Fight for our green sites on Guernsey.
Letter written in response to the request from the Societe Guernesiaise for islanders to object to the PEH Greenfield Plan. More info on this here https://guernseypress.com/news/2022/12/29/voice-your-objections-to-peh-green-field-plan/
If you care about this island and the future generations who will live on it, then please voice your objections. Politicians should not be able to compromise nature like this. It is a beautiful valley and this island needs to keep its beautiful valleys.
Dear Sirs
The Seventh Generation Principle is based on an ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) philosophy that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future.
The Children’s Fire, arose from indigenous culture in North America where chiefs agreed that no law, no decision, no action, nothing of any kind would be permitted to go out from the council of chiefs that would harm the children. The Children’s Fire is essentially a pledge to the welfare of unborn future children (human and non-human alike) but more profoundly it’s a pledge to life, a commitment to the responsibility carried by each successive generation to safeguard the vitality and regenerative capacity of the earth.
It is my feeling that the proposal by P&R to build multi-storey accommodation and car parking on a green field site by the hospital is ethically and environmentally immoral and those proposing it might do well to take on board the seventh generation principle and the Children’s Fire, created by wise leaders. Our local leaders agreeing to this proposal are not wise leaders.
Sure they may think that they are wise leaders, planning for the future, creating accommodation and parking for nurses and other hospital facilitators, but this is short term and limited thinking when we consider the future generations to come and our relationship with nature.
It is about time that we started to recognise and appreciate that we need nature to exist on planet earth as a humanity. It is very stupid and arrogant of us to feel that we can exist without it and therefore we should be doing absolutely everything we can to preserve what is left of it for now and the future. For those of us who have grown up on this beautiful island it is very sad to see the continuous development, ostentatious at times too, an outward display of increasing greed, of developer’s greed too.
Furthermore, it’s about time that leaders started addressing our sickness, rather than merely adding to it. We are a sick society because we live in a way that is out of harmony with nature -we keep destroying it - and we aren’t encouraged to take responsibility for our own health and wellbeing. Mental health issues increase and we keep on keeping on without pausing to consider changes to the way we are living to ease this.
For example, if we all made more effort to eat well, exercise in moderation, do a job that brings fulfilment and satisfaction, love and care for ourselves, be kind to others and respect our fellow man, appreciate, value and spend as much time as possible in nature (while there is still some available to us) then we might find that we don’t need to keep extending health care provision on the island – our mental health rates might decrease too.
Admittedly some may say that that is idealistic thinking, long term at least, but there is some truth in it. Short term, there are other options that do not mean we have to compromise on previous (and wise) decisions to designate land as – essentially – sacred. Nurses do not need to live on site. We have a perfectly adequate bus service providing regular access to the hospital and cycling is a favourable option on this island. There are brown field sites that could be used for development.
Furthermore, there are run-down sites in need of re-development such as St Margaret’s Lodge and Braye Lodge. Admittedly these are private but if we all started recognising that we are in this together, on Guernsey as much as on planet earth, then maybe we’d be able to come together to find a solution private or indeed public and overcome the greed that has infiltrated this island.
Also, we should be reviewing how we train nurses locally. I have friends who trained as nurses on the island, who have since had children and were unable to maintain their nursing registration, and others who have no interest in returning because they either don’t need to work or found the clinical nature of nursing soul destroying. I appreciate that the States of Guernsey cannot control nursing registration requirements or nurses’ experience of nursing, but it can bring greater control around access to local nurse training and ongoing retention of nurses following training.
I am in complete agreement with Roy Bisson, La Societe president, in that we need to jealously guard our open spaces regardless of changes in population and living conditions. I also share his concerns that ruining and removing a beautiful green facility, on a designated green field site, will set a dangerous precedent for seven other agricultural spaces adjoining the PEH campus. I also feel it makes every other designated green site on the island suddenly vulnerable to poor leadership and politics.
I am really disappointed and saddened that politicians feel that this decision is in any way in the best interests of our beautiful island and those who live on it, not just now but for seven generations to come. I long for wise and visionary leaders to step forward on this island, who are bold enough to consider both the longer term interests of the planet and the future children, and indeed adults, who will live upon it.
Your faithfully
Emma
