I WAS JUST THINKING … about invaders from Mars.

The stuff of childhood nightmares induced by the images accompanying the release, perhaps, of the Jeff Wayne/Richard Burton version of the H G Wells classic The War of the Worlds all those years ago.

I remember the red eye, the death ray, the inexorable march across our green and pleasant land and the total destruction of everything we hold dear. I remember and I shiver involuntarily. I can’t help it.

A fantasy of course. It could never happen. There is no life on Mars, despite the very recent geological finds. Yet there is an emerging phenomenon that is making me look nervously about me as I traverse the countryside. Tall, unworldly, colonising, huge arms, supported on one massive leg. Already a danger to low flying aircraft and who knows what else in the future? Yes, I’m speaking about wind turbines of course.

As Royston casts nervous glances towards Litlington and the proposal to site wind-harvesting turbines on the flat of the plain, I am at war with myself. On the one side sits my stupid, childhood irrational fear of the invading colossuses. On the other is my passionately held belief that as a society we have greedily consumed so many of the earth’s resources that we have done it and ourselves irrevocable damage.

We have laid down a stock of problems with which succeeding generations will have to grapple. We are duty bound to investigate potential solutions to those problems now so that our children’s task will be microcosmically easier.

Thus wind farms, solar energy, nuclear and wave power are all options we should feel obliged to explore, trial and then utilise if they prove effective.

And what of the ‘blot on the landscape’ merchants? Those folk who want to preserve England’s countryside in aspic. Is what they aspire to be preserved, in any case, anything but the result of centuries of change? We, as a generation, have lost the right to dig in our toes and resist. It is we who have already precipitated climate change, mass over-population and the rapine of fossil fuels and other natural resources. We may not like the fact that we will be able to see the monsters from the road, the railway and probably the Heath at Therfield but we have only ourselves to blame.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate it when I drive through the Fens or up the A11 towards Six Mile Bottom and see the field acre-devouring monsters. I hate the notion of more farms being turned over for their use. I am instinctively against them coming to Litlington. But just like my childhood fears of Martian invaders this is irrational.

They won’t kill me and if they help reverse the degradation of our planet I’m all for them.

Pictured is an image of the wind farm proposed for Litlington