HOW much does our green belt matter to us?

Recently-highlighted local issues in the Bury Times - such as green belt land at the Seedfield Centre, the lodge off Greenhill Road, Bury, and landfill sites rear to homes further up the Rossendale Valley - well illustrate the fight that caring citizens have to wage to try and preserve things that are good and necessary for a healthy future.

If sites are on protected green belt land, or are Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), then why are they being steadily eroded?

Instead of local people of modest means usually having to do the fighting, shouldn't the developers and proponents of more buildings be made to prove an overwhelming case against legally binding government public interest decisions.

Or do these decisions mean nothing? It is interesting that Bury Council apparently refused to let a resident extend his garden onto land at the Seedfield Centre. Last year, Bury Environmental Forum encouraged residents to submit ideas and to make a commitment to improving our local environment. I asked about acquiring a little adjoining council land to grow vegetables. I got no reply!

If our council want people to play their part, then they need to provide positive advice and support for the public policies they advocate and adhere to the same rule book, without yielding to self-centred profiteers. We do look to our elected representatives to protect and enhance our neighbourhood, to ensure justice where there are conflicting interests, and to achieve the common good.

It was wonderful to read of the six seals off the Lincolnshire coast who, by forming a close ring round a woman caught out of her depth on a sandbank and continually nudging and lifting her, kept her from being swept away, In effect, they saved her life! In other parts of the world, of course, seals and other animals are barbarously hacked to death.

Let us each judge for ourselves how we should treat the world that God has given us to care for.

TIM BOADEN,

Seedfield Road,

Bury.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.