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Disaster in the UK: Gordon Brown v. The Environment

5 Top Reasons to Reject the Severn Barrage

When I was a boy, my family spent many happy weekends at Lavernock, just outside Cardiff on the Severn Estuary. We enjoyed the beach and the mud flats rolling out to the horizon at high tide. We walked the clifftop paths and my boyish imagination soared as we explored the old crumbling WW2 gun emplacements hidden in the trees and undergrowth. Soon, all of this might be gone, buried under a tidal wave of concrete which will impound the Severn, permanently destroying the landscape and threatening the habitat of some65,000 seabirds.

An Aerial View of the Severn (Wikimedia)

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown proposes to dam the Severn. This is potentially an environmenta l disaster on the scale of the Three Gorges project in China.  An ironic tragedy is that this project, billed as an exercise in  environmentally-friendly electricity generation, is being pushed at the expense of cheaper and more efficient alternatives that would not destroy the Severn. 

The Estuary is an internationally important conservation area, a rare salt marsh whose mouth is a funnel, unique in the UK, which gives it the second highest tides in the world. The Severn has a very dense diversity of invertebrate species (mussels, whelks, crabs, *) which are important food sources for wading shorebirds and the many species of migratory birds programmed by millenia of evolution to stop here on their travels.

The government has rejected alternative proposals examined here (Friends of The Earth Cymru)
which would protect the environment, cost less and generate more electricity whilst stimulating local businesses.

Top 5 reasons to reject the barrage:-

1. Alternative schemes based on Tidal Lagoons will generate more electricity.

2. Tidal Lagoons are cheaper to build.

3. Lagoons will not affect migratory seabird populations.

4. Lagoons will create 'artificial' environments which will benefit some species of wildlife.

5. The Lagoon scenario is more likely to benefit local businesses.

The barrage scheme might have appeared visionary 30 years ago ( indeed it has been around in some shape or form for at least that long ) but Environmental Science and Technology have moved on. Now the whole idea seems grotesquely stupid.

The Breifing ( referenced above and here ) from Friends of the Earth Cymru provides a detailed analysis of the relative merits and demerits of the two scenarios. Here in the US we are used to the baneful effects of corporate lobbying. One can only wonder which multinational has Labour's ear at the moment and what the expected level of profit from such a gargantuan scheme will be. Or perhaps Mr Brown wishes to be remembered as a 'visionary' , his statue on a concrete plinth in mid-estuary boldly pointing toward the future like the old statues of Lenin which graced every Eastern European village before 1989. ( You know... the one where he appears to be hailing a cab ).

We strongly urge readers of this article to do anything they can to stop this lunacy. You could start by signing the petition here.

( You need to be a UK citizen or ex-pat to sign the current petition. To the organizers of this campaign over there, how about an international petition so that the rest of us can show our support? )

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