environment

There is no ‘Away’ in ‘Throwaway’

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

You can see it towering up like a kind of colossal ark against the backdrop of the sea. Cranes stoop around it like some kind of gang of gangling ministers. It is already now a living symbol of failure of vision, or something more complicit. Soon a fleet of lorries will transport daily more than 500 tonnes of waste to be burnt up in Newhaven’s new incinerator. The ash produced and the toxins it contains – whether caught in the filters or the bottom ash that constitutes around a third of that which has just been burnt – is to be deposited in ‘land raise’ sites around the county.

Here, that means that out on the flat land that runs down to the Pevensey levels, previously tranquil country lanes will be full of dumper trucks and the ash – rich among other things in heavy metals – will sit, semi airbourne, mountains in the making as a toxic realisation of what miopic local government can look like. The truly disturbing thing is that they want to use the stuff as a construction material, thereby increasing the danger of the stuff seaping into groundwater, never mind the health effect for anybody living and working in the buildings they intend to build with it.

Officials insist the risk to health is minimal, that incineration is a valuable source of power as well as a solution to the problem of our running out of landfill sites. And there is no doubt that the problem of the amount of waste produced in the UK is huge – some 434 million tonnes every year – enough to fill the Albert Hall every two hours. Some 30 million of these tonnes are produced by domestic rubbish.

But there have been great changes, not least an increase in recycling from 4% to 40% since 2000, with a target of 50% by 2020. The tragedy of the proposed move towards more incineration is that such changes are halted if not put into reverse. In fact, local authorities who’ve forked out for incinerators will be induced financially to source waste from outside their area, particularly if the incinerators are linked to providing a set amount of power. This creates the use of more trucks on the road and erodes the growing aspiration that we should be getting away from waste per se, should be encouraging more compostable products, better collection of compost itself and greater use of anaerobic digestion. Incinerators lock us in to the mentality whereby we do not think of what we throw away. The binmen do their rounds and we are all conditioned to forget.

In her recent book ‘The Secret Life of Stuff‘ – Julie Hill spells out the nature of the problems of our relationship to the stuff we consume and throw out. A large part of what we’re faced with is the effect of the ‘linear economy’ whereby we make stuff, use it, then throw it away – reintegrating any of it back into the system still takes place much less frequently. Just look at aluminium – ubiquitous because it’s so useful; light, flexible, even barely toxic when used as packaging, it is smelted in inferno-like conditions whereby a single plant can use as much electricity as a city of a million people. Transported huge distances during its manufacture we use 900,000 tonnes of the stuff in the UK every year. While around half of that used in packaging is recycled every year, that still leaves a vast amount going to waste.

Or take a look at the half a million tonnes of clothes and textiles buried in landfill each year, along with an extra half a million tonnes of carpet, 8,000 tonnes of which are laid for events lasting only hours or days. Changing our clothes and furnishings regularly irrespective of whether they still have life in them has become symptomatic of modern life – once people made patchwork quilts and rag rugs, repaired things, bought them in the expectation they would last. A hundred years ago, household rubbish mainly consisted of ash and cinders and maybe food waste if there wasn’t a dog or pig around, back in a prewar world before consumption gathered pace and where salvage was still part of the scenery.

We need to start a greater shift back to such sensibilities along with working towards solutions such as designing products for durability and for recovery of their constituent materials along with returning nutrients from food and human waste to the soil. Reforming how we reduce waste and set about its management is undoubtedly a long, hard grind and incinerators hold out the promise of a seemingly quick fix. The environmental cost of the production of the waste that they burn, to say nothing of putting elements of it back into the atmosphere shines an uncomfortable light on such a promise, or policies of here-and-now convenience.

