Lancashire’s wildlife needs your help – Hoddlesden Moss is facing a real threat and time is short. Tim Melling, Our Senior Conservation Officer in the North of England describes the threat – and highlights the campaign action we have now set up to enable you join the call to Save Hoddlesden Moss.
The landscape of the West Pennine Moors is the beautiful home to a rich variety of wildlife. Photo Credit Tim Melling
Climate change is the greatest long term threat facing the world’s wildlife. And the greatest contributor to climate change is burning fossil fuels to generate electricity. So it makes sense that we should oppose fossil fuel use and promote alternatives like wind turbines. And this is generally what we do apart from a small number of places that are just the wrong place for wind turbines.
One such place is Hoddlesden Moss in the beautiful West Pennine Moors of Lancashire where a planning application for three wind turbines has just been lodged. I wrote about the West Pennine Moors some months ago because this jewel of a wildlife haven had been overlooked as a SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest). It still hasn’t been notified but Natural England is in the throes of rectifying that.
We know that birds that depend on our hills and moorland are displaced by wind turbine developments, and Hoddlesden Moss has a rich array of upland breeding birds including snipe, golden Plover, dunlin, curlew, teal and red grouse. It even has rarities like short-eared owl and merlin in the area. All of these are at risk of being displaced by the turbines and affected by the drainage required to install turbines and access tracks.
But Hoddlesden Moss is also active blanket bog which is a technical description of a habitat made of peat formed by the accumulation of sphagnum mosses preserved in the wet conditions. The peat literally ‘blankets’ the hills, a landscape that is so distinctive of our islands but globally is quite rare.
Peat forms at the slow rate of about a millimetre a year and Hoddlesden Moss has up to four metres of peat! That is four thousand years worth of growth, and four thousand years where carbon has been taken out of the atmosphere and safely locked up in the ground as wet peat.
But if you damage peat it starts to release all that stored carbon so switches from being helpful to harmful in terms of climate change. But the whole purpose of having wind turbines is to help counter climate change. So it makes no environmental sense to damage peat bogs to install wind turbines. It is difficult to think of a worse place to put wind turbines than Hoddlesden Moss and RSPB will be strongly objecting to this proposal.
There is still time to make your own views known to the planning authority if you feel strongly enough. The planning authority is Blackburn with Darwen and here's the link to the action you can take.
Thank you!