MOBILE phones are easy targets for the "progress-means-worse" brigade, whose prejudices are fanned every time they see a gaggle of schoolgirls in thrall to saucy text messages. After the briefest of honeymoons, nearly every invention on which we now depend for a civilised life has had its period of vilification as more bane than boon.

Some of them alternate between the two. The motor car, that love-hate object which reached its apotheosis in the 30s - everything added to it since then is mere frippery, say old buffers who mastered double-declutching in their gilded youth - is currently back in bane.

Railways had to survive their Lord Darlingtons, fearful that rapid transit for the hoi polloi would ruin a favourite fox covert; the cause of refrigerators, having initially failed to advance under the banner of hygiene, caught on only when the prospect of homemade ice cream was held out to the masses; microwave ovens shied at an early health-scare hurdle but romped away in the home straight of convenience.

The mobile-phone phenomenon fits this pattern like a glove. Indeed, never has a craze encompassed quite so many of the clichs. There have been the health and snobbery angles, with the patently stupid idea that all right-thinking people should be grievously affronted whenever the device trills in public; tabloid panic about mobiles rivalling Rolexes as an invitation to muggers; business-page innuendo that the Orange flotation is some kind of South Sea Bubble; and, our gripe today, broadsheet solemnity about mobile-phone masts being the greatest threat to Britain's countryside since the Enclosures.

Some of the invective hurled at the masts by environmental militants is absurd. It conjures up a scenario in which mobile-phobe vigilantes ape the animal-worshipping, human-hating commandos whose latest outrage in their northern campaign was this week to send a letter bomb to a Thirsk agricultural firm.

It is difficult to parody the warped thinking of single-issue fascists of whatever ilk, but try "These masts threaten the nil-reception haven of the North York moors - let's tell the planning committee chairman we know where he lives and remind him that we can find out where his children go to school".

The environmental issue is distinct from the parallel concern about the possible radiation hazard. Scientific consensus on the latter is awaited and in the meantime it is sensible to be cautious about allowing masts on school or hospital buildings.

And, of course, the most sensitive landscapes should be spared; the television booster towering above the noble silhouette of the abbey high on Whitby's east cliff is an example of bad practice.

But because mobile phones are lifesavers, besides all their convenience and lifestyle plusses, it is important that they can put the endangered in touch with the 999 services no matter where the emergency happens. It is the ultimate discrimination by postcode: a victim bleeding to death in one valley whereas had he crashed in the next, the dales ambulance might have been summoned in time.

If the country gets the 100,000 masts the networks say are needed, up from the present 20,000, at no cost to the taxpayer, that would save more lives than, for instance, would the advanced passenger safety system the government is being urged to buy for the railways.

When, as expected soon, all mobile-phone masts become subject to planning approval, and not just those over 15m as at present, it should add guidelines advising against consent for on-the-skyline sites in those most sensitive landscapes, thus forcing the companies to make do with less obvious masts lower down, one on each flank of the signal-restricting hill.

In any case, masts will not be forever. Advances in technology, perhaps using satellites, will first make them less conspicuous and then redundant. Mobile phones, though, are here to stay and we should be glad of that.