Should housing developments be built at the expense of our natural environment?

It perhaps brings us to the fork in the road that the American biologist Rachel Carson highlighted – in her influential book Silent Spring (1962) on environmental pollution and the natural history of the sea. She writes: ‘We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been travelling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one less travelled – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth’.

The deceptively easy road has been the road travelled by speculators and developers thus far and they have done well. The support of government in their urgency to provide homes in a housing crisis is critical and at the same time complex. However, as much as the speculators might wish, governments are not elected to govern a single constituency, rather they must consider the whole community. Speculators speculate on the returns that might be made on investment, and they take their chance within the boundaries of government policy. These boundaries are sometimes high and sometimes low. Yes, we have a housing crisis, and we need homes. Should housing developments be built at the expense of our natural environment? Should the boundary protecting our biodiversity be a boundary, one that protects, at all costs, some cost, or no costs? This is not to say that the Hillstone proposal is an ecological horror story, or that the planning regulations do not have sufficient protections. The plot concerned may or may not be a site of particular natural or scientific interest and most plots of land green or brown can be built on, rather it’s how we build while encouraging a social political philosophy that has the protection of our unique biodiversity and nature conservation at its heart. The ingenuity – or power – with which we humans can re-shape the surface of this earth is very striking. But, with power comes responsibility and there are international protocols that need to be considered, not least the UN Convention on climate change and biodiversity which contains 42 Articles and is a legal framework to promote the adoption of all measures aimed at ensuring conservation of biodiversity, sustainability and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of our natural resources. Most business-people exercise business responsibly and we elect leaders to exercise power on our behalf with responsibility, and this includes the protection of our natural environment for our benefit and for the benefit of future generations. As Carson observes – there is the easy less imaginative road, or the difficult road

less travelled. To borrow another quote: ‘We make our choice and our choice makes us’.

Robert McCann

Forest