Editor’s note:  Esther Wrightman — the young mother who became the face and voice of massive, organized resistance to wind energy companies in western Ontario.  Famous for satirizing NextEra as “NextTerror,” and triggering a lawsuit from the offended corporation.  Esther and her family are leaving Ontario, “shaking the dust off their feet” as they depart.

Esther and her father, Harvey Wrightman, endured the indignity of an “appeal” before the Ministry of the Environment’s so-called Environmental Review Tribunal, which, it turns out, is basically a front for wind energy companies and the Green Energy Act.  (This is the hearing where Dr. Pierpont was deemed unqualified to testify regarding Wind Turbine Syndrome.  In fact, virtually all of the Wrightmans’ expert witnesses, including their WTS victims, were shit-canned — denied a hearing.)

The Wrightmans have concluded that Ontario has become a chapter in Lewis Carroll’s surreal, “Alice in Wonderland.”  They are leaving “Ontario in Wonderland” for New Brunswick, Canada — a province that takes a dim view of bullshit wind energy.

Esther is a poet.  I predict she will be hailed someday as one of Canada’s premier poets.  Visit her website.  Esther wrote the following lament as she has watched wind energy employees bulldoze and torch the landscape — trees, pond, fields, wildlife habitat — surrounding her home.

A new “Silent Spring” is underway outside her window.  One that will turn into an “ILFN-Rich Spring” once those turbines begin operating — and the wildlife altogether vanish, along with the Wrightman family.
..

“Leave”

I should have known
..that night watching
…our gracious hollow tree in the field
….burst into flames.

And firemen running about —
..frenzied ants — revealing
her charred remains.

Something should have clicked
..when the pine,
…(patiently leaning,
….a hundred years)
twisted to the ground.

And even last week,
..in case I didn’t get the message,
that Manitoba maple
..with all the keys to the world,
…where the early days hammock .. hung
…forever,
snapped in half.

Leave,
as the yellow house
dismantles — brick by
brick,

fence lines rip up
as an old roll of fabric,

ponds, bursting with every frog we know
become backfilled graves,

and cabooses and box cars
morph into black tankers and
white towers — eagles to
vultures and
wild grass to
tiled Land

Now, put out the flames
with waves of tears, and
leave.

— Esther Wrightman (April 2014)

Editor’s note:  People around the world are fed up with having wind turbines shoved up their asses by the renewable energy zombies.  They’re fighting back.  In Ontario, Canada, a bulldozer was torched, tires were slashed, and local media are predicting this is just the beginning.  (Click here for the blog source.)  Ontarians have discovered that the “social contract” of public meetings, government hearings, government tribunals, and elections are a sham.  Meanwhile, people like the Wrightmans are moving — to the other side of the continent.  (Note to those of you not familiar with Ontarians.  These are among the most long-suffering people on earth.  If this were Quebec, where I was raised, the Quebecois would have torn down these turbines years ago.  But the Quebecois are used to protest; Ontarians are not.)

Watch the news for Australia; we predict there will be dramatic expressions of anger there, shortly.

It stands to reason:  When people have exhausted the conventional avenues of redress and supplication and complaint, and been stonewalled and cynically ridiculed by government agencies, fatuous academics, and the wind companies — they are going to resort to other means of protest.  No, they are not going to vanish into thin air; they simply choose a different venue.

In Germany, the venue is turning dramatic.  Click below to watch the video.  (Scroll down once you open the link.  Look at the photos as you scroll.  Till you get to the bottom of the page, where you will find the video.)

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— Calvin Luther Martin, PhD, Editor

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The other day, something significant happened in American history.  This man stood up to the American government  — and the government backed down.  (The “American government” consisting of a small army of heavily armed cops.)

Before reading further, you must watch this video of the event.  It’s just a few minutes.  It’s breathtaking.  Resistance to tyranny is what Americans are made of.  In this instance, resisting tyranny at home, on American soil.  These 1000 cowboys and patriots understand that America is “We, the People.”

This is a story about a number of things:  (a) The renewable energy scam.  (b) A foreign energy company taking adverse possession of rangeland used by this rancher’s ancestors going back 150 years, give or take.  (c) An unseemly collusion between a powerful U.S. Senator, the Director of the Bureau of Land Management, and a Chinese energy company.

The bullying and sleaze of wind energy companies inevitably come to mind.

In this case, it’s not wind energy, but another non-starter:  solar energy.  Involving U.S. Senator Harry Reid (Nevada) negotiating with a Chinese energy mogul to build a huge solar energy plant on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) administered rangeland — right smack where this rancher and his forebears have traditionally grazed their livestock.  The Chinese company being legally represented, incidentally, by Senator Reid’s son, a prominent Nevada attorney.

Basically, the Reid gang wants ranchers off this land, so it can be sold at pennies on the dollar to this Chinese energy czar.  To do that, they had to pressure the ranchers to remove their grazing cattle.  Easily enough done:  The Director of the BLM, Neil Kornze, is a former staffer for Senator Reid.

