Natural beauty needs protection (From The Argus)

Natural beauty needs protection

5:08pm Friday 19th March 2010 in

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Brighton Green Councillor Keith Taylor’s advocacy of wind turbines on the South Downs (The Argus, March 15) is an attack on the integrity of the new National Park landscape.

He describes the beauty of the Downs as being “a subjective judgement”, but National Park legislation is not subjective.

It clearly states that National Parks are designated for their “natural” beauty. That is, beauty uninterrupted by major built development – and wind turbines are such built development, whether you consider them beautiful or not.

Mr Taylor refers to the monetary value of wind turbines, when he must know that National Parks were created specifically to insulate their landscape, wildlife and recreational values from damage by economic exploitation.

And he asks us to “look at the wider picture”, by which we can assume he means that wind turbines’ renewable energy contribution should over-ride the planning assumptions protecting National Parks, in the context of climate change.

This raises the much wider question of whether it is right that one aspect of nature (cherished natural landscapes) should be made to pay the costs for the damage done to another aspect of nature (the climate system) by rampant capitalist development.

The answer must be no. The multiple crises of nature we are suffering – in climate chaos and an enormous process of mass extinction – must be paid for by those who caused them. That is, by the rich and their free market system, not by nature itself.

The Labour movement spent two generations fighting for the robust Town and Country Planning and National Park laws, which were finally won under the post-war Attlee government.

This legislation has protected our countryside more effectively than almost anywhere in Europe.

Now Keith wants to drive a coach and horses through these hard-won protections. Our downland is not safe in the hands of the Green party, whose name implies it will make a priority of its protection.

What an irony.

Dave Bangs, Ewhurst Road, Brighton