Dear Prime Minister,
I previously wrote to you in the midst of your election campaign regarding HS2, it’s impact on the environment & global warming, but fearing you didn’t receive that email, I now write again as things have taken a turn for the worst : with Australia BURNING, an area twice the size of Wales has been destroyed since September with 27 lives sadly lost, it’s had it’s hottest day on record, with more devastation to come. In recent years our Summers have been getting hotter, with Wales, Northern Ireland & Northern England experiencing destructive fires, along with severe flooding in many other areas. We now have bird species breeding in this country, which are pushing north from their regular European haunts due to the effects of Global Warming.
All these disasters are what scientists warn will become the ‘norm’ in future if we don’t take preventative action NOW by reducing co2 levels in the atmosphere, the obvious way this can be achieved is by being less destructive with the environment & increasing tree cover at the same time, which sadly is not the case with HS2. Thousands upon thousands of trees are to be felled, I’m told in the Denham area alone twenty thousand are currently in the process of being removed, there by depriving wildlife of valuable breeding habitat & local residence of clean air to breath, it’s an area you know well as it is within/borders your constituency, in which case surely your voters have a right to breath clean air.
I know HS2 have mitigation plans to plant thousands of saplings, but it will take at least fifty- hundred years for them to reach a size where by they can absorb the same amount of co2 annually as the trees they are to replace, by which time it will be to late, we need those trees NOW. Land has to be secured to plant these trees, land which is under huge pressure, in Bucks alone we have the Oxford- Cambridge Express Way & it’s associated ONE MILLION HOMES, plus another eighty thousand homes in the Vale of Aylesbury & a thousand in Chiltern District & all the devastation that will cause, soon be no natural space left!! Then what we gonna do??
Then we have the estimated eight million litres of water a day required for the two years it will take to construct the Chiltern Tunnel, which I understand Affinity Water are refusing to supply, (still trying to get my head around that unbelievable figure, how that can be justified in times of drought & hose pipe bans is beyond belief). HS2 are currently involved in excluding Badgers from their Setts in my area, in other words blocking up the holes & netting them over, Barn Owls are to receive the same treatment, as for all the hedgerows adjoining the works, they are to be netted during the construction process, preventing birds from breeding & feeding.
All this from a project that is supposedly environmently sound.
We know the financial costs are horrendous & rising, the environmental & human cost will be catastrophic.
I look forward to hearing your reply.
All the Best
