Wind farms ‘degrade’ our green spaces

BRITAIN’S green spaces have been massively degraded, the president of the Royal Geographical Society has said.

Although 98 per cent of the country has not been built on, solar panel and wind farms, the planning of motorways and heavy utilities have altered the natural environment, geographer Nicholas Crane added.

He said the countryside as documented by respected historian William Hoskins in 1955 had changed dramatically. Mr Crane said: ‘The real problem we are facing is not that we have not got lots of green space left, it is that it is massively degraded in terms of quality.

‘So a lot of our green space is not very useful.

‘We are farming now for wind and we are farming now for sun as well as for crops, so the countryside has changed so green space does not mean… the countryside that Hoskins imagined, for example, back in the ’50s.’

Mr Crane, a presenter of the BBC2 series Coast, has written a book titled The Making Of The British Landscape which ranges from the Ice Age to the present.

He told a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society’s Northern Ireland branch the definition of a green space had changed.

‘It is massively degraded,’ said Mr Crane. ‘I personally think the real imperative now is to improve the quality of this majority of green space that we have.’

As part of a campaign to protect rural areas, he has argued that building on greenfield sites is no solution to the needs of an expanding population.