ABSTRACT
Renewable energy enjoys broad popularity as an abstract concept, yet specific cases of industrial renewable energy development consistently encounter local opposition commonly characterized by the phrase ‘not in my backyard,’ or NIMBY.
Scholars have recently attempted a broader, more thorough understanding of wind opposition focusing on discursive forms of investigation, but even these efforts are limited by unspoken assumptions of motivation and aim. These attempts have led to a sophisticated understanding of local scale arguments mobilized by wind opponents, but have ignored arguments on other scales. In a case study of Keyser, West Virginia, I discovered a broad range of arguments not included in the scholarly literature. This thesis will investigate arguments on scales including the global, national, regional, local, and individual. I will connect the local scale objections to broader scales through the lenses of landscape and placemaking theory, and I will investigate the emergent discourse of health impacts and Wind Turbine Syndrome through embodiment theory and parallel phenomena.
Perceptions of Wind Power, Community, and
Renewable Energy Landscapes
Meridel Hanna Newton
2013
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Science
2013
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my advisors, Dawn Biehler and David Lansing, for their invaluable help and advice. This project would not have been possible without them. I'd also like to thank my family for their support and understanding as I made my way through the last few years. Finally, the Allegheny Front Alliance was a crucial partner in my field work, and I thank them for their cooperation and willingness to participate.
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Table of Contents Chapter One - Introduction 1 The Problem 1 Wind Power in America 3 Study Site 6 Research Questions 10 Literature Review 11 The Power of NIMBY 11 Place and Landscape 13 Embodiment and Health 17 Methods 21 Outline of Thesis 23 Citations 25
Chapter Two - Beyond the Merely Local: Wind Opposition on the Extended Scale 30 Introduction 30 Methods 32 Literature of the Extended Scale 33 Background 36 The Extended Scale 38 Role of Government 40 Viability of Wind 44 Alternative to the Alternate 52 Conclusions 54 Citations 57
Chapter Three - The Local Scale: Place, Past and Present 59 Introduction 59 Literature of the Local Scale 61 Challenge to the Environment 66 Environment as Scenery 66 Environment as Ecology 71 Challenge to the Future 73 Decommissioning 75 Challenge to the Community 78 Conclusions 81 Citations 84
Chapter Four - The Individual Scale: Wind Turbine Syndrome and Post-modernism 86 Introduction 86
iii Approach 88 West Virginia as Wild 88 Health and Landscape 92 Wind Development and Health 94 Wind Turbine Syndrome 96 Overview 96 Wind Turbine Syndrome in Keyser 103 Constructing Turbines Through the Senses 109 Conclusions 111 Citations 113
Chapter Five - Conclusion 116 Summary 116 Key Findings 118 Limitations of the Study 120 Policy Implications 120 Citations 124
Appendix A - Interview Questions 125
iv
List of Tables
Revised framework of factors affecting public perceptions of wind farms. Source:
Graham, Stephenson, and Smith, 2009 ...... 33
v
List of Figures
Illustration 1: Keyser, West Virginia and surrounding wind farms. Source: maps.google.com ...... 8
Illustration 2: View of Pinnacle Wind Farm from Keyser, West Virginia. Photographer: Meridel Newton ...... 9
Illustration 3: United States Wind Resource Map. Source: nrel.gov ...... 47
vi Chapter One
Introduction
THE PROBLEM
The sociologist Mhairi Aitken recently argued that the vast majority of scholarship on opponents of industrial scale wind development premise their work on a number of assumptions: that wind energy is broadly popular, and therefore, opposition to wind power is “deviant,” and that the reason to investigate wind opposition is to overcome it through the development of “trust” between residents, developers, and policymakers (2010). Aitken argues that these assumptions overwhelmingly frame scholarly work on wind opposition, and as a result, the literature is limited in scope and ineffective at furthering understanding. After conducting seventeen interviews among a variety of wind activists in Keyser, West Virginia, I concur with Aitken’s assessment. In my interviews, I encountered a wide range of opinion and reasoning behind wind opposition. Some people very specifically objected to the destruction of forest habitat necessary to construct industrial turbines, while others were more concerned with the effects the wind industry has on American manufacturing and trade. The framework of assumptions described by Aitken does not have room for such wide ranging dissent. In this thesis, I will explore the array of anti-wind arguments that I encountered in an effort to understand wind opposition on its own terms.
While scholarship has increasingly become more nuanced, researchers investigating wind opposition still cleave to a limited view of the motivations and logic behind opposition to industrial development. Recent publications have sought to dismiss
1 the long accepted notion that industrial wind opponents are driven by NIMBYism – Not
In My Backyard-ism – and replace it with multidimensional explanations of landscape, environment, history, and community (Wolsink, 20006; Devine-Wright 2005; Fisher and
Brown, 2009). Even so, these investigators present a concept of wind opposition limited by their presumptions, their assumptions, and methodological barriers.
While the effort to discredit the popular myth of NIMBYism is admirable and necessary, current scholarship on wind opposition needs to look further, to broaden its range and move beyond the assumptions Aitken identified. These assumptions have limited the field in ways which make a total understanding of wind opponents impossible to achieve.
One of these limitations lies in the identification of arguments mobilized by wind opponents. Even in case studies using open-ended surveys or interview methodology, scholars tend to identify similar arguments from case to case, arguments centering on environmental issues, questions of community participation in the planning process, or unease over the appearance of industrial turbines. These arguments are local in scope, and frequently lead authors of the studies to suggest that a more integrated planning process utilizing greater community participation would resolve concerns.
However, opponents of industrial wind power actually make their arguments across a large range of scales, by no means limited to only the local. Opponents analyze wind power from viewpoints as diverse as international economics and personal health.
While local scale arguments of the environment and community are certainly important, opponents are also concerned with how industrial development impacts both global
2 issues and those as small-scale as individual human health. Yet despite this diversity of mobilized arguments, wind opposition literature continues to focus on the local and the local alone. This oversight may well be a result of the assumptions identified by Aitken.
By ignoring all arguments that do not fit the established narrative, academia ensures that wind opposition will never be fully explored or understood. Understanding and acknowledging the full range of arguments mobilized by wind opponents is a vital step forward for the field, and one that must be taken.
WIND POWER IN AMERICA
The wind industry in the United States is emblematic of the renewable energy industry, and has grown as a result of a broad range of policy initiatives intended to encourage the spread of renewable power. These policies find their root in the 1978
Public Utilities and Regulatory Policy Act (PURPA), which for the first time required utilities to buy power from third parties at an avoided cost rate – that is, the cost of the utility’s typical output minus the costs avoided by buying from the cheaper third party.
This act created a market for third party power, leading directly the first large-scale industrial wind farm in the country in New Hampshire, and the famous Altamount Pass in
California (Martinot, 2004).
In the 1990s, policy initiatives enacted on multiple levels of government boosted the incipient industry by encouraging specific governmental regions to set quotas and goals within their own jurisdiction. Several states adopted policy tools known as
Renewables Portfolio Standards (RPS), in which state governments (and, in a few cases,
3 county governments) could require that their energy portfolio include a certain percentage of energy from renewable sources. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have enacted these portfolio standards. Despite a 2012 campaign by the American Legislative
Exchange Council to roll back portfolio standards, states have kept their quotas and, in a few cases, passed laws requiring greater percentages of renewable energy.
Though there is no federal RPS, the United States federal government has supported renewable energy development in several ways. A 2008 study by the
Department of Energy found that a goal of 20% wind energy was feasible by 2030 (DOE,
2008). This report has been adopted by the wind industry as a rallying cry and unofficial endorsement (AWEA, 2013), and receives international recognition as a goal of the
Department of Energy (Sahu, 2013). The federal government also offers a production tax credit for renewable energy producers.
The production tax credit (PTC) is a central driving force of the renewable energy industry. This tax credit provides a 2.2 cent credit for every kilowatt hour of energy produced in the first ten years of a facility's operational lifespan, making renewable energy an attractive investment. However, the tax credit must be renewed each year by an act of Congress. This perceived instability has, by some reports, hobbled the industry, as no company would commit to far-sighted future projects that might not be covered by an expired tax credit (Barradale, 2010). As one international report said, “...with the expiry of PTC in 1999, 2001 and 2003, a sharp drop of 93%, 73% and 77% in installation with corresponding job losses were observed in 2000, 2002 and 2004, respectively” (Sahu,
2013). The PTC lapsed at the end of the 2012 congressional session. When it was
4 renewed in January of 2013, the renewal also included a change to the policy that allowed it to cover all projects started in the qualifying period. This led to an increase in proposed wind development for 2013 and 2014 (Cardwell, 2013).
Despite the lack of consistent federal support, wind power in America has flourished in the last decade. Installed capacity in the United States has grown by twenty percent a year. In 2010 the United States had 40 GW installed capacity of wind power, and was the second highest producer of wind power in the world, only four GW behind
China (Kaffine et al, 2013). By 2013, the United States had 47 GW of installed capacity
(Sahu et al, 2013). In light of the approval and changes to the PTC, high-profile projects are moving forward. In June, the federal government announced that it would hold the first auction of leases for offshore wind development (DiSavino and Orr, 2013).
Recent reports have stated that the current limit to wind capacity is not lack of technology, efficiency, or potential, but rather in the inability of the current electrical grid to handle the wide fluctuations of power associated with industrial wind production
(Fairley, 2008; Carvalho et al., 2012). The grid lacks large-scale storage facilities, meaning that most power must be used when it is generated, or it is wasted. As wind power output varies with the wind itself, surplus energy created during periods of high wind is wasted, and low wind activity means the resulting power deficit must be filled by other forms of energy. On February 26th, 2008, Texas, which boasts the highest amount of installed capacity in the United States, experienced an electrical emergency in which electrical production dropped abruptly from a number of wind farms as the weather cooled and customers turned on the heat. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas
5 compensated by cutting power to industrial customers who had previously agreed to participate in a contingency plan. This move was the second step in the Council’s emergency plan for a low wind event (O'Grady, 2008). Such incidents suggest that in order to reach the Department of Energy's goal of 20% wind power by 2030, the
American electrical grid will need to be overhauled in order to better accommodate and distribute power overflows and ebbs from particular areas (Fischlein et al, 2013).
STUDY SITE
Keyser, West Virginia (39°26′20 ″N - 78°58 ′58 ″W) is the county seat of Mineral
County in the northeastern area of West Virginia. The town was built in the New Creek
Valley, between Green Mountain and New Creek Mountain. As of 2010, Keyser had a population of 5,439 people with a per capita income of $15,971. The population is 88.4% white, 8.6% African-American, and 3% Asian, Native American, or mixed-race (U. S.
Census Bureau, 2013).
The town is the site of two separate industrial wind farms, one of which has been in operation for several years, while the other was only recently completed. The Pinnacle
Wind Farm at NewPage was originally a project of US WindForce, which sold it to
Edison Mission before disbanding. Construction started on April 11th, 2011, and the final rotor was installed on October 7th of that same year. This wind farm consists of twenty- three industrial wind turbines along the ridge of Green Mountain with an installed capacity of 55 MW. More than four hundred feet tall, the Pinnacle Wind Farm is easily visible from any part of Keyser.
6 The NedPower Mount Storm Wind Farm was first proposed in 2001. Construction started in 2006 and was completed in 2008. The Mount Storm project, while not as close to Keyser as the Pinnacle Wind Farm, is a twelve mile long installation built along the
Allegheny Front, and is easily visible from many places in and around Keyser. NedPower
Mount Storm is owned by Dominion Resources Inc. and NedPower, a subsidiary of Shell
Oil. This project includes 132 turbines and has an installed capacity of 264 MW.
Keyser has been the center of controversy surrounding these wind farms, as evidenced by the existence of the Allegheny Front Alliance and the blog Allegheny
Treasures. The Allegheny Front Alliance is a local opposition group organized in response to the proposal to build the Pinnacle Wind Farm. It describes its mission as seeking “to protect the Allegheny Front’s cultural and natural environment.” The
Allegheny Front Alliance, along with other concerned citizens, have organized events such as letter-writing campaigns and petitions to raise awareness of their position. This controversy has attracted attention from local media, including newspapers and news shows.
Keyser was chosen as a study site due to its proximity to both established and new industrial wind farms, which the residents interact with every day. The clear controversy surrounding the wind farms, as well as the willingness of a representative of the
Allegheny Front Alliance to act as a principal contact, made Keyser an ideal choice for this project.
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Illustration 1: Keyser, West Virginia and surrounding wind fa rms. Source: maps.google.com
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Illustration 2: View of Pinnacle Wind Farm from Keyser, West Virginia. Photographer: Meridel Newton
9 RESEARCH QUESTIONS
With this study, I hope to provide a window into the reasoning of the wind opposition movement, and to introduce a new understanding of the arguments mobilized by wind opponents. Previous studies have identified lines of argument within the wind opposition movement pertaining to local scale issues, such as the environmental impact of industrial turbines or the impacts turbines might have on a town’s appearance or cultural heritage. However, in-depth interviews with the wind opponents of Keyser West
Virginia reveal a much wider range of concerns. Wind opponents advance arguments as large-scale as international economics and as small scale as individual health. This thesis aims to explore these neglected areas of the wind opponents' arguments.
If previous scholarship has conformed to a framework of assumptions (as identified by Aitken), what anti-wind arguments have been neglected or unidentified by this bias? This thesis will explore arguments made on scales other than the local, as the local scale has been the focus of most previous scholarship into wind opposition. Indeed, if one attempts to understand wind opposition free of these assumptions, what new avenues of understanding are opened for even the local scale arguments? Using these questions as a jumping off point, this thesis seeks to understand the dynamics of a community facing a new kind of industrial development.
Finally, this thesis seeks to investigate the rise of human health impacts as a discourse mobilized by the wind opposition movement. Have wind opponents accepted the discourse of health impacts, and begun the process of giving legitimacy to that
10 discourse? By investigating this process in the microcosm of Keyser, West Virginia, this thesis will contribute to the literature of discourse and materiality.
LITERATURE REVIEW
The Power of NIMBY
Industry and government often ignore or marginalize these local voices of dissent in the wind power debate, dismissing them as “NIMBY,” or Not In My Back Yard, protesters (Jones and Eiser, 2010; Bell et al, 2005). This term carries with it the implication that the protesters are selfish, short-sighted, shallow individuals whose objections are based on aesthetics and little else (Devine-Wright, 2009). Labeling protesters with such a loaded term stifles discussion, as developers presume they know the motivations and issues driving opponents. Even if developers attempt to appease their opponents, often their appeasement only addresses what they believe to be at issue, which is not necessarily the true cause of the opposition. Thus, debates become louder and more polarized, and attempts at resolution only exacerbate the friction as they do not address the true issues.
Work in the field of environmental psychology has focused on disproving the
NIMBY narrative, providing perhaps the most detailed and structured body of literature on the subject of wind development and community opposition. Patrick Devine-Wright posits that opposition arises from a phenomenon he calls “disruption to place attachment”
(2009). He suggests that people often have social representations (Muscovici, 2001) about their homes and the surrounding landscape, leading to a phenomenon he calls
11 'place attachment.' Social representation is defined as a personal interpretation of a concept informed by past experience and personal values. While social representations tend to vary from person to person, Muscovici argues that distinct social groups which have formed around a shared idea, such as a political philosophy, carry similar social representations in regards to that idea. This leads to similar interpretations of new concepts.
In areas where the social representation of the land is weighted toward a rural, undeveloped image, possibly compounded by a reliance on tourism, wind turbines can be viewed as alien to the area, unfit or unwelcome. Industrialization represented by the huge, permanent machines clashes with residents' own ideas about the land. Disruption of this place attachment correlates with opposition to development (Devine-Wright, 2011; 2010).
Based on several case studies of energy landscapes in Wales, Devine-Wright created a framework for understanding opposition featuring eight categories and seventeen aspects
(2005). This framework was intended as a counterpoint to the NIMBY discourse, solidifying the idea that wind opponents do not merely object to the aesthetics of the turbines, but have more complicated reasoning for their positions. Graham, Stephenson, and Smith used the Devine-Wright framework to compare three wind farms in Australia
(2009). Graham, Stephenson, and Smith identified one new category and ten new aspects of concern cited by their respondents, which they added to Devine-Wright's original framework to create a revised version.
Devine-Wright recognizes wind opposition as arising from a framework of opinions and concerns. In the revised version of his framework, these concerns are
12 separated into nine categories each containing a number of different aspects, yet the framework focuses almost entirely on local arguments. Even case studies which do not employ this framework concentrate on local issues (Pasqualetti, 2011; Fisher and Brown
2009; Phadke, 2010).
Place and Landscape
Cultural geography takes a different approach to the analysis – one which considers the nine categories of the environmental psychology framework to be less than half of the equation. Place theory and landscape study both contribute to the work of geographers studying opposition to wind development. Doreen Massey builds her theory of place on Bruno Latour's amodern actor-network theory (Latour, 1986). Massey utilizes two key ideas from Latour: his suggestion to reframe debates as a series of interactions between actants of equal standing, and his attempt to reframe the nature/society divide as an artificial one constantly breached by hybrids of our own making (1993). Massey envisions place itself as the result of a network, describing it as the nexus of several factors such as culture, time, history, geography, politics, economics, and any number of others (1994). Massey sees place as a dynamic concept connected not only to space, but to time as well. She explains that these 'envelopes of space-time' are only temporarily stabilized by the experience and construction of the people who experience them. She notes, “...it is that a landscape, these hills, are the (temporary) product of a meeting up of trajectories out of which mobile uncertainty a future is – has to be – negotiated” (46).
