Windmills and Motorways

Last weekend my wife, daughter and I drove back to Glasgow from Manchester. Unusually we travelled through Cumbria and the Borders not just in daylight, but in sunshine, I can't remember when we previously travelled that road in daylight. I had expected to enjoy the rugged beauty of the hills, but what my memory had not prepared me for was the wind farms. There is something inspiring in the sight of those giant air-screws gently turning in the wind, I love to see them whether in a Rajasthani desert or on a mountain crest in Cumbria.

I know that there are many people who hate wind farms, who want to preserve the countryside unchanged; however there has never been a time when the countryside has not been changing, primarily through the action of human beings. Progress has its own beauty, but it is predicated upon the acceptance that the urge to progress, to learn, to discover, to improve is essential to the existence of humanity. If we kept – as some would have us – our wild places untouched we would have no agriculture and no settlements. Some claim that wind farms spoil the countryside, that is merely one opinion with which some of us would disagree. Some oppose road building, but would we want to spend a week travelling from London to Glasgow in a horse drawn carriage along rutted cart tracks, which in themselves represented humanity's urge to impose progress and improvement on the land. Who can say that today's resisted project won't become tomorrow's tourist attraction? Were it not for General Wade's hated roads there would never have developed the Scottish tourist industry. The monuments of our commercial infrastructure attract visitors, all the way from the Thames Barrier, across the Forth bridges up to the Skye road bridge, visitors carried on the motorways some consider scars on the landscape and upon the remnants of the magnificent rail network left to us by our Victorian forbears.

Change is inevitable and improvement is essential as long as we want to heat and light our houses, and power industry, and move food and manufactures around the world. It is easy to bemoan the pace of contemporary life, but would we willingly return to horse drawn mail coaches instead of email or candles instead of the electric light? A few perhaps, but all the time? I think not.

You may not like change, you may oppose it, but change is inevitable and life might be easier if instead of resisting you instead learnt to appreciate the beauty of progress because it is not going to be reversed any time soon.