Over the last couple of weeks this blog has been password-protected, for a number of reasons. The main reason for this decision was as a gesture of peace, goodwill and optimism, following some especially brutal rhetoric. Maybe, just maybe, this blog has done its job, and maybe the time for harsh speaking is now ready to give way to a time of reconciliation and forgiveness. Maybe the rhetorical brutalism has finally had the desired effect on those who most needed affecting, the intellectual argument has been won, and they now see that this blog’s stance is the right one. It’s certainly one backed by logic, ethics, democracy and now the law of the land in England, if not Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
It’s also the way the cookie seems to be crumbling in the USA, Canada and Australia. Wind farmers are on the backfoot, with communities now fighting back, using the force of law to defend themselves from the horrendous rape of the countryside for profit (or maybe just money laundering?).
There was another reason I temporarily password-protected the blog: an experiment, which I hope offers an example for wind farmers to follow. Words in cyberspace can disappear just as quickly as they appear. Now you see them…. now you don’t! You’ll see what I want you to see, up until I know you’ve got the message, and then when the job is done, I’ll make every effort to remove all traces of my workings. This is a metaphor for how I’d like wind farmers to behave: to remove all traces of their blight and leave the countryside exactly as they found it.
In the interests of disclosure, I should reveal the third reason for password-protecting the site: I offered a huge dossier of documentation against the wind industry to West Yorkshire Police, and I was quite happy to hand over my four years worth of research and let them get on with it. It almost felt like keeping the blog up could become counter-productive, or at least superfluous, after its contents had been discussed during a fascinating, eye-opening conversation with two absolutely brilliant police officers, who only increased my respect for the incredible work done by the police forces of the UK. How many of you would be able to do the job they do: objectively enforcing the law of the land, AS IT IS, not as maybe one would like it to be?!
I was given the opportunity to make the case that I’ve been making here over the last year, and I came away from the meeting with the clear feeling that the police share many of my misgivings about the antisocial manner in which the wind industry conducts itself. The problem they face is that the police don’t make the law, they just enforce it. And so they can only take action when the country’s legislation requires them to do so. This is further compounded by differences in English and Scottish law, particularly with regard to wind farm placement, which means that a wind farm that would be illegal in England is, unfortunately, currently legal in Scotland.
This has been a moment of soul-searching for me, because, were I a true NIMBY, I wouldn’t be remotely bothered by blight in parts of Scotland and Wales I can barely even pronounce, let alone have any personal interest in. Indeed, if I were a true NIMBY, as long as wind farms aren’t built in MY backyard, I’d feel that the Celtic extremities can go and screw themselves! Not my problem…
I don’t feel like that, however, because the high altitude moorlands, mountains and special landscapes of the entire planet are our collective backyard, as a species. It shouldn’t be a surprise that selfish wind developers simply haven’t attained the requisite spiritual development to understand this holistic view of how even faraway eco-damage can have a real and direct impact on people’s sense of mental health and well-being.
I have been transforming my anger at these people into forgiveness and even pity. But more importantly, I want to make it clear that my main role is one of Education.
As all good engineers will tell you – those who take pride in their work – the 3 E’s are the building blocks of every well-designed project: Education, Engineering and Enforcement. Where we sometimes go wrong is by jumping to engineering solutions, without at least trying to first educate people and giving them the opportunity to do the right thing. In management theory, this approach is known as Theory X. People have to be coerced into doing things they don’t want to do, as opposed to a Theory Y approach, in which people are assumed to want to excel voluntarily, given half a chance.
Even worse than just ignoring the education stage is to additionally ignore the engineering stage and jump straight to enforcement, which is basically being a totalitarian control freak. That’s not me… I’m a Classical Liberal, don’t forget! I therefore have to remind myself that I should always aim to educate people first and foremost, and only if that doesn’t work should I move onto engineering solutions (in this case, using activism as a means of getting wind farms rejected at the planning stage), followed up as a last resort with enforcement measures (ie changing the law so that wind developers end up going to prison if they don’t remove their unwanted blight voluntarily).
Clearly I want wind scammers to stop hurting me and my natural habitat. I want them to leave me and my fellow nature lovers alone, to pack up and get another job that doesn’t involve actively going out and looking for countryside to despoil. But I don’t want to harm them – I merely want to educate them as to what they’ve been doing and how it screws up the world.
Should they to listen to and learn from this education, that should be the end of it – a troupe of chastened ex-wind developers would now have much clearer knowledge about the impact of their actions. With this new awareness, one hopes they might become more and more upset about what they’ve being doing to the world, and to make up for it they might decide to whistle-blow and lift the lid on the shady practices they encountered in their former roles. Kind of like the Marty Rathbun of the wind industry!
That would be my dream come true, and it would also prove the point I’ve been making that my words really are first and foremost about educating people; they’re about getting through to the spiritual essence of everyone reading, cutting through the impersonal corporate BS, and communicating directly with you all on a raw, human, soul-to-soul basis. Kinesthetic learning means acquiring new knowledge, not from a stuffy lecture, but from experiencing an activity for yourself. I’d like to think of my writing style as emotionally kinesthetic – I want to jiggle your emotions all over the shop, in order to shake you up and wake you from your hypnotised stupor (assuming you were once, just like me, brainwashed into liking wind turbines).
The high amount of viewings received for those posts directed towards specific individuals indicates that these personally-orientated messages have been read something like ten times as often as my more general, non-specific posts! It makes me think my words really have touched the hearts of those who have read them and maybe got them learning about themselves. GOOD!
Their reward, should they carry on reading, is the knowledge that, going forward, the words get nicer from here. If you’ve ever been shocked by the brutality of the rhetoric of this website, never forget: I hate the sins, absolutely, but I never stop loving the sinners. I pray to God that one day they’ll join our ranks and speak out about the barbaric practices of the wind industry. I’d instantly forgive them their previous sins, if they were to jump ship and tell all.
And so, having taken my grievances to the police, I considered whether to pull the plug altogether on this blog, whether to keep it private, or whether to revert to full transparency after a breather. A couple of weeks later, I’m tempted to once again make MindWind public, but with a new direction, less aggressive (unless I’m triggered by wind blight), more conciliatory, and more respectful of the fact that well-meaning people might well have got swept up with the wind industry without receiving any education about its dark side. Everyone has to earn a living after all.
I’ll end this entry by reminding any wind developers reading (I have reason to believe some do!), my blog is all about Education. Now you’ve been given a crash course in how the wind scam affects so many people, there comes a point when you have to ask yourself if you’re working for a good company, selling a good product which makes people happy; or are you working for a nasty company that hurts people, loses money hand over fist (like millions of pounds of loss!) and is nothing more than a giant parasite that normal citizens wish would just go away?
If it was me, I’d leave the company tomorrow and try my best to make amends for all the bad things the company has done! I’d understand how my industry’s actions have made good people insanely angry, in exactly the same way that caging animals and ruining their habitats makes them literally go crazy. If we treated dogs the way we treat wind victims, the RSPCA would be onto us like a shot.
So feel free to blow the whistle, if you know where the bodies are buried (and that’s another metaphor, for those prone to take rhetorical discourse literally… I hope, anyway; I sincerely pray that no dead bodies have ever been thrown into the cement beneath a wind turbine!).
I’m just implying some of you might know more about the dubious funding arrangements of the wind industry, and might be able to explain exactly why on earth companies that keep losing millions of pounds a year persist in throwing their money away on horrible wind turbines, against the will and without the consent of the communities that have them imposed on them!
Where DOES the money come from, and where DOES it go???
MindWind 