Ed Miliband’s decision to give the Mallard Pass a 3,000-acre-solar farm, and others like it the green light, is like forcing a baby to have tattoos for its own health. Alas we can’t expect the majority of the population to be moved by this despoilation of natural beauty because the connection between humans and nature has long been severed. This severance happened in 1851 when the majority of the population (50.2%) came to live in urban centres – now it’s a whopping 84%. For seven generations now the majority of the population has lived away from the countryside, causing our collective natural beauty memory to be thoroughly eroded. What now counts as hunter gathering is buying supermarket food for a barbeque, or watching nature documentaries with a takeaway. It is no wonder that the majority are unmoved by acres of solar or wind farms – they cannot weep for something they rarely, if ever, see.
And if you think I’m exaggerating, let me tell you about the boy who cried over leaves. We were on a London primary school trip to Epping Forest. The boy pointed in fearful panic: “What is that?” “Why are they here?” “Are they going to get me?” I twirled around trying to establish what frightened him so. It turned out he was pointing at the trees; he’d never seen so many of them before and they terrified him.
Similarly, a young mother I knew when we lived in South West London conducted a triangular life, taking a daily journey from her flat to the primary school, to the supermarket and home. She never took her sons to any of the local parks; at the weekend they played in the bath or on her husband’s calculator (he was an accountant). Of experience or folk memory of the great outdoors and nature, there was no wandering lonely as a cloud.
Neither example is unusual. There are millions of people who live in Britain who never spend any time in nature. It was reported in 2016 that 1.3 million children never visited the countryside. I can’t imagine this figure has improved.
Likewise, the majority of people who form our thinking class and Government live in towns and cities where there is a seven-generation-long acceptance of urban ugliness. Remember that image of the pig tower block in China? Oh, how we laughed until we realised we keep humans like this. If we can make human dwellings ugly, why not fields and hills?
This is all well-trodden concrete: the atomised lives of people living in cities going from tower block to office block and back again perhaps via a gym. Those who can muster up the strength to tackle the A3 or A4, A1M, or Dartford Crossing to leave the city will invariably visit a Forestry Commission wood-chipped trail with a busy café at the end selling sausage rolls for £4.50. It’s a miserable experience and they return to the city relieved the ordeal is over.
The raw countryside of mud and butterflies, brambles and nettles, jays and chalkstreams, marl and dog rose, is empty. It is left alone for those blessed 16% of us who live within its folds. After saving up for 11 years in London we were finally able to afford to move back to the countryside. I walk over an hour every day along some of the 140,000 miles of footpaths, old pilgrim routes, ancient salt paths, even a plague trail where the diseased were marched to the local pesthouses. I am most often alone. And if you don’t believe me, perhaps you will heed Will Self who has written stirringly about walking through Britain’s empty countryside. Empty of people that is, not nature. Life teems in the hedgerows and fields. This morning alone I saw a fallow doe, clouds of gnats, slugs aplenty, King Alfred cake fungus, a jenny wren and circling kites. I find it impossible to convey the pity I feel for those who will never see a smattering of early purple orchids, or a hoar frost in June or a hare the size of a deer. To have all this spoiled by solar and wind farms tears at my heart.
“You sound ghastly,” chips in my husband, “no-one will pity this sentiment.” And for once he’s right. Most people are deeply suspicious or downright hostile towards those of us who live in the countryside. We are either “posh” or “privileged” or “gammon” or farmers who do unspeakable things to animals, or Jacob Rees Mogg. No-one really cares if our views are spoilt because the majority don’t think we deserve nice views anyway. And the beautiful soon-to-be-spoiled views themselves? They don’t matter either because the majority of the population don’t see them.
How then are we to stop these horrible things? I don’t know, but stop them we must.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I love the countryside. I am fortunate enough to live on the Pennine moors in Saddleworth which for my money is one of the most beautiful parts of the country, I work in the countryside building and repairing our 180,000 miles of dry stone walls. To date we do not have many bird choppers but a skip over the hill to Holmfirth and the skylines are full of the ugly gargoyles. And for what?
