John Barry, Geraint Ellis and Clive Robinson

Cool Rationalities and Hot Air: A Rhetorical Approach to
         Understanding Debates on Renewable Energy1

               John Barry, Geraint Ellis and Clive Robinson
Abstract
A key obstacle to the wide-scale development of renewable energy is that public
acceptability of wind energy cannot be taken for granted when wind energy moves
from abstract support to local implementation. Drawing on a case study of opposition
to the siting of a proposed off-shore wind farm in Northern Ireland, we offer a
rhetorical analysis of a series of representative documents drawn from government,
media, pro- and anti-wind energy sources, which identifies and interprets a number of
discourses of objection and support. The analysis indicates that the key issue in terms
of the transition to a renewable energy economy has little to do with the technology
itself. Understanding the different nuances of pro and anti wind discourses highlights
the importance of ‘upsteaming’ public involvement in the decision-making process
and also the counter-productive strategy of assuming that objection is based on
ignorance (which can be solved by information) of NIMBY thinking (which can be
solved by moral arguments about overcoming ‘free riders’)..

Introduction
Against the backdrop of increasingly public and policy saliency of climate change and
energy choices, the transition to a renewable energy economy has long been taken for
granted as a necessary aspect of the transition to a post-carbon world. Renewable
energy technologies such as solar, wind (on and off-shore), wave, biomass and tidal
have been promoted, researched and significant public and private sources of funding
have been invested into making these renewable energy technologies both
commercially viable and competitive when judged against conventional fossil-fuel
sources of energy such as coal, oil and gas. Equally, alongside this policy level
consensus around the need for societies to begin the transition towards a post-carbon
energy economy, there are high levels of public acceptance of the need for renewable
energy in relation to adapting to climate change and ensuring energy security.2

However, while much research has been devoted to the issues of the technological and
commercial viability of renewable energy technologies, less research has been
conducted into the following dilemma – while there is general public support for
renewable energy technologies, this sits side by side with significant localised and
organised opposition to these technologies.3 As the UK’s Sustainable Development
Commission notes, “Wind power development arouses strong opinions. For the

1
  This research has been funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (Grant Ref: 000-
22-1095) and its support is gratefully acknowledged. Further outputs from this study and detailed data
related to this article are available at: http://www.qub.ac.uk/research-centres/REDOWelcome/.
Address for correspondence Dr. John Barry, School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy,
Queens University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, email:j.barry@qub.ac.uk.
2
  Times 2005; MORI 2004; ICM 2004.
3
  Bell, Gray and Haggett 2005; Haggett 2004.

general public, a high level of support nationally for wind power can be contrasted
with opposition at the local level”.4

In this paper we explore the issue of opposition and support for off-shore wind energy
in the United Kingdom, as articulated in a selection of pro- and anti- publications,
ranging from official government and wind industry documents to publications from
anti-wind farm local groups and organisations. This sample of key texts is analysed
to establish some of the prominent discourses on this issue at a variety of geographic
scales (national, regional, local) and from a variety of stakeholders – government,
developers, opponents, the media. This analysis is based on the principle that views
of renewable energy are articulated in a variety of discourses, each of which rests on
certain assumptions, values and judgements about the world and which are shared by
those with similar motives and intents to provide ‘discourse coalitions’.5 This post-
empiricist methodological approach is grounded in the awareness that language does
not simply mirror the world, but instead actively creates and constructs the world.
The use of language thus carries power in the way in which discourses can suppress
or advance different interests. This becomes particularly evident in the context of
policy debates, when different stakeholders engage a whole range of discursive
strategies to further their arguments, to persuade others of their position or to
undermine, ridicule or otherwise weaken the positions of others.

Rhetorical Analysis
“He who does not study rhetoric will be a victim of it” found on a Greek wall from
the 6th Century B.C.

In its broadest sense, rhetoric concerns both the practice and study of effective and
persuasive communication with a specific purpose or intent on behalf of the speaker
or writer. Hauser offers the following definition:

        Rhetoric, as an area of study, is concerned with how humans use symbols,
        especially language, to reach agreement that permits coordinated effort of
        some sort. In its most basic form, rhetorical communication occurs whenever
        one person engages another in an exchange of symbols to accomplish some
        goal. It is not communication for communication’s sake; rhetorical
        communication, at least implicitly and often explicitly, attempts to coordinate
        social action. For this reason, rhetorical communication always contains a
        pragmatic intent. Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters
        that require attention, often immediately. Such communication is designated to
        achieve desired consequences in the relative short run. Finally, rhetoric is most
        intensely concerned with managing verbal symbols, whether spoken or
        written.6

The significance of rhetoric cannot be underestimated since it is a key way in which
people are persuaded or convinced of another’s position or brought around to another

4
  Sustainable Development Commission 2005: ii.
5
  Szarka 2004.
6
  Hauser 2002, 2-3. Emphasis added

point of view or dissuaded from their existing or another point of view.7 Its
significance in political life has long been recognised from the ancient Greeks on.
Aristotle’s three books On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse are some of the
earliest and still relevant texts on the subject. For Aristotle, rhetoric is about
persuasion: “It is clear, then, that rhetorical study, in its strict sense, is concerned
with the modes of persuasion. Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we
are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated”.8

This link between persuasion and demonstration helps us understand why effective
public communication depends on having a clear vision of what one wants to
convince one’s audience of and also explains the advantages of pithy and memorable
statements and the appropriate use of metaphors and similes over over-long, technical
and detailed exposition. For Aristotle there are three types of persuasion: “Of the
modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first
kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the
audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof,
provided by the words of the speech itself”.9 These can be summarised as ethos,
pathos and logos.