13 Don Mitchell furthers the study of landscape as canvas in his examination of farm workers in California (1993), revealing how landscape was actually used as a tool by the state and federal government to marginalize migrant farm workers. Land owners and farm owners in California in the early twentieth century saw the freedom of migratory farm workers as a threat, and worked to restrict it by concentrating the workers in particular areas, which made them easier to track and control. The land itself, the relationship between the land and those who worked it, threatened to expose “the shaky legitimacy upon which many agricultural empires are founded” (179). Mitchell suggests that landscape itself is the product of a network, constantly shifting and recreating itself.
Cultural geographers have begun to investigate the phenomenon of wind power opposition through these ideas. Martin Pasqualetti (2000) suggested that wind power may be unpopular for reasons beyond place attachment. In a rumination on the unpopularity of the wind turbines of San Gorgino Pass in California, Pasqualetti suggested that wind power is unique among renewable energy types in that it is highly visible and, when implemented, inescapable: “The inescapable accessory of renewable-resource immobility is the spatial intensification of the impacts of its development. Realizing this helps us understand why renewable-energy developments encounter public resistance, especially where land is sacred, protected, scenic, or otherwise sensitive” (385). Pasqualetti in fact suggested that the local, visual reminder of energy production causes a negative reaction in some people, who prefer not to be reminded of the impact of their actions upon the environment. To some, a wind turbine is a constant, inescapable guilt trip dogging their every flick of a switch.
14 Pasqualetti later applied these ideas to a wide-ranging study of four different industrial wind developments which had encountered opposition (2011). From these cases, he attempted to identify consistent factors driving wind opposition. Pasqualetti argued that developers need to take a deeper look into the history and interactions of a community before they propose new sites, learning as much as possible about the place and adjusting their development proposals accordingly. Among other issues, he noted that wind projects frequently carry little benefit for the local residents who live with them, creating a sense of inequality and injustice. Residents of Searchlight, NV, subject of a wind opposition study by Roopali Phadke (2011), strongly exhibited a sense of imposition and injustice as a result of this perceived injustice.
Phadke addressed the issue from a more critical stance, using Leo Marx's idea of the machine in the garden to describe the relationship between people and the development of their landscape. Marx conceptualized America as a middle landscape, caught between the ideals of a Romantic rural pastoralism and the modern industrial drive for capitalism (2000). As the result of two diametrically opposed ideals, Americans have sculpted their landscape to cluster intense development in the midst of rural production. Phadke suggested that industrial wind development challenges those ideas of pastoralism in much the same way that the expanding railroads once did, bringing industry into the rural.
According to Phadke, place scholars including Leo Marx, Yi-Fu Tuan, and
Massey have attempted to define and explain Americans’ unique relationship with their land (757). Phadke, however, drew a distinction between two strands of place-based
15 theory. She claimed that cultural anthropologists and political ecologists embraced the type of entrenched localism represented by wind energy opposition, while cultural geographers saw it as a dangerous form of self-centered nihilism. Phadke essentially argued that to cultural anthropologists, “social movements employ concepts of biodiversity and sustainability as part of their cultural struggles for political autonomy and self-determination” (757), and that the middle landscape struggle to maintain a local identity can be seen as a social movement. Phadke suggested the controversy over wind development is one manifestation of this struggle for local identity, and thus a part of the ongoing social movement.
While 'middle landscape' is a term used by Leo Marx, similar ideas can be found in the works of Peter Walker and other scholars of the New West. These scholars describe the transition and conflict that occurs when a traditionally rural or productive landscape begins to attract rich, urban immigrants who seek an 'escape' from lives perceived as busy, crowded, and polluted (Walker, 2003). These new immigrants bring different values with them, placing them in conflict with longtime residents. Longtime residents in these areas typically depend on the landscape for their livelihood, and see their place as one of production and energy extraction. Urban immigrants, or 'amenity migrants', chose to move to a place they perceived as beautiful and natural, and place value on undisturbed landscape (Gosnell and Abrams, 2009). These two different sets of values, and to conflict in land use planning sessions, development plans, and other functions of government
(Moss, 2006). First identified in the American West, this pattern repeats in other regions
16 as well, and is a clear result of global forces having very local consequences (Robbins et al., 2009).
Landscape theorists and political ecologists offer a critical engagement with each case, looking to the historical and cultural background of the area as well as the current milieu to explain the eruption of opposition to proposed industrial development. Yet even these theorists and their tools fall short of a full understanding of wind opposition as it exists today. Although they begin to associate local political issues with global forces, opening the question of wind opposition to greater analysis, wind opponents have founded their opposition on small scales as well as large ones. On the individual scale, the human body has become a contested site of wind development. Recently, wind opponents have argued that industrial wind turbines affect human health in a variety of ways. The emergence of health impacts as a discourse mobilized by wind opponents requires a new set of tools, ones provided by geographers of health, disease, and embodiment.
Embodiment and Health
Recent years have seen the rise of a new type of argument against industrial wind development, one which uses the vocabulary of health and personal well-being as a discourse of opposition. This discourse brings a new dimension to the wind development controversy which has not previously been explored in academic literature. While previous arguments have been local, regional, or global in nature, the health impact argument exists on the individual scale, or the scale of the human body. The condition
17 known as Wind Turbine Syndrome, and the other alleged effects of industrial turbines, can perhaps be best understood through the lenses of embodiment and phenomenological materiality.
Embodiment, and embodied geography, can provide a unique starting point from which to examine the individual scale of wind opposition. The concept of embodied geography has its roots in the theory of situated knowledge. Situated knowledge was first introduced in the essay "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” by Donna Haraway (1986), who suggested that conventional science performs a “god-trick” – that is, it claims objectivity and thus, truth in its findings. Working from a feminist perspective, Haraway suggested that the enterprise of mainstream science in fact contains systematic bias arising from those who created it: white, privileged, European men. To begin to address this, she suggested that researchers recognize that data-driven, “objective” science is in fact a partial perspective, one of many, which has been privileged above the others. Haraway also criticized a tendency in feminist literature which, seeking to transcend the establishment, tended to construct polarized dichotomies, sorting actors into two opposed groups. This polarization was simply another partial perspective, no more or less valid than previous ones. As a remedy, Haraway proposed the concept of situated knowledge, defined as the recognition that the researcher herself embodies a partial perspective, that she comes from a unique background which gives her a perspective others may not have. Any knowledge she creates is necessarily situated knowledge – and the same is true of all knowledge created.
18 Situated knowledge allows for the legitimization of forms of knowledge that mainstream science might otherwise ignore. In this way, traditional environmental knowledge and indigenous knowledge can be validated and integrated into conventional scientific studies (Goldman, 2007). Echoed by Latour's later actor-network theory, situated knowledge is the simple idea that all forms of knowledge production are equally valid – so long as it is understood that it is knowledge that must be considered, rather than unsubstantiated beliefs. In an attempt to expand these ideas, Andrea Nightingale
(2003) later suggested that mixed methods of investigation, incorporating multiple partial perspectives, can lead to greater understanding. As she said, “When different kinds of knowledges are taken seriously and all are critically interrogated, richer results are generated, new interpretations emerge and the supremacy of any one kind of knowledge is challenged” (87). This enables a type of triangulation in which the agreement or disagreement between different perspectives reveals new results.
Embodied geography is a novel form of geography in which knowledge is acquired through the body. Latour suggested that it is vital for scientists to recognize the possibility of error or misjudgment when they use tools to extend their reach. Embodied geography, as envisioned by Haraway, can be seen as a response to such claims: it relies on personal experiences and the senses of the human body, unaided by tools or equipment, as a form of knowing and sensing. Relying on the premise that modern science has cast aside the most basic of human sensors, embodied geography contends that the body can offer a form of knowing too often ignored or forgotten.
19 Embodied geography studies the way bodies are shaped by their environment as well as the information collected by the senses. Work done in this area finds significance in the smells associated with a nuclear processing plant (Parr, 2010) or the increasing incidence of allergies and their changing social significance (Mitman, 2007). While not yet considered a main cause of opposition to wind development, the health argument has been gaining popularity among opponents. The argument for a health-related reason to oppose wind turbines first emerged in 2007 in the work of Amanda Harry, a Welsh physician treating patients who lived near a new wind farm. The idea gained ground when an American pediatrician, Nina Pierpont, released a self-published book entitled
'Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on a Natural Experiment' (2009). With a to-the-point title and the weight of investigation behind it, the syndrome has gained national attention, and became a new rallying point for wind energy opponents.
Wind Turbine Syndrome as defined by Pierpont is a diverse collection of seemingly unrelated symptoms. Pierpont, Harry, and the others working to spread awareness of the condition are in the process of gaining recognition and creating materiality for the syndrome, giving it definition and the weight of reality in the popular mind. The history of Wind Turbine Syndrome in some ways parallels that of Sick
Building Syndrome, a collection of diffuse symptoms recognized and codified by female office workers in America in the 1970s and 1980s (Murphy, 2006). Michelle Murphy's work takes a critical eye to the issue, tracing the ways in which medical symptoms first recognized by an underprivileged group came to be acknowledged by mainstream science
(2004). The office workers of the 70s and 80s succeeded through several stratagems, such
20 as gathering sensory information via survey and transforming it into tables of quantitative data. Pierpont and her supporters are engaging in similar practices of collection and quantification, and the dialectics of Wind Turbine Syndrome are following a similar path to that of Sick Building Syndrome, making Murphy's work a useful lens with which to analyze the individual scale of wind opposition.
METHODS
This project follows in the footsteps of previous investigators who have examined wind opposition in the United States and abroad, building on the findings of these studies and broadening them. Previous studies have concentrated on a limited number of opposition arguments, generally focused on local issues. For this project, interviews were semi-structured, following a list of questions that can be found in an appendix to this paper. The interviews were recorded with permission and later transcribed for analysis.
The interview format of this project allows subjects to voice their concerns in their own words, allowing a greater freedom of response and encouraging them to express their own beliefs. The freedom of the method allows subjects to identify their own concerns rather than fit their views to a predefined narrative, resulting in a more accurate reflection of the true motivations of the population. Each interview was conducted between January
21st and January 25th of 2013.
For this paper, seventeen residents of Keyser, West Virginia were interviewed regarding their opinion of industrial wind development. Thirteen interviewees were well- known opponents of wind development, contacted through the Allegheny Front Alliance,
21 a wind opposition organization active in the area. The other four interviewees were supporters of wind turbine development, the first of whom was contacted through the
Allegheny Front Alliance, the others contacted through snowballing. Of the wind opponents, eight were men and five were women. Of the proponents, three were men and one was a woman.
Keyser is a small community which advertises itself as “the friendliest town in
America,” and the people I met certainly seemed to take that idea seriously. My main contact in the Allegheny Front Alliance was a well-known person in the town. On our initial tour, my contact frequently greeted passersby on the street by name, stopping to exchange a few words with them. Similarly, I conducted my interviews in the conference room of the hotel in which I stayed, and nearly every interviewee greeted the receptionist at the hotel desk by name. In one case, a subject had been close friends with the receptionist in high school, but had lost contact with her. Having grown up in suburbs where I barely knew my neighbor, the culture of the town was entirely new to me.
Though I was an outsider to the town and the community, most of my interviewees were open and friendly, eager to share their experiences and views or to point me to other people who might be interested in participating.
Indeed, the only less friendly experience I had was in an interview with a wind power supporter. This individual requested that I come to their chosen location, then insisted that I prove I was in fact associated with my university. The interviewee consented to be interviewed, but not to be recorded. This was easily the only interview of the study that I would characterize as hostile or antagonistic.
22 Most of the interview subjects were public figures or otherwise active in the community. Interviewees comprised politicians, city planners, community organizers, and teachers, among others. The proponents were prominent citizens as well: politicians or business owners. All the wind opponents seemed pleased at the chance to talk about their experiences, willing to speak freely and amused at the prospect of choosing a pseudonym.
Interestingly, while the opponents frequently spoke of the work they had done in opposition to the wind turbines, such as organizing campaigns or speaking in public meetings, the supporters of wind development had little to say in terms of advocacy or action they had taken in support of their views. While the majority of interviews with wind opponents were extended in length and covered a broad range of topics, wind supporters kept their responses short and rarely strayed beyond the questions.
By contrast, wind opponents treated the interviews as a chance to have their voices heard and to spread their message to a larger audience.
OUTLINE OF THESIS
After this introduction, Chapter Two of this thesis discusses the arguments mobilized by wind opponents on the regional, national, and global scales. These larger scales are considered under the blanket term 'extended scale' for ease of discussion. These arguments cover a wide range of fields and subjects, and frequently marshal conflicting ideologies and systems of value. It is these the complexity of these arguments and the intractability of these conflicts which suggest that previously offered solutions to
23 community opposition, largely aesthetic in nature, fail to address the essential nature of the issue.
Chapter Three focuses on the local scale arguments which have received vast recognition and analysis in the published literature. Many previous case studies have made it their aim to complicate and invalidate the concept of NIMBYism, but have done little to fully illuminate the meaning and concept of the local as it comes into play in the wind debate. I use theories of place-making and the developing literature on amenity migrants to investigate this vital aspect of the controversy,
The final empirical chapter, Chapter Four, narrows still further in scope to investigate arguments on the individual scale concerning issues of human health and the embodied effects of industrial turbines. This scale as well is one that has been neglected by the current literature. The discourse of Wind Turbine Syndrome, as well as other possible impacts industrial wind turbines have on the human body, is influencing the wind debate on both at the personal level and the international, and deserves close attention.
The conclusion chapter of this thesis attempts to draw together themes and ideas across the complete range of scales to illuminate the diverse issues of concern to wind opponents. With this thesis, I hope to begin situating industrial wind development as a phenomenon within the social milieu.
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29 Chapter Two
Beyond the Merely Local: Wind Opposition on the Extended Scale
INTRODUCTION
In his 2011 comparison of four controversial case studies, Martin Pasqualetti identified common factors resulting in opposition to industrial wind development. The factors he specified as the driving forces behind wind opposition were primarily local.
Pasqualetti claimed that by their very nature wind turbines posed a challenge to conceptions of place identity and ideas of landscape permanence. He further argued that the non-local origin of wind development, as well as the fact that the energy generated by industrial turbines typically did not benefit local residents, created a sense of intrusion and marginalization.
Pasqualetti was not alone in his hypothesis. He drew on a long list of previous work which shared the concept of wind opposition as a local phenomenon (Wolsink
2007; van der Horst and Toke 2009; Devine-Wright and Howes 2010; Swofford and
Slattery 2010; Warren and McFadyen 2010). Many of these previous investigators intended their work to inform policy and planning so as to reduce opposition and increase cooperation between energy companies and the local citizenry (Aitken, 2009). However, the local concept of opposition origin does not go far enough, and any policy rooted only in this local scale cannot begin to address all the arguments mobilized by what is fast becoming a nationally organized opposition movement. Individual pockets of opposition may find their genesis in local issues, but access to the vast array of information and
30 opinion on the Internet changes the tone and focus of their arguments. Current wind opponents mobilize arguments not only on the local scale, but also arguments focused regionally, nationally, and globally. These 'extended scale' arguments elevate the issue of wind development from the merely local, placing it in context with a greater narrative of resource exploitation and uneven development.
The choice of the term extended scale is intended to set these arguments apart from the local scale and the individual scale. While the individual scale is internal and personal, and the local scale is external but still personal, the extended scale is both external and impersonal, encompassing scales and systems beyond the individual's immediate range or sphere of influence. By expressing their opposition in themes on this scale, an individual attempts to bring their concerns outside of themselves, marking their position as not simply a personal preference or local dispute, but a philosophical or political faultline that affects the entire country.
The value of this approach can be seen when brought to bear on the common idea of NIMBYism – the “Not In My Back Yard” idea that wind opponents simply disapprove of wind turbines in their own vicinity, but would accept them in other places. By utilizing the extended scale of opposition an interviewee, knowingly or not, makes the ultimate argument against the standard characterization of wind opposition as NIMBYism. An argument relying simply on NIMBYism would be local or individual in scale, possibly implying that wind development in some other backyard, some other locality, would be acceptable. They would say that industrial turbines are wrong for their town, but possibly right for a different town. Instead, extended scale arguments refute such limited ideas of
31 locality. By grounding their opposition in broad, large-scale ideas, the individual says that industrial turbines are wrong not only for their backyards, but for any backyard anywhere. This does not necessarily preclude more local objections, but it does widen the frame of reference, making local issues only one part of the full picture.
METHODS
This study involved a series of semi-structured interviews conducted over the course of a week with outspoken wind opponents in and around Keyser. The town was chosen as the study site because it is the nexus of two visually prominent wind farms seen everyday by many of the residents as they live and work. Also vital to the study was the lengthy local controversy over wind development, evidenced by frequent newspaper editorials and an organized wind opposition group. Located in a valley between two ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, Keyser is in the middle of an explosion of wind development, and some residents have made their opposition clear in a series of public meetings, letter-writing campaigns, and other protest actions.
Seventeen members of the Keyser community participated in the study. Thirteen were outspoken wind opponents, and four were supporters of the wind farm. Of the opponents, five were female and eight were male, while three of the supporters were male. The interviews were recorded with permission. The questions used for the interview can be found in Appendix A.
32 LITERATURE OF THE EXTENDED SCALE
regtrshjdstnhRevised framework of factors affecting public perceptions of wind farms. Source: Graham, Stephenson, and Smith, 2009
While the extended scale of opposition has appeared in previous work, it has not previously been recognized as a new phenomenon. Environmental psychologists Patrick
33 Devine-Wright (2005), and later Graham, Stephenson, and Smith (2009), include arguments on the extended scale in their empirical work on wind power controversies, but their analyses still largely attribute wind opposition to local causes. Initially, Devine-
Wright identified two categories of opposition that would seem to include extended scale arguments: the Political and Institutional category, and the Socio-economic category.