Absolutely bugger all.
We have coal and shale beneath our feet and oil and gas beneath our seas and each of which could provide thousands of jobs and virtually limitless energy. What are we doing? Destroying these beautiful islands for a myth and lies that are intended to immiserate, enslave and finally kill our people.
The reset. Agenda 2030. Chuckles and his WEF chums and a bunch of crummy treasonous parasites in London.
We moved to a more rural location late in life and we’ve loved it. That said, I grew up between the River Thames and Richmond Park which provided a powerful antidote to suburban life.
Well now when all our children have flown, to the country we’ve come back;
There’s forty miles of heathery moor ’twixt us and coilpit stack;
And often as I sit by the fire at neet I laugh and I shout with glee,
From Hull and Halifax and Hell, good Lord deliver me.
Lovely
I am similarly from an area on the Firth of Forth with beaches stretching for 40 miles all the way around to St Andrews and the Firth of Tay. When you live here you can often take it all for granted. You go about your business and don’t always appreciate how lucky you are. In the 80’s I had to go work in London. There are too many people, too many cars, the place is a seething mass of humans in tube trains, busses and vehicles with barely any room to swing a cat. After I had lived and worked there for a month or two I began to think of the paradise I had left behind, and how I had not appreciated it as much as I should have. I was amazed one day to speak to someone who admitted they had never ever in their life been to the seaside. I found that astonishing. Now that I live back on the Forth I appreciate it more than ever before and we regularly go for drives out into the countryside, up into Perthshire and beyond.
“Now that I live back on the Forth I appreciate it more than ever”
I know what you mean. As I posted Saddleworth is beautiful and I realise that I am blessed to live here. I never take our hills and moors for granted. I love the place and it will always be home to me.
Avoid the area around Scunthorpe, masses of bird choppers. All probably stationary right now, unless they are powering some to create the illusion.
Socialists love ugliness, look at Cherie Blair.
I’d rather not….
I always thought that waking up next to Cherie Blair every day was TB’s punishment for being the awful creep that he is
You gotta laugh at the lone socialist doing all the thumbs down on comments. They must see themselves as the “Climate Resistance” instead of the useful Idiot that they really are.
Absolutely we choose our own suffering. It’s her inner ugliness that’s actually worse however.
It isa remarkable in a country where much of the art and especially the literature exalts the British countryside. Since the 1970s really there has been a growing callous disregard for the easygoing loveliness of the landscape. If you take stimulants you lose your ability to apprehend beauty because its appreciation requires a certain relaxed awareness. Perhaps it is money worship, perhaps nihilism. Sad to see it go though.
Nor did the farmers, when they changed the landscape by replacing trees etc and developed agriculture. Some solar farm sites don’t bother me from outdoor areas, such as Wroughton (part of an old airfield in Wiltshire).
Farmers produce food that keeps us alive- bird choppers sometimes produce electricity that we could get much more cheaply from hydrocarbons
But the whole idea of the Green Agenda is to remove cheap energy. The Eco Socialists see it as the driver of Industrial Capitalism.
Indeed. Thunberg said it out loud. Sadly there are a lot of useful idiots who wouldn’t believe anyone could be so wicked. Sound familiar?
The Fuhrer?
Indeed and one of his mates, another proponent of the Big Lie. And many other powerful people throughout history. Who knew they might lie for their own ends!?!??!? Yet people believe it, just as they believed Convid.
That’s astoundingly ugly and a poor use of land. If that doesn’t bother then you don’t mind being robbed blind by the subsidy. Subsiding food is ond thing, subsidising uselessly inefficient electricity another entirely.
I’ve never seen a wind farm yet that hasn’t been a blight on the countryside ….. apart from the ones that are a blight on our sea-scapes.
