HS2 and environmental damage

Community, Democracy and Local Affairs, Environment, Letters to the Editor, Transport

Dear Editor,

Please accept my grateful thanks for printing the excellent, and refreshingly honest article about HS2 by Wendover Parish Chair, Tom Walsh, in your September magazine. (page 7). Honesty can bring about change.

In a time when we are seeing our rights to protest being eroded day by day by our Government on behalf of organisations like HS2 (owned by our Government and only wanted by them!) it takes an enormous amount of courage to be as up front and honest about HS2 as is described in the article.

I say this as someone who has fought against this climate wrecking, ecocidal form of vandalism for many years now.

I have witnessed first-hand the brutality meted out by HS2, their ‘security’ people NET: The National Eviction Team who are NOT licensed to restrain/injure protectors yet they brutally handle both men and women, often causing terrible injuries requiring long term medical attention.

This brutality extends to our once green and pleasant countryside. Vast swathes of our heritage are being clear felled by HS2 and its contractors on a daily basis along the length of the route.

The welfare of bats, birds, hedgehogs, other mammals are ignored or ‘signed off’ by HS2 Ecologists as unimportant to an area under the watchful gaze of Natural England who share an office with HS2 and sign off any licences HS2 wants.

The brutality to our wildlife is therefore sanctioned by the very people who are supposed to protect it. HS2 mitigation for this enormous loss of bio-diversity is to plant a few thousand saplings and then let them die as they do not water them. Their ‘green’ mitigation falls vastly short even by thier own admissions. HS2 WILL NEVER BE CARBON NEUTRAL: IT WILL ALWAYS ADD TO CLIMATE BREAKDOWN and species extinctions.

As we now know from research undertaken by renowned scientists and scholars, including Sir David Attenborough, pushing the natural world to the brink allows for viruses to mutate and cross into humans and pandemics ensue.

We are if you like, causing our own demise, HS2 being a big contributory factor in pushing us to the brink that bit faster.

There are Protection Camps springing up along the route, in response to the natural disasters being caused by HS2 and I would kindly ask that people support them as best they feel they can. We are fortunate to have two protection camps in Wendover: Wendover Active Resistance on the A413 opposite Road Barn Farm, and ancient Jones Hill Wood (Roald Dahl Woods) behind Strawberry Hill Farm.

Please visit the camps, or send words of support or anything you can donate that you feel may be useful to these wonderful and utterly necessary protectors.

With grateful thanks to Mr Walsh and Wendover News for being brave enough to print the truth about HS2.