However, each category is fragmented into a number of aspects, many of which are purely local. For example, the Political and Institutional category of the revised framework includes seven aspects: energy policy opinion, political self-efficacy, institutional capacity, attitude toward wind power in general, national good/security of supply, public participation and consultation, and perception of developer. Of these aspects, 'political self-efficacy' could apply to either the local political scene or the national one. Only one category, 'national good/security of supply' is specifically non- local. Aspects of the Socio-economic category include shareholding, economic effect: property values, and social impact. While the Socio-economic category would seem to invite arguments at the extended scale, close examination of the aspects listed reveals it to, in fact, be strictly a local concern. Indeed, the fact that the 'economic effect' aspect is specifically limited to property values reinforces this idea of locality. Those categories and aspects of opposition that these scholars consider to be socioeconomic would seem to reinforce the strictly local narrative. However, in the case of the wind power opponents of
Keyser, West Virginia, the socioeconomic reasons cited for opposition to wind power in general tend to be broader in consequence and larger in scale. Whether this is merely due to differences in the case studies, or perhaps differences in methodologies, it is clear that
34 the environmental psychology framework provides a jumping off point for analysis, but does not allow for consideration of non-local motivations for wind opposition.
The extended scale is necessarily broad and includes many disparate threads of argument that appear widespread among wind power opponents. As justifications for opposition, these extended scale arguments show that opponents consider the spread of industrial wind power to be the manifestation of the interconnected system of capitalism and globalization. The industrial wind farms in their area are the physical avatars of something greater, a single aspect of an entire system which, through its workings, has conspired to place industrial wind turbines in their town. The character of these objections defies the simplicity of the Devine-Wright framework, necessitating a different lens of analysis be brought to bear. Doreen Massey and the placemaking theorists of human geography, such as Don Mitchell (1996) and Denis Cosgrove (2006), offer a nuanced and complicated viewpoint connecting humans to their land, to their government, and to the international, global milieu. To understand the extended scale of wind opposition, it is necessary to mobilize landscape theory and the previously discussed theories of place, and space, and locality.
Doreen Massey's definition of place lends itself particularly well to an extended scale, relying as it does on the idea that the local is intimately connected to the larger global system. She describes her theory of place as “...a sense of place, an understanding of 'its character', which can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond”
(Massey, 1994, 156). This allows for a form of analysis which encompasses the extended scale of argument as well as the local, two parallel tracks that recognize the impact of
35 global forces upon local places and vice versa, two competing systems which influence and erase each other at the same time.
The placemaking theorists of human geography provide a lens through which to understand the tactics wind opponents employ when making arguments on the extended scale. As opponents attempt to nationalize their issue, they are doing the theoretical work of connecting their place to the national and international stage. These connections reflect
Massey's idea of place as a network created by the intersection of many factors, showing that no place, no matter how rural or undeveloped, is independent of the world around it.
BACKGROUND
Keyser is an historic coal mining town, surrounded by reclaimed strip mines and centered upon the historic Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. From the founding of the town, its history has been one of production and development. The mountains around Keyser have been mined for coal, logged for wood, and now provide wind power as only the latest in a progression of resources produced and shipped elsewhere, to be processed and sold as products. The town was a center of train commerce, and was even named after a vice president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Keyser is essentially a town built around connections to the rest of the world, both defined and bounded by the production and export of energy. It is the quintessential “dreamwork of imperialism” (Mitchell,
2002).
Much like a developing country in the Global South, Keyser is an underprivileged area plundered for resources which are carted away, processed, and resold by outside
36 interests (Smith, 1983; Harvey, 1996). This pattern is clearly seen in places such as
Nigeria, where oil companies turn the populace against itself as they extract oil for refinement elsewhere and sale around the world (Watts, 2004). While the residents of the exploited place manage to survive off this exploitation, they receive little of the energy or profit ultimately created from the commodities they produce, and they must live in the landscape left behind when industry moves on. The ravaged landscape created by this economic system is a daily reminder of the exploitation and social inequality from which the people have historically suffered. Keyser, West Virginia has seen several cycles of this process since its founding in 1852, as it has been has been a center for both logging and coal mining. This history was well known among the interviewees, several of whom mentioned the railroad when asked to describe the area. “Gary,” a politician, Keyser resident, and wind proponent, said, “The windmill location, prior to the windmills going in, was a strip mine. The timber had all been clear-cut off the mountain several times.
Yeah… essentially where the wind mills are located, there’s not much more you could do to the land that hasn’t already been done.”
One of the striking aspects of the arguments voiced by the wind opponents of
Keyser is the consistent separation of the local from the global, and the attempt to frame
Keyser as a locality seeking to be independent of the influence of global forces. At the same time, they are keenly aware that the outside exerts an inevitable pressure upon the town in the form of encroaching development and resource exploitation. This conflict is expressed in the multiplicity of arguments opponents mobilize against industrial wind.
No opponent interviewed for this study based their opposition on a single reason, a single
37 line of justification. Indeed, every one of the thirteen interviewees cited multiple reasons for their opposition to wind power, spanning fields as diverse as economics, climatology, governance, and habitat conservation.
THE EXTENDED SCALE
In their efforts to place their struggle in a greater context, to tie their own experiences into a national narrative, the wind opponents of Keyser mobilize a number of arguments on the extended scale. These arguments cover a wide range of subjects, but three common themes can be detected: the role of government in fostering industry, the viability of wind power as an energy source, and the search for alternate forms of energy to develop. These three themes characterize wind opposition on the extended scale, blending history, insight, and understanding.
The history of the town serves as backdrop to the wind controversy. Many of the most outspoken opponents of industrial wind in Keyser are immigrants, who say they prize the mountains around Keyser for their natural beauty. One resident, “RC,” typified this view when he said, “Keyser is not necessarily a beautiful town, but it's in a beautiful valley, and you know, I always appreciated the viewscape here and, you know, the sweep of the Allegheny Front.” Some even chose to live in Keyser because of the mountains, exhibiting classic amenity migrant behavior (Moss, 2006). In contrast, the proponents interviewed were native to Keyser, and saw the wind farms as an economic boon.
Supporters voiced their opinions in terms economic and technological. They
38 characterized the wind industry as a partner working to revitalize the town, and wind power as a clean form of energy with little environmental impact. The controversy over wind development in Keyser is rooted deeply in Appalachian history and in the character of the residents themselves. Natives, invested in the town as a community, view the landscape as a resource to be consumed. Immigrants, on the other hand, invest themselves in the idea of a “natural” landscape and equate resource extraction with exploitation.
Some wind opponents complain that they made unnecessary “sacrifices” to the wind industry and see little return, as all electricity generated by the turbines is transmitted out of the area. Opponents feel that they have lost what they refer to as the
“natural beauty” of their mountain, and the size and sheer physical presence of industrial turbines serve only to reinforce these feelings. While some of these opponents object to the building of new transmission lines to transport this energy, others evince a distinct resentment towards the larger cities that will be receiving it. Consciously or unconsciously, resentment of resource exploitation underlies the extended scale arguments mobilized by many wind opponents.
“You know, wow, that's great, but all these poor folks in between, you know, they don't really get, I think, their fair share out of Annapolis. And the mountains are being consumed, or will be more consumed, by these turbines that really benefit no one except the developer. “ -AT (referring to the proliferation of industrial wind farms in rural areas of Maryland)
“...they wanted to bring lines in through West Virginia, through Virginia, in order to bring New York power. I'm sorry, New York can get their power somewhere else. We don't need to have it come through us, you know. They didn't want to have all those things, in their state, but they were fine with, you know, having it come through ours.” -Marge
39 “...the cities are the ones that need the power, let them produce it near the cities. They can put it on their tall buildings, nobody would even notice it, and they can produce it for themselves.” -Jill
Many of the interviewees saw their situation in a broader context, placing their town and their issue in a larger struggle between governmental policies, predatory industry, and residential communities. In this argument, large cities are seen to be redistributing their resource consumption, making rural areas bear the burden of the urban need for electricity. This rural/urban dynamic is seen as a long and frequent process repeated throughout Appalachia. Industrial wind development essentially exacerbates urban bias (Tacoli, 1998), contributing to the discourse of exploitation common among wind opponents.
“Doc,” a community organizer, explicitly placed Keyser and industrial wind in historical context when he said, “History of Appalachia is repeating itself. We've got these outside investors coming in, and capitalizing on our resources, eliminating large swaths of our trees and so forth...” Though they approached the idea in different ways and may not have been aware of the global implications of the process, many of the wind opponents saw their struggle as a repetition of historical events: the inexorable grind of uneven development. They may not have stated it as explicitly as Doc, but many of the interviewees voiced objections to the idea that energy created in their area was transmitted to other areas for sale and use. Some, such as “Thomas,” related this power differential to an economic imbalance: “But [the Chesapeake Bay] views are too important, so they stick 'em out here in the mountains where we don't have the money to
40 fight it, basically.” In the fight against industrial wind, the sides are defined by money: rich versus poor, urban versus rural, exploiter versus exploited.
Role of Government
One of the most oft-repeated arguments against wind opposition stems from the federal government's subsidies for renewable energy development. Interestingly, proponents and opponents both found reason to object to what was seen as federal intrusion and artificial manipulation of an industry. While the interviewees were not always clear on the exact mechanics of the production tax credit, many of them were very aware of the existence of the subsidies. Ten of the thirteen opponents cited federal support of the wind industry during their interview, and three interviewees noted subsidization as the main source of their objection to wind development.
“...they're gonna put 'em basically everywhere they can in time to secure the tax rebates. If the tax rebates go away, they won't be putting any of these up. “ -AT
“It could not survive on its own. It depends on government subsidy, which are... very significant. And I think wind will come, and then it will go. Because these – the biggest part of the subsidy is coming from the production tax credit for wind.” -Doc
“They have energy production tax credits after they're built, and they have forgivable loans and grants that they get for construction. And the average taxpayer is paying somewhere between sixty and ninety percent of the cost of putting the turbines up, and then they're paying a constant energy subsidy for them to generate electricity afterwards. And they're not producing electricity that's useful.” -George
“Boondoggle. I mean that's basically how I see this, it's a great big corporate welfare boondoggle.” -RC
41 Interestingly, one of the proponents interviewed was also against the tax subsidy.
“Gary,” a member of the Keyser town council stated, “...I don’t believe in government subsidies, and wind energy is one of the only ones that can actually stand on its own if you take all the subsidies away.” In stark contrast to wind opponents, Gary spoke of his full support for wind on economic as well as philosophical grounds, but even he resented the federal government's support of the wind industry.
This resentment of the federal subsidy reflects a tension between the local sense of place and the intrusion of the nonlocal, the national as represented by the federal government. Several theorists describe this tension in different vocabularies. Patrick
Devine-Wright describes it as 'disruption of place attachment,' – a consequence of the tension between rural identity and intruding modernization or industrialization. Devine-
Wright views this disruption as mainly a tension between the rural and the industrial, and indeed claims that all industrial wind opposition can be traced back to this idea (Devight-
Wright, 2005). Similarly, Leo Marx writes about tension between competing ideals, the ideal of capitalistic progress and manifest destiny, and the ideal of “Big Sky Country.” To
Marx, these two competing ideals create a 'middle landscape' of ruralism marked by industry (Marx, 1964). Finally, Doreen Massey warns against the consequences of provincial localism in her calls for a new global sense of place (Massey, 1994). Though each of these theorists arrive at the idea in a different manner and follow different ideological routes to get there, each predict a similar reaction and each provides an explanation consummate with their own theories.
42 However, the story of wind opposition is not a simple one. In the same breath with which they castigated federal support for the industry, the interviewed wind opponents frequently decried a perceived lack of regulation or oversight. Several of the interviewees repeatedly stated that there was no federal confirmation of the amount of energy generated by the wind farms once they were constructed, while others expressed a wish for regulation in the siting and planning of industrial turbines. At the same time that they were objecting to the presence of the federal government in the form of production subsidies, they were calling for a greater presence in the form of regulation. From this, it is clear that wind opponents are not simply political conservatives, with the aversion to large government that that would entail. They hold nuanced and complex views of the federal government's role in their lives. Indeed, most interviewees were quick to express concern for the environment or support of energy-saving policies.
This confluence of conflicting views can also be seen in many of the most publicized struggles over wind farms. In the controversy over the Cape Wind Project of
Nantucket Sound, where the most outspoken wind opponents are politically liberal and famously environmentally oriented, prominent conservatives joined the opponents' cause.
One’s position on wind power is not part and parcel of political party or ideology.
Opponents are a diverse group, mobilizing many different arguments for their cause, and holding differing views of the federal government’s role in industrial development. This diversity of ideologies is evidenced especially by the many arguments mobilized by wind opponents on the topic of government involvement. In order to gain national recognition for the wind opposition movement, liberal wind opponents claim that the federal
43 government needs to be more involved while conservative opponents claim it must be less involved.
“But as I said before, I think that the placement of this type of energy project could be more regulated so that it's environmentally sound, so to speak.” -Anne
“...the real sucker thing is to sell the green credits, you know to a college here, a college here. For something like five cents, you know, for five cents a kilowatt-hour. You know, it was the hocus pocus and the environmental stuff, you know the... the green credits are very much like papal indulgences during the Middle Ages.” -Thomas
“...the government supports these programs and makes tremendously high loans to them. I mean, tremendous amount of money. And I think they need to scrutinize that, because I don't think they're getting back the equity that they're putting into those.” -Zelda
These calls for government oversight are intended to slow or stop construction on new wind farms. After all, a federal investigation, regardless of its eventual outcome, would tarnish the industry’s reputation and delay new contracts. These interviewees seem to view the regulatory power of the federal government as a potential tool, a counterweight against the tax credits and subsidies the government itself offers to the wind industry. Thus, a peculiar form of tension can now be added to the list of factors involved in the wind controversy – the federal government, constructed as either a source of industrial growth, or a potential solution to the intrusion of that industry. The government is perceived as an instrument for good or ill, depending purely on who can wield it and for what ends.
Viability of Wind
44 The calls for greater regulation often centered on the perception of the inconsistency or inefficiency of wind turbines. The perception of the wind itself as unreliable and inconstant extends to include the turbines meant to derive energy from that wind. Opponents trace what seems to them to be a clear, logical line: the wind is inconsistent, so industrial wind turbines are inconsistent. Industrial wind turbines are inconsistent, so adding them to the grid makes the grid unreliable. A single, memorable image was repeated across several interviews: that of flicking on a light switch only to have no light turn on. To underscore this idea, many of the interviewees would relate tales of times they had observed some or all of the turbines unmoving. Others would speak of the need for backup thermal generators, or backup power plants, necessitated by the perceived inconstancy of wind, or the vulnerability of the turbines to weather conditions.
The perception of wind power as inconstant or unreliable precipitates a view of the wind industry as dishonest and exploitative. Though the turbines have the ability to produce a certain amount of power, interviewed opponents commonly believed that the turbines produce much less – as little as ten or twenty percent of their reported capacity.
Opponents assume the federal government pays tax credits based on the theoretical capacity of the wind farm rather than its actual output. This belief engenders much of the indignation that so marks wind opposition on the extended scale and creates the palpable sense of exploitation and resentment among the interviewees.
“Even when, even in areas where the wind is four and five, the intermittency and the inefficiency of wind and solar has no real future in reducing global warming. If it did, I would not be talking to you.” -Doc
45 “And the reason why I don't think industrial wind fits in the system, number one, it's ill- sighted to be putting these projects along these Appalachian ridges. These are class three winds. They're not big strong winds as it is to offshore. It's not big strong winds that you're going to see sustainable energy in the Midwest.” -Oz
“I didn't know that at a certain temperature, the turbines don't work anymore, so they have to be heated up in order to work. And of course on Mt. Storm it gets really cold and snowy again. That's when the places where you have to use coal energy to warm up your wind turbines in order to work. I don't know if it's, that... you know, saving anything.” -Marge
“...it is thoroughly useless because you have to have a 100% backup, and and then you know, that backup is inefficient, so the backup for that is gas turbines, which aren't efficient. You know, it's not like a coal plant, once you get that thing fired up, it's real efficient, you know?” -RC
In making the argument for the insufficiency of wind as an energy source, opponents mobilize information from a wide array of government institutions, popular media, and personal contacts. The repeated callouts to wind class, such as when “Doc” talks about “where the wind is four and five” and “Oz” refers to “class three winds,” reference data gathered and distributed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
This data, freely available to the public, is the industry standard used when judging viable new sites for industrial wind turbines. Class three is generally considered the lowest possible class at which an industrial turbine is viable (UMCSS, 2012).
46
Illustration 3: United States Wind Resource Map. Source: nrel.gov
47 But the construction of wind as an unreliable source of energy is not limited to the wind itself. Opponents also argue that industrial turbines fail to turn wind into a palpable energy gain. This argument takes various forms, including the points that wind turbines use power from the grid for various reasons: to turn to face the wind, to start the blades moving, to heat the nacelle and blades in cold weather, and various other reasons. Finally, they claim that wind turbines need to be “backed up” with traditional power sources such as fossil fuels, in the case that the wind should stop blowing for an extended length of time.
The question of verity is not at issue here. Rather, what is of interest is the spread of the discourse, which arguments are mobilized and how. These claims are of interest due to the sources of the information. The wind industry itself does not publicize anything of the sort. Instead, these ideas are spread among wind opponents themselves.
Wind opposition groups organize and connect through the internet, creating networks to spread information and arguments not only through West Virginia or Appalachia, but across the country and the globe. When questioned on the sources of their information, the interviewees in Keyser would cite other members of their own community, other opposition groups, or the internet. The idea of wind power’s unreliability has spread as a meme, becoming one more tool in opponents’ fight. The extended scale of argument becomes an extended scale of communication, in which things that might be true for a particular type of turbine erected in one place become appropriated and repeated for every wind farm under controversy.
