Electricity pylons are at risk of destroying the countryside (Image: Getty)
When people think of the east of England, three things generally come to mind: the glorious, sweeping beaches, Constable country and big skies.
That’s what those of us who live here love.
We share that love with the millions of visitors who come every year to watch birds, enjoy the coastline and take long walks in the countryside.
Yet our region is at risk of being industrialised on an unimaginable scale and changed forever under the government’s vision that we should become the powerhouse of the UK.
That vision, forced upon us without our say, will litter landscapes with towering pylons and vast substations and converter stations.
Trees will be ripped out in their millions. Ironically, the habitats of the birds we are simultaneously trying to protect in the UNESCO Superhighway proposal will be destroyed.
Many of those birds will die, in collision with the new power lines.
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Government’s vision will force business owners from fruit farmers, to those in the tourist industry, smallholders and even stud farmers into closure.
Homeowners are watching the value of their property plummeting before their very eyes as proposal after monstrous proposal rears its head in rural idylls across East Anglia.
It is wonderful that the North Sea can generate so much wind power. That we celebrate.
But with a lack of strategic planning, the government is taking a wrecking ball to our heritage, landscapes and the nature and communities that live here.
The fury of communities at this attack on their beloved home is heightened by the well-known fact that the grid can be upgraded to transmit wind power to London without much of this upheaval.
We should follow the lead of the United States, where it is a requirement to upgrade the existing grid before building new, costly and harmful new infrastructure.
We should take the lead from our North Sea neighbours who have been coordinating grid infrastructure offshore for years, to reduce the impact, the cost and the harms.
And where new cables do have to go on land, they should make landfall at brownfield sites, and should be buried, using new-style, cost-effective, HVDC technology.
There is simply no reason for East Anglia’s coasts and countryside to be sacrificed in the name of net zero.
Pylons in the UK countryside (Image: Getty)