Bog Myrtle & Peat

There’s a windfarm planned for Radnorshire. I read about it in the Guardian’s Country Diary, and I recognised the site as one I’d recently visited. The writer Jim Perrin wrote passionately in defence of the “wild country” around Fforest Clud, but it set me thinking on the nature of beauty and wilderness, both of which are subjective concepts. Because everywhere has a kind of beauty, and our understanding of wilderness is based on a spectrum of relativity. For my part, I would not call Fforest Clud “wild” in any sense of the word. It’s a heavily farmed landscape, and humans have been intervening in the shape and outlay of this place for thousands of years. As a result, it lies somewhere on the continuum between city and primordial forest, and if we can accept that every part of the countryside lies somewhere on that scale, there’s no cast-iron point at which wind development becomes “fine”. As we face up to the realities of climate change, battle lines are being thrown up according to very hazy ideas of what can and can’t be lost. 

A similar tension has arisen around a proposal to build a windfarm in Calderdale in West Yorkshire – a place which features vividly in the poetry of Ted Hughes. Objections to this development now centre around that connection between landscape and poetry. I admire the link, but we can’t ignore the fact that it’s entirely subjective and arbitrary . Because what of all the other Dales which Ted Hughes might have loved but simply didn’t write about? Or the many places Ted Hughes never saw at all? What if Ted Hughes had been dropped by Faber and all his best Calderdale poems languished forever in a drawer? It’s important that he spoke to us through that landscape, but we were never destined to love Calderdale in his name – and when you lift the lid on how we came to make the specific association between one man and one place, it’s floatingly precarious.

Jim Perrin’s right; Fforest Clud is beautiful, but no more or less beautiful than the hills of Lanarkshire or Nithsdale which have been completely overturned by windfarms during the past twenty years. These big changes are driven by a balance of policy and public consent. Proposals are brought forth and pushed back – action is determined by compromise. And it often seems that resistance rises not in defence of beauty or wilderness but from the public’s ability to recognise, mobilise or articulate a complicated blend of values.

After the War, civil servants recognised the need to produce more timber in Britain. They proposed the creation of Forest Parks as land specifically designated for that purpose, and a number of sites were identified as suitable for development. Notably, both Galloway and the Lake District were put forward as viable locations. But in the Lake District, opposition was loud and the plans were abandoned. There was opposition in Galloway, but it was over-ruled because complaints were quieter and easier to balance against the need for wood. 

Eighty years later, it’s hard to see what Galloway was before that decision was taken. The old world was irreversibly shattered by the change, but in surviving glimpses here and there, it’s  fair to say that the hills of my home had every bit as much to offer in terms of beauty and wonder as the Lakes. Now that Galloway is so heavily degraded by commercial and industrial interests, it’s no longer a fair comparison. The Lake District wins, hands down – but it would have been a close-run thing in those days. And it’s fair to say that unquantifiable terms like beauty or wilderness are not the deciding factor in what we keep or lose; it’s an ability to enliven popular support and channel it effectively to decision-makers in power. It turns out that if Ted Hughes loved your landscape, you’re in luck – and that’s where I disagree with Jim Perrin when he says that his opposition to development is nothing like NIMBYism. He loves those hills and he’s right to leap to their defence. But many other landscapes are threatened with comparable change; hills which lack a voice to speak for them or mobilise support for their defence.

It’s reasonable to say that if windfarms are such a curse on the landscape, they should be zoned in such a way that if one place is ruined, others can breathe easy. I’ve heard the same said about forestry in Galloway, and friends in Angus have expressed relief that we have trees so they don’t have to. At a strategic level, that makes sense. But it doesn’t mitigate the shock of change for those who find themselves designated in a certain district because they were unable to rally enough support to outweigh other contenders. That’s the story of the southern uplands, and now a key objection to further development here is “cumulative impact” – any sense of balance has gone, and there are too many turbines. But perhaps that’s another sliding scale, and “too many” is in the eye of the beholder.

It would also be fair to argue that once you have fifty turbines turning in a landscape, the horse has bolted. Besides, the infrastructure is already in place, and with fewer objections to development, you might as well have a hundred. That lends heat to the first application which is touted for an area without any development. These can be viewed as the thin end of the wedge. And the worst case scenario is what has played out in Galloway – where people feel like they no longer have a say in how land is used, and it’s pointless to speak out against further development. Proposals are brought forth in Galloway without any resistance at all nowadays, not because we’ve made our peace with the change or we have a highly developed appreciation of green infrastructure. They pass without comment because we’ve learnt that comment doesn’t help, and even if you can overturn plans at a local level, resistance will just be defeated higher up the ladder in Edinburgh.

We all understand that the world is changing, but it’s hard to grasp global concerns until they become suddenly local. When wind farms are proposed in Fforest Clud or Calderdale, they provoke outraged resistance, but opposition is far more nebulous and subjective than it seems. And if not in Your Beautiful Backyard, then whose?