Flying into Edinburgh Airport the country now looks like a giant pin cushion
There is a poem by Philip Larkin called Going, Going. He captures it perfectly.
Yup, he was a genius
There’s a reason why Will Self finds himself wandering about, alone, in the countryside.
I think Coming Up For Air by Orwell also describes the attack of this force on something much superior. Hardy described the English mythos as something both fragile and magnificent. If you succumb to its vandalsim then you have commited a great sin against beauty. You sold your birthright for a mess of pottage.
Take them out of the countryside. Deracinate them and uproot them. Make them feeble supplicants in a harsh and unfamilair city. Don’t ask the man on the street for directions because you are likely to get ‘I no spikka English’. Forget your past and your grandmother and become a globalist slave. That is the only future we allow you.
I don’t want to get into the whole ‘cock-up or conspiracy’ argument, but will just say, regardless of whether was a plan all along, ‘we’ (meaning the general public) have gone along with it 100%, and continue to do so.
Listen if you are in your forties or fifties now then get out while you can unless you have the stomach for it. If you can’t get out then at least encourage your children to learn foreign languages and then get them out as soon as possible. Like when the Irish had a Wake for a relative who went to America and they never saw him again.Have evacuation in your mind as the highest priority. If you can’t get out then stay and fight but it will be a nasty affair with an unclear outcome. If you have brothers or sisters in Canada or Australia then I suggest that you make every effort to join them quickly.
But where to and at those ages it is difficult to emigrate unless you have a lot of cash. Unless you can get into a suitable country and claim asylum or burn your papers, how an it be done.
They are no better
London Green Belt Council has been promoting the fact for years that open space is important for mental health. The ability to run, walk or cycle outdoors is clearly also good for physical health.
Access to open space has been well understood for generations but our current elites do not know or will not listen.
Mental health can be maintained by access to open space and those with problems in that department are much imprived by the experience.
I was in Cambridgeshire today and went to the drove where my late father farmed for over 30 years from the late 1940s. Almost all “his” fields are now covered with solar panels. At least one other field is covered by uncontrolled bushes – “rewilding” I suppose they will say. That field is inaccessible to the public and seems redundant as Wicken Fen is very close at hand.
It is in that vicinity that Sunica is to build a large solar array. It will take approaching 3,000 acres of good productive farm land out of food production and blight the villages and footpaths around. In the past days the hypoctitical LibDem MP newly elected for the area has condemned the approval. That after her party campaigned for anything that was not hydrocarbon.
This issue is like so many others these days. We are being told untruths but by the time the facts are known to the majority the damage will be irreversible and the culprits will long since have retired. If we ever get the sort of government and Parliament we need some sort of retrospective penalties will have to be applied.
If city people don’t notice the countryside then maybe it’s time to start siting the wind turbines and solar farms in the parks of the cities. Solar panels all over Richmond Park anyone?
How much does it cost to get outline planning permission? Would such a thing wake up the masses if someone were to apply to put turbines in say Hyde Park. One outside the door of Kensington Palace might wake Chuckle’s family up to the realities of them.
Off-T
The push for universal digital ID and it will come off the back of a worldwide financial crash.
Also includes a talk about the Theft of the Commons.
https://youtu.be/ZaDwnpV1TB8?si=oUYuItOsm52Az6ve
I noticed some Labour person on GB News yesterday say that those who live near these monstrosities of part time silly energy should “benefit” from having them near where they live. What she means is they should be bribed into having them. Isn’t this freely admitting that they are totally undesirable and need to pay off people to accept them?
With a ‘national grid’ there’s no way that anyone local can immediately benefit from them. it’s like the myth of only buying ‘green’ energy from your supplier.
Yes all electricity goes into the grid, but the local people near solar farms will be bribed in some way or other. Perhaps 10% off their bill or an annual sum paid into their bank account.
