Would Romney treat America as he treated his dog?

Steve Nelson, "Sensibilities", Valley News (White River Junction, Vt.), Jan. 8, 2012:

It is nearly the eve of the New Hampshire primary and, despite the surprising Iowa results for Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney appears to be the man to beat. I suppose this is no great surprise, as Romney is a known quantity and seems relatively sensible despite his opportunistic lurch to the right during this campaign. While his reputation for flip-flopping is well deserved (health care, abortion rights, gay rights, etc.), there are few politicians who don't pander or at least play to the base (both meanings intended) during primary campaigns. Bill Clinton was, somewhat affectionately, dubbed Pander Bear by some during his presidential campaigns.

Ambition and opportunism are not qualities that should disqualify Romney. If they were disqualifiers, we'd have few if any candidates for high office. Romney is ill suited for the presidency because he once drove to Canada with the family's Irish setter on the roof of the car, as New York Times columnist Gail Collins never fails to humorously note in her Romney-related columns.

But unlike Collins, I'm quite serious. America is in trouble. Poverty is at the highest levels since the Great Depression. Unemployment is tenacious and debilitating for millions of families. The gap between rich and poor is shameful. Folks don't have access to decent health care. Schools are underfunded. As the Occupy Wall Street movement chaotically reminds us, life is better for 1 percent and decidedly worse for the other 99 percent. While this may be slight statistical hyperbole, the general point is indisputable.

Mitt Romney was and is among the 1 percent. He was born into privilege and, like too many others with this birthright, believes deeply in the myth of opportunity and meritocracy. There is not a shred of evidence in his personal, professional or political life that he is self-aware enough to recognize his own unearned privilege or empathic enough to understand the deep structural disadvantages that plague millions of Americans. He believes that decisions can be made by analyzing mounds of data and trusting the ethically blind mechanism of free markets.

He embraces his religious faith with the same uncritical certainty that he embraces the other "values" he learned in the privileged and exclusive confines of his private schools, his Mormon university and his gated communities. It's not that these things are necessarily bad. It's that they are his world, not the world.

It is not that wealth and privilege should disqualify anyone from public office either. Other privileged folks in American political history have shown great capacity for genuine empathy. The Kennedy family, despite imperfections among some family members, comes to mind. Their privilege was accompanied by a deep commitment to social justice that continues to play out in the lives of the current generation. The convictions of wealthy progressives may be a form of noblesse oblige, but noblesse oblige beats the heck out of no sense of obligation whatsoever, which is what Romney displays in word and deed.

Romney's treatment of the family dog during a road trip 25 years ago offers a clue to his political sensibilities. I am, quite admittedly, an unrepentant dog lover who mourned the loss of my last dog with intensity that surprised even me. But my excesses aside, I cannot imagine what would lead someone to put his dog in a carrier and strap it to the roof of the car. He claimed that the "dog liked it." The dog, of course, couldn't verify or deny that claim, but it was certainly put at significant risk compared with the human passengers who enjoyed relative safety and comfort inside the car. I can't know the dog's experience, either, but an empathetic person can reasonably deduce that it wasn't a joy ride up there with the roaring wind and isolation from family members.

But just like the struggling Americans that Romney doesn't seem to really see, he may have assumed the dog was lucky to be along for the ride. Romney has never been buffeted by the winds of misfortune or been at risk because of poverty, lack of health care or substandard housing. He's never felt the sting that comes with being denied basic human rights and dignity because of race or sexual identity.

Mitt Romney can't help that he's never had these experiences, but he can't be excused for failing to understand them.

Steve Nelson lives in Sharon (Vt.) and New York City, where he is the head of the Calhoun School.

Struggle for land rights in India and Mexico

National Wind Watch has posted recent detailed updates about the struggle of the Zapotecas in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the Adivasis in Gujarat, India, against abuses by giant wind companies (Spain's Iberdrola in Mexico and Suzlon in India), aided by the government and police, taking land for industrial wind energy facilities.

