. ... More needs to be understood regarding the effects of low-frequency noise on humans.”
15. Jakobsen J: Infrasound emission from wind turbines (J Low Frequency Noise, Vibration and Active Control): “a simple assessment of the ‘normal’ wind turbine noise suggests a fair explanation of the adverse public reaction”
16. Leventhall G: Low frequency noise and annoyance (Noise & Health): “Low frequency noise, the frequency range from about 10Hz to 200Hz, has been recognised as a special environmental noise problem, particularly to sensitive people in their homes. Conventional methods of assessing annoyance, typically based on A-weighted equivalent level, are inadequate for low frequency noise and lead to incorrect decisions by regulatory authorities. There have been a large number of laboratory measurements of annoyance by low frequency noise, each with different spectra and levels, making comparisons difficult, but the main conclusions are that annoyance of low frequencies increases rapidly with level. Additionally the A-weighted level underestimates the effects of low frequency noises.” Leventhall had also previously (2003) written a “Review of published research on low frequency noise and its effects” for the U.K. government, noting that “dBA underestimates annoyance for frequencies below about 200Hz. ... Table 5 shows very adverse effects from low frequency noise levels which are close to the threshold and which do not exceed A-weighted limits. ... Infrasound exposure is ubiquitous in modern life ... and as an emission from many artificial sources ... including wind turbines. ... There is no doubt that some humans exposed to infrasound experience abnormal ear, CNS, and resonance induced symptoms that are real and stressful.”
17. Pedersen, E (Sweden Environmental Protection Agency): Noise annoyance from wind turbines: a review: “Noise from wind turbines is not at all as well studied as for instance noise from road traffic. As the number of studies is low no general conclusions could be drawn. However, ... annoyance from wind turbine noise: is to a degree correlated to noise exposure; occurs to a higher degree at low noise levels than noise annoyance from other sources of community noise such as traffic. ... Wind turbine noise: is, due to its characteristics, not easily masked by background noise; is particularly poorly masked by background noise at certain topographical conditions.”

Then there are reviews that Chapman chooses not to include, for example:

Senate inquiry into the social and economic impact of rural wind farms (2010), Australia: “The Committee: considers that the noise standards adopted by the states and territories for the planning and operation of rural wind farms should include appropriate measures to calculate the impact of low frequency noise and vibrations indoors at impacted dwellings; ... recommends that the Commonwealth Government initiate as a matter of priority thorough, adequately resourced epidemiological and laboratory studies of the possible effects of wind farms on human health; ... recommends that the National Acoustics Laboratories conduct a study and assessment of noise impacts of wind farms, including the impacts of infrasound; recommends that the draft National Wind Farm Development Guidelines be redrafted to include discussion of any adverse health effects and comments made by NHMRC regarding the revision of its 2010 public statement.”

Literature review 2013: association between wind turbine noise and human distress, by Ian Arra and Hazel Lynn: “All studies rejected the Null Hypothesis (no association between wind turbine noise and human distress). In other words, evidence of association was found (weak evidence: Level 4 and 5). No published peer-reviewed study showed no association. Three studies showed dose-response relationship. The studies are level 4 or 5 (a weak type of evidence). Nevertheless, [they] strongly warrant further research (multiple studies, multiple designs, investigating multiple hypothesis).” Update, May 24, 2014: Systematic review 2013: Association between wind turbines and human distress. Cureus 6(5):e183. “In this review, we have demonstrated the presence of reasonable evidence (Level Four and Five) that an association exists between wind turbines and distress in humans. The existence of a dose-response relationship (between distance from wind turbines and distress) and the consistency of association across studies found in the scientific literature argues for the credibility of this association.”

Wind farm noise and human perception: a review (April 2013), by Noise Measurement Services, Australia: “The hypothesis from this Review is that serious harm to health occurs when a susceptible individual is so beset by the noise in question that he or she suffers recurring sleep disturbance, anxiety and stress. Research for the Review suggests that 5% to 10% of the individuals living in the vicinity of a large wind farm will experience serious harm to their health. The observed markers for serious health effects are: wind farm noise level of LAeq 32 dB or more outside the residence; and wind farm noise is heard or is perceptible (felt) at levels above the individual’s threshold of hearing inside the home.”

(Update 2, October 3, 2013: “32 reviews”. Wind turbine noise, Christopher Hanning and Alun Evans, BMJ 2012;344:e1527 (Published 8 March 2012): “A large body of evidence now exists to suggest that wind turbines disturb sleep and impair health at distances and external noise levels that are permitted in most jurisdictions ... Sleep disturbance may be a particular problem in children, and it may have important implications for public health. ... Robust independent research into the health effects of existing wind farms is long overdue.”)

Update, May 7, 2013:  “19 reviews”?  Two more “official reviews” were issued in April that Chapman or his acolytes will no doubt add to his list: 1) Wind Farms, Sound and Health, by the Department of Health, Victoria, published in “Technical information” and “Community information” forms; and 2) Report on Health Impacts of Wind Turbines, prepared for the Scottish Government by Sabine von Hünerbein, Andy Moorhouse, Dani Fiumicelli, and David Baguley of the University of Salford, Manchester (“a rapid, desk based analysis of ... literature specified by the Scottish government, peer-reviewed original studies and recent peer-reviewed literature reviews”).

The Victorian Department of Health pamphlet concludes, “Wind farm sound, including low levels of low frequency sound, may be audible to nearby residents. Audible noise from any source, including windfarms, can cause annoyance, resulting in prolonged stress and other health effects.” It also insists, “There is no evidence that sound which is at inaudible levels can have a physiological effect on the human body. This is the case for sound at any frequency, including infrasound.” This clearly means evidence that they choose to consider, because there is indeed such evidence, and it is a growing area of research (see, e.g., the links here). The pamphlet also compares wind turbine infrasound favorably against one’s own heartbeat and breathing, but (ignoring the cited measurements being selective and simplistic) that may in fact be part of the problem as an external source forces itself on the body’s own physical rhythms. Update, May 28, 2013:  Wind Watch has posted two letters to the Victorian Department of Health pointing out shortcomings of their information sheets: 1) from Alec Salt and Jeffery Lichtenhan about the direct physiological effects of low-frequency noise; and 2) from Colin Hansen about the unique characteristics of wind turbine noise.

Von Hünerbein has produced government policy–affirming reports about wind turbine noise before, and this is only the latest. The tone of her conclusions makes her bias clear: in short, although there may well be problems, even to causing ill health, measures to prevent that would be too burdensome for the development of wind energy. “The review shows there to be evidence for annoyance due to WT noise. There is also some evidence for sleep disturbance which has found fairly wide, though not universal, acceptance. It should be noted that environmental noise from other sources such as road traffic and aircraft noise is a known causes of annoyance and sleep disturbance so to find these effects from WTs is not unexpected. Some authors label these effects as health effects and others do not. If low frequency noise and infrasound was an issue an as yet unproven method of human response would have to be involved. Universally agreed noise mitigation strategies have not been identified. Generally noise issues can be minimised by conservative noise limits. Set-back distances are also used internationally but have a number of disadvantages. The relevant [and much criticized] UK guideline document ETSU-R-97 has been derived from research on the response to noise and aims to provide a reasonable degree of protection to noise sensitive listeners; without unduly restricting the development of WT renewable energy resources.”

Update, May 23, 2013:  “20 reviews”!  At least here — Chapman is still at 19, having added the information sheets from the Victoria Department of Health and another government report: Wind Turbines and Health, by Patricia Fortin, Karen Rideout, Ray Copes, and Constance Bos of the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, February 2013.

“The sound level associated with wind turbines at common residential setbacks ... may lead to annoyance and sleep disturbance. ... Sleep interruption has been associated with wind turbine sound among residents living less than 2.5 km from turbines, particularly when sound levels are above 45 dBA at night; however, some people report noise annoyance from wind turbines at outdoor sound levels below 40 dBA and at lower levels than other sources of environmental noise. When aerodynamic modulation (swishing sound) occurs, wind turbine sound may be perceived as more annoying than steady sound or “white noise.” ... [I]f the noise has an outdoor A-weighted level, which corrects measurements to the low-level frequency sensitivity of the human ear, of 40 dBA, there is a risk that some residents will be annoyed by low-frequency noise even indoors. A small increase in sound level at low frequency can result in a large increase in perceived loudness and may be difficult to ignore, even at relatively low sound pressure levels, increasing the potential for annoyance when there is a sizeable low frequency component. It is suggested that problems can be reduced with an outdoor limit of 35 dBA for large wind turbines.”

Update, May 24, 2013:  “24 reviews”.  Public health effects of siting and operating onshore wind turbines, Conseil Supérieur de la Sante, Belgium, publication no. 8738, 3 April 2013: “Modern wind turbines are unlikely to have any direct effects on health and well-being other than annoyance and possibly sleep disturbance. Both annoyance and disturbed sleep can, however, lead to undue stress, which may adversely affect the health and well-being of those concerned. ... It follows that the operation of wind turbines or wind farms may affect the quality of life (i.e. health and well-being), but in a complex fashion that depends on a variety of interrelated factors. ... [L]a nuisance attribuée au bruit du fonctionnement des éoliennes, tant en phase d’éveil que lors du sommeil, constitue un effet environnemental majeur sur la santé. [Annoyance attributed to the operation of wind turbines, while awake as much as during sleep, constitutes a major environmental health impact.] ... The noise levels due to the operation of wind turbines and wind farms near people’s homes should comply with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and WHO Europe guidelines for day-time and night-time noise exposure in order to avoid serious annoyance and (self-reported) sleep disturbance. This would lead to [outside] sound levels below 45 dB(A) during day-time and 40 dB(A) at night. ... Belgium should participate in or take the initiative for an international study on the possible specific impacts of wind turbine operation on the health and well-being of those living in their vicinity.”

