Resonance Chambers and Industrial Nightmares: Big Wind’s Civic Afflictions

Abstract

In the past decade, industrial wind installations, or what we commonly call wind farms, have proliferated across the U.S. along with talk of a constellation of illness symptoms known as Wind Turbine Syndrome. Despite widespread efforts to debunk claims that wind turbines make people sick, the syndrome has achieved a rhetorical virulence in the deliberative sphere, where it “catches” among residents who live hundreds of miles away from wind turbines. Here, where wind installations exist only in the deliberative imagination, Wind Turbine Syndrome presents as a civic affliction with serious consequences for the trajectory of municipal debate.

Notes

¹ I would like to thank RR reviewers, M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Donnie Johnson Sackey, for their invaluable perspectives on the manuscript draft, and Elise Verzosa Hurley for her editorial guidance. I am grateful for a chance encounter with Colleen Derkatch at the 2017 Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric Conference, who indelibly reshaped my thinking about rhetorical and civic afflictions, and for the insight and support of Cory Holding, Kari Campeau, and Pam Burton, Hammond Town Clerk.

² Throughout this essay, I will use the term “industrial wind development” or “industrial wind installation” to refer to what we commonly call “wind farms.” In doing so, I follow the reasoning of the Hammond Wind Advisory Committee, who provided the below rationale for their terminology in their 2011 report to the Town Board:

We have chosen to use the term Industrial Wind Power with the understanding that it may be criticized as “biased.” We would simply point out that the phrases “Wind Farms,” “Harvest the Wind” and other terms adopted by wind developers are also biased, but in the direction that the wind industry would like to shape perception for the purpose of making Industrial-Commercial Wind Power seem more acceptable to the public. These terms mask the fact that Large-scale Wind Power installations are industrial installations. While many of these installations have been placed on farmland, they are not farming operations. (5)

Additionally, “industrial wind” denotes a specific business model for wind energy development. Corporations, rather than communities, own industrial wind installations and the energy they produce, while merely leasing land and rights-of-way from property owners. In a community wind model, on the other hand, communities raise the capital to develop their own wind project; they own the turbines and the energy they produce and are therefore able to make decisions about how that energy should benefit the community.

³ For a sampling of environmental health studies countering the validity of WTS, see Harrison; Pedersen and Waye; Chapman and St. George; and Rubin, et al.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Noel Thistle Tague

Noel Thistle Tague is a Visiting Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, where she recently received a PhD in Critical and Cultural Studies. Her dissertation, “The Winds: Rural Susceptibility, Environmental Rhetoric, and the Afterlife of Municipal Deliberation,” examines conflicts—and conflicted feelings—surrounding wind energy development in northern New York State from angles lodged in regional environmental history, agrarian rhetoric, and individuals’ memories and narratives about place. Readers are welcome to contact her at [email protected].