Ontario resident’s personal testimony: ‘Anti-wind groups make me sick’
From the blogs this past weekend comes a thoughtful piece from Meredith, an Ontario resident and wind industry employee, titled Anti-wind groups make me sick.
Meredith, an unabashed enthusiast of utility-scale wind power, covers most of the bases in her article, including the suspicion–expressed in the title–that her view of the technology might be quite different had she been exposed to the fear-laden rumors that are fanned by anti-wind groups:
"What if I been told that windmills would make me sick, make my dog sick, make my family sick, etc, over and over again until I believed it? Would living here, looking out at the things that supposedly make me sick every day, make me sick? If I truly believed in it, yes, I have no doubt that I would make myself sick. I would stress myself out thinking about these windmills making me sick. I wouldn’t sleep. I would give myself headaches. I would be filled with worry and anxiety. If my dog threw up (which is perfectly routine around here), I would believe that it was because of the windmills. In a situation where I am anxious or stressed about something I tend to develop a headache, so if I was stressed out by the windmills it makes perfect sense that I would have that happen. The symptoms are real. The cause has been wrongly attributed. Anti-wind groups are at the root of this suffering, planting seeds of doubt and fear in people’s minds until it manifests itself in illness."
She offers this final thought:
"There is so much more that can be said on this topic, but I don’t wish to dive in to politics, start dissecting research papers or quoting scientific studies. That has already been done. My mission is to quell fears, destroy doubts and satisfy uncertainties. My husband, my dog and myself live among windmills. We have worked underneath them for months on end. We have neighbors and friends who live in even closer proximity than we do. I am friends with turbine technicians and tradespeople who have spent countless hours inside nacelles, 80 meters in the air. We are all fine. We are happy. We are healthy. We chose to believe in science instead of scare tactics."
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