We are selling Scotland's soul to make energy giants rich |
On the announcement of a UK contract for a massive wind farm in the outer Firth of Forth, Herald columnist Rosemary Goring asks if its green credentials outweigh the environmental harm.
Raised as I was in Dunbar – Belhaven to be precise – the soundtrack to my childhood was the squawking and skirling of gulls. It is what I miss most about living by the sea. In the ruins of Dunbar Castle, hundreds of kittiwakes nested in the hollowed-out sandstone walls. Their raucous cries made conversation impossible; I won’t attempt to describe the smell.
Far more overpowering, however, in scale, sound and stench, was the Bass Rock, whose elephantine shape stood out at sea, a giant stepping stone between the Lothians and Fife. It was so encrusted with guano it looked as if it were perpetually covered in snow. As the second largest colony of northern gannets in the world, the Bass Rock was then, as now, a byword for ornithologists fascinated by these regal birds. I suspect that if Coleridge had been born in Dunbar, his Ancient Mariner might have been wracked with guilt at shooting a gannet rather than an albatross.
The fictional slaughter of seabirds is bad enough; the reality a great deal more disturbing. This week, the UK government’s award of a contract to SSE Renewables for the first phase of the Berwick Bank wind farm in the outer Firth of Forth, has brought the death of tens of thousands of seabirds alarmingly closer.
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Heralded as the largest offshore wind farm on the planet, Berwick Bank is to lie off the East........