This article first appeared in the July edition of Birdwatching Magazine
Our current government, worried about an environmental campaign at an upcoming by-election, announced several re-introduction projects, of eagles, beavers and pine martins. Thereby showing its naivety and complete lack of understanding of the issues. The seat was lost to the Green Party. Hardly surprising as the government has done zilch to address the crisis in waste-water management, that sits at the top of voters concerns neck and neck with the cost of living.
Fly-tipping, once a local nuisance, is now a disaster aided and abetted by organised crime. Detailed analysis would show some understanding of root causes, like how charging commerce to dispose of waste, leads to off-the-books collections and builders’ rubble strewn across country lanes. While inadequate monitoring, of contracted out ‘re-cycling’, leads to toxic waste dumping on a massive scale, killing entire woodlands and polluting watercourses. Just clearing fly-tipping on public property like roadsides costs councils 20m a year!
There is clearly no joined up thinking when so-called environmentally friendly power creation is systematically destroying whole swathes of our most precious habitat!
At least fourteen million trees were felled in Scotland over the last two decades to make way for wind farms. Even given that these were mostly commercial non-native conifers for eventually harvesting, surely planting native trees in their place would have better topped up lost carbon capture?
The newly operational 800,000+ panels at Cleve Hill Solar Park, North Kent, UK’s largest, covers 360 hectares of former marshland. It features 4m-high panels and battery storage units. Further projects on the same scale are approved or planned for Romney Marsh. Meanwhile, the National Grid’s proposed converter station and substation on Minster Marshes would cover 90,000 square meters (9 hectares) and be 28 meters tall. Successive governments think that marshes are ‘wastelands’, instead of green lungs supporting tens of millions of birds and shielding other areas from floods.
That Minster marshes proposal is matched by one in Suffolk at the other end of a 90-mile cable – that too would destroy an SSSI and build huge infrastructure on a marsh.
Sizewell C nuclear power station project in East Suffolk covers a total site area of approximately 1011.6 hectares (371.7ha onshore and 639.9ha offshore). Located on the Suffolk coast north of the existing Sizewell A and B stations, it directly impacts the Sizewell Marshes Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), and lies within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).
Another huge solar farm is planned for Gwent Levels on protected Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), which are the jewels in the crown of Gwent’s wildlife heritage. Gwent Wildlife Trust rightly says that, we need the right development in the right place and that there are tens of thousands of acres of land throughout Wales, which are much more suited to solar farms than SSSIs.
Unfortunately, this sort of thinking is fuelling projects up and down the country. Houses might be allowed to fall in the sea because shoring up eroding cliffs costs too much, but there are no plans to move them away from floodplains. We are still stuck in a Victorian mindset; whereby nature is either picturesque or ripe for development and taming. There for us to look at and paint, or put to human use. ‘Wasteground’ being any land not already being exploited by man.
People of my generation will remember the Battle of Ben Tre in Vietnam. A US military spokesman was quoted as saying: “In order to save the village, we had to destroy it“.
It is complete raving lunacy to try and save the environment by destroying it!