Update, May 27, 2013:  “25 reviews”.  There are also older reviews, predating the work of Nina Pierpont and Sarah Laurie, the two physicians primarily attacked by wind advocates for “causing” health problems by documenting them, for example:

Eoliennes, sons et infrasons: Effets de l’éolien industriel sur la sante des hommes (Wind turbines, noise, and infrasound: effects of industrial wind turbines on human health), by Marjolaine Villey-Migraine, Université Paris II–Panthéon-Assas, December 2004: “Les aérogénérateurs émettent des infrasons, ceci n’est controversé par personne. ... Il nous paraît immoral de la part de cet organisme [Agence de l’Environnement et de la Maitrise de l’Energie] d’affirmer, sans référence aucune, que les infrasons émis par les éoliennes sont parfaitement inoffensifs, et d’autre part, de faire état de soi-disant “mesures”, alors qu’on ne peut prouver l’impact de infrasons des éoliennes sur l’homme que par des études épidémiologiques. ... Les sons et infrasons émis par les éoliennes ont un impact certain sur la santé de l’homme et peuvent gâcher la vie des gens. ... Les promoteurs éoliens ont la responsabilité de mettre en place les mesures adéquates pour diminuer les risques d’atteinte à la santé des riverains des éoliennes, en les éloignant des habitations non de 500 m comme ils le suggèrent dans leurs publications, mais à 1600 m en tenant compte de sons, et au minimum à 5 km en tenant compte des infrasons.” (“Wind turbines emit infrasound, this is not disputed by anyone. ... It seems to us immoral on the part of this organization [Agency of the Environment and Energy Management] to assert, without any reference, that infrasound emitted by wind turbines is perfectly harmless, and furthermore, to make claims of so-called “action,” but that we can not prove the impact of wind turbine infrasound on humans by epidemiological studies. ... Noise and infrasound emitted by wind turbines have a definite impact on the health of humans and can harm people’s lives. ... Wind developers have a responsibility to put in place adequate measures to reduce the risks of damage to the health of residents living near wind turbines by siting turbines no closer to homes than – not 500 m as suggested in their publications – but 1600 m considering audible noise and at least 5 km considering infrasound.”)

Le retentissement du fonctionnement des éoliennes sur la santé de l’homme (Repercussions of wind turbine operations on human health), by Claude-Henri Chouard, l’Académie nationale de médecine, France, March 2006: “Qu’il soit très intense, ou qu’il représente une pollution sonore plus modérée, le bruit est le grief le plus fréquemment formulé à propos des éoliennes. Il peut avoir un impact réel, et jusqu’ici méconnu, sur la santé de l’homme. ... [I]l serait souhaitable, par précaution, que soit suspendue la construction des éoliennes d’une puissance supérieure à 2,5 MW situées à moins de 1500 mètres des habitations.” (“Whether it is quite intense or it represents a more moderate noise pollution, noise is the complaint most frequently made concerning wind turbines. It can have a real impact, and so far disregarded, on human health. ... It would be desirable, as a precaution, to halt the construction of wind turbine facilities greater than 2.5 MW closer than 1500 meters from homes.”)

Location, location, location: An investigation into wind farms and noise, by The Noise Association, U.K., July 2006: “[W]ind farm noise generates many more complaints than equivalent levels of noise from most other sources, including road noise. ... [L]ow-frequency noise is much more disturbing indoors than outside ... Dr Geoff Leventhall agrees there are times when ‘A’ weighting is not entirely adequate: “Audible low-frequency noise does have annoying characteristics which are not shown in conventional environmental noise measures, such as A-weighting.” ... There has never been any dispute that wind turbines generate infrasound. ... Wind Farm noise, in common with noise generally, affects different people in different ways, but the evidence suggests there is rarely a problem for people living more than 1-1.5 miles from a turbine.”

(Update, October 24, 2013:  “33 reviews”. Infraschall von Windkraftanlagen als Gesundheitsgefahr (Infrasound from wind turbines as a health hazard), Erwin Quambusch and Martin Lauffer, ZFSH/SGB–Zeitschrift für die sozialrechtliche Praxis 08/2008: “Windkraftanlagen erzeugen unzweifelhaft Infraschall. Im Gegensatz zu den Äußerungen von Behörden und den den Anlagenbetreibern nahestehenden Institutionen, Infraschall sei “völlig harmlos”, verweist eine zunehmende Zahl von Wissenschaftlern auf die gesundheitliche Gefährlichkeit des Infraschalls. Die Gefahr stellt sich inzwischen als so hinreichend wahrscheinlich dar, dass an die Stelle der bisher gepflegten Ignoranz staatliche Maßnahmen der Gefahrenabwehr und der Gefahrenvorsorge treten müssen. Solange und soweit die Gesundheitsgefahren nicht durch technische oder ähnliche Vorkehrungen abgewehrt werden können, können Errichtung und Betrieb der Anlagen nur zulässig sein, wenn diese außerhalb der Sichtweite zu Wohngebieten liegen.” (“There is no doubt that wind turbines produce infrasound. In contrast to the pronouncements of the authorities, plant operators, and related institutions that infrasound is “completely harmless”, there are an increasing number of scientists noting the health risks of infrasound. The risk is sufficient that new regulations are required for prevention. As long as and to the extent that the health risks are not prevented by technical or similar guidelines, construction and operation of these plants should be allowed only if they are out of sight of residential areas.”)

Update, August 2, 2013:  “28 reviews”.  Report on the Health Impacts of Wind Farms, Sarah Taylor, Director of Public Health & Planning, National Health Service Shetland, 15th July 2013: “It is generally accepted that the primary effect of low frequency noise on people is annoyance. Annoyance is recognised as a critical health effect, and is associated in some people with stress, sleep disturbance, and interference with daily living. There is an increasing body of evidence that noise levels associated with wind farms cause annoyance, in a dose-related response. ... A range of symptoms are attributed to the noise of wind turbines in people living close to them, which are those associated with general environmental noise exposure, and are often also described as stress symptoms. They include headache, irritability, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, dizziness, anxiety, and sleep disturbance, and are often described in relation to annoyance. ... [I]t is recognised that low level noise from wind turbines is more often found to cause annoyance than similar levels from other sources. Some consider that the common cause of complaints from wind farms is not associated with low frequency noise but with the audible modulation of the aerodynamic noise, especially at night. There is also evidence that some people perceive the low frequency noise components of wind turbine noise, and that these are more significant at night and with large wind turbines. ... Regardless of whether the perceived impacts of noise from wind farms are physiological or psychological in nature, they are considered to cause adverse health effects through sleep disturbance, reducing the quality of life and as a source of annoyance which sometimes leads to stress related symptoms. ... Conclusions: Wind turbines are known to cause a number of effects that have an impact on health: risks from ice throw and structural failures that are minimised by appropriate setback distances; noise and shadow flicker that are sources of annoyance, sleep disturbance and symptoms of stress in some people. Current mitigations do not entirely deal with the annoyance caused by wind farms, the results of which are a cause of distress and related ill health for a number of people living in the vicinity.”

Update, September 26, 2013:  “29 reviews”.  Kirjallisuuskatsaus – Tuulivoiman terveysvaikutukset (Literature review – Health effects of wind power), Saara Huttunen, Johanna Kohl, and Nina Wessberg, Valtion Teknillinen Tutkimuskeskus (Technical Research Centre of Finland) for Suomen Tuulivoimayhdistys (Finnish Wind Power Association), 16.8.2013: This industry report concludes that all adverse health effects are merely a problem of public relations.

Update, October 3, 2013:  “30 reviews”.  Health impact of wind farms, Donata Kurpas, Bozena Mroczek, Beata Karakiewicz, Krzysztof Kassolik, and Waldemar Andrzejewski, Annals of Agricultural and Environmental Medicine 2013, Vol 20, No 3, 595–605: “Short description of state of the art: The nuisance caused by wind turbines is stereotypically linked with the noise that they produce. Nevertheless, the visual aspect of wind farms, opinions about them, and sensitivity to sound seem to be of the greater importance. ... Health effects are more probably associated with some environmental factors leading to annoyance or frustration. All types of studies share the same conclusion: wind turbines can provoke annoyance. ... The influence of wind turbines on human emotional and physical health is a relatively new field of research. Further analyses of these issues are justified, especially because none of the studies published in peer-reviewed journals so far meet the criteria for cohort or case-control studies. ... The authors did not analyse coherent publications or website documents (study by M. Alves-Pereira and N.C. Branco and the study by N. Pierpont).” [The authors also missed the Nissenbaum 2012 paper in Noise & Health, which appeared after their submission. And they assert that noise from wind turbines cause only subjective effects, despite the evidence under review of interference with, e.g., sleep, and physiological effects.] “The authors are involved in community public consultations with the advocates of new projects” [rather a major conflict of interest to be mentioned only in passing].

Update, October 7, 2013:  “32 reviews”.  Bedeutung des Ausbaus der Windenergie für die menschliche Gesundheit (Consequences of wind energy for health), Dorothee Twardella, Sachgebiet Arbeits- und Umweltmedizin/-epidemiologie, Bayerisches Landesamt für Gesundheit und Lebensmittelsicherheit (Division of Labor and Environmental Medicine/Epidemiology, Bavarian State Office of Health and Food Safety), Umwelt und Mensch – Informationsdienst (Environment and People Information Service), No. 3, September 2013, pp. 14-19: “Belästigung und Schlafstörungen durch Schallimmissionen im Hörschallbereich können nicht völlig ausgeschlossen werden. Über die alleinige Betrachtung der direkten gesundheitlichen Risiken hinaus wäre eine Analyse der direkten und indirekten Risiken und auch Chancen, die sich durch die Umstellung von fossilen Energieträgern auf Windenergie ergeben, im Sinne einer Gesundheitsfolgenabschätzung sinnvoll.” (“Annoyance and sleep disturbance caused by noise cannot be ruled out. A health impact assessment is needed to evaluate systematically the direct and indirect risks as well as benefits of the substitution of fossil energy with wind energy.”)

Update, November 13, 2013:  “35 reviews”. 

Infraljud från vindkraftverk – en förbisedd hälsorisk (Infrasound from wind turbines – an overlooked health hazard), Håkan Enbom and Inga Malcus Enbom, Lakartidningen (Journal of the Swedish Medical Association), 2013 Aug 7-20;110(32-33):1388-9: “Infraljud från vindkraftverk påverkar innerörat och utgör en möjlig hälsorisk för personer med migrän eller annan typ av central sentitisering. Regelverket för nyetablering av vindkraftverk bör revideras med hänsyn tagen till denna omständighet, anser artikelförfattarna.” (“Infrasound from wind turbines affects the inner ear and is a potential health risk for people with migraine or other type of central sentitisation. Regulations for construction of wind turbines should be revised, taking this fact into account.”)

Industrial Wind Turbines, Human Variability, and Adverse Health Effects, Michael A. Nissenbaum, New England College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine Reporter, Volume 2 Issue 38 Fall 2013: “In summary, in many IWT projects, the preconstruction sound modeling has underestimated the eventual real world sound levels those turbine projects eventually produce. When coupled with the underappreciated human physiological responses to the type of noise large turbines produce (adverse sleep and mental health effects), this has had real world consequences for those living near them. The relationship of noise to sleep disturbances is established. The biological plausibility of sleep disturbances resulting in ill health is settled science. Chronic noise exposure leads to chronic sleep disturbance in many of those exposed, often resulting in ill health. Observed adverse human effects must trump preconstruction sound modeling; changes in practice must occur when there are errors. It’s all about distance when siting decisions are made.”

