Feature Article March 4, 2004
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Skyline Littering
From their office in Dorval, Quebec, Bell Mobility has announced that they will redesign the skylines in Verona and in Parham by adding yet another ugly cellular phone tower into each view. Mountain Grove may also get their skyline further scarred by a second tower as surely a piece of roadside litter as any beer can and lighted too, to be both day and night litter. Has there been sufficient discussion of these planning decisions by the communities that will have to live with them?
If one drives through the countryside in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries much like Canada, there are no cell phone towers in sight anywhere even in the north. They are not allowed and the phone companies have to use technology that does not impose ugly structures on the people who live in and look at that countryside.
In some towns in Canada, proposed phone towers, exposed to view, have been blocked by local citizens, with the result that phone companies have to pay rent to churches to have their equipment inside church steeples out of view.
Do all the competing cell phone companies have to duplicate their separate towers repeatedly across our landscape, turning what was attractive scenery into something more like an exposed auto wrecking yard?
Who is responsible for planning and regulating the future beauty of our skylines and our landscape views? Will our grandchildren accept the rusty metal of the cell phone age as unavoidable and an acceptable part of the landscape inherited from us? If not, what will it cost to correct?