For our purposes it is also significant to place rhetorical analysis in relation to both
the ‘linguistic turn’ in social scientific research (and policy-related research in
particular) but more specifically in relation to understanding this ‘linguistic turn’ in
terms of ‘argumentation’ and contestation. This is because (most) policy and political
developments, proposals and interventions rarely enjoy consensus but either reflect or
reproduce underlying social dissensus.            This is particularly the case with
technologically-based economic innovation which invariably generates ‘winners’ and
‘losers’, as well as often raising difficult ethical questions and leading to value-based
political debate and conflict, which liberal democracies often find difficult to contain
deal with, particularly in relation to the distribution of costs and benefits arising from
the innovation.10

Social psychologist Michael Billig has made the point about needing to see the ‘text’
(of a speech, written document or other communicative text) within its argumentative
‘context’. As he puts it:

         [T]o understand the meaning of a sentence or whole discourse in an
         argumentative context, one should not examine merely the words within that
         discourse or the images in the speaker's mind at the moment of utterance. One
         should also consider the positions which are being criticised, or against which
         a justification is being mounted. Without knowing these counter-positions, the
         argumentative meaning will be lost.11

Against theorists such as Habermas who lay emphasis on the regulative concept of an
‘ideal speech situation’ - understood as a discursive context within which the ‘force of

7
   Rhetorical analysis is related to discourse analysis and in this paper we use the two interchangeably.
For environmental policy-related examples of discourse analysis, see Hajer 1995 and Fischer 2000.
8
  Aristotle 2004, Book 1, chapter 1: 1355b
9
  Aristotle 2004, Book 1, chapter 2: 1356a.
10
   Fischer 2004; Sclove 1995.
11
   Billig 1987, 91.

the better argument’ holds (roughly equating to Aristotle’s logos based mode of
rhetorical persuasion) - Aristotle reminds us that in the real and non-ideal world of
discourse, communication and language use (particularly in political debate and
argument), an individual’s moral character (or perception of moral character) or
ability and skill in speaking to or ‘tuning into’ an audience’s emotional state are
equally – if not – more widely used and effective. Given one of the constitutive
aspects of the study and the practice of environmental or green politics is to both
engage in political activity (through conventional and unconventional means); and
that a central aspect of that political engagement is the (political and democratic)
persuasion of citizens, policy-makers, business interests and other stakeholders of the
normative rightness and scientific credibility of the need for a different type of social
organisation – based around the (contested) concept of sustainability – it is surprising
that there has not been more work on the relationship between the art of rhetoric and
green/environmental politics. There have been some explorations12 which use
rhetorical analysis and green theory, and other more activist-orientated analyses that
look at marketing and ‘branding’ green politics and issues13, and some use of
rhetorical analysis within environmental policy discourse.14 However, on the whole
there has been relatively little research on the role/s of political rhetoric in relation to
green politics and the politics of sustainability more widely. In this article we seek to
demonstrate the significance of rhetorical analysis for renewable energy development,
itself a key aspect of the politics of sustainability in general but also we feel with
particular relevance to green/environmental politics.

So to conclude this brief overview – a rhetorical approach views language as an
expression of argument and persuasion, so that any discourse will show how its
originator (speaker or writer) sees the world and attempts to persuade others to adopt
similar standpoints or to dissuade them of other opposing standpoints. Rhetoric helps
identify this process of argumentation by clarifying the resources, devices and
techniques the originator deploys in putting her message across, the creativity of
language used, the understanding of context and the claims she makes on rationality,
the moral standing of the speaker/proposer, the justness or rightness of her argument
and the unjustness or irrationality of other positions, arguments and viewpoints. This
has exciting, but under researched, potential for application in a range of
environmental disputes, but none so pressing as the current push to expand the wind
energy sector in the UK and indeed throughout the world. The main ‘blockage’ to this
expansion appears not to be technological or financial, but in terms of local opposition
wind farms proposals.15 A first stage in exploring the nature of such debates is to
understand how each protagonist in this conflict expresses their aims, concerns and
fears, from which a deeper understanding of the respective positions can be gained,
the starting point for any conflict resolution process.

Wind Energy related Texts Chosen for Rhetorical Analysis
Twelve texts were chosen to represent archetypal examples of policy argumentation,
and as such can be analysed and interpreted through a study of the rhetoric and

12
   Lane, forthcoming; Torgerson 1999.
13
   Gordon 2002.
14
   Hajer, 1995; Fischer, 2004
15
   DTI 2003; Toke 2005; Beddoe and Chamberlain 2003; Strachan et al 2006; Sustainable
Development Commission 2005.

rhetorical devices they employ. As such, rhetorical analysis is ideal for understanding
how different stakeholders or interested parties contest the issues around wind farm
development, with the variety of discourses deployed over such developments saying
much about the different interpretations of wind farm development, and the power
held (or assumed) by the different stakeholders engaged in the debate.

The texts selected as a sample of the different discourse coalitions at local, regional
and national spatial scales were:

a) Policy documents produced by government and regulatory agencies dealing with
   windfarm development:
   - Text 1: Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2004) PPG 22: Renewable
       Energy.
   - Text 2: Department of Enterprise Trade and Investment (2003) Energy White
       Paper.
   - Text 3: Department of Enterprise Trade and Investment Northern Ireland
       (2001), Renewable Energy in Northern Ireland: Realising the Potential.

b) Promotional material issued by developers and supporters of windfarm proposals:
   - Text 4: UK Sustainable Development Commission (2005) Wind power in the
      UK.
   - Text 5: British Wind Energy Association (nd): Frequently Asked Questions
   - Text 6: B9, Powergen, RES (2002): Tunes Plateau: Northern Ireland’s
      Proposed Offshore Wind Farm: Outline Project Description.

c) Campaign material developed by those opposed to windfarm development.
   - Text 7: Coleraine Borough Council (2002): ‘Possibly the Right Solution?
     Definitely the Wrong Site’.
   - Text 8: ‘Invasion of the Wind Turbines’ Moriston Matters (2003)
   - Text 9: J. R. Etherington/Country Guardian (2006) The Case against Wind
     ‘Farms’

d) Local and national media reports relating to windfarm development:
   - Text 10: Leake, J. ‘Invasion of the Wind Farms’, The Times (24/4/05)
   - Text 11: Vidal, J. ‘An Ill Wind’, The Guardian (7/5/04)
   - Text 12: Crowely, M. Tilting at Windmills’, Derry Journal (6/9/02)

The results of this analysis are summarised below.

