Letters / You can’t eat landscape
This has become an excuse for ignoring what we do to our land in Shetland.
We have been fortunate that a major development like the oil terminal was well designed to sink into the hills around Sullom Voe. BP employed landscape architects to achieve that.
More recent developments of wind farms and their electricity poles have ignored the landscape that is characteristic and defines Shetland.
A poet W T Harrison wrote “Lie back in the long summer grass and watch the line of the hills”. I think he understood that a community such as ours is wedded to our environment and interfering with it causes deep seated upset.
We can, of course, continue to ignore this problem and allow SSE to erect more poles, pylons, wires, substations and industrial buildings across our land. It will bring little benefit to us; we may feel good that the Shetland wind is giving green energy to the rest of the UK. Well, 48% of the time.
But stop a moment.
Apart from damaging the natural wildlife and scarring our landscape, this business of pushing the windfarms to the extremities of Britain – Shetland, Orkney, the Highlands and Western Isles – saves the land around the cities and industrial centres and creates long and intrusive transmission routes through wild areas that do not matter to the vast majority of Britain.
So why are they not putting wind farms near the users of the electricity. Is it because it would spoil the landscape around our cities and be unpopular?
Shetland Islands Council has caved in to dictates from the Scottish Government that they have the power to decide where our energy production goes.
I think we elect our Councillors, our MSP, our MP to represent our interests, to ensure our islands are not damaged and to care for our natural environment.
That may conflict with what Governments want to do to our land. So there is a conflict which needs to be addressed. I want to see that our elected folk care.
John Scott
Bressay
