Articles from Newspapers

"Like Philistines we desecrate the landscape"	This article, written by Sir Simon Jenkins in October 2003, was in part the inspiration for this website The last two paragraphs: "In the calculus of beauty, I would pit the hills of Cumbria, the coast of Devon and Cornwall, the Pennine uplands and the mountains of Wales against any Constable, Gainsborough or Stubbs. They are no less fragile, and currently far more vulnerable. I would not burn a Constable if I were told it might help to save fossil fuel, if only because the benefit would be vastly outweighed by the loss. Nor would I sacrifice the landscapes that Ms Hewitt plans to destroy for so trivial a donation to the cause of global cooling as a few hundred wind turbines. The Government's thesis that the countryside of upland and coastal Britain is "worth sacrificing to save the planet" is an insult to science, economics and politics. But the greatest insult is to aesthetics. The trouble is that aesthetics has no way of answering back." Link to the article: http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/features/eco/windmush.html
"Wind farm threat to natural wonder"	In this article Cameron McNeish describes a day spent in the wild and largely inaccessible land between Loch Ness and the Cairngorms. It is is a valuable living and breeding range for the golden eagle and other rare birds. This precious wilderness is threatened by a wind farm of thirty-four giant turbines erected at 2000 feet. This would be the highest wind farm in Britain. Cameron McNeish is an author, broadcaster, lecturer, backpacker and mountaineer. You can learn more about him on his website, www.cameronmcneish.co.uk Link to the article by Cameron McNeish, in the Sunday Herald online http://www.sundayherald.com/48811 (2008 this link no longer seems to work, hoping to find another link to this excellent article) .
"Wind farms? You may as well take a knife to a Constable"	Like Simon Jenkins, Robert Macfarlane compares our landscapes to priceless works of Art. In his article he says "It is not irreplaceable landscape art that is being hastily sacrificed in the name of clean energy, but irreplaceable landscapes." He also has much to say about the plans by Amec to build a vast wind farm in the Isle of Lewis, on one of the world`s last great peat bogs which has been compared, in ecological significance, to the Serengeti. Robert Macfarlane is author of Mountains of the Mind,, (2003) which won the Guardian First Book Award. He is now writing The Wild Places, a book about wilderness in Britain and Ireland Link to the article by Robert Macfarlane in the Guardian online http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/opinion/story/0,12981,1426074,00.html
Better to have nuclear power than a blot on the landscape	This is another article by Simon Jenkins, about the decision of the industry minister, Malcolm Wicks, to put twenty-six wind turbines 370 feet high in Romney Marsh, dominating the view from the ramparts of Rye and the slopes of the Sussex Weald. This article was written on October 28, 2005. Romney Marsh - read the article by Sir Simon Jenkins (Guardian Online)

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