While inveighing against all things Brussels, the English gentleman was able to take the fullest advantage of the Common Agricultural Policy, developing the agribusiness of the seventies and eighties, expanding subsidized yields by grubbing up hedges and copses, ploughing up verges and making vast stretches of monoculture kept sterile by aerial doses of pesticide. As a result, millions who grew up before this onslaught mourn the loss of grasshoppers, skylarks, the songthrush, even the common [house] sparrow, and many unseen others, which their children will never know. The countryside of Shakespeare and his successors in all the arts, Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Lark Ascending’, for instance, no longer has a true point of reference.
— Maureen Duffy. England. The Making of the Myth from Stonehenge to Albert Square. Fourth Estate, 2001. Page 250.
On Tuesday (9 December 2014) I joined the RSPB and The Wildlife Trusts on their joint ‘Rally for Nature’, in other words a briefing in Church House, a short march to the Houses of Parliament, and a meeting with my MP, Angie Bray (Conservative) in the Central Lobby.
RSPB-TWT Rally for Nature panel in Church House. From left: Mark Avery (RSPB), Joe Dudworth (LACS), Stephen Trotter (TWT), Mike Clarke (RSPB), Kerry McCarthy MP (Lab), Caroline Lucas MP (Green)
The briefings gave those hoping to see their MP something to say and a bit of guidance about how to say it. Joe Duckworth of LACS hosted the morning panel in a very jolly way.
A cheerful Caroline Lucas, MP
Caroline Lucas spoke clearly and passionately on key campaign causes, fitting a great deal into her 5 minutes: the goals of a Nature and Wellbeing bill, especially to reconnect children with nature; a long-term government commitment to nature; a mechanism for national and local action, including mandatory plans at these levels; and proper coverage in school curricula. She then spoke on the need to control Wildlife Crime, with consistent application of existing laws; need to act on illegal carbofurans used to poison birds of prey; sentencing guidelines; training of prosecutors; and action on trafficking of endangered species. She emphasized the role of the European Union Birds and Habitats Directives, the backbone of our wildlife laws (she noted that the UK did support these, once), and that they are now in danger, even though they are not in any way a block to development. She told us gently that Natural England now has to “consider economic growth” in every decision: an outrageous imposition on an important conservation body, itself in peril of being merged into nothingness. She spoke of the value of nature in people’s mental wellbeing, and that we needed to challenge the idea of growth as the be-all and end-all of government policy. She decried vague talk of “the environment” and told us to focus on the local and real, such as allotments.
Rally assembled at Church House
Kerry McCarthy told us she was one of 3 vegan MPs; said people thought it “a bit mad” talking about “bees, bats, badgers”; but that when the public in marginal seats send in over a thousand emails about such a topic, it makes a difference. She reminded us that deprived people were much (10x) less likely to live in green areas, and instead suffered from smoking, drinking, fat, diabetes, unemployment, loneliness and depression. These can all be ameliorated by contact with nature. She said that bees and other pollinators were declining, and that in Bristol the urban pollinators project showed children what bees did, and provided free vegetables to all and sundry. She mentioned Fracking in Chew Valley, and opposed the wasteful practice of subsidising grouse shooting. I asked her what Labour’s biodiversity policy was; she said there wasn’t one yet as the Manifesto wasn’t ready, that it wasn’t a “doorstep issue” (one that voters asked her about), and that a long-term view was needed. I think I heard a polite intake of breath from the audience as they realized Labour really hadn’t got its act together on nature at all.
Badger on the March
Julian Huppert MP (Lib. Dem.) said airily “We can destroy our viability on this planet.” but said little, to my mind, on what Parliament might do to prevent this. He did say that MPs were impressed by anyone who bothered to come to parliament as it showed commitment. He advised us to make our case, given that “people” (I think he meant MPs) fell into one of 3 categories: those who care about the world (I assume he meant nature); those who care for the local environment (their constituency); and those who just care for how they are perceived, i.e. could be embarrassed into some kind of action if it were seen to be popular. He claimed that the coalition government had doubled renewables and increased green energy. It didn’t seem to be much to do with nature or biodiversity really.
Joe Duckworth, Bill Oddie at Houses of Parliament
Sir John Randall MP (Con.) told us to be nice to our MP as they assume people will be confrontational, and are far more receptive when we’re not! He had seen peregrines over Parliament and grey wagtails and kingfishers in St James’s Park: wildlife was here, with us, even if there were fewer birds in the countryside, and despite “the scandal that’s going on in Malta” (illegal mass shooting of migrating birds). He came across a lot better than Huppert did.
I was astonished to find no queue at Security, so I had to wait in the Central Lobby for the time I had allowed for queuing! It gave me a chance to go over my carefully-prepared notes, not a bad thing.
