Copyright 2004 Telegraph Group Limited
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)

January 16, 2004, Friday

SECTION: News; End Column: Pg. 29

LENGTH: 341 words

HEADLINE: False friends

BYLINE: BY PETER SIMPLE

BODY:
WHAT kind of world do you want? This momentous question, on a glossy
leaflet, dropped out of a newspaper. It came from Friends of the Earth, the
environmental group, with their familiar message: that climate change,
caused by the increased emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gases, is a bigger threat to the world than terrorism, nuclear war and all
other conceivable threats combined.

A year ago, Tony Blair announced plans to reduce these emissions in Britain
by 60 per cent by the year 2050. Accordingly, we are to develop
"sustainable" sources of energy such as wind, tidal and solar power. Of
these, wind power is the most important and is already a rapidly growing
industry. It is also the biggest present threat, not to the world as the
abstraction ("planet Earth") that environmentalists are continually talking
about as though they lived outside it themselves and watched it from afar,
but to what really concerns us here and now: the state of our own country.

The wind power industry is relentlessly imposing its hideous, noisy,
wild-bird-slaughtering turbines on the few remaining quiet and beautiful
parts of the country. This is not a matter for a few old-fashioned aesthetes
and Luddite romantics such as myself (extreme raving environmentalists have
coined a wonderfully offensive new term for us: "landscape fascists"). It
concerns everyone who still hopes that England, in spite of everything, may
still, if only for a little while, remain a country fit for human beings to
live in.

Those are not true friends of the earth who want to sacrifice present good
for an imaginary "sustainable" future and ensure that there are no longer
any places of refuge or respite from the ever advancing industrial system,
which by the perpetual manufacture of superfluous goods, machines and
gadgets supports our demented manner of living.

What will become of us when, wherever we look, we see only new and ever more
elaborate signs of our enslavement to that system? Is that the kind of world
we are supposed to want?

LOAD-DATE: January 16, 2004