On an incredibly warm afternoon for the end of September (26° C), I went for a walk around Wraysbury Lakes, not expecting to find much: nearly all flowers should be over by now; it’s too warm for most birds to bother migrating south for the winter; insects and birds have mainly finished their showy summer breeding season; the winter ducks will not yet have arrived from the north. So I determined to relax and enjoy whatever might turn up, if anything.
There were not many ducks on the lake: mostly Tufted, a few Mallard, but 13 shy Gadwall under the far bank. A couple of Great Crested Grebes, a Heron, and a family group of cygnets made up the waterfowl, but for a party of a dozen Cormorants flying past. There were no gulls except a few Black-Headed. For the warblers, a couple of Cetti’s sang briefly; something churred once; and a few Chiffchaffs called.
Banded Snails on dried Hogweed: there are 5 in the photo
The hogweed had almost all formed its fruiting umbels and dried up, though one or two latecomers were still in full leaf. The dry stalks each had at least one banded snail parked up: some had 5 or more. So I thought I’d photograph each snail and, unusually for a nature blog, do a little rather random science and try to count the numbers in each colour variety. For the white-lipped banded land snail is rather delightfully polymorphic. I imaged 37 snails, all those I could reach, so they were probably a fair sample, unless you think there were some better-camouflaged ones I didn’t notice: I doubt that as all of them were high up on the stalks. Here are a few of them to illustrate some of the colour variation.
Polymorphism in White-Lipped Banded Land Snail
I counted:
2 yellow ( unstriped), 5%
16 yellow with brown stripes, 43%
15 white with black stripes, 40%
4 black, with an obvious broad fused stripe, 11%
Actually the stripes and background vary fairly continuously so a better way of dividing them up would be necessary. All the same, it’s fun to see just how convincing the polymorphism is. I didn’t see any dark-lipped snails (another species), by the way, and only a couple of snails of other species.
A small Pedunculate Oak had dozens of spangle galls under its leaves; these are caused by tiny wasps that live inside them.
Spangle Galls on Pedunculate Oak
A few dragonflies were still about: one Emperor; a few Hawkers, probably the Migrant Hawker; one smaller species, likely a Darter; and one Common Blue Damselfly.
The teasels, like the hogweed, had all fruited and dried out, forming a handsome pattern against the sky with their bristly pineapples on spiky stalks.
Teasels
Rose hips and hawthorn haws proclaimed Autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness: contradicted by the humid heat of the day.
Round on the reclaimed landfill hill, it was a pleasure to see the low five-petalled cinquefoils in the horse-nibbled grass.
Potentilla (cinquefoil)
The surprise of the day came almost at the end of the walk: a party of perhaps fifty Meadow Pipits, shyly calling see-see-see as they swept up from the meadow, flashing their white outer tail feathers: the same species I had seen all over the moors of Badenoch and Strathspey, 500 miles to the north. It felt a little strange to see them passing by here.
For a day when I didn’t expect to see much, I think I did pretty well.
Ah, the environment. I remember a time when I was driven by a landowner through the English countryside. He was disgusted at the litter of discarded plastic bags that had stuck in the hedges. His rural landscape was visually contaminated with the worthless outpourings of careless city-dwellers. He was furious at this despoliation of the environment.
What is the environment? It’s a vague enough thing to some people, everything around us from the end of our nose to the end of the universe. Defined like that, it’s (almost) the whole of Nature, the world, the universe. Defined by my landowner, it was probably more narrowly understood: the visible landscape, or perhaps the immediately visible world, landscape, skyscape and maybe waterscape in his neck of the woods.
To politicians, in this final party conference season before the British general election next May, the environment is something rather unimportant. The odd landowner and the occasional grumpy ex-soldier, “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”, may complain about litter; Prince Charles may sound off about modern architecture and hideous glass stumps invading the landscape; but for the rest of us practical folk, the environment frankly doesn’t matter, compared to urgent questions like the economy, health, education, pensions, war and winning the next election.
But “environmentalists” aren’t worrying about the odd plastic bag, or the visual impact of an occasional skyscraper, however horrid those things are.