Neil Kornze, BLM Director

Part of the deal for the Chinese company getting approval from, I believe, the county, is that the solar energy produced must have a guaranteed buyer.  This means the big power company in Nevada would have to commit itself to high-priced, intermittent solar power.  (Meaning, that when the solar wasn’t available to the grid — which demands instant, “dispatchable” power — the state’s sucker power company would have to rapidly buy backup energy from, say, natural gas or coal or nuclear sources — at most unfavorable prices.  This is what happens with wind energy, by the way.  And you and I bear the astronomical costs.)

In any case, the Nevada power company, so far, has declined the shitty deal.

The Reid gang isn’t happy about it declining to lock itself into buying expensive solar power and, when unavailable, being forced to buy at exorbitant rates on the spot market.  But, then, the Reid gang doesn’t necessarily care about Nevada energy ratepayers.  (It also doesn’t care about the fact that solar arrays “cook” the landscape.  So much for preserving the “threatened” turtle — supposedly threatened by cattle grazing, despite the fact that turtles and cows have co-existed on this land for centuries.)

Cliven Bundy (pronounced “Kl-eye-vin”) is not the first rancher to be evicted from this land by the BLM.  The others caved in.  Cliven didn’t.  Despite repeated threats and legal notices and legal judgments, Mr. Bundy calmly responded, “Nope!  I’m not moving my herd, and I will not pay your exorbitant so-called rents.  I will pay them to the State of Nevada, but I have no contract and never had a contract with the federal govt., and I and my ancestors have been ranching this landscape since the 1870s.”

So, the BLM, under Senator Reid’s former staffer — the same BLM that’s famous for its bullying and tyranny throughout the American West — assembled a posse of Rangers and other law enforcement agents and descended on the Bundy ranch and started rounding up Bundy’s herd and impounding it.  Armed to the teeth and using, among other weapons, a helicopter and police dogs.   I believe there were somewhere in the vicinity of 200 of these cops — brandishing weapons fit for a military assault.

Remember those old John Wayne movies?  The “Duke”?  What would the Duke have done?  You know what he would have done.  Stayed calm and put out the word, “My fellow Americans, I appeal to you to come stand by me!”

Cliven Bundy did what the Duke would do.

Within days, over 1000 people showed up — from all over the West — to stand shoulder to shoulder with him and his family.  To stand toe to toe with the govt. thugs.  And, since the govt. thugs brought guns, so did these patriots who joined Cliven Bundy.  They exercised their Second Amendment right to bear arms.  Lots of them.

If you want the full flavor of what this was like, watch Robert Redford’s, “The Milagro Beanfield War.”  Nearly identical plot.  (My favorite movie of all-time, by the way; its message is hugely important — CLM.)

Suddenly, a sleazy, back-room caper between the Reid gang, BLM, and a Chinese plutocrat spun out of control into another Milagro Beanfield War.  The Bundy Cattle Ranch War.  A standoff.  Bundy supporters were tasered, thrown to the ground and threatened with fang-baring police dogs and drawn weapons, even as the Bundy supporters did not draw their weapons and assault the cops.

The Bundy patriots refused to budge, however.

(With thanks to cartoonist Glenn McCoy and the NY Times.)

Meanwhile, back in Washington, the BLM chief was sweating bullets.  “What the fuck!”  It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.  The county sheriff wisely brokered a truce — and got the BLM to back down just as tempers were about to explode.  The agreement was:  The BLM agreed to release the 300-400 cattle it had impounded and the Rangers would leave.  The Bundy supporters would likewise leave.

In short, everyone agreed to go home.

Except me.  I’m staying on that hallowed ground, savoring it.  I see a man saying “No!” to a renewable energy money-making hoax and its bullying attorneys and government enablers.  I see “people of the land” refusing to be fucked by people who intend to make windfall profits from electric ratepayers and taxpayers.

How nice it would be to see this same spirit — the Spirit of Cliven Bundy — in confrontations with the wind developer thugs.  Yeah, the guys in suits followed by the goons in hardhats.  (Talk to 5’, 100 lb. Esther Wrightman if you want an earful about the goons in hardhats who nearly ran her and her colleagues over!)

Wind energy.  Solar energy.  Same scam.  Same useless energy.  Same strategy to dispossess people from their land.

What would the Duke do?

Editor’s note:  The following is an excerpt from Dr. Watts’s letter to the National Health & Medical Research Council on its amateurishly bullshit “systematic literature review” of Wind Turbine Syndrome.  (Not even sophisticated, clever, or dazzling bullshit.  Clumsy!  Rank amateurism!)

Note that Dr. Watts has personally treated victims of WTS.  (Click here for his entire letter.  Click here and here for more postings about this much celebrated physician.)

National Health & Medical Research Council’s DRAFT INFORMATION PAPER: EVIDENCE ON WIND FARMS AND HUMAN HEALTH, 2014

This report is grossly deficient and is thus surprising given the universal condemnation of the first NHMRC review in 2010. It would appear your organisation has learnt nothing in the intervening period. This includes the rapidly evolving research which is demonstrating adverse health effects (AHE), in addition to the environmental, political, intermittent efficiency and economic aspects of industrial wind turbines (IWT).