Grassroots Resistance: Contesting Wind Mill Construction in Oaxaca, by Sylvia Sanchez (originally published by Znet)

Unclean Intrigues Behind Clean Energy: Dhule Adivasis’ Glorious Struggle for Land Rights, by a fact-finding team led by Anand Teltumbde (originally published at struggle-for-land-rights.blogspot.com)

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism

Around the world: two days of the wind energy depredation news

India: Vultures hounded by windmills

Suthari village in Abrasa Taluka, Kutch, used to have 10 to 15 nests of the white backed vultures till a couple of years ago. This year, just a lone nest has been found. Where once there were more than 70 birds, now only 10 to 15 remain. When birdwatchers got together to look for a possible reason for the sudden drop in number of these birds, they attributed it to the wind farms that have come up in the area in the last year. ... In India, no Environmental Impact Assessment is done before setting up windmills as they are [presumed to be] a source of clean energy.

California: Riverside County supervisors doubt necessity of bird-safety rules

Two supervisors in Riverside County, one of California’s top producers of wind energy, want the region to be exempt from new statewide guidelines aimed at reducing the deaths of hawks, bats, owls, and other animals from windmills.

Illinois: Study puts focus on bird deaths by wind turbines

Despite proof that birds and bats are being killed by the rotating blades of wind turbines, a new state report says more studies are needed to determine if anything should be done about it.

Scotland: Council accused of ripping up rulebook over windmills plan

Wind turbines will be built close to a road and a stone circle after councillors over-ruled policies set out to prevent their construction on sensitive sites. The decision paves the way for a Turriff pig farmer to diversify his business with income from three 262ft-high windmills.

Iowa: Wind turbines raise some legal questions for landowners

Roger McEowen, an extension specialist at Iowa State University, says wind energy farming presents legal issues landowners need to carefully consider before entering into an agreement with developers.

India: Maharashtra ignoring tribal rights over forest land

Senior leaders of the Peasants and Workers Party (PWP) and the Janata Dal, N. D. Patil and Mrinal Gore on Tuesday alleged that the Maharashtra government was favouring companies over the rights of poor Adivasis in Dhule district. ... Since January, there have been several protests in Dhule over the allotment of forest land for wind energy projects. Earlier this month the government issued notices to extern five activists championing the cause of the Adivasis and ban their entry into Dhule and four other districts.

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism

Bruno Vico and Finnegans Wake

From A Word in Your Ear: How & Why to Read James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, by Eric Rosenbloom, pages 29–39:

Saints Giordano and Giambattista

Besides characters, there are a few informing spirits behind the work, most notably Giordano Bruno (of Nola) and Giambattista Vico. Giordano was a determinedly independent philosopher burned in Rome by the Inquisition in 1600 after 8 years of imprisonment. He spent his youth — 13 years — in the refuge of a Dominican monastery. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia characterized his thought as “incoherent materialistic pantheism.” From the Copernican solar system he went on to suggest that the sun is not the center of the universe, that creation is infinite, and further that every living thing contains an infinite universe. He said the earth, too, is a living being. Developing the work of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), who said that in God contraries unite, Giordano stated that everything knows itself best in the struggle with its opposite, even creating its opposite for that purpose, or by finding it across time as well as space — or in a mirror — and that no living thing exists except that its opposite exists as well. He envisioned entities in constant flux, exchanging identities, moving farther from and closer to the unity of God. He also worked on a system of memory training, dabbled in alchemy, and believed that Jesus was a magician. He first fled Rome and then many other cities ahead of various church and university authorities, and spent a few very productive years in London as toast of the town. Back in Venice, he was betrayed by his host to the Holy Office. The Nolan’s wide-ranging intellect and varied life (much of it in exile) yet singleness of vision represented for Joyce the spiritual unity of character. As such, he is found in Dublin as the stationers Browne and Nolan (who published the edition of Chapman’s Homer that Joyce probably read as a child).

Giambattista Vico (1688–1744) was a linguist and legal historian who published his New Science, which he described as “a rational civil theology of divine providence,” in 1725 and went mad while perfecting it for further editions. Developing many of Giordano’s ideas, he too rejected the idea of “golden” ages; the New Science examines the course of nations out of Cyclopean family clearings, divine kings, and the offer of asylum for vassals, through alliance of the “noble” fathers in eternal reaction against the growing demands of the vassals, to a certain equity for all, descent into civil wars and anarchy, and salvation under a civil monarchy. The monarchy (i.e., empire) collapses, and, as divine kings rise again in its wake, barbarism returns and the nations are reborn. The cycle began after the universal flood with a flash of lightning and clap of thunder that drove brutish giants to recall their humanity and hide in shame in caves, there beginning the institutions of religion, marriage, and burial that are at the origin of every civilization. A recourse of the cycle began in Europe after the collapse of Rome.