Opposition Discourse Themes
There are a number of themes we can identify in the discourses of opposition in the
examined texts. These include:

Sacrifice and Disempowerment

This discourse places strong emphasis on place-based local values (including both a
sense of the importance of local sea and landscape, and associated community identity
associated with those). It sees these values and the physical environment and the
social/community practices upon which they are based as being scarified for national

or global ends. A clear expression of this position is Leake’s question as to “whether
Britain should be preserving its landscape or saving the world from global warming.
Is the loss of some of our most beautiful views a reasonable price to pay for the
renewable energy that could tackle climate change?”.16

Typical of the statements found in this opposition discourse are the following passage
from Simon Jenkins:

        There lies the complete Cader range: an unsullied panorama of British
        landscape from the heights above Bala round to the shores of Cardigan Bay. I
        have gazed on this view since childhood and even the Forestry Commission’s
        set-square plantations failed to ruin it. Today the view has been defaced
        beyond belief… Across its summit now march 24 gigantic white wind-
        turbines. Like creatures from The War of the Worlds, they frantically wave
        their arms across the scenery… Nobody with an ounce of respect for the
        countryside could have permitted their erection.17

This rhetorical device presents both the proposed sites for wind energy development
and the communities who live there as being vulnerable, threatened and facing larger
more powerful opponents. Within anti-wind power discourses there is a consistent
theme of local interests being (relatively, though not completely) powerless against
large centralised and impersonal forces of central government or big business. Thus,
rhetorically these anti-wind farm texts seek to present the anti wind-energy position as
‘Davids’ facing renewable energy ‘Goliaths’ – variously identified as renewable
energy corporations, the state and/or wind industry lobby organisations and
supporters, including (some parts of) the environmental movement.

Prominent throughout anti-wind farm rhetoric is the discourse of the sacrifice and
despoliation of pristine and beautiful natural environments. We find phrases such as
“the desecration of beauty and the destruction of, and introduction of unwarranted risk
to, otherwise unspoilt natural territory” and “This sacrifice, therefore, is the basis of
large corporate profits”.18 The vulnerability and powerlessness of local defenders of
these areas of natural beauty is also graphically described. An example is from
Cameron McNeish (head of the Scottish Ramblers Association) who writes of his
personal helplessness at the ‘theft’ of his children’s birthright in the name of ‘green
energy’.

        As I lay by the small summit cairn and allowed the vastness of this wild
        landscape to percolate my own spirit I’m afraid I cried. I wept tears of
        frustration at man’s arrogance and greed. I wept tears of helplessness that
        people like me, to whom these wild places mean everything, couldn’t
        effectively fight the political/corporate forces that are determined to steal
        Scotland’s soul in the name of green energy. And I wept tears of genuine
        sorrow that my children’s children wouldn’t enjoy these places as I have
        done.19

16
   Leake 2005
17
   Jenkins, in Etherington 2006, 19. Emphasis added.
18
   Cowley 2002.
19
   McNeish in Etherington 2006, 20.

Such personal and highly emotionally charged forms of rhetoric are clearly designed
to invite the reader to feel sympathy with the plight of the individual (and the
argument he represents), this deploying ‘pathos’ (one of the three main modes of
rhetorical persuasion as outlined by Aristotle above) and instilling a particular
positive emotional reaction in the audience. In the statement from McNeish above we
get a mental picture of the lone (heroic and noble) individual defending a ‘birthright’
from faceless, powerful ‘outside’ forces. This trope of a rightful minority resisting
more powerful opponents is of course a dominant one in western culture, literature20,
art and history, and this theme of ‘outsider’ versus ‘indigenous’ or ‘local’ is discussed
further below.

Lack of trust in Government, Regulatory Processes and Windfarm Developers

Throughout the analysed texts there is a common theme of a lack of trust in
government and regulatory agencies and wind energy developers and supporters.
This varies from mild scepticism to outright mistrust of the public institutions
involved in windfarm promotion or regulation and the motives and intentions of
windfarm developers. In some discourses (such as Etherington’s document) there is
also scepticism about the science and economics behind not just wind energy, but also
about the scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change (Etherington, 2006:
45-52). This involves recourse of alternative ‘authoritative’ knowledge and science,
pragmatic appeals to ‘common sense’ and pragmatism, and the deployment of the
language of rights and democratic participation to claim that wind farms cannot
simply be ‘imposed’ from outside on unwilling communities and citizens. Part of this
distrust in public institutions is discursively presented as the government actively
supporting (via subsidies) or being forced to support (via its commitments to EU and
global climate change policies and treaties) the ‘urgent’ development of wind energy.
This is portrayed by opponents of wind energy as being a ‘wind rush’ (Vidal, 2004) in
which the state has created an artificial and subsidised commercial environment for
quick profits at the expense of other energy solutions and against the express wishes
of local communities and environments affected. This taps into the populist suspicion
that we live, ultimately, in a corporatist state, with big business and lobby groups
having privileged access to government decision-makers, thus compounding the hurt
felt by wind farm objectors – not only are they being robbed of their loved landscapes
and tradition, but also cheated of natural justice and their democratic rights.

