“Wind Power in the Windy City:  Not There When Needed”

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(This image was not part of the original article)

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—Jonathan Lesser, PhD, Energy Tribune (7/25/12)

Summertime is in full swing with its barbeques, vacations, and record breaking heat waves. If you can’t keep cool in the lake or neighborhood pool, you are probably staying indoors with air conditioning – which was running non-stop in the Chicagoland area during the record heat the first week of July. That’s not unusual, of course. Because we like to be comfortable, throughout the U.S. electric demand generally peaks in July and August. To meet that high demand, we must have plenty of generating capacity available, which means our nuclear, coal and natural gas-fired plants have been running at full tilt. But wind power contributed almost nothing during Chicago’s recent heat wave because the unfortunate reality is wind almost never blows when the weather is hottest and the demand for electricity is highest.

Sadly, that stark truth hasn’t stopped state and federal policymakers from using consumer and taxpayer dollars to fund aggressive state renewable portfolio standards and generous federal subsidies to add expensive wind power to the nation’s electricity grid, especially in the Midwest and Texas.

President Obama’s home state of Illinois is a perfect example. According to the American Wind Energy Association, Illinois has one of the most aggressive wind energy programs in the country. At the end of 2011, over 2,700 megawatts (MW) of wind generation had been installed, and another 600 MW was under construction. (For comparison, the Braidwood Nuclear Plant southwest of Chicago has a generating capacity of 2,300 MW.) Thus, during the recent heat wave, when temperatures in Chicago soared to 103 degrees, wind turbines stood by to do their part to keep the Windy City cool. And stand they did…still, that is.

Illinois wind generated less than five percent of its capacity during the record breaking heat last week, producing only an average of 120 MW of electricity from the over 2,700 MW installed. On July 6th, when the demand for electricity in northern Illinois and Chicago averaged 22,000 MW, the average amount of wind power available during the day was a virtually nonexistent four MW, less than the output of two large wind turbines, or about and enough power to operate 4,000 blow dryers. In fact, the most electricity wind produced on any day during last week’s heat wave was an average of 320 MW on July 3rd, or about 10 percent of the capacity of the wind turbines built in Illinois, when temperatures soared to 103 degrees.

Wind power’s failure during last week’s extended heat wave is no fluke. When I performed a similar analysis last summer, the results were the same: the hotter the weather and greater customers’ demand for electricity, the less electricity produced from wind. Of course, this should not really be surprising. After all, the most miserable summer days are hot, humid, and still. What is surprising, however, is that policymakers keep throwing consumers’ and taxpayers’ hard-earned money at wind generation. And, because Illinois has one of the most aggressive renewable portfolio standards in the country, those subsidies, and electricity bills, will continue to soar, driving more businesses away from a state that continues to hemorrhage jobs in tough economic times. It is difficult to imagine a worse energy policy.

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*Jonathan Lesser, PhD, is the President of Continental Economics, Inc., an energy and regulatory consulting firm based in New Mexico.

—Mark Cool, Falmouth MA (7/30/12)

Would you support your selectmen or town council if they developed a policy to force firefighters to be ready to respond after a 48 or 72 hour shift? Using municipal firefighters as an example, towns have policies, in addition to bargaining unit contracts, dictating the hours one employee can work in succession. Laws preclude unreasonable shift durations because of safety concerns focused primarily on adequate periods of rest.

Sleep deprivation results in impairment of cognitive ability and causes significant risk of making mistakes when engaging in all activities. For example, several major industrial accidents in recent history have been attributed to sleep deprived workers.  These include the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident, the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

The U.S. Department of Transportation identifies fatigue as the Number One safety problem in transportation operation. Sleepy drivers are as much a danger as alcohol-impaired drivers, says the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

A study conducted by the Civil Aerospace Medical Institute concluded that fatigue effect closely resembles the effects of alcohol. After 24 hours awake, cognitive performance is consistent with the skill level of someone with 0.10 blood alcohol concentration (considered as too impaired to safely operate a vehicle).

In Falmouth Massachusetts, sleep deprevasion/fatigue accounted for 85% of the reported symptomatic problems by residents within 3/4 mile from the town’s industrial turbine zone.

Bringing home the point. In June 2003, “Maggie’s Law” was passed in New Jersey and made it illegal to knowingly drive a vehicle while impaired by lack of sleep.

The law raises the specter of municipal and state liability for subjecting people to unreasonable limits of fatigue to meet the demands of “green energy goals” and illusory profit streams.

Laws and regulatory provisions protect firefighters from risk of fatigue. Are some people not worthy?

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Addendum by Preston McClanahan, author of “Violated in Mass.”

Do the legal references, above, along with the Mass. State Constitution, Article 97, regarding the people’s right to freedom from excessive and unnecessary noise—all of which provisions have been ignored and transgressed—justify a class action suit holding accountable the wind industry in Massachusetts and the elected officials who act in violation of these statutes?

Would the legal fees be covered by donations from readers of this website?  Should such a suit go to court but not be decided in favor of those afflicted, would the license to violate people’s rights not be revealed along with the complete failure of adequate power generated by the inconsistent wind?

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—Calvin Luther Martin (Autumn 2001)

Nina’s at the hospital discharging a 15-year-old abducted from home, driven at knife-point to a remote spot, raped then stabbed over and over. Finally pushing her out of the car, naked, bleeding, by the side of the interstate. Spotted there by a truck driver who called the police.

She’s in the hospital, recovering.

Though of course she won’t recover for years. Cuts and broken facial bones will heal soon enough. The soul won’t heal so easily.

I write about humanity and humanness—and then, this. Here. On my telephone. This child. A fellow man (literally) does this to a child.

I am not angry at him; I am uncomprehending. I am left wondering how such a person is molded. I am not a man of morality; morality is a late-comer in human consciousness. I am a man of something older, more important that morality: the gift. The gift and grace.

Where is the gift and grace in this? In this man’s psyche, his soul, his mind? He suckled it at his mother’s breast, and then what?

This is hard. I remember Friedrich Nietzsche, son of a minister, the philosopher who wrote volumes about what it means to be human. Study his photographs and you see an intense man. One day he witnessed a man, a tradesman, whipping his horse as it drew his cart. The philosopher ran out, drove the man off, and embraced the horse—and his mind simply snapped. Like a twig: snapped in two. The incident was a trigger; from then on Nietzsche was an incoherent madman.

When does one’s mind snap apart because of stories of a man raping, cutting, discarding a 15-year-old girl?

