A View from the Lords, with LORD GREAVES. . .

AFTER May's splendid weather we are back to our more typical summer fare of gusty winds and showers. It's the penalty we pay for living amongst our wonderful Pennine skylines and open moorland ridges.

But it's now the weather - our windiness - which threatens our Pennine future.

Our valley towns were built on the coal which was dug out from the underlying rocks, and the industries which grew up near the pits. I love our local towns but for the people who lived in them over the best part of a hundred years they were unhealthy and squalid. The air was not fit to breathe, outside or inside the mills and the pits. Diseases were rife, people worked long hours for low wages, and the house-proud local ethic could not counter living conditions that we today would not stomach.

Yet for many people there was a saving grace to living here. The open hills and moorlands are on the doorstep. People could escape into the countryside for exercise, clean air and spiritual refreshment, even if only for one afternoon a week. It's not surprising that generations of Burnley and Pendle folk have given the act of "going up Pendle" an almost totemic significance.

Our towns have always been real communities but massive investment in recent decades (with much more planned) is making them good places to live in the physical and environmental sense as well. When their Lordships debated energy last week I told them these things. I reminded them of the words of the Manchester Rambler - "I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I am a free man on Sunday".

I questioned the sense of the new energy policy based on a "dash for wind" which threatens to cover large areas of our uplands with huge wind turbines forming so-called wind "farms" - actually new industrial landscapes, wind factories in our remaining wilderness areas.

On a good day you can see Blackpool tower from the top of Pendle. The threat is of forests of turbines, many of them even higher than Blackpool tower. Our uplands will be transformed for ever. Global warming and climate change are the single greatest threat to the world and to human life. But the idea that the answer is to destroy large areas of precious uplands like the Pennines is surely a short-term folly.