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The eco-town protesters of North Oxfordshire call themselves The Weston Front. Headquartered in the quaint little village of Weston on the Green, they have papered their posters everywhere, on the old stone walls and the yellow Cotswold limestone facades of the 200- and 300-year-old thatched cottages.
"This Is Not Brownfield"
"Crops? Or Concrete!"
"Eco-Town Chaos Coming Here Soon"
Matthew Jackson, head of policy and planning for the Berks, Bucks & Oxon Wildlife Trust, has driven me out here to have a look at the proposed site of the Weston Otmoor eco-town, 2,000 acres of open fields where a developer plans to build 15,000 homes.
Jackson says he can see why the government would consider this "a brilliant site," with its access to an underused rail line and the highway. But he can also see why the 500 residents of the village of Weston on the Green would not want to live in the shadow of this new town, whether eco or not. "If this plan were coming through the usual local planning process," he says with certainty, "it wouldn't be built here."
As a wildlife specialist, Jackson has a particular concern. Adjacent to the planned eco-town's train station and its parking lot for 6,000 cars lies an expanse of rare grasslands -- an authentic ecological relic, the result of being continuously (and still) farmed by methods more than a century old, with no pesticides or chemical fertilizers. The fields provide habitat for rare snipe, great crested newts, and hairstreak butterflies. Part of the land is a Trust-owned nature preserve, and the rest a government-protected Site of Special Scientific Interest.
As we slog across the sodden fields rutted with harvester tracks, it's clear that water is an issue. In places, this fall's seemingly ceaseless rains have created muddy ponds big enough to mire a small car, and climate change models point to increasing precipitation across the British Isles. The hydrology of the area has never been studied, Jackson complains, and until it has, there's no way to tell what impact the developer's plan will have. A proper study, he says, could take a couple of years. "Our concern is that there's a rush to build. An eco-town based on unsound ecology is a big loser."
Back in the village I meet Anthony Henman, joint chair of the Weston Front. Inside his home hang oil portraits of his celebrity son on the court at Wimbledon, and the elder Henman, dressed in a crisply pressed blue suit, also has the lithe build of a tennis player. He has spent a lifetime looking at the surrounding farm fields and appreciating the green buffer that separates the village from the big towns and motorways beyond, and in some ways even from the passage of time.
"I don't think we can be accused of being NIMBYs," he says, "because this is a totally bad site -- in terms of location, in terms of infrastructure, and because it will prejudice the sustainability of the nearby towns of Bicester and Kidlington," which already have development plans of their own in the works. Worse, he estimates that the eco-town will add at least 20,000 cars to the already crowded country roads and local freeway junctions. And that alone would seem to him to negate the idea of carbon-neutral development.
Henman is right. Cars are eco-town killers. Transportation accounts for some one-third of all energy use and CO2 emissions in the U.K., Europe, and the United States. Getting people out of their cars requires a combination of strategies, from the passive -- such as compact development, pedestrian and bicycle paths, and substantial public transport -- to the draconian -- restrictions on parking, taxes on driving, limits on car ownership, and moratoriums on highway expansion, none of which are part of the eco-town plans.
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