Tuesday 4 December 2007

Sustainability in Aberdeenshire

The Trump affair has been big news here and has now moved onto the next stage:
The Scottish Government has intervened and called in Donald Trump's application for a £1 billion golf resort after it was rejected by local planners.

The objectors to schemes like this always talk about "sustainability" as if that trumps (!) any other consideration. But what is meant by sustainability? I never hear any of the green lobby acknowledging that mankind sustains itself by relentlessly altering the environment. If we didn't, few of us would survive beyond adolescence or indeed birth. I remember reading some years ago of a golf course development in (I think) Ayrshire being rejected by the local planners on the grounds that it would "intrude onto the green belt"! That says it all I think.

1 comment:

David Farrer said...

Comments made on previous template:

Neil Craig
I suppose if they could define "sustainability" in any objective terms then it would be obvious most "sustainable" developments aren't. I had this with somebody on the Herald comments, saying that if the golf course doesn't go bust then, by definition, it is sustainable. He disagreed, ultimately on the grounds it wasn't because it wasn't & "sustainable" projects were because they were.
19 December 2007, 19:06:38 GMT – Like – Reply

TdS
surely the second law of thermodynamics means that nothing is sustainable, in the whole.
14 December 2007, 19:43:21 GMT – Like – Reply

jameshigham
Hello, David? Anyone home?
12 December 2007, 11:47:41 GMT – Like – Reply

Neil Craig
I agree with you about the general problem in politics of people approriating words which, in ordinary English, meam something different from what they use it for.

Apparently in architecture a "sustainable building" doesn't now mean one that won't fall down but one with a windmill on top (the vibrations of which actually increase the chance of it falling down).
9 December 2007, 15:22:30 GMT – Like – Reply

David Farrer
1789 as a "year of revolutionary change"

1789? It's too soon to tell!
7 December 2007, 14:34:36 GMT – Like – Reply

James Braid
Minimum wage skivvy stuff is excellent, especially if you are an irreverent Scottish caddy.
My father, a London-based Scot, was a member of Royal Blackheath Golf Club and in the club magazine I spotted a delightfully Wodehousian article which referred to the year 1789 as a "year of revolutionary change". This, of course referred to the fact of that year being the first one during which non-Freemasons were admitted as members to a club which was founded by the Scottish retinue of James the Saxth.
7 December 2007, 06:44:27 GMT – Like – Reply

jameshigham
Oh to be in Alex's Scotland now.
7 December 2007, 04:50:22 GMT – Like – Reply

Martin
David,

This episodoe provide an interesting insight into the soi-disant, ersatz 'Scottish Government's opinion of local democracy.
6 December 2007, 08:29:12 GMT – Like – Reply

Andrew Duffin
A golf course development in Ayrshire?

I don't know which one that was, but you can't throw a brick in Ayrshire without it landing on some golf course development or other, so they must have not paid the right bribes or something.

As for Trump, I reckon we can do without him. His customers would all be loud Americans and the only jobs created locally would be minimum-wage skivvy-type stuff.

Bah humbug.
5 December 2007, 19:51:59 GMT – Like – Reply

jameshigham
...as if that trumps...

Too clever by half, David.
5 December 2007, 18:05:42 GMT