YOUR VIEWS: ‘I’m glad my area resisted national park application’
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
I read your editorial (Strathy letters, January18) with interest about criticism of national parks because here in the Scottish Borders there has been a push by certain groups for a national park over the past few years.
The proposal was rightfully thrown out by Scottish Borders Council last December.
As a geographer and a libertarian I believe that national parks contribute nothing to productive land management; create quangos of busybodies; authorities, and ‘officers’ opposed to economic development; attract thousands of visitors to the brown signs and tat shops and generally make life worse for local communities amid a sea of yellow lines and ‘do not’ edicts.
It would be interesting to know how much Scotland’s national parks cost the public purse, especially when the SNP executive, which is pushing for more of them, has dug a £1.5 billion black hole for itself despite the Barnett money which gives every Scot, man, woman and child £2000 more in public spending than the UK average.
Be careful what you wish for.
The NC500 is a case in point, as is the nationalist Great Tapestry of Scotland in Galashiels, which nearly everyone who wants to see has seen, and the taxpayer, or at least the 60 per cent of Scots who actually pay tax have had to foot the £6m bill for the new building, which is mainly used as a tearoom.
William Loneskie
Oxton
Lauder.
* * *
Cairngorms crofters and farmers’ protest should be redirected
It is good to see that a positive dialogue is emerging from the recent protest by crofters and farmers at the Cairngorms National Park Authority office (Strathy, January 18-24).
But the CNPA is not responsible for the main factor currently influencing most land use decisions in the Cairngorms.
This is the public funding used to support agriculture and forestry and the relationship between the two.
Today this is a very unhealthy relationship because of the dominance of forestry interests and the huge amounts of public money being given to organisations to plant trees in the wrong places.
Perhaps the protesters can now take their tractors and placards to the front doors of the craft brewing company BrewDog, the asset management company Abrdn and to Scottish Forestry (SF), the government body responsible for wasting this public money.
During the last three years SF has awarded forestry grants to plant thousands of hectares of hillside in the national park, including over £1 million to BrewDog to plant above Aviemore and over £2 million to Abrdn to plant above Newtonmore.
In both these locations SF were strongly advised to refuse planting grant and instead restore the hillsides by reducing grazing pressures and allowing nearby native woodland to expand through natural regeneration.
SF ignored these representations. Instead diggers have been disturbing the peaty soils for months, creating mounds for the tree planting and thereby releasing carbon for decades.
In addition, the latest reports suggest that 90 per cent of the trees planted by BrewDog have died due to drought conditions last summer.
All this public money would have been far better spent in employing local gamekeepers, stalkers and shepherds to manage the overgrazing and paying crofters and farmers to plant trees into mineral soils in lowland locations rather than on the peaty hillsides.
Fortunately the Scottish Government, at long last, seems to have realised that large scale industrial forestry, with all its digging of peaty soils, deer fencing and planting species that are likely to suffer serious drought impacts, disease spread and wind throw, is no longer appropriate over much of Scotland.
The cut of £32 million from the SF budget for 2024/25, representing 41 per cent of its present budget, is a welcome step in a new direction for Scottish forestry.
Habitat restoration of our hills is the future, with heather, grassland, lichens and mosses, along with naturally regenerating woodland, recognised as all of equal importance in capturing carbon and protecting biodiversity.
Planting will still be needed, as a matter of urgency, on those steep hillsides above our rail and road systems in order to minimise erosion and landslips. But the main focus for future planting should be in the lower lying areas of the national parks and elsewhere, led by crofters and farmers.
We do not need tree planting led by investors, contractors and multinational companies based in far away places whose main concern is shareholder value and executive pay and pensions.
Public money should be used to meet community aspirations not private greed.
Dave Morris
Glen Road
Newtonmore.
* * *
Saying a friendly hello
As I walk about Strathspey, I generally say hello to everyone I meet, be they friend, acquaintance or stranger, unless of course I’m on a busy street.
However, even on a remote hill top some people make no eye contact and carry on silently.
Is this nurture – they spend too long in busy cities where a ‘Hello’ represents a threat, or nature...they’re just miserable gits?
Peter Gordon
Craigmore Crescent
Nethy Bridge.
* * *
Cracks are being papered over on ‘settled science’
In his attack on Charles Wardrop, Jim MacEwan uses the words ‘Two false statements (lies?), allegations, lie’. (18 January).
These words should be used against those who monotonously tell us ‘the science is settled’.
Those on the Climate Gravy Train repeat parrot wise that ‘97 per cent of scientists endorse the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory’.
How was this 97 per cent calculated?
John Cook, an Australian former web programmer and blogger, who later gained a PhD in philosophy assembled a group of volunteers recruited via his website and tasked them with examining the summaries of 11,944 climate papers from 1991-2011 with the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’.
The reviewers said 3,896 endorsed AGW, 7,930 had no AGW position, 78 rejected AGW and 40 were uncertain.
Instead of admitting that just 3,896, 32.6 per cent of the climate papers endorsed AGW they removed the 7,930 which did not take a position on AGW leaving just 4,014 abstracts of which 3,896 (97 per cent) supposedly endorsed AGW.
There are lies, damned lies and climate percentages.
Clark Cross
Springfield Road
Linlithgow.