Some examples of this scepticism are the statement from Cowley that, “the business
promoters hold themselves as saviours of the world and use that idea as their mission
statement. They suggest that nothing like a profit motive enters into the equation”
(Cowley, 2002). Here the author is rhetorically precluding that wind energy can be
seen as both contributing to ‘saving the planet’ and also being commercially
profitable and also denying profit-making as a legitimate reason or basis for building
wind farms. But perhaps more that that the aim of the author is to present the pro-
wind development position as disingenuous and that effectively those holding that
position as lying about or hiding their ‘true’ motives – that is making profits and not

20
  A classic expression of this (and the anti-colonial rhetoric discussed below) and appropriate to the
emotion that McNeish tries to evoke is Kipling’s “A Pict Song”, which begins: “Rome never looks
where she treads/ Always her heavy hooves fall/ On our stomachs our hearts and out heads/ And Rome
never hears when we bawl/Her sentries pass on – and that is all/ And we gather behind them in hordes/
And plot to reconquer the Wall/ With only our tongues for our swords”.

saving the planet. This binary logic is a common rhetorical device used not just by
anti-wind farm discourses but can also be found in pro-wind farm documents as will
be discussed below.

Another dimension of this lack of trust in public institutions is the common theme in
anti-wind development texts that there is a ‘done deal’ around the aggressive and
widespread development of wind farms within the United Kingdom. That is, despite
the official consultation and regulatory, planning and other measures in place to
govern and manage wind farm development, the anti-wind energy position
consistently seeks to question the integrity of those public institutions put in place to
balance wind energy development against other interests, such as the views of local
communities or environmental and economic considerations. A good example of this
is Etherington’s 2006 pamphlet in which he draws attention to the UK rejecting the
report of the 1994 Welsh Affairs Select Committee on Wind Energy. He writes,

        The Committee had advised that wind ‘farms’ should be sited neither within
        Designated Areas nor where they would be clearly visible from such areas.
        Government rejected that ‘general presumption” as it “would effectively
        preclude development from the greater part of Wales.” From that view has
        grown the feeling that the wind power industry can force wind turbines onto
        almost any part of Britain.21

Here, the wind energy industry is being portrayed as a powerful economic interest
group that can unjustly subvert the ‘normal’ democratic and policy process in a way
the anti-wind energy lobby cannot or could not. But allied to that is the more
powerful rhetorical communication that the UK Government has already decided to
push for wind energy development regardless of countervailing views and opinions.
Thus the Government – in conjunction with the renewable energy industry – is
portrayed as not acting in the public interest or as a neutral arbitrator balancing
different interests and objectives, but as partial and biased and acting in particular not
general interests and failing to adhere to proper procedures and democratic standards.
As Etherington puts it, what is happening in the UK in relation to wind farm
development is “the undemocratic overthrow of public opinion”.22 In this way, anti-
wind industry objectors portray themselves not simply as defenders of valued local
environments but also as grassroots defenders of the democratic process.

Language of War, Conflict and Defence

Objector discourses also have recourse to the language of conflict, war and defence,
reflective in part of the intensity of feeling around their opposition, but also evidence
of a strategic deployment of an ‘us/them’ narrative, one of the most powerful of
rhetorical modes. Phrases such as ‘Invasion of the windfarms’ are common in the
texts reviewed, while other phrases expressing this discourse include ‘three armed
invaders’ and ‘a phalanx of turbines’ and also need to see anti-wind farm opposition
as a ‘battle against wind farms’.23 Allied to this the texts also articulate the need to
‘defend’ valued local environments and their associated land/economic uses –

21
   Etherington 2006, 21. Emphasis added.
22
   Etherington 2006, 23.
23
   Leake 2005.

particularly the local tourist industry which is often portrayed as threatened by wind
farm development and therefore in need of defence and protection.

Some of the anti-wind farm texts talk of ‘waging a war against turbines’ and aspects
of this discourse sometimes shade into a quasi anti-colonial trope in terms of this local
war and defence being waged against ‘outside’ and centralised (i.e. non-local) agents,
interests and sometimes values. This is expressed not just in written form but also
through the use of photomontages which portray wind farms or individual turbines as
huge, threatening, ‘unnatural’ and out of place in scenically beautiful settings. The
rhetorical device of ‘threat’ (though what constitutes the ‘threat’ is understood in
different ways) is interesting in that it is pervasive in both objector and supporter
discourses and its common usage can be explained by the fact that the identification
of a ‘common threat’ both helps mobilise people and bring them together – the ‘us’
and ‘them’ rhetoric is common in the discourses of warfare, civil defence and conflict.
Thus the deployment of the rhetoric of ‘threat’ and war is powerful and one of the
most persuasive rhetorical moves that is employed in the public debate around wind
energy. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the use of a language of war, ‘us’
and ‘them’ etc is one of the most powerful (and increasingly common) discourses one
can use in politics. One has only to think of the increasingly use of this security and
war discourse in contemporary geopolitics and how it is used to persuade people to
think in binary and simplistic terms of being either ‘with us or against us’, whether
this is the US President talking about the ‘war on terror’ or the UK Prime Minister
talking about the war and occupation in Iraq. In an increasingly risk and security
conscious age (manufactured or real), there is real political benefit to be gained from
presenting arguments and positions in terms of this security and conflict discourse,
particularly if one can inflect it in terms of constructing the political context as one
constituted by ‘friend and enemy’ as famously articulated by Carl Schmidt.24

It is also the case that, as indicated above, anti-wind energy positions also present
themselves as defending democracy, often along populist lines of the ‘peoples’
democracy’ needing to be protected from the pervasive influence of non-elected, non-
local corporate and bureaucratic elites and special business and environmental interest
groups. In this way this aspect of the anti-wind energy discourse has elements which
it shares with other populist anti-environmental rhetoric such as that found in the US
‘Wise Use’ movement25 or a ‘free market environmentalist’ position26, or indeed with
the more progressive, left-wing environmental populism of the ‘environmental justice
movement’27 that has effectively merged the discourse of civil rights with that of
environmental protection..

