The following letter was published in the New Blackmore Vale magazine on 13 May 2022. For the convenience of anyone interested who missed it, it is reproduced here:

SCIENTISTS tell us the human race cannot continue to allow the natural environment to be covered in bricks and mortar without terminal results for all biological life on Earth - including of course ourselves. Hence two items in your 29 April edition stood out for special mention: First, on p5, the lead item 'Homes green light could see village population increase by 20 percent' gave a revealing and disturbing insight into how Dorset Council's planning system is now operating. The revelation was that, in effect, Dorset's planning officers are unable to recommend any refusals for even moderate scale housing development because they are under pressure to meet central government housing targets. What was, and is, disturbing is that even those councillors, such as council chairman Val Pothecary, who are 'not happy' with this situation feel unable to reject plans if officers tell them they can't! The moral of that particular story is not just that officers and not elected members now decide on development in Dorset but also that nothing will change until someone decides, as set out very plainly by planning officer Hannah Smith in the report, that Dorset has reached a development 'tipping point'. In her words: 'There's no cap on development numbers...The last inspector said there may well be a tipping point but this is not it' - that is, we're not there yet. So now we know a 'tipping point' is on the cards, I'd suggest the residents of Dorset now need to get their local politicians to define exactly what that tipping point - that line in the sand if you prefer - is and when it might be reached. This is precisely what we elect politicians to do after all. Then, on p40, North Dorset MP Simon Hoare, in his opinion piece bewailing the low moral state of his colleagues in Parliament, lists the cost of living crisis, global economic slowdown, and war in Ukraine as issues that make this 'a deeply unsettling and frightening time'. Indeed they do - but he makes no mention of the one issue that far and away surpasses all others for being 'deeply unsettling and frightening' and that is climate change. Scientists tell us we have only a matter of a few years - until about 2030 - before we reach a climate 'tipping point' from which there is no likely return, for the human race at least. So the only real question then is which 'tipping point' we reach first: the tipping point of destroying so much of the natural world by development for purely financial gain - aka greed - that it becomes uninhabitable or the climate tipping point that will end all human life on Earth anyway. They may, of course, be the same point but for our children and grandchildren's sake someone at Dorset Council needs to have the courage and foresight to start telling us - and fast. Richard Thomas Shaftesbury