YOUR VIEWS: The ‘heartbreaking scars of industrialisation’ and making nature conservation a priority
How much more can our communities take?
As I travel around the Highlands trying to avoid the heart-breaking scars of industrialisation creeping across the landscape, I have become increasingly aware of the presence of the navy and green vehicles belonging to SSE.
I am either passing them parked at the side of the road, being overtaken by them, behind them or in a queue with at least one of them.
I encounter transporters with diggers and other large machinery careering around our narrow roads pushing me and others into the side and sometimes off the edge of the road as they pass.
When I am at home I hear helicopters hovering overhead, light aircraft weaving backwards and forwards and drones buzzing across the land and yet no planning applications have yet been submitted.
I am taken back to the awful time when the Beauly Denny was constructed. The sound of vehicles beeping, crushing and unloading rock and again the helicopters were shattering the peace.
Our roads were a terrifying place to be as many involved in the devastation used them as little more than a race track.
I really don’t know how much more the communities can take. People are under incredible mental and financial stress.
They see the lives they have built with hard work and passion being systematically dismantled by the insane reality that rural Scotland and its inhabitants have been sold out to the wealthy global investment companies who pretend they are concerned about the planet as they shatter the environment around us.
We are under occupation by Big Energy with SSE as the main aggressor in northern Scotland.
They along with other multinationals also demand we accept even more massive swooshing wind turbines with demonic red flashing lights to be connected to a metallic jungle of transmission lines and sprawling substations and energy traders inundate us with proposals for huge battery storage units; our precious silent black nights gone forever.
Where are our elected representatives? Too feart to speak up and needing a spine transplant before they will demand action to protect the people who voted them in.
Precious few are on our side and those that are find little support from others.
What a shameful situation to be in. Our governments back the multinationals against us and close their ears and eyes to our pleas for help and our tears.
I have never known anything so appalling and so chillingly widespread in a so called democracy.
Those who sit on the fence and refuse to act will soon find their comfortable seats and political careers hanging on a shoogly peg as those they have so disgracefully let down seek to punish them at the ballot box.
Lyndsey Ward
Spokeswoman for Communities B4 Power Companies
Beauly
Give priority to nature conservation at Coul Links
Jamie Stone in his Stone’s Throw (November 8) opinion piece states that, “If the Scottish Government fails to back the proposed Coul Links golf course, I believe there is a bleak future for Coul Links and indeed Sutherland”.
Leaving the economic and demographic issues and golf marketing hoodwinkery (like the ‘community’ oxymoronic ballot question) for others to argue, I believe there will be a bleak future for nature conservation of that part of the integrity of Loch Fleet SSSI, if the golf course is built, mown, disturbed and trampled by up to an anticipated 25,000 rounds per season, even with the course shut from autumn to spring to avoid freshwater inundations and occasional sea water along the lower Cluain Burn.
Jamie’s article was published a few days before the Scottish Government Coul Links hearing, so he is using his political influence on the public and MSPs before he has heard evidence presented to the government’s DPEA Reporters and the public.
Instead, he is putting the cart before the horse and reiterating information that sounds to be coming from the so-called Communities for Coul golf evangelism hymn sheet.
That propaganda campaign reiterates simplistic messages that aren’t shared by the majority of ecologists, including NatureScot’s, in the hope to sway hearts and minds or satisfy wishful ‘thinking’.
As a local retired and experienced ecological surveyor, I have listened to the webcast of C4C’s ecologist’s presentations to the hearing and would dispute much of what he said.
Some ‘details’ about the site were exaggerated: projected nitrogen deposition levels were a poor excuse for golf and lowered by other evidence; ‘chest-high’ Meadowsweet was perhaps measured using a child as a yardstick; Rosebay Willowherb is not advancing on the (biodiverse) non-SSSI links to the degree he described; etc.
If any believe these native species, Burnet Rose and Creeping Willow are as invasive as stated, check the Comparative Photographs portfolio (2016 - 2024) I submitted to Not Coul’s heap of documents for the DPEA hearing.
Also consider that those plants are natural components of dune vegetation, along with invasive birches, gorse and (fairly static but too dense) bracken, and collectively support numerous dependent insect species.
A rare moth and a scarce gall wasp are more strictly dependants on Burnet Rose, which is also used by nesting and foraging birds.
Creeping willow is a dwarf shrub with a multitude of dependent insects and, on Coul, a dependant parasite (perhaps saprophyte), nationally scarce Coralroot Orchid.
The ecologist spoke of scouring dune slacks, to reduce Meadowsweet and willows, which are characteristic of these Ramsar designated wetlands.
That interference would alter the natural sand, soil and peat profile, bring nutrients up to the surface, causing eutrophication, and alter the vegetation negatively, removing other components, including nationally scarce Baltic Rush, Fritillary butterflies’ Violet food plants, perennial Early Marsh-orchid and Sutherland’s beautiful county flower, Grass-of-Parnassus.
The ecologist has exaggerated the dominance of False Oat-grass and ignored the abundance of similar and desirable Downy and Meadow Oat-grasses in richer dune grasslands.
False Oat-grass and Meadowsweet, if so detrimental, are best controlled by light cattle grazing.
The ecological philosophy he described is not to get bogged down with ‘twitching’, counting individual species biodiversity or rarities, but apply a broad brush to conserve habitats, yet ecology is about the relationships of species to each other and the habitats and their inter-relationships that they depend on.
It shouldn’t be simplified, as he proposed, to lever developments that don’t conserve habitats or species.
Species, common to rare, need to be recorded and respected, and, if really necessary, controlled. Important species like Kidney Vetch, with dependant Small Blue butterfly, and breeding Reed Bunting, have been grossly underestimated.
Habitats should not be managed in ignorance of species, supported by defective surveys and inadequate Environmental Impact Assessment reports, promoting bogus biodiversity net gain, allowing destructive clumsy excavators and persistent mowers to level protected topography and shave habitats of species and structure.
Last autumn’s severe erosion and this year’s spring tides caused dune retreat at Coul, which already necessitates moving two of the proposed holes inland. The ecologist said rightly that golf course design isn’t finite, so the damage inflicted could move with every design whim.
Internationally important Coul Links is one of the most intact and natural dune systems of size in Scotland. Undeveloped dunes are among the most natural of British habitats and landscapes.
NatureScot’s dune ecologist was rightly critical of the development’s (semi-artificial) wildlife gardening approach.
A golf course would be ‘transformative’ but ultimately I believe that the Loch Fleet SSSI would be diminished, as happened at Trump’s Foveran Links former SSSI catastrophe.
A sensible alternative to golf would be sale to a conservation body to give real priority to nature conservation, including appropriate grazing and quality, free but managed public access.
Andrew Weston
Dornoch
