Sing for Wales or shut your trap
Mari Mitchell
‘Sing for Wales or shut your trap
All the rest’s a load of crap.’
Harri Webb (1920 – 1994) – a poet who fought against the drowning of Tryweryn by the Liverpool City Corporation in 1965. They apologised in 2005. Wales doesn’t forget.
Does the left hand know what the right hand is doing?
As part of our plan to tackle the climate emergency, Wales needs to plant 43,000 hectares of new woodland by 2030.’ To this end, the Welsh Government’s Sustainable Farming Scheme had a requirement for farmers to plant 10% trees in a Woodland Creation Scheme, while the development of wind farms on forestry land to the east of Brechfa and elsewhere will necessitate removing vast numbers of trees. Trydan Gwyrdd Cymru’s pylons would run in tandem with GreenGen’s pylons, which will remove even more farmland from food production, risking food security. (Environment, Food and Rural Affairs report 28th July 2023).
Public meeting
In April 2020, the Welsh Government launched their National Forest of Wales project; in November 2022, NRW produced their Brechfa Forest Resource Plan. A public meeting was held in Brechfa to show these plans.
They set a direction to develop programmes ‘to include the ecosystem approach for woodlands and forests within the context of wider landscape and environment, using an integrated natural resource management approach.’ This includes developing continuous cover and, importantly, restoring and managing ancient woodlands.
This was approved in December 2024 but now includes a section about renewable energy.
Representatives of Trydan Gwyrdd Cymru, the publicly owned renewable energy developer for Wales, state that there is no ancient woodland in the path of these turbines, yet NRW’s maps show differently.
Moreover, there is no reference to establishing wind turbines and related pylons, wooden poles or otherwise in NRW’s plans of 2022.
Welfare
There is a commitment to protect the welfare and mental health of the population (Welsh Government strategy for All-Age Mental Health and Wellbeing 2024 – 2034). The government makes donations to charities such as Tir Dewi and DPJ Foundation while pursuing strategies which exacerbate poor mental health in farming and the general public.
Tourism in Carmarthenshire is valued at £600 million a year, creating thousands of jobs. The Welsh Government’s ‘Priorities for the Visitor Economy 2020-2025 are to deliver ‘benefits for people and places including environmental sustainability, cultural and social enrichment and health benefits.’
Wales is not alone in fighting the proliferation of wind turbines and pylons which threaten to engulf our land to feed other countries and enrich international companies.
Exploited
The people of Sardinia are also fighting an ongoing battle to prevent yet more wind turbines despoiling their landscape to feed electricity to mainland Italy. (The Telegraph Magazine 26th October 2024) Like Wales, they are a poor country dependent on tourism and farming for a living. The mayor of Genoni in Sardinia says, ‘They are trying to “save the world” using the same system that got us into this mess.’
Wales has a history of being exploited for the benefit of others: coalmining, the iron industry, valleys flooded to create reservoirs. In the past, decisions affecting our country were all made by the British government. That the same heartless decisions are now being made by our own Welsh Government is unacceptable.
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I have to agree that we need to move urgently to sustainable renewable energy and this will come with difficult decisions regarding putting up wind farms in beauty spots and mountains around Wales. I will never support solar farms unless they are the type that allow agricultural farming to continue. In other words, the more expensive types. The only wind farms that should go up in Wales should profit the people of Wales. We should have the local skills and expertise to build, put them up and maintain them.
The only difference with solar farms that support growing plants underneath is the height. Not a big deal.
We don’t have them here and they are not included in the recent planning applications to my knowledge.
It sounds good sustainable renewable, however research about the production and lifespan of the windmills , it makes the case far less compelling .
Compare and contrast to even a gas power station.
A wind farm is an industrial site, including access roads and cables underground. It is not realistic to farm it.
Interesting article, this is just one example of “lack of joined up-ness” at Goverment level” c.f Planning rules where houses can be built without enhancements to ensure health care and local infrastructure has adequate future capacity.
I wrote to the Welsh Government about their forestry policy which seems barmy. On the one hand they are cutting down mature forest especially as an example the Dillwyn Estate outside Swansea in that case to build houses. The result there was the loss of mature woodland including a heritage tree the large Redwood for which the developer was fined. Elsewhere farmland is being planted thus finishing off rural villages and pushing the language nearer to extinction. The number of windmills is unsustainable and together with the grid infrastructure will destroy the rest of the rural landscape. Wales is essentially… Read more »
For the same cost, more land could be purchased in Amazonia. Then, it’s totally protected, as we’ve heard this is an area being despoiled, cut, cleared, and burnt. It would lay down a market for other countries to follow.
Advantage? Food security here at home, is enhanced. Also in the tropics, trees photosynthsise for most of the year unlike in GB, for 5 o’r 6 months max, a year. Also leaf fall is approx 4 year, not annually as is the case here.
Won win
Ecological colonialism, basically, then.
I guess you got no problem with the new wave of colonialism that’s swamping our country. Typical gentrified urban wally who just thinks about his own needs for juice.
No. Read beneath
Lease is what I meant to write, not purchased that means regular income to Brazil to preserve or conserve an important, globally important resource.
We uh… tried this. You see the thing about illegal logging is that it’s … y’know… illegal and they’re taking the trees and making money out of them and since there are no trees any more… well the land can be farmed, since there’s nothing left to protect.
Who tried it? When, where?
If Brazil are paid megabucks by many countries, illegal loggers would find it harder to operate, if at all. It’s worth a try. I can’t promise, bu’r at least it’s a constructive idea.
More wind turbines please. There’s no point protecting nature when it’ll be destroyed by the climate crisis.
If we took 10% of golf clubs and made them solar farms we’d generate more than enough electricity. That seems reasonable right?
