FROM READERS.

What Will Wind Turbines Do to Migrating Birds?

I was very disturbed to read in "Energy for a New Century (March/April) that Christopher Flavin is advocating wind power and, by association, "giant wind firms," without considering the ecological damage these operations cause. A wind farm in California has killed thousands of birds, primarily Golden Eagles and hawks, which depend on the same air currents for their migrations that are used by the wind farms for generating electricity. At the very least, the situating of a wind farm needs to take unintended ecological consequences into account.

HERBERT CURL, JR.

Science Advisor

Seattle Audubon Society

Christopher Flavin responds: Indeed, many U.S. wind power projects in the late 1970s and early 1980s were planned and constructed with little consideration of the potential effects on birds--sometimes with tragic results. But it's worth noting that no major bird fatalities have been identified with the wind farms built over the last decade. This is due in part to the cooperative efforts of environmental groups, wind power developers, and other stakeholders to develop systematic ways of assessing the potential avian impacts of proposed sites (see www.nationalwind.org).

Find a Thousand Synonyms for "Ouch"

Ed Ayres's point, that the Internet is not always a reliable source, is certainly well taken (Note From a Worldwatcher," January/February). But the same issue of the magazine shows that print sources, even reputable magazines and scholarly journals, can generate "urban legends" of their own.

That issue's "Matter of Scale" (page 22) reports that the "working vocabulary of the average 14-year-old in the United States in 1950" was 25,000 words, but in 1999 was only 10,000 words. Since performance on intelligence tests has been going up during this same period, such a drastic decline seems questionable. Moreover, Shakespeare's working vocabulary is generally computed at 30,000 words or less, and that of the King James Bible at less than 12,000 words (Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue [New York: William Morrow, 1990]). The figure of 25,000 for the average 14-year-old in 1950 seems suspiciously high. So I decided to check the data out.

You mention as a source the article "Verbicide" by David Orr in the August 1999 issue of the journal Conservation Biology. Orr gives as his source Charlene Spretnak's recent book, The Resurgence of the Real. Spretnak's claim is slightly different, and even more puzzling: vocabularies are "down from 25,000 words to 10,000 words in less than fifty years for the average six- to fourteen-year-old child in the United States." The concept of an average vocabulary of the whole group of children from six to fourteen seems an odd and pointless one. While there is no claim here that it is a "working" (writing?) vocabulary, the figure of 25,000 still seems extremely high.

But on to Spretnak's citation: "Harper's Index" for August (actually October) 1990. Harper's specifies "the written vocabulary of a six- to fourteen-year-old American child." The years in question are no longer 1950 and 1999, but 1945 and 1990. Harper's gives no printed source for its 1990 data, only a name and an academic affiliation (Gary Ingersoll, University of Indiana at Indianapolis). The 1945 data comes from H.D. Rinsland's A Basic Vocabulary of Elementary School Children (McMillan, 1945). Rinsland's book is an impressive piece of scholarship funded by the Works Progress Administration, and it does contain a list of 25,000 words (26,632, to be exact). But Rinsland's list is actually compiled from over 100,000 compositions written in 1937 by school children in grades one through eight from all over the United States. To be more specific, each word in the list was used in at least three papers from at least one of the eight grades. Obviously, a vocabulary obtained from the work of tens of thousands of children is not at all the same thing as the average vocabulary of the children. So 1937 becomes 1950, 1990 becomes 1999, and a compilation becomes an average. Thus are legends born and, I am afraid, schools and teachers unreasonably maligned.

SEYMOUR SARGENT

Portland, Oregon

We take pride in the reputation for high standards of accuracy WORLD WATCH has achieved, so this letter serves as a humbling reminder of how easily we can stumble in the quest for truth. Our guess is that by now, David Orr and Conservation Biology, too, are feeling our pain.

When Land-Shock Meets Water-Shock

After...