Foreignness, Aliens and Anti-Colonial Rhetoric

The rhetoric of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is also commonly seen in discourses of migration and
colonialism and these are also strongly represented in debates around wind farms
which portrays them alien and foreign. Examples include highlighting turbines as a
‘Danish invention’ transplanted to another and inappropriate place or the expression
‘they don’t belong or fit in here’. One interpretation is that wind farms are seen as
24
   Schmidt 1996.
25
   Beder 1997.
26
   Barry 2007.
27
   Schlosberg 1999; Szasz 1994.

‘pollution’, in the sense that pollution is simply ‘matter out of place’. That is, if
pollution is some substance or entity which is not in itself ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ but as a
consequence of it being placed in the ‘wrong’ place or site becomes ‘pollution’, it is
possible to link the anti-wind farm discourses of ‘pollution’ and ‘foreignness’, which
can act as an effective foil to being drawn into the debate of the virtues of renewable
energy per se. In both the Cowley and Etherington texts, much is made of the
‘Danishness’ of wind turbines – the implication being that while it might be
appropriate to Copenhagen, wind farms are not suitable for the UK sites chosen. At
the same time, the anti-wind texts have a clear line of argument which suggests that
the agenda for wind energy development is being pushed from above by global
agreements such as the Kyoto protocol.

In some texts there is also a nascent ‘anti-colonial discourse’ or sub-text, in the sense
that aspects of the objector discourses deploy similar other rhetorical devices that are
found in anti-colonial arguments. There is the clear drawing of firm boundaries
between ‘us’ and ‘them’; the unwillingness or inability to concede anything positive
about ‘them’; the classification of ‘them’ as coming from either some foreign land
(Denmark) or from the ‘centre’ within the country (London or Belfast in the case of
official government agencies and developers); the firm belief that the intentions of
‘them’ are malign and that these outside forces are intent on exploitation and
expropriating the local environment and destroying the local community and its
values. In the texts reviewed we find statements about Scotland being ‘cleared’ and
sacrificed for energy users in South of England.28 In the case of the proposal for an
off-shore wind farm off the Tunes Plateau in Northern Ireland, the local community is
portrayed as rural, peripheral and being ‘sacrificed’ for central government or
business interests.29

Taking the ‘us and them’ device beyond the foreign or colonial metaphor is the
portrayal of wind farms and wind turbines as alien – that is not of this world – and
something from science fiction. This can be seen in the quote from Jenkins above
where wind turbines are presented as being ‘Like creatures from The War of the
Worlds’. Other examples of this include McNeish’s similar claim that wind turbines
were like ‘metal giants, like something from a HG Wells novel’ (presumably the same
novel – The War of the Worlds). Thus not only are wind farms being presented as
foreign (from another country) to their proposed location but also as something
completely out of keeping with human comprehension (from another planet or future
time), or even the global biosphere. Clearly, in the case of The War of the Worlds
(rather than, for example ET), these aliens are imbibed with destructive intent. In this
way, the technology of wind energy – specifically the size, shape and design of wind
turbines – are presented as the ultimate ‘other’. Turbines are not just a malign and
unwanted intrusion into a settled and (putative) harmonious balance between a local
community and its environment, but incomprehensible and utterly out of appropriate
human (never mind local) context.

Industrialisation and Commercialisation of the Environment

28
     Moriston Matters 2003; Vidal, 2004.
29
     Cowley 2002.

This anti-wind farm discourse depicts windfarms as destroying areas of beauty and
tranquillity, turning the ‘rural’ or ‘wilderness’ into an outdoor industrial production
plant for electricity generation. Here, in part, the emphasis is on undermining the
notion of ‘farm’ which has rural, pastoral, ‘safe’ and ‘unthreatening’ connotations and
in its place the projection of such developments as industrial factories. A good
example of this is Etherington’s consistent placing of ‘farm’ in scare quotes
throughout his pamphlet,30 drawing attention to and questioning the association of
wind energy production with agricultural land use and associated rural practices,
values and symbols. Haggett and Toke also note this rhetorical move to dissociate
wind energy production from the values ands symbols of the rural through the use of
‘wind farm’. As they note, “A “farm” is an obvious and fitting part of the
countryside. The term has connotation of working with nature, and of productivity.
“Farms” will be a part of the rural landscape, not an alien imposition upon it”.31.
Questioning the naming and status of renewable energy installation as ‘farms’ thus
breaks the link between wind energy production and rurality and appropriateness as
well as undermining its ‘green and clean’ image. This issue of the contestation over
the narrative of ‘rurality’ (and associated discourses and conceptions of ‘nature’ and
‘naturalness’) and the ‘appropriateness’ of wind energy within a rural setting between
pro and anti groups has also been highlighted by others.32

From this perspective of renewable energy as the industrialisation of the environment,
windfarms are the 21st century version of William Blake’s description of factories as
‘dark satanic mills’ which were viewed by opponents to this early phase of
industrialisation and the factory system as despoiling England’s ‘green and pleasant
land’.33 It is clear that this aspect of the anti-wind energy discourse turns on
presenting the local environment and community as an unspoilt, non-industrialised
and non-urbanised ‘countryside’ bathed in tradition, and therefore, as countryside,
effectively outside or beyond industrial society and its dynamics. As Rennie-Short
puts it, “the countryside is seen as the last remnant of a golden age...the nostalgic past,
providing a glimpse of a simpler, purer age...[a] refuge from modernity”.34 Such a
positive-cum-romantic view of nature as refuge from (or saviour of) modernity and
industrialisation is usually associated with ‘deep’ green perspectives such as those
associated with the preservation of ‘wilderness’, deep ecology and bioregional or
place-based articulations of ecological thinking and action.

