So-called NIMBYs should be celebrated and not derided for caring about their local environment - Yorkshire Post Letters

The new government has certainly hit the ground running and shows promising signs of being more focused on delivery than its predecessor – not least in the fight against climate change. But a word of caution is already needed.

Underpinning the campaign rhetoric of ‘stopping the blockers’ there is an assumption that all or most of the people who speak up against proposed developments do so without real justification and that if only they could be more easily overruled we’ll march together into a sunrise of solutions to all our economic and environmental ills.

I’m not convinced. In my 25 years as a landscape architect involved in developments of all shapes and sizes, I’ve rarely met anyone whose concerns about change in their environment were not grounded in a deep and passionate understanding of their locality and its problems. These are not ‘NIMBYs’ but people who care about their local environment. As far as I’m concerned, that’s something to be celebrated, not derided.

The big potential change looming over my part of Yorkshire is the Walshaw Moor Windfarm. Perched on the hills between Calderdale and Haworth, this proposed colossal development would involve 65 turbines up to 200m tall, scattered liberally over the peat moorland – a Site of Special Scientific Interest known for hosting a variety of rare bird species and which in part at least was the inspiration for the setting of Wuthering Heights, hence of global literary significance. Public Rights of Way criss-cross this moor, affording views of unparalleled drama in West Yorkshire across to the southern Pennines and the outliers of the Dales. It is a beloved place.

That word ‘place’ is itself beloved of landscape architects like me. Our role in development is to identify what makes places unique, what is valued about them and what should be protected, or if that is impossible, somehow offset with new features that may in time come to be similarly valued.

And here is the crux of the problem as I see it with a climate change strategy that only looks at the big numbers and checks the boxes saying ‘X Gigawatts of renewable energy delivered’: if it doesn’t also consider the value of the landscape in which those gigawatts will be generated, it risks destroying the relationship between people and place by ripping out what they most value about their environment.

And if we do that, how are we to ask them to value the aspects of the environment that are more remote to them and that the climate strategy is designed to protect?

I can see why for a new government it’s tempting to bite the hand off developers lining up with wads of cash offering to solve the zero-carbon equation on whatever bit of land they have interests in. But before doing so, let’s ask the question ‘Is there a better way?’ Shouldn’t our climate mitigation and energy plans be led by national and regional government, not developers?

Shouldn’t it focus on finding ways to empower households and communities, affording them not just energy security but energy sovereignty through home and district-based energy generation systems? Shouldn’t the plan look to new and developing technologies, energy efficiency and storage solutions before offering to wreck vast swathes of multifunctional landscape precious for other equally vital services such as carbon storage, natural water management, biodiversity, and in lowland places, food production?

And in amongst all that, should it not recognise the essential role that open space, un-developed wilderness and yes, beauty, play in the quality of our shared life and every person’s relationship with the environment that climate campaigners like me celebrate?