This review clearly ignores both the developing weight of evidence and the intellectual expertise of the national and international research community. Expertise and experience that includes a knowledge of IWTs, infrasound and human health impacts that, I would suggest, greatly exceeds that of the review panel.

Further it again represents another shameful opportunity for the international research community to criticise Australia’s lack of rigour, truth, diligence and decency in this debate. When will the NHMRC exhibit any real concern for its international and national reputation?

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Click here for more photos.  (The 7,000 figure is from a personal communication from one of the protest organizers.)

Editor’s note:  Is your community being stalked by wind developers?  If so, you need to read this primer on how to come up with a local ordinance that either bans these monsters or makes it impossible for them to gain a foothold.  (Incidentally, wind developers typically come in secretly, surreptitiously, and begin working behind the scenes, signing up owners of large properties and cultivating town officials.  By the time you become aware of what’s happening, the fix is in.)

(We thank John Droz and the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions for allowing us to reprint this.)

Editor’s note:  Last year, we posted an article on the German wind energy company, InfraVest, intimidating local residents — with hired thugs.  (See J. Michael Cole in the Taipei Times, “Wind power firm hires thugs to protect site,” June 10, 2013.)

Here’s an update, from a source who asks not to be named.  Click here to read more about this unsavory outfit.  (The source of the latter article is here.  We used Google Translate to render the Chinese text into English — with uneven results.)

What InfraVest has stated are lies, in keeping with their shoddy CSR business practices and use of violence against local residents.

(1) When InfraVest submitted a single Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) application for Yuanli, Tongsiao and Jhunan townships, InfraVest created the illusion of a much larger area for the wind farms, and hence was able to exceed the 10 percent land usage limit. By doing so, it also avoided having to address the three townships’ specific and unique environmental requirements. After receiving conditional EIA approval, InfraVest submitted a Difference of Environmental Impact (DEI) evaluation and requested that five wind turbine sites be shifted to Yuanli, bringing the total there to 14, which is well above the 10 percent limit.

(2) Local residents were not adequately informed or provided a proper public consultation session prior to construction, and InfraVest manipulated data and paperwork to obtain approval from the EPA without proper public consultation.

(3) In total, there are to be 14 wind turbines (≥120 m) installed along 3 km of coastline, with the closest a mere 134m from human settlement. A number of these have already been built in an area reserved for bird conservation.

You can contact autoamateur@gmail.com for more details. You can also check out independent media Coolloud’s detailed reporting for photos and a views of where the wind turbines are placed and their setbacks.  (Click here for an imperfect Google translation of Coolloud’s report — Editor.)

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Editor’s note:  If you’re not familiar with the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), you’re missing out.  Click here for their statement, “Who we are.”  Click here for their Board of Trustees.  And here for the Academic Advisory Council.

Basically the GWPF is a group of former high level U.K. government officials, Members of Parliament, and a host of scholars from heavy-weight universities, worldwide, who are alarmed at the hysteria and brainwashing being orchestrated by energy corporations (read:  Wall St. banks) who have much to gain.  (Note:  The GWPF does not accept money from any energy company or donor representing the interests of an energy company.  In other words, it is not a front for Big Oil or Big Wind or Big Nuclear, or Big Anything for that matter.)

The GWPF does not deny climate change; indeed, its members cover the entire spectrum, from those who are convinced it’s chiefly human-caused to those who think the whole thing is moonshine.  Listen carefully to what I’m saying:  The GWPF is insisting on real science, not agenda-driven science.  It is insisting on rational decisions, not “climate dogma,” as we chart our future.  Their goal is to tone down the rhetoric, strip ideology out of climate science, and remove the corporate financial agenda and government power-grabbing from the whole climate conversation.

As a retired professional historian, I agree.  History is loaded with paroxysms of mass hysteria about one “belief system” or “cause” or “noble ideal” after another — with results that were always disastrous.  That’s not all:  Someone always got very wealthy and powerful from championing that noble ideal or doctrine or to-kill-for worthy cause.  Someone always morphed into a tyrant and became completely corrupt, and did incalculable damage, from being the “savior-in-chief” of humanity — whatever the issue du jour.

I warn you:  Don’t let this happen!  I see the GWPF as a sane voice in the gathering madness of “Oh my god, the earth is about to incinerate as a result of human misbehavior, and governments and corporations and schools need to do something about it, NOW!”  This is a recipe for dictatorship.  Tyranny.  Big Brother.  Totalitarianism.  The likes of which humanity has never seen.

Anyhow, the GWPF has just issued a stunning document on how children in British public schools are being brainwashed (greenwashed) about global warming.  Again, I caution you:  The GWPF is not taking a position “yea” or “nay” on global warming; it’s stripping the discussion of junk, agenda-driven science, corporate interference, and political opportunism and imperialist ambition.

