Biodiversity, motherhood and Industrial Wind Turbines: the Transformers
Administrator | May 04, 2012 | Comments 4
When my son was five years old he developed a passion for “Transformers” toys… those little mechanical looking gizmos that could be manipulated by moving and reconfiguring various parts to look like animals, monster robots, and futuristic vehicles and machines etc.. They seemed to inspire a great deal of imaginative, creative play. It occurred to me that if the pro Industrial Wind Turbine (IWT) development folk created some of these toys which in the shape of IWTs could be transformed into the various species of birds that frequently meet their fate in the swirling blades of real IWTs they will have taken their deceptively trite presentation of IWT development as a “motherhood” issue to its ultimate expression… “look mommy, the windmills make birdies”… it’s just so adorable and cute when the children go “green”. Motherhood incorporated into IWT development propaganda, as illustrated by deceptive descriptive language terms such as windmills, wind farms, green, renewable, and made as entreaties on behalf of our “children and grandchildren”, future generations, is after all more compelling than the nebulous inconvenient truth. Using toys to get at these malleable human minds at a young age would also help establish insidious conditioning to ideological visions. As I recall these Transformers toys came in themed series’ of a dozen or so. This one could be themed the “biodiversity” series, allowing for them to be further transformed into other animal or plant life forms, perhaps those whose habitats have been damaged/destroyed by IWT developments. They could even do battle with the anti IWT development “forces”. The technomachine illusion in all its glory.
I use this example because it has come to my attention that Industrial Wind Turbine development advocates have made pretense to “understanding” biodiversity in ecological reference. In fact, some of the aforementioned actually promote IWT development as a manner in which to maintain/sustain biodiversity. Curious, I and many thousands of others have spent years studying theoretical and statistical paradigms engaging the conceptual framework of biodiversity, understanding that as a scientific paradigm it cannot be controlled or comprehensively analytically understood because of the complexity and interaction of the multitude of possible variables. Contemporary “Chaos theory” gives scientific reference to this natural evolutionary phenomena. No human, no matter how developed their cortex or their ego can understand biodiversity in any significant analytical predictive way. The “naturalists” among us come closest to an intuitive response/recognition of its ethereal beauty and necessity.
Perhaps the most truly environmentally “green” aspect of these Wind Turbine Transformers toys could be realized if they were made from hemp plastics. Not only would they have real carbon capture utility, unlike the actual Industrial Wind Turbines that they model, they would be biodegradable as well.
David Norman, Rogue Primate of Bloomfield
Filed Under: Letters and Opinion
Dear Peter, thank you for your reference to Jonathan Swift. It caused me to recall his essay “An argument against abolishing Christianity” which I had occasion to read a few decades back. In it, there are some interesting juxtapositions of rhetorical arguments which in my perception, relate to pro and anti Industrial Wind Turbine sectarian factions. My local pro IWT organization, the “County Sustainability Group” provides an entertaining example in this regard. They present a “religious” sectarian like orthodoxy… and there is a presumed salvation and idolatry like worship of these giant IWT ecological crucifixes. They have even associated themselves with a particular Christian Church, where they hold their meetings and presentations. As an aside, if the “reformer or heathen” anti-IWT folk in my County are unable to hold back this IWT invasion, I can imagine the pro-sect attempting to decree that these IWTs will be shut down on a “Sabbath” in an attempt to placate those who “imagine” that they are suffering from their presence and to remind them of their power in its denial, albeit, electrical. According to Swift’s notion in this essay that humanity has an inborn “spirit of opposition”, factions like the County Sustainability Group are a necessary arbitrary sectarian distinction and serve to satiate this inherent predilection. And so I engage this absurdity in the only way I know how.
This perspective is refreshingly satirical: a needed salvo in the argument against industrial wind turbines, which reminds me of the essay written by Jonathan Swift in 18th Century Ireland. In the essay, the author argues that a possible solution to overpopulation could be that society simply condones eating newborn children: a practical way to solve both hunger and overpopulation at the same time! So, the concept of “transformer turbine birds” just might have “legs”. . . or I guess that should read . . . “wings”. Thank you, Rogue Primate of Bloomfield. If satire were NOT a powerful social tool we would never remember Mr. Swift hundreds of years after he lived.
Biodiversity—maybe we should send Mr. Harper and Mr, McGinty a definition of this word,
Why–because both of them in their most recent budgets are attempting to kill the biodiversity of this planet
How–by taking away all the environmental safeguards that have been put in place over the years. They have no concern for thr water we drinkand the air we breathe.
Man is the greatest threat to our biodiversity. Our footprint on this planet is becoming larger and larger.
We must have respect for our natural environment.
I noticed tonight that a mourning dove has made a nest in one of my hanging pots on the porch. It has 2 eggs in it so now that hanging pot will have to stay there for the summer even though a larger one was to replace it in a couple of weeks. Moving one pot will destroy one life while one turnine will destroy hundreds of lives. It is my duty to save that one life and it is our duty to save the hundreds of birds and other species. We must not let government and big business and big oil ruin our world
Maybe we should insist that any IWTs built, be made from hemp plastics and other biodegradable materials, so that after 20 years they just dissolve away.