Depressing walk :(

[Toddy]

Normally I walk near home. I don't go far, but the network of wooded lanes and wild spaces is a quiet delight. Old overgrown footpaths and messy forgotten planted areas.

Last Summer though they started building over the burn. We're calling it Alcatraz huge great wall put up to narrow the burn and allow them to level out the old hayfield. The badgers are gone, so are the deer, and the hedgehogs, and presumably many others too. There are three enormous four storey blocks of flats. The original planning permission was for thirty flats….aye, well, there's over eighty now. They sent in a team with chainsaws and they've cleared much of the undergrowth our side of the burn too….to stop it blocking any of the now narrowed watercourse.

Todays walk made things feel worse. The last wide open piece of wild grass land with willows in it, full of an enormous variety of wild plants, insects, amphibians and a refuge for the deer, the fox and the badger is now being fenced off with a 3m high steel fence about 400m long. They're clearing the land with huge great machinery, and they're going to put up huge great warehouses.

The little bit of Scots Pine woodland, The Greeny, at the end of the street is now advertised for sale for development, "Roadside site, ideal for industrial or commercial use".

Felt like crying when I got back. Fed up with seeing my peaceful bit of the world obliterated by tarmac and concrete and huge great gulag school of architecture eruptions and carbuncles.

M

 

[crosslandkelly]

I know how you feel, much the same is happening here, they're developing the forty acre Kodak recreation ground. not fifty feet from my house. Came home from work just before christmas and the developers had cut down over fifty mature trees, Larch Birch and conifers, very depressing.

 

[sandbender]

That is depressing and mirrors some of my own walks in the past years.

Still, the trees will win in the end...

 

[Goatboy]

Sorry to hear that M. The creep of concrete & iron can be pretty disheartening. You end up with your garden being a little oasis in a desert of tarmacadam and if you move then that little water hole will be swallowed up too.
It's one of the reasons that rosebay willow growing out of chimneys and pineapple weed forcing the cassies apart make me smile, plants showing the indomitable spirit of nature.

That's a cracking picture Sandbender, all those rusting hulls lined up and being slowly reclaimed, bit like meeting a girl wearing an eyepatch; you know there's a story to be told.

Sent via smoke-signal from a woodland in Scotland.

 

[Hoodoo]

Condolences Toddy. Saw this happen on a fairly large scale in Indiana where I grew up. So many of the forests where I used to play and hunt in my youth were cleared for growing crops. Most of my relatives had farms with large woodlots and lots and lots of fence rows. All gone. It's one of the main reasons I moved to Michigan.

 

[Laurentius]

My condolences too. The older I get the more I see of this sort of thing, and correspondingly the less of open spaces I remember. Round here the green belt means nothing any more and we are not supposed to complain, people need houses is the cry we hear, and so they do, but there will come a time when there is no space to grow anything in this land anymore, and then what will all the people in those houses eat?

 

[Joonsy]

that's sad, having suffered a similar attack on the senses I can imagine how you feel, such development brings another atrocity which can be really irritating, ''noise pollution''

 

[Toddy]

This has all gone.
Obliterated, devastated, buried and dead.

Just how many houses do we need ? we can only live in one at a time. And, why 'more' warehouses ? there's enough previously destroyed land lying desolate and mouldering in town. Ah, but, someone in planning decided that this area needed it's quota too

M

 

[ateallthepies]

Without getting political all they bang on about is GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH as if it's the best thing ever? Will they be happy when there is not a shred of greenery about and we are all shoulder to shoulder packed into this land like Sardines?

If anyone here read 2000AD as a boy I have visions of a future like The Mega Cities! Growth y see!

 

[stone monkey]

I really feel for you, when i bought my bungalow 22 years ago it was on the edge of town with fields and woods at the other side of the hedge. Now i am in the middle of a housing estate without even moving house !!

 

[Robson Valley]

Toddy, I must comiserate with you.
Maybe it should have been expected but many of my favorite cedar forest patches have been logged off, one after the other, in the past 10 years.
Favorite haunts, up what were old logging roads. Shady. Quiet. Now windy and bright sunshine to fry what is left of the shade tolerant understorey.
Our Ruffed Grouse look a lot like the Red Grouse that I've seen on the NYorks moors. Our grouse are forest birds. Gone.
I live in an older (1960's - 1970's) part of the village. Go ahead and laugh = almost new! One by one, 24" butt willows are being cleared.
Behind my place, across the street, next door. Those big blocks of green helped to mark the seasons = gone except for the spruce trees that
always look the same.