Taking 10% of golf acerage makes more sense than 10% of good productive farmland. Also take a much bigger percentage of building roofs and vertical surfaces and re clad with advanced solar panels.
Sounds expensive. Wales is easier to exploit with the cheaper nastier stuff.
I wasn’t much of a fan of golf courses until we moved to live quite close to one, in the last place where we previously lived. Back then we were on the very edge of a huge conurbation, just at the point where suburbia finally fizzled out and open agricultural countryside began: houses on two sides of our property, and open fields on the other two. A very large golf course occupied the land two fields away from our house, as is often the case on ‘frontier country’ on the borders of town and open farmland, and the variety of… Read more »
But the butterflies have loved this summer. But if that statement is too frivolous, I agree with you about golf courses.
Wind Turbines are ok as long as they are at coastal or offshore locations.
Inland Wind turbines have been proven to be useless and inept for lengthy parts of a calendar year.
TREES and Wind Turbines Two men found guilty of cutting down the Sycamore Gap tree have been sentenced to four years and three months each in prison. The Welsh Government agreed to the premature felling, and non replacement, of nearly two million trees to make way for just four Wind Turbine site complexes (they are not ‘wind farms’), with many more millions of trees set to fall in Wales to the axe soon (Source of information – Freedom of Information Questions by myself to Natural Resources Wales). This is for Forestry Estate land alone, and does not include broad leaf trees… Read more »
You make a very valid point, Ioan. Government vandalism seems to be exempt!
‘Wales is not alone in fighting the proliferation of wind turbines and pylons which threaten to engulf our land …’
When I open my back door and look westward, I see pretty close to a dozen wind turbines ranged across the hill tops. I can’t say that I’m affronted by their presence, because they do seem to me to have a sort of grace.
And what do we do if we don’t use the power of wind and sun – keep burning fossil fuels? That hardly seems to offer future generations a positive future, does it?
We are still using fossil fuels, and will continue to do so. Far more than you realise.
We are, and indeed we inevitably will for quite a while yet because it’ll take time to create an environment in which alternatives become practically viable. For sure, change can’t be achieved in a short time span. But if we obdurately stick with fossil fuels, as the lead-brained Trump seems to be seeking to impose, our children and grandchildren will inexorably be left to cope with the dire consequences. We’re coming to the end, or so we in Britain are just being told, of the hottest and driest summer on record. Now autumn’s coming, and this weekend the rains are… Read more »
Good article. Wales is once again being annexed by England for industrial exploitation, but this time the Senedd, set up to protect Welsh interests, is totally complicit in this crime. The effects of this destruction of Welsh heritage, if it goes ahead, will reverberate for generations.
What a one sided argument with little or no consideration of the long term consequences to the whinging about wind turbines. Of course government can be and often is utterly ridiculous and contrary. However, to conflate it with the lazy argument that wind turbines are ugly is just bizarre. Wind turbines may or may not be a blot on the landscape. What is worth is no plant life, no animals – just barren wasteland. That’s the alternative to renewables. Personally, I think that would look a lot less attractive than a few turbines. Oh, and those who object to the… Read more »
Where did I say wind turbines are ugly? And I do consider the long term consequences of wind turbines ( deliberately misreading you there)
Well said Mari. You need to tell the world how erratic and ineffective Wind Turbines are. Next thing these nasty deluded ‘greens’ will call you a ‘climate change denier’ using the terrible lie implication you are a ‘holocaust denier’, an awful dirty untrue insult they hurl on me! How can little Wales stop India and China and USA emissions? Brechfa people need to highlight this fact. Remember that a ‘Jay’ in Welsh is ‘Screch y coed’ – ‘The screech in the woods’. Your quote of the late Harri Webb’s was a reminder to me of meeting him myself, with a… Read more »
Have you seen the rate that China are greening up? They are already past the tipping point and as the idiot in the US pulls money saving projects (that will cost them billions), China now lead the world. They out produce the EU in wind power alone. Pretty darned good and we still have a historic legacy of pollution that now looks like China will never break
Oh there are electric machines at supermarkets now, you just take your bucket and fill it up with electricity to take home.
City based politicians and councils will always look to exploit the countryside. Sometimes that city has been external to Wales (such as Liverpool) but Cardiff and Newport were very happy to use Acts of Parliament in Westminster (the same as Liverpool did) to ride roughshod over communities in Powys and flood their homes to supply their cities with water. Don’t assume that Welsh cities or towns automatically will look after the Welsh countryside, capitalism usually dictates the city gets what it wants. Indeed the council in Bala supported the construction of Llyn Celyn because they thought it would bring ‘economic… Read more »
Today a friend of mine told me a tall tale of how he’d called into a quiet pub in the Tywi valley for a pint. He had a big surprise in that there were only two customers in the pub heatedly arguing about wind turbines and the pub dog sleeping on a mat by the coal fire. The two men arguing were Nigel Farage and Ed Miliband. He said he did not stay long and quickly left. Out on the street a stranger going into the pub asked him “What’s it like in there?”. So my friend told him “It’s… Read more »
Interesting read in the guardian.
Fight the turbines if you wish, I expect a lot of the usual suspects are egging this on but when the reality of damage bites, it will be too late to say we should have done it.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/28/collapse-critical-atlantic-current-amoc-no-longer-low-likelihood-study
OK Jeff, who do we believe? The Guardian or the Telegraph? Who are these ‘usual suspects’ ? Be specific – name them! Anyway we need to move on, and in moving on, we need to globally safeguard our planet with sustainable action. How on earth can a little country like Wales save the planet from the excesses of irresponsible greedy carbon emitting countries like India, China and the USA? The Members of the Wales Senedd are mostly committed in nearly all political parties to covering large swathes of Wales in steel and concrete all for erratic unreliable ineffective wind turbine… Read more »