Money over morality may see woodland destroyed in search for oil
A shit-storm is building over permission to dig for oil in the beautiful South Downs having been granted to a petroleum company by West Sussex County Council, despite it being a designated area of outstanding natural beauty.
Northern Petroleum is set to drill an oil well in Markwells Wood, an ancient woodland in the village of Forestside, near Chichester. The drilling will destroy a hectare (2.5 acres) of woodland in an area likely to become part of the South Downs National Park. The council’s own ecologist and landscape officers object to the scheme but other, more ignorant, officials decided that the application met all legal requirements and approved it on the understanding that Northern Petroleum will replace and enhance the woodland when it has finished working on the site, which is expected to be in about three years’ time.
Of course you can’t replace ancient woodland. Because it’s ancient. You can plant new trees, mere saplings, but what about the biodiversity of the area? Woodland Trust spokesman Steve Marsh called Markswell Wood ‘irreplaceable’ and added that the area is ‘our richest habitat for species in the UK’ and ‘the equivalent, in terms of importance, to a rainforest.”
“Technically it is ancient woodland,” conceded Mark Dunn, West Sussex county councillor for Forestside, “but to look at it you would not regard it as a very important piece of land. We granted permission for oil to be drilled for two reasons: one is that there is a national policy in favour of extracting minerals from the earth where we have them; and secondly because we have struck a deal with the company which will actually see the area of woodland improved when they are finished.”
Ah. So actually, the clue is in the words ‘we have struck a deal’–it’s all about the money. No surprise there. The oil company buys the council’s approval, and the council goes on to spend the money on more parking attendants, CCTV, and pay rises for council workers, no doubt, confident that people will accept the wood being replaced eventually by a little bit of turf and a few saplings. Birds, bugs and other wildlife might even repopulate the area after several years, assuming they’re not wiped out by the drilling activity.
The old familiar arrogance is on display, that we can somehow improve upon what nature has taken centuries and even millennia to provide—and, what’s more, do so after completely destroying the area and creating a bloody big hole. The drilling rigs will be 36 metres high and will drill 24 hours a day for up to five weeks at a time, and are being set up when there isn’t even any certainty that there is any oil at all underneath the land.
“There are four oil wells in the vicinity,” said Dunn, “so there is great expectancy, almost certainty, that there will be some here too. It would be incredibly bad luck if there wasn’t.”
Expect activist intervention a-plenty, and given that Dunn is an elected councillor, we can only hope the people of Forestside give him the kicking at the ballot box he deserves at the next available opportunity. But they don’t need to wait until then. They can write to the council to protest, they can lobby council meetings, they can make their voices heard in many different ways. And as the South Downs are part of the UK, so too can every British citizen eager to put a stop to this environmental vandalism.
tags: conservation, environment, oil, South Downs, trees, vandalism, wildlife, woodland, woods
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