A difficult question. Walt Whitman offers the best response: “I am the man … I suffered … I was there.” I am the girl and I am her assailant. I am both. I am compassion; I am grace. I am the gift. I am healing—healing the girl, the man, and healing myself. That is all.

This man was at one time a child; a mother loved him for awhile, at least.  (Or perhaps not, for that too is possible.)  Still, he was a boy. Then a teenager. I have a son who became a teenager who became a young man. I have seen my child grow. Perhaps I could have watched that child, the rapist, grow into a festering sore.

No, I don’t detest him; what I am is uncomprehending of the paradigm that produced him. It’s as though the stream whose patient current carves the soul into the shape of compassion—as though that stream has abandoned some people, or perhaps been unavailable to them. What then grows is a monster of tissue in human form.

Where did that creator of genuine human life go? That creator that is grace and the gift, I mean? It was there for me when I was a child and it has been with me ever since, but where was it for him? And many like him?

I sometimes understand why the philosopher went mad.

Editor’s note:  The following was written by an Ontario, Canada, engineer who specializes in energy production.  Gas plants. Nuclear plants.  Wind & solar energy.  He explains to his township (Clearview Township, Ontario) why wind energy is folly.

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—Eric Jelinski, P. Eng. (7/19/12)

I am writing to express my objections to the installation of Industrial Wind Turbines in Clearview Township, Ontario, Canada.

My wife and I moved here to retire on 50 acres, building a house, market garden, as well as taking many other initiatives to become part of the vital social fabric.

It is bad enough that under Ontario Premier McGuinty, the social fabric in big cities like Toronto is in need of repair, as it happens, in part because those “50,000 jobs” in renewable energy have not materialized, and there is little productive activity for many of the youth in the cities. Guns and drugs are very much part of the social fabric in some neighbourhoods.

What gives McGuinty, with his Toronto constituent Members of the Provincial Parliament (MPP’s), the moral right to tell us in Clearview that we must accept wind turbines “or else”? One way to stop the wasted energy and environmental impact of urban sprawl is for big city MPP’s to clean up their own yard and make cities safer and more habitable. While they listen to those who object to new gas plants, and cook up a new “plan of the month” for public transport, why do they ignore the issues with wind turbines?

My background is nuclear and chemical engineering, with over 30 years combined working at each of the nuclear plants in Ontario. I teach nuclear engineering at University of Toronto and Georgian College (Power Engineering) in Owen Sound for the purpose of training the next generation of staff who will design plants and work them safely.

I know nuclear reactors and how e=mc² gets us the energy. I know chemical reactors, e.g. to make gasoline from crude oil, and refining metals. I know solar and wind energy going back to the 1970’s, as energy and exergy are my major fields of study.

The application of Ontario’s “Green Energy Act” is in violation of principles in engineering, where we teach engineers to anticipate unintended consequences and not proceed with implementation until consequences and risks are taken into account.

The Green Energy Act is an abomination that is creating a living hell for almost everybody in rural Ontario, and the provincial government is ignoring the data of emerging health issues, property value issues, setbacks and zoning, impacts on fowl, fauna, and fish, impacts on local weather such as the dew point and foliar uptake by plants that is important in particular to alleviate heat stress on biota.

I have seen firsthand one of my neighbours from the 1980’s near Ripley forced out of his farm home due to wind turbines in Huron Township. Others are putting up with the impacts.

The energy available from wind in Ontario is borderline minimal compared to other countries and areas of the world. 25% to 30% is the capacity factor. The wind is not available when we need energy the most, i.e. summer air-conditioning and winter heating. The shoulder seasons have the most wind here, yet this is when air-conditioning and heating demands are minimal.

The power equation for wind results in 8 times the energy for a doubling of wind speed, and the excess energy has to be “dumped.” Storage systems are available, but prohibitively expensive. Hythanation is possible, but wind turbines are not economic for hydrogen production given the added infrastructure relative to the cost of natural gas.

Wind turbines use 5 to 7 times the amount of concrete and steel vs. say a nuclear plant on a per Megawatt basis. It will require some 10,000 wind turbines to replace the ~6000 MW of coal generation at 25% CF (capacity factor). Back-up gas fired plants have to be added like plug-ins everywhere because the wind is not reliable.

The pastoral scene of a field of wind turbines slowly turning in almost still air has environmentalists dreaming in technicolour. The truth is that these wind turbines need about 8 km/hour of wind before they will start generating electricity. Any rotation of the blades at wind speeds below 8 km/hour is accomplished by taking power from the grid to get the wind turbine started in anticipation that the wind may pick up.  (Click here.)

The economy of scale that has historically brought competitive energy prices in Ontario is not available, given the thousands of wind turbines, and that will also become a maintenance nightmare as machines and contracts approach end of life. Why do we not refuel Nanticoke, Lakeview, Lambton, Lennox and complete Wesleyville to run on natural gas?

What makes McGuinty et al. think they can impose industrial wind turbines on Clearview and all of rural Ontario? Is Clearview thinking of becoming part of this scheme of waste?

This scheme of waste is happening not just by government order, but it is happening because of the salacious relationship between government and the developers. The most telling example is the head of the Federal Liberal Party is a wind developer. The activity surrounding the recent cancelled “gas plant” in order to preserve seats, and thus preserve the Green Energy Act, is also telling.

We also have the government using engineers from wind developers making recommendations on health impacts. As a P. Eng. I can say that engineers are not the authority on health. The conflict of interest between the engineer being paid for engineering work, vs. the same engineer as proponent and key advisor to the government is quite apparent.

The set-back of 550 meters has no scientific basis. Noise from wind turbines has been measured up to 10 kilometers away in some locations. Medical doctors have noted the health impacts, yet they are being ignored by the Ontario government.

The Feed-in Tariff takes billions of dollars out of communities, out of the province, and out of the country. This is money that is very much needed for healthcare, for schools and teachers, and to replace aging infrastructure and to build much needed new infrastructure such as public transit.

For the first time in decades (I don’t think it ever took place), Ontario is taking equalization payments from the Federal Government, and this points to not only the unsustainability of Ontario as an economy, it is dragging down the rest of the country. It would be different if we owned everything, did local planning, and used a process that garnered respect.

The Ontario government is following the advice of foreign countries and foreign companies to give our money away to them irrespective of the advice of many MP’s. It is most interesting to note that one of the political parties with a labour platform appears in complete agreement with giving away the work and the money and the surplus electricity.

Japan is restarting its nuclear fleet. Russia, China, India, Britain, the US, and even the United Arab Emirates are building or planning to nuclear reactors for electric generation. What is the purpose and value of Ontario energy policy? Every product we buy in Ontario that is made someplace else (most items, can you name one thing that is made here?) has a nuclear energy component in that product.

