“I hate the endless sleepless night” (Poem)
Mar 30, 2012
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I love a sun burnt country
I love its sweeping plains
I can tolerate our years of droughts and our destructive flooding rains
But I hate the sight of wind farms that in our rural lands abound
I hate their jerking twitching arms and their swishing hissing sound
I hate the way they blight our view of our once proud fertile soil
I hate their ghastly ghostly hue
Where farmers used to toil
I hate the endless sleepless nights
And the headaches that they bring
I hate the ugly metal sites which used to bloom in spring
Instead of trees and fields and flowers and clear blue open sky
We see slicing blades and tall white towers where eagles used to fly
So take these monstrous things somewhere and build them faraway
Where our deserts have more room to share
And the wind blows every day
Editor’s note: This was send to us by Sue Kennedy, Australia, with the following note.
The original poem by Dorothea McKellor was first published in London in September 1908. Over a hundred years later her great-nephew wrote these new words to this very moving poem.
It makes me cry every time I read to it. Many thanks for all your updates; we look forward to getting them as we are fighting a proposed wind farm directly across the road from our place. In fact, we will be closer to the substation than the host farmer’s own place. We will be looking onto it from our “entertainment area”! How good is that?”
Sue Kennedy
Comment by sue Hobart on 03/30/2012 at 9:57 pm
endless sleepless nights…
this poem says it all…
Fight or flight… first fight and if it goes up flight is my best suggestion.. these things are slow death.
bless you and praying for a win…
Comment by Marsh Rosenthal on 03/30/2012 at 10:49 pm
There is something lethal about the giant wind turbines. It is the inaudible disturbance produced in the blade swept air called “infra-sound.” Since it is not sound at all, this may be an unfortunate name. I believe that it impacts on the human brain and causes abnormal alterations in the brain wave activity. I have been told by an impactee that he cannot remember dreaming at all. I am aware that the dream function is essential to achieving proper restorative sleep. I believe that it is through dreams that the subconscious mind, during the REM sleep period, addresses the unresolved issues of the awake parts of our day, and if that dreaming activity is blocked, denied or interfered with, the mind becomes injured. This is the insult to the brain that the inaudible presssure waves from the turbines create.
The range of impact can be quite far because infra-sound, measured in Hertz and not decibels, travels undisrupted by dense media, like soil and pavement, only to transduce into house foundations and play into the house space, as if it were being propagated by a subwoofer in a sound system.
You cannot close the door on infra-sound. You cannot utilize sound proofing to damp it. If it is present, you cannot escape it.
The bio-physical organic degradation of the brain and the psychological depressive realization that the only real strategy for survival of this man-made antagonism is either to flee or to destroy the noxious source.
Editor’s note: Marsh, let me clarify something about infrasound. Infrasound is “sound pressure” below 20 Hertz. (“Hertz” being simply a measure of frequency, as “cycles per second.”) Hence, infrasound is “low frequency sound pressure”—below 20 cycles per second. (Think of “cycles” as “waves,” as in ocean waves.) However, decibels do figure prominently in this discussion. Decibels being the measurement of “high pressure” or “low pressure.” Since we’re below the hearing threshold with infrasound, we can’t usefully talk about “high loudness” and “low loudness”; hence, we’re in the realm of “pressure.”
As you can see from the graph, below, wind turbines produce plenty of infrasound with very high pressure—high decibels. From the work of Rick James and Rand & Ambrose and Cooper (in Australia), we know these pressure waves are rapidly pulsed, at many times/second. Rapidly pulsed with extreme peaks and valleys. And it is this which triggers Wind Turbine Syndrome, so Pierpont argues. Dr. Salt’s research and other research Pierpont discusses in her book, “Wind Turbine Syndrome,” suggest this is a plausible explanation. But it needs further study.
Now, when wind developers talk about decibels, they are talking about decibels in the hearing range—in the audible range. Wind turbines do indeed produce decibels in the audible range—but it’s irrelevant to Wind Turbine Syndrome. Turbine “audible” decibels are minor compared to turbine “infrasonic” decibels, which are huge—huge, rapidly pulsed pressure waves which zap the body’s (inner ear’s) vestibular organs.
The key is the realization that the vestibular organs are evolutionarily adapted to picking up infrasonic decibels and responding to them. The vestibular organs “listen,” as it were, for inaudible, infrasonic pressure changes, just as the cochlea “listens” for audible sound.
Now for the nasty part. Wind companies measure turbine sound levels (in decibels) using a filter that filters out all infrasound. This filter is called an “A” filter. The notation is “dBA.” In doing so, the wind companies pretend there is no infrasound worth paying attention to. On the contrary, as the graph below shows, there is all sorts of wind turbine infrasound worth paying attention to, as Wind Turbine Syndrome sufferers around the world can attest.
Comment by Gail on 03/31/2012 at 1:22 am
It’s a beautiful poem and I agree wholeheartedly up to the last three lines. There is NO space on earth where these machines can’t do harm – deserts are living things, too.
Comment by Marsh Rosenthal on 03/31/2012 at 9:57 am
Calvin, Many thanks for the detailed explanation. I agree that more controlled work would be necessary to actually understand the bioelectric mechanisms of WTS, but I think it would be cruel and inhuman to ask test subjects to become guinea pigs. I am clear that we already have the evidence to close this industry as a grisly manifestation of technology gone awry and it being used as an instrument of social torture and control. The sane world has restrained itself from the use of nuclear weapons on each other, but somehow, the insidious global deployment of “windpower” has escaped humanitarian concern.
This is the political battle that now confronts us. The windpower farce must be stopped!
Editor’s response: If I can take your excellent points even further, bear in mind that industrial infrasound and low frequency noise (ILFN) are not limited to wind turbines; we hear, nearly weekly, from people throughout the world who are being bombarded by ILFN from a host of industrial sources (including natural gas compressors and industrial air conditioners) and are experiencing the same illnesses Pierpont described as Wind Turbine Syndrome. Fact is—and this is most alarming—Wind Turbine Syndrome is found wherever industrial ILFN is generated. At some point the name, “Wind Turbine Syndrome,” will need to be changed to its much larger, more inclusive name, ILFN Syndrome.
Pierpont’s great contribution to ILFN Syndrome is that she has begun to clarify its pathophysiology. ILFN Syndrome has been around since the inception of the Industrial Revolution; its devastation has been, and remains, huge. Colossal. Now, thanks to this physician, clinicians can understand its mechanism. Pierpont has achieved a major milestone with her research. More needs to be done, but, as you say, without turning human beings into clinical “guinea pigs.” There are ways of conducting such research without harming humans or, for that matter, guinea pigs.
Someday, my friend, Pierpont will win a Nobel Prize. Long after she’s dead. Someday, medicine will grasp what she has done. She has joined the giants in the History of Medicine and Public Health.
Louis Pasteur
Comment by Marsh Rosenthal on 03/31/2012 at 12:30 pm
Agreed!