As the zoologist Gerald Durrell said, people think I’m trying to save fluffy animals. But I’m trying to save life on Earth.
There’s nothing fluffy about it. Habitats everywhere are being destroyed. Global warming is moving vegetation zones towards the poles and up mountains. Anything that is trapped at a north coast or on an isolated mountain top is doomed if it can’t move further. Species everywhere are heading towards extinction. Things that are beautiful, useful for the genetic diversity of our crops, valuable for medicines; things we haven’t even named yet; things that perform vital services, giving us oxygen, forming the web of life of which we are part: all these things are being recklessly eliminated. We’re axing our own life-support system in this little ball-of-rock spaceship, with nowhere else to go to for untold billions of miles in every direction. The human race, under the direction of our political leaders, is racing to spend what’s left of our inherited family silver, happy that there’s a little bit left for the next few years. After that? We have no idea.
Why should politicians put “the environment” at the top of their agendas for the next election? Because it’s an emergency, for all of us.
Today, since I was passing by, I dropped in to the British Museum’s new gallery celebrating Anglo-Saxon (or, if you prefer, Old English) culture and art. To anyone who thinks Saxon just means crude and rough, dull Dark Ages stuff, think again. The new gallery, Room 41 (upstairs, almost above the main entrance) is resplendent with finely-crafted treasures. The most famous among them are from the Sutton Hoo ship burial of some real-life Beowulf-like leader. And one of the finest of the pieces from that collection is the carved gilt helmet.
Restoration of Sutton Hoo Helmet, with protective animals
At first glance, the carvings on the helmet seem to be restricted to the panels, which show warriors with swords, on foot or on horseback, along with elaborate ‘Celtic’ patterns of knotwork. That would be fine enough, but there is more. The nose and eyebrow guards of the helmet, together with the moustache, form a large winged animal with angry red inset garnets for its eyes, fiery red rectangular garnets bordering its wings. It touches nose-to-nose with a snake or dragon – the old word for both was ‘worm’ – that stretches as a crest over the top of the helmet. The worm’s eyes too are of garnets. And even better, the ends of the eyebrow/wings are shining gold boar’s heads, just like the boar-headed helmet mentioned in the Beowulf poem.
So this marvellous helmet, this treasure almost beyond price (both now and when it was a prince’s armour and emblem), is adorned, no, actually made of no less than three powerful beasts, each perhaps with almost magical powers: flight, fire, and ferocity, we might say. It isn’t hard to imagine that these were talismanic animals, symbols of warrior bravery, strength and victory in battle. Were they spirit guides, protective animals chosen or sent to guard the wearer from harm? I should think so.
So, what was the Old English feeling towards animals? Certainly they were taken for food; but on the evidence of this splendid piece of royal armour, they were surely also admired for their strength, speed, and courage. Can we describe that as love of nature? Of course we can.
One final question: how long have the English loved nature? We may guess the date: since the foundation of our kingdom by Hengist and Horsa in c. 550 AD, it seems. Both of our founder-kings (they ruled together) had animal names: Hengist means stallion, while Horsa (you guessed it) means horse. Not too hard to imagine which fine strong proud animal their parents specially admired, then.
Down at the Gunnersbury Triangle, I pulled out a quantity of Ivy that had spread across a considerable area of former meadow. We know it was meadow as it is shown as such on the old reserve map from 30 years ago, and – if proof were needed –the area is covered in old anthills: the yellow ant makes its hills in open grassland.
Anyway, I pulled out armfuls of the ivy, along with brambles and a few nettles, and was rewarded by the sight of a new area ready to grow into flowery meadow, if we can keep it reasonably open and free of brambles.
I disturbed a toad that was sheltering somewhere under the ivy, and took a break to photograph it. The static shots were nice and sharp, but I found I much preferred this action shot as the toad scrambles up a bank. Yes, that’s an ivy stem that I hadn’t yet pulled out.
Knotgrass Moth Caterpillar, Acronicta rumicis, in garden, on a beautiful autumn day. It has eaten a substantial portion of the leaf. Its aposematic black-red-white coloration and bristling setae advertise it conspicuously as foul-tasting or poisonous.
