Observer: 'Developers eye up national parks'

[Paul Mobbs]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1350922,00.html

British rural heritage in peril as developers eye up national parks

Juliette Jowit reports on a test case that could have far-reaching effects on 
the global environment

The Observer, Sunday November 14, 2004


'They thought they had never seen a more pleasant place to live in ... nor a 
land with more honey and fish,' say the 14th-century legends of the 
Mabinogion, the Celtic stories of Welsh mythology.

Today it is easy to imagine the same scene in the far south-western tip of 
Wales as flocks of starlings and buzzards sweep over this strangely quiet 
landscape of sandy beaches, green cliffs and ancient woodland.

So special is this stretch of Pembrokeshire coastline that it has been 
recognised as one of the most important landscapes in Britain and given the 
highest form of protection as a national park.

But despite at least 35 protections under six pieces of legislation, 
developers have been given permission to build an all-weather holiday 
village, complete with a snow-dome and sewage works, in and on the edge of 
the park.

Nor is Pembrokeshire the only one. National parks across Britain and protected 
areas around the world, from the cold wilds of Alaska to bird-rich areas of 
continental Europe and the big rivers of China, are under threat from a tide 
of development proposals, intensive farming, climate change and pollution.

Against this background, a legal challenge to the proposed Bluestone holiday 
village in Pembrokeshire in the High Court in London this month is seen by 
international experts as a cause célèbre in their battle to stem the mounting 
threats to the world's most precious landscapes, habitats and species.

The case is being brought by the watchdog body the Council for National Parks, 
which claims Bluestone sets a dangerous precedent when the range and scale of 
threats - from road plans to water skiing in the Lake District - are greater 
than ever. 

'No one on their own is enough to worry us, but when we look at the collective 
effect we're quite concerned,' said Ruth Chambers, the council's deputy chief 
executive.

But Bluestone's importance goes further than this. The case is also about the 
key to understanding this global assault on protected lands: the age-old 
conflict between environmental protection and eco nomic development. It is a 
battle conservationists say they are increasingly losing.

The investment and employment promised by developers of roads, dams or local 
industries and, particularly, of tourism create a dilemma for those making 
decisions.

In Pembrokeshire, for example, park officials rejected the proposed holiday 
village, but elected officials approved the development, worth nearly £50 
million, because it will create 600 permanent jobs in an area of highly 
seasonal employment and another estimated 300 jobs in the wider economy.

'There seems to be a momentum which is probably down to the worsening economic 
climate; there seems to be an anti-environment climate,' said Zoltan Waliczky 
of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

More subtly, the row over Bluestone also highlights the difficulty of making 
judgments between the two sides. Its backers say they will build to the 
highest environmental standards on land which is mostly outside the park and, 
where it dips into the boundary, is on intensively farmed fields. The park 
authority admits the site itself has no specific geomorphological or 
ornithological interest.

'Bluestone is a UK exemplar of a win-win scenario,' said chief executive 
William McNamara. 'It complies with national park environmental purposes as 
it is a holiday experience "close to nature".

Objectors claim the impact of the building and thousands of visitors will 
destroy a tranquil backwater of the Cleddau estuary and woodlands growing 
over medieval ruins.

'[Protected areas] are selected because they harbour a very important piece of 
biodiversity,' said Waliczky. 'But they also have other values: they provide 
water, fresh air, opportunities for tourism and other sustainable economic 
activities.'

Others go further. 'Culturally, spiritually and psychologically, open space 
and rural tranquility are very important for an awful lot of people and are 
an inheritance,' said Henry Oliver, head of planning policy of the Campaign 
to Protect Rural England.

More than that, the threats anger those who believe it is a betrayal of 
generations which allowed rapid urban, industrial and agricultural 
development in exchange for protecting pockets of habitat, landscape and 
tranquility for future generations.

So serious is the pressure for economic development that some countries, 
including France and parts of eastern Europe, are considering lowering their 
legal protections. 'If you start saying they are not quite so sacrosanct as 
we thought, that's reneging on the deal the national parks came out of,' said 
Chambers.