There are now 81 incinerators planned around the country. It has been calculated they produce twice as much CO2 as fossil fuelled power stations, making the plan for more incinerators look doubly perverse. Meanwhile those living under the prevailing wind will have to deal with a legacy of increased likelihood of cancers. The extent to which dioxins produced represent a significant risk is still controversial, though their output during the start up and shutting down of the furnace has not been properly monitored in the UK. Meanwhile the filters do not catch nano particles which can infiltrate the lining of the lung and cause internal inflamation, damaging organs and even unborn children.

At Newhaven now and anywhere downwind we have to live with a leviathan that may well set the county back by decades. The building looms as a testament of how not to do things, of what can happen when councils bite the bullet of an out-of-sight-and-mind mentality that sums up our modern problem of waste production itself. The facts that the way in which the councils involved have acted here has been described by the local MP, Norman Baker, as ‘amateurish and slipshod’, that the very legality of the deal with the construction firm has been called into question are somehow depressingly unsurprising. If anything can be drawn from such a sorry story, it should be that many other places in the country still have a choice about whether to meet the future of waste management with an attitude fit for this century, not some all too easy, corporately financed non-solution that creates more problems than it claims to bring an answer to.

“Our Richest and Most Fragile Habitat”

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

At first there was the by now usual sense of stunned disbelief: the government – not content with dispatching any public body with a goal of serving the greater public good or attempting to provide some kind of environmental balance from on high – was coming for the Forestry Commission. But beyond the justified chorus of concern, the petition that has already gathered 150,000 signatories, the score of campaign groups that has sprung up, is the idea really as bad as it sounds?

After all, The Forestry Commission itself was set up after the First World War during which the importance of a domestic supply of timber had been made acutely relevant by the interfering effect of German u-boats. Our previous habit, formed in the previous century, had been to simply strip other unsuspecting countries of their wildwood. In a short space of time after the founding of the Commission in 1919, vast tracts of upland hillsides, moorlands and heaths had been planted up.

The effect on these habitats in our backyards was obviously less than brilliant but at least we weren’t denuding the pristine forests from so much of the rest of the empire. And here, even at this first inception of the Commission, there lies the rub of how we provide for our appetite of timber without undue damage to the natural environment. Is it so bad if so much of the Commission land has now come up for sale? Weren’t these trees planted to be harvested at some stage down the line? With our current deficit isn’t now as good a time as any to call in our debts? We might even stand to reclaim some of those moors and heaths and barren but beautiful hillsides that were lost beneath the blanket of dark spruce.

One very large problem with this is that large areas of ancient woodland have been cut down and grubbed up and planted with conifers this century, seen as they were after the collapse of their age-old management pattern as somehow extraneous, unproductive patches to be tidied up. About half of our ancient woodland has been lost since the end of the Second World War and replanting with conifers accounts for by far the largest share of this. At least, such a proportion would have been lost if these woodlands had not proved so unexpectedly durable – they can revive after a considerable time with the right conditions and even decades of the heavy shade of conifers have not removed them entirely.

Infact, since the 80’s there has been a growing recognition of the need to thin out conifers where they have been planted over ancient woodland and revive the latter in all its beautiful and species-enriched glory. Which is exactly what stands to make the proposed sell off so tragic – the Commission was planning to pursue such restoration on a massive scale. A vast amount of recoverable ancient woodland stands at risk of being lost, forever.

So even if the concept of selling off an asset once held firmly for the public does not raise hackles in and of itself, even if the thought of tracts of forest losing the excellent level of upkeep of paths and rides that the Commission currently provides does not sit uncomfortably then perhaps the proposed pawning of this most precious asset – the 20,000 hectares of woodland as close to wildwood as anything we are ever likely to possess might just wake us up to what we stand to lose in this proposed sell off.

The sorry star upon a proposal which has long since shed its needles and should be removed from both houses with all speed is that the mechanism drafted to facilitate the sell off is not even constitutional. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we’re glibly told that this is an opportunity for community groups to acquire their local woodland – even if such groups gather the money, where exactly do their members hope to find the time to manage forests with any thing like the level of dedication the Commission currently provides?