This week down at the Gunnersbury Triangle I found myself faced with a rather large challenge: a willow had fallen on to another willow, which … had fallen on to a third, which had fallen right across our little ‘Mangrove Swamp’ wetland at the end of the reserve, and was overhanging the boardwalk that we had all rebuilt last winter.
Fallen Willow across Gunnersbury Triangle’s ‘Mangrove Swamp’
I cut off all the small branches for two other volunteers to drag away for dead-hedging. Then I sliced off all the larger wood I could reach. The rest was alarmingly high up, or far too large for a bandsaw: much of it will have to wait for a chainsaw team. We held a little conference, and I realized I could cut some more by scrambling up on a fallen trunk. I sliced through a largish branch, and the cut end gradually sprang back to the vertical, ending four metres up, and posing a nice puzzle for anybody wondering how it might have been cut! We cut up and dragged away the considerable pile of bits, and I ended the day with a pleasantly clear ‘Mangrove Swamp’ area, bordered by a neat line of large horizontal willow trunks, defended by a thicket of holly which had become trapped and had regrown all around the fallen trees.
Mangrove Swamp, some hours later, cleared of fallen trees (well, mostly)
The other odd thing that happened was that the picnic meadow was utterly befouled by a filthy assortment of broken raw eggs, cotton wool pads, mashed potato from powder, pieces of raw onion and raw ginger, and nearly empty bottles of vinegar and vodka. It smelt terrible. The team picked the stuff up with gloves and a litter-picker, and we speculated how it had arrived there.
Our story is that a group of new students at the start of term held a night-time initiation ritual there en plein nature, each initiate being required to take a bite of onion, mouthful of mashed potato, shot of vodka, swig of vinegar, etc etc, and to pay a forfeit of being pelted with eggs if they flinched. Or maybe they were pelted willy-nilly, who knows. And then perhaps they tried to clean the worst of it out of their eyes with the cotton wool.
Whatever the truth of the matter, there is no doubt that city-dwellers make contact with nature in a myriad ways. Some go birdwatching; some microscopically study pond life; some walk or run or cycle in green and pleasant places; some hold drunken picnics. Perhaps we should value nature (and nature reserves) for its ability to support all these activities.
Greater Thames Futurescape. Image: RSPB; Map: Google
This is the immense area (3834 km2) of the Thames estuary, including broadly all the neighbouring land up to the 5 metre contour (actually it covers all of the Isle of Grain and the Isle of Sheppey too).
Futurescape has a slightly unfortunate hokey sound to it – reminiscent of the French Futuroscope (near Poitiers), a once imaginative place with exciting architecture and a vision of the future which has turned into a sprawling business park. But the idea and the execution are very different.
There are actually a whole lot of Futurescapes around Britain; the RSPB’s contribution is to manage the Greater Thames one, and it’s a good choice, as there is a concentration of wildlife here – not least, 300,000 migrating waders – and a matching clump of RSPB nature reserves, including Cliffe Pools, Elmley Marshes (now managed by its own conservation trust), Nor Marsh and Motney Hill, Northward Hill, Old Hall Marshes, Rainham Marshes, South Essex Marshes, Shorne Marshes, Vange Marshes, Wallasea Island Wild Coast Project and West Canvey Marsh. There is also a rich sprinkling of conservation acronyms and designations across the area, with Special Protection Areas (SPA), Ramsar sites, national nature reserves and dozens of Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).
If there are so many fine, well-protected and skilfully-managed reserves in the area, why create yet another layer of management? The answer goes to the heart of the challenge to nature in a crowded place like Southeast England, and indeed in a crowded world. With a changing climate and rising sea levels, it’s always possible that a reserve, specially one down on the mud flats within a metre or two of the high tide mark, may become unsuitable for the species it was meant to protect – or may disappear altogether. If so, the wildlife will have to move to neighbouring sites, preferably suitably protected, or die out in the region.
A thousand Oystercatchers in the Thames Estuary at Sheppey
The logic of this means that although having a reserve like Cliffe Pools that is splendid for avocets, or Elmley Marshes for waders and Marsh Harriers, is a brilliant start and very necessary, it isn’t enough. What is needed is to manage the entire landscape to make it resilient: if a shock occurs in one place, the landscape as a whole can absorb it, meaning that populations will barely fluctuate but instead simply move about. Perhaps the avocet area will turn out to be a lifeline for some other wader, or a snail, a bumblebee, or a rare pond plant.
