Save Our Common Mountain Environment

   
The following letter submitted to the 'letters page' of THE WESTERN MAIL newspaper, which calls itself 'The National Newspaper of Wales', failed to be published by the editorial staff.

Therefore SOCME takes pride and pleasure to be able to publish it on our web site.

   
SIR -
I first saw red kites in the early 1980s, from Pwllpeiran Experimental Farm below Plynlimon, when they were still very rare. It was a magical and memorable experience and I am sure the students who were with me will never forget the two birds whose curiosity brought them circling to within a few feet above us.

Your Country and Farming article ( Roll up for the 'white' red kites. August 20, 2004) on the RSPB Cymru-Forestry Commission's Bwlch Nant-yr-Arian kite-feeding station brought the picture back as if it were yesterday .

Nearby, Plynlimon is now the scene of an utter holocaust inflicted in the name of sustainable development. Huge pits torn into the flesh and bones of the mountain, access roads gouged across the slopes and quarries opened to make thousands of tons of concrete. All of this by permission of the Forestry Commission, and for a wind 'farm' which will generate barely one percent of the output of South Wales biggest power station.

The Brandenburg State Environment Office has recently published data, recording 38 red kite deaths in Germany, by collision with wind turbines.
Plynlimon is in the heart of red kite territory and the high ground to the east of Tregaron is targeted for another 170 to 200 giant turbines establishing what I have described elesewhere as "a drift-net of whirling blades".

Last year, after a kite was killed by a wind turbine near Aberystwyth, Dr Stowe, the Director of RSPB Cymru attempted to reassure me that there was no problem by writing: - "I think this is the first definite casualty that we know about despite a lot of looking and despite the proximity of a wind farm to a kite feeding station at Nant-yr-Arian (400m apart!!)."
Is the feeding station there to prove a point?

I hope Dr Stowe is right. But even more I wonder why we are doing this, and why organisations charged with looking after the countryside of Britain are pursuing this purblind course which is so damaging, and cannot possibly achieve the saving of CO2 emission which they claim is necessary. They press on regardless, against this advice from all the major engineering institutions and their many academic advisors.

Dr JOHN ETHERINGTON (former Reader in Ecology, University of Wales),
Llanhowell, Pembrokeshire.