* * *
Banking hub will get to nub of the banking problem
‘Banking crisis’ has become a well coined phrase and everyone in the Highland region is being affected in one way or another.
The drive to force customers online is unrelenting even in the face of the difficulties that we have in the North of Scotland with poor broadband, poor communications, poor roads and poor service provision.
Having been away over the Christmas and New Year period, my journeys took me into the bowels of Angus to the town of Brechin, where I was confronted with some out of the box thinking that had actually been actioned in ‘The Banking Hub’.
These are being opened across the UK and are funded and supported by nine major high street banking providers.
They are Bank of Ireland UK, Barclays Bank UK PLC, Danske Bank, HSBC UK Bank plc, Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest Group plc, Santander UK plc, TSB Bank plc and Virgin Money.
Brechin was chosen for a hub after LINK, the UK’s cash access and cash machine network, identified the need for enhanced cash deposit services following bank branch closures in the town.
So if they can get together and do this in Angus then surely we can do this here.
The question to those in authority is “Why can’t the Highland region do the same and support their rural communities”?
Mark Duncan
Aviemore.
* * *
Don’t forget the loss of 1.2 trillion insects
Jim McEwan (Strathy, January 18) is of course perfectly entitled to express his views on certain aspects of perceived climate change.
However, his bald accusations of falsehood as well as sarcasm directed at Charles Wardrop, and by implication all climate realists with whom he disagrees, adds nothing to a civil, constructive exchange of opinions.
He quotes the number of avian deaths from the UK’s current stock of 11,500 wind turbines at a strangely wide range of between 10,000 and 100,000 per year and dismisses them as insignificant in comparison to feline predation.
Presumably he concludes that this an acceptable sacrifice for this intermittent form of electricity generation which consistently fails to deliver more than between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of installed capacity.
It would be more appropriate to describe ‘renewables’ as ‘unreliables’.
Presumably Mr McEwan shares the utopian green vision that the UK will one day meet 100 per cent of its electricity needs by means of a possible five to six-fold increase in wind turbines and buys into the spurious argument that they will keep the lights on because the wind is always blowing somewhere.
This could potentially create a nightmare scenario with an increase in their numbers to between 50,000 and 70,000 which would put paid to around half a million birds per year.
Not only that, but trivial though it may seem, a study has revealed that those ‘gracefully beguiling blades’ that so many would have us believe are a key component in altering what is in fact a largely naturally changing climate, have been responsible for the loss of 1.2 trillion insects (a 78 per cent decline) in Germany annually on which so much bird life and a healthy ecosystem depends.
If we had been reliant solely on wind installations where landowners and overseas developers reap the monetary rewards regardless of whether or not the wind blows, then many lights would have gone out during the recent cold spell.
Thankfully hydrocarbons and nuclear – a considerable proportion of which had to be bought from continental Europe – kept industry functioning and our homes warm.
I’m afraid that a number of reality checks are long overdue, Mr McEwan.
Neil J Bryce.
Gateshaw
Kelso.
* * *
Cereal production is rising at a great rate
Grant Frazer suggests that global warming could lead to food shortages (Letters, 18 January).
Official data doesn’t support this assertion. The current climate alarmism really began with the Rio conference in 1992, so let’s look at changes in the data between then and now.
Nigeria and Ethiopia are often listed as climate-vulnerable countries. But cereal production in the former grew from 19.6 to 29.9 million tonnes annually, and in the latter grew from 5.3 to 30.1 million tonnes.
Surely if catastrophic climate change was indeed happening between 1992 and today then these figures would have reduced.
Geoff Moore
Alness.
* * *
Ten years since Indy rebuff and Scotland has gone backwards
As the disaster of Brexit deepens, causing real damage to the Scottish economy and indeed that of the UK, protecting public services and promoting prosperity is becoming increasingly difficult.
The limited powers of Holyrood, which are constantly being attacked by Westminster even on devolved matters, is not enough.
Only a fully independent Scotland, in control of all its economic assets and bountiful resources, will be able to tackle poverty and bring about a fair and equitable society.
On this 10th anniversary year of the 2014 referendum, Scotland has lost out by being part of this corrupt and dysfunctional Westminster system.
In comparing the political culture of Westminster and Holyrood, very different values emerge in terms of compassion at home and abroad and in progressive change.
Scotland has been held back by successive Tory governments it did not vote for and indeed by a London dominated Labour Party in tune with the Tories.
In truth Scotland is ignored and held in disdain by an increasingly isolated Westminster parliament, out of step with Europe and the world.
Grant Frazer
Newtonmore.
* * *
An age-old remedy?
Jim MacEwan’s and Roy Turnbull’s accusations that I am a liar about climate changes (Strathy letters) might be their own opinions but are unsupported by valid evidence.
From re-examination of their correspondence and wider literature, they would have to concede that clear proof is lacking of a causal link between rising atmospheric levels of man-made carbon dioxide and dangerous climate changes and their potential prevention by worldwide decarbonisation.
CO2 exerts a very minor greenhouse gas effect, less than five per cent of the total, in blocking infrared radiation compared with that of water vapour, including clouds, at more than 95 per cent.
In the ‘good old days’, these correspondents’ insults might have been met by challenges to a duel with ‘Pistols at dawn’. But, as an inveterate coward, I would simply have demanded that they make a literature search, as I do now!
Charles Wardrop
Perth.
