Edited by: Loren Knopper, Intrinsik Environmental Sciences, Canada
Reviewed by: Claire Lawrence, University of Nottingham, UK; Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen, Johns Hopkins University, USA
This article was submitted to Epidemiology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Public Health.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
A nocebo effect hypothesis has been proposed to explain variations in where small minorities of exposed residents complain about noise and health effects said to be caused by wind farm turbines. The hypothesis requires that those complaining have been exposed to negative, potentially frightening information about the impact of proposed wind farms on nearby residents, and that this information conditions both expectations about future health impacts or the etiology of current health problems where wind farms are already operational. This hypothesis has been confirmed experimentally under laboratory conditions, but case studies of how this process can operate in local communities are lacking. In this paper, we present a case study of the apparent impact of an anti-wind farm public meeting on the generation of negative news media and the subsequent expression of concerns about anticipated health and noise impacts to a planning authority approval hearing in Victoria, Australia. We present a content analysis of the negative claims disseminated about health and noise in the news media and available on the internet prior to the hearing, and another content analysis of all submissions made to the planning authority by those opposing the development application.
Australia’s first commercial wind farm commenced operation in 1987, in Western Australia. Over the next 27 years, some 52 farms ranging from small single turbine operations to a 120 turbine 420 MW farm in Victoria became operational (
News reports of a British rural doctor’s claims that wind farms were making people sick (
A 2013 audit of the history of health and noise complaints about wind farms (
The Waubra Foundation, together with several other local cells of opposition centered around a small number of wind farms in South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales, worked to spread their views about health impacts via local meetings, news media, and the internet. Two Senate enquiries (
Given that the variable spatio-temporal distribution of complaints about wind farms in Australia is incompatible with a direct causation theory of noise and health impacts, various psycho-social variables have been noted as being associated with complaining. These include pre-existing negative attitudes to wind farms (
A nocebo effect hypothesis has also been proposed to explain reported complaints about noise and health effects said to be caused by wind turbines (
In this paper, we present a case study of news media and other disseminated negative information and personal testimonies in the months prior to an administrative tribunal hearing to consider objections to the proposed Cherry Tree Range wind farm in rural Victoria, Australia. Australian census data show that the three settlements nearest to the proposed wind farm have the following populations: Trawool (376 dwellings with 789 people), Whitehead’s Creek (159 dwellings with 373 people), and Seymour, 15 km away (2,923 dwellings with 6,370 people). This short video shows views from the planned site for the 16 turbine, 50 MW wind farm
We present a content analysis of the claims disseminated about health and noise prior to the hearing, and summarize references to future health concerns subsequently made in all public submissions to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) by those opposing the development application. The developer, Infigen, had taken the issue to VCAT for a decision as the Mitchell Shire Council had not delivered a response about planning permission within the specified timeframe. The Cherry Tree wind farm has not yet been constructed but our data provide baseline information about those publicly expressing beliefs about their concerns about future illness for subsequent potential corroboration of the nocebo hypothesis.
Sources of negative information, which might have primed residents to feel concerned about noise and health issues include news media reports and correspondence, a local meeting organized by the wind farm opponents and negative information from the internet, in addition to dissemination of this information through social networks in the area.
All coverage of the proposed wind farm was obtained from a commercial media monitoring company (iSentia) for the period November 9, 2011 through to February 28, 2013. This covered the period from the project’s public announcement until soon after the commencement of the VCAT hearings. Google News was also searched over the same period, using combinations of the search terms (“Cherry Tree”, Cherry Tree, Infigen, “wind farm”). The records retrieved included news, letters, and editorials in local district, state, and national newspapers, but not local radio or statewide television. This material was examined for any negative content about noise and/or health issues under three broad concerns and this data plotted against the total number of items retrieved by the search terms.
The three concerns used to classify items were expressions of concern, or direct assertions:
that the wind farm would have a direct impact on human health (“Health”) that the wind farm would generate audible noise that would cause annoyance or impact on quality of life (“Noise”) that the wind farm would have a direct impact on human health through inaudible noise in the infrasonic range (“Infrasound”).