48 Wind opponents utilize these ideas in their movement, creating a controversy around industrial turbines which calls into question the supposedly expert knowledge they receive from energy companies and policy makers. By crafting a counter-narrative to the conventional knowledge of the industrial turbine, wind opponents create scientific controversies defined by Sarah Whatmore (2009) as :
“...those events in which the knowledge claims and technologies of environmental science, and the regulatory and policy practices of government agencies that they inform, become subject to public interrogation and dispute. Such events take many forms but arise when the rationales and reassurances of environmental science and policy fail to convince those affected by what is at issue – whose direct experience and/or knowledge of it contradicts prevailing expertise – or to allay their concerns.” (2009, 588)
Wind opponents collect knowledge from various sources to support their claims, utilizing this collected knowledge in their daily experience. Having accepted the premise of wind’s unreliability, their experience of the turbines becomes one which conforms to this idea. Several interviewees related anecdotes in which they drove past turbines that were not turning, despite a strong wind close to the ground. This very inactivity became evidence supporting their ideas. They equated these unmoving turbines with failed technology and wasted money.
The unreliability of wind is an argument which opponents claim is supported by government data such as the Wind Resource Map. It can be framed in evocative images such as a dark light bulb or a conventional backup power source, and communicated to people who may not have been sympathetic to an environmental argument. “Thomas,” for example, claimed he was initially in favor of industrial wind development, but was convinced otherwise by stories of grid instability: “They're very disruptive of the grid.
49 Germany's grid virtually went down within the past few months, when there was a lull.
Texas's grid went out last – virtually collapsed during a cold snap last winter.” This quote makes clear that wind's unreliability, as an argument, is not limited to Appalachia and other areas with class three winds. Texas has the most installed capacity in the country, and is subject to winds of classes three and four.
Yet even as they argue against the entire idea of wind as a viable resource, opponents also argue that the current, extremely successful implementation of wind extraction enriches the wrong people. Most industrial wind turbines are manufactured overseas by foreign companies, and purchasing them enriches foreign powers without benefiting American industry. These opponents also object to wind farms developed and operated by foreign companies, as in those cases even the tax subsidies are funneled out of the country. This argument is very much a national one, not limited the physical areas of specific wind farm sites. Here, the extended scope is intentionally employed in order to enlist potential allies from other states and municipalities.
“And I just see that, you know, for example, a large percentage of the incentives that were given, the monetary expenses – incentives that were given out, from the Recovery Act, went overseas. To foreign companies. They had a little office here in this company, and you know Iberdola USA. Well no they're not, they have a shingle out, but the money's going back to Spain. Yeah, and that's not fair, so…” -AT
“I've also learned that the turbines are mainly made outside this country so that's not helping our employment.” -Marge
“...and sending more money overseas, and I mean you know, we're not developing the technology. The Japanese and the Chinese and Spanish, all those other people are developing it. That was one of the selling points. 'Well, America doesn't want to be left behind on the green energy front.' Well, okay, who's making the windmills? All right?” -RC
50
“Quite interesting how they brought them in, these were turbines that were made in Mexico, the turbines themselves were larger ones, were made in Mexi- uh, the blades, and the towers were made in Mexico, and the nacelles, the larger units, the generator and everything were made in Japan... These are not American-made or anything like this.” -Oz
This argument, that the wind industry should not be enriching other countries, relies on the presupposition that the wind industry is a legitimate industry, that the money it makes should be made, and that money, once made, should stay in America. Opponents acknowledge that wind development is profitable, despite its perceived unreliability, but disapprove of the idea that said profit may not stay in the United States. This line of reasoning recalls the earlier theme of resource exploitation and uneven development.
The economic argument, while extended in scale, is premised on the constructed idea of the 'local'. It relies on an unspoken but extremely important idea: that economic resources created in one area should benefit that area. Once again, the wind opponents of
Keyser seem to draw parallels between their own situation and that of a developing country exploited for its resources by greater powers. Keyser's history is that of a town long exploited for its resources. Raw materials such as timber and coal have been extracted from the landscape of the town by outside interests for the entire history of the town itself, and wind opponents see industrial wind as a continuance of that trend. But industrial wind is a national issue, and the exploitation occurs on a national level. Now the exploited area is not limited only to a small area of West Virginia, but includes all taxpayers in the United States. This argument, in essence, claims that the wind industry is in the process of successfully economically exploiting the entire country.
51 Alternative to the Alternate
Another thread of discussion frequently employed by the wind opponents in
Keyser rests on the perception that development of wind power delays or siphons money away from the development of other alternative energy types, or that wind power is incentivized above other possible alternative fuels. Opponents believe that funding and research should be reassigned to further development of nuclear fusion, hydroelectric generators, natural gas, solar power, and even coal burning plants employing new technologies. This argument rests on the idea that technological advances could solve the issues involved with other fuels, by contrast implying that wind power would never be solvable in the same way.
“Well, that concept of throwing all this money at industrial wind as the solution to that implies that we are so stupid that we wouldn't have develop nuclear just sixty, seventy years ago.” -AT
“I like the idea of solar. I... wish there was more done about hydro. There's lakes, there's waters, I mean, okay granted we have to build more dams and put more facilities up and such stuff, but water's always going to be there. So's wind, but wind isn't consistent. And water is much more consistent than wind.” -Clara
“I mean, if we can get fusion down, and generate energy the way the sun generates energy, we're set. And, quite frankly, the investments they've made in billions and billions and billions of dollars of turbines probably could contribute to maybe bring – fusion may be a pipedream, I don't know, but that would definitely be the ultimate alternate energy.” -Thomas
The narrative as told by these opponents is a clear one. Although they recognize that there are environmental problems associated with hydroelectricity, they believe that technology can provide solutions. Nuclear processes, too, are seen as potential solutions,
52 and only a lack of research and development has prevented fusion or fission from reaching their full potential. And in the case of “Bill,” who said, “...one more coal-fired plant, or natural gas-fired plant coming online, would meet that demand without defiling all the countryside that these wind turbines have done,” the environmental issues associated with coal and natural gas pale in comparison to the impact which industrial wind turbines have on the landscape. Yet despite this belief in the advance of technology, wind is considered an unsolvable problem and an impossible source of fuel. Science has the power to develop those other resources, but the problems presented by wind are insurmountable.
Perhaps one reason for this contradiction may be found in the cultural constructions associated with each potential energy source. Water, coal, natural gas, and nuclear are constructed as resources which can be predicted and controlled by technology, by people. Water can be channeled, dammed, and stored in reservoirs. Coal and natural gas are hidden deep within the ground, untouchable until they are accessed via human endeavor. And nuclear is considered the ultimate well-controlled source of power, one which carries with it the iconic narrative of Society triumphant over Nature
(Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). In contrast, wind is seen as untamed and untamable, the source of the devastation of tornadoes, hurricanes, and typhoons. Wind is not only inconstant but also unpredictable, making it impossible to be bent to the will of human technology.
This theme appears repeatedly throughout the interviews. Above, “Clara” qualifies her previous statement with, “...water's always going to be there. So's wind, but
53 wind isn't consistent. And water is much more consistent than wind.” “George” also spoke to this theme when he said, “And it varies without the control of the operator so it's inherently unstable and unreliable, and it won't produce the kind of electricity that the users on the grid demand.” The image of control taken from the hands of a human operator echoes the common image among wind opponents of a light bulb which will not turn on. Ultimately, the argument is not simply about the unreliability of wind. It is about the consequences to society if electricity were to vanish. If electricity were to become unreliable, if grid operators could not cope with the unsteady flow, lights would not turn on, and modern civilization would suffer. In this argument, industrial wind is not simply a detriment to a small town, but a threat to the entire modern world.
CONCLUSIONS
When limited strictly to an extended scale of argument, the wind opponents of
Keyser, West Virginia marshal three major themes among the arguments they mobilize in their fight against the encroachment of the wind industry. These are the themes of the government's role in market development, the construction of wind as a nonviable resource, and the supposed neglect of other possible energy sources.
Wind opponents situated in rural towns, especially those with a history of resource extraction and energy production, draw parallels in their arguments between their situation and those of underdeveloped countries. Sometimes these parallels are recognized and acknowledged, but more often they are unconscious associations, made through parallel arguments or discourse. Also relevant are cultural divisions between
54 urban and rural areas, especially as proxies for the rich, powerful class and the underprivileged class.
These may well stem from structural issues within the wind industry and its approach to growth. The wind industry acts no differently than previous industries focused around resource exploitation. Wind power companies take advantage of subsidies available, buy cheap materials from international providers, and change the landscape in obvious ways, altering what opponents describe as a ‘natural' place, but they do so under the guise of a cleaner, greener mandate.
It is not the action and procedure of typical industrial growth which motivates groups of wind opponents. If it were, wind opposition would simply be another cause taken on by established environmental groups. Instead, wind opponents form new, single- issue groups, and members are often new to organized social engagement. What makes the wind industry different, what these newly mobilized citizens are responding to, is the cloak of environmental sustainability worn by the wind industry. The dissonance between new green rhetoric and standard industrial activity creates a new category of opponent, drawing people who would normally not object to one or the other into a group which objects to both. This, then, seems to characterize the wind opponent as a consequence of the so-called “new green economy.” It is neither the “green” they dislike, nor the
“economy,” but the action of one in the disguise of the other.
This characterization is not only relevant in the narrow case of a small
Appalachian town fighting against an outside industry. It relates closely to ongoing debates in the spheres of politics, philosophy, and political economy. The case of Keyser,
55 West Virginia serves as a microcosm for these larger issues, revealing a telling portrait of the state of the American consciousness in the changing context of the world today.
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58 Chapter Three
The Local Scale: Place, Past and Present
INTRODUCTION “This is not a decision about money. It's not even a decision about power. It is a decision about our environment, about the legacy we leave our children. It is a heritage given to us by God. We may not, we cannot, trash this extraordinary resource that the
Cape enjoys.” One quote ties together family, place, heritage, religion, and environmental stewardship. It sounds like any other argument for conservation – except it was said by
Mitt Romney, at the time the governor of Massachusetts, and he was speaking against the construction of Cape Wind, an offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound (Williams and
Whitcomb, 2008). In his speech, Romney characterized the advance of wind power as one diametrically opposed to the goals of conservation or environmental sustainability.
He employed the language of place, invoking the history and identity of Nantucket Sound in his arguments against wind development.
Wind opponents frequently marshal these kinds of cultural and historical arguments and invoke ideas of identity, history, and heritage. Such geographically-rooted arguments tie wind opposition to conceptions of place and community, and previous investigators have explored these arguments thoroughly in an effort to debunk the myth of the Not In My Back Yard (ie. NIMBY) protester. The archetype of the NIMBY protester is that of a person who objects to new developments purely for reasons of aestheticism or convenience. It has been used as a derogatory term toward wind
59 opponents, and is an easy way to disregard their opinions and views. The NIMBY label is one which erases the subtleties of opponents' arguments, and scholars have made a concerted effort to move beyond it. Environmental psychologists, for example, have created a detailed framework of issues cited by wind opponents which is almost entirely local in scale and deeply concerned with place identity (Devine-Wright, 2005; Graham,
Stephenson, and Smith, 2009).
Such concerns are not limited to place identity, however, as ecological concerns are also frequently expressed. Many arguments against wind are centered on the environmental cost of wind development, interspersed with the well-explored concept of place identity. Opponents characterize industrial wind development as destructive to the environment and to habitat in the same breath with which they protest the challenge to place identity. Yet these ecological arguments have been given a disproportionately small amount of attention in previous investigations (Pasqualetti, 2011; Phadke, 2011).
Pasqualetti and others have done an admirable job dismissing the myth of NIMBYism, but they have not fully cracked open the black box of opponents' local concerns. Wind opponents, as a group, comprise educated and monied elites, many of whom can be categorized as amenity migrants. Their sense of place is not the same as that of a native citizen who wishes to see their town grow. The conflict between these views drives the controversy in many local debates over wind development. It is possible to see this tension by examining the specific local arguments mobilized by wind opponents.
The previous chapter considered in detail the 'extended scale' arguments mobilized by wind opponents – that is, those arguments which reached beyond the local
60 scale to consider issues of national or global relevance. While the extended scale of wind opposition is indeed integral to the issue, objections based on local issues are equally common. In this chapter, after a review of the literature I will explore three local scale issues of concern to the wind opponents of Keyser, West Virginia: environmental destruction, the behavior of the wind industry, and community cohesion.
LITERATURE OF THE LOCAL SCALE
While the extended scale explicitly applies to arguments that enlist the aid of outside actors on the national or international stage, the local scale encompasses those arguments which apply strictly to the community and the physical environment of the interviewees. The local scale of analysis considers issues of place and locality, and those factors which define a single area or town as a space distinct from those around it. While the extended scale is chiefly concerned with the outside world, with enlisting the sympathy or antipathy of actors in other places, local scale arguments are restricted to a single place – that of the wind farm in question. The difference between the extended scale and the local is one of intent and audience, and as a consequence the reasoning for local scale objections tend to be more detailed and specific to place. However, previous scholars have fallen short of a full exploration of the importance of the local in wind opposition. Some have been overly specific and restrictive, necessitating revisions in order to be relevant outside the original case study. Others have been almost too general in their approach, attempting to identify common factors leading to wind opposition
61 without considering a town's unique situation. In order to be useful, an attempt to characterize and understand wind opposition must respect the diversity of the local.
If local scale arguments are those concerned with a specific place, it is necessary to consider 'place' more thoroughly. Doreen Massey envisions place itself as the result of a sort of network, describing it as the intersection of such factors as culture, time, history, geography, politics, economics, and any number of other factors (1994). Massey sees place as a dynamic concept connected not only to space, but to time as well. She explains that all too often residents of a place interpret landscape as permanent and unchanging.
Through the eyes of residents, a place is not dynamic or fluid, not the nexus of factors, but instead read as permanent, fixed, and unchanging. Indeed, places are only ever temporarily stabilized by the perceptions of the people who experience them. In describing the landscape of England's Lake District, Massey says, “...it is that a landscape, these hills, are the (temporary) product of a meeting up of trajectories out of which mobile uncertainty a future is – has to be – negotiated” (2006, 46). It is in the clash of this fixed perception against changing reality that conflicts arise. The new modern intrudes on the supposedly pristine past, reified in such instances as an industrial wind farm built in an established rural community, challenging the convictions people hold about their homes and places.
Massey's view of place informs more specific theories of human-landscape interaction. Denis Cosgrove (2006) lays out the history of the landscape concept, tracing the origin of the word to Germanic and Scandinavian governance language. 'Landschaft' was considered to be the land beyond the reach of centralized government, and carried a
62 wild and uncivilized implication. Only later, with the introduction of landscape painting, mapping, and imperialism, did landscape come to be viewed with, and valued for, its aesthetic qualities. Once the appearance of landscape gained value, it became worthy of control and regulation. Cosgrove quotes W.J.T. Mitchell (2002) calling landscape “the dreamwork of imperialism,” a visual representation of geopolitical imperialist domination. In local scale arguments in the debate over industrial wind development, landscape plays a starring role as an aspect of place and identity.
These ideas of landscape figure heavily in Patrick Devine-Wright's examination of wind opposition, which he describes as a response to a challenge to place identity. The
Devine-Wright framework (2005) for characterizing wind opposition arguments consists almost entirely of local scale categories. Most categories in the framework are explicitly local. As discussed in chapter one, even the 'Socio-economic' category of Devine-
Wright's framework is concerned primarily with the municipal-level economics of shareholding and property values. While the category called 'Social and communicative' has the potential to include global communications and the growing online network of wind opponents, the original 2005 framework only included 'social influence processes', which seems clearly aimed at how residents within a town influence each others' opinions. Nor was this category expanded in a later version of the framework chart created by Graham, Stephenson, and Smith (2009). The revised version of the chart included a new category called 'Environmental'. While this could, theoretically, address the environment as a national or global issue, the only aspect included within it is labeled
'local environment'. These aspects and categories were compiled through multiple survey
63 tools employed by the investigators, and are supposed to reflect true concerns originating from the citizens themselves. If that is the case, and considering the explicit attention paid to the extended scale by the wind opponents of Keyser, West Virginia, one must ask: were the residents surveyed by Devine-Wright and Graham, Stephenson, and Smith uniquely concerned with the local, while Keyser residents' extended scale arguments represent a unique phenomenon in the development of wind opposition? Or were the environmental psychologists limited, either by survey design or methodological bias, to either not elicit extended scale arguments from their subjects or to ignore such arguments when they arose? Or, finally, does the occurrence of extended scale arguments represent a new development in wind opposition, evidencing a move toward a more mature and resourceful movement from 2009 to 2013? Regardless, it is clear that the Devine-Wright framework is, in a sense, too narrow and specific.
Other work in the field has tended to the general. Pasqualetti recognizes the importance of locality to wind energy opposition, but attempts to identify a general cause
(2011). In a comparison of four case studies, Pasqualetti identifies five common factors leading to wind opposition. He characterizes these factors as “...immobility, the site specificity of the resource; immutability, an expectation of landscape permanence; solidarity, the close relationship between people and the land; imposition, a sense of marginalization; and place identity, a loss of security” (907). Four of these five factors are explicitly local in scale. Only the question of imposition, concerning local exploitation by non-local industry, might tie to the extended scale, but the specification that 'imposition' entails a sense of marginalization suggests it should be considered a local issue
64 concerning social relations. Similarly, Roopali Phadke (2011) studied the case of
Searchlight, Nevada in an attempt to “challenge the presumption that such oppositional movements are simply examples of “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) politics.” She mobilized both geographic place theory and literature on the rise of the “New West” to explain the controversy surrounding the Searchlight project. However, Phadke concentrated on attempting to tie the Searchlight controversy into the literature of the
New West, and paid little attention to the specific gripes of Searchlight residents. Though she characterizes wind opposition as a local phenomenon, the concept of locality is a black box, opaque and unexamined.
