Sigrid Rausing, owner of the Granta publishing house and one of Britain’s
richest women, says that with great wealth comes great responsibility
By Mick Brown
Sigrid Rausing is one of the wealthiest women in Britain. SNIP
Sigrid Rausing also owns a 40,000-acre estate in the Monadhliath mountains
in the Scottish Highlands, from where she waged a long but unsuccessful
battle against the plans of her neighbour the Bahamas-based
multi-millionaire Sir Jack Hayward to install 33 wind turbines on his
Dunmaglass estate. What she prefers to call ‘wind power stations’ in ‘wild
areas’ are a particular bête noire of Rausing’s. ‘It’s a form of
industrialisation,’ she says, ‘but because it’s supposed to be “green”
people describe it as something other than what it is. I like things to be
described as what they are. If we are content with industrialising the
Highlands and the wild landscapes of Britain, then let’s have wind farms –
but we must be aware it means widening narrow roads, it means pylons
everywhere, and it means an uncertain power supply as well. So I am not
sure that, cradle-to-grave, that form of energy is particularly “green” if
you take everything into account.’ This short peroration – softly spoken,
understated but at the same time unequivocal – seems typical of Rausing. SNIP
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