The result is that no one organisation, not even a rich one like the RSPB – it is the largest single landowner in the Greater Thames area – can hope to do the best for nature on its own. Instead, all across the landscape, different areas, protected initially by separate organisations for their own purposes – flowers, bumblebees, birds, whatever – need to be managed together. And that means partnership, consortium, multi-organisation projects with EU funding, meetings, planning, glossy leaflets, and management-speak.
The Greater Thames area is home to a large population of humans: 6 million, not counting the similar number of Londoners who live within the area’s contour. There are powerful pressures on the land and even the mudflats below the high tide mark: housing, business, roads, bridges, railways, even mad ideas for whole new 4-runway hub airports. London mayor Boris Johnson is just the proponent of the seventh proposal in the past 50 years for a new airport in the Thames Estuary. Others (I digress, forgive me) included John Prescott’s daft attempt to put an airport on the Cliffe Pools reserve, using the Northward Hill reserve as a convenient source of spoil to spread 15 metres deep over the marshes; an earlier attempt wanted to take the Ministry of Defence’s wild seascape at Foulness, a lengthy train-ride from London. So Boris hardly invented the idea; and its dismissal for the seventh time is no guarantee that it won’t come back yet again. What is needed is enough education of the public about the value of the Thames Estuary, a vision of the future that stresses its importance to wildlife and the benefit of that wildness to us humans, so that the idea of plonking an airport in the midst of the Greater Thames land-and-waterscape sounds as ridiculous as trying to put it in Hyde Park. Prescott actually said, as he flew over (as one does) in his helicopter, clutching a map of the Southeast, “What a lot of whitespace down there”. No, it isn’t whitespace, it’s one of the best places for nature in Europe, and irreplaceable.
Crossrail has built a 180 metre jetty at Wallasea to accept shiploads of spoil for the RSPB’s new nature reserve there. Image: Crossrail
Since the sea level is certainly going to rise, areas are going to have to be managed actively to make them suitable for wildlife when the tide reaches higher than it does now. It isn’t enough just to breach the sea wall and gouge out pools, leaving the sea to shape mudflats, as can be done on the (rising) west coast of Britain. Huge amounts of material will have to be brought to places like Wallasea Island to turn them into wetlands and prevent them from simply vanishing beneath the waves. The RSPB has spent 10 years of patient negotiation (what a marvellous tolerance of sitting in meetings) with partners such as Crossrail, a commercial company, with the wonderful result that Crossrail will dump all the millions of tons of spoil from digging its tunnels under London at Wallasea in the Wallasea Island Wild Coast Project. Even so, more spoil is needed, and the RSPB is patiently sitting in meetings about future dredging in the Thames estuary (yeah, sounds exciting), waiting for the chance to get more mud for its nature reserves.
Ah, poaching. It sounds so romantic. The merry strains of the English folk song, “The Lincolnshire Poacher“, that we sang at school come into my ear:
When I was bound apprentice in famous Lincolnshire
Full well I served my master for nigh on seven years
Till I took up to poaching as you shall quickly hear
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year.
We think of the cheerfully naughty countrymen pushing a hare or a pheasant into their bag, making off home and delighting their wives with something to put into the pot for their families. We hardly spare a thought for the landowners, and if we do, it is with a pantomime image of greedy, fat, rich and selfish characters who “will not sell their deer”. Cue a chorus of boos and hisses from the gallery.
But (like most rose-tinted views of the world) this is all wrong. Poaching on that scale may or may not still exist: but much worse forms of it certainly do.
In Britain, poaching is organized crime, and becoming big business. Stolen game, farm animals and wild fish, especially salmon, find their illegal way into the human “food chain” (the term is borrowed from an older view of ecology, where it has fallen into disuse, and of course it has shifted its meaning: we consumers do not eat slaughterhouse workers, or supermarket shelf-stackers). There is no inspection of the unlawfully sold meat, which may be infected with tuberculosis (TB), may have been handled unhygienically, or may simply be past what should have been its sell-by date. There is no attempt to manage the ‘crop’ sustainably. If a wounded deer escapes, it will receive no veterinary treatment for its injuries or infections. In short, the whole sorry business is about money, with none of the usual protections that we expect in food and farming.
