Last updated 13:37, Wednesday, 01 October 2008

WIND farms 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.

To put this threat into perspective, there have been 64 proposals for wind factories in Cumbria, and there are 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.”

Remember that 15 million tourists come to Cumbria every year, 37,0000 jobs are supported by tourists and 62 per cent of people who visit Cumbria come here for the outstanding landscape and scenery.

Now, 400-foot-high wind turbines can have a significant adverse affect on the environment. The Government in PPS 22 recognise that: “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 magnified by Cumbria’s contained landscape and low skies.

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 loss of thousands of associated jobs.

You would anticipate a significant adverse impact on tourism and residential amenity to increase in proportion to the number of wind factories constructed.

If you need any further evidence that wind factories can damage the economy of Cumbria you need to consider the experience north of the border.

“The economic impacts of wind farms on the Scottish tourism”, a report for the Scottish Government by Glasgow Caledonian University, March 2008, found that “20 per cent to 30 per cent of tourists preferred landscapes without wind farms”.

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 wind farm development goes ahead, it will do little to cut greenhouse emissions, and it will create visual pollution that will scar the county for generations to come and do untold damage to the perception that the Lake District as the breathing space of the nation.

ANDREW CARTER
Bowscale