It is time to stop being altruistic or hypocritical about our energy. There is no rational reason for the 50% cap on nuclear in Ontario. Are we on some unwitting “race to the bottom” being orchestrated by some competitor countries wanting to control us? Having ample low cost energy is crucial to sovereignty, internal peace, and security.

As such, there is no respecting McGuinty, Bentley et al. for this indictment. There is also no need to respect any wind developers as they have already indicated their respect for us. I commented last year on WPD, and sent comments to their consultant as requested, and they have not replied, and their silence speaks volumes. I have sent many an e-mail to the government recommending a moratorium and have not been given the courtesy of any reply.

The purpose of the developer is to make money, i.e. take our money as allowed for by the government, and with minimum effort on their part. This speaks to the quality of the public meetings and their answers to our concerns. The public meetings are a sham.

There are quite a number of lawsuits already taking place and others pending. I thank the Federal government for the recent announcement on the health study. It is also pivotal to learn today that the Ministry of Health is being forced to testify (click here).

My recommendation is for Clearview to take the high road and avoid complicity in matters that are before the courts, and who knows, but it is quite possible (I hope) that the renewed call for a moratorium may take hold for good reasons posted here.

A moratorium in Clearview is very appropriate.

While the WPD wind turbines west of Stayner are quite a few km from our place, they are likely the thin edge of the wedge planned for coming into Clearview. Let me remind you, we came here because this is a good place to live with good opportunities for business. All of that changes if wind turbines are allowed to disrupt the neighbourhood. And 10,000 wind turbines and solar farms are not the answer to Ontario’s energy needs.

As I said before, a province-wide moratorium is needed, and I believe this will come as a matter of time because the inconvenient truth about wind turbines is too big for McGuinty’s carpet. The track record for dictatorial governments throughout history is that all dictatorships eventually capitulate. A moratorium in Clearview would be a “made in Clearview” solution to stop the waste sooner than later.

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—Preston McClanahan, Professor Emeritus, RI School of Design (7/26/12)
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To the Legislators and Representatives of the People of Massachusetts.

In November 1972 the citizens of Massachusetts approved at the ballot Article 97, which became the 97th Amendment to the State Constitution. The amendment reads:

The people shall have the right to clean air and water, freedom from excessive and unnecessary noise, and the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic qualities of their environment; and the protection of the people in their right to the conservation, development and utilization of the agricultural, mineral, forest, water, air and other natural resources is hereby declared to be a public purpose.

“The general court shall have the power to enact legislation necessary or expedient to protect such rights.”

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People with Wind Turbine Syndrome in Massachusetts whose Constitutional rights are violated:

» Sherman Derby, Hancock. .05 miles distant from turbine. “Sounds like a jet plane. We just can’t sleep.”

» John Methia, Fairhaven. 2,000 feet distant from turbine. “Sound is like a jet flyover that doesn’t stop.”

» Karen Isherwood, Fairhaven. 1,500 feet distant. “I will have to abandon my home.”

» Louise Barteau, Fairhaven. 1,400 feet distant. “Pressure behind my eyes, confusion, and nausea.”

» Doreen Reilly, Kingston. 900 feet distant. “My Children are losing sleep.”

» Tim Dwyer, Kingston. 1,600 feet distant. “Headaches, sleep disturbance, tinnitus, ear pressure, vertigo.”

» Neil Anderson, Falmouth. 0.25 distant. “Headaches, head and ear pressure, ringing in ears, heart palpitations, increased blood pressure, loss of sleep. Completely wiped out financially. Forced from home, lawyers and doctors fees dissolve our life and retirement funds.”

» John Ford, Falmouth. 2,300 feet distant. “Depressed, high blood pressure, headaches, earaches, anxiety, stress, vertigo.”

» Barry Funfar, Falmouth. 1,558 feet distant. “My doctor’s advice is to move away from the noise.”

» Mary Zawoysky, Falmouth. 900 feet distant. “Infrasound bombards my home so I can’t sleep.”

» Nan Cook, Newburyport. 1,000feet distant. “The vibration comes through the walls in some houses.”

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Two Solutions to Wind Turbine Syndrome are:

(a) To discontinue the quest for energy from wind, realizing that wind is not a solution to our energy problem. Wind’s low productivity and high expense in public tax monies, public health and environmental devastation are evident in the factual evidence from around the nation and the world. Those who still believe in wind energy are either uninformed, blind followers, have an ambitious career agenda, are motivated by profit alone and may have any combination of the above.

(b) To legislate adequate setback distances of industrial wind turbines from occupied homes.

The difficulty is that the loudest noise components are from the blades for which there is no effective noise control except distance, or shutting the turbines down. If the turbines are installed, the distance is set. At that point, complaints and civil lawsuits about noise impacts can be addressed only by shutting the turbines down. The developer has no recourse with the manufacturer and there are no engineering controls that I am aware of for this design class of wind turbine, the large three-blade elevated horizontal rotor design.” Robert Rand, Rand Acoustics, 65 Mere Point Road, Brunswick , ME.

Editor’s note:  Watch this spellbinding interview by Bill Moyers with Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, a former bureau chief for the NY Times.  Those of you fighting Big Wind will resonate to the theme, “capitalism’s sacrifice zones.”

Notice Hedges’s call for civil disobedience.  Hear hear!

Our thanks to Dr. Sarah Laurie for bringing this interview to our attention.

Bill Moyers and Chris Hedges on Capitalism’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’ from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

There are forgotten corners of this country where Americans are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of capitalistic greed. Journalist Chris Hedges calls these places “sacrifice zones,” and joins Bill this week on Moyers & Company to explore how areas like Camden, New Jersey; Immokalee, Florida; and parts of West Virginia suffer while the corporations that plundered them thrive.

“These are areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. We’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed,” Hedges tells Bill. “It’s the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings… And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state.”

The broadcast includes images from Hedges’ collaboration with comics artist and journalist Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which is an illustrated account of their travels through America’s sacrifice zones. Kirkus Reviews calls it an “unabashedly polemic, angry manifesto that is certain to open eyes, intensify outrage and incite argument about corporate greed.”

A columnist for Truthdig, Hedges also describes the difference between truth and news. “The really great reporters — and I’ve seen them in all sorts of news organizations — are management headaches because they care about truth at the expense of their own career,” Hedges says.

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Calvin Luther Martin

 (Summer 1994)

The road comes up from the river and runs away through fields of
 clover and grass. Growing daisy and buttercup like any old hayfield
—I faithfully visit each summer to smell and feel such joy. This
 being its sole concern. And now is mine. I have come to join
 creation performing itself in beauty.