By examining Greek and Roman history, language, mythology, and law, Vico described the course of nations in terms of the Egyptian ages of gods, of heros, and of people. Each age has a characteristic nature (poetic, heroic, human), reflected in its social organization (family, city, nation), natural law (divine, force, reason), government (theocratic, aristocratic, democratic), customs (religion, social ceremony, civic duty), reason (revelatory, political, personal), language and letters (mute gesture and heiroglyphics, heraldry and symbolism, popular speech and characters), and so on. The heroic age is transitional, transferring the rights and property of Adam to more of the people. It is marked by verbal scrupulousness, punctilious manners, violent struggles, suspicion and civil turbulence, and pura et pia bella (pure and pious war, such as the Crusades that ended the “dark” age of Europe’s ricorso).

Each age itself goes through a cycle of rising and falling, recovery and demise, ending with a poet — theological, heroic, vulgar — who culminates the age and ushers in the next by creating a new Jove.

Vico does not limit himself, however, to this 3-stage scheme, describing 5 and 6 stages as well for the unfolding of humanity through necessity, utility, comfort, pleasure, luxury, madness, and “waste of his substance.” His scheme can be described as a flux between divine kings defending the special status of the “heros” and a civil emperor protecting human equity. And just as Vico analogizes individual development to speculate about early humanity, Joyce sees a cycle of history in every person’s childhood, maturity, and decline.

The major part of the New Science establishes the thought of the divine and early heroic ages, their “poetic wisdom.” For example, as a nation’s world expanded, local names were re-used for farther places in the same direction. This (along with Dante’s finding that he and Florence were a central concern of the divine order in his Comedy) provides a model for Joyces’ Dublin-based universe (“they went doublin their mumper all the time” (p. 3)). Vico also discovers the true Homer as the collective voice of the Greek peoples, those of the northeast in the Iliad and centuries later those of the southwest in the Odyssey; this is akin to Joyce’s mystery of Finnegan and his incarnation in HCE, Here Comes Everybody.

Viconian Cycle

It is usually said that the four parts of Finnegans Wake follow a Viconian cycle of gods–heros–people–recourse. Indeed, “vicus of recirculation” is mentioned in the first sentence, there is a flood followed by thunder later on the first page, and thunder words continue to be heard (pp. 3, 23, 44, 90, 113, 257, 314, 332, 414, and 424 — nine of 100 letters each and one of 101 to total 1001 letters). The thunder, however, is like the audible babblings of a fitful sleeper threatening to rise, given form by responses from the players of the book that ensure he will stay down until they are ready, i.e., the book seems to be stuck in the pre-human state of atheist giants, in the Norse Ginnungagap, before (and after) time.

The four parts of Finnegans Wake do not follow the Egypto-Viconian ages. If anything, they go backwards, from the rollicking expansiveness of the first book (of the people), through the set-pieces of the second (the heroic family), to the self-worshipping Shaun of the third (the god-like son). Most problematic with the identification of Joyce’s parts with Vico’s ages is that the recourse (ricorso in Italian) is not a 4th age, but the return of the 1st. Instead of following Vico’s cycle, the four parts of Finnegans Wake may — as Samuel Becket claimed — represent the three institutions (religion, marriage, burial) that move humanity into the light of civilization and, finally, step into history. Kabbalistically, they may represent the archetypal, creative, formative, and material worlds in the process of getting from idea to the manifestation of dawn. They may be simply four different dreams through the deepening night. They may originate from the four parts of the Tristan & Isolde stories.

Joyce, as he does with all his sources, re-interprets Vico to fit his own scheme. He certainly uses Vico, but the heroic age is always in the present, the divine age always in the past, and the popular age in the future; and they are all present simultaneously. Finn Mac Cool with the goddess Brighid is of the divine age, HCE and ALP are of the heroic, and Shem, Shaun, and Issy the popular. Avatars of each of them appear in every age. Cycles spin off from multitudes of events and in myriad lives, overlapping and intertwining and confusing each other. The flood represents the cataclysmic end as well as the pause before going round again.