Update, January 12, 2014:  “36 reviews”.  Wind turbines: is there a human health risk? Jennifer Roberts and Mark Roberts, Journal of Environmental Health, April 2013, Volume 75, No. 8. Also: Evaluation of the Scientific Literature on the Health Effects Associated with Wind Turbines and Low Frequency Sound, Prepared for Wisconsin Public Service Commission Docket No. 6630-CE-302, October 20, 2009; and Wind Turbines and Exposure to Low-Frequency Sound, Exponent Heath Sciences News Release, Volume 6, 2010. “[T]he authors present a literature review to determine whether LFS leads to negative human health effects. In the reviewed studies the authors found that annoyance plays a large role in people’s perception of wind turbines and additional research is warranted” (“About the Cover”). “Although limited, research has demonstrated that LFS can elicit adverse physical health effects, such as vibration or fatigue, as well as an annoyance or unpleasantness response. ... [T]he association and particular pathway between LFS specifically generated from wind turbines, annoyance, and adverse physical health effects have yet to be fully characterized. Hence, additional epidemiological research studies are warranted” (poster presentation, Jennifer Roberts, 4 July 2012, 7th International Conference on the Science of Exposure Assessment). [These authors also appear to ignore the Nissenbaum et al. study in Noise & Health (2012).]

Update, June 19, 2014:  “37 reviews”.  Wind turbines and human health, Loren Knopper, Christopher Ollson, et al., Frontiers in Public Health 2014;2:63: “Setbacks should be sound-based rather than distance-based alone. Preference should be given to sound emissions of ≤40 dB(A) for non-participating receptors, measured outside, at a dwelling, and not including ambient noise. ... Post construction monitoring should be common place to ensure modeled sound levels are within required noise limits. If sound emissions from wind projects is in the 40–45 dB(A) range for non-participating receptors, we suggest community consultation and community support. Setbacks that permit sound levels >45 dB(A) (wind turbine noise only; not including ambient noise) for non-participating receptors directly outside a dwelling are not supported due to possible direct effects from audibility and possible levels of annoyance above background. When ambient noise is taken into account, wind turbine noise can be >45 dB(A), but a combined wind turbine–ambient noise should not exceed >55 dB(A) for non-participating and participating receptors. Our suggested upper limit is based on WHO conclusions that noise above 55 dB(A) is ‘considered increasingly dangerous for public health,’ is when ‘adverse health effects occur frequently, a sizeable proportion of the population is highly annoyed and sleep-disturbed’ and ‘cardiovascular effects become the major public health concern, which are likely to be less dependent on the nature of the noise.’”

Update, June 21, 2014:  “38 reviews”.  ‘Wind turbine syndrome’: fact or fiction? Amir Farboud, R. Crunkhorn, & A. Trinidade, Journal of Laryngology & Otology, Volume 127, Issue 03, March 2013, pp 222-226: “There is some evidence of symptoms in patients exposed to wind turbine noise. The effects of infrasound require further investigation.”

Update, July 7, 2014:  “39 reviews”.  A Review of Wind Turbine Noise Perception, Annoyance and Low Frequency Emission, Con Doolan, Wind Engineering, Volume 37, No. 1, 2013, pp 97-104: “Low-frequency noise levels from wind turbines may exceed audibility thresholds and thus it is possible that they are correlated with annoyance. A review of studies related to general low-frequency noise annoyance shows there are similarities with annoyance studies involving wind turbine noise. ... noise levels may comply with existing environmental noise guidelines based on the dB(A) scale yet still cause annoyance due to the uniqueness of low-frequency noise problems. However, there is very little information (level, spectral balance, temporal qualities, etc) regarding low-frequency noise in people’s homes affected by wind turbines. ... Thus more research is needed in understanding the fundamental aspects of wind turbine low-frequency noise generation, propagation and perception.”

Update, September 19, 2014:  “40 reviews”. Wind turbine infra and low-frequency sound: warning signs that were not heard, Richard R. James, Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 32(2) 108-127 (2012): “There is sufficient research and history to link the sensitivity of some people to inaudible amplitude-modulated infra and low-frequency noise to the type of symptoms described by those living near industrial wind turbines.”

Update, December 8, 2014:  “42 reviews”. Health effects related to wind turbine noise exposure: a systematic review, Jesper Hvass Schmidt and Mads Klokker, PLoS ONE 9(12): e114183 (2014): “At present it seems reasonable to conclude that noise from wind turbines increases the risk of annoyance and disturbed sleep in exposed subjects in a dose-response relationship. There seems to be a tolerable limit of around L_Aeq of 35 dB. Logically, accepting higher limits in legislations may lead to increased numbers of annoyed subjects. It therefore seems reasonable to conclude that a cautious approach is needed when planning future wind farms. Furthermore, there is an indication that noise annoyance and sleep disturbance are related and that disturbed sleep potentially can lead to adverse health effects. These conclusions are, however, affected by a potential risk for selection and information bias even in the larger cross-sectional studies providing the current best evidence. The evidence for adverse health effects other than sleep disturbance is primarily supported by case-series reports which certainly may be affected by various sources of bias. Larger cross-sectional surveys have so far been unable to document a relationship between various symptoms such as tinnitus, hearing loss, vertigo, headache and exposure to wind turbine noise. One limitation causing this could be that most studies so far have only measured L_Aeq or L_den. An additional focus on the measurement of low-frequency sound exposure as well as a more thorough characterisation of the amplitude modulated sound and the relationship between objective and subjective health parameters could lead to different conclusions in the future. Finally, in regards to the objective measurement of health-related disorders in relation to wind turbine noise, it would be valuable to demonstrate if such health-related outcomes fluctuate depending on exposure to wind turbine noise.”

And an older review from Switzerland:  Eoliennes et santé humaine, Nicole Lachat, June 2011: “Le présent dossier a permis de mettre en évidence, sur la base des travaux de nombreux auteurs, que les contrariétés dues aux éoliennes sont bien réelles, qu’elles ont des effets néfastes avérés sur la santé et que ces effets ne sont pas seulement auditifs.” (“This review presents the evidence, based on the work of numerous authors, that disturbances due to wind turbines are quite real, that they have harmful effects on health and that those effects are not just auditory.”)

Update, February 1, 2015:  “43 reviews”. Wind turbines and health: a critical review of the scientific literature, Robert J. McCunney, Kenneth A. Mundt, W. David Colby, Robert Dobie, Kenneth Kaliski, and Mark Blais, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 2014 Nov;56(11):e108-30: “The Canadian Wind Energy Association funded this project.” These authors produced the similar review for the American and Canadian Wind Energy Associations in 2009. “Epidemiological studies have shown associations between living near wind turbines and annoyance.”

Update, May 21, 2017:  “44 reviews”. Nuisances Sanitaires des Éoliennes Terrestres, Patrice Tran Ba Huy, Académie Nationale de Médecine, France, May 9, 2017: “[L]e caractère intermittent, aléatoire, imprévisible, envahissant du bruit généré par la rotation des pales, survenant lorsque le vent se lève, variant avec son intensité, interdisant toute habituation, peut indubitablement perturber l’état psychologique de ceux qui y sont exposés. Ce sont notamment les modulations d’amplitudes causées par le passage des pales devant le mât qui sont dénoncées comme particulièrement dérangeantes. [The intermittent, random, unpredictable, invasive character of the noise generated by the rotation of the blades, arising when the wind rises and varying along with its intensity, preventing habituation, can undoubtedly disturb the psychological state of those who are exposed to it. These include amplitude modulation caused by the passage of the blades in front of the mast, which is noted as particularly disturbing.]

“[L]e groupe de travail recommande: ... de revenir pour ce qui concerne leur bruit (et tout en laissant les éoliennes sous le régime des Installations Classées pour le Protection de l’Environnement) au décret du 31 août 2006 relatif à la lutte contre les bruits du voisinage (relevant du code de Santé publique et non de celui de l’Environnement), ramenant le seuil de déclenchement des mesures d’émergence à 30 dB A à l’extérieur des habitations et à 25 à l’intérieur.” [The working group recommends returning to the decree of 31 August 2006 concerning the fight against neighborhood noise, reducing the the threshold for emergency measures to [ambient levels] 30 dBA outside residences and 25 dBA inside [limiting wind turbine noise to +5 dBA in daytime (7am–10pm) and +3 dBA at night (10pm–7am)].]

Update, May 30, 2017:  “45 reviews”. Wind Turbine Noise & Human Health: A Review of the Scientific Literature, Vermont Department of Health, May 2017: “[A]nnoyance attributed to wind turbine noise by respondents was associated with migraines, dizziness, tinnitus, chronic pain, hair cortisol concentrations (an indicator of stress), blood pressure, and self-reported sleep quality. Efforts to minimize annoyance should address both noise and non-noise related factors. In order to minimize annoyance attributed to noise, an annual limit of 35 dBA coupled with community engagement could be considered.”

Go to wndfo.net/revs for just the non-government, non-industry reviews.

Undertake your own review — Click here for a list of, and access to, 21 published studies (2003–2012) of health effects of industrial wind turbine noise.

Also see the tables from “Health Effects Related to Wind Turbine Noise Exposure: A Systematic Review” by JH Schmidt and M Klokker (2014)

Also:  “There is clear evidence of an annoyance or irritability caused by the acoustic signal from wind turbines that appears to be greater compared to other equivalent-level environmental noise such as airport or road traffic noise. In this regard, wind turbine noise is unique in having low-frequency signal components including infrasound (below 20 Hz). The sounds that are audible have a distinct amplitude modulation component, generally described as a “swish” or “thump”. This rhythmic characteristic makes the noise difficult to ignore or to adapt to, and its enhanced perception compared to un-modulated noise appears to contribute to its increased annoyance factor. Biological health issues can arise when the irritability and annoyance leads to sleep disturbance and stress.” —On the biological plausibility of Wind Turbine Syndrome, Robert Harrison, International Journal of Environmental Health Research, 2015, Vol. 25, No. 5, 463–468.

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, human rights

Pagan: not a soldier.

PAGAN (Lat. paganus, of or belonging to a pagus, a canton, county district, village, commune) ... It has long been accepted that the application of the name paganus, villager, to non-Christians was due to the fact that it was in the rural districts that the old faiths lingered. This explanation assumes that the use of paganus in this sense arose after the establishment of Christianity as the religion generally accepted in the urban as opposed to the rural districts, and it is usually stated that an edict of the emperor Valentinian of 368 dealing with the religio paganorum (Cod. Theod. xvi. 2) contains the first documentary use of the word in this secondary sense. It has now been shown that the use can be traced much earlier. Tertullian (c. 202; De corona militis, xi.), says “Apud hunc (Christum) tam miles est paganus fidelis quam paganus est miles infidelis.” This gives the clue to the true explanation. In classical Latin paganus is frequently found in contradistinction to miles or armatus (cf. especially Tac. Hist. i. 53; ii. 14, 88; iii. 24, 43, 77), where the opposition is between a regular enrolled soldier and the raw half-armed rustics who sometimes formed a rude militia in Roman wars, or, more widely, between a soldier and a civilian. Thus the Christians who prided themselves on being “soldiers of Christ” (milites) could rightly term the non-Christians pagani. See also Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ed. Bury, 1896), ch. xxi. note ad fin.

