Zoopolis

It has recently come to my attention that all of my environmental do-gooderism is a carefully constructed front for my real desire to infest the countryside with wildlife-destroying industrial machinery, all for financial gain. Thought you should know.

I’m not dead, but there are some members of local anti-wind groups who apparently wish I were.

Ontario Regulation 359/09 under the Environmental Protection Act stipulates, as part of the Renewable Energy Approval application process, that project proponents must carry out certain public consultation activities. These activities are excellent and necessary regardless of whether or not they are enshrined in law, if only because a person ought to be consulted when you are planning a major construction project in their neighbourhood. Sometimes, local residents know important and useful information not collected anywhere else, and that information might be necessary to plan the project properly. Sometimes they have concerns which, regardless of whether they seem valid, deserve an airing and an honest and complete sharing of available information.

But sometimes they just want to yell at someone, and the consultant for the project makes as good a target as anyone else. Wind energy projects are drawing more and more vitriol from local communities, each  apparently convincing itself that wind turbines are dangerous, noisy health hazards that pulverize bird and bat populations, drive down house prices and don’t even reduce carbon emissions. That none of this is true, and it can all be proven to be untrue, is irrelevant, as Farhad Manjoo argues in True Enough: people no longer have the time or resources to evaluate all of the issues they need to make decisions on in a rational and empirical way, if they ever did. Now most people find an authority, self-proclaimed or no, who appears to be credible and trustworthy and adopt their conclusions as their own without investigation.

If you’re honest you’ll admit to doing this too. Every time you go to the doctor and walk out with a prescription without reading through the medical literature on its origins, efficacy and safety, this is exactly what you’ve done. Most of the time it works well, but sometimes it doesn’t.

Venting at a target too is valid so far as it goes, I suppose, though I’m nearly positive that it’s not what the drafters of Ontario Regulation 359/09 had in mind when they included a requirement for two public meetings, the first to have at least 30 days advance notice and once the draft Project Description Report has been completed, and the last to be held at least sixty days after the draft reports are released for public review. The timing and requirements for these meetings ensure that the public, first of all, gets plenty of notice that a project is brewing before anything is finalized and while they still have plenty of opportunity to provide input and affect the final outcome, and secondly, so that they have plenty of time to read over and respond to the reports before needing to attend a final meeting with their questions and concerns.

The drafters of these requirements hadn’t taken into account, I don’t think, a large and growing community of anti-wind activists willing to travel considerable distances to public meetings in far-flung communities in the apparent belief that anyone involved with a wind project must be acting in collusion with a corrupt industrial wind complex, in full knowledge of wind’s deadly impacts and with callous disregard for the interests of the local community.

For example, one might have a group of angry residents surrounding one at an initial public meeting, essentially mandated to be held before the final layout is known, demanding to know where the turbines and cables and access roads are going to go. Some of those residents may pull out their video camera to demand answers on tape, and when they don’t like the answers you provide, they might call you a liar. They might demand that you release confidential and private information about third parties. They might whip out their cameras to photograph yourself and your colleagues as you walk around the room, or talk to community members. They might even open a back door, thus letting in so many additional people that the Fire Marshal comes and shuts the meeting down. You won’t find that particular tidbit in this article, but you will find me if you read down far enough.

I’d like to stress, and I can’t stress it strongly enough, that this is a minority, and I recognize that. I’ve met and spoken with many people at these public meetings who, whether or not they support the projects, were wonderful people with valuable input. I love that. Those conversations are why we hold the meetings in the first place, and why we’ll continue to. I absolutely do not want to paint everyone who dislikes wind energy as boorish, aggressive or potentially violent. If I knew nothing about wind energy, found out a wind farm might be built within seeing distance of my home, and had access only to the most easily-available information I could find online, I might be scared and angry too. I can absolutely understand why people want a presentation and Q&A session, even as I understand why it’s generally not a good idea (i.e., the public meetings are supposed to be about information exchange, and we don’t get any feedback or information from the community when we’re on a stage defending wind energy for three hours). But understanding doesn’t help me figure out what to do. How do you have a conversation with someone who actually articulates an opinion that you are exactly the same as a tobacco industry PR rep covering up the scientific information that smoking causes cancer?

None of this makes sense if you believe that people make rational decisions based on full consideration of the evidence, but it all falls into place if you believe that they have chosen a source they believe is credible and accepted their conclusions as their own. It’s an issue of trust, as Manjoo describes. I must be cast as a villain or none of the anti-wind stuff makes sense; and once I am cast as a villain I deserve whatever I get at these meetings, including thinly-veiled threats.

~~~~~

About three and a half years ago, someone threatened me with death and forced sterilization because they didn’t like one of my daughter’s traits. The details aren’t relevant and it’s a painful episode that I’d rather not relive, but I have been thinking about it lately while processing these public meetings for reasons you may be able to intuit.

I remember too, feeling in the aftermath that whatever I did I could not retaliate–not because death threats don’t warrant it, but because that death threat was founded on a world view that saw an Us and Them defined by what I consider to be genetic trivia. If I retaliated, I believed, then I participated in the creation of that world, I reaffirmed that dividing line between my daughter’s humanity and his. This I refused to do. Like it or not, “Mike,” you and my daughter are both human.

I’m trying to hold on to the same perspective here. If I begin to deal with this small group of people as a Them, as an opposing force with which I need to do battle, then I reaffirm the dividing line they’ve drawn and entrench the distrust and the mentality of opposing sides that gave rise to the whole thing in the first place. I can’t fight them; I need to hold on to the underlying vision of a humanity and a cause that transcends politics and self-interest that got me into this field and this work in the first place. Like it or not, we are on the same side, part of the same species sharing the same fate on this isolated, fragile ecosphere.

I still don’t know what to say or how to say it, though. Expect a lot of rumination on this subject over the next little while. There must be information out there on how to open up a dialogue with someone who thinks you’re evil and wishes you were dead. And if I find it you’re sure to see it here eventually.