Save our salmon
Sir: On a Winston Churchill scholarship to discover what other North Atlantic host countries were doing for beleaguered salmon numbers in the 1990s, I found that the Canadian government considered hydroelectric schemes far less green than wind farms (‘Something’s fishy’, 1 September). The Canadian experience was that hydro units minced fish, interfered with the movement of migratory species, and often produced electricity in amounts well below original specification targets.
On return to the UK, I looked closely at ‘my’ Scottish river, Carron Kyle of Sutherland. Water is abstracted from headwaters to feed turbines in a neighbouring catchment. The scheme built by the government is a complete barrier to migration for 365 days of the year and the tunnel leading water away is bone dry for a fortnight at a time. The salmon population wiped out would once have been the famous early season springers; how dirty is that?
Jonny Shaw
Ross
Population explosion
Sir: Brendan O’Neill criticises ‘population panic groups’ (‘Malthus’s children’, 25 August). Yet Malthus’s children are still with us. In Niger, the population has risen from 4 million in 1970 to 16 million now. The average number of children per mother is seven, the highest in the world. Is it surprising that with this huge number of extra mouths to feed there are many hungry people in Niger?
O’Neill is right to stress the intelligence of mankind. One of the results of this ingenuity is that we now have safe and effective contraception. Of course the first duty of charities working in this area must be to feed the hungry. But they should also provide family planning clinics. If they fail to halt the rapid population growth in Niger, their efforts will lead to even more hungry people in the next generation.
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