In part, such critiques of wind-energy development articulate romantic-based (which
sometime shades into an environmentally-based) defences of the ‘rural’ and the
‘natural’ against the ‘industrial’ and ‘unnatural’. Again, much like the ‘us and them’
discourse of war and defence, the use of the rhetorical device of ‘natural-unnatural’ is
equally powerful in terms of debate, argument and persuasion. As Soper (1995) has
suggested in her authoritative study of the ideological and political uses (and abuses)

30
   Etherington 2006.
31
   Haggett and Toke 2006, 117.
32
   Woods 2003, 273.
33
   Barry 2007.
34
   Rennie-Short 1991, 31-34. An important issue in need of further research is to calculate the influence
of second-home owners or members of local communities who have retired there (as opposed to being
native to or working there), within anti-wind farm mobilisation and indeed other forms of
‘environmental’ protest. Anecdotal evidence suggests a disproportionate influence of ‘part-time’ and
‘second-home’ owners as pivotal actors in such disputes, ironically highlighting the romantic rural
tradition, but not essentially being of it themselves.

of the concept of ‘nature’, the use of a natural/unnatural distinction or frame means
that whatever if defined as ‘unnatural’ (such as wind turbines in this case) is
effectively pejoratively and negatively described and normatively proscribed.

A related discourse here is that not only do windfarms represent the industrialisation
of local environments, but also the main benefits of this are private not public. This
constitutes the commercialisation of the environment in that it is for private profit that
windfarm development takes place. Drawing on further analogies with the early phase
of industrialisation, there is a strong sense that what windfarm development represents
is a form of ‘enclosure’ and ‘privatisation of the commons’. That is, the commercial
aspect of windfarm development is viewed as the taking of what was once publicly
owned and/or enjoyed into private ownership and control. A clear example of this is
in John Vidal’s article ‘An Ill Wind’ noting that “Cameron McNeish, the president of
the Ramblers Association in Scotland, says wind power is the biggest threat Scotland
has faced since the Highland clearances”, or Cowley’s article which is keen to stress
the profit motive of the wind farm developers as paramount and effectively crowding
out any other possible environmental or sustainable development motive.35 The effect
(or intention) of this presentation of wind farm development as the privatisation of the
countryside is to portray those proposing or supporting wind energy development as
motivated solely by commercial and pecuniary interests, leaving those opposing wind
energy to occupy the high moral ground of environmental protection and concern for
future generations and the preservation of valued traditional landscapes and associated
modes of life. Thus, the rhetorical devices used by anti-wind energy positions deny or
pre-empt the possibility that those proposing wind energy can be motivated by both
profit-making and environmental/sustainability motives and that commercial viability
can be compatible with environmental concern and sensitivity. In this binary
presentation of the issue, the anti-wind farm position is similar to the early
environmentalist position in the 1960s and 1970s which saw no possible compatibility
or harmony between ‘economic growth’ and ‘environmental protection’.36 This
opposition was overcome, rhetorically at least, with the emergence of the discourse of
‘sustainable development’ in the late 1980s, particularly when understood in a ‘triple
bottom line’ sense, and the policy discourse of ‘ecological modernisation’ in the
1990s – both of which are discussed below.

NIMBY rebuttal

A final, strong narrative within discourses opposed to windfarm is the countering of
the perception of objectors as expressing narrow and parochial concerns or that
objection to wind energy is based on ignorance of the realities of climate change,
energy security and the need to move to a low carbon economy. This shows
awareness of how accusations of the populist ‘NIMBY’ concept37 can be extremely
damaging to anti-development protests. The discourses of objection tend to be
characterised by a self-understanding of objectors not as ‘ignorant locals’ or climate
change deniers, though some such as Etherington and the group for whom he wrote
the pamphlet, Country Guardian, do fall into the latter category.38 Those presenting
the anti-wind energy position are keen not be regarded as motivated by self-interest,

35
   Cowley 2002.
36
   Barry 1999.
37
   However unfounded – see Wolsink 2006 and Ellis 2004.
38
   Etherington 2006.

but are sceptical of ‘non-local forces’ (state and business) coming in and trying to pull
the wool over their eyes with what they see as ‘PR stunts’ portrayed as consultations.
Cowley expresses this explicitly in describing the ‘nice line in pedantry’ of the PR
consultant representing the wind energy promoter which he views as being presented
for ‘lesser mortals’ i.e. local people.39

This anti-wind discourse can be regarded as articulating what Plough and Krimsky’s
(1987) term ‘cultural’ rationality to distinguish it from the ‘technical’ rationality of
experts and expert knowledge. They understand technical rationality as a mind-set
that stresses the centrality of empirical evidence, data gathering and the scientific
method and it relies and defers to expert judgments in making policy decisions and
recommendations. A typical example of technical rationality would be the standard
‘cost-benefit analysis’ used in many countries to inform decision-making from road
building to investment in new technologies such as wind energy or biotechnology.
‘Cultural rationality’, in contrast, is orientated around the importance of personal,
emotional and value-based experiences and modes of judgement rather than objective,
impartial, technical and quantifiable calculations. As Fischer puts it,

        Cultural rationality can, in this respect, be understood as a form of rationality
        inherent to the social-life world. It is concerned with the impacts, intrusions,
        or implications of a particular event or phenomenon on the social relations that
        constitute that world. Such concerns are, in fact, the stuff upon which social
        and environmental movements are built.40

Central to cultural rationality is the standing of the person making the claim or
judgement (Aristotle’s ethos), the values of the community in question and the value-
bases of the positions that community, or its members, take (something most objective
technical modes of decision-making do not take into account) and the integrity of
those making the claim. Hence, the importance in this anti-wind energy discourse of
the need for objectors to pre-empt their (mis)definition as ignorant locals with a
NIMBY and selfish mindset. In keeping with the findings of other research,41 our
findings here are consistent with this political and discursive need for anti-wind
groups to avoid being portrayed as motivated by NIMBY concerns, since this would
prove fatal their attempts to persuade others, whether government or the public, of the
‘rightness’ and ‘legitimacy’ of their case.42 Rather, their strategy as articulated in the
texts surveyed is to make visible the (legitimate and important) values upon which
objector discourses are based as well as revealing and undermining or questioning the
values and interests of supporters of wind energy. This also is related to the strategic
imperative to establish the moral ethos (in Aristotelian rhetorical terms) of the
individuals or groups articulating an anti-wind farm position as of ‘good character’
and therefore motivated by ‘good (and universal rather than parochial) reasons’.