Archaeological evidence indicates that the earliest humans set aside land for 
spiritual reasons and resources such as water. Later, rulers and landlords 
marked out areas for protection - usually for hunting.

But it was the creation of Yellowstone National Park in America in 1872 that 
began the modern movement which now boasts that nearly 12 per cent of the 
land area of the planet is protected - an area the size of South America.

Despite this, the layers of legal protection from local sites of geological 
importance to Unesco world heritage sites seem unable to prevent what the 
World Parks Congress in Durban has warned - 'many protected areas are badly 
in need of protection themselves'.

A survey of Europe reveals a 'striking diversity' of threats, said Dr Bob 
Aitken, an independent consultant based in Edinburgh.

Chemical-intensive and land-hungry modern agriculture has long been a problem, 
as have logging and poaching. Roads concrete over land and generate pollution 
which devastates vege tation and seeps into soil and water. Industrial 
pollution is often an insidious problem and sometimes has a catastrophic 
effect. Tourist developers are increasingly putting on pressure to expand 
developments into more attractive areas; ever-rising demand for power means 
more and more applications for wind farms, river dams and the like. Climate 
change is shifting habitats out of their protected areas.

Directly or indirectly, all these can be traced back to the 
economy-versus-environment conflict. From Laos to the Lake District, there 
are attempts to build up eco-tourism as an alternative source of income. More 
controversially, some park authorities are allowing 'sustainable' hunting, 
logging or mining by local communities as an alternative to commercial 
development. Reformed agricultural grants now pay farmers to protect the 
environment and experts are trying to get governments to formally recognise 
the value of protected areas - which is much harder to quantify than 
investment or jobs.

Despite the fact that we are struggling to protect existing areas, the World 
Parks Congress agreed informally to try to double the proportion of the 
planet under protection.

'I don't think it's unreasonable to say between one- fifth and one-quarter 
needs special care,' said Professor Adrian Phillips, a respected 
international expert and former chairman of commission on protected areas of 
IUCN, the world conservation union. 'What's interesting is that their value 
to society becomes ever greater as the tide [of threat] rises.'

The Americas

President George Bush wants to open up Alaska, one of the last great 
wildernesses on Earth, to oil drilling. Successive American administrations 
have cut funding for national parks, creating a big backlog of work. Forest 
fires to clear ranching land in Latin America often spread to protected 
areas.

Europe

Transport schemes in eastern Europe proposed by the EU would cut through 20 
sites critical to endangered species. Road pollution often destroys 
vegetation and pollutes soil and water. Ski resorts want to move into 
protected areas up the Alps (pictured left) because of lower snowfall - 
blamed on climate change.

Africa

Climate change is forcing the rare Fynbos - the richest of the world's six 
floral kingdoms - out of its protected area on the South African Cape. 
Agriculture, mining and logging destroy 1.5m hectares (nearly 1m acres) of 
forest a year in the Congo Basin - the second most important rainforest after 
the Amazon.

Asia

Many energy projects include up to 13 dams on the Salween river in China's 
Three Parallel Rivers, a Unesco world heritage site described as 'one of the 
richest temperate regions of the world'. National parkland in Indonesia is 
being encroached on by coffee and palm oil plantations.

juliette.jowit at observer.co.uk



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"We are not for names, nor men, nor titles of Government, nor are we for
this party nor against the other but we are for justice and mercy and
truth and peace and true freedom, that these may be exalted in our
nation, and that goodness, righteousness, meekness, temperance, peace
and unity with God, and with one another, that these things may abound."
(Edward Burroughs, 1659 - from 'Quaker Faith and Practice')


Paul Mobbs, Mobbs' Environmental Investigations,
3 Grosvenor Road, Banbury OX16 5HN, England
tel./fax (+44/0)1295 261864

email - mobbsey at gn.apc.org
website - http://www.fraw.org.uk/mobbsey/index.html