Sunday, March 09, 2008

"If there is such a thing as a clever fool, she is one!" -- Geoff Leventhall, PhD

... why is Nina Pierpont, a country doctor, doing the work of the Centers for Disease Control, the NYS Department of Health, the US Dept. of Health & Human Services, innumerable schools of public health affiliated with medical schools, etc.? I'd like a realistic answer, please. (I fear the real answer is devastating.)

Why is she spending her time and treasure interviewing the physician beside himself from the Wind Turbine Syndrome he suffers living on the farm he and his wife labored over for years? (When I say “suffering,” I mean suffering.) This evening she interviews a family that raises prize horses, the other day it was farmers in Norway, last week families in Ireland. Before that, England & Wales. And don't forget the people she interviews throughout Canada, the American Midwest, the Northeast, and so forth. It's endless. It's only beginning.

They all have the symptoms. They all wish to leave their homes, or have left them (read: abandoned them or been bought out at absurdly low prices by the wind developers). I am not a clinician, as you know. I took the call last evening from the desperate father who sent this email:

The noise is overwhelming.
The shadows are more than annoying.
Our equity has been destroyed.
Our dreams of building a new home have been crushed.
We have attorneys working on a settlement, and/or a lawsuit.
Can you all help us ?
Do you have any suggestions ?

I did a preliminary interview, to see if he was a candidate for Nina’s study. It was amazing how I could go down the checklist of symptoms and know what he had before he told me. He seemed surprised, relieved, and somewhat embarrassed (when it gets to the part about feeling their guts vibrating, people think they might be making it up: they're not). I didn't press him on memory loss; that's always the most painful revelation, Nina tells me.

Again, why is it a country doctor in upstate New York doing this? On no budget. In her "spare" time. (Hint: country doctors don't have spare time.)

The wind developers hire a man named Geoff Leventhall, PhD (physics, University of London), who presumes to pronounce judgment on Nina’s handling of clinical medicine. (She’s a Johns Hopkins-trained physician, not to mention a Princeton PhD in population biology.) He writes in a recent, widely circulated email, "If there is such a thing as a clever fool, she is one!" The man with no training (we are aware of) in anything clinical. The paid consultant to wind developers.

Nina Pierpont, the “clever fool” who stands up to the multi-billion-dollar global wind industry. Why? Where's the support?

Calvin Luther Martin

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