Nonetheless, Finnegans Wake is full of 3- and 4-term sequences; usually they represent the religion, marriage, and burial at the beginning of history, e.g., “Harry me, marry me, bury me, bind me” (p. 408; all 3 institutions are binding: by piety, shame, sense of immortality). Their regularity emphasizes the universality and circularity of human time that Vico stands for in the book. On page 590, the cycle appears very simply as “Tiers, tiers and tiers. Rounds.” And on page 452: “The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.” This describes simultaneous opposite movement from a point of unity, joining briefly on the other side and continuing back to the origin. It describes a flux as much as a cycle, a “systomy dystomy” (p. 597) like the beating of the heart or the fall and rise of all human endeavors.

Joyce, although often referring people to Vico, also asserted he did not “believe” Vico’s science, “but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung.” He was perhaps using Vico to think about the subconscious mind in history more than about history itself. Vico provided the idea that mind and history are identical, and that language betrays their secrets. Thus all history could be revealed in a book of a sleeping soul, its crude projections redeemed in the unconscious mind that created them. (As Stephen Dedalus might have said in his dotage, “History is a nightmare I’m dreaming to wake.”)

Hugh Kenner has suggested that the dreamer does not want to wake up, that ALP is a widow resisting the conscious awareness that her husband — executed after the 1916 Easter uprising, he says — is no longer beside her. The hanging scaffold is suppressed by becoming Tim Finnegan’s building scaffold. Her tears become the river in which her dreams flow. The book of history assures us that life always rises from the ashes, but we also know that individual loss is unrecoverable. The incomplete sentence at the end of Finnegans Wake gives the reader a choice: Leave the book and return to life, or return to the book’s first words.

Joyce once likened Finnegans Wake to the Dark Night of the Soul, a treatise by shoeless and imprisoned Saint John of the Cross on the perfection of love and his poem Dark Night. That work is the fourth part of his Ascent of Mount Carmel, and similarly Finnegans Wake as a whole is a separate elaboration of Vico’s cycle through the nightly unrest of dream. As history courses like the rise, glory, and descent of the sun each day, an individual recourse occurs at night. The language of the book reflects this period of transition from — the flux between — decadence and a new beginning. There is a Vico road in Dalkey, a southern coastal suburb of Dublin.

Death and Rebirth

Joyce once imagined his book as the dead giant Finn Mac Cool lying by the Liffey (where swam the salmon, his totem animal) watching history — his and the world’s, the past and the future — flowing through him. This life-in-death dream becomes a sacramental process of rebirth. At Finnegan’s wake, Finnegans wake.

One should also remember that Joyce nearly joined the Jesuits, and that the Christian ceremonial cycle continued to shape his imagination. The mystery of the trinity, for example, three persons (multiplicity) representing unity, is very much in the spirit of Finnegans Wake. At its best, Christianity has been a great syncretizer and humanizer of older myths. For example, the stations of the cross represent a sacrifice ritual in terms of a human procession, the paschal drama of the rise and fall and rise again of human history. At its worst, it is a great beast devouring, Shaun-like, everything before it in the name of salvation after death.

The Christian sacramental meal, the eucharist, the host, is often present. Hoc est corpus (“This is the body”) is another manifestation of HCE (“Here Comes Everybody”; but also High Church of England). As host (“victim” in Latin) at his pub, HCE serves and is mocked by his 12 customers. In Vico, the earlier meaning of host is alien, thief, violator of the clearing — an enemy of the people who is sacrificed in their name. The first cities were identified with the altars that were in the fields, where, for example, Cain slew the more primitive Abel and Romulus slew Remus who jumped over the just-plowed boundaries. It is alienated Hosty who writes “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” (pp. 44–47) against the outsider HCE.

Vico called the course of nations a history of piety, and in their recourse they were guided by Christianity, a more human religion. For Joyce, Christianity is more prominent than other religious and mythological systems because it is the one he knew intimately. But the eucharistic meal — the renewing sacrifice — fits the pattern described in James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough of killing and eating a divine king. And it is connected with the Jewish feast of tabernacles, or Succoth, as a turning of the year. Although it is now only theater, the original barbaric act (“He’ll want all his fury gutmurdherers to redress him.” (p. 617)) still erupts into history and continues to reverberate in the human unconscious.

