| Wind Watch is a registered educational charity, founded in 2005. |
Wilds’ wind blow
Credit: www.scotsman.com 23 November 2011 ~~
Translate: FROM English | TO English
Translate: FROM English | TO English
An interesting conundrum was posed in your leader article “Three years to save Scottish tourism” (21 November).
At a recent conference on wind farms, the John Muir Trust quoted some dizzying figures: in 2003 some 40 per cent of the Scottish landscape could be considered to suffer no visual impact from human development, a proportion of truly wild land that few Western European countries could boast. Sadly, since then the figure has dropped to a mere 23 per cent. So we’ve lost nearly half of our wild landscape in under a decade. The runaway culprit? Wind farms.
With plans to power Scotland from renewables by whatever date the Scottish Government comes up with and with many, many hundreds of new wind turbine installations either approved or in the planning pipeline (planning which, if refused locally, will be overridden by Holyrood) it cannot be long before we have zero per cent of truly wild, undeveloped landscape to enjoy.
To be fair, visitors come to Scotland to enjoy our history, our culture and many other of our endearing national characteristics but the overwhelming majority come primarily to enjoy our wild landscape because, hitherto, we had more of it than they had.
If we are to attract visitors to a tourist product with a changed face, and not disappoint them in future, we had better not market our wild landscapes because, as the loss over the past eight years would indicate, there just won’t be any to see.
Dave Rice
Belstane
Kirknewton
This article is the work of the source indicated. Any opinions expressed in it are not necessarily those of National Wind Watch.
The copyright of this article resides with the author or publisher indicated. As part of its noncommercial educational effort to present the environmental, social, scientific, and economic issues of large-scale wind power development to a global audience seeking such information, National Wind Watch endeavors to observe “fair use” as provided for in section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law and similar “fair dealing” provisions of the copyright laws of other nations. Send requests to excerpt, general inquiries, and comments via e-mail.
| Wind Watch relies entirely on User Contributions |
 (via Stripe) |
 (via Paypal) |
Share:
[ Short URL: https://wind-watch.org/news/?p=15851 ]