Supporter Discourse Themes

39
   Cowley 2002.
40
   Fischer 2004, 91. Emphasis added.
41
   Haggett and Toke 2006.
42
   Wolsink 1994.

There are also a number of themes we can identify within the support discourses from
the selected texts:

The Assumption of and Imperative Towards Consensus

There is a commonly used assumption of consensus/agreement within supporter
discourses. This consensus both relates to the reality and threats of climate change
and the urgent need for renewables as part of the transition towards a low-carbon
economy. This discourse begins with an assumption of overwhelming agreement on
need for wind power – hence a pro-development presumption that challenges its
opponents, noted in the questions ‘Why Wind? Why Not?’ posed by the British Wind
Energy Association,43 reflecting the presumption in favour of development that has
traditionally underlain the British planning system.44

Further examples of a more dogmatic insistence on consensus include the DETI
Northern Ireland report noting that wind energy as a ‘non-negotiable element of
future energy use in Northern Ireland’ (Department of Enterprise Trade and
Investment (Northern Ireland), 2001: 2; emphasis added), making it clear that there is
no room for flexibility or dissensus on this issue.

This presumption in favour of wind farms by government agencies and wind energy
developers is based on the pressing need for them based on the irrefutable ‘facts’ and
reality of climate change and energy security (as established by scientific expertise,
such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, national UK government
energy, climate change and sustainable development policies and commitments, and
international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol), which should ‘naturally’ lead to
a consensus around their development. The position here within pro-wind discourses
is that if and when people know the ‘full facts’ about climate change and energy they
will come round to accepting the need for the rapid development of wind energy.
The rhetorical move here is to present the anti-wind farm position as based on
ignorance and/or intransigence. A typical example of this is Tony Juniper, director of
Friends of the Earth UK, who argues that the organised opposition to wind energy in
the UK is “parochial, short-sighted, selfish, peddling falsehoods and
misconceptions”.45

This claim that opposition is based on lack of knowledge is a standard one in ‘public
understanding of science’ type debates which for a long time was dominated by the
simplistic idea that if only the people opposing the technological innovation or
infrastructural development had the relevant knowledge (as given by experts) then
their opposition would wither away.46 However, it is also one to be found in early
green political discourse which was based in part, as Dobson points out, on the (naïve)
assumption that if people were simply informed about the scientific reality of global
and local ecological degradation then that was enough to motivate political action to
stop it.47 Thus, there is a common theme here that consensus is the natural or
expected outcome if only people were to make decisions based on full knowledge of

43
   British Wind Energy Association 2004.
44
   Reade 1987.
45
   Vidal 2004.
46
   Wynne 1995.
47
   Dobson 1995.

the facts. Or alternatively, when in possession of all the relevant knowledge and facts
it is only ideological and irrational motives which prevents objectors from allowing
the emergent consensus from emerging (which of course also has the advantage of
precluding the pro-wind position as being ‘ideologically’ motivated). In short,
aspects of the pro-wind energy discourse claim that objectors are simply ‘not getting
with the programme’ and are a small, organised and vocal minority holding up
progress on this pressing socio-ecological problem.

Another aspect of this pro-wind discourse on consensus is the claim that no one
community can ‘opt out’ of its energy/climate change obligations. As the Sustainable
Development Commission report puts it, it is hard for any community to be
considered exempt from ‘doing its bit’ to help decrease carbon emissions and help
mitigate climate change.48 In some ways the framing of the issue in this manner
explicitly makes those that object to wind farm developments as prima facie ‘free
riders’ seeking to enjoy the benefits of any future renewable energy system without
having to make any change or sacrifice which will be borne by others. This, of
course, is the mirror opposite of the anti-wind position which portrays local
communities and valued environments as being sacrificed and exploited by, and for
the sake of, non-local interests and objectives.

Rational, Knowledge-Based, Scientific Evidence

Supporters of wind farms appeal to existing rational and scientific evidence bases to
overcome or rebut objectors’ claims over the energy productive capacity, noise,
economic viability, visual impact and negative house price impacts of wind farms49.
In both official government and developer texts much effort is made to display the
rigour of the process with which sites are chosen – inter alia, feasibility studies,
environmental, social, economic and other impact assessments, statutory local
community consultation, a robust regulatory framework and planning guidance.50 A
key rhetorical effect of this is to establish the rational basis and framework upon
which decisions are made. In contrast to the cool, objective ‘technical rationality’
upon which the pro-wind position is outlined, objector discourses are thus presented
as not based on evidence and clear thinking, but rather are based on ideological and
personal, local, selfish and NIMBY grounds51; or on ‘subjective’ grounds around
which consensus and agreement is impossible using ‘fact-based’ arguments.52 The
report from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) states that a better
understanding of the technologies involved and of the planning policies and
procedures which apply, is needed if the introduction of wind farms is to proceed
smoothly.53 This is in keeping with the standard policy process which assumes the
superiority of ‘technical rationality’, what Torgerson calls the ‘administrative mind’
and its ‘tragic seriousness’ and unilinear and non-creative modes of thinking, coupled