—Encyclopedia Brittanica Eleventh Edition (1910–1911)

See no evil, hear no evil, nocebo

Can expectations produce symptoms from infrasound associated with wind turbines?
Fiona Crichton, George Dodd, Gian Schmid, Greg Gamble, and Keith J. Petrie, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Health Psychology, March 2013, doi:10.1037/a0031760 [update: republished online November 25, 2013. The Power of Positive and Negative Expectations to Influence Reported Symptoms and Mood During Exposure to Wind Farm Sound.]

First paragraph:  Harnessing wind energy is a critical component of long-term strategies for securing sustainable power supply in countries throughout the world, with the potential to help address global climate change. However, recent opposition to wind farms has seen a substantial increase in rejection rates for new wind farm developments, which threatens the achievement of renewable energy targets. Much of the opposition to wind farms stems from the belief that the infrasound produced by wind turbines causes health complaints in nearby residents. Although there is no empirical support for claims that infrasound generated by wind turbines could trigger adverse health effects, there has been a lack of other plausible mechanisms that could explain the experience of nonspecific symptoms reported by some people living in the vicinity of wind turbines. In this study we investigate whether exposure to information that creates negative expectations about symptoms from infrasound could be a possible explanation for this relationship.

Spatio-temporal differences in the history of health and noise complaints about Australian wind farms: evidence for the psychogenic, “communicated disease” hypothesis
Simon Chapman, Professor of Public Health, Alexis St George, Research Fellow, Karen Waller, and Vince Cakic, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney, Australia
March 2013, unpublished [update: published online October 16, 2013. The Pattern of Complaints about Australian Wind Farms Does Not Match the Establishment and Distribution of Turbines: Support for the Psychogenic, ‘Communicated Disease’ Hypothesis. PLoS ONE 8(10): e76584. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0076584]

Abstract (background, objectives, and conclusions):  With often florid allegations about health problems arising from wind turbine exposure now widespread in parts of rural Australia and on the internet, nocebo effects potentially confound any future investigation of turbine health impact. Historical audits of health complaints across periods when such claims were rare are therefore important. We test 4 hypotheses relevant to psychogenic explanations of the variable timing and distribution of health and noise complaints about wind farms in Australia. ... In view of scientific consensus that the evidence for wind turbine noise and infrasound causing health problems is poor, the reported spatio-temporal variations in complaints are consistent with psychogenic hypotheses that health problems arising are “communicated diseases” with nocebo effects likely to play an important role in the aetiology of complaints.

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The bias of both of these papers is glaring. The Crichton paper seems more worried about wind development targets than about human health, and Chapman expresses his long established contempt and mockery of people adversely affected by wind development with the phrase "often florid allegations".

Both papers disingenuously claim that there is no scientific support for the claim that infrasound can have physiological effects. In fact, there is, and mechanisms for such effects are currently being elucidated (see, eg, Responses of the ear to infrasound and wind turbines, Low-frequency noise: a biophysical phenomenon, Infrasound: your ears “hear” it but they don’t tell your brain, Owen Black affidavit re: wind turbine syndrome, and the work of Mariana Alves-Pereira and Nuno Castelo Branco in Portugal: Vibroacoustic disease, Vibroacoustic disease: biological effects of infrasound and low-frequency noise explained by mechanotransduction cellular signalling, Industrial wind turbines, infrasound and vibro-acoustic disease (VAD), In-home wind turbine noise is conducive to vibroacoustic disease). [Update: see bibliography of PubMed-indexed studies at www.aweo.org/infrasound.html.] Both papers thus set out only to prove that "hysteria" is the cause, seeing no reason to test that hypothesis against the evidence for physical causes which they simply ignore.

Nor do they seem to consider the barrage of "positive" information that has accompanied the buildup of wind power. Related to this, they fail to consider the possibility (never mind the many reports) that people with a favorable view of wind development become adversely affected after a nearby facility began operation.

For these reasons, Chapman's paper is simply a joke. There is not even a pretense of testing his hypothesis, only a laughable effort to demonstrate it.

The Crichton paper at least pretends to set up a controlled experiment. Unfortunately, since the researchers ignore the work of acousticians who have measured infrasound from wind farms, they don't come close to recreating the experience of actual wind turbine noise (as, e.g., explored in Development of experimental facility for testing human response to ILFN from wind turbines), let alone its reported effects over time. They thus end up only showing the effect of suggestibility in two different "sham" situations. No group was actually exposed to infrasound levels and patterns like those from wind turbines.

Finally, these researchers exploit the fact that this phenomenon is indeed new, and consequently not yet extensively investigated, having developed along with the relatively recent growth of wind power development closer to homes. Furthermore, as with all noise phenomena, not everyone is affected, and those that are, to different degrees. There has been no robust epidemiological study of the issue, so it is irresponsible as well as unethical to dismiss it out of hand. Neither of these papers betrays the slightest humanity towards the many people who are truly suffering, many of them forced out of their homes. Nor does either one express the slightest interest in actual study of the cases. Both papers seem instead to be attempts to run ahead of the continuing medical and acoustical research and declare the issue dead. But the science has already left them well behind.

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Update:  Another recent paper following Chapman's lead:

Fright factors about wind turbines and health in Ontario newspapers before and after the Green Energy Act
Benjamin Deignan, Erin Harvey, and Laurie Hoffman-Goetz, University of Waterloo, Ontario
Health, Risk & Society, March 2013, doi:10.1080/13698575.2013.776015

Abstract:  In this article, we analyse coverage of the health effects of wind turbines in Ontario newspapers relative to the Green Energy Act using published risk communication fright factors. Our aim was to provide insights into the health risk information presented in newspapers serving Ontario communities where wind turbines are located. ... We conclude that Ontario newspapers contain fright factors in articles about wind turbines and health that may produce fear, concern and anxiety for readers.

According to the abstract, this paper did not make any attempt to correlate the "fright factors" with health complaints, nor did it compare coverage of health concerns (which would of course be "negative") with coverage of wind energy development in general (which I dare say is overwhelmingly "positive"). And again, there does not seem to be any interest in examining actual cases, only in establishing theoretical bases for ignoring them.

This one seems even sillier (or more chilling) than Chapman's exercise, in that it is raising alarm about language. Are they suggesting that the Government of Ontario censor news coverage as part of its support for wind development?

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Update:  And another recent paper along the lines of Crichton/Petrie:

The influence of negative oriented personality traits on the effects of wind turbine noise
Jennifer Taylor, Carol Eastwick, Robin Wilson, and Claire Lawrence, University of Nottingham, U.K.
Personality and Individual Differences, February 2013, doi:10.1016/j.paid.2012.09.018

Abstract:  Concern about invisible environmental agents from new technologies, such as radiation, radio-waves, and odours, have been shown to act as a trigger for reports of ill health. However, recently, it has been suggested that wind turbines – an archetypal green technology, are a new culprit in explanations of medically unexplained non-specific symptoms (NSS): the so-called Wind Turbine Syndrome (Pierpont, 2009). The current study assesses the effect of negative orientated personality (NOP) traits (Neuroticism, Negative Affectivity and Frustration Intolerance) on the relationship between both actual and perceived noise on NSS. All households near ten small and micro wind turbines in two UK cities completed measures of perceived turbine noise, Neuroticism, Negative Affectivity, Frustration Intolerance, attitude to wind turbines, and NSS (response N = 138). Actual turbine noise level for each household was also calculated. There was no evidence for the effect of calculated actual noise on NSS. The relationship between perceived noise and NSS was only found for individuals high in NOP traits[, suggesting] the key role of individual differences in the link between perceived (but not actual) environmental characteristics and symptom reporting.

According to the abstract, high NOP traits are correlated only with general health complaints, as would be expected, not with perceived turbine noise or attitude to wind turbines, as the authors imply. Furthermore, actual noise measurements were not made, and small urban wind turbines are nothing like the rural giants that give rise to most complaints considered to represent "wind turbine syndrome". The authors' bias is also evident in describing "wind turbine syndrome" as "non-specific symptoms"; in fact, Pierpont recognized a recurring set of symptoms that suggest inner ear disturbance. Others have attributed the complaints as compatible with sleep disturbance, a factor that Taylor/Lawrence do not seem to have considered. The concluding sentence of the abstract also reveals bias by insisting that NOP plays the key role (not just a contributing role) and that any noise or other disturbance is perceived but not "actual".

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Update:  Crichton/Petrie and Chapman join forces:

The link between health complaints and wind turbines: support for the nocebo expectations hypothesis
Fiona Crichton, Simon Chapman, Tim Cundy and Keith James Petrie
Frontiers in Public Health, 2:220 (2014). doi:10.3389/fpubh.2014.00220

Abstract:  The worldwide expansion of wind energy has met with opposition based on concerns that the infrasound generated by wind turbines causes health problems in nearby residents. In this paper we argue that health complaints are more likely to be explained by the nocebo response, whereby adverse effects are generated by negative expectations. When individuals expect a feature of their environment or medical treatment to produce illness or symptoms then this may start a process where the individual looks for symptoms or signs of illness to confirm these negative expectations. As physical symptoms are common in healthy people, there is considerable scope for people to match symptoms with their negative expectations. To support this hypothesis we draw on evidence from experimental studies that show that, during exposure to wind farm sound, expectations about infrasound can influence symptoms and mood in both positive and negative directions, depending on how expectations are framed. We also consider epidemiological work showing that health complaints have primarily been located in areas that have received the most negative publicity about the harmful effects of turbines. The social aspect of symptom complaints in a community is also discussed as an important process in increasing symptom reports. Media stories, publicity or social discourse about the reported health effects of wind turbines are likely to trigger reports of similar symptoms, regardless of exposure. Finally, we present evidence to show that the same pattern of health complaints following negative information about wind turbines has also been found in other types of environmental concerns and scares.


Edited by: Loren Knopper, Intrinsik Environmental Sciences Inc., Canada, industry consultant. Reviewed by: Robert G. Berger, Intrinsik Environmental Sciences Inc., Canada – industry consultant – and James Rubin, King’s College London, UK – author of studies blaming electromagnetic sensitivity on psychological conditions

This article simply reviews the authors’ previous articles, repeating their errors and shortcomings and adding nothing new to what they have already badly said.