Figure
On August 28, 2012, a newly proclaimed local anti-wind farm group, the Trawool Valley Landscape Guardians (TWLG), organized a public meeting at Trawool, a small settlement near the proposed site. There was an estimated attendance of 100. The meeting was addressed by two residents (Donald Thomas and Noel Dean) who have property near the Waubra Wind Farm, a road distance of 230 km from Trawool; Max Rheese, a member of the Australian Environment Foundation, an activist group skeptical of global warming and opposed to wind energy; and Steve Campbell, then chief of staff to Senator John Madigan, a minor party politician outspoken in his opposition to wind farms (
A video produced by the Waubra Foundation was shown at the meeting
The internet also provides ready access to an abundance of claims about diseases and symptoms said to occur in humans and animals exposed to wind turbines. Some 236 such problems have been cataloged since a collection began in early 2012 (
Submissions made to the VCAT are public documents. These were searched for opposing submissions made to the “Cherry Tree Wind Farm Pty Ltd v Mitchell Shire Council” consideration of an application by Infigen Energy to construct and operate a 16 turbine wind farm known as Cherry Tree, near the top of a 550 m ridge, some 12 km from the town on Seymour in Victoria. Seventy five opposing submissions were examined for any mention of health concerns, with other concerns also being recorded (see Table
Quote | Source |
---|---|
“After attending the urgent community meeting regarding the Cherry Tree wind farm proposal, we are now more than ever gravely concerned members of the community” | Letter from four residents. Seymour Telegraph, September 12 2012 |
“The major concern of the audience was health including sleep deprivation, increased blood pressure, heart racing, nosebleeds, and constant headaches derived from the noise, vibration, and infrasound produced from the 160 m turbines” | Seymour Nagambie Advertiser, September 4 2012 |
“Headaches, wanting to vomit all the time, pains in the chest, blood pressure, can’t sleep, sleeping tablets do nothing for you” | Resident featured in Waubra Foundation video screened at Trawool meeting |
“Really bad chest pains in the night, and a lot of blood noses, I’d be asleep and then wake up, and my nose would be bleeding. It’s just pretty scary stuff” | Resident featured in Waubra Foundation video screened at Trawool meeting |
“Symptoms have been consistently reported in Australia, up to 10 kilometers from homes. Most symptoms disappear when people leave the area, or when the turbines are switched off” | Waubra Foundation video screened at Trawool meeting |
[There’s] “not a single credible research paper in the peer reviewed literature stating that chronic wind turbine noise is harmless to human health but there is now over a dozen peer reviewed papers that say the opposite” | Max Rheese, climate change skeptic, wind farm opponent, at Trawool meeting |
“It’s the most bizarre thing. It just sounds so weird but you lay down and you can hear the turbines in your pillow” | Waubra resident Donald Thomas, speaking at Trawool meeting |
Of 126 media articles retrieved, 41 (33%) contained concerns about the health impacts of the proposed wind farm. Ninety five per cent of these were published after the anti-wind farm TWLG meeting in August 2012. Figure
Using the 5 different search strings, 27 different sites were retrieved in the top 10 hits thus returned. Of these 8 (30%) were stories or pages, which described negative health impacts of wind farms, and 2 were ranked in the top 10 weighted click-ranked sites. The cumulative weighted click rank score of these negative sites was 134 representing 36.6% of the 366.6 clink rank score for sites that did not give mention or emphasis to negative health issues (see Table
Site | Google page rank on five search strings* |
Click rank | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | – | 147.6 | |
4 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 77.7 | |
– | – | – | – | 1 | 32.5 | |
3 | 5 | 4 | 5 | – | 31.7 | |
– | – | 2 | 3 | – | 29.0 | |
6 | 6 | 10 | 7 | 3 | 26.1 | |
2 | – | – | 9 | – | 20.2 | |
– | 3 | 5 | – | – | 17.9 | |
– | – | – | – | 2 | 17.6 | |
8 | 7 | 6 | 6 | – | 15.4 | |
5 | – | – | 4 | – | 14.2 | |
– | – | – | – | 3 | 11.4 | |
– | 4 | – | – | – | 8.1 | |
– | 9 | 7 | – | – | 6.1 | |
– | – | – | – | 5 | 6.1 | |
– | 10 | – | 8 | – | 5.9 | |
– | – | 8 | 10 | – | 5.5 | |
– | – | – | – | 6 | 4.4 | |
– | – | – | – | 7 | 3.5 | |
7 | – | – | – | – | 3.5 | |
– | 8 | – | – | – | 3.1 | |
– | – | – | – | 8 | 3.1 | |
– | – | 9 | – | – | 2.6 | |
– | – | – | – | 9 | 2.6 | |
10 | – | – | – | – | 2.4 | |
– | – | – | – | 10 | 2.4 |
There were 75 submissions made from 53 households (some sent separate submissions by different family members). Of the 53, 14 came from Trawool households (representing 3.7% of residences), 16 from Whitehead’s Creek 9.5 km away from the site (10.1% of residences), and 13 from Seymour, 12.7 km away (0.4% of residences). Three were sent from Melbourne addresses (110 km away) and two from known interstate anti-wind farm activists (although interestingly, one used a local address in the area). The remaining five were from hamlets at direct distances ranging from 4.6 to 26.4 km from the proposed wind farm site.