Humanism

My use of the term is not philosophically rigorous, but Vico and Giordano are important also as humanists. Giordano’s love of God was such that he loved nature as it is. He showed that the infinitude of the divine is within every element and creature of nature and every human being. Vico showed that history was not a matter of destiny or fate, but the operation of divine providence in the human mind; he insisted that “the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind.”

Cowspiracy

There is one single industry destroying the planet more than any other. But the world's leading environmental organizations are too afraid to talk about it. Clips:

Global Warming
Richard Oppenlander, author, Comfortably Unaware: “My calculations are that without using any gas or oil or fuel every again from this day forward, we would still exceed our maximum carbon-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2030 ... all simply by raising and eating livestock.”

Kirk Smith, Professor of Global Environmental Health, University of California, Berkeley: “If you reduce the amount of methane emissions, the level in the atmosphere goes down fairly quickly, within decades, as opposed to CO₂ if you reduce the emissions to the atmosphere, you don't really see a signal in the atmosphere for 100 years or so.”

Demosthenes Moratos, Sustainability Institute, Molloy College: “The single largest contributor to every known environmental ill known to humankind – deforestation, land use, water scarcity, the destabilization of communities, world hunger – the list doesn’t stop – it’s an environmental disaster that’s being ignored by the very people who should be championing it.”

Will Tuttle, author: “Free-living animals made up, 10,000 years ago, 99% of the biomass and human beings, we made up only 1% of the biomass. Today, only 10,000 years later ... we human beings and the animals that we own as property make up 98% of the biomass and wild free-living animals make up only 2%. We’ve basically completely stolen the world, the earth, from free-living animals to use for ourselves and our cows and pigs and chickens and factory-farmed fish, and the oceans are being even more devastated.”

Oppenlander: “Concerned researchers of the loss of species agree that the primary cause of loss of species on our earth ... is due to overgrazing and habitat loss through livestock production on land and by overfishing, which I call fishing, in our oceans.”

Tuttle: “We’re in the middle of the largest mass extinction of species in 65 million years, the rainforest is being cut down at the rate of an acre per second, and the driving force behind all of this is animal agriculture: cutting down the forest to graze animals and to grow soybeans, genetically engineered soybeans to feed the cows and pigs and chickens and factory-farmed fish.”

Oppenlander: “Ninety-one percent of the loss of the rainforest in the Amazon area thus far to date, 91% of what has been destroyed is due to raising livestock.”


Ocean

Water“One quarter-pound hamburger requires over 660 gallons of water to produce. Here I've been taking short showers trying to save water, to find out eating just one hamburger is the equivalent of showering 2 entire months. So much attention is given to lowering our home water use, yet domestic water use is only 5% of what is consumed in the U.S., versus 55% for animal agriculture. That’s because it take upwards of 2500 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef.”


Rainforest“Our global rainforests are essentially the planet’s lungs. They breathe in CO₂ and exhale oxygen. An acre of rainforest is cleared every second, and the leading cause is to graze animals and grow their food crops. ... And it is estimated that every day, close to a hundred plant, animal, and insect species are lost through the rainforest’s destruction.”


WildlifeDeniz Bolbol, American Wild Horses Preservation Campaign: “The government has been rounding up horses en masse, and we now have more wild horses and burros in government holding facilities – 50,000 – than we have free on the range. Basically you have ranchers who get to graze on our public land for ... about one-fifteenth of the going rate, and what the Bureau of Land Management has to do is say how much forage and water is on the land and then they divvy it up. They give so much to cows, so much to ‘wildlife’, and so much to the wild horses and burros, and what we see is the lion’s share of the forage and water’s going to the livestock industry. And then they scapegoat the horses and burros and say, ‘Oh there’s too many horses and burros, let’s move them.’ I always tell people that wild horses and burros are just one of the victims of the management of our public lands for livestock, because we also see the predator killing going on: wolves are now being targeted by ranchers. USDA has aircraft and all they do is aerial gunning of predators. All a rancher does is call and say, ‘I’ve got a coyote here’, and they’ll come over and they’ll shoot the coyote, or they’ll shoot the mountain lion, or shoot the bobcat. And this is all for ranchers.”