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Update:  Chapman openly joins forces with the industry:

Fomenting sickness: nocebo priming of residents about expected wind turbine health harms
Simon Chapman, Ketan Joshi and Luke Fry
Frontiers in Public Health, 2:279 (2014). doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2014.00279

Abstract:  A nocebo effect hypothesis has been proposed to explain variations in where small minorities of exposed residents complain about noise and health effects said to be caused by wind farm turbines. The hypothesis requires that those complaining have been exposed to negative, potentially frightening information about the impact of proposed wind farms on nearby residents, and that this information conditions both expectations about future health impacts or the aetiology of current health problems where wind farms are already operational. This hypothesis has been demonstrated experimentally under laboratory conditions, but case studies of how this process can operate in local communities are lacking. In this paper we present a case study of the apparent impact of an anti wind farm public meeting on the generation of negative news media and the subsequent expression of concerns about anticipated health and noise impacts to a planning authority approval hearing in Victoria, Australia. We present a content analysis of the negative claims disseminated about health and noise in the news media and available on the internet prior to the hearing, and another content analysis of all submissions made to the planning authority by those opposing the development application.

Edited by: Loren Knopper, Intrinsik Environmental Sciences, Canada – industry consultant. Reviewed by: Claire Lawrence, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom – co-author of papers blaming noise complaints from wind turbines on personality traits – and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen, Johns Hopkins University, USA – co-author of Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection review that attempted to minimize and dismiss health effects from wind turbines

Now they have lowered the bar from denial of actual health consequences of actual wind turbines to decrying the fact that raising concerns about adverse effects of wind turbines during a permitting process meant to raise concerns, raises concerns, even though the permitting agency ignored those concerns anyway.

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Also see:  "Notorious Falshoods" — The Drapier’s Fourth Letter: To the Whole People of Ireland (Jonathan Swift, Oct. 13, 1724)

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, human rights

Bernie, don’t betray us

[Letter to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, from Garret Keizer of Sutton, Vermont — Published in the Times Argus and the Rutland Herald, March 31, 2013. Removed by request of the author.]

... Bernie Sanders, ... de facto spokesperson for the opportunists of “green capitalism”.

[Garret Keizer previously wrote in Harper’s Magazine (June 2007) about this issue — click here.]

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, Vermont

Rump Steak

Advocacy group Rural Vermont is promoting its 2013 “Annual Celebration”:

“Philip Ackerman-Leist,” director of Green Mountain College’s Farm & Food Project ... will be the guest speaker. Ackerman-Leist will share his first-person account of the recent international controversy involving Green Mountain College’s pair of working oxen “Bill” and “Lou.” This moving and disturbing story illustrates the profound lack of understanding and connection between contemporary American society and the source of our food. ... Special guest Philip Phillip [sic] will offer his ideas on how we can work together to bridge this divide.

Rural Vermont is a fairly politically progressive organization unfortunately bound by a devotion to and reflexive defense of the exploitation of animals. Ackerman-Leist similarly is too gorged on the flesh of (and the profits from) his grass-fed heritage-breed cows to consider that he might be the one with a profound lack of understanding. What possible ideas could he offer to bridge the divide between those who think a team of oxen deserved retirement after 10 years of work and those who can only think about such animals as food?

It was precisely people who are connected with the sources of their food who were able to draw a line at killing Bill and Lou. Ackerman-Leist, who petulantly had Lou killed despite (or rather because of) the controversy, is like the slaughterhouse worker who recently posted a video of himself shooting a horse. There is nothing in his actions or words that suggests working together to bridge a divide. In fact, the bridge is already there, but he refuses to acknowledge it, stubbornly seething at the shoreline, still shouting impotent defiance after those who have left him behind.

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, Vermont, ecoanarchism

Life after Oil and Gas: Pity Earth’s Creatures

Today’s New York Times Sunday Review juxtaposed two pieces on its front page: Elisabeth Rosenthal’s puff piece (last gasp?) for large-scale renewable energy, “Life After Oil and Gas”, and Edward Hoagland’s lamentation about nature’s disappearance under the march of human civilization, “Pity Earth’s Creatures”.

Hoagland’s piece stands as the answer to Rosenthal’s.

Except for some comments by International Energy Agency economist Fatih Birol suggesting that conservation and efficiency are more practical and effective choices, Rosenthal hardly considers why we have an energy crisis, of consequences as much as supply. (She also ignores, of course, the fact that huge investments in wind and solar have never been documented to actually reduce the use of other fuels. And both Rosenthal and Birol ignore the fact that countries and states that produce a high percentage of their electricity from wind are actually on larger grids, which make the percentage very much less.)

Instead Rosenthal assumes that we can “easily” produce the power we need from wind, solar, and water, citing the latest work of Mark Jacobson, whose numbers should frighten rather than inspire:

For New York State alone: 4,020 onshore and 12,770 offshore 5-MW wind turbines, 387 100-MW concentrated solar plants, 828 50-MW PV solar plants, 5,000,000 5-kW home and 500,000 100-kW business rooftop PV solar systems, 36 100-MW geothermal plants, 1,910 0.75-MW wave systems, 2,600 1-MW tidal turbines, as well as 7 1,300-MW hydro plants (half of which already exists).

Except for the rooftop solar, where do these go? Where do all the new “smart-grid” power lines and substations go? Where do all the materials to build and maintain and replace all these things come from? And what if these projections fall short (as they most certainly would)?

Except for rare hydro sources like Niagara Falls (or geothermal sources like Iceland’s volcanoes), renewable energy sources are diffuse. Therefore they require sprawling facilities of huge devices to collect enough to meet even a fraction of our electricity needs, let alone all of our energy (i.e., including transportation, heating, and manufacturing).

Furthermore, wind and solar are intermittent: The wind isn’t always blowing, and the sun shines only during the day. On top of that, their energy is variable, wildly so, in the case of wind. That means they need 100% backup.

Jacobson’s vision has already been imagined by H.G. Wells. In his 1897 “A Story of the Days To Come”, he described “the Wind Vane and Waterfall Trust, the great company that owned every wind wheel and waterfall in the world, and which pumped all the water and supplied all the electric energy that people in these latter days required.”

Far away, spiked, jagged and indented by the wind vanes, the Surrey Hills rose blue and faint; to the north and nearer, the sharp contours of Highgate and Muswell Hill were similarly jagged. And all over the countryside, he knew, on every crest and hill, where once the hedges had interlaced, and cottages, churches, inns, and farmhouses had nestled among their trees, wind wheels similar to those he saw and bearing like vast advertisements, gaunt and distinctive symbols of the new age, cast their whirling shadows and stored incessantly the energy that flowed away incessantly through all the arteries of the city. ...

To the east and south the great circular shapes of complaining wind-wheels blotted out the heavens ...

Where is nature in all this? Where is the countryside? Jacobson’s vision would turn it all into a power plant for the cities, and mines and refineries for endlessly building that power plant. There would be no escape. No nature to marvel at and lose oneself in. No nature to be left alone to live its own lives. Only the vain hand of human expansion.

As Hoagland writes in the other piece, we have already lost so much, as 7 billion people (doubled since 1970, tripled since 1940) trample over and push aside the world of other lives. The dream of renewables, which are inherently inefficient, only expands that process. If we would decry what we have already done to the earth, we need to start doing with a lot less. But the reality of renewables is that their use not only allows but requires more use of fossil and nuclear fuels, more extraction of resources, more paving over paradise.

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, ecoanarchism

Wind industry fears real scrutiny

To the Editor, Valley News:

What is the real threat of Vermont Senate Bill 30 (Dori Wolfe: “Don't Reject Wind Energy in Vermont,” letter, March 17)? Now stripped of the 3-year moratorium provision, it only requires the Section 248 permitting process to abide by rather than merely consider Act 250 criteria.

It is ironic that business people like Wolfe, while in one breath urging us to save the environment by buying their products and services, in the next express alarm that environmental scrutiny “would severely damage the wind industry.”

But on the latter point she is right: These projects, especially on otherwise fiercely protected ridgelines, are not green. The environmental (not to mention financial) costs far outweigh the necessarily minuscule benefit from a diffuse, intermittent, and highly variable source.

To avoid that conclusion, Wolfe raises the specter of oil and gasoline, which fuel our cars, heat our homes, and power our factories but provide almost none of our electricity. In fact, more wind requires building more natural gas– and even diesel-powered plants just for backup. She notes that housecats kill more birds, as if that absolves the additional deaths caused by wind turbines, and disregards wind energy’s unique toll on raptors (eagles, owls, and the like) and bats, the latter already decimated by white nose syndrome.

Wolfe also touts the latest poll showing continuing support for industrial wind energy (ignoring the broad dissatisfaction everywhere they are actually erected or even proposed). If industrial wind is as popular as the polls indicate, then the greater local involvement enabled by Act 250 would be a boon, not a threat.

But S.30 would make it harder for developers to divide communities and to pit town against town, because Act 250 puts the region’s interests before those of industry lobbyists in Montpelier.

If industrial-scale wind (and solar) are indeed beneficial to the environment and communities, locally as well as globally, then its marketers have nothing to fear from a more democratic and environmentally rigorous permitting process. If they do indeed have reason to fear, that’s precisely why we need to say yes to S.30.

Eric Rosenbloom
Hartland

[Note:  The letter as reproduced here reflects minor editing by the author.]

[Click here to read about Jeff Wolfe's threats regarding S.30.]

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, Vermont

in the muddle is the sounddance

Why do European cars have twice the fuel efficiency as in the US?

Dear Senator/Representative:

I use the Mini Cooper Clubman (manual transmission) as a typical example here, and because the Clubman is a larger model. Compare these fuel efficiency figures:

US: 35 mpg hwy, 27 cty, 30 comb.

UK: 50 mpg hwy, 34 cty, 43 comb. (CO₂ emissions 129 g/km, 152 g/mi)
(converted from Imperial to US gallons)

Diesel:
UK: 65 mpg hwy, 53 cty, 60 comb. (CO₂ emissions 103 g/km, 138 g/mi)
(converted from Imperial to US gallons)

These new super-efficient diesel engines (and apparently the regular gas engines, too) are burdened in the U.S. with obsolete particulate emissions rules that severely reduce their efficiency.

Whereas their efficiency ensures very low emissions anyway.

Please do all you can to allow the new-generation diesel engines that Europeans enjoy into the US, without forcing them (or even regular gas engines) to lose their incredible efficiency.

Imagine cutting the greenhouse gas emissions from most of our cars by half!

[comment:  CO₂ emissions are not regulated in either the U.S. or the E.U., and particulate emission limits are similar (and similarly specified as g/mi or g/km), so it is even stranger that high-efficiency diesel-powered cars, common in Europe, are not available in the U.S. Or that those few diesels that are available in the U.S. (e.g., from Volkswagen) get much less mileage than comparable models in Europe.]

