Sir, – Each week in your Business and Commercial Property Supplement you show aerial views of urban landscapes, often with a red line around some remaining green patch of grass, trees and shrubs, often large old gardens. This Wednesday (November 28th) there is such an area in Sandymount, Dublin, where there is a plan to build 25 residential units.
We recognise the urgent need to build more houses but feel sad at the loss of habitat for those wild plants, birds and insects which depend on this green patch.
We humans need the green patches too.
The solution to this quandary is complex, but maybe, for a start, we could build housing estates based on the principles of the “arts and crafts” garden city and suburb movement. Some of the intensively farmed agricultural deserts – treeless, hedgeless expanses – could be transformed into both housing and wildlife haven. – Yours, etc,
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IGOR CUSACK & TRICIA CUSACK,
Greystones,
Co Wicklow.