These works characterize wind opposition as a complex phenomenon and a local one, but do little to illuminate exactly what 'local' means. When examined closely, local scale arguments prove to be widely diverse and complex, reflecting the history of the town and the types of people who live in it. To understand them, one must examine the people who are making them as well. Fisher and Brown (2009) did this well in their case study of a failed wind development proposal for the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. Through
Q methodology, they found that support for wind development coalesced around the argument for economic growth, but opposition to wind development fractured into at least three major arguments. These arguments reflected the diversity of value systems found in the community.
The wind opponents of Keyser, West Virginia, a town with a long industrial history, consider industrial wind development to be a challenge to their town and to their way of life. Industrial turbines present challenges to the local environment, to the town's
65 future, and to community cohesion. Each of these challenges threatens a wind opponents' established sense of place. By examining their arguments, it becomes clear that 'sense of place' and 'place identity' are as diverse as the people of the town itself.
CHALLENGE TO THE ENVIRONMENT
Environmental issues play a key role in the debates over wind development.
Every wind opponent interviewed expressed a form of concern over the physical intrusion of industrial turbines into the landscape around them. However, these concerns break down into two distinct categories: 1) environmental aesthetics concerning
“viewshed” and “scenery” and 2) ecological destruction endangering birds or bats. All interviewed wind opponents expressed environmental concerns, and nine of the thirteen opponents expressed opinions in both categories in intertwining ways. Below, I consider the role that these categories have played in how interviewees formulated their opposition to industrial wind development.
Environment as Scenery
When opponents cite the loss of scenery or “viewscape” as an objection to industrial wind energy, they are essentially claiming that in order to be attractive, a landscape should be undeveloped and natural. When developers build five hundred foot tall wind turbines in a place considered beautiful, opponents see them as “monsters” intruding upon a previously undeveloped landscape, and consider this intrusion a loss.
66 The interpretation of the landscape as scenery, and of turbine construction as loss of that scenery, is the one objection that could be most clearly recognized as NIMBYism
– the 'Not In My Back Yard' argument – as it is traditionally thought of. In fact, some interviewees even used the exact phrase, or explained that they would not object to wind turbines being built in a different area. “Clara,” for example, stated, “No, wrong vie–
Wrong mountain. Not in my backyard.” Other interviewees are less forthright about the local nature of their objections, but they still make it clear that they value the wild appearance of the land, and consider its loss to be a personal one. For several of them, the mountains played a key role in their decision to move to Keyser. When asked why he moved to Keyser, “George” said, “We came to West Virginia as a lifestyle choice” and
“Jill” characterized opponents by explicitly saying, “And I think a lot of the people that we find that do care tend to be ones who aren't originally from this area. They choose – chose to come to this area because they love the mountains, they love the area.”
These quotes suggest that many wind opponents characterize themselves as separate and distinct from those native to the area, and would seem to class them as amenity migrants. Amenity migration, defined as “the movement of people based on the draw of natural and/or cultural amenities” (Gosnell and Abrams, 2009), is usually viewed as a driver and/or a symptom of the restructuring of rural economies as traditional occupations disappear. These traditional occupations, such as farming and mining, are replaced with migrants from more industrial areas who seek a rural lifestyle. Phadke
(2011) references the work of Michael Woods (2003) on this topic, characterizing rural movements like wind opposition as “...struggles in the defense of a rural identity.” In
67 short, the new immigrants, the ones who moved seeking an escape from industrialization, become the ones who fight hardest to save the rural identity of the area (Walker, 2003).
These amenity migrants hold a strong conception of their place, giving it a static identity which conflicts with the different place identity held by those native to the area.
As amenity migrants, wind opponents consider the appearance of the mountains to be integral to their experience. Their outrage over wind development can be read as an expression of feelings of attachment to the mountains. The rural aspect of the mountain is part of their life experience, part of what they expected to experience when they chose to live in Keyser, and by building its turbines, the wind industry has violated that attachment. “Basa” exemplifies this when he says “...I see these wind mills glaring at me,
I call it the land of wind mills now. I don't look at it in the same way as an environmentalist would look at it. Not at all, not anymore.” To him, the town has lost its attraction. When claiming that he no longer looks at it “in the same way as an environmentalist would,” he expresses a sense of loss, of disgust for the perceived destruction of what he once thought to be a natural and beautiful place. This attitude was not a rare one:
“Well, it certainly doesn't have the natural feel that it did. And in the area in the valley, it doesn't have a natural feel. But you always had the mountain backdrop to kind of frame that, and to give it kind of a natural setting. The turbines have taken up so much forested area that now there isn't even an intact forest line along the ridgeline.” -George
“It's a waste of time, it's a waste of beautiful landscape, it's just really disgusting.” -Jill
“They don't produce anything, and they're scars on the landscape, it's just... tremendous.” -Oz
68 “I'd be supportive of wind- research into wind mills and wind generation, just you know, could I work with something that's not a blight on the mountains, or an absolute blight wherever you put 'em...” -RC
In the quotes above, wind opponents use extremely loaded language to describe what has happened to the landscape since the wind turbines were built. The turbines are a
“blight” or a “scar” on the landscape. The landscape has been “wasted.” “George” repeatedly expresses his desire for a “natural” landscape, implying that with the coming of the turbines, the town has lost that quality. Notably, all four interviewees quoted above are immigrants to the area. When “Thomas,” one of the three lifelong native wind opponents interviewed, expressed a similar sentiment, he said “It was a beautiful place, before they defiled our mountain.” With the use of the pronoun “our,” the native interviewee seems possessive, while the four immigrants seem to express indignation or offense at what they perceived as a violation of the landscape. Possessive or offended, all express the investment which strongly characterizes place attachment: a belief that the landscape should exist in a natural and undeveloped state.
Devine-Wright writes extensively on the idea of place attachment. As he says,
“...place attachment is a positive emotional connection with familiar locations such as the home or neighbourhood, correlating with length of dwelling, featuring social and physical sub-dimensions the relative importance of which may vary and leading to action, both at individual and collective levels” (Devine-Wright, 2009). In his framework,
Devine-Wright renames actions often interpreted as NIMBYism, such as industrial wind development opposition, as 'place-protective actions'. In doing so, he specifically reframes the context of the debate, moving the contested region from a hypothetical
69 'backyard' – a term implying provincialism and a certain degree of possessiveness and selfishness – to a place, with all the history and rootedness that implies.
The usefulness of Devine-Wright's very explicitly local framework for the understanding of wind opposition is brought to the fore when considering complaints about loss of scenery or viewshed. Devine-Wright is not attempting to quantify or explain the entire controversy surrounding wind development, but simply to reframe the question of NIMBY-ism as one more worthy of examination. For this reason, his original framework (2005) was very concentrated on the local scale, and even the Graham,
Stephenson, and Smith additions to the framework (2009) stayed within these bounds. In the view of environmental psychology, the debate over wind development is one of place and locality. This reframing allows for better understanding of quotes such as this one, from prominent activist “Oz”:
“Number one, wind is not green, it's not clean, it's not predictable, and is very, very expensive. It's expensive directly, and it's expensive indirectly. Indirectly, for me, is I lost a landscape. But it goes beyond that. This, the community has lost some of the culture and historical heritage that's out there.”
“Oz,” who moved to Keyser for the mountains, people, and heritage, explicitly links the landscape with the culture and history of the area. To him, the wind turbines are not merely an aesthetic issue; they pose a real challenge to the very existence and continuation of the community. Landscape is place, place is community, and the nuances of such an argument are lost in the suggestion that wind opposition is purely about aesthetics (Pasqualetti, 2000). The appearance of the land is deeply tied to the character and history of those who live there.
70 The ties between landscape and community are well-theorized in the scholarly literature (Sauer et al., 2009; Rowe, 2002; Daniels et al., 2011). Geographers have long recognized that they shape each other: humans act upon the land even as the land dictates how humans build, socialize, and construct new economies. From the hidden origins of
California's agriculture (Mitchell, 1996) to the artificially bucolic landscape of the modern gated community (Cosgrove, 2006; Rowe, 2002), landscape influences the shape of the communities built upon it. For wind opponents, industrial wind has changed that landscape and endangered their perception of their own community. They see the undeveloped mountains as integral to their place, a major part of their place identity.
Wind turbines challenge that facet of the identity, and by association endanger other aspects of it as well.
Environment as Ecology
Even a cursory interview with a wind opponent reveals that the environment is a central issue to the controversy. Opponents are not concerned only about loss of scenery,
'viewshed', or local environment. While these were common complaints, more common even than these aesthetic concerns were concerns for the impact industrial wind turbines might have on animal habitat and the ecology of the mountains.
Whether opposition is viewed as NIMBYism or as place protective actions, the consideration of environmental degradation is a clearly different issue from that of viewshed impact. Many of the interviewees mobilized arguments involving hydrology, migratory bird flight paths, animal habitat conservation, and other issues well beyond the
71 mere aesthetic. These opponents expressed a wish not only to keep their place looking natural, but also to keep their environment healthy and stable.
“But then when you get into the deep forest interior, where you can get forest interior- dwelling species, the turbines are ripping up the tree up there, so it's changed the pattern of bird activity, and I don't spend as much time outdoors.” -George
“My real concern when this project started was the amount of Golden Eagles and Bald Eagles that pass through this project. Over two hundred of 'em, fall and spring migration. And then, fifty percent at rotor height.” -Oz
“… when you have an inversion, fog in general, but when you have, when the clouds drop down to almost mountaintop level, the birds drop down to where they're in the gauntlet. And it isn't like they have to get past one, they have to get through one, two... they're arrayed directly parallel.” -Thomas
Opponents' concern for the environment is not merely aesthetic, but in fact encompasses a broad range of arguments implying deep familiarity and investigation into the issue. In reference to the denudation of the mountain ridgetops to site wind turbines,
“Bill” said, “You know, we still don't know to this day what kind of, what effect that's having on precipitation runoff from the tops of the, in our case here, the Green
Mountain.” Clearly, while Bill may be concerned about aesthetic issues, his concerns are also broader than the idea of place attachment would allow. Bill, as well as the other interviewees quoted above, can consider the mountain environment from an ecological standpoint and express their opposition to wind development in terms of how it will affect species other than humans. While this may still be a 'place protective action', it cannot be ascribed only to place attachment. The environmental psychologists' framework does not have the space for the consideration of other species. Likewise, this
72 local argument is one which does not fit into the generalizations of Pasqualetti or the New
West theorization of Phadke. It is a more complicated idea of 'local' which deserves recognition for what it is – an extended understanding of place more substantial than simply appreciation of the scenery. This is, perhaps, why amenity migrants and wind opponents overlap so much: the former group is invested in the idea of the land as an undeveloped place, while the latter group is fighting a form of development.
Previous efforts to address wind turbine opposition have focused on the aesthetic.
They have suggested alternative siting plans for the turbines, or even simple fixes such as camouflaging them (Phadke, 2011). However, even when limited to the local scale, it is clear that such surface fixes would not be enough to placate wind opponents. By mobilizing arguments that at least cite scientific principles, opponents show that it is not merely the appearance of the turbines to which they object. If wind turbines negatively impact the environment itself and endanger animals that live amongst them, then no aesthetic fix could ever be enough. When couching their opposition in terms of consideration for the environment or other species, opponents transcend the NIMBY hypothesis and broaden the issue from local concern to global urgency.
CHALLENGE TO THE FUTURE
The somewhat abstract argument of environmental degradation rests on knowledge of science and of the consequences of industrial development. However, local scale objections can also be much more personal. Frequently, wind opponents object to the conduct of the industry itself, whether from personal experience and interaction, or
73 disapproval of a company's stated policies. These arguments are still local in nature, though they are more narrowly focused. In these arguments, the focus is not on theoretical damage to the environment, but on a particular company, a particular company policy, or a particular event related to a company. While these arguments sometimes expand to include the entire wind industry, many of them are local and related to specific actions. Of all the arguments mobilized by wind opponents, those that fall in this category would seem to be the most easily resolvable. They focus on policy present and future, on present industry-community relations and on the future reclamation of the land used for industrial turbine construction.
One example of this type of argument was related by “Bill.” According to Bill, US
WindForce, the corporation building the Pinnacle Wind Farm on Green Mountain, initially approached a local preservation society with which he volunteered with an offer of a $10,000 grant. When the society board asked about stipulations or limitations on the money, US WindForce tabled the offer in order to better develop the details. Several months later, and without attempting to contact Bill's group again, US WindForce announced the creation of a community grant fund to which all could apply, though grants were limited to $5,000. Bill expressed mistrust of US WindForce's motives when he told the story. “And they offered us a sum of money to help, I guess that they, for lack of a better term, to lessen our opposition to the turbines.” Ultimately, he found the bureaucratic grant system frustrating and restricted, undercutting the primary goals for which the community fund was established in the first place. “Instead of them giving us a
74 check for ten thousand dollars, we had at one point, we had to spread it out over two years, and you know actually submit an application for it.”
Encounters like these are not the only source of tension generated by the industry's actions. Industry policies and tactics, well publicized by wind opponents, also become sources of mistrust and friction within the community. In these cases, the information may be second- or third-hand, but the tensions generated stem from the same source: the wind industry's community-friendly rhetoric seems to be undercut by the actual actions they take. Keyser residents, long familiar with the antics of exploitative corporations, especially resent the inherent hypocrisy and disrespect they sense in the wind industry's attempts to placate them. For example, “Doc” likened wind developers to coal companies of the past: “In other words, five years ago, when this thing started, the entrepreneur was very careful to make friends with the town. And reminded me when I was a kid, the coal companies would come in to Davis, and build baseball fields and so on and so forth to get the eye of the town. The same thing's happening.”
Decommissioning
Modern industrial wind turbines are expected to have a twenty-year working lifespan. These massive structures influence the perception of a place on the temporal scale as well as the spatial. Wind opponents object not only to the construction of wind turbines in the present, but to the presence and possible condition of them in the future as well. Several of the interviewees explained that their objections to the turbines were founded in the possibilities of their future deconstruction and the reclamation of the land.
75 Having accepted the reality of the finished wind farm, their concerns were less for the present than the future of their town.
Residents of Keyser, West Virginia and the Mineral County Planning Commission attempted to extract a commitment from US WindForce to deconstruct the turbines and clean up the site of the wind farm once it was no longer in use. However, they were unable to secure such a commitment, and the future fate of the farm, and the ridgetop, remains a source of great concern. Wind opponents worry that, without a commitment from the industry to reclaim the land, the decommissioned turbines will never be removed, as the cost would be too high for the town itself to afford. “AT” said, “So right now this community in my estimation is sitting on hundred – seven hundred and fifty thousand dollar variance to what the cost could be to take those things down.”
Massey conceptualizes place as a temporary meeting point of many different factors, stabilized by the perceptions and shared ideals of the people living there (1994).
Time is one of these factors, as the definition of place can depend upon the perception its residents carry of its history. Likewise, plans for the future can also define place. A guarantee that the site of a wind farm would be reclaimed and allowed to reforest leads to one perception of a space, while that lack of a guarantee leads to a different perception.
The guarantee means the difference between one place and another. For some of the residents of Keyser, West Virginia, the ambiguity of the wind farm's future has influenced their view of the present.
76 “...when you're building something like this that's going to be have a 20 year lifespan before they were interested in decommissioning the materials, and who is going to take care of that? Was it going to be the company that was going to pay for that? Or was it the local people, and so forth?” -Anne
“I understand that the, what do you call it, the anchor, the concrete base, I understand it goes like 20 feet deep, maybe twelve? And, you know, that's going to take an awful lot to get it back up out of the ground. Is it going to be worth it to, you know, pull it back up out of the ground? Or is it just going to be there, what I would call, how can I put it? Industrial waste. That's the way I would put it. I would put all of it at industrial waste.” -Basa
“You know and I don't know whether – you know, we were kind of talking about that the decommissioning, you know, these people don't have any qualms about trashing places and leaving it there.” -RC
“And I think my biggest concern, and I think it will continue to be, is that as these systems become debilitated, or need repairs, that they won't get 'em, and eventually they will be metal that is rusted and deteriorated, and they will be on property, and that person on that property will be responsible for the dismantling of it.” -Zelda
These residents feel that the presence of the wind farm has indelibly changed their experience of their town, and they fear that the town is forever changed from what they knew. To them, the refusal by US WindForce to guarantee a plan for removal and reclamation of the turbines represents a challenge to their town's sense of place, or as
Devine-Wright would have it, their sense of place attachment (2005). It is the future of the town itself which is in danger should the turbines never be removed. Keyser would no longer be the Keyser that they know, but a different town, a different place. Thus, despite the fact that the wind farm would be decommissioned after twenty years, they still represent a possibly permanent problem. Wind opponents who mobilize this argument against industrial wind development are protesting, on one level, an industry policy with
77 a simple but expensive fix. On another level, they are giving voice to the fear that wind development represents a change from which their town cannot retreat, the permanent intrusion of industrialization into their rural town. The wind industry itself represents a challenge to their conception of place and community.
CHALLENGE TO THE COMMUNITY
Controversy as long and sustained as that created by industrial wind development can have a polarizing and damaging effect on the community. The question of community unity was not explicitly addressed by either opponents or proponents, yet in many of the interviews it was clear that deep divisions had arisen within the community as a result of the wind farm. Strikingly, both groups commented upon the polarizing effect of the controversy, but interviewed opponents did not seem to see this as an argument against the wind industry. Though the controversy created rifts in the community, those rifts were not recognized as a negative consequence of the wind farm.