Across the world, matters are even worse. As roads cut into rainforests all through the tropics, the poor go into the remaining wildlife-rich areas to kill anything worth eating for bushmeat. In lawless areas, hunting the last of the game animals is an easy way for anyone with a gun to earn a little money. Once common and widespread species in many groups – monkeys, deer, snakes, birds, you name it – are being driven towards extinction.
Tiger Penis is supposedly aphrodisiac. Image by ProjectManhattan on Wikimedia Commons.
And of course, poaching can mean killing elephants for ivory, rhinoceroses for their horns, tigers for their skins or their penises, bears for the bile from their gall bladders. Frankly, even the most beautifully carved ivory statues cannot compensate for the loss of elephants in the wild. Even if a dose of tiger penis brought an erection so huge that a horde of beautiful women were to flock about me, an unlikely result, it would not make up for the loss of one of these magnificent animals, let alone their extinction. If you have erectile dysfunction, Viagra might help you; animal body parts certainly won’t.
There is nothing romantic about poaching. It is incredible that, although it is illegal in Britain, it is not a notifiable crime: the police do not have to keep any record of how many animals are killed, how much property damaged, how many crimes committed.
With wars and refugee crises, human suffering and epidemics of tropical diseases from Malaria to Ebola virus, it is no wonder that poaching gets scant mention. Yet all the while, when there is money to be made, wildlife gets short shrift. Satellite imagery shows deserts expanding, forests burning. The destruction wrought by poaching is less visible, but it is having a terrible effect on hundreds of species.
You can do something about it. Support a wildlife charity. Campaign against the use of animal body parts in traditional medicine. Lobby your member of parliament, your government. Vote for a greener government next time. Now is the time to get on with it.
An Indian Summer is one of those special times. Yes, autumn is here; yes, flowers and leaves will soon fall; yes, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, all of that: but for a brief moment, we know it is warm, even hot; that the time is precious, and we must seize the moment; and we drop everything to go outside with binoculars and camera to see whatever is to be seen.
And it is as wonderful as we could have hoped, warm and blithe. The Jackdaws hop about, quick to take their opportunities: some seem to live exclusively on sandwiches and crumbs. A Jay perches close by on an oak branch, abandoning the usual caution of its species. A series of high-pitched calls is not the usual posse of Ring-Necked Parakeets, but a family group of three Hobbies almost overhead, wheeling, diving, chasing each other, showing off their power and agility with long angled wings, stooping into a mock dive, fanning a tail, their black moustaches clearly visible.
Down at the Pen Ponds, pairs of Common Darter dragonflies are still in cop, laying eggs while the sun shines; around them zip Migrant Hawkers, and I glimpse one blue damselfly too. We walk around the ponds; a Heron flaps quietly across the water; a pair of Mute Swans ride high towards us, their two grey cygnets sailing between them.
And then, quite suddenly, I saw him: a stag with fine 14-point antlers, brimming with testosterone, preparing for the autumn rut. He stood quite still, up to his belly in the water. He had decorated his head with vegetation – Bracken and some Oak twigs – and was now quietly absorbing the elements, sun and water, as he listened to the occasional preliminary roar of another stag in the distance. In a few weeks he will be fighting for a harem of hinds; but today, he seemed contemplative.
A few hundred yards away, in the open grassland, a group of twenty hinds is accompanied by a couple of young males with nearly straight antlers. A big stag will surely put them to flight in an instant when the rut begins; but today, they grazed quietly with the females.
A Buzzard soared overhead, circling in the fair-weather thermals; one of the young Hobbies dashed past.
Bee in the garden of Pembroke LodgePembroke Lodge
In the beautiful garden of Pembroke Lodge, they were preparing for a wedding, the lawn looking its verdant best, the bees buzzing softly in the still colourful flowerbeds full of tall daisies and delphiniums, lavender and alkanet. On the belvedere terrace, with its spacious view to the West, lovers made soft conversation at the café tables.
