Heritage by James Stourton

Author:James Stourton [Stourton, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838933180
Publisher: Head of Zeus

Orford Ness: Cold War pagodas.

Geography Photos/Contributor/Getty.

The protection of Britain’s coastline has been – with notable exceptions – a success story, especially compared to the continent of Europe. No sooner had the coastline been put on the national agenda, and much of it saved, than the trauma of a coastal catastrophe awoke the British public to its fragility: in March 1967, the oil tanker Torrey Canyon sank off the Isles of Scilly, resulting in an oil spillage that devastated miles of Cornish coastline. Thirty thousand tons of oil spilled in the first few hours, and a further 20,000 tons over the first week wreaked environmental havoc. It was an environmental disaster on a scale never previously witnessed in Britain, with an immeasurable loss of marine and bird life. Television news showing pictures of birds paralysed by oil had an enormous impact on the public. The Torrey Canyon was ‘a symbolic landmark event in the emergence of the UK environmental discourse’.14 People began to wonder whether civilisation was threatened less by nuclear attack and more by man’s own impact on nature. Nietzsche was often quoted: ‘to sin against God was the greatest sin: but God died and those sinners died with him. To sin against the Earth is now the most dreadful thing’.15 Environmental radicalism, born in the late 1960s, came of age in the 1970s.16

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