Last updated 10:39, Friday, 19 September 2008

Windfarms now pose one of the biggest threats to the unspoilt beauty of Cumbria’s landscape.

Not since the Industrial Revolution has the Lake District been under so much pressure from industrialisation.

There have been 64 proposals for wind factories in Cumbria to date, and there are many, many more to come.

This is vitally important because the Cumbria and Lake District Joint Structure Plan clearly states ‘Cumbria is richly endowed with fine landscapes.

These resources are valuable assets that underpin the tourism industry, attract business and investment into the area, and contribute to the quality of life of local communities’.

Remember that 15 million tourists come to Cumbria every year, 37,000 jobs are supported by tourists and 62 per cent of people who visit Cumbria come here for the outstanding landscape and scenery.

Now it is acknowledged that 400ft-high wind turbines can have a significant adverse affect on the environment. The Government, in PPS 22 recognises that, stating: “Of all renewable technologies, wind turbines are likely to have the greatest visual and landscape effects.”

When they are built on such an industrial scale with thousands of tons of reinforced concrete and steel, they are totally out of scale with the surrounding dales, vales and fells, and the turbines strike a discordant note.

This will undoubtedly have a knock-on effect and several reports have concluded that up to 15 per cent of tourists would not revisit a location if wind farms proliferated. With tourism worth £1.2 billion a year to the local economy, that would represent a cut in revenue of £180 million and the loss of thousands of associated jobs.

If you need any further evidence that wind factories can damage the economy of Cumbria, you need only to consider the experience north of the border. The economic impacts of windfarms on the Scottish tourism, the report for the Scottish Government by Glasgow Caledonian University in March 2008, found that “20 to 30 per cent of tourists preferred landscapes without windfarms”.

So there you have it, in less than a generation we run the risk of destroying what we all fervently want to preserve – Cumbria’s world-class landscape.

And if indiscriminate, inappropriate and opportunistic windfarm development goes ahead, it will do very little to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

ANDREW CARTER
Strategic Alliance Against Lakeland Wind Turbines
Mosedale