estuary airport

by

Beauty and the Beast

untitled (3)Visited the Shorelines Literature Festival of the Sea today at Leigh on Sea in Essex. A festival dedicated to the sea and the wonderful estuary landscape in both Essex and North Kent. I found the festival both inspiring and depressing. Inspiring because of the really interesting stories people are telling about a landscape which I love but which is so often derided as ugly and valueless by people who judge beauty by some Cotswold, middle England set of values and depressing because of the scale of destruction taking place.

The Thames super port development is currently hoovering up the Thames seabed causing fish numbers to plummet, ancient oyster and muscle beds to be destroyed, beaches to erode at alarming rates and spewing tons of sludge containing heavy metals and untold other pollutants into our water. Why? so yet more cheap goods can be shipped in from the Far East.

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/nature-and-cosmos/will-massive-global-container-ships-destroy-the-history-and-ecology-of-the-thames-river-estuary/

Also at the festival I bumped into Joan Darwell and Gill Moore, friends from my previous life with the RSPB and long term campaigners against the destruction of the Hoo Peninsula to make way for London’s Super airport. The latest scheme, beloved monster child of  London’s mayor Boris Johnson, will see the whole of the peninsula and most of the Thames destroyed to create an airport far larger than Heathrow and a 6 lane motorway joining it to London. This will be built on some of the most important habitat for wildlife in England and one of Britain’s premier literary landscapes which inspired Charles Dickens to write Great Expectations.

www.stopestuaryairport.co.uk

The trashing of Britain’s countryside, traditions and history in order to line the pockets of the super rich is just beyond belief. These people will undoubtedly go down in history but maybe not in the way their super sized egos dream about. Boris Johnson will no doubt be taught about in schools in years to come but probably as a super villain who should have been stopped.