Despite the lack of an explicit connection in the Keyser interviews, Patrick
Devine-Wright recognizes this form of tension as a motivating factor behind wind opposition (2005). In his framework of factors affecting public perceptions of wind farms, he lists the aspect “social influence processes” under the category “Social and
Communicative” (2005). In their later editions, Graham, Stephenson, and Smith added the aspect “social impact” to the “Socio-economic” category (2009). While these social divisions are clearly acknowledged in the literature as a source of tension and opposition,
78 the interviewees of Keyser seem to blame the divisions on social processes, cultural differences, or educational lapses rather than tying them to the wind farm itself.
“The politicians sold us out, sold our, you know, just, a heritage of a people, they're selling 'em out. Like I said in the beginning, it's up for sale, and I expect one day, this place will be nothing more than a crossroads.” -Basa
“It's changed my life on some of these things. I'm really at the point, and many of us are really ready to leave this community. You know? It's not the same community here. If people don't care about it, why live in that kind of environment where it's not that important to them?” -Oz
“You know, the local people don't have that… I mean, don't have much of an aesthetic sense, I mean Keyser's kind of a dumpy little town, right? There – people – if you're into aesthetics you're the left, here. And so… I think people will kind of get used to them. Because people don't – they don't really look at the mountains the way I do. I look at them as unique, you probably look at them as unique, people here just grew up with them, you know, so…” -RC
The wind controversy has taken a deep toll on this community. Not only has it divided opponents from proponents, but the members of the opponent group have defensively withdrawn from those who do not share their opinions. They target specific people or organizations for a perceived failure to ask questions or act properly. “Oz” said,
“And I was very disappointed in the community that was sitting there. They didn't know enough to ask questions.” In these arguments, wind opponents set themselves apart from
“the local people” and express disappointment or anger at the community itself. The fact that many wind opponents are amenity migrants or intellectual elites contributes to this distance, exacerbating a normally silent divide. The issue of the wind farm has divided opponents from the rest of the town, causing them to see themselves as an isolated group, the only ones who can see the truth in a town of people refusing to “pay attention.”
79 The results of social division are easy to see in quotes such as those above, yet opponents themselves do not appear to be aware of their own role in the process. The fact is that, for the most part, wind opponents and town natives are not peers at all. Wind opponents (or at least, those willing to be identified as such) value the land in an entirely different manner than do wind supporters. As amenity migrants, they have invested in the idea of an undeveloped, “natural” landscape. Gosnell and Abrams (2010) go so far as to refer to this as “the commodification of domestic rural landscapes as lifestyle amenities.”
To wind opponents/amenity migrants, there is value in the ruralness of the land itself.
Wind supporters, of whom three of the four were native to the area, found value in the energy production of the turbines and tax revenue from the wind developer.
Proponents made it clear that their motivations were very different from those of the opponents. Not only were their motivations different, but their interpretations of events differed as well. When presented with the issue of the community fund established by US WindForce, “Jeremiah,” a real estate agent, had only extremely positive things to say.
“The fund, or the foundation that they set up, has impacted a lot of people, because the grants or the – they give out about fifteen or twenty grants each year. And they go to things like, you know, Little League and, you know, putting lights on the Little League field and helping with you know, the toys and things for the kids' Christmas.”
The differences are so stark, the two groups seem almost to be speaking about entirely different situations. And indeed, they are. While proponents do not feel that the wind turbines on Green Mountain have significantly affected their community, to opponents the community is irreversibly changed. Opponents believe they have lost something indescribably valuable. They feel that they are losing their town, and their
80 community, even as they isolate themselves. They blame the wind industry for the destruction of their place even as they retreat from the other people who make up the community. For wind opponents, the controversy has become a death spiral, and so long as the majority of their town stays silent or supports the wind farm, the only path left open to them is to entrench themselves in their own opposition and deny or vilify those who disagree. Wind opponents and wind proponents are essentially living in the same town, but in two different places.
CONCLUSIONS
While previous investigations have focused on the local nature of wind opposition, the idea of 'local' has been treated as a black box, never unpacked. Upon close examination of the interviewees of Keyser, West Virginia, though, it becomes clear that
'local' is a far more complicated concept than is allowed for in previous frameworks.
These local arguments are in fact a tightly encapsulated Gordian knot of cause and effect.
Previous investigators have suggested that wind opponents' objections are mainly aesthetic, and that aesthetic solutions may therefore go a long way toward resolving opposition. However, those solutions do not begin to address the network of factors at play. When opponents object to wind turbines because they may cause damage to the environment, merely painting wind turbines will not lead opponents to accept them. After all, they will still be wind turbines, and they could still be endangering birds or destroying habitat.
81 The argument most commonly cast as a NIMBY argument is that of base appearance (Kahn, 2000). While opponents do object to the appearance of wind turbines on the mountain tops, that objection is motivated by their conception of the deeply complex connection between the landscape itself and the community upon it. Wind opponents view the mountain ridge tops as commodities which are valuable in their undeveloped state and important to the town. Building wind turbines on the mountains damages not only the scenery, but the community itself.
The association of the community with the landscape and the mountains is one aspect of the strongly held sense of place which motivates opponents. Place is a manifestation of the nexus of many factors, time as well as space, and as such it is only logical that wind opponents object to the presumed future of the wind turbines as well as the known present. The wind industry's token attempts to integrate with the community are exemplified by the lack of an established decommissioning plan for the eventual removal of turbines from the mountaintop. Opponents fear that the turbines represent a permanent change to their community, that the future of the town will feature rusted hulks of machinery on every ridgeline.
Yet even as they mourn the loss of the place and community they once knew, opponents set themselves apart from that community, driving the wedge of controversy deeper even as they fight to reclaim community unity. Though they don't appear to realize it, the wind turbines are only a symbol of the problem they face, a physical manifestation of the divisions that they have created and perpetuated for themselves. As amenity migrants and educational elites, wind opponents carry different priorities and values from
82 those of the established community. The advent of the wind turbines has challenged not only their perception of the landscape, but also their perception of community and their place within it.
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85 Chapter Four
The Individual Scale: Wind Turbine Syndrome and Post-modernism
INTRODUCTION
“...if you go south of here and drive into Davis, West Virginia, there's a large wind farm in that area, but there's also a coal-fired power plant. When you come over one rise, on the right-hand side you can see this huge pile of 'coal slag', is what they call it. It's coal that they can't use 'cause it's not high enough quality. Huge pile of coal slag, and then there's these big smoke stacks, and plumes coming up out of 'em. Smoke. That's from that power plant. On the left side, you see the wind mills. So I've been in a car with people from times, I said – you know, and I've been in a car with people that were against the wind mills. And I said, 'Okay. Let's just stop here. Pick!' Yeah? I mean, that's, honestly that's, if you pick, which one do you like best? Like the coal, and the plumes, or do you like the wind mills? I mean, then it just depends on the individual.” –Jeremiah
“Jeremiah,” a real estate agent in Keyser, West Virginia, describes in vivid terms the discordant landscape created by two different forms of energy production, evoking a sense of choice rooted in the landscape itself. His narrative relies on an understanding of the effects of coal on the environment and on the human body, and assumes that industrial wind has no such consequences. But in the end, he says, “it just depends on the individual.” Jeremiah places the individual, with all that entails, at the center of the landscape and the center of the issue. This positioning is no coincidence – recently, the individual has come to hold a new and unique position in the debate surrounding industrial wind power.
The previous chapters have examined how the wind opposition movement draws on both extended and local scale imaginaries in advancing diverse arguments related to
86 economic, environmental, and historic issues. This chapter addresses individual scale arguments marshaled by wind opponents, a form of oppositional discourse that has not yet been discussed in previous literature. The individual scale has been incorporated into wind opposition through the mobilization of a new discourse on health and the possible effects industrial wind turbines have on the human body. Introduced into the controversy by a small but well-publicized group of people, the claims of health-related issues, and of the existence of a Wind Turbine Syndrome, have both been heard on the national stage and have made their way into arguments utilized by the wind opponents of Keyser, West
Virginia.
Early arguments in the debate over wind power focused on external or non- personal issues, many of them treating the environment as separate and separated from the people who lived within it. In these earlier arguments, opponents claimed industrial turbines had an adverse effect on the landscape, the viewshed, and the local wildlife.
Only on the new individual scale, with the construction of the health argument, did people come to be included in that list of potential victims. The individual scale of argument is personal and internal – personal to the individual and internal to the human body. In order to mobilize such arguments, opponents have created a new mode of discourse which represents a sea change in the controversy over wind power. By embodying their opposition to wind power, opponents are constructing new knowledge to be marshaled in the debate over industrial wind development. In this paper, I shall attempt to show that the interviewed wind opponents of Keyser, West Virginia are
87 contributing to a larger movement to gain mainstream acceptance for the health impact discourse of the wind debate.
APPROACH
West Virginia as Wild
The construction of West Virginia as a 'wild' place is a popular one, endorsed by both the residents and the government itself (Jolly, 2009). This idea is reflected in the advertisements, images, and rhetoric used to represent their state to the outside world.
Throughout its history, this idea of the wildness of West Virginia has played a strong role in its place identity (Rice, 2010).
West Virginia was admitted to the Union in 1863, and has since then maintained a strikingly consistent image of itself (Rice, 2010). Nature has always played a starring role in this self-image, with state symbols and other representations of the state reflecting this strongly. The state motto, adopted in 1863, is 'Montani Semper Liberi', or 'Mountaineers are Always Free'. Even from the earliest days of the state, West Virginia's residents and government emphasized the mountains and woodlands as integral to the state's identity.
West Virginia's government and governing organizations have engaged in a long and active campaign to encourage both residents and visitors to view the state as a natural wilderness (WVDT, 2012).
The West Virginia Division of Tourism runs extensive advertising campaigns in surrounding states and across the country. These campaigns feature landscapes and natural features of the state, often specifically pitched to promote wilderness recreation.
88 One widely-publicized campaign blanketed Metro stations in Washington DC with posters that featured the question “Where is your West Virginia?” juxtaposed over images of dramatic scenery. As of November 2012, the Division's website featured a video which, in thirty seconds, featured seven distinct outdoor scenarios and only two brief shots either indoors or of an urban environment (WVDT, 2012). From these campaigns and others, it is clear that West Virginia's government and tourist industry attempts to define its place as one of dramatic scenery, wilderness, and undiscovered natural beauty, perhaps to combat preexisting stereotypes about the state and its people.
West Virginia's residents support this representation of place as well. In one enlightening incident in 2009, the governor attempted to change the longtime state slogan, “Wild and Wonderful,” promoted by the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce. In an effort to attract business and combat stereotypes, Governor Joe Manchin III changed highway signs and tourism propaganda to instead feature the motto “Open for Business!”
However, some residents argued against the change, and a third slogan, very similar to the original, was adopted less than a year later – “Wild, Wonderful West Virginia” (Jolly,
2009). This return to the words and meaning of the original slogan reflects the strong place identity held by some residents – they view it as a wild place as well, and they prefer it that way. From incidents such as this, it is fair to assume that at the least, a particularly vocal segment of residents and policy makers view West Virginia as a place of wilderness and relatively little development. This controversy illustrates a distinct binary in the place identity of West Virginia. Governor Manchin sought to capitalize on
West Virginia as a historically productive landscape of energy extraction, attractive to
89 industry and development. This capitalistic view seeks to modernize the state, moving it away from the stereotype of West Virginia as a place of low income and little education.
The second view of Virginia's place identity is that advanced by the Chamber of
Commerce and the tourism industry, promoting West Virginia as a place of unspoiled wilderness and outdoor adventure – one which might attract wealthy and educated immigrants seeking to escape urban life.
In a more recent incident illustrative of this binary Manchin, now a senator, attempted to convince MTV to cancel the reality show 'Buckwild'. The show purported to portray West Virginia young people, as executive producer John Stevens said, as “totally wild and carefree” (Rayfield, 2012). Senator Manchin argued the show was a crass attempt to profit off young people, and that it portrayed “ugly, inaccurate stereotypes.”
He was unsuccessful, and one of the show's young stars was found dead four months later when his truck was trapped in deep mud (D'Addario, 2013). The debate over the state's motto and the controversy over 'Buckwild' evince a common trend: an attempt to ignore or erase the West Virginia with both a vibrant Appalachian culture and on-going issues of poverty. Although the potential state mottos represented opposed ideals, they both attempted to obscure the problems faced by the population. Senator Manchin tried to cancel 'Buckwild' because he feared it would perpetuate stereotypes, but had he been successful it also would have had the effect of hiding portrayals of poverty from the rest of the country. In attempting to change the perception of West Virginia, Senator Manchin and the Chamber of Commerce run the risk of denying and ignoring the reality underneath that perception.
90 The construction of West Virginia as a wild place provides the background for understanding outspoken local reactions against the wind industry. Doreen Massey's theory of place states that 'place' is never fixed. Instead sense of place, or identity, is a construction of many different elements converging on a space: “...what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus” (1994, 154). Residents of that space mistakenly assume identity to be permanent and inherent to the land, overlooking evidence that regional identity or sense of place has evolved even in living memory. On small scales and large, spatial identity is an ever- moving, changing thing, dependent on the people who construct it rather than on any intrinsic property of the landscape (Massey, 1994). Thus, West Virginians who protested the change to the state slogan were invested in an idea of their state that was built through popular myth-making and media, and saw wilderness and natural beauty to be definitive of West Virginia. When Governor Manchin attempted to change the state tourism slogan, he favored the historic West Virginia identity as a productive landscape, challenging the idea of the state as a natural, wild place. The backlash against Manchin’s proposal exemplifies the consequences of clashing place identities held by different populations in the same space. According to Doreen Massey (1994), landscape is one part of a complex network which, taken as a whole, creates a sense of place, as important as culture, history, and immigration. Indeed, landscape is both constructed by and reflective of these other factors, existing as a text which, when read in context, can relate the history of an area and a people (Massey, 1994; Mitchell, 1996). People and their places are co-constructive
91 of each other; as people define the place around them, so too does place define the pattern and activities of their daily lives.
This definition of place is inherently subjective, particular to each person and their lived experience. Pulido suggests that place identity varies across individuals even within the same community: “People who are part of places develop complex place-based identities. These identities are not inherently progressive or reactionary but can serve any number of ideological purposes. The politics of a particular place-based identity are a function of both the various subject-positions of the actor as well as the larger political objectives in which one is engaged” (1997, 19). An individual's perception of a place's identity is dependent upon that individual's situation, life experience, politics, or any number of other factors. In the context of controversies over wind development in West
Virginia, this suggests that even individuals within the Keyser community view their place differently based on their background and politics. Lifelong residents of Keyser may view their place as one of energy production (Bell and York, 2010), while immigrants to the area view it as an unspoiled wilderness, resulting in two different place identities occupying the same landscape.
Health and Landscape
Those who value a landscape for the perception of unspoiled natural beauty frequently imbue said landscape with healthful, healing attributes. The association between landscape and health has a long history in the United States. Once seen as a source of mysterious disease and unknown ailments, in the nineteenth century American
92 society began to view “wilderness” as a source of health and well-being. From the hay fever resorts of the Northeast and Midwest mountain regions to the identification of
Arizona and Colorado as asthma retreats (Mitman, 2007), society has frequently attempted to locate in wilderness an escape from the atmosphere of the city. This dichotomy between the civilization of Society and the wildness of Nature reflected an ongoing and entrenched attempt to create modernity – defined by Latour as a process in which Society constantly sets itself apart from Nature even as it utilizes Nature to create technology. Latour writes that Moderns “steadfastly hold to the absolute dichotomy between the order of Nature and that of Society, a dichotomy which is itself possible only because they never consider the work of purification and that of mediation together”
(Latour, 1993, 40). Nature was something to be found outside Society, outside the city.
The landscapes identified as healthy places in the nineteenth century were generally undeveloped ones. Indeed, the 'wild' nature of places like the White Mountains of New Hampshire was vital to this perception of a healthy 'escape.' Though this very designation frequently led to development, it was believed that the clarity of the air, high winds, or quality and amount of sunlight gave these places some inherent value advantageous to human health. Tellingly, the very features that attracted visitors and residents were frequently destroyed or undermined by those wishing to capitalize upon such 'health tourists' (Mitman, 2005). Even in twentieth-century medicine, the
Hippocratic revival drew strong links between the health of the landscape and the health of the people: “...some biologists in the interwar years looked instead to the ancient
Greek physician Hippocrates, whom they credited with introducing the concept of health
93 as a state of equilibrium between the organism and its total environment” (Mitman, 2005,
186). This idea drove much of the subsequent research and treatment of conditions such as asthma and hay fever, and continues to play a role in our perceptions of the environment.
Wind Development and Health
Historically, West Virginia's wealth has been premised on resource extraction rather than health. While health does not figure prominently into West Virginia's place identity, it plays a significant role in the controversy over industrial wind power development. Wind opponents around the world have constructed an argument that wind turbines are inherently detrimental to human welfare, creating a discourse which appears to have been adopted by wind opponents in specific locations such as Keyser, West
Virginia. The historical association of health with wild landscape and the identity of West
Virginia as a wild place play no small role in this.
The history of health and landscape is one of immigration and population movement, and tellingly, wind opponents in Keyser tend to be immigrants rather than natives. Of the thirteen interviewed wind opponents, only two described themselves as native to the area. Some moved to the area following jobs, but decided to stay for the scenery, while others moved to Keyser purely for the scenery itself. This marks the wind opposition movement as one of amenity migrants – educational or economic elites who move to an area for its perceived amenities such as mountain scenery (Gosnell and
Abrams, 2009). These opponents have invested themselves and their lives in the
94 perception of West Virginia as a wild and undeveloped place. They subscribe to an old idea of place, one Massey describes as “an (idealized) notion of an era when places were
(supposedly) inhabited by coherent and homogenous communities” (1994, 146). She suggests that to some people, “a strong sense of place, of locality, can form one kind of refuge from the hubbub... a response to desire for fixity and for security of identity in the middle of all the movement and change” (151). In this view, one which Massey believes to be problematic and possibly dangerous, place identity is equated with personal identity, and the perception of the rootedness of place leads to a stable personal identity.