Population“Some people would say the problem isn’t really animal agriculture, but actually human overpopulation. In 1812, there were 1 billion on the planet. In 1912, there were 1.5 billion. Then just 100 years later, our population exploded to 7 billion humans. This number is rightly given a great deal of attention, but an even more important figure when determining world population is the world’s 70 billion farm animals humans raise. The human population drinks 5.2 billion gallons of water every day and eats 21 billion pounds of food. But just the world’s 1.5 billion cows alone drink 45 billion gallons of water every day and eat 135 billion pounds of food. This isn’t so much a human population issue – it’s a humans eating animals population issue. Environmental organizations not addressing this is like health organizations trying to stop lung cancer without addressing cigarette smoking, but instead of second-hand smoking it’s second-hand eating, that affects the entire planet.”

“You can’t be an environmentalist and eat animal products. Period.”

—Howard Lyman, former cattle rancher, author, Mad Cowboy

“To feed a person on an all plant-based vegan diet for a year requires just one-sixth of an acre of land. To feed that same person on a vegetarian diet that includes eggs and dairy requires three times as much land. To feed an average U.S. citizen’s high-consumption diet of meat, dairy, and eggs requires 18 times as much land. This is because you can produce 37,000 pounds of vegetables on one-and-a-half acres but only 375 pounds of meat on that same plot of land.

“The comparison doesn’t end with land use. A vegan diet produces half as much CO₂ as an American omnivore, uses one-eleventh the amount of fossil fuels, one-thirteenth the amount of water, and an eighteenth of the amount of land.

“After adding this all up, I realized I had the choice every single day to save over 1100 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 square feet of forested land, the equivalent of 20 pounds of CO₂, and 1 animal’s life. Every single day.”

References and calculations

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism

“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

Against the Giants in Oaxaca

Al Giordano wrote in the Feb. 9, 2006, Narco News:

This is not about windmills, Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos thundered on Monday morning across this windswept plain. "It is about giants."

The greedy grab for the Isthmus of Tehuantepec -- the narrowest stretch of land in Mexico -- is a mega-project by Capital and State that does not stop at windmills. It also includes new highways and oil pipelines connecting the ports on both oceans, an expanded hydroelectric dam in Jalapa del Marques along the way, tourist Meccas to replace small fishing communities between Salina Cruz and Huatulco and a new zone for maquiladoras -- those cheap-labor mills that generate power not from wind but from human muscle and bone along the US-Mexican border -- that will exploit the poverty of the workers that the mega-developments displace from their lands and the natural resources they cultivate.

And so it is to this breezy plain that Zapatista "Delegate Zero" came on Monday morning to harness the wind that only human hands, and not machines, can tap: that of rebellion. "You are not alone," he told yet more communities of fighting (read: still human) people throughout the Isthmus. In La Venta's town square he said, "We will fight with you against these windmills."

Nancy Davies wrote on Mar. 28:

... here's the article I've been predicting: "Teachers and APPO and communal land owners announce the boycott of Venta II," accompanied in action by other organizations including The Front of the People of the Isthmus in Defense of the Land. President Felipe Calderon and Governor Ulises Ruiz are inaugurating the construction of the new wind farm to generate electricity, owned by a Spanish transnational, on Wednesday March 28 (see the video newsreel, The Windmills of Capitalism). About two hundred hectares of communal land and about nine sub-municipalities of Juchitán are in dispute. The wind farm is seen as a basic part of the development of the Plan Puebla Panama, and infringes on the autonomy of the indigenous residents of the area. The area is protected, according to Noticias, by a circle of military soldiers.

Ninety-eight wind generators already operate with a supposed capacity of 83.3 megawatts. In the second stage the transnational company, Iberdrola, has invested $100 million. The World Bank has recently loaned $20 million for the development of La Venta III, which confirms that regardless of who's protesting, the project will go ahead.

On March 3 three-hundred-and-sixty men from the Federal Preventative Police, traveling in vehicles with dark windows and carrying high power weapons, evicted the communal land owners from the neighborhood Tres de Abril located within the polygon of Venta II, because they were an "obstacle to the project." Many believe that the outcry against the wind generators has more to do with the offensively low rental and a voice for the people whose land has been "rented" for thirty years. The rental was reportedly carried out by agents who ignored the community assembly process and were in turn allegedly paid off handsomely by the government and/or Iberdrola.

