ZEITGEIST

So when's the last time you saw a windfarm?

On the ads the Co-operative Group put out a little while ago?

Or perhaps on Twiggy's advert for Marks & Spencer?

Maybe you saw the windfarm on the BBC's "Hope Springs" last night?

The thing is, there's a fairly strong chance that you'll have seen one recently. And that's a good thing.

Windfarms are no longer hidden away in remote corners. They are becoming part of the culture. They symbolise something - a new approach to our electricity needs, a new sense of responsibility for the environment, a new kind of technology, which gives back more than it takes, a new age of thinking clean and thinking green.

This was also exemplified in the recent European elections. What very few commentators have bothered to notice is that the Green vote went up all across the UK. Europe will now have more Green MEPs, and if the trend continues, the UK will soon be voting more Greens into the European parliament.

(This is the same European parliament that VVASP wants to suspend all European windfarms, simply because they don't want one near them. Bastards.)

Now, Green politics aside, the fact that windfarms and turbines are becoming a part of the popular consciousness, a veritable symbol of environmental responsibility and the shape of things to come, can only help the present debate.

There are people in our local villages who fear change. Curiously, these people are not necessarily those whose families have lived in these villages for generations. No, rather it is the 'immigrants' from the cities who fear change, regardless of the fact that they themselves brought change to the villages by moving into them without first taking the trouble to understand what a community, or indeed the countryside, is.

The fear of change that these poor souls suffer from has led them into wild and irrational behaviour when confronted with the possibility of having an awe-inspiring, reassuring, state-of-the-art windfarm in their area.

But while they've been fuming and fulminating, lying and threatening, the world has moved on. Windfarms are increasingly recognised as a valuable part of the British landscape, as the means of clean energy production, and as a key aspect of life in the 21st century.

Being scared of them is just daft. Telling lies about them is crazy. Opposing them is plain anti-social. Trying to use Europe to stop them is a retrograde step of epic proportions.

They're here, and they're magnificent. And more and more people are recognising and embracing those facts.

Maybe one day, the weirdos of VVASP will wake up and smell the coffee. It'll be fun to see them trying to pretend that they were in favour of windfarms all along, when they finally realise how misguided, out-of-touch and reprehensible their dimwitted, misplaced opposition was.