48
   Sustainable Development Commission 2005, 52.
49
   This is predominant in supporter discourses, but not isolated to it, for example see Devine-Wright
and Devine-Wright 2006, who assess the discursive exchange on the issue of intermittency and its
impact on the efficiency of wind power.
50
   B9, Powergen, RES, 2002; Sustainable Development Commission, 2005; chapters 5, 12.
51
   Vidal 2004.
52
   Sustainable Development Commission 2005, 60.
53
   Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2004.5.

with its overarching ‘knowledge –deficit’ model to understand and overcome public
opposition to most policy innovations.54

A common discursive move made by pro-wind energy discourses is to insist that the
context for discussing wind energy must be climate change and energy security of
supply and that any objection to wind energy cannot do so without reference to this
context. In this way, the pro-wind position seeks to set the discursive agenda as it
were by insisting that objections to wind energy proposals must demonstrate
awareness of climate change and energy security issues. Specifically, a common
formulation used is to make the point that although wind farm development does
involve landscape change, climate change will also dramatically affect the landscape.
Examples of this include the Sustainable Development Commission’s report which
states that, “Climate change will have a radical impact on our landscape, and wind
developments must be viewed in this context”.55 In other words, it is not the case – as
commonly presumed in anti-wind energy texts and positions – that the choice is
between ‘no wind energy development equals no landscape change’ and ‘wind energy
development equals landscape change’ but rather the inevitability of landscape change
due to climate change and/or landscape change due to wind energy development. The
implicit argument here is that the small landscape changes due to wind energy
development can mitigate against large landscape changes due to climate change – in
other words a small sacrifice for saving/preventing larger (and more harmful)
changes.

A related but different argument along these lines is can be found in Cowley’s anti-
wind article which notes that “B9 Energy’s PR consultant had a nice line in pedantry
for lesser mortals saying all societies would have to strike a balance between ‘what is
invisible and doing damage to our health our environment [climate change] and what
is visible and doing us no harm whatsoever [wind energy]. The ‘no harm’ is
debatable”.56 This linking of ‘visible-no harm’ and ‘invisible-harm’ is a common
discursive move used in pro-wind arguments which at one and the same time
acknowledges the visual impact of wind farm development but then moves to
undermine the anti-wind position of linking ‘visible’ to ‘harm’ by pointing out that
the invisible threat of climate change is more harmful to human communities and the
environment. And key to this identification of invisible harm is of course science.
Since we cannot ‘see’ future harms of climate change, it is science – specifically the
climate change models and scenarios developed by the International Panel on Climate
Change and others – which can render this invisible harm ‘visible’ through discursive
communication. Unlike the ‘subjective’ value judgements of anti-wind arguments to
do with aesthetic judgements around whether wind turbines ‘blend into’ or are a ‘blot
on the landscape’ – which cannot admit of ‘fact-based’ agreement – the rational basis
upon which pro-wind arguments are based are such that they can (indeed must) admit
of agreement and consensus.

Allied to this ‘rational’ basis of pro-wind farm positions is the claim that such rational
and scientific, evidence-based modes of decision-making establishes the prima facie
grounds for appropriate expertise to have an important input into, or indeed make, the
final decision about the siting of wind farm developments. The report from the Office
54
   Torgerson 2006.
55
   Sustainable Development Commission 2005, 52.
56
   Cowley 2002.

of the Deputy Prime Minister is striking in this respect in the following statement
under the heading of ‘Landscape and Visual Effects of Renewable Energy
Developments’:

          The landscape and visual effects of particular renewable energy developments
          will vary on a case by case basis according to the type of development, its
          location and the landscape setting of the proposed development. Some of these
          effects may be minimised through appropriate siting, design and landscaping
          schemes, depending on the size and type of development proposed. Proposed
          developments should be assessed using objective descriptive material and
          analysis wherever possible even though the final decision on the visual and
          landscape effects will be, to some extent, one made by professional
          judgement. Policies in local development documents should address the
          minimisation of visual effects (e.g. on the siting, layout, landscaping, design
          and colour of schemes).57

While establishing the link between expertise and objective, scientific criteria and
data, what is striking about this statement is that it also proposes that disagreements
about visual and aesthetic aspects of wind energy siting are amenable to expert
judgement. Thus, the ODPM report is effectively saying that even essentially
subjective/taste-based disagreements can be decided objectively and therefore by
experts rather than other more discursive processes of persuasion and argument in
which lay citizens and experts are equally positioned. Of course, such pre-emptive
closing down of discursive processes coupled with the explicit confidence (verging on
arrogance) in the objective settlement of subjective aesthetic and value-based
disagreements, only serves to ‘prove’ – from the anti-wind position – that the decision
to proceed with wind energy development is a ‘done deal’ and therefore official talk
of ‘community consultation’ is meaningless and a sham. This view that the existing
planning system can incorporate and deal with aesthetic disagreements expressed by
the ODPM report in many ways represents a ‘colonial’ discourse in the sense that the
‘technical rationality’ of the existing planning system is assumed to be capable of
incorporating non-quantifiable, value-based judgements without recourse to
discursive processes. This ultimately undermines the democratic character of the
wind energy development process and reinforces the perception of the non- or anti-
democratic nature of official government and wind developer support for the
technology.

Overcoming Opposition

There is a split in the pro-wind texts on how they analyse opposition to wind farm
development and how to engage in changing the minds of those who object. On the
one hand there is a dominant discourse which holds that more knowledge about the
need for and impacts of wind farms will persuade local opposition – suggesting that
the basis for opposition is ignorance or a knowledge gap, which suitable information
from government, wind developer and other expert sources will fill. A dimension of
this discourse sees opposition to windfarms as ‘old-fashioned’ and/or a localised
inability or unwillingness to ‘get with the programme’ regarding the need to develop

57
     ODPM 2004, 13.