 

[Trig]

Pretty horrible to see it happen when you can probably drive 5 or 10 minutes and see plenty of abandoned buildings/ground.
I work in construction (Dont shoot!) and we built row upon row of industrial units on old grassland, which have mostly lay empty for the past 4 years, and just across the road a massive factory was being demolished at the same time. Whose ground has also lay unused since then.And of course,at the end of this year we are due to go back and build more units, meanwhile less than a quarter of the previous ones have been occupied since creation. Doesnt make sense...

I also walk my dog through a couple of natural woodlands (privatly owned) near my house, which are in danger of being cut down to fuel a bio-mass boiler. Doesnt make sense either when we have a country full of pine trees grown for pretty much that purpose.

 

[Laurentius]

Without getting political all they bang on about is GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH as if it's the best thing ever? Will they be happy when there is not a shred of greenery about and we are all shoulder to shoulder packed into this land like Sardines?

If anyone here read 2000AD as a boy I have visions of a future like The Mega Cities! Growth y see!

Difficult to keep politics out of it, if you say you are agin it, you are called a nimby, you are told you are standing in the way of peoples jobs, all sorts. We are also told that we need more expensive housing in the higher Council tax bands, so that the Council can get more revenue. It's a nightmare when you have any involvement in local politics. Mainstay of our economy in the City Centre seems to be students, and more and more residences are being built, but the Council does not get a penny in Council tax from them.

I know what I feel and what a lot of the citizens feel about it, but of course we don't have the same pressures on us that the Councillors do when they are making those planning decisions. And you know what, if they don't make those decisions, the power to make them, will be taken off them and it will be back to the free for all of the between the wars period when agricultural land was being gobbled up with no concern for the future to come.

 

[rorymax]

That is depressing and mirrors some of my own walks in the past years.

Still, the trees will win in the end...

What a great pic ( I know, depends how you relate to it), thanks for it.

 

[sandbender]

What a great pic ( I know, depends how you relate to it), thanks for it.

It isn't mine, it pops up all over the internet, I believe it was taken in a Belgian forest.

 

[stonehippo]

Sadly, too many people, not enough badgers!

 

[Tengu]

Id be ripping that lot up for classic care spares.

I come from Swindon which is growing, and growing, and growing some more. We see a lot of farmland developed...but plenty of unworked areas with trees planted and a lot of wildlife.

I suspect nature benefits from new builds but farming doesnt. (Some allotments might be nice but hey ho)

Would it be better to live in an area with nothing economicaly or one that was being developed?

 

[santaman2000]

.......Would it be better to live in an area with nothing economicaly or one that was being developed?

When you're still working age you need to live near the employment and long for the day you can retire back to the countryside. Sadly when retirement comes you usually need to live near the developed areas for the medical concerns that come with age.

 

[Robson Valley]

I wanted to move away from the city when I retired, 10+ years ago. I wanted a small town with one of everything, if that was possible.
Buying a home in McBride was no mistake. Of course, living in the village (550+) doesn't explain the ongoing logging/harvesting that looks
to despoil my favorite haunts, as non-consumptive as my expectations may be.
My #2 choice remains my #2 choice. Google McBride. Google Golden.
My costs for living here are not 1/2 what they were in the city and I have been back so often that I am convinced.
There's one of everything here, fully equipped med lab, hospital and all.

The real deal is that you have to shoot for this, 10-15 years before you retire.
Imagine how the little places are going to grow = make some projections.

 

[Dogoak]

I feel for you Mary, horrible to see.
Even up here in a National park we see what could be deemed inappropriate building and development.
For instance the land next to us is open moor/bog, a regular nesting ground for waders in the spring, lots of rodents which in turn brings in owls and raptors. The owner applied for planning permission for a house, right next to our property, I contacted the planning re. the water/drainage issue of building on such ground (a new house built further away a few years ago has had subsidence!) down to the buyer apparently!
After objecting to the planning I also contacted the National Park office and asked for a wildlife survey, the report stated that there was 'no mammal habitat', also my objection, viewable on-line, had all the species of birds and mammals that I had listed blanked out!
I did question the survey and pointed out that most houses at some point have mice in them so if a house is mammal habitat then how come the wild land isn't? There seemed to be a lot of back tracking and it was altered to state 'no endangered mammal habitat', funny that water shrews are rare in Northern Scotland and they're on that land let alone being nesting grounds for the waders which in the UK are generally in decline. To be honest I don't think whoever surveyed it even got out of their car. Permission was given, luckily for us no one has purchased it yet, time will tell. The annoying thing is that there are already plots that have been available in a nearby village for over 10 years.

Unfortunately a lot of problems with development stem from money, it's cheaper to buy some land and build than clear/demolish what is already left abandoned, more profit. Of course the other problem is the numbers game, the government give local councils housing targets which have to be fulfilled and that puts pressure on them to grant the permissions.