Time and the Ferret Fancier

Time, still a cross, an irreconcilable liability; the single healthy moment chased by a starvation future and devoured by a voracious past. Paul Noble said time was only the skin of space, a necessity relative to the mind of man. That hard word relative: the height of a tree relative to the depth of the root and the strength of the storm.

Time like an everflowing stream . . . that pessimistic hymn that always made him see vividly the Annam and hear the curlews mewling, the melancholy air the cry of doomed prisoners in the dark; one of Rainey’s favorites because it could be dropped a key and roared without strain.

But he kept on trying to agree his two times – he had to, to make-believe some semblance of normality. He swore in a new set of intentions every night.

Morning and evening, Rainey one end, Jill the other and every evening scrape scrape scrape – Jill harping on the taut netting-wire with a not unmusical minor sound, the pink eyes flashing when they caught a spark of light. He always intended to be early with her meal but, just like going to school, some small thing or another appeared to delay him.

And then the dull end of a melancholy day – a few hours in the house, the fire dying down, the smell of hot rubber when the bottles were filled, Agatha making her policeman rounds, Ellen taking out her hairpins and letting the still rich gray-black hair flow over her shoulders, transforming herself unwittingly into a young old witch, the dark eyes burning in the parchment-pale face, Conor yawning, winding the clock and examining the kindling for the morning, the refreshed clock dinging and danging out time – ding-dang, time-time. Wash hands, face, teeth, feet and take the miming candle and dance a horde of shadows up the stairs. Bed and an insurance man's spell of a prayer that was a rope down which he slid into timelessness, through all the gathering pageantry of dream.

—Anthony C. West, The Ferret Fancier (1963)

Annie Gower

By Eric Rosenbloom, copyright 2013

She bore me and she bears me still     My mother Annie Gower. She played with me and plays to kill     My sister Annie Gower. She took me in and takes it well     My lover Annie Gower. She made our bed and makes a meal     My wife my Annie Gower. She mourns me and each morn she will     My widow Annie Gower. She reads my words and red her quill     My daughter Annie Gower. I built a bower on the hill     And wooed my Annie Gower. And we embraced beneath the elm     That grew for Annie Gower. We sang my rise and when I fell     And dreamed of Annie Gower.

Gluttony dressed up as foodie-ism

B. R. Myers wrote in the March 2011 Atlantic:

We have all dined with him in restaurants: the host who insists on calling his special friend out of the kitchen for some awkward small talk. The publishing industry also wants us to meet a few chefs, only these are in no hurry to get back to work. Anthony Bourdain’s new book, his 10th, is Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook. In it he announces, in his trademark thuggish style, that “it is now time to make the idea of not cooking ‘un-cool’ — and, in the harshest possible way short of physical brutality, drive that message home.” Having finished the book, I think I’d rather have absorbed a few punches and had the rest of the evening to myself. No more readable for being an artsier affair is chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir, Blood, Bones and Butter.

It’s quite something to go bare-handed up an animal’s ass … Its viscera came out with an easy tug; a small palmful of livery, bloody jewels that I tossed out into the yard.

Then there’s Kim Severson’s Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life, which is the kind of thing that passes for spiritual uplift in this set. “What blessed entity invented sugar and cacao pods and vanilla beans or figured out that salt can preserve and brighten anything?” And I thought I knew where that sentence was going. The flyleaf calls Spoon Fed “a testament to the wisdom that can be found in the kitchen.” Agreed.

To put aside these books after a few chapters is to feel a sense of liberation; it’s like stepping from a crowded, fetid restaurant into silence and fresh air. But only when writing such things for their own kind do so-called foodies truly let down their guard, which makes for some engrossing passages here and there. For insight too. The deeper an outsider ventures into this stuff, the clearer a unique community comes into view. In values, sense of humor, even childhood experience, its members are as similar to each other as they are different from everyone else.

For one thing, these people really do live to eat. Vogue’s restaurant critic, Jeffrey Steingarten, says he “spends the afternoon — or a week of afternoons — planning the perfect dinner of barbecued ribs or braised foie gras.” Michael Pollan boasts in The New York Times of his latest “36-Hour Dinner Party.” Similar schedules and priorities can be inferred from the work of other writers. These include a sort of milk-toast priest, anthologized in Best Food Writing 2010, who expounds unironically on the “ritual” of making the perfect slice:

The things involved must be few, so that their meaning is not diffused, and they must somehow assume a perceptible weight. They attain this partly from the reassurance that comes of being “just so,” and partly by already possessing the solidity of the absolutely familiar.

And when foodies talk of flying to Paris to buy cheese, to Vietnam to sample pho? They’re not joking about that either. Needless to say, no one shows much interest in literature or the arts — the real arts. When Marcel Proust’s name pops up, you know you’re just going to hear about that damned madeleine again.

It has always been crucial to the gourmet’s pleasure that he eat in ways the mainstream cannot afford. For hundreds of years this meant consuming enormous quantities of meat. That of animals that had been whipped to death was more highly valued for centuries, in the belief that pain and trauma enhanced taste. “A true gastronome,” according to a British dining manual of the time, “is as insensible to suffering as is a conqueror.” But for the past several decades, factory farms have made meat ever cheaper and — as the excellent book The CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations] Reader makes clear — the pain and trauma are thrown in for free. The contemporary gourmet reacts by voicing an ever-stronger preference for free-range meats from small local farms. He even claims to believe that well-treated animals taste better, though his heart isn’t really in it. Steingarten tells of watching four people hold down a struggling, groaning pig for a full 20 minutes as it bled to death for his dinner. He calls the animal “a filthy beast deserving its fate.”

Even if gourmets’ rejection of factory farms and fast food is largely motivated by their traditional elitism, it has left them, for the first time in the history of their community, feeling more moral, spiritual even, than the man on the street. Food writing reflects the change. Since the late 1990s, the guilty smirkiness that once marked its default style has been losing ever more ground to pomposity and sermonizing. References to cooks as “gods,” to restaurants as “temples,” to biting into “heaven,” etc., used to be meant as jokes, even if the compulsive recourse to religious language always betrayed a certain guilt about the stomach-driven life. Now the equation of eating with worship is often made with a straight face. The mood at a dinner table depends on the quality of food served; if culinary perfection is achieved, the meal becomes downright holy — as we learned from Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), in which a pork dinner is described as feeling “like a ceremony … a secular seder.”

The moral logic in Pollan’s hugely successful book now informs all food writing: the refined palate rejects the taste of factory-farmed meat, of the corn-syrupy junk food that sickens the poor, of frozen fruits and vegetables transported wastefully across oceans — from which it follows that to serve one’s palate is to do right by small farmers, factory-abused cows, Earth itself. This affectation of piety does not keep foodies from vaunting their penchant for obscenely priced meals, for gorging themselves, even for dining on endangered animals — but only rarely is public attention drawn to the contradiction. This has much to do with the fact that the nation’s media tend to leave the national food discourse to the foodies in their ranks. To people like Pollan himself. And Severson, his very like-minded colleague at The New York Times. Is any other subculture reported on so exclusively by its own members? Or with a frequency and an extensiveness that bear so little relation to its size? (The “slow food” movement that we keep hearing about has fewer than 20,000 members nationwide.)

The same bias is apparent in writing that purports to be academic or at least serious. The book Gluttony (2003), one of a series on the seven deadly sins, was naturally assigned to a foodie writer, namely Francine Prose, who writes for the gourmet magazine Saveur. Not surprisingly, she regards gluttony primarily as a problem of overeating to the point of obesity; it is “the only sin … whose effects are visible, written on the body.” In fact the Catholic Church’s criticism has always been directed against an inordinate preoccupation with food — against foodie-ism, in other words — which we encounter as often among thin people as among fat ones. A disinterested writer would likely have done the subject more justice. Unfortunately, even the new sociological study Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape is the product of two self-proclaimed members of the tribe, Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann, who pull their punches accordingly; the introduction is titled “Entering the Delicious World of Foodies.” In short, the 21st-century gourmet need fear little public contradiction when striking sanctimonious poses.

The same goes for restaurant owners like Alice Waters. A celebrated slow-food advocate and the founder of an exclusive eatery in Berkeley, she is one of the chefs profiled in Spoon Fed. “Her streamlined philosophy,” Severson tells us, is “that the most political act we can commit is to eat delicious food that is produced in a way that is sustainable, that doesn’t exploit workers and is eaten slowly and with reverence.” A vegetarian diet, in other words? Please. The reference is to Chez Panisse’s standard fare — Severson cites “grilled rack and loin of Magruder Ranch veal” as a typical offering — which is environmentally sustainable only because so few people can afford it. Whatever one may think of Anthony Bourdain’s moral sense, his BS detector seems to be working fine. In Medium Raw he congratulates Waters on having “made lust, greed, hunger, self-gratification and fetishism look good.” Not to everyone, perhaps, but okay.

The Roman historian Livy famously regarded the glorification of chefs as the sign of a culture in decline. I wonder what he would have thought of The New York Times’ efforts to admit “young idols with cleavers” into America’s pantheon of food-service heroes.

With their swinging scabbards, muscled forearms and constant proximity to flesh, butchers have the raw, emotional appeal of an indie band … “Think about it. What’s sexy?” said Tia Keenan, the fromager at Casellula Cheese and Wine Café and an unabashed butcher fan. “Dangerous is sometimes sexy, and they are generally big guys with knives who are covered in blood.”

That’s Severson again, by the way, and she records no word of dissent in regard to the cheese vendor’s ravings. We are to believe this is a real national trend here. In fact the public perception of butchers has not changed in the slightest, as can easily be confirmed by telling someone that he or she looks like one. “Blankly as a butcher stares,” Auden’s famous line about the moon, will need no explanatory footnote even a century from now.

But food writing has long specialized in the barefaced inversion of common sense, common language. Restaurant reviews are notorious for touting $100 lunches as great value for money. The doublespeak now comes in more pious tones, especially when foodies feign concern for animals. Crowding around to watch the slaughter of a pig — even getting in its face just before the shot — is described by Bethany Jean Clement (in an article in Best Food Writing 2009) as “solemn” and “respectful” behavior. Pollan writes about going with a friend to watch a goat get killed. “Mike says the experience made him want to honor our goat by wasting as little of it as possible.” It’s teachable fun for the whole foodie family. The full strangeness of this culture sinks in when one reads affectionate accounts (again in Best Food Writing 2009) of children clamoring to kill their own cow — or wanting to see a pig shot, then ripped open with a chain saw: “YEEEEAAAAH!”