“Imperialism”?  Yes, as with natural gas fracking becoming a weapon, a tool of public policy over who supplies Eastern Europe, especially the Ukraine, with fuel.  When matters of empire, politics, ideology, or corporate profit enter the debate — be it wind energy, fracking, solar power, oil, nuclear — science and reason immediately become corrupt and, frankly, dangerous.  Readers of this blog have witnessed this aplenty in the wind energy uproar — rife with ideologically-driven science and medicine.

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“Climate Control:  Brainwashing in Schools”

— by Andrew Montford & John Shade
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_ (Click here for PDF of the report, here for its appendices, and here for a link.)

Children are being treated as political targets by activists who wish to change society in fundamental ways. This is unacceptable whether or not they are successful — from the Introduction, p. 10.

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body — John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty.”

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read.  The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think.  The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling — Thomas Sowell, “Inside American Education.”

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Foreword by Professor Terence Kealy, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham

Politicians and political activists have always wanted to control the schools, for obvious reasons. St Francis Xavier of the Jesuits may or may not have said ‘give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man’ but too many politicians have wanted the child until he or she is seventeen, just to make sure.

In this impressive paper Andrew Montford and John Shade have shown how effectively eco-activism appears to have captured our schools’ curriculums. It is of course true that the greenhouse effect is based on good physics, but even better physics recognises that the globe is a complex system and that many different effects – not just the greenhouse effect – will influence the climate. And since we cannot yet model the world’s climate with confidence, we must be suspicious of the certainty with which eco-activists seek to influence the schools’ curriculums.

Eco-activism is, as Montford and Shade have shown, only the most recent example of attempted curriculum-capture by political activists, so we need to construct institutions to protect the schools from such capture. Montford and Shade have invoked the horrible examples of education under the communist regimes of Eastern Europe or China, and in so doing they point the way to the only solid future – democracy.

Educational researchers such as EG West (Education and the State, 1965) and James Tooley (The Beautiful Tree, 2009) have shown how the nationalisation of the schools in England and Wales during the 19th century was a mistake, which neither increased the expenditure per pupil nor fostered social justice – it only handed the schools over to John Stuart Mill’s ‘dominant power in government.’

But the nationalisation of the schools is now effectively irreversible, so how can we protect the curriculum within it? One harbinger is provided by the UK Statistics Authority, which is funded by government but which reports not to a minister but directly to Parliament. Thus its independence is optimised. Perhaps we now need a Curriculum Authority, reporting to Parliament via a select committee, because by its nature a legislature can foster a wider range of views than can the executive branch of government.

In the meantime, let us echo the call from Montford and Shade for an independent review of our current climate curriculum, because if – as the title of their paper suggests – schools are indoctrinating rather than educating, we have a problem.

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Executive summary

We have found examples of serious errors, misleading claims, and bias through inadequate treatment of climate issues in school teaching materials. These include many widely-used textbooks, teaching-support resources, and pupil projects.

We find instances of eco-activism being given a free rein within schools and at the events schools encourage their pupils to attend. In every case of concern, the slant is on scares, on raising fears, followed by the promotion of detailed guidance on how pupils should live, as well as on what they should think. In some instances, we find encouragement to create ‘little political activists’ in schools by creating a burden of responsibility for action on their part to ‘save the planet’, not least by putting pressure on their parents.

The National Curriculum has recently been reviewed by the government, but the proposed changes seem unlikely to prevent such practices.

Surveys show that many children are upset and frightened by what they are told is happening to the climate.

Teachers and administrators have a fairly free hand to choose textbooks, other materials, visiting speakers and school trips for pupils provided they fit in with curricular goals. This raises the risk that some may select alarming and politi- cally loaded sources in order to win children over to the ‘environmental cause’. This ‘cause’ is often presented through the notion of ‘sustainability’, a poorly- defined catchword covering political and personal actions for which funda- mental criticism is rarely entertained.5 Many campaigning NGOs and other organisations with vested interests such as energy companies proffer teach- ing materials and other resources for use in schools. Some of it is presumably being used.

There are clear grounds for very serious concern. We therefore call upon the Secretary of State for Education and his counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to undertake urgent inquiries into climate change education in our schools. Only a systematic evaluation of what is going on can determine the extent of the indoctrination as well as the emotional and educational harm to pupils that is undoubtedly resulting.

Editor’s note:  Mexico.  State of Oaxaca.  The Zapotec have occupied this landscape since time out of memory — even before Cortes splashed ashore carrying the Spanish flag, a bible, and smallpox.

The conquistadors are back, this time with wind turbines — and firearms.  The new invader being the wind energy giant, Fenosa.

Before going further, familiarize yourself with Fenosa’s policy on “health & safety.”

Committed to “ensuring the health and safety of . . . society as a whole,” Fenosa’s Corporate Responsibility Policy has “improved acceptance of operations by the local community.”

Really?

Not in Oaxaca.  Locals say that Fenosa, in collusion with corrupt (bought-off?) government officials, co-opted communally-owned land, precious to the indigenes for its farming, fishing, and other sacred qualities.  Now usurped for wind turbines.  Lots of colossal turbines, being erected mere hundreds of meters from people’s homes.

