Letters / Nature is Shetland’s main asset
We, my wife and I, have been following the recent euphoria within Shetland about the wind farm being planned and planted along the backbone of your isles.
We feel entitled to comment on that because we have been visiting the Old Rock for more than 45 years, i.e. more than 20 times since 1974.
And that was because of the people, though not the peerie folk, the nature and the birds, in particular of course.
We remember spending weeks in the early 1980s on the cliffs of Lamba Ness. But now we get sad and angry reading of the plans to turn that beauty spot into a rocket launch pad. Which birds will be flushed out first, the puffins, the gannets, the rain geese or the phalarope?
Nature is the asset of the Shetland Isles, and the islanders making use of it in the way it has been done for centuries.
The eyesores of wind farms are ephemeral insults to man and nature, and rockets launching in Shetland is beyond comprehension in terms of pollution by noise etc.
There is something profoundly wrong when going green by producing electricity means harming or sacrificing nature on land, on the cliffs, on the lochs and in the sea. And all that will be wrapped in noise of rockets, lifting off, landing or plummeting.
That project in Shetland is like nailing a pudding to the wall, working only for seconds.
The roar of rockets and the sight of wind farms are inescapable. We have not yet made up our minds whether to visit Shetland next year.
Sincerely worried,
Robert and Karin Peters
Bergisch Gladbach
Germany
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