Growing up in the countryside, it was a feature of drives with my parents that electricity pylons would be deplored. So I am familiar with the instinct to oppose wind turbines, which like pylons are large, energy-providing infrastructure, among some country dwellers, leading David Cameron to tighten up rules in 2015 in a way that led to a 97% reduction in the numbers granted planning permission.
Although the current government has just announced an easing of these rules, they still give plenty of power to objectors. But I would ask country dwellers still inclined to block them to see that they are in fact beautiful. They are prettier than power stations, less destructive than fracking, certainly lovelier than floods, fires, droughts and other effects of climate change. They enrich the nation with the help of its abundant wind, and make us less dependent on fossil-fuel despots. Wind turbines are in a long rural tradition of robust practical structures that also includes barns, mills, viaducts, canals and others that have become beloved and protected. On those same drives I was always happy to see an old windmill. It shouldn’t be too hard to love their modern equivalents.