When residents formed a protest group — as tens of thousands of people around the world have done — and began blockading roads and holding demonstrations, Fenosa responded — by shooting them.

So says the beleaguered protest group, the Popular Assembly of the Juchiteco People (APPJ).  (Forget about the sham public meetings, forget about phony environmental impact reports and bogus health studies.  Just shoot ‘em!  Shoot ‘em to save the earth from global warming, by God!)

Héctor Regalado Jiménez, opponent to the wind-energy projects and sympathizer of the Popular Assembly of the Juchiteco People (APPJ), died on 1 August [2013] in the city of Juchitán de Zaragoza as a consequence of the injuries he sustained due to the six gunshot wounds he received on 21 July [2013].

According to a denunciation from the APPJ, Héctor Regalado and other members of the organization were fired upon by hitmen working for the multinational energy firm Fenosa Natural Gas, being accompanied also by units of the Auxiliary, Banking, Industrial, and Commercial Police (PABIC), a police institution that has been contracted by the firm to safeguard the construction work of the wind-energy park Bii Hioxho. (Click here for source.)

Wind energy.  “Clean, green, renewable!”  Oppose it and you’re dead!  Oaxaca’s new slogan.  (Pump him with 6 bullets, to be certain you kill the bastard, not just wound him.)

Did Fenosa hire the killers?  Who’s to know?  The point is, the local Popular Assembly of the Juchiteco People (APPJ) maintains it did.  If it didn’t — if, instead, these are  freelancing thugs acting on their own, without Fenosa’s blessing — what is Fenosa doing to condemn and stop the intimidation and killing?

Weeks before the attack, persons identified as hired gunmen threatened Héctor Regalado with death and warned him that they would fire on the APPJ [wind energy protest group] camp on the Playa Vicente access road, which is the location of the site where the multinational [Fenosa] is building the Bii Hioxho wind-energy park. Furthermore, days after being threatened with death, Héctor Regalado warned that representatives of the multinational had attempted to co-opt him by offering him work, in exchange for his abandoning the APPJ campaign.

On 24 February 2013, indigenous residents and Binniza fisherfolk founded the APPJ in the fishing village near Juchitán de Zaragoza. This organization asserts as its principal objective the struggle against the construction of megaprojects [industrial wind plants] on their lands and territories. As a first action, APPJ members blockaded an access road in Playa Vicente so as to impede the movement of workers and vehicles owned by Fenosa.

The residents denounce that the rented lands are of communal use, and that the contract signed between them was illegal.  Since its founding, the APPJ has denounced the constant death-threats and attacks suffered by its members at the hands of the state police and private hitmen hired by the firm.The APPJ “holds the state government of Oaxaca and the State Attorney General’s Office responsible for the wave of death-threats and aggressions that we as members and sympathizers of the [APPJ] constantly suffer.” (Click here for source.)

Read more, taken from here.

Some 1,200 agents from the police forces of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca tried unsuccessfully on March 26 [2014] to remove local residents who were blocking a road leading to the Bii Yoxho wind farm, which is under construction in Juchitán de Zaragoza municipality near the Pacific coast.  The operation was also intended to recover construction equipment protesters had seized on Feb. 25 in an ongoing effort to stop the completion of the wind project, which is owned by the Mexican subsidiary of the Spanish company Gas Natural Fenosa.

Local prosecutor Manuel de Jesús López told the French wire service AFP that 22 people were injured in the March 26 operation, including 11 police agents, and one police agent was taken prisoner.  Protesters reported eight local people with serious injuries, including Carlos Sánchez, the coordinator of Radio Totopo, a community radio station.

Several companies have been building wind farms in southeastern Oaxaca on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.  Residents in the Juchitán area, mostly from the Zapotec and Ikoots (Huave) indigenous groups, say the Bii Yoxho project is being built in an area they use for fishing and farming that also includes ceremonial sites, along with mangrove forests that are critical to the local environment.  The barricade blocking access to the Bii Yoxho project on the Juchitán-Playa Vicente road is one of four main points of resistance to the wind turbines.

Activists have also occupied the town hall in San Dionisio del Mar since January 2012; have refused to recognize the mayor in San Mateo del Mar, Francisco Valle, because he favors the projects; and have set up a barricade in Juchitán’s Alvaro Obregón neighborhood to block access to another wind park, owned by the Mareña Renovables company.

The resistance has been subjected to police harassment, such as the 24-hour detention by federal police of Lucila Bettina Cruz Velázquez, a leader in the Assembly of the Indigenous Peoples of the Tehuantepec Isthmus in Defense of Land and Territory, in February 2012.  Protesters also report the presence of armed paramilitary groups, some with connections to unions and other groups affiliated with the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) or close to the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

On March 21 a group of men linked to Juchitán’s PRI mayor, Francisco Valle Piamonte, briefly detained reporter Rosa Rojas and photographer Francisco Olvera, both from the left-leaning national daily La Jornada, along with three reporters from alternative media and a San Mateo resident.  On the morning of March 29 a paramilitary group dismantled Radio Totopa, seizing a laptop and the transmitter and cutting the power cables, according to the Popular Assembly of the Juchiteco People (APPJ).  APPJ spokespeople called this “another attack by the state government and the transnational companies which are trying to use violence to silence the voices of those who oppose the construction of wind parks.”