There will always be a need for sustainable forestry. But brokerages as hasty as this one appears to be, running the risk of selling off to firms who only have profits in mind and little or no sense of what husbandry can look like don’t do the country any favours by any yardstick. The Commission maintains 100% of its woodland to Forestry Stewardship standard – there will be no such requirement for future owners. To make a former point again, even the economics is dubious; the FC making sizeable returns on their estates to the point where the body costs the public only 30 pence per taxpayer per year. But this government has no sense of value, of what a thing is worth, of what generations past have held dear and fought for. They paint themselves as bitter medicine, as the cruel but kindly short sharp shock. Really though they are just libertarians, about as respecting of institutions as their far left mirror images. Whether semi-crazed by ideology, or simply guilty of an amauterish gambling in the face of the crisis we face, they seem set to discover the limits of the population’s tolerance.

Toppling King Coal

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

The news pops up unmissable, if it weren’t for every other scrap of news also popping at the same time, along with reports of Ann Widdecombe being transported by a showbiz wire above the heads of an incredulous or simple nervous audience on the now worryingly ubiquitous Strictly. So, this particular bit of news says ‘anger was justified’; and this from the former NASA scientist talking about the occupation last year of a coal powered power plant in Ratcliffe-on-Soar near Nottingham by a troupe of activists aiming to shut it down for a week.

The action is a clear case-in-point of a host of issues wider than the heavy handedness of the police response; the right to protest, how this may somehow impinge on wider rights if it means it interferes with the public’s ability to watch Ann Widdecombe – and many more besides – sailing literally or metaphorically with apparent tranquility above the host of disbelieving heads. These millions of mesmerized, vaguely despairing or just bored – a number I could be in on another night – caught in the glare of a mass media that has become both slicker and strangely more popular as it gets ever more debased, suggest we will not think again about our actions even as the savage weather of a dawning century paws with renewed ferocity at the door of our collective consciousness.

And that of course is why those protests took place, why one hundred and fourteen people felt inclined to brave the vagaries of trespass and the response that was bound to come with it. We’re all of us only too aware of the wolf down the road, of the carbon ratcheting up as we hurtle down the motorway of ambivalence towards a fate we all try not to think about. Really, it is not indifference but a kind of collective terror at the situation that we’re in that makes the retreat to the semi fantasy of Saturday night TV seem all the more appealing.

So many now will not join up the dots. The more pronounced the arguments become, the greater the need to take stock of our situation then the greater the temptation not to engage, to turn the other cheek, to ignore the growing feeling that one day soon we will not be able to ignore the rising tides or signs of climatic instability. It is here now, with us, this is the perfect storm, Northern Europe freezes while in Canada and elsewhere the temperature is well above the norm.

But somehow, for the most part, it does not seem so bad. So long as we are warm and have enough to eat we discover our capacity to be content. Sitting virtually incarcerated in cars on the immobilised motorways a thousand motorists turn up the radio and keep their fingers crossed. The more fortunate of us curl up in our living rooms as ice locks us all in and scour our DVD’s and anything else that will help to pass the time and really all of this is only natural; to make the best of any situation. But we seem at times strangely reluctant to not let ourselves really appreciate the nature of our situation, we do not feel inclined to count the cruel tally of the coal as the carbon stacks up from the stacks that churn it out. And partly this is understandable as to do so is to walk along the edge of a kind of precipice looking out over our future, one that does not reassure, an apparently perilous path that could lead us all too easily down a scree or more sudden slope towards despair.

The actions of those at Nottingham in 2009 were of those who chose not to look away, who sought to raise awareness that here, in Britain in the Twentyfirst Century we are rolling on quite happily with the burning of a fuel that is the major cause, besides the oil we use in cars, of anthropocentric driven climate change. Whether we continue to use coal in anything like historic quantities sets up the expectancy or otherwise for any other country in the world to follow in our wake, or set off on another, far more hopeful path.

Of course, it is not enough to beat our chests and sing out; “let there be no more burning of coal.” We have to take stock of the truly huge scale of the problem, of how much we are reliant of this source of fuel, of how comparably unreliable alternative sources of energy can be when providing the necessary base load capacity to enable sixty one million viewers to turn on their kettles in the breaks between Ann’s airbourne debuts on the box. The answers are there but they require both political will and appropriate investment.

In the recent court case, it was argued that seeking to engage the public by encouraging the use of less power on certain days would have been a more constructive response. But, as James Hansen argued, we need to leave the stuff in the ground, not merely moderate our use of it. In that sense taking on a government policy where coal is all but mandatory looks alot more credulous.

Speaking on a debate on Radio Four recently, George Monbiot defined a crucial element of justification of any protest as one of accountability, of surrendering yourself to the full force of the law if you are to break it, in the belief that your actions will be tried in a court, that the rightness of your cause will meet the rigors of the legal system and have the chance to be vindicated in the process. As I understand it, the protestors at Ratcliffe were planning to lock on en masse; in this, they had made the decision to have their beliefs put to just such a test and in the process to present themselves as accountable for their deeds.

However much such protests may make us uncomfortable, they remain, at their best, a simple articulation of an article of a clarified awareness. Whether or not shutting down power stations is the best way to go about it, even an action like this can serve to remind us that things are wrong, that we cannot afford to sit by in denial or complacency while we betray the future through the failure to acknowledge that there must be change, that whatever the complexity, whatever psychological mires we may face, we are at a turning point and must look for and continue to express our expectations that we can moderate our impact on this earth, that we remain – to a possibly still crucial degree – the masters of our destiny if we can only see it.

No Oil But Dirty Oil

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Some things strip away the camouflage and leave the very ugly truth just staring back, unshamed. Suddenly the hopes are gone that somehow we might struggle through the end of the age of cheap oil even though it represents a monumental challenge. Or rather the conditions of such hopes become much clearer; that all such efforts will be totally in vain if we do nothing to prevent the onslaught facing our remaining indigenous peoples and the land that they protect. They are threatened by the corporations that effectively dictate the currents of our Northern policies, that are now rushing at full tilt into securing the resources a rapaciously expanding economy demands.

What’s clear is that those in these corporations that – as the recent article in the Washington Post confirms even Obama’s administration has been to a very large degree in deference to – will stop at nothing to do what must be done to feed the mindset and reality of an industrial dream long since turned sour. And those that stand to suffer most; who are even now in many places fighting for the very right to live, are those who have done the least damage, who are infact light years in everything they do from those patterns of thought and behaviour that are so surely selling us right down the river.

Suddenly it all comes crowding in, the floodgates are unleashed, an awful clarity arrives; the people in Ecuador suffering records rates of cancer thanks to the activities of Texaco, the very water that they drink and wash in poisoned by the run off from substandard oil sumps so that their children suffer horrific lesions, the ground itself so polluted that their poultry and their dogs simply keel over. Waking up to the scale and extent of what is now well underway in Canada is equally horrific; a realisation that what is planned for the tar sands of North Alberta will probably make that region uninhabitable in another fifty years.

Add the ever-spreading travesty within the Gulf of Mexico, think about the lapse in regulations that helped to lead to such a tragedy occurring and there can be no doubt that those who profit from oil also do so from a truly diabolical contribution to our collective fate. And they will not be stopped by governments, by wishful thinking, by their laying down to accept that the show is really over, that they will have to grow up and get used to finite resources on a finite planet. They will not stop by any volition of their own. They will not simply ruin or take the lives of nearly every people living in accord with any kind of ancient harmony. They will not simply remove what hope remains of our ever building something better than our outgrown industrial model as we endeavour to remould our cultures and societies. They stand to remove our last real chances of our ever leaving a biosphere that will not have reached the tipping points, that can still be classed as habitable or which would enable such a thing under something other than the direst circumstances. If we do not act we will only witness so many countries running even further out of water, or which are either fried beneath the anvil of an ever more intolerable sun or have been swallowed beneath the waves that only echo the despondency that stands to let this happen.

Out of our own humanity if nothing else we must all wean ourselves off our extravagance of oil. We must not shy from holding up a mirror to our Western world, to the cars we nearly all see as a right, the planes that are now almost mandatory to many. It is not fashionable. There is a faint embarrassment in crying out too loud, in scaring off all those who would be sympathetic to our cause. But what price does pandering to such sympathy entail? This is no joke or abstract wishing well of good intentions that bears little resemblance to real life. This goes further even than seeking to preserve our here and now, our own green hills and valleys – as intrinsic in their understated way to the big picture as they are. This is the ideal that we must wake up to and the earth herself is attempting to shake us by the throat. But the dream we are caught up in – and it is one that holds us in its very real concerns and even snares – almost seems to know this and raises the pitch of her siren-like voice.

We must find our way beyond it, we must wake up to the other story that we lost so long ago and whose importance now could not be greater. The longer we leave it, the more our denial is written in blood. For the scale of the horror we are all responsible for, look to the jungles of Ecuador, try to imagine the cries of people who have had no part in contributing to this mess, who – from Russia to Papua New Ginea to Nigeria – are now fighting for their lives and that of the land they have lived truly lightly on.

We must wake up. We really know on every level that we are in trouble but seek to block it out, to let our lives hold to their current course because this requires less effort, because we are caught up in the momentum of several centuries of change that let us think we could play God. Our awakening must be as much as anything from the forces of despair and apathy and must bring us into not only a greater perception of the nature of the problem; it must bring us into a greater sense of our own power, of what we can achieve despite all odds. Even the most glorious of summers, even the strongest sense of peace will not lead us clear if we do not confront the paradigm that seeks to keep our future from us and which vast leagues of speculators serve, blindly or recklessly or simply caught by love of money and the power it appears to bring but which ultimately leaves you all the weaker if in it’s acquisition you have lost so much that once was precious.

The scale of the challenge is nothing short of monumental. It is already one of several fields – the often literal coalface in the most unspoiled regions of the world being the most obvious and perhaps the most pressing and extreme. But also we are challenged in what we permit to pass within our nations’ borders – however much such borders must be held in perspective with the growing volkerwanderung we all now face, however much we cling to the comforts of a passing age. We must too challenge everything about our own behaviour, about how we relate to our land and localities. We must above all never think we are incapable or unworthy of the task that has been set us.

Everything we love lies in the balance and this is not the time to sit back, cross our fingers and hope for the best. We must all act to the best of our potential. It is for every one of us to play our part. And to do so we must step away from our screens for a while, think what it is like to lose your land and health and loved ones and remember this is not some tubthumped doomsday that may come if our elected politicians do not save us. It is already the reality for a growing number of First Nation peoples to whom we all owe a massive debt of gratitude, who hold so much knowledge that can inform the nature of the way ahead. We owe it to them to re-evaluate our every shared assumption, our every scrap of received wisdom: our own survival rests upon their fate, as does that which still remains of our morality.

A Noon Day Star

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Waking yesterday was like a minor miracle; the world was snowbound, even quieter than normal around here, the muffling up of noise by the blanketing of snowfall left a world that was almost silent and somehow strangely charged. But last night, with the news, it is like sadness or dismay but some sound sense of things has not departed, the sense that things are at a woeful ebb but that more hope, more force of attitude will surely still return because it must.

Perhaps negotiations were destined to fail by the standards we had set for them, perhaps it’s better that we are not locked into some binding half-arsed settlement when the situation calls for so much more. The road to Copenhagen was a long one, which makes it all the harder that we have so little now to show for it. But this must still be just the beginning of a mettling of wills to bring about a treaty that is in any real way acceptable.

We all know what’s at stake, we all know the gravity of our collective situation. But our fate is not yet settled. What’s clear, what the summit shows above all else is that we must put faith in the power of the world’s people themselves to affect the course of history. Efforts by our governments are surely to be welcomed but even the most effective, binding targets are quite meaningless if they do not have the will of the people to support them. And the absence of such targets puts only more responsibility on our shoulders; as individuals and communities.

And besides all this, it seems our governments are bound by an economic model of constant growth that is as much of a problem as – and which in any case goes a long way to beget – any number of chimneys, any amount of oil of dirty coal. These things are twinned, go hand in hand; without a major shift of fundamental paradigms we are locked into a model of destruction that renders any summit little more than a frantic rearranging of the deckchairs.

The future comes up from the ground, from underneath our feet, and is borne out in the visions that we hold, is breathed to life by the extent that we can imagine something different, by the scope of our diagnosis of the ills that we sit side by side with and accept as normal or just inescapable. The system, or simply the dynamics of a global infrastructure built on oil and the long distance transport of all kinds of goods, determines what we must seek to overcome. Power, and heat, the means of keeping our machines in motion; these sources are a boon but so smoothly given it is hard not to take them for granted. We must face up to the cost of our daily consumption and the more we can provide for ourselves in ways that we can clock, the more we can wean ourselves off what is extraneous, then the more we can come to value the great gifts the world has laid at our door and which we daily work away at; beyond what we can actually afford, beyond all scale of what is human, of any sense of where the balance lies.

There are those who might welcome in what appears to be coming, or who at any rate value the wild above our human ship, call it what you will; civilisation, dystopia or collective hallucination made real. And the scale of our various imbalances are not helped by the maths that state that there are more people than the earth can actually support, that we are eating into resources of all future generations. And yet we are all caught up in a dream and for the lucky ones amongst us it is beautiful; life, health, friendships, family, the thousand watersheds and markings out in life that make it meaningful. For many, any kind of wish to see it all come crumbling down seems simply intransigent or worse.

The reality though is that a major change is on its way, whether from a climate driven to the brink, or just our dwindling resources of all kinds and that the road will in every likelihood be at least rocky at times. Which simply makes it all the more imperative that we must prepare while there is time, that if we cherish all that is good about a culture, about what it means to lead good lives, to value our humanity, we must change our customs and our course to keep hold of what is meaningful. And, crucially, we may just about be able to achieve this if we can pull ourselves away from everything that no longer serves, from anything that goes beyond what is needed. And comfort is a human need, even if we may need to redefine how we come by it. The truly good things are generally not bought or sold and it may well be, if we can come together, that we will be richer – in time, in company – than many of us are with how things stand.

Meanwhile our governments will hammer out their treaties and I hope that doing so over the coming months and even years may go some way to addressing the most fundamental imbalances in the global economic system. I hope that justice can be agreed upon between North and South, just as I hope the southern hinterland within our northern nations can find a greater voice, that we can build a future based on individual awakening to responsibility for our every action, for our every pattern of behaviour. We need not wait for global politicians to forge the way ahead.

Here, around my flat, around the hills surrounding this old town, the snow lies thick and speaks of long established settlement, of peace. All is quiet and the feeling still persists that things can somehow still work out. Whether this will actually be so will depend on a shifting state of gears, of stillness waking up to motion, even to a storm of movement. But for now, the world is quiet and though the logic says we should be only too dismayed, the feeling of some promise is still with us, albeit battered, albeit even partially betrayed for the time being.

In a few days time the sun will shift, the days will grow again, we will stumble from our hangovers into another year, bright or harsh or coldly real but clearer and we’ll carry on because we each of us carry as great a potential for hope as any international gathering, because the future can be found in what we choose to carry in our actions, in our every intent, in the dreams we choose to keep alive because not to do so never was an option and every one of us holds power equal to the miracle of the noon day star enshrined by Buddhist philosophy, the miracle that lets us take our place upon this earth that we must now all hold as dear as any other relative.

Torch Bearers

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

You could see it like a gash on the horizon, beginnings of embankments marked in white from all the Dorset chalk. It was only too familiar but far too sad to see by any measure; now it seems another road by yet another backward looking council is advancing at full tilt and all the trials of those who’ve tried to stop it have come to nothing. Like England is scarred now not by almighty programmes from on high, but piecemeal, prosaically, facilitated by a trough of ill advise or apathy.

Dorset County Council – the ones who’ve pushed this road from the beginning – state on their own website that Dorset’s coast and countryside is amongst the most varied and beautiful in England and is believed by many to be the County’s most important asset. Thanks to Thomas Hardy, its hinterland is of international renown and it is where that hinterland meets the coast, where the ridge that makes it way down from the heartland plateau of Salisbury Plain, that the full damage of the road becomes quite clear.

As I write the scar grows ever wider and a line of hills that stretches up past Wiltshire to Ivinghoe Beacon on the Chilterns, a line that forms the backbone of the country, has now been desecrated for the sake of dubious expediency. The road had been proposed for nearly twenty years with high levels of local support, given that they were told that it would solve the town’s congestion even though, as Natural England stated in their objection at the road’s public inquiry; “[the scheme’s] advantages are limited and likely to be achievable in large measure by other means.”

The very need for the scheme was questioned by both The Council for the Protection of Rural England and the Woodland Trust. This was brushed aside by both the Council and the Planning Inspector however as if the presence of unquestionable congestion justified tackling this through increasing road space; a mock solution that had been discredited more than a decade ago. The adoption of such a pseudo solution today points to either an absolute absence of vision, endemic crookedness, sheer stupidity or perhaps simply the inability to convince a population that another road will not change anything, other than lock us in further to a pattern of environmental degradation and the cultural loss that comes with it.

There were other casualties besides the ridge. Two Mile Coppice – a patch of woodland and part of a SSSI – has now been carved up, effectively depriving the town of a much loved walking spot. It was the only remaining piece of ancient woodland within the Borough of Weymouth and Portland and, like all ancient woodland, had taken centuries to evolve. Compare this with the ‘mitigation’ package that somehow justifies the tearing in two of a nature reserve; the offer of the use of a piece of secondary woodland half a mile away, cut off from the town now by the road and containing only a fraction of the richness of the habitat, offered to console or otherwise entice the owners of Two Mile Coppice – The Woodland Trust – whose many objections at the inquiry were rebuffed with breathtaking simplicity by Dorset County Council. Amongst other things, the Council stated that the benefits outweigh the harm and that the secondary woodland could be an equal or greater resource, like pieces of land are theirs to carve up, like doling out one plot can justify the annihilation of the other.

And this, in echoes of other SSSI’s destroyed or damaged right across the country, has taken place despite national, regional and local legislation, including the Natural Environmental and Rural Communities Act and the UK Biodiversity Action Plan. English Heritage at any rate did not object, were happy with a payout that enabled a survey of the barrows on the portion of ridge that soon would no longer exist.

There was also the dissecting of a local housing estate which – among the predictable disadvantages of forced relocation, division of community, noise and air pollution – meant that many well used cycle routes away from the main roads are now impossible to use. Other land destroyed, damaged or rendered semi-sterile by the noise and toxicity of passing cars includes Dorset Wildlife Trust’s Lorton Meadows Nature Reserve and an and area designated of Local Landscape Interest. Bincombe Valley and its peace has now been lost. Add to this the marring of enjoyment of well known and well used long distance footpaths; Wey Valley Walks, the Dorset Jubilee Trail, the South West Coast Path itself and it’s clear the building of this road is a full blown tragedy.

Why was it built? Who funded it? How did it come to pass that it was allowed to go ahead? As I’ve already mentioned, there was strong local support for the scheme among much – but clearly not all – of Weymouth’s population. And – as also mentioned earlier – it reflects too the growing gap between local and national governmental thinking. This is partly a reflection of the engineering background of many County Council planning men, which fundamentally skews their entire mentality. It also tells of the kind of money that is still available for big schemes like roads and bridges, even trams on better years. Small scale and smart schemes – workplace and school travel plans, more cycle paths, car clubs – these things do not possess the same appeal for many councillors as large and slick construction contracts, are perhaps harder to sell as ‘doing something’, do not appear to carry the flame of ‘legacy.’ The big irony, considering the much promulgated Green Team Great Britain is that this road was partly funded, and largely justified by the 2012 Olympics, Weymouth hosting the yatching events for the occasion.

The coming disaster was acknowledged by the turnout of those already mentioned who objected to the scheme at the inquiry. But, in a saddening echo of the eighties and nineties, it was by then a largely foregone conclusion. There were others who stepped in, a man called Noddy who set up camp in an oak in Two Mile Coppice in the freezing cold of mid December, who was joined by others but by far too few. And yet they held the promise of what’s needed, of what in other times and places has come to pass and could still do so again. The flame at Two Mile Coppice was shortlived, but the ember of dissent the symbol of that protest holds could still be carried for what lies ahead.

It is tragic that at such a time, with the carbon impact of road transport only all too clear that a strong resurgent movement casts off as unfashionable or strategically second place the fight against the forces of road building. What makes Weymouth no less tragic, and which should make it stand as a bitter but vital reminder, is that we know we can fight – and win – against road building and on a national level, which should make taking on local councils relatively easy.

Thomas Hardy made the landscape of West Dorset famous in his time, a fame that lives today around the world. And it was a love for landscape that moved me and many more to join the protests against roads when we did. Global warming almost seemed abstract then against the all too real and visible butchery of hills that was taking place around us. For me the feeling still holds; not one issue over another because, in many ways, they are inseparable. The feeling holds not just through the corresponding tally of road transport to emissions, or the pathological degree of insulation from our natural surroundings when travelling in a car. The state of today’s and tomorrow’s climate is perhaps to some extent a reflection of how we treat our landscapes and our hills. The scientific consensus we now have over emissions is of course of indispensable value. But we should not be too quick to dismiss finer sentiments, the undersung feelings of belonging and connection, of living up to a feeling of greater responsibility.

As the saying goes, what we do to the land we do to ourselves. This is in no small part reflected in the writings of Hardy who was in his way somehow married to the land. His work speaks of lovers looking out for one another as one rounded a track on the side of a hill, reddle men making their way over down and heath for days like they were almost aboriginal in their intimacy with the ground below and all around them. Figures on the skyline fading with the light, stood on barrows that were in themselves like tiny, smaller hills upon the back of larger ones when you saw them from any kind of distance. He describes an intenseness of connection where a place is more than just personified. It is in it’s way like a world, represents and actually carries a force, holds a character that encompasses the other lesser figures so that their passions reflect the feeling of the place that they inhabit, seem almost trivial by comparison or somehow lifted up and made a part of the wider scene. At his best, he evokes some sense of common blood, of common destiny running through both place and the people upon it so that the stories of love and betrayal, of tragedy and whatever scraps of redemption can be found in hearts of sadness seem somehow of a greater order, a pattern that cannot be totally defined but somehow sits there with us.

Hardy’s greatest poem, or at least the one that has stayed with me above the rest, was ‘The Darkling Thrush’ in which he describes listening to the bird, in the twilight on a December’s evening at the beginning of the twentieth century. It ends;

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

Today, with the world Hardy knew and sought to preserve in collective memory seemingly vanished it is our charge to somehow constitute a move back towards something that resembles the best that it contained. There may still be hope for this, for the kind of world we still will have some say in, but not if more roads like Weymouth’s are officially approved and widely ignored. We must keep hold of our hills, cherish them in the full knowledge that life depends upon their preservation. They hold more than our past and sense of place; they keep our very future and hold the power to awake, even when – horrifically but nonetheless especially – they have been taken from us. Weymouth’s loss can remind us of everything there still remains to fight for. We should do so while hope for so many more places persists.