Plouray

I have visited the commune of Plouray a few times over the past two weeks, it is a beautiful area with lots of woods and streams. Much of the commune is less intensively farmed than more low-lying communes and this seems to have made it a target for large businesses looking for somewhere out of the way to site unpopular projects.
A few years ago the locals fought a successful campain against the development of a large incinerator at the Doux 'factory'. Now they are battling against a project to dump vast amounts of industrial waste on farmland at the head of the Elle river.
When one has a chance to visit this beautiful place, it makes one wonder what form of madness has gripped the world that should make people want to do such things.

Wind Turbines in Central Brittany

We are planning a short article on wind turbines for the January 2010 issue.
I would be interested to hear people's views on the subject - please feel welcome to post a comment on the blog, or on the CBJ Forum.
I believe that the idea of wind turbines received a lot of public support at the outset, and that they have been generally welcomed by local politicians, perhaps because of the revenue that they bring in.
They also seem to be quite widely supported in the press.

I have to admit that I have never been a big fan, they just seem too big to me, and to defy the principle of 'Small is Beautiful' which made absolute sense to me in environmental terms from the first time I heard about it.

However, I would be interested to hear people's views on power generation in general: where Brittany should get its power from, and how much electricity it is appropriate for people to use.

Welcome to the Central Brittany Blog

Welcome to the new Central Brittany Blog.
One of my New Year Resolutions for 2009 was to create a new website for Central Brittany that that would fulfill the same function on the internet that the Central Brittany Journal does in print. My idea is to create a website that allows people to connect up with each other and to do things that would not otherwise be possible.
I am sure that the technology of the internet offers this possibility to an even greater extent than printed magazines, but I must admit that I have found it to be much harder to master than I had imagined.
A couple of months ago, I launched the new CBJ website, but, so far, have not been able to find the right formula to either motivate myself to really make it work, or to involve other people in making it really dynamic.
Hence, this blog. It occurred to me that I was perhaps being over-ambitious in trying to create a complete website all in one go. It might be more appropriate to get some regularly-updated content on a blog, to get some feedback, to see what people need, and to take it from there.
My aims for this blog and the CBJ website are more the less the same as those for the Journal when I started it - to promote the use of the English Language in Central Brittany, to help people to settle in and integrate into local life, to help people to earn a living in Central Brittany, to promote local culture, to let the rest of the world know about Central Brittany, and to welcome visitors to the region.
I welcome feedback and suggestions as to how this blog and the website can be used to achieve this.
Gareth Lewis (editor CBJ)