CAMPAIGNING AGAINST THE COUNTRYSIDE

The dream of moving out to the country is one shared by many.



But the consequences of too many people leaving the cities for the rural life are now becoming painfully obvious. Apart from other problems, like the lack of affordable housing, one major headache caused by too great a migration of interlopers is a complete misunderstanding of what the countryside is all about.



Too many city-dwellers turned would-be country squires haven't the foggiest idea of the extent to which our entire landscape has been shaped over the years by human activity. As a consequence, they expect the countryside to remain unchanged, dormant and effectively dead from the moment they arrive.



One example is the Church Lench Parish Councillor who has campaigned feverishly against her local farm being ... well, a farm. She wants something nice to look at, not an agricultural business and a livelihood which has sustained local families for generations.



A countryside that never changes is an mythic idyll dreamt up by city-dwellers. Now that they have moved out into rural villages, they think they have the right to impose that non-existent idyll on their local area. They are becoming the new, self-appointed custodians of the countryside, elbowing working farmers - the traditional custodians of the countryside - aside in their haste to force their own views down everybody throats.



Farmers in the main are not opposed to windfarms. Okay, there is the odd one who grumbles because the turbines aren't on his land, but otherwise, the farming community welcomes windfarms as a sensible, effective use of land. Most farming activities are kind of a waste of time, thanks to supermarkets, mostly, but windfarms offer investment without damage to farmland, and they allow farmers to continue raising livestock or growing cash crops while guaranteeing a much-needed regular income.



But, of course, the newcomers to the countryside HATE farmers - especially those who insist on making a living. These newcomers honestly think that the countryside exists solely for them: that it is their privilege, as wealthy property owners, to dictate how the countryside works - or, more often, how it doesn't.



If the nimbies get their way, the countryside around the Lenches will die just a little bit more. It will become just a picture, a view from the windows of a few, in which nothing ever happens or is allowed to happen. It will be a dead thing. In claiming, bizarrely and irrationally, that the Lenchwick Windfarm will 'kill the Vale countryside', the thoughtless protesters of VVASP are doing their absolute utmost to kill the local, as well as the global, environment.



The link below, sent to me by one of the followers of this blog, puts the more intelligent, open-minded and reasonable case. It is a timely celebration of the good windfarms can do, not just for society, but for the rural landscape.



It is what has been lacking from the narrow-minded local debate - a sense of joy, wonder, excitement, hope and possibilities. The deadheads of VVASP want the land, their local area, to be as dead as they are, to be as lacking in life and joy as they are. This article - from The Times, of all places - proves that we don't need to conform to their hideously inappropriate vision of 'their' countryside and that their dull fantasy of an inactive, moribund rural landscape is not shared by those who appreciate the living, ever-changing countryside.


Read it, and enjoy:


http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/caitlin_moran/article6682305.ece?openComment=true