Therefore, industrial wind turbines threaten not only the health of the landscape, but also the health of the people. Residents who subscribe to this idea view Wind Turbine
Syndrome as an internal manifestation of an external sickness upon the land.
The emergence of health as a line of argument used by wind opponents relies on the assumption that the landscape was a healthy one before the advent of industrial wind turbines. In West Virginia, residents have demonstrated their adherence to the idea of their state as a wild place, and though the concept of health is not specifically associated with the West Virginian wilderness, some interviewees did seem to make the connection themselves. “Basa,” when asked his impressions of the landscape of the town, waxed nostalgic about the climate and the beauty the area once possessed. Then he described the coming of two coal power plants and a paper mill and said, “But between both of them, I mean the smog in here, you know, and then people ooh and ahh about the sun when it comes up in the morning, how nice and pretty orange it is, or when it sets, they love it, you know? And I ask 'em, I say 'do you know what that is?' 'Yeah, it's an orange sun, it's
95 sunset.' You know, they have no idea what they're breathing around here. This is also a high cancer area. It used to be number one in the nation. And there's still a lot of people, most people I would say around here die of cancer.” While there may be no explicit link between the wilderness of the West Virginian landscape and any benefit to health, there is a clear association between development and the decline of health. Wind turbines, as one more avatar of industrial development, are seen by some as little different than the coal plants or the paper mill. They threaten human health as well as the environment.
Industrial development in West Virginia has long taken forms which lead to worsening quality of life and health for the residents. Coal mining, one of the most important industries in the state, is well known to have dire health impacts both on the coal miners and on the non-miners who live around the mines. Newly arrived amenity migrants have missed the heyday of mining in West Virginia, and may not be aware of how much the industry has impacted the landscape. To them, the construction of industrial turbines is destruction on par with mountaintop removal.
WIND TURBINE SYNDROME
Overview
In 2009, Nina Pierpont, who describes herself as “a country doctor practicing in the poorest county in New York State,” released a self-published book which launched a new branch of the wind debate. Wind Turbine Syndrome (2009) has become a rallying point for wind turbine opponents entirely different from their original arguments. And
Pierpont is not a lone voice raising the call – Amanda Harry (2007), a doctor in Wales
96 and Sarah Laurie, founder of the Waubra Foundation (2012) have been making the same claims, as well as a handful of others around the world.
Pierpont's book includes the results and analysis of a survey conducted with residents living in and around five industrial wind farms. For her research, Pierpont questioned ten families about their medical issues. She interviewed twenty-three people over the phone and collected “limited medical records” from three of the ten families
(2009, 41). Pierpont included thirty-eight people in her sample, both adults and children.
Of these thirty-eight, one was a baby born only a few days before the family moved away from a wind farm. In the book, she constructs a case for the existence of “Wind Turbine
Syndrome” caused by constant exposure to low frequency noise or vibration, termed
'infrasound'. She attributes a long list of symptoms to infrasound, and occasionally cites shadow flicker as a factor as well. The syndrome as she defines it affects those parts of the inner ear related to balance, and manifests itself in conditions ranging from panic episodes and tachycardia to problems with concentration and memory. She specifically defines Wind Turbine Syndrome as “mediated by the vestibular system – by disturbed sensory input to eyes, inner ears, and stretch and pressure receptors in a variety of body locations. These feedback neurologically onto a person's sense of position and motion in space, which is in turn connected in multiple ways to brain functions as disparate as spatial memory and anxiety” (13).
Wind Turbine Syndrome has made a significant impact on the nascent wind industry opposition, and Pierpont's Wind Turbine Syndrome has become a significant talking point in the years since she published her book. Using inviting and suggestive
97 language, Pierpont's book encourages those who read it to take note of the symptoms and consider their own susceptibility, saying, “To those of you living near turbines and recognizing your own symptoms within these pages: you are not crazy and not fabricating them. Your symptoms are clinically valid—and unnecessary” (21). Perhaps due to its accessibility, the talking points and terms associated with the syndrome have become popularized among wind opponents.
The impact of Wind Turbine Syndrome can be seen in wind controversies across the country. The online newspaper VT Digger, a publication of the Vermont Journalism
Trust, ran an op-ed column on November 9 th , 2012 in which Annette Smith, a member of
Vermonters For a Clean Environment, claimed “The audible noise and inaudible low frequency and infrasound are driving people from their homes. People do not abandon their homes for no reason. Noise from these big machines can extend three to six miles in mountainous terrain, with residents within 2 miles most at risk” (Smith, 2012).
On the August 16, 2012 edition of NPR's Diane Rehm Show , a caller identified as
“Dawn” voiced her disapproval of wind turbines in almost entirely health-related terms.
The previous conversation had focused only on positive aspects of wind development, with no mention of possible health effects.
“The human element is not being addressed here. I have two-- we have two industrial-sized turbines less than 800 feet from the neighborhood. People are sick. I have friends that I've met while I've been fighting these, and they're not in my back yard. I have friends that have not suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome for years, and since these have been in their backyard, they have now attempted suicide. I have another woman that has attempted suicide because she can't live with this anymore. I know people that have abandoned their homes. So the problem with these it gives the wind industry carte blanche – and developers carte blanche – to set these – site these things anywhere they want to. We don't have the proper siting for these. I believe there is a place
98 for wind, but it's not in people's – it's not in neighborhoods. People are getting sick, and it's killing wildlife, and nobody seems to care anything about this.” (Rehm, 2012)
The panel responded to her initial statement in general terms, expressing sympathy with siting issues and emphasizing that wind development was popular in less developed areas such as the mid-West, but they said little about any allegations of health issues relating to the turbines. When asked for further comment, the caller said:
“...the problem is the study that was done in Massachusetts did not take into account infrasound. They completely ignore infrasound. And a lot of the problems that are happening in these homes are due to infrasound. So you can't say that the study, "Oh we did the sound study and we did an audible study and we don't think it's going to bother people..." Well, you have to look at the whole picture.” (Rehm, 2012)
The caller spoke to a panel of guests which included Denise Bode, the Chief
Executive Officer of the industry lobbying group American Wind Energy Association,
Daniel Simmons, Director of Regulatory and State Affairs at the Institute for Energy
Research, and Coral Davenport, energy and environment correspondent for the National
Journal. The host and guests on the show all claimed not to know what infrasound was.
However, the term and its associated implications have become a part of the national dialogue surrounding wind turbines, reaching even the New York Times which, in a 2011 article, wrote, “Apart from the impact on the environment itself, few if any people could live on the land because of the noise (and the infrasound, which is inaudible to most humans but potentially harmful) produced by the turbines” (Bryce, 2011). Wind Turbine
Syndrome, or at least the effects of noise generated by industrial turbines, also featured prominently in an cover article in the July/August 2010 edition of A udiology Today, a magazine published by the American Academy of Audiology, which described wind turbine noise as an “important community noise concern” (Punch, James, and Pabst,
99 2010, 20). This article discussed noise from industrial turbines extensively and described
Pierpont's book as “definitive,” with no reference to Pierpont's methods, which involved little to no contact with the alleged sufferers themselves. Even when they did not specifically use the term Wind Turbine Syndrome, residents near wind farms spoke out about the health effects of the turbines, very clearly linking the turbines with their own bodies. Daniel d'Entremont, who lived near the Pubnico Point wind farm in Nova Scotia in 2006, said, “They grind, they bang, they creek. The noise is like surround sound, it’s omni-directional. It feels like there's this evil thing hovering above you and it follows you everywhere, it will not leave you alone. This noise will not allow you to have your own thoughts, the body cannot adapt, it’s a violation of your body” (AEC, 2008). Wind
Turbine Syndrome has become part of the national and international conversation on wind development even as it occupies a position mired in uncertainty.
The existence or nonexistence of Wind Turbine Syndrome is a subject of much debate, featuring the embodied experience of residents on one hand with scientific uncertainty on the other. 'Uncertainty' when applied to science is a slippery thing – though often generated by scientists themselves in an effort to qualify and hedge their data, it is just as often used by policy makers to justify their own lack of action on scientific findings. As Michelle Murphy pointed out in her study of Sick Building
Syndrome in the headquarters of the EPA of the 1980s, “Uncertainty justified the need for the proliferation of yet more studies and the continuing tinkering with protocols.
Ceaseless agency calls for more studies allowed the production of ever more ambiguities and thus the generation of uncertainty ad infinitum, helping to make regulation next to
100 impossible” (2004). Murphy's work on Sick Building Syndrome traces the attempts of various groups to overcome sources of uncertainty in order to have their voices heard and the input of their senses taken seriously (2006).
Joy Parr works with issues of uncertainty and the senses as well, as in her case study of a heavy water processing plant built on the shores of a lake used for recreation in
Inverhuron Park in Ontario (2010). She traces residents' and workers' use of their olfactory senses in detecting invisible plumes of poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas when scientific instruments proved inadequate. Parr advocates for greater recognition of embodied knowledge in academic disciplines such as environmental history, saying, “this broader embrace of the sensuous will also offer the opportunity to know differently. In a more sensuous and embodied environmental history, the senses become recognizable, qualitatively distinguishable and synergistically companionable, the body both the archive and the instrument tuned to these encounters” (2010, 160). Parr essentially argues that the senses have a place in the creation of knowledge, that they should not ignored or discounted.
Both Murphy's work and Parr's contribute to the greater dialogue surrounding the processes of materiality – specifically, how an 'idea' becomes a 'thing'. Murphy focuses on the question of how Sick Building Syndrome gained materiality, while Parr suggests that a wider range of information should be considered in the transition from idea to thing. Whether she knows it or not, Pierpont and the wind opposition movement are in the same process. Wind Turbine Syndrome started as an idea in the realm of discourse. In the early stages of a discourse, the boundaries might be fluid, making it uncertain what
101 belongs in the discourse and what doesn't. However, once participants in that discourse agree on the boundaries, a discourse becomes solidified and easier to communicate to others. By publishing her book, Pierpont created a definition and a set of boundaries to encompass the concept of Wind Turbine Syndrome. Once it has been defined, it is able to be communicated, strengthened, and spread. Solidifying the boundaries of a discourse is key to gaining materiality for a contested disease. Sick Building Syndrome, for example, gained materiality when it transitioned from a disparate group of unhappy office workers to an acknowledged and investigated complex. Pierpont and her peers are currently defining boundaries, creating a discourse in order to claim materiality.
Pierpont traces the many symptoms of Wind Turbine Syndrome to the supposed effect of sound pressure on the inner ear. However, the constellation of symptoms she identifies are so numerous and diffuse that they seem to have very little to do with each other, and that nearly anyone might have one or two of them. With symptoms such as headache, tinnitus (the perception of ringing in one's ears), and irritability, Pierpont and her peers face an uphill battle attempting to prove that any of their case studies do in fact suffer from a new syndrome. The syndrome itself, as well as its cause, is imperceptible in the way that Murphy defines it – it falls outside the regimes of perceptibility accepted and used by modern medicine (2006). Like Sick Building Syndrome, the materiality of Wind
Turbine Syndrome has not been recognized by the mainstream establishment of doctors and policymakers and drug manufacturers; it is created and perpetuated by the residents themselves, given voice by Pierpont and her colleagues.
102 The successful identification of and reaction to Sick Building Syndrome must be taken into account when considering Wind Turbine Syndrome as a potential health threat.
In the case of Sick Building Syndrome, the sufferers were largely females in the 1960s and 1970s, a disenfranchised minority struggling to gain attention and recognition for their perspective. They faced an industrial society run by men whose perspective had been privileged above all others. By recognizing the existence of Sick Building
Syndrome, that society conferred legitimacy upon the office workers’ perspective, granting it a certain amount of privilege.
Those making the argument for Wind Turbine Syndrome face a similar situation.
As opponents of wind power, they challenge a system in which industry, government, science, and a great deal of society have colluded. They argue that, as the possessors of bodies affected by wind turbines, they alone are in a unique position to judge whether or not industrial turbines have health effects. Whose knowledge, then, counts more? The massed forces pushing the growth of wind power, or the few individuals with lived experience of industrial wind turbines? If wind opponents follow the trajectory of the female office workers of the 60s and 70s, they may well find a way in which to gain privilege for their perspective.
Wind Turbine Syndrome in Keyser
With the rise of the health effect argument on a national scale, local wind opponents have incorporated the language and the theory of Wind Turbine Syndrome into their own oppositional actions. While none of the interviewees specifically knew the
103 name of Pierpont or any of her colleagues, many were familiar with the idea of Wind
Turbine Syndrome, either by name or by symptom. Interviewees freely discussed the impacts of “low frequency noise,” “vibrations,” and “shadow flicker” on those who live near wind turbines. Several also mentioned that studies have been done on the health effects of wind turbines, though they named no sources.
This may be in no small part due to the prominence of a recent court case centering on Keyser residents. The Braithwaite v. Pinnacle Wind, LLC complaint was filed with the West Virginia Public Service Commission. In March of 2012, Richard
Braithwaite filed a complaint against the operator of a wind farm near his home, with 75 neighbors signing his petition. The complaint detailed noise and shadow flicker, as the turbines featured new model motors which had never before been used so close to residential homes.
“In this filing, Mr. Braithwaite indicates that the operating wind turbines generate an intolerable noise which makes it impossible for him to rest or sleep at night. The Complainant also indicates that "flicker" produced by the shadows of the turbine blades during daylight hours causes him to have migraine headaches.” (Public Service Commission of West Virginia, 2012)
The initial complaint was dismissed due to jurisdictional confusion, but the original complainant and cosigners said they were considering bringing the issue to court
(Sawyers, 2012). A second complaint filed by Gary Braithwaite was similarly dismissed
“because the sitting order does not contain material terms and conditions related to noise or flicker and because the agency does not possess the statutory authority to address the issues” (Sawyers, 2012). The two complaints did succeed in pressuring Edison Mission, the parent company of Pinnacle Wind, to install sound dampening louvers on each of the
104 turbines in the Pinnacle Wind project. Unfortunately, none of the cosigners of the complaint were willing to be interviewed for this project. The lawyer handling the case stated that all participants signed a nondisclosure agreement, and he was not willing to release any more details. Oblique references by one interviewee on the record implied that the case went to court and was settled, with the residents receiving some amount of compensation. However, no official information is available to confirm this.
However, Braithwaite and his neighbors spoke frequently to local newspapers and news organizations about their initial complaints. Several of the interviewees were familiar with the circumstances of the Braithwaite case, and sympathized with their situation. This exposure to people who claim to have had their health directly impacted by wind turbines may well have spread awareness within Keyser of Wind Turbine
Syndrome, or of the general idea of detrimental health effects from wind turbines. When asked if she thought that wind turbines have any effect on human health, “Anne” said,
“Yes, well, the people who live close to it. They've had, because of the blades going around, and the noise that they create and so forth, there's been quite a bit of information in the local newspaper and on the internet...” Similarly, “Bill” commented, “Well I can only go by what I read in the papers. I don't know any studies or anything, but I know people that live up there, under 'em and among the turbines. Talked about sleep interruption, sleep disturbance because of the noises.” “Anne” and “Bill” both give the impression that they would not have considered health impacts as an argument had they not been familiar with the local Braithwaite case. Nor were they the only interviewees who were familiar with the circumstances:
105 “I think they might [have an impact] on people nearby, from the fact that people that are living close to it have complained tremendously about the noise impact their life, that they can't get rest, and they – it's a constant interfere with their life and their home, going outside to barbecue, things like that.” -Zelda
“It bothers me that the people that live near them, who supported them and were told these will be about as loud as a refrigerator, are at the point where they're just about to sell their homes and leave the place they've lived in for decades. That's sad.” -AT
These interviewees used extremely intimate and personal terms in describing the impact turbines have had on nearby residents. The idea that residents are “leaving the place they've lived in for decades” or that the turbines are interfering with “their life and their home, going outside to barbecue” places the issue of wind turbine development on a very personal, individual scale. Wind Turbine Syndrome is not simply an abstract concept to these interviewees, even though they do not personally claim to have been affected by it. It presents a real danger, a threat to their way of life that they see as a very real issue.
Other interviewees very deliberately mobilized the health argument among their reasons for opposing wind development. These opponents showed that not only were they familiar with the idea that wind turbines might impact health, they were also familiar with the symptoms and circumstances of Wind Turbine Syndrome, specifically using that term and others not commonly found in everyday language, but frequently used in
Pierpont's book.
“Well, I think the health of the residents living nearby are definitely – they're definitely impacted. There's a lot of studies, more so coming out, you know, literally every day. You can go into go into the resources and find the things called Wind Turbine Syndrome, which the wind community and their experts will choose to say, 'No, that's not real.'” -AT
106 “Some of that noise is not perceptible by ears but that doesn't mean that the noise isn't going to affect you. You can't hear microwaves, when a microwave oven runs. You hear the oven, but you don't hear the microwaves being generated. But if they put you in a microwave oven you'd feel it pretty damn fast. It's the same with pressure waves.” -George
“Yeah, infrasound. And more and more research is being done along that line, and I think it's real, personally. But, if you're living a little closer, say a mile, then when, during certain periods of the year, you have the flicker syndrome...” -Doc
By mobilizing the health argument, wind opponents have proceeded from declaring industrial turbines a blight on the landscape to declaring them a blight on themselves and their bodies. In doing so, they create – or assume the creation of – a connection between themselves and their environment. More complicated than the “place identity” of Devine-Wright, which he describes as an “affinity,” the adherents of Wind
Turbine Syndrome necessarily assume that the landscape, thrown out of balance, also throws their own bodies out of balance. The propagation Wind Turbine Syndrome may well be a return to the Hippocratic ideal of the healthy landscape (Mitman, 2005). Per
Mitman, disease is “at the ecological nexus of animal and human communities. Far from reinforcing a divide between humans and nature, disease ecology, in all its protean forms, necessitated the insertion of humans back into the environment” (2005).
