Environmental rape: right on our doorstep

You hear the term "environmental rape" and you immediately think China or  Russia, with their headlong rush to industrialisation with little regard to citizens and the environment they live in. Yet yesterday we heard that the despoilation of a vital piece of ecology happened in North Wales, not in the dark days of the 19th century but last year.


I refer to a river in the Conwy valley in the town of Llanrwst, a river which has flowed since the end of the last Ice Age being torn up and replaced by a concrete sluice, in the name of flood prevention, and, wait for it, carried out under the auspices of the NRW (Natural Resources Wales). You might think a little forethought might have prevailed prior to carrying out this despicable act of environmental vandalism, but NRW stated that it took a "pragmatic view" in an "exceptional case" where a delay could have threatened the project. What they were trying to say is that they had to spend £280,000 before the end of the financial year and so they rushed in and destroyed the stream before their funding dried up.


We must conclude NRW cares more about its funding than the environment in which it operates. Indeed, they care so little about issues outside money they went ahead and concreted over the stream right in the middle of the salmon breeding season (that's right, it's a salmon spawning ground) when thousands of salmon eggs were in the river.


Who cares? they probably said. We've got to spend this money in double-quick time so lets get those bulldozers moving. No one cares about one little stream do they?


Well, here's the news, NRW. We do. I utterly condemn this rape of a river as showing an utter poverty of ideas, ethics and morality and an attitude that smacks of cynicism and negligence. If it were in my power I would prosecute the leader of NRW and the executives who signed off on this disgraceful act to the fullest extent of the law. Which as it stands is probably not very much. But future generations will look back on this act of rape and shake their heads in despair, just as we look back on the era of slavery and wonder how we could ever have been part of such a barbaric system.