Speakers Corner

Nature and Freedom.

Nature.

Rather more than a year ago, while walking along the Leven Canal, I saw a Marsh Harrier. It appeared from somewhere behind the banks of reeds that ran between us, and I remember being surprised by the sudden sound of a heavy take off and by the disappearing bird’s size and grace in the sky as it flew away from me along the canal.

Never before in the open landscape, have I experienced such proximity to a large, (and rare), bird of prey.

Marsh Harriers Above is a photograph of what I saw. It is the hard copy, (as it were), of my memory of that experience. I have presented it as a photo-merged image, (the composite of several separate images), because that seems to me most consistent with my sense of what a memory is.

My memory of this event only exists because I was there to perceive it and then to remember it. But before that, both I and the marsh-harrier had to be close enough for the event to occur, (for it to be startled and to fly away in front of me).

These sorts of experience, (the sorts of experience that generate memories of Nature), cannot happen everywhere and at all times: they can only happen here and there and now and again, (otherwise they will not be memorable).

Not only does there need to be enough space for here and there, there needs to be enough time, for now and again. Nature has to have enough space to be natural but we must be enabled to have enough time with Nature to draw memorable experiences from her.

On-shore wind-farms reduce the space in which Nature can be natural. Moreover, they incline us to spend less time with her since they offer a degraded experience of landscape likely to induce aversion now and avoidance later.

I assume that greening of the public consciousness is prerequisite for public cooperation in the fight against climate change. The more people there are with positive experience of Nature and who thus retain a positive memory of her, (and not a negative one or none at all), then the greener that public consciousness can become.

If landscapes capable of providing experiences such as mine with the marsh-harrier are important, then doubly so are those places sufficiently extensive and accessible to let such experiences happen yet close enough to human settlement, (and interaction), to make them more common.

Rotsea, Watton Carrs and the adjacent flat landscape around the River Hull provide just such a place: a place definable by the roads that run at its perimeter, (the A164, the B1249, the A1035 and the A165), and by the high degree of peripheral settlement variously interconnected by them.

One cannot overstate just how important is this whole area of landscape, (as I have defined it), with so many SSSI located beside a river coursing through an extensive park-like agricultural setting but with relatively good access into much of this by Public Rights of Way and with so much significant settlement around it.

This area of land is a huge local asset and likely only to become more valuable.

It is no place for wind-farms

Freedom

Recently, because I subscribe to the magazine and as a “Dear Spectator Reader”, I received a communication from Mr Bill Bryson, President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

He had “alarming news” to impart: “A staggering 263,900 houses are set to be built on some of the most beautiful, precious green fields across the country over the next five years – and once they are built, there’ll be no turning back”.

In asking me to help him “protect the precious tranquillity and beauty of our countryside from this sort of ever-increasing, ugly development” he had “no hesitation” in asking me for a £2 a month contribution – “which will make a huge difference”.

£2 a month is not much to ask of a Spectator reader, (you might think). But I demurred, (and the deadline was the end of March).

A monstrous housing programme may appal him yet Mr Bryson seemed strangely silent on the matter of wind-farms. Here is a threat equally disturbing for our landscape – and as imminent, but Mr Bryson did not mention it. Whyi is this?

If the wind-farm threat becomes reality, then supposing my £2 a month could stop all these houses being built, so what!

But year by year the threats mount, whether they come from massive housing development programmes in the South of England or from wind-farm proliferation in the North: or in Scotland, (where afforestation with mats of Canadian Spruce is another continuing menace): or from the chronic threat everywhere of new road building. We seem in continuous retreat from our own land and landscape while becoming steadily compressed toward a closer and closer – and alienating – confinement among ourselves.

We are building ourselves a prison, made with walls of each other.
There are more and more of us, (and more to come), and we need more and more rules to keep each other from each other’s throats. We afflict our neighbour with our individualism, our noise, our mess: and we do it all the more carelessly the more we are ourselves afflicted. If there was ever fellowship or even kinship there is now tolerance enforced by law – the modern restraint on loathing.

Meanwhile we lubricate our closeness with a Spiv’s Culture of endless IOUs and hope for Mass Immigration to pay our pensions. Never-ending Growth is our stairway to a Heaven we believe in. Business is our worship but our stunted Spirit could be the Price.

Mr Bryson did not mention wind-farms in his letter. Perhaps it was just an omission. My bank was instructed and Mr Bryson got his money. £2 a month is a cost I can bear.

¹In fact the CPRE is no exception to a common coyness on this matter and is equally indulgent of the cosy notion of “a contribution of wind-energy to overall energy requirements that does not come at the expense of the beauty, character and tranquillity of rural England”. As a sentiment among lovers of the countryside this springs, I suspect, from a misplaced emphasis on the area of wind-farm layout and a corresponding underestimate of turbine presence in the landscape. So, for the CPRE turbine proliferation over 240 square miles – “an area almost as large as Exmoor Nation Park” – is the estimated extent, (albeit disquieting), for 15% power generation though on-shore wind-energy by 2020.

But as I have tried to suggest in the companion article to this piece on the WWFO website, (“How Much Space Do Wind Turbines Require”), a 20 MW wind-farm, (of ten 2MW turbines), can have a visually dominating presence for 11 square miles and more. To provide even 7% of our present energy needs could require 420 twenty-MW wind-farms with a combined visual dominance extending over several thousand square miles.

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