In proclaiming the materiality of Wind Turbine Syndrome and claiming it as their own lived experience, wind opponents are tying themselves into their environment in much the same way as Murphy's office workers were when they battled Sick Building
Syndrome. Though the office workers fought to have the gleaming façade of the privileged, middle class office building perceived as an environment with hidden dangers
(2006), wind opponents have the much easier task of tying an avatar of industry to their
107 own health. Wind opponents do not need to change the perception of the environment in order to have the syndrome accepted as a materiality. Instead, they face the task of redefining a technology, usually seen as cleaner and safer than the alternatives, as one that causes illness. They face a regime of imperceptibility (Murphy, 2006) created by the wind industry, environmental activists, policymakers, and the medical establishment, which defines industrial wind energy as the healthier alternative to fossil fuels.
The issue of health impacts upon residents with homes near the turbines themselves bring the arguments full circle, placing humans within the environment on the same level as the birds and other animals whose habitat is endangered. This argument reinforces the idea that West Virginian wind opponents are deeply invested in their land, placing great importance upon the landscape and the sense of place derived from it. By utilizing the individual scale, opponents construct themselves through the landscape, even as the landscape is constructed by the people. They identify with and through the land, and industrial wind development threatens not only their view, but their very identity. The internal, embodied aspect of Wind Turbine Syndrome can be viewed as a reflection, a reclamation, of the effect opponents believe industrial turbines have upon the land. When the land is sick, the people are sick. Wind turbines are a manifestation of industrialization, which the residents see as a blight upon the landscape and upon themselves. “Doc” made this point very explicitly when he said:
“Any time, this is what wind has in common with coal or any other kind of industrial development, any time you interpose industrial development with homesteads, and impact the basic rights of seeking happiness, because of the presence of that industrial development, you're gonna have these folks over here get sick. Because of the external control that they have imposed on them from the industrial development. And that makes you sick.”
108
CONSTRUCTING TURBINES THROUGH THE SENSES
The emergence of Wind Turbine Syndrome as a discourse of opposition, as well as the other forms of the health effect argument, relies on the acceptance, by opponents and their allies, of embodied experience as a form of information gathering. Activists recognize and collate the experiences of themselves and of other sufferers in order to establish the materiality of contested illnesses. Murphy (2010) tells of how the advocacy group 9 to 5 gained recognition for the materiality of Sick Building Syndrome through surveys that “objectified and quantified” what previously was purely sensual experience.
Pierpont began the process of creating materiality with her 2009 book detailing the cases of thirty-eight individuals she claimed showed signs of Wind Turbine Syndrome.
Pierpont's book is full of charts and numbers detailing the demographics of her cases and the frequency of individual symptoms among her study population. She is not alone. In just one example, Amanda Harry, a Welsh doctor, published a paper (2007) detailing thirty-nine cases of the supposed health impacts of wind turbines. These works reproduce the process of turning pure sensory information into quantitative data.
In Keyser, West Virginia as well, information from the senses is recognized as a valid source of information for those suffering from the health effects of industrial wind turbines. In a publicly available memo related to the Braithwaite case, the Director of the
Executive Secretary Division of the Public Service Commission of West Virginia informed Pinnacle Wind, LLC that their request to dismiss the complaint would not be granted. In doing so, she stated that the Service Commission believed Braithwaite's
109 complaint to be “verified,” and that they would be investigating further. This investigation would take on a particular form.
“Staff will focus on what it believes to be the main thrust of this case, which is the fact the Pinnacle project is generating unpredicted and objectionable noise. The existence of this unpredicted and objectionable noise has been verified by the staff engineer in this case using the most appropriate scientific measuring methodology available, his own ears” (Squire, 2012).
Interviewees also employed the language of the senses when describing their impressions of and reactions to the wind farm. Even when not discussing the possibility of health impacts from industrial turbines, opponents freely discussed the visual and auditory impact of the turbines, and some described these sensory impacts as physical sensations.
“Well, it's sort of ugly. Don't really like them. And actually, when I get close to them, it makes me dizzy to watch them. Makes me sick. I have a tendency to get carsick, and just watching them go 'round makes me sick.” -Jill
“Oh, I have to admit that when I see wind turbines it's a viscerally negative feeling.” -Doc
“Doc,” who is in fact a medical doctor, also related a story of a friend with heart problems who lived within a mile of the wind farm. “Doc” was afraid that proximity to and frequent exposure to the industrial turbines would kill his friend.
“I have one good friend who may or may not talk to you, that I met a long time ago as he was having cardiac arrest. And he's still in such a tizzy over the impact of this – the turbines that affect his homestead are about a mile away. I'm hoping that he'll sell, you know, he'll just move away, and now that he has a settlement of some sort. I'm hoping that he'll move down to Florida, where his internist son lives. Or he'll die, he's that upset.”
From these examples, it is clear that wind opponents view the advance of industrial wind development as a threat to bodies and health as well as a threat to the
110 environment. Indeed, by advancing arguments such as Wind Turbine Syndrome and the
“visceral” effects of the turbines on bodies, wind opponents place themselves within the environment. When mobilizing ecological arguments on the local or extended scale, wind opponents imply a separation, Society acting upon Nature and ruining unspoiled natural beauty. However, by utilizing the individual scale of argument, wind opponents erase that division, bringing themselves into nature as components of a natural environment.
Industrial turbines are not merely a “blight” upon the landscape, but upon themselves as well.
CONCLUSIONS
In Keyser, West Virginia, the emergent discourse of the health impact of industrial wind turbines is supported by two preexisting themes within the history and the landscape of the town. The first theme is that of wilderness. The government and residents of West Virginia have endorsed and propagated an image of West Virginia as a wild place, rural and undeveloped, and some recent immigrants have embraced that image of their chosen home place.
The second theme is that of the longstanding association between health and landscape. Human health has been tied to landscape since the time of Hippocrates, and that association is evident in the development of American places seen as 'wild' and
'natural' into health resorts. Though West Virginia was never an historic health resort, the emphasis on its wildness places it within this narrative. When residents claim that
111 despoiling the landscape makes them unhealthy, they are utilizing the long historic association between health and landscape.
When they argue that industrial wind turbines have unforeseen health effects, wind opponents are mobilizing medical history, place identity, and holistic ideals of landscape to give materiality to the idea of Wind Turbine Syndrome. In the process, they have created a discourse and fixed its boundaries, solidifying the concept of Wind
Turbine Syndrome as a consequence of the spread of industry into a seemingly natural landscape.
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115 Chapter Five
Conclusion
SUMMARY
This thesis investigated the array of opinion and argument mobilized by the wind opponents of Keyser, West Virginia. Over the course of seventeen interviews, wind opponents expressed their reservations about industrial wind power on several scales: the extended scale, local scale, and the individual scale of the human body. Using previous scholarship on wind opposition as well as landscape theory, peacemaking theory, embodiment scholarship, and science and technology studies, this thesis analyzed these arguments in an attempt to discover the motivations behind them and the consequences they might lead to.
Chapter Two explores arguments made on the extended scale, a combination of regional, national, and global scales. Arguments made in this scale concerning issues frequently elided by previous scholars, whose efforts have concentrated on local issues.
Residents of Keyser expressed resentment of large cities and richer areas which received the energy generated by the wind farms built in their town, equating it in another instance in West Virginia's long history of resource exploitation. They also disapproved of the role of government in financing the industry, focusing on the production tax credit which lowers the cost of wind farms for the first ten years of their operation. Finally, wind opponents are distrustful of the very concept of industrial wind power, questioning the viability and efficiency of the technology.
116 Chapter Three contains a nuanced look at the local scale arguments mobilized by wind opponents. While previous scholarship has focused on the local scale, it has been either too specific or too general and has failed to fully address the issues. At the local scale, opponents express concern over the environmental destruction entailed in constructing industrial turbines. Wind opponents point to both visual and ecological problems likely to result, mourning the loss of their viewshed and worrying over animal habitat. Furthermore, they resent the actions of the wind industry and its lack of planning for the future. Wind opponents in Keyser look forward twenty years in the future, when the wind farm is projected to be decommissioned. As the development companies have made no promises to deconstruct the aged farms, opponents fear that their town will be left with rusting, decrepit turbines on their ridgetops.
Chapter Four explores a new dimension of the wind opposition movement: the construction of industrial wind as a potential threat to human health. Wind opponents have mobilized a new type of argument in the emergent discourse of Wind Turbine
Syndrome. Previous wind opposition scholars have not explored arguments on the scale of the human body, perhaps because they are a relatively recent phenomenon. However, the alleged health impacts of industrial wind turbines tie into a long history of association between landscape and human health, as well as the fear of industrial development and its impact upon the human body.
117 KEY FINDINGS
This thesis hopes to have introduced a new set of theoretical lenses to be used in the discussion of industrial wind development opposition. Wind opposition is frequently misunderstood as NIMBYism, and even previous literature attempting to debunk this idea has followed a set of assumptions that has limited the scope of previous investigations.
The arguments marshaled by wind opponents range across a number of scales, and they can be understood through a number of different lenses. The wind opposition literature needs to recognize the diversity of arguments rather than attempting to fit every argument into a predefined set of assumptions.
The most striking finding unveiled in this thesis must be the significance of the demographics of wind opponents. Many of the most outspoken opponents of wind development in Keyser can be seen as amenity migrants, people who chose to move to the rural and undeveloped area in order to enjoy what they perceived as its natural beauty.
Most of the others were educated or well-traveled, and frequently displayed a tacit sense of separation from the native population of Keyser. These amenity migrants carried with them different values and views from the native population, including a divergent sense of place identity which placed him at odds with those who favored greater development.
A second common theme throughout these chapters must be the perception of an antagonistic relationship between industrial development and personal well-being. Again and again, wind opponents voice their dissatisfaction with the wind turbines in terms of how they impacted quality of life in the town, whether that be from the loss of natural scenery or from detrimental impacts the turbines might have on the human body. They
118 also questioned the viability of wind power as a technology, pointing to the inconsistency of wind as evidence that over-reliance on the technology might lead to a loss of comfort and stability in daily life. Previous scholarship on wind opposition has assumed that industrial wind development is an undeniable good which will benefit the country and the world. It has assumed that the perceived advantages of this new type of industrial development will outweigh relatively minor disadvantages, granting the wind industry an elevated status as a green industry. In this thesis I have attempted to avoid such predispositions, and instead have evaluated the effect industrial wind development has had on the lives of those living in and around wind projects in an impartial manner. By recasting the wind industry in this way, the opponents are recast as well, and it becomes possible to recognize and analyze more of their arguments than previous scholars have acknowledged.
This leads directly the final theme, which addresses the method and process of legitimizing knowledge. Wind opponents are engaged in the process of creating a body of knowledge which supports their opposition. By communicating online and sharing arguments with each other, wind opposition groups around the world reinforce their own opinions and build arguments to be presented to policymakers and undecided individuals.
Furthermore, the efforts of some opponents to gain recognition of Wind Turbine
Syndrome parallel previous contested diseases and force the question of who, in the end, claims to know more about a body than the person who lives in it. Opponents of wind power attempt to collect and distribute knowledge, but they face the grand challenge of gaining recognition for their claims.
119
LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY
This study was conducted through interviews with seventeen individuals contacted through only two organizations. Though a few interview subjects were acquired by the snowballing method, this clearly limits the range of the study to those who were known to be of a certain opinion and were willing to speak about it. Obviously, the small number of interview subjects limits the scope of the study, though the diversity of opinion was certainly rich enough for analysis.
Future attempts to continue this research might do well to include on-the-street interviews, which would place in context the views of wind opponents, providing an idea of how common anti-wind sentiment is within a single town. Alternatively, a Q-sort derived from the interviews already taken would provide interesting insight into the relative importance of each argument in the minds of the subjects.
Finally, the choice of a single study site familiar with industrial wind farms may well limit the usefulness of the findings in this thesis. There have been industrial wind turbines in the vicinity of Keyser for more than ten years. Repeating the interviews in a town facing controversy over the construction of a future wind farm would provide fascinating insight into the commonality of opinions among wind opponents new and old.
POLICY IMPLICATIONS
Much previous scholarship into wind turbine opposition has been conducted with the unspoken aim of resolving controversies and promoting wind turbine construction.
120 These studies have commonly suggested that wind opposition is a result of a clash, in the most general sense, between what people think of the place in which they live and what they see the future as once industrial turbines are constructed. Common policy suggestions have been to make wind turbines more visually attractive (Pasqualetti, 2000), to work closely with the community when siting industrial wind farms (Hindmarsh and
Matthews, 2008), or in some countries, to create community ownership of the wind farm through shareholding systems (Warren and McFadyen, 2010).
While certainly useful suggestions, none of these truly address the oppositional dialogues identified in this thesis. I have shown that wind opposition is a symptom of changing demographics within a rural community, and that a fear of negative consequences for human health has appeared among wind opponents. Future policy initiatives intending to promote industrial wind farms would need to address these two points, and may well prove prohibitively expensive and ultimately ineffective. For amenity migrants who value a place for what they perceive as a lack of development, any policy solution would need to either change the perception of the place, or change the perception of the turbine. Wind opponents, by their very opposition, have already rejected the idea that wind turbines might benefit the environment, and any attempt to recast a place as already developed or exploited would be difficult, counteracted by a range of opposed forces (ie., tourism campaigns or local conservation organizations). Likewise, the discourse surrounding Wind Turbine Syndrome already incorporates a distrust of mainstream science or official avenues of information. Attempts to resolve this argument
121 would need to treat the syndrome as an established medical condition, or else risk a backlash from those who felt erased.
Wind opponents mobilize a range of arguments in their attempts to prevent the construction of industrial wind farms, many of which would be extremely difficult to address directly. However, the wishes of wind opponents (and potential future wind opponents) and the industry are not irreconcilable. If it continues on its current trajectory, the wind industry will continue to encounter opposition, which will only grow entrenched as the issue matures and the movement organizes. Instead, policymakers and developers wishing to promote wind power without controversy would do well to invest in entirely different locations and systems of distribution. Like solar power, wind power is well- suited to distributive generation. The ability to generate power at the site where it would be used makes wind power a flexible addition to an electrical grid (Sovacool, 2007).
Individual institutions might invest in their own industrial turbine, especially if they received subsidies or tax credits for the power generated. This more distributed model of generation would allow consumers to lower their energy costs and the cost of power in general. It would resolve the issue of the rural/urban dichotomy, as power would be generated and used in the same place. And a more distributed model would, theoretically, decrease the concentration of infrasound, addressing the health concerns of some opponents.
Alternatively, establishing wind turbines offshore and away from human sight lines would circumvent many of the arguments discussed in this thesis. Offshore wind offers many advantages. The wind is steadier and stronger, making offshore wind more
122 reliable than onshore wind farms. Locating the turbines away from land avoids the question of viewshed or scenery loss, and would also address the concerns of those who believe in Wind Turbine Syndrome, as infrasound-generating turbines would be far removed from human habitation.
Wind power is a renewable energy technology which has great potential as a major part of America's future energy portfolio. However, the advantages brought by wind power must not be bought at the cost of the peace of mind and trust in government of America's small towns. The current model of the wind industry engenders resentment and resistance on levels not yet fully acknowledged by academics and policymakers.
Upon fully examining several newly-recognized arguments, it seems clear that the industry needs to reassess its approach to development in order for wind to live up to its promise as a progressive, green technology.
123 CITATIONS
Hindmarsh R, Matthews C. Deliberative speak at the turbine face: Community engagement, wind farms, and renewable energy transitions, in Australia. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning. 10(3): 217-232.
Pasqualetti M. Morality, space, and the power of wind-energy landscapes. Geogrl Rev. 2000; 90 (3): 381-394.
Sovacool B. Coal and nuclear technologies: creating a false dichotomy for American energy policy. Policy Sciences. 2007; 40(20); 101-122.
Warren C, McFadyen M. Does community ownership affect public attitudes to wind energy? A case study from south-west Scotland. Land Use Policy. 2010; 27:204- 213.
124 Appendix A
Interview Questions
1. Where do you live? How long have you lived there? Why did you decide to move
here, if you did?
2. Tell me a little about the town and your experience in the area. (Do you own a
house or land in the area?)
3. How would you describe the landscape of the area before the farm? After it?
4. How do you believe wind energy fits into America’s energy production?
5. Can you tell me what you thought of renewable energy (and windfarms) before
the proposal?
6. Have you changed any aspect of your daily routine in response to the wind farm?
7. How would you describe your views of energy consumption?
8. Have they changed since the wind farm was built? What do you think about
renewable energy in general now?
9. How did you first hear about the wind farm? When was that?
10. And what did you think about it then? Why did you feel that way?
11. Did you follow news on the wind farm proposal? How did you hear more about
it?
12. Did later information change your thoughts? How? Where did that information
come from?
13. When was the farm finished? How did you feel about it then?
125 14. How has the finished farm impacted you?
15. What do you think of when you see the turbines?
16. Do you think the turbines have any impact on your health? Why or why not?
17. How has it impacted the town?
18. How often do you see or hear the turbines? What do they make you think of?
19. Do you ever seek them out?
20. What do you think about the wind farm now?
21. Another community faces a proposed wind farm. What would you say to the town
council? To the company proposing the farm? To the residents?
126