Backstory: Cornwall's battle of the 'breaks'

Traveling to St. Ives in Cornwall, on the very southwest coast of England – or the "toenail of England" as Virginia Woolf called it – is like traveling back in time.

Its Fore Street is as English an avenue as you'll ever find – curving, cobbled, draped with the salty whiff of the Atlantic and the constant squawk of seagulls. Rotund men with sun-reddened cheeks stand outside rickety shopfronts, imploring us to buy, buy, buy Cornish pasties, ice cream made from Cornish clotted cream, and big glass bottles of Scrumpy, a cider named after the local dialect verb "to scrump," or to steal apples.

It's Olde England preserved in formaldehyde except for one thing: the surf shops. Five of them on this one street – and they're the busiest shops of all. The preponderance of surfboards, wet suits, and shades, as well as straggly blond hair, bronze tans, and "Dude!" punctuating the salt air in this English surfing mecca, really punctures the stereotype of the pasty, bowlered Brit on summer holiday at the White Cliffs of Dover or in the beautiful-but-rainy Lake District.

"We do a roaring trade – well, in the summer at least," says David Hall, who has been running the Wind an' Sea surfing store for 15 years. "People have been surfing here since the '50s, but it has really taken off over the past decade."

Yes, Britain is an isle, but who knew it would have its own respectable surfing mecca? Woolf, who spent her first 13 summers – 1882 to 1894 – here, caught a hint of the appeal, writing of "hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach."

A century later, those waves continue to crash, but today they're carrying more than prose and pink and purple surfboards – they're carrying controversy. In what some are calling the "Battle of the Breaks," the waves themselves have become the subject of an increasingly bitter conflict between environmentalists and surfers.

A grand scheme to convert the power of Woolf's "one, two, one, two" into electricity is being developed by the British government and two British energy firms. Scheduled to be operational by 2008, the £20 million ($38 million US) project will anchor 20 sets of turbines, pistons, and pumps 10 miles off the southwest coast, where they will float in the path of the Atlantic swell, capturing energy.

The good news is that the "Wave Hub" is predicted to generate 20 megawatts a year – enough to power 7,500 homes, or 3 percent of Cornwall's overall demand, says Matthew Taylor, one of this region's parliamentary backers of the plan. The bad news is developers believe it will reduce the height of waves by more than 10 percent, affecting a 20-mile stretch of beaches from St. Ives to Newquay, a larger Cornwall town considered to be the "surfing capital" of England.

"Of course it may reduce wave size," says Mr. Taylor, "but Cornwall has so many fantastic surfing beaches that we can help save the planet and still have enough surfing for everyone."

So who owns the waves? Are there enough to go around? And should the thrill of catching a wave in a wet suit override the need to find new, greener ways to generate electricity?

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