newspeak

A short remark concerning the post hereunder minimiser les effets.

It is customary to talk in English about wind farms, in Dutch about windmolenparken. But farms, nor parcs or windmills have anything to do with the industrial zones that are created all through farmland and forests to install gigantic wind turbines. Windmills or watermills at least used to mill something: cereals, or seeds or even wood. These huge industrial wind turbines don’t grind anything at all. And while windmills and waterwheels were fully integrated in the landscape, the contemporary enormous turbines can be five or six times higher than the largest trees that happen not to be cut to create these plots. Landmarks they are, certainly, and they can fit in large port areas or industrial zones, but would you accept huge areas of woodland to be erased for the construction of an industrial complex?

It’s completely erroneous then to speak about farms or parcs, as if these industrial zones had anything to do with agriculture or a woodland ecosystem or any charming aspect of nature. It’s much like the widespread term container park – containerpark – parc à conteneurs. When you bring away your assorted garbage, do you really think about a parc with lanes and trees and grass and bushes and the appeal of nature?

The term newspeak was coined by Georges Orwell in his novel 1984. Merriam-Webster gives this definition: “propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings”.

It wouldn’t be the first time that industrial promotors and their political accomplices scatter terms that evoke things green, natural, ecological, … But let’s call the things by their name. It’s all about wind turbines, that are settled in power plants for which industrial zones are created. No more, no less.