Habitat Destruction

I came across this fellow on a path through a field in which environmental impact assessors have recently been laying habitat traps. The field is one of many here threatened with being built over if the West of England Combined Authority has its way and drops a thousand houses on us. 

It's unusual to see a slow worm in the middle of the field though, so I suspect the assessors have disturbed the field boundary and the migration routes sufficiently to drive out many of the creatures they are surveying for - to the delight of course of the developers who will have less mitigation to put forward as they concrete over the landscape.

I am becoming accustomed now to being stopped during our exercise walks around the village, by anxious residents seeking news of the latest developer intentions. It's hard to explain that while carbon reduction and sustainability are talked about in the media, they don't actually mean much in the real world.

Not that anyone here is particularly NIMBY, but while you can build in new school places and new shops, doctors and employment opportunities (not that these are part of WECA's plans of course, just more houses), you can't make wider the narrow and congested country lanes that go through and around our village. 

Neither, it seems, can anyone think of how to make viable our "no longer fit for purpose" nearby motorway junction. Nor how to pay for it. I admit it, this is my negative blog entry for July. I'll try and do better. But I'm so tired of this bloody war. And all the others. This isn't the 2017 I envisaged when we sang about the dawning of the age of Aquarius.