After negotiations with representatives of the Oaxaca state government on March 28, the APPJ returned 12 vehicles, including a backhoe, to Gas Natural Fenosa; in exchange the state agreed not to press charges against the protesters.  However, the APPJ rejected the state’s proposal for them to lift the road blockades on April 1 and attend an April 2 meeting in the city of Oaxaca.  The protesters said they would maintain their barricades, and they called on Oaxaca governor Gabino Cué Monteagudo to come meet with them in Juchitán.

(You can read more here and here and here and here.)

And you folks in Wisconsin, Ontario, and Australia thought you had it tough with the wind thugs!

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Editor’s note:  No, this isn’t Rosemary Lester.  Rosemary Lester is Chief Medical Officer of the State of Victoria, Australia.  Dr. Lester is the recipient of the letter reprinted, below — from a woman, a middle-aged woman, who, as she wrote the letter, couldn’t stop weeping.  Her name is Melissa Ware.

Melissa (lovely name) is writing to Rosemary (another lovely name), asking for humaneness, common sense and, not least, proper medical attention.

The tragedy is, Rosemary will almost certainly reject Melissa on every request.

How so?  Dr. Lester steadfastly refuses to investigate the screamingly obvious health problems at wind farms within her jurisdiction.  Instead, her department published a report denying physiological impacts from wind turbine infrasound and low frequency noise (ILFN).  A report effectively trashing the work of Professor Alec Salt (Dept. of Otolaryngology, Washington University School of Medicine, Missouri, USA), Professor Colin Hansen, Dr. Nina Pierpont, and a host of other researchers & clinicians who have demonstrated — drum roll, please! — direct physiological impacts from wind turbine ILFN.  (Does this tin-horn bureaucrat know something these clinical researchers — with credentials that eclipse hers — don’t know?)

Leading to the obvious question:  What happened to Dr. Lester’s duty of care as senior medical officer?  Where is the state’s duty of care?  Lester can’t claim she knows nothing about the suffering; Annie Gardner bombards her with emails, even as sick and suicidal residents have met with Lester and her department — for naught.

“Rosemary, what the fuck is going on, honey?” (It’s time to use her first name, reminding her that the “doctor” stuff is professional horseshit.  Above all, she’s a human being, dammit, and from our perspective she’s doing a really bad job at that task.  Not, “First, do no harm,” but “First, be a human being for God’s sake!”)

Rosemary’s own medical staff admitted they knew there was a problem with Wind Turbine Syndrome.  We refer to Dr. Simon Slota-Kan and Dr. Stephanie Williams.  Both physicians admitted to the community and to directors of the Waubra Foundation (meetings in April 2011 at Evansford and on 14th October 2011 in the health department offices in Melbourne), that they knew there were real health problems from turbines!  Indeed, at the April meeting, Drs. Slota-Kan and Williams said research money was available.

“Um, Rosemary, what happened to the money, honey?”

None of these pleas, none of this evidence, has moved this woman or her department to conduct a health impact assessment, again, despite repeated requests and, indeed, despite it being her legal responsibility.  And despite it being obvious, for Chrissakes, Rosemary!  (Why is this woman still in this job?  Is anyone in the govt. paying attention?  Where’s the media?  Hello!  Anyone home in the Land of Oz?)  

(Reporting on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt was struck by what she called “the banality of evil.”  The government bureaucrat just — doing his job.)   

Anyhow, read on.  Melissa Ware is one of many sufferers under the official, certified, legal, state-mandated, medically approved & authorized & licensed care and protection of Rosemary Lester.  (Why does she still hold a medical license?)

What the fuck!?
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This abuse and torture have got to stop, now!  Too many of us, including children, handicapped and elders are physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted, too many of us are fed up, and too many of us are forced to live with preventable pain caused by operating or proposed industrial wind facilities.

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To:  Dr. Rosemary Lester, Chief Health Officer, Victoria, Australia
From:  Melissa Ware, Cape Bridgewater, Victoria, Australia
Regarding:  Abuse & torture of residents by wind turbine infrasound & low frequency noise
Date:  April 2, 2014

You and your Department are well aware of impacts of industrial wind turbines on human health from reports from Victorian residents.  This document explains precisely what is occurring for residents living in quiet rural areas and what physiological harm is occurring (click here).

We experience many health problems living next door to the Cape Bridgewater Wind Farm in South West Victoria. I have read the statement by Mr. Mark Duchamp from the World Council of Nature (click here).

Today it’s difficult to stop crying.   Not only is human health being ignored, animals are severely impacted by wind turbines as well.  Tears are flowing because not only are animals not protected from harm, neither are we residents. We can no longer bear the impact of our experiences near wind facilities not being heard, not being acted on and not being prevented.

