World Upside Down: Past Tree-hugging Environmentalists Become Rabid Futurist Lumberjacks
Almost 16 million trees have been chopped down on publicly owned land in Scotland to make way for wind farms, an SNP minister had admitted amid a major drive to erect more turbines.
Mairi Gougeon, the Rural Affairs Secretary, estimated that 15.7 million trees had been felled since 2000 in land that is currently managed by agency Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) - the equivalent of more than 1,700 per day.
She insisted there was a planning presumption in favour of protecting woodland and wind farm developers would be expected to undertake “compensatory planting elsewhere”.
But Liam Kerr, a Scottish Tory MSP, said the public would be “astonished” at the total and cited concerns about the developments that had been raised with him “by communities all over the country.”
Scotland already has turbines theoretically capable of generating 8.4GW of power, well over half the UK’s total, but SNP ministers want to add a further 8-12GW.
The John Muir Trust, a conservation charity, has warned the new threshold for allowing wind farm companies to build turbines on wild land is so low that it appears impossible for them not to meet it.
The SNP wind power target also includes replacing existing turbines that may be coming to the end of their working life with even taller and larger versions, a process called “repowering”.
It emerged earlier this year that some developers want to erect turbines up to 850 feet tall, the equivalent of more than 60 double decker buses.
In a letter to Mr Kerr, dated July 13, Ms Gougeon said the equivalent of around 7,858 hectares of trees had been chopped down to make way for wind farms since 2000.
With an average of 2,000 trees per hectare, she said: “This gives an estimated total of 15.7 million trees which have been felled in order to facilitate windfarm development.”
“I’ve been contacted many times by rural communities all over the country questioning the location of these developments, sharing legitimate concerns not just about the visual impact but also damage to wildlife and business. Now we learn there’s significant damage when it comes to trees.”
He said ministers “must be alive” to the “significant costs” that could be incurred with the siting of wind farms.
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