A beautiful handmade placard
Angie Bray MP told me she was an RSPB member, and that she had written an article for the Ealing Gazette on bees, but (she volunteered) wasn’t convinced by the dire claims on neonicotinoids; it wasn’t something on my list, as it happens. We agreed totally on the need for children to get outside to play, to be in nature, and that parents were needlessly fearful of paedophiles in the park (most child molesters are, unhappily, within the extended family or otherwise known to the children concerned). She mentioned in passing that LACS were basically too wild to be taken seriously. She agreed that poisoning and the use of illegal lead shot were not good, and we parted all smiles.
Gamekeeper Allen Lambert has been sentenced to 10 weeks of imprisonment, suspended for a year, for intentionally poisoning 10 buzzards and one sparrowhawk with pesticide. The judge commented, unarguably, that the offences had crossed the custody threshold. That a gamekeeper old enough to know much better – Lambert is 65 – should do such a thing is pretty shocking. That the law should do so little given what the RSPB called “truly dreadful” and the worst bird of prey poisoning case it had ever seen in England, is disappointing in the extreme. If this isn’t enough to see a perpetrator behind bars, then what is? For of course, nobody is going to imagine that these were the first raptors that Lambert ever poisoned.
The owner of Lambert’s workplace, the famous Stody Estate in Norfolk is Charles MacNicol. We don’t know what he knew of what his gamekeeper of long standing was up to, nor what orders may have been given. What we do know is that MacNicol “wouldn’t tell BBC News whether he knew, or whether he condemned the killings.” Why not? If MacNicol was innocent, why didn’t he just say straight out that he thought the killings of protected birds of prey shocking and illegal, and that the Stody Estate would not condone them? Why not? It would have cost MacNicol nothing. His head-down-and-keep-shtum response immediately suggests his attitude to be entirely reprehensible, and leaves open the question of his knowledge, involvement in and responsibility for the actions taken.
In Scotland, the law on wildlife crime was changed by the Wildlife and Natural Environment (Scotland) Bill in 2011. This introduced ‘Vicarious Liability’ for Scottish landowners: in other words, they are automatically assumed to be responsible for criminal activities like poisoning wild birds on their land. This excellent piece of legislation makes wildlife crime clear-cut. If they knew or gave orders, they are liable. If they didn’t know, they should have, and they are still liable. The result? Wildlife crime in Scotland has suddenly and rapidly fallen from 10 poisoning incidents (killing 16 birds of prey) in 2011 to just 3 (killing 3 birds of prey) in 2012.
But in England, a country that loves nature, landowners aren’t liable for crimes committed by their gamekeepers. If a landowner were to buy some pesticides for lawful pest control, and give a quiet nod and a wink to a gamekeeper to poison off some buzzards and sparrowhawks, the landowner is more or less immune from prosecution. The RSPB wants England to have a similar law to Scotland’s. It’s about time we had one.
Today, with dry weather, damp ground and a gentle breeze it was perfect for burning some of the brash that we had cut in the past few months. Three enormous piles of wood and brambles were eaten up by the flames. As we raked up the remains, a few little frogs, charmingly bright green, hopped away. A red admiral butterfly fluttered energetically around an ivy bush.
Orange Peel Fungus Aleuria aurantia
On bare ground in the open meadow was a good clump of Orange Peel Fungus, Aleuria aurantia. With its brightly coloured open cup, it’s clearly an Ascomycete. It’s said to be edible; it looks as if something – maybe a snail – has been eating away at this one.
Most of my last few visits to Gunnersbury Triangle have been taken up with untangling a mass of fallen Willow trees in the mangrove swamp. One tree fell on the next, which fell on the next … and the whole lot were in sticky mud with a rising autumn water table, covered in ivy to boot. I lopped, chopped and carried branches and lumps of ivy away, getting happily hot, tired and dirty in the process.
Lopped Trunks in the Mangrove Swamp
Yesterday I wandered around with no tools other than camera and binoculars, and was rewarded with the sight of a Grey Wagtail, a Robin and a Wren hopping about and feeding in their different styles, exactly where I had been clearing.
Grey Wagtail: it is blurred as it was moving and wagging its tail
The wagtail was gobbling mouthfuls of grubs that it grabbed from the soft mud. It constantly bobbed and wagged its tail, displaying its yellow rump in the process. Could that be aposematic – is the yellow, in other words, a warning that the bird is distasteful? If not, why does it constantly flash yellow, even when no other birds of its species are about?
Today, I finished lopping the fallen Willow branches; as these last ones were over on the side, it was a cleaner and drier job. Then I joined in with a corporate group from Lend Lease, a well led and relaxed team … of property developers. They were incredibly pleasant to be with. The next surprise was at the hut when we all had a cup of tea: a nice Indian businessman in a suit came and asked us if his firm of engineers could use the reserve … for a group meditation. They stood about quietly and respectfully in a group, at least one person with hands pressed together in the ‘namaste’ position. We went on clearing and coppicing in the delightful autumn weather.
