When Gordon Brown announced plans for 10 new eco-towns, last year, he won’t have expected to receive opposition from Labour party donors and environmentalists.

But that’s what he’s got. Last week the publisher Felix Dennis – a “filthy rich” former donor (as he puts it himself) and originator of the largest individual forestry project in centuries – lodged a fierce protest against one of the proposed new towns, just two miles from his estate in Warwickshire.

In many cases, this could be dismissed as nimbyism. Not this time, as I discovered when I visited Dennis. His green credentials are impressive. He showed me his organic cattle, chickens and pigs. And we looked around his home, which features a swimming pool with an island in the middle, banqueting hall, cinema and gym. But the most remarkable fact about Dennis’s home is that this is the biggest timber structure built in Britain for 300 years.

It’s not going to be his largest wooden legacy, however. Dennis plans to plant the biggest continuous forest in Britain on 50,000 acres of his own land. At my request he listed the variety of native trees, including sweet chestnut. “If you’ve been here for 2,000 years you’re native,” he joked. Then he recounted with savage relish how neighbours (“in faux-Tudor houses”) tend to complain, ineffectually, about having their view cut off as the Forest of Dennis springs up around them. Plainly, nimbies attract no sympathy from Dennis.

Born in southwest London in 1947, he was brought up by his mother after his father, a jazz pianist, abandoned them. Leaving school at 15 he worked as a gravedigger and door-to-door salesman before falling among the group who published the underground magazine Oz. He was jailed for corrupting public morals, but went on to publish more mainstream – and lucrative – titles, including Maxim, The Week, Auto Express and Stuff.

What motivated him to plant his forest? He likes to see how fast wildlife returns, he said – meaning everything from fungi to deer. But it’s evidently not entirely about watching this process himself, because he intends to keep planting trees after he’s dead. He’s recently gone through the laborious business of writing his will – there will be tests for his godchildren to pass before they inherit – and revealed that all but £23m of his £750m estate will be left to forestry. So there must be some deeper ecological motive, surely?

Apparently not. Despite his tree fetish, Dennis is no friend of the main green movement. “Eco-Nazis are always blaming and forbidding,” he told me. “It’s become a f****** religion. Jesuitical. You must believe in the true cross. ‘Do as we say or you will burn. Dennis, you will burn on your Rolls-Royce’.”

Whether climate change was man-made is immaterial, he says. The question is: what are we going to do about it? And the answer? “There will be a technological solution.”

I asked if greens aren’t right to raise the alarm before catastrophe strikes – before, say, Bangladesh sinks beneath the sea. “Bangladesh isn’t going to sink. Let’s just send the people who know best about this, the Dutch, to provide a solution.”

The environmental movement was started by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, which catalogued the loss of wildlife caused by extensive use of DDT. “How I love pointing out the 490 errors of fact in Silent Spring,” said Dennis, who reads New Scientist magazine every week. “Banning DDT was probably the cause of the biggest mass death [by malaria] in the history of Asia and Africa. The interfering West thinks of itself as Luke Skywalker but it’s f****** Darth Vader.”

But are eco-towns really so menacing? The one that worries Dennis, known as Middle Quinton, would provide 6,000 homes on a 600-acre brownfield site – the old Long Marston army camp four miles south of Stratford-upon-Avon.

It is one of 10 such developments, each containing up to 20,000 homes. The settlements would be built to zero-rated carbon standards yet remain “family-friendly”. As well as containing state-of-the-art recycling and water conservation schemes, they would have gardens, green spaces and good quality houses, rather than apartments. Within the settlements, shops and schools would all be in walking distance to try to cut carbon emissions.

Dennis claims the proposed development would threaten a beautiful country area, bring thousands more cars onto narrow rural lanes and disrupt major footpaths. He also says the plans have no support from the local authority or other local stakeholders.

Of 147 residents, councillors and planning consultants who attended a public meeting to discuss the proposals, the overwhelming majority opposed the scheme. They’re furious that the developers will be allowed to present their plans to the council at a closed meeting, and many – including Dennis – have written to Hazel Blears, the communities and local government secretary, who is expected to identify formally the 10 new towns from a list of 57 proposed schemes early next month.

The government’s green paper, published last year, makes clear that it will impose the new settlements if councils fail to come forward with their own proposals. A Conservative councillor in Stratford, Chris Saint, argues that this is profoundly undemocratic. “The planning process is supposed to be fair but this ignores people’s rights and regional policies. The man in the street has no opportunity to properly challenge whether or not this should happen.”

Dennis’s estate manager, David Bliss, is helping to coordinate the protest. “We’ve got rare Dingy Skipper butterflies on the site,” he explained. “One moment the government is proud of them, the next they’re trying to move them. There are no Broads within seven kilometres and even if roads and services are upgraded locally, this will only lead more traffic into Stratford. Roads are a problem, as underlined by the recent floods, because there are so few bridges over the Avon. If one or two bridges are impassable the other villages are blocked with traffic.”

The protesters believe Brown is simply pushing ahead with more houses and using the eco-banner to force them through with normal planning rules suspended. It won’t win him any votes.

Dennis has always been a Labour supporter and for a while he also gave money. But for a long time he’s felt disappointed. “Tony [Blair]’s first few years in power were a breath of fresh air. He did a fantastic job. But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Additional reporting: Sally Jones

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