Tilting At Windmills
My first job out of graduate school was at an environmental consulting company which mostly handled site planning for wind farms. Wind farms had not yet become iconic features of the Scottish landscape, and there was still a significant degree of scepticism around our efforts. In Scotland, this was mostly in the form of genuine concern for birds or the integrity of peat moors or the ability of small boats or planes to navigate the Hebrides.
In England, indemnity to the wind farms seemed to have bubbled up from some deep well of racism and misguided nostalgia for the Industrial Revolution. UKIP made the abolition of the wind farms-- and the reinstatement of coal plants-- a part of their political platform, and as a result we received regular angry phone calls from south of the border, spewing a mix of racist vitriol and conspiracy theories. One particularly dedicated fellow left us weekly threatening voicemails, which lost a good deal of their punch once we discovered via the resulting police investigation that the culprit was a frail eighty-five-year-old calling from a care home in Leeds.
The wind farms might have remained vaguely unpopular had it not been for Donald Trump. Trump’s Aberdeen golf course had been energetically opposed by the locals from the start, but the forces of late capitalism carried the day, even after Trump was successfully sued by Clan Davidson for misuse of clan heraldry, and the golf course settled into being an accepted object of public resentment.
The planned Aberdeen wind turbine array brought the golf course problem-- and the Donald Trump problem-- roaring back to life. Trump claimed that the wind farm would ruin the view from his golf course, and simultaneously discovered an interest in the welfare of the local birds. As the environmental consulting companies who were involved in planning the wind farm scrambled to put together all of our evidence in favor of the wind farm, the tide of public opinion turned in our favor. People might have been lukewarm about the wind farm, but if we were the enemy of Donald Trump we had their support, and the wind farms were suddenly a source of national pride.
As I handed off my last folder of statistics to our expert witness, I remember saying to my boss “Thank goodness I’ll never have to think about that asshole again” with a great sense of relief.
It was nice while it lasted.