If you do feel solar is the answer, why not cover all supermarket car parks with solar panels? Probably too fragmented, but at least it would save the countryside.
If you feel solar is the answer to what? In winter in the UK it gets dark about 4 pm and does not get light again till after 8 am. And in summer it gets dark at night——-Solar is only the answer to the eco socialists dream of controlling our energy use, or I should say reducing it as much as possible by taking away energy that works and giving us energy that doesn’t work
According to this data, Miliband will be sacrificing large areas of the most fertile farm land in the the world!
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wheat-yields?time=2022
What also needs to be taken into account is that large areas of good farmland are now being grown as monoculture maize for feeding bio-digesters.
At cutting time we have hundreds of tractor and trailer movements along our country lanes taking the cut corn to the digesters.
The farmers earn more money per acre and it is less labour-intensive than producing food.
As a member I’ve just written to both the RSPB and National Trust asking how they can carry on supporting this assault on our countryside. Sadly I expect they will come back with the usual rubbish excuses. It really is heart breaking.
Field trip with18 year olds in suburban Hampshire ‘Something’s bitten me – it was on that plant over there’ (points to stinging nettle). When we explained about nettles, the young person genuinely had no idea what they were.
There are supposed to be hundreds of different vernacular names for the cuckoo pint so I used to test my biology students to see what they called it – in recent years, none of them have even seen it. It’s not because cuckoo pints have all evaporated due to climate change.
It’s not (just) that we have concreted over fields for development, I live in the middle of a city and can walk to a SSSI with marsh orchids, twayblade and autumn lady’s tresses. Connection with nature seems like another piece of our culture that we have willingly surrendered (like nursery rhymes – but that’s another story).
It amuses me that in the heading picture they have maintained all the hedgerows between the bountiful crops of monocrystalline silicon fertilised with scarce minerals. Presumably they are preparing for subsequent crop rotation when this particular fad dies away.
We stop them by protesting at the sites making it impossible for them to work, by creating as much disruption as we can. I take the protesters in LLanelli who picketed and disrupted a large Hotel which had been designated as a ilegal immigrants hostel, the people from the town made it impossible for the work to be carried out and after many months the company gave up.
Writing to MP’S as we know achieves nothing, this carnage the Government seeks to create, not only puts an ugly horrendous block on the landscape, it reduces the available land for growing food, the things themselves poison the land, the animals that would have lived off and around those fields can no longer do so, and the stuff that the panels are made from are not recyclable, they have to go into landfill where the elements that make them are so toxic they leech into the water table.
These things are bad for humans, Ed Milliband is anti human, as are the other zealots in the climate change scam. The ony way to stop them is to en masse say no and large numbers to make their views known by installing themselves at the sites.
It really is no surprise that so many of our population are depressed. There is a known and very clear link between having a connection with nature and a person’s mental well-being.
All the philistines who infest the Establishment care about is money, their own power and control over the population.
England’s green and pleasant land is being deliberately destroyed by their policies.
I live in rural West Suffolk and spent a sleepless night recently when I heard that the eco fanatic Milliband ( notice the mad glint in his eyes!) was going to build a 100 mile (Km?) long row of wind turbines from Norfolk to Suffolk to Essex. I kept imagining all the dead bodies of migratory birds piling up all around the turbines.
Then came the news of about 2,700 acres of solar panels on rural land in West Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. By that time I had given up any hope and managed to sleep through the night.
But my heart is heavy and I don’t think I will be living for very long in this so called green and pleasant land. S E Asia now seems very appealing. And with Labour in power how long will this country remain green? As for pleasant – it certainly won’t be.
What did people think would happen when they voted for Labour?
I’m not sure but it wouldn’t be any better under the lib dems either
Yep——–In Germany the Red Kite has been virtually wiped out by the 40,000 turbines in that country.
It’s not only the bird mincers and the panels but also the miles of pylons which are cheaper than buried cables that will soon despoil our green and pleasant land.