Gooseberry Sawfly: possibly unwelcome to many gardeners, but beautiful nonetheless. Unlike typical ants, wasps and bees, the Symphyta have no narrow waist to the abdomen.
Back at home, a pair of bright saffron-coloured Gooseberry Sawflies (there are actually several species that attack gooseberries and other currants indifferently, I’m not sure what species this one is) were joyfully mating near my currant bushes, while others flew sedately about – they have a rather unusual steady flight, not like anything else. The air was warm and light; and the sawflies did not seem to have made any impact on the fruit crop. I was happy to get a photograph of one of the tiny insects, happy to see them flourishing in this Indian Summer.
Green Politics: A cheerful Caroline Lucas, MP, briefing members of the RSPB and Wildlife Trusts on how to lobby their MPs
It has been said that nature-lovers are left-wing on all political questions except immigration, where they are distinctly right-wing.
This can readily be explained by guessing that nature-lovers essentially choose to prioritize in the following order:
Themselves (well, everybody does)
Wildlife and the Environment
Other people
Big business
Immigration is unpopular both because it conflicts with #1: it puts pressure on resources near the home, and because it conflicts with #2: it puts pressure on land.
I’ll return to the question of putting nature above people later, but first I want to note that this set of priorities is radically different from those of the right (say, the Republican party in the USA, or the Conservative party in Britain), who we may guess have these priorities:
1. Themselves
2. Big business
3. Other people
4. Wildlife and the Environment (if they rate this at all)
On this rather simple view of politics, left-wing people (say, the Democrat party in the USA, or the Labour party in Britain) are imagined to have these priorities:
1. Themselves
2. Other people
3. Big business
4. Wildlife and the Environment
The reason left-wingers may put business above wildlife is that, despite all the left-wing rhetoric, they do recognize that business generates the money needed to pay for welfare and shared services such as health care and education. So, although there has been a historic rich vs poor, Upstairs vs Downstairs polarity between left and right, they do actually agree on most of their priorities.
If you’ve followed the argument this far, you’ll see that at least in countries like Britain and the USA, this places anyone who has ‘green’ political views, favouring wildlife and the environment, in a tricky position. There is nobody with any reasonable likelihood of getting into power that they can vote for with any confidence.
In countries like Germany with a proportional representation system for voting, smaller parties are able to flourish, and Green parties can become significant in regional and national parliaments. In countries like Britain and the USA, which have “first past the post” (winner takes all) voting systems, smaller parties usually get trodden underfoot, along with any more subtle points of view than left vs right.
I would love to be able to tell you (I assume you are a nature-lover) that I have a brilliant solution for you, but I doubt there is one. Instead, you have a few possible choices.
You could carefully study, and ideally question, your candidates from left and right about their views on nature conservation in the hope of finding or provoking a spark in some of them. (I’m trying this myself.)
You might consider joining their party so you can lobby them more effectively; you might attend policy forums and try to push the environment up the agenda (I don’t hold up much hope on that one, though I know energetic people who are trying it).
If you have money, you might give donations to either side, accompanied by whatever pressure you can apply.
If you are persuasive, you might speak or write to the candidates, arguing that saving the environment is good for people (their health, exercise, mental state, and so on) or for jobs (tourism, conservation work, pollination of crops, that sort of thing).
Or you could move to Germany, work hard, and apply for citizenship. You could give up on politics altogether, and immerse yourself in practical conservation, campaigning and suchlike.
If you don’t find any of those suitable, you do have another option, but it’s very long-term. You campaign for a fair, democratic, voting system that will actually represent your views, along with those of other minorities: you fight for proportional representation. If you thought that was a dull, dry piece of constitutional reform, think again. It’s the only way things that matter to you and to me will ever be taken seriously. We greens need seats in our legislatures, in direct proportion to our numbers. That might be 30 or 40 green MPs in Westminster, for example. Now that would be talking. Until then, frankly, we’re disenfranchised. And that’s wrong.
