Conservation Why It's Up To Us - Funding Hill Paths With Stuart Younie of Mountaineering Scotland
As hillwalking gains in popularity the paths that we take for granted become increasingly eroded, creating unsightly scars and damaging fragile habitats. In the absence of Government investment, who'll pay to fix the problem? Dan Bailey joins S...
Comments
I'm a lot more interested in promoting biodiversity than in preserving how wild a place "feels" to modern domesticated humans. They're two completely separate issues which are often conflated. We've profited immensely from, for example, North sea oil and gas, which has been out of sight and out of mind whilst enabling for many of us the lifestyle that allows us to travel to wild places and enjoy them. If the impact of renewable energy infrastructure is primarily visual impact then that's a tiny price to pay for the benefits of weening us off fossil fuels, particularly since hydro and wind offer the British isles energy independence in an increasingly uncertain world. The alternative is new nuclear, for example at the Wylfa or repowering Trawsfynydd. I wonder how the author would feel about that if he lived in North Wales?
"open moorland" is partly a man made structure in itself!
Absolutely right. Not only that, but *all* of the so-called wild places in Britain have been affected in some way by human activity. Deforestation, grazing, culling of predators, air pollution, micro-plastics.... The list goes on and on, but so long as the author can't see wind turbine blade tips on the horizon they can continue to indulge their fantasy.
I'm not sure how helpful it is to set one group of people who care about our outdoors environment against another group of people who care about our outdoors environment. The author makes reference to 'green-on-green conflict', and I think it preferable to all those who care to share ideas and attempt to develop consensus positions, instead of attempting to claim that one position trumps any other. Whatever is done will almost certainly need to be a compromise, and may well vary across different locations.
My reading of the article is that they don't care so much about our outdoors environment as they do about their own experience of it. I'm all for preserving the areas of wilderness that we have left on the planet, but almost by definition that would mean severely restricting access to them. I'm certainly not in favour of that in Scotland.
Cards on the table, I've spent the last 15 years mostly working in renewables and I've spent the last 5 years working on a fleet of medium scale wind turbines and hydro sites scattered around farms on Wales. I've seen how new income streams make hill farmers less dependent on overgrazing and I've also seen how severely regulations have limited the roll out of renewables since 2010.
I'd like to be able to reach some sort of consensus position, but when the opposing position is based on an ineffable sense of "wildness" rather than measurable outcomes (eg biodiversity and a decarbonised grid) it's hard to see where that could be found.