And George Salzman wrote on Mar. 25:

"Harvard contributes to reconstructing Oaxaca" is the grand headline splashed across the Sunday, March 25, 2007 front page of Noticias, the major daily newspaper published in Oaxaca City. When I saw that announcement this morning I thought, "Oh, my God! (Never mind that I'm an atheist.) That's both good news and bad news."

The good news is that the popular struggle in Oaxaca is serious enough that it is being seen by those pre-eminent intellectual guardians of global capitalism as a potential threat to the status quo. The bad news is that Harvard University, always in the service of the super-rich, and therefore in step with (or ahead of) U.S. government plans and actions, is preparing to put its gloved but dirtied hands to work for the PAN/PRI government of Felipe Calderon and the local PRI governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. The message is clear. It's going to take more than sheer military suppression to crush the popular revolution. But it must be crushed, in the interest of global capitalism, and therefore the 'intellectual power' of Harvard University will be brought to bear in addition to the military state of siege already put in place in the city. What we can be certain of is that Harvard's intellectual prowess will not be used to uncover the fates of the people disappeared and still unaccounted for by the Federal and State armed agents or to assist in the struggle for justice and dignity for the people of Oaxaca.

Also see the press releases posted here from the Union of Indigenous Communities of the Northern Zone of the Isthmus.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, human rights

Omnivores?

Today, the New York Times Magazine published the winning essay in their Ethicist contest for the ethical justification of eating meat. As expected, it is lame.

And in a strange fit, the Times “Public Editor”, Arthur Brisbane, decries the contest for making meat-eaters uncomfortable (which strongly suggests that the ethics of meat eating is indeed elusive).

He cites, apparently as reasonable critique, a blog post by Lisa Henderson, a sophomore at Kansas State University, on the Pork Network: “I believe that humans are omnivores and that meat provides protein and other things that are essential for health. Animals utilize the grass. Animals help us utilize more of the earth. I am not anti-vegetarian, but they seem to be anti-meat, and they seem to want to take that choice away from me.”

The omnivore argument actually justifies a vegetarian diet, because, especially since the invention of cooking, humans can thrive in a large variety of environments without meat. Furthermore, while meat-eaters insist that the imperative of being omnivorous drives their eating habits, they are not in fact omnivorous. Do they eat other humans? Do they (at least the majority in the U.S.) eat horses and dogs? The fact is, they too make ethical and cultural decisions about their diet and do just fine.

It is also telling that meat-eaters always feel threatened by the mere existence of a vegetarian diet. That response suggests that the only justification is indeed cultural in that vegetarians are seen as apostates or traitors.

Brisbane then solicits a comment from Calvin Trillin, which again he cites as apparently meaningful: “If they had a chance, they would eat us.”

Those vicious cows and chickens: terrorists in our midst!

Finally, Brisbane had also noted evocations by animal experimenter Linda Cork of life on the Arctic tundra and arid plains, where she sees fishing and herding to be essential to survival. But that only underscores that animal flesh is not essential to survival in Stanford, California. (Science researchers like Cork, for all their avowed objectivity, generally sugarcoat the fate of their victims as “sacrifice”.)

[[[[ ]]]]
So to the winning essay, by former vegetarian Jay Bost, who, like Linda Cork, apparently saw that life in the Arizona desert would be difficult without eating animals and that therefore it’s OK to eat them in North Carolina and Hawaii, too.

In what Brisbane derides as “awfully complicated”, Bost lays down three conditions (not necessity, not imperative) to feel OK about eating the corpses of other animals: 1) accept that death begets life, that all life is just solar energy temporarily stored in an impermanent form; 2) invoke compassion to choose ethically raised food, vegetable, grain, and/or meat; 3) give thanks.

Bost defines “ethical” as “living in the most ecologically benign way”. He compares boutique organic beef to monoculture/pesticide agriculture and — quel surprise! — concludes that not eating meat may be unethical. He compares the “best” situation on one side (we're not even getting into the horrors of “organic” dairy) to the worst situation on the other. Of course, meat eaters also eat plants, since healthy life without plants is a lot more unlikely than life without meat. They are implicated in both sides.

But let us consider cannibalism again. Since the greatest burden on the earth’s ecology is in fact the burgeoning human population, why wouldn’t it be ethical, by Bost’s definition, to eat other humans? In fact, one might conclude from his argument that not eating humans may be unethical. After all, if grazing animals help the land, it would be unethical to kill them. Whereas the Gospel of John in the Christian testament notes at 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son”. In the ritual of the eucharist (i.e., “thanks”, Bost’s final condition), believers consume the flesh of Jesus (”just solar energy temporarily stored in an impermanent form”), not a sheep or chicken.

