A Personal View from an Ecological Perspective - Brian Carter
An Ecological Argument against the Torbay Ring Road running through Westerland Valley.
by
Brian Carter
Herald Express Country Columnist and Environmentalist, author, writer and presenter of television
documentaries on the Devon Countryside - including Dartmoor, the Threatened Wilderness, and a Fragile Earth
environmental profile for Channel 4.
Westerland Valley is farmland that includes wildflower-rich fields, ancient hedges and woods; and I believe the impact of Stage 3 of the Torbay Ring Road, both the Valley Route and Plateau Route on this rural backwater would be disastrous.
Wild creatures like the fox and badger are highly adaptable, but others aren't, and the vulnerable would suffer from the massive disturbance caused by road building in this sensitive urban-fringe countryside. Among the losers would be the ten pairs of breeding cirl buntings (songbirds confined almost entirely to South Devon), tawny owls, lesser white-throats and lesser spotted woodpeckers.
Local glow-worms and great green bush crickets would also suffer in terms of breeding habitat loss. But if a new road is adopted Westerland will become part of the vast National loss of countryside, with 20 per cent of the UK doomed to be urbanised by the year 2050.
Council public relations teams and consultants may point out that dispossessed wildlife will go elsewhere, but we are running our of Elsewheres on a global scale. So this is an ecologically unsound argument.
Furthermore, birds and animals have territories and in most cases rivals aren't tolerated. Then there's the question of available and suitable habitat.
Keeping in mind the National trend of urbanisation, the proposals for Westerland Valley could contribute to the movement which is sweeping our most vulnerable wildlife onto the endangered list.
Consider: due to habitat loss and changes in farming, the populations of the following birds have dropped dramatically over a fairly short period - corn buntings down by 75%, barn owls 70%, song thrushes 64% and skylarks 54%.
Meanwhile the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Council for the Protection of Rural England are campaigning on behalf of the countryside, including places like Torbay's urban fringe. But Torbay sometimes comes across as a conurbation out of control, and many residents believe that the area between Newton Abbot and Brixham will soon be our Hong Kong.
Despite the authorities' lip service to a positive conservation stance, where Westerland is concerned, we shouldn't forget that the valley is farmland. And isn't it time to think small again and invest in non-intensive agriculture, encouraging local farmers to grow quality crops with local retailers buying genuinely local produce? Then, perhaps, we could return to the old concept of farmland as unofficial, self-managing Nature reserves.
The bureaucrats and Eurocrats who shape our destinies, in particular with politicians, often get it wrong, as time reveals. So why not a new agriculture strategy which would revitalise places like Westerland Valley and give the kiss of life to the UK countryside, to our benefit and the well being of the fauna and flora involved?
If we keep pandering to the car and the motor industry we're in trouble and the countryside is in trouble. And Westerland is a classic example, with the Valley in danger of being sold out in the short-term, blinkered approach to the transport problem and road congestion.
I can't accept, though, that even the most basic conservation thesis could present a vision of Tomorrow's World without urban fringe green places. Yet so often we've watched helplessly as the authorities have consigned one urban fringe area after another to concrete and tarmac.
The NIMBY (not in my back yard) jibe is tossed at people prepared to fight for their home patch yet professional ecologists constantly remind us that conservation begins on our doorstep. But I'm convinced the parochial is the sum of the universal and all active concern for the environment, from the village hall protest meeting to the university debate, have their place in the global context.
Unfortunately rarities are often required to save a stretch of countryside from one form of development or another. Yet if the development-road building juggernaut is given access to more and more countryside it will create rarities.
Born and bred natives in Torbay have seen so many green places destroyed to accommodate a variety of things from out-of-town supermarkets (already concrete dinosaurs in the USA), to housing and industrial estates.
Most of this growth hasn't been organic. In the majority of cases change has been thrust upon us, under the banner of 'Progress'. But if Sites of Special Scientific interest aren't sacrosanct, with Twyford Down springing instantly to mind, why should we listen to the planners' PR teams talking about so-called Country Zones, Areas of Great Landscape Value, Urban Landscape Protection Zones or anything else?
Cynics aren't born; they're made.
And waxing cynical I believe the real purpose of the Torbay Ring Road Stage 3 and 4 and the rest, is to help turn Devon into the UK's Silicon Valley. County Hall has been trying to entice industry to set up home in Devon for over fourteen years. Recent adverts on Classic FM confirm the campaign is still operating.
Therefore, dual carriageways, linking business parks and industrial estates to the motorway, could prove a major factor in persuading high tech firms to set up shop down here. Companies involved in things like computers, bio-technology and electronics will be eager, of course, to escape a grey industrial environment at the expense of our local environment, which will be taken apart to accommodate them and speed their products to market.
So another urban fringe valley, its flora and fauna, is in jeopardy. But isn't it time the government said: Enough is enough? A conurbation like Torbay can't expand whenever and wherever it chooses at the expense of the rural communities on its boundaries. And it's obvious that both routes would be another nail in the urban fringe coffin.
Ideally, I'd like to see the Ring Road schemes abandoned and a new environmentally friendly transport initiative adopted.
The whole rationale is suspect, and if westerland is part of the price we are asked to pay for convenient and speedy travel then it's too much. Conservation doesn't come cheap but it's a real investment in the future.
Ultimately we have to weigh a landscape for its own worth and the days of using the environment carelessly and selfishly are numbered unless we're prepared to become the victims of our own excesses.
Westerland Valley, its tranquillity, wildlife and agricultural potential must not be sacrificed to the car.