GP’s and Specialists advise the cure is to “move away,” give limited instructions and advice, proffer prescriptions and pills, request blood tests etc. to discover the cause of ill-health and as required by law to provide correct diagnosis and treatment; expensive measures on a national scale and our health and well-being deteriorates.  Relocation is unaffordable, our home deemed unsalable according to the valuer engaged by the bank holding our mortgage.  We have followed instructions of the Health Department, Department of Planning, and Glenelg Shire Council and co-operated as requested, with Pacific Hydro whom own the wind facility.

We are traumatised by the inhumanity being shown towards our communities.

We hit our heads against a medical system brick wall over and over again, in attempt to be simply being heard.  To repeatedly point out independent noise testing in our homes detects noise problems, that these noises are the direct cause of headaches, illness and many health problems. To repeatedly be put down, dismissed and told “there are no problems near wind farms” and “there’s nothing we can do” or “there is no evidence” or “move away.”

For those responsible for our pain, to legally speak, “Ignorance is no excuse,” and you will be held to account.

The 2011 “Senate Inquiry into the Impact of Wind Farms” called for more research into wind farm noise, as does Prime Minister Abbot’s government, as does Minister Guy, as does the National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC), as do many senators and professionals and persons of integrity wanting to see justice for people and communities who are negatively impacted and suffering.

Solid stone homes, concrete slabs, corrugated roofs and sheds, even the ground vibrates to the sound energy emissions from the turbines.  Bodies and internal organs and tiny bones, vibrate to imissions and are blasted by pressure waves. Years of exposure to bodily harm; infrasound and low frequency noise bombard every living cell. Prolonged exposure to noise and resulting sleep deprivation causes harm.

Noise pollution from wind turbines was shown by Dr Neil Kelley, thirty years ago, to DIRECTLY cause a range of symptoms, currently named Wind Turbine Syndrome, to neighbours of bigger and larger wind facilities with ongoing unresolved noise issues (click here).

Negative impacts have been well researched and documented.  Dr. Kelley defined and established health protective exposure limits for wind turbine infrasound and low frequency noise, which state and federal governments, including the NHMRC, have been repeatedly made aware of, yet choose to ignore.

The Association of Veterans Affairs Audiologists in America in 2010 documented the effects of infrasound and recommended levels of exposure determined by various highly regarded bodies such as NASA etc. (click here).

No-one monitors or limits our exposure levels

Not to noise, not to infrasound, not to blade flicker, not to vibration within our homes, not to electromagnetic radiation — no one is monitoring this industry.  People living next door are required to report faults, or fires, or blade damage or noises.  There’s seemingly no safeguarding whistles and bells, as reported at this wind facility.

Environmental noise exposure risks public health, and is recognised by international bodies such as the World Health Organisation and the US Center for Disease Control.  What are your directives for managing wind farm harm?  What are you doing to protect people from wind industry interference in health management? Interference revealed by Senator Madigan in parliament recently regarding wind farm communications with medical clinics in the Western District, including two clinics in Portland (click here).

How much longer are we to bear ongoing wind farm abuses?   Six, ten, twenty, thirty years reporting problems and nothing has been done to cease the pain and harm.  We’ve been palmed off from one government department to another and eventually ignored or derided.  All the while, infrasound and low frequency noise, audible noise and vibration from the turbines tortures us.

Noises annoy us, sleep eludes us

Denial of the problems and this form of torture is unacceptable.  No doubt litigation will occur here in Australia as it has  overseas, with turbines being ordered to be pulled down in Portugal, because of proven vibroacoustic disease in animals and humans.  In December 2013, Justice Muse ordered the wind farm in Falmouth, Massachusetts (USA) to be turned off at night to prevent “irreparable harm to physical and psychological health.”

How often is it to be repeated that people, physicians, the public, administrators must be better educated regarding the issues we’re daily confronted with?  The Health Department, the EPA, the NHMRC and government are where such awareness and education begin, where solutions are enacted.  Departments, professionals and government representatives, including local government, need to consider their advice (or lack of), their own behaviour, adhere to their standards of conduct and act with integrity and honesty, and have no conflicts of interest and actively advocate on our behalf.

Even the wind industry  admits to problems of noise, engineering design and maintenance.  (See, for example, lubrication problems and poor or incorrect installation or siting.)  Section 5.1.1 of the draft New Zealand standard on wind farm noise, 2009, states:  “Limits for wind farm noise are required to provide protection against sleep disturbance and maintain reasonable residential amenity.”

THIS ABUSE AND TORTURE HAVE GOT TO STOP, NOW!  Too many of us, including children, handicapped and elders are physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted, too many of us are fed up, and too many of us are forced to live with preventable pain caused by operating or proposed industrial wind facilities.

Raising awareness starts by reading professional and personal statements.  You may begin here with responses made to the Australian Medical Association’s recent statement wrongly proclaiming no health effects from wind farms.

Your written response to this letter and URGENT action from you and your department, consistent with your legal, professional and ethical duties, are urgently required.

Editor’s note:  Professor Alec Salt and his colleague, Professor Jeffrey Lichtenhan, both in the Dept. of Otolaryngology in the School of Medicine at Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri), have published a superb article, excerpted, below.