All but one submission mentioned health concerns, with reduced visual amenity and bird deaths also being commonly mentioned. Thirty three (44%) of submissions together named 28 different symptoms or health concerns, with the most common being sleep problems (17 mentions), headache/migraine (
Concerns expressed | |
---|---|
General concern about health impacts | 74 (99) |
Concern that sound or noise will cause health impacts | 58 (77) |
Specific symptoms, illnesses named | 33 (44) |
Anticipated abandonment of home | 17 (23) |
More research needed on health impacts | 17 (23) |
Blade glint/shadow flicker | 14 (19) |
Concerns pre-existing illness will worsen | 11 (15) |
Electromagnetic interference | 10 (13) |
Comparisons with tobacco, asbestos or lead as previously benign re health | 4 (5) |
Visual amenity marred | 57 (76) |
Fire risk | 47 (63) |
Traffic and access problems | 37 (49) |
Loss of tourism | 21 (28) |
Decline in local business | 15 (20) |
Fauna deaths (esp. birds) | 64 (85) |
Flora destruction | 37 (49) |
Community divisiveness | 16 (21) |
Concern over wind company’s multi-national status | 15 (20) |
Belief wind farms are uneconomic | 12 (16) |
Across the 75 opposing submissions, there were many examples of people expressing concern after having been exposed to alarming, negative claims, and testimonies from victims, and scientists and doctors. These were often sourced from the anti-wind farm movement, and particularly the Waubra Foundation, and the TWLG public meeting.
For example:
“ “
Exposure to people claiming to have been made ill by turbine exposure was repeatedly mentioned: “
Many submissions referred to “research conducted by the Waubra Foundation,” despite the organization having recently declared that they do not conduct medical research: “From research from the conducted Waubra Foundation[
Wind farm opponents have circulated the factoid that “over 40” Australian families have abandoned their homes (
The specter of a distant and venal transnational corporation putting profits over local residents’ health was raised in 20% of submissions. The company concerned, Infigen, operates wind farms in Australia and the USA. Significantly, Australia’s only community-owned wind farm at St Leonards Hill also in Victoria has not been spared minority opposition despite its ownership status. “
Three quarters of submissions expressed concern that existing health problems would be exacerbated: “
One submission referred directly to claims made by the two Waubra residents who had addressed the meeting: “
Our results describe the dramatic increase in expressed concerns about health and other issues published in local news media immediately following a public meeting organized and addressed by dedicated opponents of wind farms from outside the area. The meeting exposed the small proportion of local residents in attendance to a powerful mixture of sometimes emotional testimony from two complainants from another community, and to contributions from the Waubra Foundation presumably intended to provoke health concerns in those attending and in the social networks with whom they were connected. Our data show that anyone searching the internet in Australia for information on health and wind farms will readily find negative material published by opponents.