Here, surrounded, is my favorite place to run.

I run for this only—for praise, not to pace off space. To fill in-sucking lungs with 
pungency, the sweetness and musk, heat and summer brightness of this 
place.

I run to feed the silent furnace by my salt and sweat, 
brushing air’s low vapors. Watching wind move fields and me, in the soul, in shapes and patterns as rain does water. There is utter joy
 moving here.

I run for meadowlark and bobolink hatched, fledged, singing these 
very fields. Praise to prairie things in tongues born of that holy 
grass. Hearing its own voice grown.

My own breathes only, till I
 reach the line of trees to say only how they are so beautiful.

Is it time to hold another wind energy conference—for the shepherds of the land?

—Calvin Luther Martin, PhD

How many hundreds of groups are there, around the world, fighting wind turbines in their backyards?  The answer is, “lots.”  Talk about a grassroots movement that turned into a whirlwind of fury and outrage in every country and every community where Big Wind has dared set foot.

Remember David & Goliath?  Imagine Goliath as a 2.5 MW bully towering higher than the Statue of Liberty, with mammoth rotating blades slicing the air at 200 mph.  Nothing could stop this apocalyptic beast—so thought his corporate sponsors.

Except they failed to calculate the improbable:  the shepherd boy who wasn’t corporate at all.  The kid whose infallible weapon was that he was tied to the land.  David was a product of that landscape.  His home.  His fields. His hills.  He knew their powers.  They filled him.

He called those powers, “Jehovah.”

The kid was not going to let this giant jackass destroy his landscape.  The Spirit of the Earth detested the Philistine monster, and the Spirit filled the shepherd boy with power and courage—and one helluva aim.

Against all odds, David knew he could take down the monster.  One smooth river-stone hurled from a homemade slingshot, miraculously guided in its trajectory by the Spirit—and the towering, bellowing thing was felled.

For eight years I have been sitting before this computer screen, corresponding with shepherds all over the world.  Shepherds armed with  nothing more than a smooth river-stone and slingshot and, somehow, filled with the holy fire of the land they occupy—these people have been bringing down Big Wind.

It is time, I think, for the “shepherds of the land” to convene.  From all over the world.  Convene and tell their story—the story of what a colossal obscenity Goliath in fact is.  Obscene to birds and bats and all other domestic creatures and wildlife and habitat and ridge lines and fields and rangelands and marshlands and people’s homes and health and sanity and property value.  Obscene to basic principles of physics and engineering and economics.

A thunderous obscenity and altogether a hoax.

Shepherds of the land, let us convene.  Confer.  Somewhere.  Somehow.  Let us brainstorm about how to do this.  All ideas are on the table.  We are a genuine movement.  Let us gather to celebrate and grow this movement.

Withal, may we keep it simple and cheap.  Remember, we’re all just shepherds.  Our tools are simple.  Our strength, however, is legendary.  History will remember us as it remembers young David—the improbable hero.

I titled this “victims of wind energy.”  Was David a victim of Goliath?  Nope!  He brought the son of a bitch to a full stop.

We will convene as shepherds of the land, not victims of corporate bullying.  The difference is consequential.

Editor’s note:  The following is a news release from the European Platform against Windfarms (EPAW) and the North American Platform against Windpower (NA-PAW).

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Dr. Robert McMurtry, a prominent member of the Canadian health establishment, joins the victims of industrial wind turbines (IWT’s) in their call for Health Canada to turn over their future wind turbine noise study to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). While the study is being conducted, they demand an immediate moratorium on all pending and proposed IWT projects.

The victims are represented by the North American Platform Against Wind Power (NA-PAW), and the European Platform Against Windfarms (EPAW), which re-group over 600 associations of victims from 26 countries. These federations, and Dr. McMurtry, are dissatisfied with the way the study is to be conducted. Health Canada (HC) being an arm of the Canadian government, they say it offers no guarantee as to impartiality, which is the crucial point in this matter.

Arm’s length studies could be assured with involvement from CIHR, according to Dr. McMurtry.  “Research into adverse health effects is a good idea, but is being addressed by the wrong agency, which is a regulatory branch of Health Canada. A better approach is to assign the task to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which reports to Minister Aglukkaq and is more capable of establishing causation, prevalence, and answering other important questions.”

Recently obtained Health Canada Scientific Advisory Board documents reveal that HC has already agreed to not let the results be “causative,” and not become a tally of how many people have been affected. These are the first signs that the study is already being used as a political stratagem, says Sherri Lange, of NA-PAW.  “The study, if conducted by Health Canada, may not provide the clarity and truth that is being demanded by Canadians.”

The victims are also concerned that the best specialists on the matter may not be consulted as they are not listed in the initial list of 25 experts to assist with this study. They also feel that, now that the authorities have finally admitted there could be a health problem, the scientific and clinical “pre-cautionary principle” must be applied and a moratorium must be called immediately.

Dr. McMurtry concurs.  “The admission by Health Minister Aglukkaq that there are substantial gaps in our knowledge reveals the absence of evidence-based guidelines. There is thus the need for a moratorium on further IWT [Industrial Wind Turbine] development until the requisite evidence of safe placement of wind turbines is available.”

“Several families and physicians have reported wind turbine associated heart attacks and even suicides,” notes Ms. Lange.  “When a family has lost home enjoyment and restful sleep, with no chance of recovering them, we have a recipe for despair. We cannot afford to wait another two years and a thousand more turbines till the study is done. The devastation of lives must stop immediately.”

We can’t look to Europe for a solution to the health problem, says Mark Duchamp of EPAW. “Denmark recently conducted a study on the matter, but it was done by a consultant whose main client is the wind industry. As a result, it wasn’t truthful, and monstrous 3 MW turbines continue to be installed too close to homes and workplaces at great risk to public health. Tricks were used in the measurements of low-frequency noise and infrasound, as denounced by Professor Henrik Moeller, a renowned acoustician from the University of Aarlborg.¹ Under the circumstances, the world is looking at Canada for, at last, an unbiased study. That must be the work of CIHR.”

