THE ENVIRONMENT
Open letter to Mr Crosland
BARBARA MAUDE
Now that the great conservation year is under way, we shall all be anxiously waiting to see what you, as Minister for the En- vironment, are going to do about it. May I make some suggestions?
Of course, it would be quite unrealistic to expect you to make a really serious attack on these vast problems in what may be an elec- tion year. This would involve you in decisions so politically difficult that they could only be taken by a government fresh from a victory at the polls. We could not ex- pect you, for example, to take such firm ac- tion as President Nixon's against the ad- dition of lead and other known pollutants to petrol; or, in a period of runaway wage and price inflation, to insist on the rigorous enforcement of our own laws against the industrial pollution of waters. But don't despair. There are some things you could do—straight away—which would not involve you in any political difficulty whatever, and would actually do the environment some good. Here are a few of them.
I suppose nothing makes more impact or causes more damage to our environment (both rural and urban) than the activities of county surveyors and Ministry of Transport officials. Of course they mean well— especially towards 'vehicle operators'. But have you noticed that few voters share your Ministry's tenderness towards these people? On the contrary, the owners and drivers of heavy vehicles seem to be the new privileged class. Everything has to give way to them—trees, buildings, people, peace and quiet. What is there so sacred about traffic? Aren't people, their homes and their heritage, more important? Doesn't traffic really exist to serve them and not the other way round?
And, since vehicle fumes are now known to be a major pollutant of the atmosphere, is it not your duty to find some way of positively discouraging heavy freight from using the roads at all? Were you to institute a fresh look at the possibilities of using the railways to shift all this stuff about, you would find yourself extremely popular. Meantime, by a simple amendment to the General Development Orders relating to the Town and Country Planning Acts, you could make all road works subject to planning con- trol. Then the engineer who wants to 'im- prove' the road so that lorries and tankers can go faster through the village—not to speak of knocking down the houses for the same purpose—will at least have to reveal his plans to the people who are going to suffer from them. And, talking of heavy lor- ries—can't you decide once and for all that anything bigger than what we are already en- during simply isn't on?
The financial arrangements governing new roads conduce to waste and tend to prevent adequate landscaping and proper reclama- tion. You have no powers to buy any extra land, other than that needed for the road itself; nor can the Ministry of Transport undertake the rehabilitation of land lying alongside the road. Yet, seeing how much of England is now a spoiled landscape, it seems ridiculous that the occasion of massive engineering works cannot be used for this sort of creative improvement. As you now command both the Ministries of Transport and Housing, you could remedy this anomaly at once.
This year the Arts Council is spending some £9 million on theatre, music, painting and sculpture—some of it quite ephemeral. Yet, except for the very few buildings as- sisted by the Historic Buildings Council, the whole burden of ensuring the continued existence of our architectural heritage rests on the shoulders of ratepayers and owners. (One county, particularly rich in vernacular architecture, has just increased its annual allotment for this work five-fold—from £500 -to £2,500!) Can't you twist Miss Lee's arm a bit? She would find it hard to assert that the high street of Henley-in-Arden, say, or Tewkesbury, contained no works of art— and surely she would hardly miss a million or two?
Then, you have just had—and missed— two splendid opportunities. You could have stayed the dam-builders' hand at Meldon, and thus averted not just one disaster but a whole following chain of them. And there is the Chiltern scarp.
Not everyone knows the full history here, or why the engineers found themselves in such difficulties. It was because they had (in what one can only feel was a singularly carefree way) actually completed the road as far as the Stokenchurch roundabout before beginning to work out how to get it down the hill. They therefore designed a gorge through the slope—dramatic, no doubt, but utterly foreign to a chalk down. It was left to Geoffrey Jellicoe and Ove Arup to contrive a line which, by sinking in a cutting through the woods at the top of the hill, would descend the slope with the contour, masked by trees, and emerge onto the plain with minimum impact. The whole weight of professional opinion is be- hind this elegant solution; but your in- spector, regardless, opines that it 'suffers from its late conception and hasty prepara- tion' and favours the official ravine on landscape grounds. But it was he, you re- member who, years ago, wanted to carve up Christ Church meadows for a major road. Is his aesthetic judgment so impec- cable? Or could you not, even at this stage, intervene?
The tiny county of Rutland is off the tourist track, but it is none-the-less beautiful, full of character, well farmed and virtually unspoiled. The decision, taken in the face of united opposition from the whole county, to flood 3,000 acres of good farmland for a shallow reservoir, will not only dispossess people but will impose a quite foreign element—a large lake—on an essentially small-scale, pastoral, domestic landscape. And, of course, this is yet another example of the folly of abstracting at the wrong end of the river. If this were forbidden, the polluters downstream could be made to mend their ways. Can you not use your influence, even at this late stage, to persuade the Ouse and Nene Authority to think again? None of the things T've suggested (and there are many others) would cost much. But has it occurred to you that they might ac- tually pay? The tourist industry is after all not insignificant; but visitors from abroad don't come here to look at car parks and supermarkets, motorways or even nature
reserves. They come to discover Old Eng- land. I believe they have car plants in Detroit—and motorways inter-state; and thousands of acres of wilderness national parks. They have not Chipping Campden, Levens, or Compton Wynyates and—most of all—they have no
'Hundred little towns of stone, Forgotten in the western wolds.'
The impact of technology, unchecked, is destroying all this as surely as it is destroying our air, our soil and our water; and no technology can bring it back. You can act—now—to give us a breathing-space; time to take careful thought and make pro- per plans for the future.
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