[[[[ ]]]]
Which leads me to my own (unsent) entry, imagining the only possible ethical argument, namely, the circular one of religion:

Meat: An Ethical Imperative

In the Book of Genesis, Cain slew Abel, because Abel was a meat-eater and thereby found greater favor with G-D. Having distanced himself from the ways of G-D by foregoing meat, Cain’s ethics had deteriorated to the point that his envy turned to murder. After that, he kept to cities, where a greater variety of sin is possible. But as the mark of his crime faded, his envy rose again, and so today urban vegetarians righteously condemn the diet that has sustained humans for millenia. They denounce meat-eaters as cruel, but instead of being cruel to animals, vegetarians must be cruel to other humans, just as Cain was toward Abel.

Violence and murder are a part of the human psyche. If we don’t regularly kill animals — respectfully, gratefully incorporating their spirits into our own — we end up killing other humans, even loved ones, as Cain killed his own brother. To advocate a vegetarian diet is ultimately to advocate murder. To eat humanely raised and slaughtered animals is to promote peace among men, which is why sacrificial meals are at the core of every religion and community.

As the essential bond of society, shared murder is its ethical basis.

To maintain civilization, if we are to avoid human sacrifice, the crime of Cain, we must slay animals and, to honor them as worthy gifts to the gods, eat them.

In choosing a nonviolent diet, vegetarians deny that ethical necessity. In continuing to eat meat, even to our own and the planet’s harm, we recognize the necessary sacrifice that ethical living demands. We must bear the burden of Cain by emulating Abel.

—o—
Update, April 7, 2013:  Chris Grattan of Brockport, N.Y., writes: “In paleolithic hunting cultures, the rites connected with the killing of game were oriented toward an expression of gratitude to the animal for having given its life and the belief that its spirit would return in another body. In neolithic horticultural and agricultural societies the rites to promote the fecundity of the land were often gruesomely bloody, often in the form of human sacrifice. I try to keep this in mind when being subjected to vegetarian sanctimony.”

Get thee behind me Cain, ye ferking vegetarian!

[[[[ ]]]]
But, back in reality, as omnivores we can choose what we eat. For most people most of the time, there is no need to eat animals. To choose to eat animals is to choose killing and suffering, and ethical justification for that choice — when it is a choice — is impossible.

As I have quipped before, meat-eaters claim to be omnivores, but they can’t swallow the truth.

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, anarchism, ecoanarchism

Happy birthday, Eugène Pottier

l'Internationale

Awake, the cursed of the earth, Awake, the slaves of hunger, Reason thunders in its crater, It's the eruption of the end. Let's make a clean slate of the past, Enslaved masses, rise up, rise up — The world will change at its foundation; We are nothing, we will be all. This is the final struggle; Let us unite and tomorrow The International Will be the human race. There are no supreme saviors No God, no Caesar, no Court — Producers, let us save ourselves, We decree the common greeting. To make the thief disgorge his booty, To free the spirit from its prison, Let us fan the forge together, Strike the iron while it is hot. This is the final struggle; Let us unite and tomorrow The International Will be the human race. The state represses and the law cheats, The tax bleeds the disenfranchised; No duty is imposed on the rich, The right of the poor is an empty word. No more to languish in submission, Equality means other laws; "No rights without duties," it says, "And no duties without rights." This is the final struggle; Let us unite and tomorrow The International Will be the human race. Hideous in their glory, Kings of the mine and rail, Have they never done anything But steal from the worker? In the strongholds of their gang What work created is melted down — In demanding its return The people claim only their due. This is the final struggle; Let us unite and tomorrow The International Will be the human race. The kings drugged us in their smoke, Peace among us, war to tyrants, Bring the strike to the armies: Surrender and break the ranks! If these cannibals persist To make us heroes They soon will know that our bullets Are for our would-be generals. This is the final struggle; Let us unite and tomorrow The International Will be the human race. City, country, we are The great party of workers, The earth belongs only to us, The idle will stay away. How many have fed on our flesh! But if these ravens, these vultures, One of these mornings are gone, The sun will shine forever.