The federations demand the participation of the following specialists in the study:

Dr. Robert Y. McMurtry, M.D., F.R.C.S. (C), F.A.C.S., Canada; Carmen Krogh, BSc Pharm, Researcher Wind Turbines – Adverse Health and Social Justice, Canada; Stephen Ambrose, Acoustician, USA; Dr. Jeffery Aramini, Epidemiologist, Canada; Dr Arline Bronzaft, Noise and Health Specialist, USA; Dr Steven Cooper, ENG Fellow Australian Acoustical Society and Member of Institute of Noise Control, USA; Professor Phillip Dickinson, Acoustician, New Zealand; Barbara J. Frey BA, MA and Peter J. Haddon, BSc, FRICS, Scotland; Dr Christopher Hanning, BSc, MB, BS, MRCS,LRCS, LRCP, FRCA, MD, Sleep Disturbance and Wind Turbines, UK; Professor Colin Hansen, Acoustician, Australia; Dr Magda Havas, Biological and Health Effects of Electromagnetic and Chemical Pollution, Canada; Richard James, INCE Acoustician, USA; Dr Mauri Johansson, Specialist in Community Health and Occupational Medicine, Denmark; Dr. Sarah Laurie, CEO Waubra Foundation, Australia; Professor Henrik Moeller, Acoustic Specialist, Denmark; Dr. Michael Nissenbaum, Radiologist, USA; Dr. Carl Phillips, Epidemiologist, USA; Dr. Nina Pierpont, Author of Wind Turbine Syndrome, USA; Robert Rand, Acoustician, USA; Dr. Daniel Shepherd, Noise and Health Specialist, New Zealand; Dr Malcolm Swinbanks, Acoustician, UK; Dr. Robert Thorne, Health Sciences and Acoustics, Australia.

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Contacts:

Sherri Lange +1 416 567 5115 (Canada) CEO, NA-PAW, email kodaisl@rogers.com

Mark Duchamp +34 693 643 736 (Spain) Executive Director, EPAW email save.the.eagles@gmail.com, Skype mark.duchamp

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References

1.  Tricks used in Denmark: http://epaw.org/media.php?lang=en&article=pr11

Remember how in The Wizard of Oz, the Scarecrow finally gets a brain, the Tin Man gets a heart, and the cowardly Lion gets courage?

Fast forward a century to Falmouth, Mass, where a brain, a heart, and courage have been notably lacking among the wizards of City Hall—especially those on the Board of Health (BoH), which would seem like a logical place for brains, compassion, and courage.

Well, maybe that’s about to change.  The BoH recently sent a plaintive letter to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with the opening lines:

The Falmouth Board of Health requests that Mass DPH (Dept. of Public Health) immediately initiate a health assessment of the impacts of the operation of wind turbines in Falmouth. This appeal is compelled by two years of consistent and persistent complaints of health impacts during turbine operation. . .

Excuse me, but I thought the Mass DPH had already assembled the greatest brains in the Commonwealth and issued a report definitively showing Wind Turbine Syndrome to be scientific and clinical bullshit?  Now the Falmouth BoH wants Mass DPH to revisit its bullshit report?  (I’m confused!  Which is bullshit?  WTS or the Mass DPH report on it?)

Anyhow, click here to read the remainder of the BoH plea to Mass DPH.

Is the Wind Turbine “Wicked Witch” finally going to be slain in Falmouth, MA?

“Whooping Crane Flock Numbers Plunge during Winter 2011-2012”

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—Jim Wiegand, California “raptor” specialist and Berkeley-trained wildlife biologist

Somebody has to do a story. How long will the public put up with the lies coming from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the wind industry’s ongoing mortality cover-up?

Even with the new USFWS flawed (exaggerated) estimates, they are claiming only 245 surviving Whooping Cranes. The real population number is now probably less than 200. The Central Flyway Whooping Cranes have declined proportionately with the explosion of the wind industry in the Central Flyway over the last 6 years. A hundred lost this year? One third of the population? You had better believe it, because in the next 3-5 years we are now looking at the end of the free flying Whooping Cranes.

Despite captive breeding pumping up the numbers and decades of population growth, this population has been declining since 2006. The wind industry has been hiding bodies for decades, so the industry could expand with little resistance. Now, because of this fraud, the Whooping Crane is one of many species in steep decline from the insidious development of wind energy.

If you want to get to the bottom of all this in a hurry, just post a million-dollar reward for information about these endangered species being found dead at wind farms, so the wind industry personnel will start talking. Then we can finally put this terrible corporate lie to rest and move forward.

.
Click here for a fuller account by Jim Wiegand.

Click here for Vermont civil disobedience—blocking wind turbine construction on ridgelines.

(For Gay Bradshaw)

(With thanks to Eric Bégin)

.
Calvin Luther Martin

, PhD (Summer 1993)

What did the fox pup cry as it was struck by the motorist in the 
night?  And did the driver of that machinery of convenience think to
 stop, kneel and watch the green fire go out of its eyes, I wonder?

Where do the fires of wildness go, and might they ever enter our 
calculations of necessity?

Questions we seem loath to answer.

Death in this manner is unavoidable in this murderous place.  This is
 the horror: the pitiless logic of atrocious acts.  Evil is most
 monstrous when most banal—when they say it cannot be helped.  What
 kind of dream is this civilization that makes us think so?  Is man no
 longer sapient?

The cry it gave in death I imagine was but a universal plea for
 comfort.  Surely our kind can will the mind into that fuller realm of
 compassion embracing both earth and our uncomprehended selves.

I 
learned this when I heard, I swear it, the voice of fox come round
 again that morning.  When I heard “We must stop,” quietly, decisively,
 from the physician who says children most resemble animals. 
 And we did.

I watched her lift the limp smashed body from off the burning road to 
lay it by the river.  There singing, she did, of beauty and trotting 
and sniffing for mice and moles.  There to ask the keeper of foxes to 
rekindle the fire in yet another furnace of fox persuasion.  There to 
leave tobacco with a softly furred trotter whose keeper I too must 
surely be.

Ceremony of infinite innocence. “I can be a frog or a fox 
and still be a person,” someone who knew creation’s etiquette once 
said. 
 So obvious, so unavoidable.

Compassion.  Surely this is what the earth seeks most in us, the
 very thing we crave ourselves.

Somewhere in man’s primordial darkness 
away beyond intelligent grasp the shapeshifter arises consoled, 
requickened by the voice of the truly great physician.

.

—Calvin Luther Martin, PhD (Summer 1993)

Fortnightly she makes her bread. For all the years I have known her she has done so. Five loaves, that’s all that can fit in the oven. It is enough. Enough for two weeks? No, for I too live by more than bread alone. It is enough grace. Remember how five loaves and two fish fed five thousand—through immense compassion.

Where there is such compassion faith comes easily: faith to move mountains, faith to feed a multitude. What mattered then, as now, was not the thrifty logic of bread but the power to see something as worthy of the full impact of the universe, whose logic and majesty is sustenance. To live filled by such amazing grace. Such imagination! Who else could have imagined feeding such a multitude? Out there in the desert.