It’s time to come back to the awkward matter, for green politics, of at least seeming to put nature above people. To put it at its mildest, it can look somewhat self-indulgent in the well-off with money and leisure enough to enjoy looking at wildlife in beautiful places to argue that conserving nature is more important than dealing with the pressing social issues of the day: hunger, homelessness, unemployment, poverty, disease, and all the side- and after-effects of war: trauma, grief, coping as refugees, orphaned or widowed. And that is to hint at the hidden, unspoken issue for green politics, migration, which numbers among its many causes inequality, war, and climate change.
The cause of green politics is not simply an open-and-shut case of selfishness, however. There are arguments that can be used in its favour.
A key one, perhaps, is the moral argument for care for other living things, and for the environment as a whole: we are just one species among millions, and we have just one world to look after, not just for ourselves (the poor, homeless, unemployed and so on) but for all Earth’s species, and for all future generations, our children and our children’s children. If all species were valued equally, and why should they not be, then wildlife should score a millionfold more than any purely human priority. It seems, of course, that nobody can quite bring themselves to value other species anywhere near as highly as Homo sapiens: indeed, even the assertion that a million other species might be worth nearly as much put together as humankind would raise eyebrows – who cares about a rainforest or two when business or livelihood is at stake?
The somewhat more selfish argument that we need nature for a large number of ‘ecosystem services’ such as pollination of crops, a ready supply of timber or fish, genetic variety in the shape of ancestral species related to valuable crops (wild potatoes, wild maize, wild apples) or a list of candidate pharmaceutical drugs from as-yet-undiscovered species of plant, fungus or micro-organism, may have a little more traction. Here, nature is worth conserving for its enormous utility, of which we currently have only a hazy notion, but which we already perceive to be much larger than we ever imagined. Most clearly, the cost to farmers of hand-pollinating every fruit tree is becoming frighteningly obvious as bees of many species vanish from the ploughed and pesticide-sprayed countryside.
A slightly less utilitarian argument concerns the value of nature for human well-being, both now and for future generations. We wouldn’t want to live in a world with no ‘charismatic species’ such as elephants, giraffes, lions, gorillas and tigers. Yet, we could easily find ourselves there, with perhaps a few miserable beasts desperately keeping their species alive in zoos and safari parks. More mundanely, we know that city-dwellers are happier and more relaxed, better able to focus clearly at work, if they have a little time in a park or garden with trees and flowers, and perhaps with bees and butterflies too (if that isn’t too much of a luxury).
If we accept any or all of these quite good reasons for saving life on Earth, then we must make nature conservation a high priority: which means making it a higher priority than at least some human political priorities. And that is a ‘green’ agenda. If anything, it is alarming to anyone who reflects on the question just how little effort is in fact being spent by governments on keeping the world’s ecosystems in existence: we are all so busy fighting wars and economic collapse that such larger matters spend their whole time on the back burner, if not (to mix metaphors disgracefully) on the ‘too difficult’ pile.
Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that all the non-human species in existence add up in moral terms to our single species (leaving aside any idea that this grossly undervalues them). Let us suppose, too, that all future generations add up in moral terms to the generation which is alive today (and yes, we’ll ignore any idea that this undervalues them, too). Then all our conventional political goals should be given 1/3 or thereabouts of the total weight: the other 2/3 belong to nature, and to future humanity (who of course may care about nature also). And Nature should then easily top the political agenda.
Or we can look at green politics in space rather than in time. The politics of big business, and of the social systems of rich nations, ignore the rest of the world, where injustice, drought, poverty, dictatorship, war, tropical disease and famine are major factors. Worse, our greed and selfishness has inflicted post-colonial disaster (think of the Anglo-French agreement to draw borders for the new kingdom of Iraq after the First World War) and exploitation of minerals on many parts of the world. We owe it to everyone to put these matters straight, which means protecting the environment: their environment, in the places where we are stripping them of their resources, or already did so, or where we are dumping the wastes that we don’t want to deal with ourselves. This way too, justice means green politics, but more clearly Nature and suffering humanity need to be safeguarded together.
Green politics is not a luxury for the idle rich. Making wildlife and the environment, biodiversity and conservation a top priority is vital for everyone, rich or poor, on the entire planet.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