Here too, though, an at least half-serious moral logic is at work, backed up by the subculture’s distinct body of myth, which combines half-understood evolutionary theory with the biblical idea of man as born lord of the world. Anthropological research, I should perhaps point out, now indicates that Homo sapiens started out as a paltry prey animal. Clawless, fangless, and slight of build, he could at best look forward to furtive boltings of carrion until the day he became meat himself. It took humans quite a while to learn how to gang up for self-protection and food acquisition, the latter usually a hyena-style affair of separating infant or sick animals from their herds. The domestication of pigs, cows, chickens, etc. has been going on for only about 10,000 years — not nearly long enough to breed the instincts out of them. The hideous paraphernalia of subjugation pictured in The CAFO Reader? It’s not there for nothing.

Now for the foodie version. The human animal evolved “with eyes in the front of its head, long legs, fingernails, eyeteeth — so that it could better chase down slower, stupider creatures, kill them, and eat them” (Bourdain, Medium Raw). We have eaten them for so long that meat-eating has shaped our souls (Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma). And after so many millennia of domestication, food animals have become “evolutionarily hard-wired” to depend on us (chef-writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, The River Cottage Meat Book). Every exercise of our hungry power is thus part of the Great Food Chain of Being, with which we must align our morals. Deep down — instinctively if not consciously — the “hardwired” pig understands all this, understands why he has suddenly been dragged before a leering crowd. Just don’t waste any of him afterward; that’s all he asks. Note that the foodies’ pride in eating “nose to tail” is no different from factory-farm boasts of “using everything but the oink.” As if such token frugality could make up for the caloric wastefulness and environmental damage that result from meat farming!

Naturally the food-obsessed profess as much respect for tradition as for evolution. Hamilton, in Blood, Bones and Butter, writes of her childhood dinners: “The meal was always organized correctly, traditionally, which I now appreciate.” Even relatively young traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey must be guarded zealously against efforts to change or opt out of them. Foreign traditions destigmatize every dish even for the American. In Best Food Writing 2010, one foie gras lover asks another whether he would eat tortured cat if there were sufficient Mongolian history behind the dish; the answer is yes.

So tradition is an absolute good? No. When it dictates abstention from a certain food, it is to be rejected. Francine Prose shows how it’s done in her prize-winning Saveur article, “Faith and Bacon.” I need hardly explain which of those two she cannot live without. Prose concedes that since pigs compete ravenously with humans for grain, her Jewish forefathers’ taboo against pork may well have derived from ecological reasons that are even more valid today. Yet she finds it unrealistic to hope that humans could ever suppress their “baser appetites … for the benefit of other humans, flora, and fauna.” She then drops the point entirely; foodies quickly lose interest in any kind of abstract discussion. The reader is left to infer that since baser appetites are going to rule anyway, we might as well give in to them.

But if, however unlikely it seems, I ever find myself making one of those late-life turns toward God, one thing I can promise you is that this God will be a deity who wants me to feel exactly the way I feel when the marbled slice of pork floats to the top of the bowl of ramen.

Yes, I feel equally sure that Prose’s God will be that kind of God. At least she maintains a civil tone when talking of kashrut. In “Killer Food,” another article in Best Food Writing 2010, Dana Goodyear tells how a restaurant served head cheese (meat jelly made from an animal’s head) to an unwitting Jew.

One woman, when [chef Jon] Shook finally had a chance to explain, spat it out on the table and said, “Oh my fucking God, I’ve been kosher for thirty-two years.” Shook giggled, recollecting. “Not any more you ain’t!”

We are meant to chuckle too; the woman (who I am sure expressed herself in less profane terms) got what she deserved. Most of us consider it a virtue to maintain our principles in the face of social pressure, but in the involuted world of gourmet morals, constancy is rudeness. One must never spoil a dinner party for mere religious or ethical reasons. Pollan says he sides with the French in regarding “any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners.” (The American foodie is forever projecting his own barbarism onto France.) Bourdain writes, “Taking your belief system on the road — or to other people’s houses — makes me angry.” The sight of vegetarian tourists waving away a Vietnamese pho vendor fills him with “spluttering indignation.”

That’s right: guests have a greater obligation to please their host — and passersby to please a vendor — than vice versa. Is there any civilized value that foodies cannot turn on its head? But I assume Bourdain has no qualms about waving away a flower seller, just as Pollan probably sees nothing wrong with a Mormon’s refusal of a cup of coffee. Enjoinders to put the food provider’s feelings above all else are just part of the greater effort to sanctify food itself.

So secure is the gourmet community in its newfound reputation, so sure is it of its rightness, that it now proclaims the very qualities — greed, indifference to suffering, the prioritization of food above all — that earned it so much obloquy in the first place. Bourdain starts off his book by reveling in the illegality of a banquet at which he and some famous (unnamed) chefs dined on ortolan, endangered songbirds fattened up, as he unself-consciously tells us, in pitch-dark cages. After the meal, an “identical just-fucked look” graced each diner’s face. Eating equals sex, and in accordance with this self-flattery, gorging is presented in terms of athleticism and endurance. “You eat way past the point of hitting the wall. Or I do anyway.”

If nothing else, Bourdain at least gives the lie to the Pollan-Severson cant about foodie-ism being an integral part of the whole, truly sociable, human being. In Bourdain’s world, diners are as likely to sit solo or at a countertop while chewing their way through “a fucking Everest of shellfish.” Contributors to the Best Food Writing anthologies celebrate the same mindless, sweating gluttony. “You eat and eat and eat,” Todd Kliman writes, “long after you’re full. Being overstuffed, for the food lover, is not a moral problem.” But then, what is? In the same anthology, Michael Steinberger extols the pleasure of “joyfully gorging yourself … on a bird bearing the liver of another bird.” He also talks of “whimpering with ecstasy” in a French restaurant, then allowing the chef to hit on his wife, because “I was in too much of a stupor … [He] had just served me one of the finest dishes I’d ever eaten.” Hyperbole, the reader will have noticed, remains the central comic weapon in the food writer’s arsenal. It gets old fast. Nor is there much sign of wit in the table talk recorded. Aquinas said gluttony leads to “loutishness, uncleanness, talkativeness, and an uncomprehending dullness of mind,” and if you don’t believe him, here’s Kliman again:

I watched tears streak down a friend’s face as he popped expertly cleavered bites of chicken into his mouth … He was red-eyed and breathing fast. “It hurts, it hurts, but it’s so good, but it hurts, and I can’t stop eating!” He slammed a fist down on the table. The beer in his glass sloshed over the sides. “Jesus Christ, I’ve got to stop!”

We have already seen that the foodie respects only those customs, traditions, beliefs, cultures — old and new, domestic and foreign — that call on him to eat more, not less. But the foodie is even more insatiable in regard to variety than quantity. Johnston and Baumann note that “eating unusual foods is part of what generates foodie status,” and indeed, there appears to be no greater point of pride in this set than to eat with the indiscriminate omnivorousness of a rat in a zoo dumpster. Jeffrey Steingarten called his first book The Man Who Ate Everything. Bourdain writes, with equal swagger, “I’ve eaten raw seal, guinea pig. I’ve eaten bat.” The book Foodies quotes a middle-aged software engineer who says, “Um, it’s not something I would be anxious to repeat but … it’s kind of weird and cool to say I’ve had goat testicles in rice wine.” The taste of these bizarre meals — as researchers of oral fixation will not be surprised to learn — is neither here nor there. Members of the Gastronauts, a foodie group in New York, stuff live, squirming octopuses and eels down their throats before posting the carny-esque footage online.

Such antics are encouraged in the media with reports of the exotic foods that can be had only overseas, beyond the reach of FDA inspectors, conservationists, and animal-rights activists. Not too long ago MSNBC.com put out an article titled “Some Bravery as a Side Dish.” It listed “7 foods for the fearless stomach,” one of which was ortolan, the endangered songbirds fattened in dark boxes. The more lives sacrificed for a dinner, the more impressive the eater. Dana Goodyear: “Thirty duck hearts in curry … The ethos of this kind of cooking is undeniably macho.” Amorality as ethos, callousness as bravery, queenly self-absorption as machismo: no small perversion of language is needed to spin heroism out of an evening spent in a chair.

Of course, the bulk of foodie writing falls between the extremes of Pollanesque sanctimony and Bourdainian oafishness. The average article in a Best Food Writing anthology is a straightforward if very detailed discussion of some treat or another, usually interwoven with a chronicle of the writer’s quest to find or make it in perfect form. Seven pages on sardines. Eight pages on marshmallow fluff! The lack of drama and affect only makes the gloating obsessiveness even more striking. The following, from a man who travels the world sampling oysters, is typical.

Sitting at Bentley’s lustrous marble bar, I ordered three No. 1 and three No. 2 Strangford Loughs and a martini. I was promptly set up with a dark green and gold placemat, a napkin, silverware, a bread plate, an oyster plate, some fresh bread, a plate of deep yellow butter rounds, vinegar, red pepper, Tabasco sauce, and a saucer full of lemons wrapped in cheesecloth. Bentley’s is a very serious oyster bar. When the bartender asked me if I wanted olives or a twist, I asked him which garnish he liked better with oysters. He recommended both. I had never seen both garnishes served together, but … (Robb Walsh, “English Oyster Cult,” Best Food Writing 2009)

I used to reject that old countercultural argument, the one about the difference between a legitimate pursuit of pleasure and an addiction or pathology being primarily a question of social license. I don’t anymore. After a month among the bat eaters and milk-toast priests, I opened Nikki Sixx’s Heroin Diaries (2008) and encountered a refreshingly sane-seeming young man, self-critical and with a dazzlingly wide range of interests. Unfortunately, the foodie fringe enjoys enough media access to make daily claims for its sophistication and virtue, for the suitability of its lifestyle as a model for the world. We should not let it get away with those claims. Whether gluttony is a deadly sin is of course for the religious to decide, and I hope they go easy on the foodies; they’re not all bad. They are certainly single-minded, however, and single-mindedness — even in less obviously selfish forms — is always a littleness of soul.

environment, environmentalism, vegetarianism, veganism

What Is Finnegans Wake?

Some thoughts for those about to enter the river of life or dig in the mudmound for the first or the five-hundredth time.

By Karl Reisman, author of “Darktongues”: Fulfulde and Hausa in Finnegans Wake and more.

Many people begin their journey carrying as baggage certain preconceptions: about books, about novels, about characters and even about plots and their roles in such novels or books. True, Finnegans Wake has characters and plots but to focus on them, while sometimes enlightening, is often to miss the larger stream in which they are involved.

Also. as the wisest readers have discovered, it is not possible to make a consistent story or cast of characters that carries you through your reading - although sometimes the story line is very clear.

So the first notion that has to be abandoned is that Finnegans Wake is about something.

It is not about Life, it is life.

