Tilting at Windmills

The recent outcry over the omission of the Green Party from pre-election debates prompted me to look more closely at the environmental policies of new-comers to the debating table, UKIP. It was rather like turning over a stone; the blind, wriggling creatures you discover are fascinating and repulsive in equal measure.

Take, for example, their attitude to trees. They are all for trees, are UKIP, which is great. They want to see England swathed in woodland once more, to the point of banning ‘the mass falling (sic) of trees in all forms’. Which is fine unless you want to manage one of those awkward non-woodland habitats, like heathland or chalk grassland. And what about coppicing?

And then there’s renewable energy. UKIP aren’t so keen on renewable energy. They hate wind farms, because ‘the rotating blades kill and maim countless of (sic) innocent birds…’ They also ‘emit grotesquely disturbing noise pollution which petrifies so many small animals’. The horror…

Photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GreenMountainWindFarm_Fluvanna_2004.jpg

Solar farms are no better. Encouraged by the ‘obscene’ feed-in tariff incentive, they are effectively a ‘life sentence for the countryside’, scarring a landscape they describe as ‘the most breathtaking on mother Earth’ (clearly UKIP members don’t travel. Not ‘abroad’, anyway).

Whilst I love the British landscape dearly, even I admit that there are parts of it – the flat, agricultural lowlands, for instance – that can be a little, well, dull. There; I said it. But here I think the UKIP are mistaking green for Green. Vast rolling acres of high-intensity cereal agriculture may look verdant, especially if you spend most of your time in an urban environment, but in ecological terms they are close to deserts.

It's green. Green is good, right?

 Solar farms tend to be constructed on the poorest quality agricultural land; areas that require high (and therefore expensive) fertiliser input in order to scrape a financially viable crop from them. So leaving aside the point that we should be encouraging the use of solar power anyway, we are also talking about the conversion of land that is ecologically depauperate and requires a high input of agrichemicals into something that produces energy from sunlight. But the key point is that, with appropriate landscaping, such sites can become wildlife havens too.

The lack of disturbance and chemical input means that the area around solar panels is ideal for the sowing of low-maintenance seed mixes. In a landscape where nearly all the plant species remaining are wind-pollinated cereal crops, providing a long-flowering nectar source can have enormous benefits for pollinating insects.

A scar on the landscape?

FlowerScapes are excited to be working with the British Beekeepers’ Association and major solar energy providers Belectric on a number of sites across lowland England. These sites have been transformed from sterile green prairies into a blaze of nectar-rich colour. I’m sure UKIP will hate them, but the bees might disagree…