Everything is possible, he whispered, as he blessed the bread and broke it and gave it away. In the exercise of grace numbers dissolve into absurdity, are confounded of meaning. One so gifted, so possessed, so engaged need not pause to calculate whether it is possible or not—such puny questions, allowing of doubt, fear even.

Only those for whom faith comes hard are fearful, he said. Faith can come hard only for the uncompassionate, I say.

Every fortnight she bakes her bread, five loaves, from a compassion that could feed a multitude. For me.

Editor:  The following is taken from the Health Canada website.  Click here.  For a news release on the research design, click here.  For official “Questions & Answers,” click here.  For Health Canada’s notice to “stakeholders,” click here.  For Health Canada’s list of the research “working group,” click here. For lots of Canadian media coverage of this event, do a Google “search.”  

For the real story on what wind turbines do to people’s health, click here.

For naively imagining this study is going to be anything other than political theater and a whitewash, pinch yourself here.

July 10, 2012

OTTAWA—Health Canada, in collaboration with Statistics Canada, will conduct a research study that will explore the relationship between wind turbine noise and health effects reported by, and objectively measured in, people living near wind power developments.

“This study is in response to questions from residents living near wind farms about possible health effects of low frequency noise generated by wind turbines,” said the Honourable Leona Aglukkaq, Minister of Health. “As always, our Government is putting the health and safety of Canadians first and this study will do just that by painting a more complete picture of the potential health impacts of wind turbine noise.”

Health Canada is aware of health-related complaints from individuals living in close proximity to wind turbine establishments. The study is being designed with support from external experts, specializing in areas including noise, health assessment, clinical medicine and epidemiology.

The proposed research design and methodology was posted on Health Canada’s web site today for a 30-day public comment period. Feedback obtained will be reviewed by the design committee, compiled and published to the website, along with the design committee’s responses.

The study will be focused on an initially targeted sample size of 2,000 dwellings selected from 8-12 wind turbine installation facilities in Canada. In addition to taking physical measurements from participants, such as blood pressure, investigators will conduct face-to-face interviews and take noise measurements inside and outside of some homes to validate sound modelling.

Health Canada has expertise in measuring noise and assessing the health impacts of noise because of its role in administering the Radiation Emitting Devices Act (REDA). As defined under REDA, noise is a form of radiation.

The study results are expected to be published in 2014.

Media Enquiries:
Health Canada 
(613) 957-2983

Cailin Rodgers
Office of the Honourable Leona Aglukkaq
Federal Minister of Health
(613) 957-0200

Public Enquiries:
(613) 957-2991
1-866 225-0709

—Calvin Luther Martin, PhD (Winter 1999)

He drove up in a beat-up Ford Pinto. It looked like someone had spray-painted it with a hand-held can—orange. This is the jalopy he drives around Albuquerque.

I stride over, grinning, with my hand out. “You must be a roamin’ priest,” I boom out. I had talked to Father Bob often by phone but never met him till this moment. He’s full of corny jokes. This is one of his corniest: how he had been once invited to serve on some ecumenical panel. The chairman said he needed a Roman priest, and Father Bob (as he calls himself) replied that he was “roamin'” alright—roamin’ the skies in his Cessna.

Anyhow, he liked that I turned his joke on him. The hand he shook mine with was grease-smeared. I noticed his black shirt untucked in the front; I noticed the food stain on the belly of the shirt, the dirt on the coat sleeve, and the baseball cap and red Irish hair. He was apologizing for the soiled hand. “I was working on an engine,” he hurriedly explains. (Probably someone else’s car engine, I figured.) I figured, too, that if this priest was flying bush planes around Alaska in the 1940s (which he was) and planes around New Mexico and Mexico since the 1950s (which he was), he must know engines pretty darn well. On weekends he rides a 50-year-old Harley around town, and hits the teen hangouts. He says that a 77-year-old priest rumbling up in leather on an antique Harley is an eye-catcher for kids.

It is. They think he’s cool. He gets the thirteen and fourteen-year-olds talking about the motorbike, and then gives them a message of hope, of confidence. He tells Nina and me over coffee that the Lord told us to be fishers of men, “but he didn’t tell us what bait to use.”

Hence the old Harley.

Father Bob Kirsch is the founder of the San Martín Flying Mission. He flies doctors and nurses down to Chihuahua province in northern Mexico to minister to the Tarahumara, an ancient mountain people famous for their runners. There are about 25,000 of them. When he can beg enough money out of some American philanthropy, he builds a clinic. He told us that a Rotary Club somewhere in Texas had just finished putting up a handsome new clinic for his people. He was most proud of the Rotarians for this.

He was not proud of himself. The man showed remarkably little vanity or even concern about himself. Whether it was his appearance or dignity or even his safety, he was indifferent to the usual vices, so far as I could tell. This was amazing to witness. His thumb-smudged business card carries a quote by Albert Einstein: “Only a life lived for others is truly worthwhile.” To meet this priest gives words like that substance.

He said the Tarahumara were being withered by a tuberculosis epidemic. Given their way of living, including their nomadism, it was proving most difficult to treat them. As he spoke he couldn’t keep from digressing into long admiring speeches on their wisdom and knowledge of the ways of the earth. He said the early missionary priests had done incalculable damage to people like this when they damned their way of life. Damage that was most likely irreparable, he thought. I questioned him closely about his thoughts on their culture. He said he was a convert to their religion—he, too, viewed all of creation as intelligent and inspirited. He included rocks in his commonwealth of spiritual beings—not just biological life but the stones themselves.

Clearly he loved these people and just as clearly he loved their “way of the human being.” He said that to truly understand people one must eat their food and live in their homes and dance their dances and speak their language. One must convert to their way of life.

Nothing arm’s length in this man’s theology.

He asked if I had read any of Teilhard de Chardin. I said I had and that I admired Teilhard the mystic and pantheist. I told him how I had used his “spirit of the earth” concept as the title of my last book. This pleased him. He said if there were to be a fourth member of the Trinity, he would nominate Teilhard to that honor.

Father Bob recruited Nina and me to join him in his spiritual adventure. We were dazzled. I asked if he could use me as a non-ordained priest should we move to Albuquerque. He chuckled a rich Irish chuckle. “Yes, of course.” I asked if he could teach me to fly his planes so I, too, could deliver the doctors and medicines to the Indians. “Of course.” When I asked, lastly, if he would still be alive when we returned a year from now, he explained that he considered dying to be merely a graduation, from the mortal to the fully spiritual plane. He laughed: “I know I don’t have enough credits to graduate yet.”