Confirmation bias is a well-documented cognitive heuristic where people search for, interpret, and prioritize information in ways that confirm their beliefs (
Victim testimony can be a powerful ingredient in fomenting anxiety in those exposed to their claims. As has been noted in a study of Dutch media coverage “Scientists, technicians, and experts get significantly less space, than laypeople, government, industry, and interest groups, in media coverage of EMF health impacts.” So here too, local news media highlighted this ingredient in its reportage: “
An audience member thanked the speakers and said “
The Waubra wind farm commenced operation May 2009, so Mr. Dean would appear to have been in rehabilitation for a head injury for some 5–6 years prior to that time and still required this care during the period in which he attributed various adverse health conditions to his exposure to the turbines near his property. He once told another anti-wind farm meeting at Baringhup in Victoria that electricity generated by wind turbines started charging his cell phone without it being plugged in “
The meeting provided attendees no exposure to the many who live near wind farms who have no noise or health complaints. A selection of such people from the Waubra area can be seen on this video
The Trawool public meeting provided a concentrated and memorable set of highly negative claims that were followed by a surge in media local reportage, although only one-third of this raised negative issues about wind farms and noise or health. However, in total, objections submitted to VCAT were sent by members of only 53 residences out of 3458 (1.5%) in the Trawool, Whitehead’s Creek and Seymour townships. Australian qualitative research of attitudes toward wind farms in nine eastern Australian wind farm communities found there was “strong community support for the development of wind farms, including support from rural residents who do not seek media attention or political engagement to express their views.” (
There was considerable evidence of shared identical wording among submissions. For example, six contained an identical paragraph disputing the wind company’s statement that the noise of wind turbines would be comparable to background noise at a beach. These similarities suggested networking between opponents.
The VCAT decision has since allowed the wind farm to proceed. Of health considerations, VCAT rejected direct causation hypotheses about wind turbines and adverse health outcomes, implying that psychogenic variables were relevant to understanding such experiences:
“The Tribunal has no doubt that some people who live close to a wind turbine experience adverse health effects, including sleep disturbance. The current state of scientific opinion is that there is no causal link of a physiological nature between these effects and the turbine.” and that “The totality of material before the Tribunal suggests, but does not conclusively prove, that these effects are suffered by only a small proportion of the population surrounding a wind farm.” and “The position now, as then, stated by the NHMRC in summary, is that there is no evidence that wind turbines cause adverse health effects.” (
Every Australian planning case to date considering the issue of “wind turbine syndrome” has found the evidence offered by proponents of the disease to be insufficient (
The continued prominence of this issue in wind energy planning cases is linked not to legal utility but more likely to the resonance of received negative information about health impacts of wind farms, and its subsequent repetition through news media and in submissions. This effect is likely to reflect the various “fright factors” that characterize environmental threats with greater propensity to cause outrage in communities. These include factors such as involuntary exposure, perceived inequitable or unfair distribution of risk, “industrial” rather than “natural” risks, untrustworthy sources, and dreaded consequences (
An under-explored component of the mechanics of nocebo priming is the attribution of symptoms commonly found in any community to exposure to feared or disliked technology like wind turbines. A recent New Zealand study found that sleep problems, headache, and anxiety, among the most common symptoms mentioned in the Cherry Tree submissions, occur in 28.6, 35.4, and 14.1% of the population, respectively (
The VCAT submissions and signed letters to local newspapers by those opposing the Cherry Tree wind farm are all public documents. As such, they provide researchers with data that may be useful in testing the hypothesis that the nocebo priming we have reported translates into symptom reporting after the wind farm commences operation. A future study might select residents living a similar distances to the wind farm who had not attended the “frightening” anti-wind farm meeting and who had no or poor recall of any local media coverage of likely adverse health effects. The symptom profiles of this group could then be compared to those who had made submissions to VCAT as a “real world” test of nocebo priming.
Finally, it is interesting to compare the Cherry Tree Wind Farm development with the Coonooer Bridge Wind Farm, developed and approved at a similar time in Victoria. The latter utilized a community sharing model to distribute income equitably among wind farm neighbors. A scientist from the CSIRO noted in media coverage of the two projects: “When we dug a little deeper, we often found their opposition was based more on concerns about process” (
We suggest that research into anti-wind activism comparing varied models of wind energy development will lead to greater knowledge of the dynamics and predictors of health fears around large-scale clean technology projects.
Simon Chapman provided and was remunerated for expert advice on psychogenic aspects of wind farm health complaints by lawyers acting for Infigen Energy in the Cherry Tree VCAT case described in this paper. Ketan Joshi is employed by Infigen Energy. Luke Fry has no conflicts of interest to declare.
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