Alec N. Salt and Jeffrey T. Lichtenhan, “How does wind turbine noise affect people?” Acoustics Today, vol. 10 (Winter 2014), pp. 20-28.

They blow Geoff Leventhall out of the water, with his now famous yet dogged misunderstanding of inner ear physiology, and they deliver the death blow to any future A-weighted noise measurements.  Their laboratory research demonstrates, unequivocally, that infrasound of the sort produced by industrial wind turbines does indeed affect the cochlea and vestibular organs.  (Nina Pierpont pointed out the likelihood of vestibular effect in her book, “Wind Turbine Syndrome,” in 2009, which Leventhall and other wind energy consultants have seen fit to trash — and continue to trash, digging their scholarly graves ever deeper.)

If you suffer from Wind Turbine Syndrome (WTS) and are getting nowhere with your physician, show him (her) this article.  If you’re a WTS sufferer and want some action from your municipal or state or provincial government, or board of health, show them this article — and make an appointment with a lawyer.

Dr. Salt has been publishing in this vein for at least 5 years.  Slowly but surely his laboratory is showing the physiological mechanism for the symptoms that Pierpont christened “Wind Turbine Syndrome.”  Those of  you suffering from WTS don’t need Dr. Salt to tell you that, yes, you’re sick.  He can, however, explain why you’re sick.

While Salt and his colleagues continue to figure out the exact pathophysiological mechanisms, justice and humaneness and common sense plus of course the “precautionary principle” would say that all wind turbine installation projects should be put on “hold” while the clinical and scientific jury is out.

Click here for the full article.
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Excerpt:

The essence of the current debate is that on one hand you have the well-funded wind industry (1) advocating that infrasound be ignored because the measured levels are below the threshold of human hearing, allowing noise levels to be adequately documented through A-weighted sound measurements; (2) dismissing the possibility that any variants of wind turbine syndrome exist (Pierpont 2009) even when physicians (e.g., Steven D. Rauch, M.D. at Harvard Medical School) cannot otherwise explain some patients’ symptoms; and (3) arguing that it is unnecessary to separate wind turbines and homes based on prevailing sound levels.

On the other hand, you have many people who claim to be so distressed by the effects of wind turbine noise that they cannot tolerate living in their homes. Some move away, either at financial loss or bought-out by the turbine operators. Others live with the discomfort, often requiring medical therapies to deal with their symptoms. Some, even members of the same family, may be unaffected. Below is a description of the disturbance experienced by a woman in Europe we received a few weeks ago as part of an unsolicited e-mail.

‘From the moment that the turbines began working I experienced vertigo-like symptoms on an ongoing basis. In many respects, what I am experiencing now is actually worse than the ‘dizziness’ I have previously experienced, as the associated nausea is much more intense. For me the pulsating, humming, noise that the turbines emit is the predominant sound that I hear and that really seems to affect me.

While the Chief Scientist [the person who came to take sound measurements in her house] undertaking the measurement informed me that he was aware of the low frequency hum the turbines produced (he lives close to a wind farm himself and had recorded the humming noise levels indoors in his own home) he advised that I could tune this noise out and that any adverse symptoms I was experiencing were simply psychosomatic.’ . . .

Given the knowledge that the ear responds to low frequency sounds and infrasound, we knew that comparisons with benign sources were invalid and the logic to A-weight sound measurements was deeply flawed scientifically. . . .

From this understanding we conclude that very low frequency sounds and infrasound, at levels well below those that are heard, readily stimulate the cochlea. Low frequency sounds and infrasound from wind turbines can therefore stimulate the ear at levels well below those that are heard. . . .

No one has ever evaluated whether tympanostomy tubes alleviate the symptoms of those living near wind turbines. From the patient’s perspective, this may be preferable to moving out of their homes or using medical treatments for vertigo, nausea, and/or sleep disturbance. The results of such treatment, whether positive, negative, would likely have considerable scientific influence on the wind turbine noise debate. . . .

Another concern that must be dealt with is the development of wind turbine noise measurements that have clinical relevance. The use of A-weighting must be reassessed as it is based on insensitive, Inner Hair Cell (IHC)-mediated hearing and grossly misrepresents inner ear stimulation generated by the noise. In the scientific domain, A-weighting sound measurements would be unacceptable when many elements of the ear exhibit a higher sensitivity than hearing. The wind industry should be held to the same high standards. Full-spectrum monitoring, which has been adopted in some reports, is essential. . . .

Given the present evidence, it seems risky at best to continue the current gamble that infrasound stimulation of the ear stays confined to the ear and has no other effects on the body. For this to be true, all the mechanisms we have outlined (low- frequency-induced amplitude modulation, low frequency sound-induced endolymph volume changes, infrasound stimulation of type II afferent nerves, infrasound exacerbation of noise-induced damage and direct infrasound stimulation of vestibular organs) would have to be insignificant. We know this is highly unlikely and we anticipate novel findings in the coming years that will influence the debate.