As we walked Father Bob back to his car a man approached on the sidewalk. An Indian. He had been drinking. He walked meekly up to the priest, calling him padré, and asked how he might get to a certain street somewhere in the city. Father Bob asked him where he was from. He was Navajo, from Farmington, up by the Four Corners—far from here. Father Bob asked him his name. “Thomas,” he said thickly. “Thomas, I will take you where you are going,” said the padré. “Come. Get in my car.”

As we said goodbye Nina put out her hand, but he put his arms around her and hugged her (saying under his breath that in Mexico one hugs another to check for a shoulder-holster)—and then shook her hand. He did the same to me.

Then, turning to Thomas, the priest embraced him, too, as though this derelict in shabby clothes were possibly Christ in disguise. In that instant I realized this is precisely how Jesus would come back to us: not in glory but in the rags of someone in despair.

The priest who knew neither fear nor vanity nor indifference, knew that.

—Calvin Luther Martin, PhD (Spring 1993)

It was 7:30 or so when we set out for Dark Island the other evening, Roland Slocum and I.  He was driving a small open-hulled aluminum outboard, and he had thought to bring along some old army blankets knowing we might get wet.  It had been windy all day—sunny but windy.  By evening it was still blowing hard out of the southwest.  Whitecaps in the bay.

Roland is a kind man.  Typical of him he had spent the afternoon baking pies for the turkey dinner we were having this evening.  They were carefully packed away, still hot, in the bow.  Apple, pumpkin, banana cream.

Out beyond Rob Roy we began rolling and taking on splash.  I folded the blanket around my exposed legs and pulled over a nylon shell, yanking my cap down tighter.  I was facing Roland: a riverman if ever there was one.  The wind neatly parted his hair down the middle, his old horn-rims flecked with water.  He worked the rollers like a seasoned dog working the flock.  No hurry to it.  He eyed each as it came toward us, giving each special attention—playing each note as it was.  A virtuoso of waves.

In the channel, two miles out, he started telling me how he can’t swim (I looked around and noticed no life vests aboard).  Not a stroke, he said.  He said he respects the river.  It’s not like the ocean, which he fears.  He’s a diver, and has many times climbed down into the canyon beneath the channel we were inching over.  To visit the monstrous hulls silently entombed there.

I did not feel uncomfortable with such a man.  It was strangely calming knowing he had already been to the bottom—the river had already consumed him.  Working its steely, tossed surface this evening, the two of us in a small gray boat, I felt eternal.

—Calvin Luther Martin, PhD (Autumn 2002)

Low on the northern horizon, a faint white light forming.  Even as the night unfolds, this light forms.  Amid myriad stars.  There is no moon.  Pleiades dance in the east, seven—I count seven.

Black except there, on the northern horizon, low:  faint white light gathers itself.  “Now it ripples, now it murmurs, ripples, it sighs, hums” (Quiche Maya, “Popol Vuh”).  Constellations wheel slowly, night sinks into darkness.  The light grows, glows brighter, sending silent fingers arching across the sky to the very dome of heaven.  Then—ripples.  Huge cosmic ripples.  The aurora comes alive, flowing into the vault of heaven, sending long jets, volleys of light.  Rippling, discharging, immense.  White, green, some red.  Half the night a shimmering tissue of light—jets, streams of cosmic matter.

All this above this mountain pond this autumn night.  Loons call—a rippling.  Barred owls growl and scream, echoing strangely through spruce forests.

Was it this way at the beginning of creation?  The Maya say it was; the wise men, they say, remembered and wrote it down.  “Whatever might be is simply not there:  only murmurs, ripples, in the dark, in the night.”

This autumn night I witness creation again.

—Calvin Luther Martin, PhD (Winter 2003)

Last night I walked out into the firmament. Ursa major hung low over the eastern horizon. The moon intense on fields of snow. And I thought of forebears who attended to these matters, although this says it too mildly. I thought of ancestors who found themselves within the events of the night sky, weaving it into stories and their understanding of who they are and what life means.

As I thought this, I mourned—mourned a universe grown coldly silent.

The ancient ones lived in a perception I have lost, within a reality no longer taught or learned. (I remember the Anasazi ruins at Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon.)

And I wondered as a historian: am I part of a degenerate race of man, now? I find myself surrounded by things, by endless stories borne along by media and every scrap of paper I encounter. Except that none of this flotsam and jetsam transports me into the reality those ancestors knew—for millennia.

Last night I walked out into the firmament and wondered who I am, after all, and I grieved.

—Curt Devlin, Fairhaven, MA

Karen Isherwood does not think of herself as a victim. She’s a fighter, perhaps I should say a combatant. Every day, she gets up in the morning and goes toe to toe with lymphatic cancer.

When you first meet Karen, her diminutive stature might lead you to believe she is a pushover, but that would be a mistake. She is tough, she has stamina, and she has a great team in her corner. Her daughters, Chelsea and Leah, are always there for her. Chelsea still lives at home and helps support the household because Karen has not been able to work since 2010. Fighting cancer is a full time job for her.

She has good doctors, too, ones she has gradually come to trust. Above all, they emphasize how important it is for her to nurture and strengthen her immune system. To do this, she has to eat right, get good sleep and, most importantly, she has to avoid stress as much as possible.

Till recently, Karen lived in the ideal place to follow her doctors’ orders. You could say she had the home field advantage. She lives in what was once an idyllic little cul-de-sac in Fairhaven, MA called Teal Circle. There’s no traffic at all, it is quiet, and she gets along well with her neighbors who share the circle. Shady woods loft directly behind her house. Beyond the woods, there is a quiet, marshy estuary flowing into Little Bay—a beautiful nook tucked into a recess of Buzzards Bay.

Karen chose this location with great care almost 25 five years ago, when she got married. For all these years, song birds have serenaded her, hawks have hunted there, and the deer visit to take advantage of the salt lick she puts out at the edge of her property.

Like many people who live here, Karen is very proud of her Portuguese-American heritage and her family who has made this area its home for four generations. Her place on Teal Circle is more than a piece of property, even more than a home; it is part of her roots and identity. This is where she raised her family and where she has every intention of seeing her grandchildren grow up.

She had no intention of leaving this place—until recently.

The other day, something ominous happened. Her neighbor’s dog fell down the stairs. Ordinarily, you would not think of this as a remarkable event, but in this case it could be.

Karen knows why it happened.

