socialmedian: This bulldozing of nimbys must not become colonial

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This bulldozing of nimbys must not become colonial | Julian Glover

Source: guardian.co.uk Politics

Nov 08, 2009

Summary

A new planning body that puts the national interest ahead of local concerns is welcome, but must be closely watched

'I became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike," wrote Richard Jeffries at the start of his entrancing but rarely read novel After London. He was a Victorian farmer's son who died young, after dreaming his vision of a post-industrial England drowned by noxious floods and strangled by forests. He predicted environmental apocalypse as modern climate scientists do: but in his world some undescribed calamity had ended urban civilisation and nature had overcome the cities. Today the fear is the reverse: that the cities will overcome nature.

Jeffries wrote of brambles and briars, oxeye daisies and charlock. He described long mounds over which, it was said, "machines worked by fire" had passed. "They traversed the land swift as the swallow glides through the sky, but of these things not a relic remains to us." His future was dystopian, with the few hungry survivors of disaster bound to their maste

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