As Samuel Beckett said in the short profound essay he wrote for Mr. Joyce: "His writing is not about something; it is that something itself."

Scientists dealing with difficult concepts sometimes build a kind of "model" of what they are contemplating. The model behaves in the way that their object of study behaves and by understanding the model they are able to understand things about the world they have made a model of. Niels Bohr's model of the structure of the atom was one such. As even earlier the model of the solar system which most of us have in our head.

In that sense we might, although it is limiting, say that Finnegans Wake is a "model" of Life. It behaves the way life behaves. Finnegans Wake, then, is not a book in the traditional sense. It is a living object.

Finnegans Wake has many identities - it is, for instance, a river. Joyce lets us know this in the first word, "riverrun".

One feature of the world Joyce has created is that it is built pervasively on ironies - what Giordano Bruno called "the coincidence of contraries". We can see this immediately in understanding life as a river. There is the river of Heraclitus, constantly changing so that one can never step into the same river twice. But there is also the river that endlessly repeats the same process of moisture from the clouds down the same path to the sea, that takes us "by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." Both are present and one in the structure of Finnegans Wake.

The book and its parts in many ways share features with stages in the life of human beings. At the end for instance as death approaches we come to see that much of what we have thought important in our lives is not so important, and life becomes much clearer and we see clearly the answers to questions we thought so difficult, so at this point the writing in Finnegans Wake becomes much clearer and simpler, until the final catastrophe of death itself on page 628.

The book is its own teacher. The keys to it have been given in the book.

"Lps. The keys to. Given!" (page 628.15)

As with rivers so with roads - or "ruads". And here the thing is that there are so many. There is no right road to the book. As it says on page 497: "from Rathgar, Rathanga, Rountown and Rush, from America Avenue and Asia Place and the Affrian Way and Europa Parade and besogar the wallies of Noo Soch Wilds and from Vico, Mespil Rock and Sorrento," ...

And so also it is a book of many languages all of which contribute to the multiple meanings of its sentences. When different languages come in contact they often break down the structure of language itself. One example that Joyce uses is the African based Creole languages of the West Indies and other plantation societies with African slaves. These languages often break words into syllables and play with the meanings that emerge - as Joyce himself does in Finnegans Wake. This book is "an earsighted view", you have to hear the sounds of the different languages as your are able, and at the same time see the words on the page, with their special and peculiar spellings. Each person brings different perceptions to this process.

Although as you become more and more familiar with the book you will find that you begin to speak its language.

For the language of Finnegans Wake is some of the most beautiful ever written, and it sounds in your head and becomes engraved in your memory, so that eventually it transforms from a written work into an oral one.

And of course Finnegans Wake is a book of the night and of the dark. Whether approached psychologically as John Bishop does in his remarkable Joyce's Book of the Dark, or mythologically or by any analysis of dreams and dreamers.

And then the remarkable mind of Joyce takes us far beyond all these.

Because it is such a living work, all reading of Finnegans Wake in which one finds pleasure, or enlightenment, or beauty or particularly laughter, is valuable reading whether by novice or longtime reader.

One consequence of what I am saying is that Finnegans Wake is not a "difficult" book. It may be unfamiliar at the start, but it speaks the language of us all.

So to answer the question in my title, Finnegans Wake is far more than a "book". It lives, it talks to us, it finds us new things. And we talk to it. And eventually it changes us and lives in us.

As I said the book is its own teacher, although one may be lead to discover many things through curiosity aroused by the book.

The only other "teachers" I would recommend to the beginner are Samuel Becket's little essay "Dante ... Bruno . Vico .. Joyce" from Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress and the remarkable and loving book by James Atherton, The Books at the Wake.

Ten Ways to Kill Big Wind

Mike Bond writes:

Despite many victories, communities around the world are still facing a plague of industrial wind projects that like hideous War of the Worlds steel monsters are destroying communities, mountains, and wildlands, slaughtering birds and bats, sickening people and driving them from their homes.

Even though these wind projects do not reduce greenhouse gases or fossil fuel use, they have dreadful environmental, social and economic impacts on whole regions. But they are a tool for energy companies and investment banks to make billions in taxpayer subsidies that get added to our national debt.

The good news is that communities worldwide are learning how to defeat these dreadful projects. More and more laws and moratoriums are being passed against them, while other projects are defeated on legal grounds or by overwhelming public opposition.

In Hawaii, an industrial wind project that would have constructed ninety 42-story turbine towers across seventeen square miles of Molokai has been defeated by a determined two-year effort of the island’s residents. In the process we learned many tactics, which I’ve tried to summarize below and are further described in Saving Paradise:

1. Show wind projects for what they are: industrial. Not environmental, not green, not renewable, and cause no reductions in greenhouse gases or fossil fuel use, no long-term jobs and few short-term ones.


2. Don’t be nice. These wind developers are your enemies: they want to destroy where you live, steal your money (property values), and are quite happy to literally drive you from your homes. They will lie, cheat, bribe, buy politicians, and do whatever else they can to win. They won’t be fair and you can’t trust them.


3. Create a group and get your community behind you. Point out property value loss, human health issues, environmental destruction, tourism impacts, and all the other dreadful results of industrial wind. If you have a homeowners’ associations, make them aware of the danger so they can join the fight.


4. Publicize your case. In the newspapers, TV and radio, on blogs and in nationwide petitions. Use good graphics. Go viral, worldwide. Develop a good professional website with lots of information and ways for viewers to participate. Community members should write op-eds and letters to the editor. A very powerful tool is frequent press releases that pass on news reports from National Wind Watch and other groups about the devastating impacts of industrial wind. These press releases should be sent to all relevant media outlets and local, state and national legislators.


5. Do mailings to everyone. In Molokai we sent two mailings to all the island’s 2,700 addresses. The first mailer described the dangers of the project and included a survey with a stamped return envelope. We had a massive response, with 97% of responses against the project, and our group gained hundreds of new members. A year later we sent a second mailer with photo mockups showing how the turbines would tower over homes and landscapes. This mailer also included a bumper sticker which many residents then put on their cars.


6. Be visible. Put up lots of signs, both homemade and professionally done. Put up billboards if you can. Professional signs show you mean business, and are taken more seriously.


7. Find legislators who will help you. On the state level, Republicans are often more responsive and more concerned about the environment than traditionalist Democrats who have bought the idea that wind is environmental (or who are receiving contributions from wind companies).


8. Litigate. Find every avenue to impair or slow the wind developers. Once the Washington industrial welfare subsidies are removed, industrial wind companies will vanish overnight.


9. Get property value loss appraisals. Average losses of 40% or more are being reported; in Molokai, one of the reasons the landowner planning the project cancelled it was they estimated a 75% property value loss on their lands near the project. Publicize the loss of assessed value at county level, and how that will reduce tax revenues. In most cases, property value loss far exceeds any revenue the county might receive from the project.


10. Civil disobedience. Politicians and energy companies are terrified of this. Don’t be afraid to go to jail to protect the land and homes you love. On Molokai we planned if necessary to start a hunger strike on the island, and there were people ready to starve to death to protect our island. The level of your commitment is equal to the level of your success.

—Posted on March 8, 2013, by Mike Bond, mikebondbooks.com

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights

Coal has surged despite destroying environment for wind energy

Wind Wise Radio (blogtalkradio.com/windwise, windwiseradio.org, facebook.com/windwiseradio) has recently posted a few news items about the increase of coal use around the world, despite (or in part because of?) the huge expansion of industrial-scale wind energy.

China's Wind Farms Come With a Catch: Coal Plants

‘To safeguard against blackouts when conditions are too calm, officials have turned to coal-fired power as a backup. ... More coal is being burned in existing plants, and new thermal capacity is being built to cover this shortfall in renewable energy. ... Officials want enough new coal-fired capacity in reserve so that they can meet demand whenever the wind doesn't blow’

China consumes nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined

‘Coal consumption in China grew more than 9% in 2011, continuing its upward trend for the 12th consecutive year, according to newly released international data. China's coal use grew by 325 million tons in 2011, accounting for 87% of the 374 million ton global increase in coal use. Of the 2.9 billion tons of global coal demand growth since 2000, China accounted for 2.3 billion tons (82%). China now accounts for 47% of global coal consumption—almost as much as the entire rest of the world combined.’

As China Burns More Coal, India Needs More

‘It has now been estimated by the International Energy Agency that India may be importing as much coal as China by 2017. ... India has large reserves of coal, however, its economy is growing at a rate where domestic production is unable to meet consumer demand. India currently relies on coal-fired power plants for the majority of its electricity production. However, strict environmental regulations make it difficult to increase the output of the power plants. Importing large amounts of coal is also not always an efficient alternative, as it is difficult to pass on the costs to consumers, many of whom live on less than two U.S. dollars a day. India is thus commonly faced with power outages due to the slow supply of coal. Cities are commonly plagued with blackouts that last for hours, especially during the summer months when air-conditioning is needed. In response, India now aims to build at least 16 more power plants, referred to as ultra-mega power projects.’

Most U.S. coal exports went to European and Asian markets in 2011

‘In 2011, total annual coal exports were up 31% compared to 2010, reaching 107 million short tons, due largely to rising exports to Europe and Asia. ... In general, coal use abroad continued to grow. ... Falling domestic coal consumption (down 4.6% in 2011) along with a slight increase in U.S. coal production (0.9%) freed up more coal to export. ... Rising spot natural gas prices in Europe, up about 35% in 2011, prompted European electricity generators to use more coal.’

Coal resurgence threatens climate change targets [U.K.]

‘Coal is enjoying a renaissance, with the highest consumption of the fuel since the late 1960s. ... The controversial use of shale gas in the US, where it now makes up a quarter of electricity generation, has brought down carbon emissions there – but the greenhouse gases have simply been exported elsewhere, meaning no net gain for the planet. As gas power has replaced coal in the US, the excess coal has pushed down prices on world markets, sparking a bonanza for the high-carbon fuel. Last year, coal had its best year in more than four decades. Its global share of primary energy consumption rose from about 25%, where it has been for years, to 30% – the highest level since 1969, long before governments made any efforts to tackle climate change. ... In the UK, between the second quarter of 2011 and the second quarter of 2012, coal consumption rose by nearly a quarter. Europe overall has burned more coal in the past year than any time since it pledged steep emissions cuts, and China and India have also been burning more. Cheap coal, caused by weakening demand in the US where power stations have switched fuels to use gas, has been the biggest factor. ... Fracking has cut the US's greenhouse gas emissions to their lowest level since 1992, as power stations across the country have switched to gas from coal.’

Germany to Add Most Coal-Fired Plants in Two Decades, IWR Says

‘Germany will this year start up more coal-fired power stations than at any time in the past 20 years as the country advances a plan to exit nuclear energy by 2022.’

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism