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Probably one of the more major repercussions of the recent Tory electoral catastrophe is the apparent green light it gives the government to plough ahead with their gargantuan resurgent road building programme. By way of a reminder, that means the continuation of some 238 schemes; more than 76 bypasses, 48 link roads, 12 link roads and 56 widened roads. All in all that’s some 772 miles of new or widened roads. It’s a reversion to old Tory form, given apparent legitimacy by a panicky response to our economic situation where any kind of fiscal stimulus is seen as the only way forward.

Too bad then that the weight of evidence is stacked up against the long-term efficacy of building our way out of congestion. And too bad that figures show that levels of traffic may have actually been plateauing these last ten years if not on a steady decline. But that hardly seems to matter in the new paradigm of Conservative consensus. Let’s just build our way out of recession, whatever the logic or evidence may actually be.

Many people I know would rather not drive were it not for the exorbitant costs – and frequent overcrowding – of public transport. A unique opportunity of potential behavioral change is being lost by at best indifference but in all likelihood a cynical rejection of a genuine chance for a true modal shift.

Though of course while that’s true, it cannot all be laid at the feet of the government. While a probable still-sizable majority of folk own and frequently travel by car, it can be argued that procurement of roads is simply responding to popular demand. For most people in the UK, regular car use is a fact of life. For families in particular or for most living anywhere particularly rural, they’re often a seemingly unalterable crutch if not actually outright indispensable. Their advantages in getting people exactly where they need to be at any given time, their capacity for shifting stuff as well as people apparently give them a huge upper hand.

That’s the logic of car use; an undeniable one for so many. But their plush if pathogen-laden interiors insulate people in more ways than one. Not only is the immediacy of the natural world removed from us as if by a veil or the displacing effect of rapid movement, but the true costs of the roads that facilitate car use are equally hidden. Not just the landscapes and communities marred or removed but fiscally too; the cost of roads are rendered obscene at a time of supposed tightening of belts. It has been estimated that each metre of new road costs in the region of £25,000. And that at a time when, as we all know, other vital services in local councils are being cut to the quick; real, vital services that make a huge impact on people’s daily lives here and now.

It would be easy to say this was tragic. Tragic because we could be at a genuine crossroads for major changes in how we get about. Not some throwback where cars are got rid of altogether, but shifts in overall behaviour where car ownership is no longer some kind of mechanised Holy Grail for individuals and families alike, where lift sharing and car sharing clubs can truly take off, where trains are affordable and spacious, where we cultivate a different sense of distance, a different sense of respect for the places we pass through.

If it wasn’t for the prospective loss of so many places you could say it was more like a very black farce; at least as far as governmental policy goes. In times of financial hardship a clear choice has been made along ideological, not practical grounds. It has less to do with the grinding pressure of congestion and everything to do with car manufacturing, oil and road building lobbies. It’s just a happy accident for them that so many of us are suckling on the petrol-headed teat.

And the roads themselves; vanguards of development, offering a dream of easy freedom. For another few years till another is needed, steering the masses away from hard choices, fostering an easy way of doing things, taking us further to escape what we’ve done to our immediate locality. They lock us in to six-laned roads, to half-lives on the motorways where everything is flat and air comes stalely through the vents.

Who wouldn’t be free of all this if we actually believed we had a choice? A choice that might not always be as gratifying or easy as jumping in the driving seat at any given moment. But one which offers another kind of freedom; freedom from the drudgery of roads, from the financial yolk of keeping a car on the road, a freedom to be able to really look at and travel benignly through the landscapes and places around us.

Otherwise we only enforce on the wider world the landscapes already within us. If we are wired to machines every hour of the day, if our heads and souls are so full of a never-ending media, if we are so transfixed with affairs of the day or the latest app or who in the public eye is saying precisely what about precisely who and all the while the world at our windows is crying out to bring us all closer and home to our natural gifts, our natural inheritance just to be out in creation – is it any wonder that, if we cannot hear that call, then all the moors, the woodlands and the ancient fields seem a little bit more abstract as we weigh their cost; expendables to modern life, pleasant irrelevancies that mean little to economies of luxury and pace while all the while we let ourselves grow poorer by degrees, the world suffers and one day we wake and find ourselves surrounded by a wasteland, crying out how was it that we let it come to this?

We all of us have choices still, whether as individuals or as part of our society itself. For many, car use remains alluring and undeniably convenient. But it’s clearer than ever it comes at a huge cost. Perhaps it comes down to that which we consider most important; our landscapes and communities, the wildlife we should act as stewards towards, or an open road, however temporary, the ability to pass unhindered down the screeslope of prediction and provision. We cannot wish some all-or-nothing, either-or where every journey amounts to an irredeemable castigation. But choices remain and we cannot continue to deny that new roads ultimately serve no one; they may help cut congestion for a time but we all have to pay a long-term price. We have to ask ourselves what kind of country we really want to live in. Will we be remembered as a generation that sacrificed so much while propping up policies discredited decades ago? Finding our way into a different future is largely a question of will. It’s a real sorry state of affairs then that our current government seems so intent on building the last things we need.

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.

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Landscapes

Toppling King Coal