When he took his dog to the vet, her neighbor expected the worst.  So he was surprised to learn his dog had vertigo. Vertigo (dizziness) can usually be treated with the same kind of medicine you take for seasickness. This event is ominous because vertigo is one of the signature symptoms of a much bigger problem, something called Wind Turbine Syndrome. Vertigo is just one of the symptoms commonly caused by the low frequency sound emitted by large industrial turbines. Two of most common symptoms are sleeplessness and an otherwise unexplained anxiety.

In short, it is the worst nightmare for someone battling lymphatic cancer.

Early this spring, Charlie Murphy, Michael Sylvia, and Brian Bowcock, the Fairhaven Select board, secretly conspired with Executive Secretary Jeffry Osuch to put up 2 large turbines just 1300 feet from Karen’s home. This was done in secrecy because the original plan, concocted by Sylvia, Bowcock and Manzone was defeated legally in 2008. The new plan included a dubious wind developer calling itself Fairhaven Wind, LLC.

Teal Circle is now in the shadow of these 400 foot, life-destroying mechanical monsters that assault Karen randomly yet relentlessly, spewing toxic noise—day and night, 365 days a year. Many healthy people are forced to leave their homes when subjected this onslaught of audible and inaudible noise. Living in the shadow of turbines is extremely stressful and there is a growing body of medical evidence to prove it.

For Karen, however, the onslaught could be catastrophic. Neither she nor her daughter, Chelsea, is sleeping well anymore. This has already begun to impact Chelsea’s performance at work, a job which is critical for her own career as well as helping to support the household.

Karen knows that she desperately needs rest, relaxation, and good sleep to win her fight against cancer.  But she also knows that what happened to the neighbor’s dog is one more indication that the odds are turning against her. Her neighbors, Chris and Peter Goben, are subjected to hellacious flicker each sunny morning. (Try to imagine living somewhere that makes you hope you do not have bright sun and a breeze.) Karen knows that she will have to face this flicker herself this fall when the leaves drop, behind her house.

Karen is losing the home field advantage.

Put in this seemingly no-win situation, most of us would cut our losses and run.  But not Karen. The selectmen made the mistake of underestimating her courage and resolve to fight. She has joined other abutters in Little Bay in a lawsuit against the town and against Fairhaven Wind, LLC.

Sumul Shah

Sumul Shah, Fairhaven Wind’s CEO, has met with Karen to offer her “mitigations.” In this context, mitigations denote steps like putting central air in your home or sound proofing your bedroom, ostensibly to reduce the effects of turbine noise.

Apparently, Shah is willing to throw her a bone to keep her quiet. Of course, Karen has educated herself, so she knows these mitigations are entirely ineffective against turbine infrasound and low frequency noise.

Recently, she made it clear that she is holding the town responsible for what happens to her health. She also pointed out how preposterous and bitterly ironic it is to run air conditioning and consume more power to protect herself and Chelsea from this so-called “green” technology.

Karen Isherwood has courage and tenacity, but she’s facing ferocious odds and she knows it. She knows time is not on her side. She wants people to understand she cannot fight these odds alone. People who are getting sick need to come forward and join the fight. She realizes that many people still do not understand that it is the toxicity of the turbine noise that is making them ill. She also realizes that many people are less sensitive to turbines. It may take some longer to begin to get sick, but she has to fight now. She knows that those who are affected will sink or swim together.

Fairhaven Wind and town officials have confronted her with “Hobson’s choice.”  Soon her choice could become as stark as “leave or die.”

Karen doesn’t want to either; she has resolved to dig in and fight. She wants to remain party to the lawsuit and hopes to regain the peaceful enjoyment of her beloved home. She wants to live to enjoy the natural beauty and delights of her own backyard and share them with her grandchildren.

Time, however, may be running out for her. Justice delayed is truly justice denied in her case. It is no metaphor or exaggeration to say she is in a fight for her life.

Like Jenny (see “Jenny took enough pills to end her life”: The true story of a Wind Turbine Syndrome victim), I have come to consider Karen a good friend. So, if it does come down to this choice, I hope Karen will carefully consider Jenny’s warning. “We need to get the message out to all turbine sufferers. . . . No location is worth dying for.” I know Karen is thinking about this idea because she told me that Dartmouth, a town nearby, recently passed a bylaw prohibiting turbines.

Perhaps Dartmouth has a place of respite for a turbine refugee who wants to put out a salt lick for the deer, sleep with the windows open, and live to see her grandchildren.

I hope so.  For her sake, for Chelsea’s sake, for Leah’s—and my sake. The world is a better place with friends like Karen in it.

“Monks selling retreat at Ae forest”

—Jackie Grant, Dumfries & Galloway Standard (6/29/12)

Buddhist monks are selling their spiritual retreat in the forest of Ae because they can’t live near a windfarm.

Scottish Power, which has lodged plans to extend the Harestanes development with a further 19, 125-foot turbines, said it was close to finalizing a buy-out deal with the Tharpaland monks.

Concerned monks submitted evidence to a Scottish parliamentary inquiry into the government’s renewable energy plans, claiming they suffered serious side effects when they were praying within five miles of a windfarm.

They say these included: pain in the head and chest, heart palpitations, dizziness, dry retching, anger, heightened emotions and crying.

Tharpaland is Britain’s only international retreat centre of a popular and growing branch of Buddhism known as the New Kadampa Tradition.

It was founded in 1985 and attracts thousands of people from all over the world.

In their evidence, the monks said: “As Buddhists, we cherish the natural environment and all who live in it and are committed to the development of clean and sustainable forms of energy and are therefore not opposed in principle to the development of windfarms.

“However, in March 2003, following news of a proposal to build a massive windfarm in the Forest of Ae, Tharpaland set about assessing the wider implications this would have on the centre’s ability to provide suitable conditions for meditative retreat, if the windfarm was approved.

“The findings of these studies were so surprisingly negative and adverse that there was little room for doubt that the proposed windfarm, if approved, would force Tharpaland to close.

“It showed a consistent and progressive average 70 per cent loss in ability to develop concentration over the various distances approaching the windfarms and virtually a total loss in ability to develop concentration at the turbine site itself.

“Subjects also reported disturbing negative psychological reactions including confusion, loss of self-confidence, effects similar to depression, effects similar to mania, irritability and anger, heightened emotionality and crying.

“For most of the subjects in these studies, these windfarms were centers of massive and traumatic disturbance, even after only a few hours. They also claim that spiritual centres and communities could be forced to close and disperse.

A Scottish Power spokesman said: “We have been in regular contact with Tharpaland and, after positive discussions, are in the process of finalising an agreement to purchase the property.”