While the industry portrays electricity-generating windmills as a benign and natural source of power, community opposition to new windmill farms is cropping up across the country - particularly in Eastern states, where there are more people fleeing urban blight to live in idyllic rural towns.

The following links are to three audio interviews conducted by the Canadian Broadcasting Company to investigate Mr. d'Entremont's claim that noise from the Pubnico Point wind plant has driven his family from its home.

Editor's Note: You will need RealPlayer to listen.

The idea of windmills brings to mind bucolic Renaissance paintings of Dutch landscapes and tulip beds. But that is hardly the experience of some who have to live next to the 400-foot electricity-generating windmills being built across America's breezy plains.

The idea of windmills brings to mind bucolic Renaissance paintings of Dutch landscapes and tulip beds. But that's hardly the experience of some who have to live next to the 400-foot electricity-generating giants being built across America's breezy plains.

Ventdubocage has posted a report from the National Academy of Medicine in France, "Le retentissement du fonctionnement des éoliennes sur la santé de l'homme" ("Repercussions of wind turbine operations on human health"). Following is a translation of a notice of the report by Dr. Chantal Gueniot in "Panorama du Médecin, 20 March 2006:

A Drefach-felindre Action Group has called on planning chiefs to turn down an application for three new turbines at Blaen Bowi windfarm.

Neighbours of Windflow Technology's prototype turbine on Gebbies Pass have begun complaining about its noise again.

They call it the train that never arrives. It's a low, rumbling sound that goes on and on ... and on. Sometimes, in a stiff easterly, the rumbling develops into a roar, like a stormy ocean. But worst of all is the beat. An insidious, low-frequency vibration that's more a sensation than a noise. It defeats double-glazing and ear plugs, coming up through the ground, or through the floors of houses, and manifesting itself as a ripple up the spine, a thump on the chest or a throbbing in the ears. Those who feel it say it's particularly bad at night. It wakes them up or stops them getting to sleep.

Amaranth Township has scheduled the evening of March 3 and all day Saturday, March 4, as public meeting dates to review proposals for 23 wind-turbine sites.

For those who live among the towers, the consequences of the development are palpable. The construction required building new roads and widening existing ones to make room for oversize vehicles. Hundreds of workers moved into town or stayed in trailers on the job site during the summer rush. The rural landscape was transformed into an industrial setting. Where stands of poplars and fields of corn and hay covered the plateau, the smooth lines of the light gray towers and steady rotation of the rotors now define the view. And the noises changed. The unobstructed wind has always been the dominant sound on the plateau. Now, the whoosh of the wind is mixed with the hum of the machines and a mechanical whomp of the blades turning.

The noise generated by a pair of wind farms proposed for Titiokura Summit could rip the heart out of the Te Pohue community.

Opponents today vowed to fight the resource consent granted to Meridian Energy to build 70 super-sized wind turbines near Makara in Wellington.

A group of Grant County landowners has filed a lawsuit seeking to block construction of a Mount Storm area wind-power project.

The Wind Farms Awareness Group before the meeting. The encroachment of wind farms into Perthshire was again halted by councillors as another five proposed schemes were knocked back.

"It's a mechanical monstrosity. ... It's ugly. It makes noise, said Beverly Whitcomb. It makes a whopping sound which will just drive you nuts."

They introduced the world to "environmentally friendly" energy, but now some of Europe's "greenest" countries are under pressure to backtrack on wind farms as public anger grows over their impact on the countryside.

Plymouth GP Dr Amanda Harry has conducted her own survey on the effect of noise on people living near the Bears Down wind farm in Cornwall. Here, she reveals her findings.