I got a small winged bug in my mouth; it released a pungent taste of cinnamon oils. Probably that is a chemical defence too: certainly a powerful taste, probably unpleasant in any quantity; but it was not bad in a one-off dose.
I ended my day sawing off some of the tree-stumps left over from the coppicing, together with one of the very capable and enthusiastic London Wildlife Trust trainees. It’s tremendous to see such good work going on in the reserve. And a piece of excellent news: a new warden has been appointed to manage work on the reserve, along with a West London warden who will be based here, but will have the massive task of keeping all the Hillingdon reserves from getting totally overgrown with hawthorn and blackthorn, among other things. So, suddenly, the place is full of life! Let’s hope we soon get our new visitor centre, we need it.
Conservation work with property developers; meditating engineers. You couldn’t make this up, or if you did, nobody would believe you. People say nature opens your mind, helps you feel relaxed. It does, you know.
Well, what a terrifically interesting book. I’ll say at once that while I’m right up there with Monbiot’s dream of a well-rewilded landscape (with a bit of wildwood near you for peace and refreshment from the electronic world), Monbiot is so bold in his arguments that it’s impossible to agree with everything he writes.
The starting point for this book is that we all feel the need to be free of our society’s stifling artificiality. We quietly hate being stuck on commuter trains, boxed into offices, jammed onto pavements, trapped in front of screens, permanently at the beck and call of electronic devices and social media. Monbiot is very funny on this sad topic. He uses as evidence not all this stuff from today’s world – you know it already – but the results when people from our world have gone into tribal societies: they uniformly want to stay. Conversely, when tribespeople have visited our world, they always want to go back home. Wild, 1. Civilised, 0.
Remnant Bluebells on Ramsey Island, Pembrokeshire: once this bare moorland was forest. Photo: Ian Alexander
Monbiot moves to Wales, near the bare open heathery uplands of the Cambrian Mountains, that everybody tells him are beautiful. He finds what every hillwalker (myself included) must have noticed without thinking too much of it, that there are very few species up there: few flowers (save Tormentil, a marker of overgrazing as sheep won’t eat it), few insects, few birds.
“I hate sheep”, writes Monbiot, startlingly: no echoes of Wainwright here, no grudging admiration of those toughest of hillwalkers, the mountain sheep like the Herdwicks of Lakeland. He hates the bare sward, devoid of trees. Trees? On the mountains? Yes, he shows us the record from pollen cores: from the end of the last ice age, the Welsh uplands were covered in forest – hazel, oak, alder, willow, pine and birch. “By 4,500 years ago, trees produced over 70 per cent of the pollen in the sample.” Then, Neolithic farmers cleared the wildwood, and by 1,300 years ago the trees had gone, replaced by heather. And domestic animals, sheep and cattle, replaced the great beasts of the forest: the elk, bear, wolf, wild boar, lynx, wolverine. Even the mild beaver was driven to extinction.
Just proposing to rewild the British Uplands would be controversial enough, though the process has begun with many small schemes and a few large ones – Trees For Life’s vast Caledonian Forest project notable among them, with (at its core) the 40 square kilometres of the Dundreggan estate becoming bushier by the year. Proposing the reintroduction – the release into the wild, not yet legal in Britain – of beaver and boar and elk and lynx is more dramatic still. But Monbiot would like the large predators, too. Gulp.
And he goes further. We are all guilty of “Shifting Baseline Syndrome” (let’s call it SBS for short, it sounds a horrible disease). We imagine the world should be as we recall it from our own childhood. But it was already depauperate then!
Monbiot would like to allow nature to rebuild itself, with a little help to get started where necessary. He observes a remarkable fact that again we hadn’t thought much of: if you cut a tree, or lay a hedge of hawthorn, hazel, oak, willow – it sprouts vigorously up from the broken trunk, the cut stumps, the splintered branches. Why did our native trees evolve those responses? Because, argues Monbiot, they are adapted to large herbivores. Really large herbivores: elephants, rhinoceroses. Oh my. He wants to bring those back too. Actually it was the straight-tusked elephant we used to have: and the woolly rhino, both extinct: but Monbiot suggests that the living species are good and close replacements. Clearly, getting the relevant permissions might take a little time.
These are just some of the big, meaty ideas in Feral. There are sacred cows in there: the conservation authorities value the bare uplands, and certainly they have a beauty, manmade or not. The story is powerfully told, enlivened and illustrated by tales of wild (and dangerous) personal adventures. Monbiot knows his ecology and his landscapes: he just interprets them differently from the establishment. Quite often, as with his descriptions of the disgraceful overfishing practised by Britain and the European Union, he is certainly right. At other times he is controversial, even combative, but always fascinating. Whether you agree or disagree, if you’re interested in nature – as I assume you are, given that you’re here – you need to read Feral.
Responsibly-caught scallops on a fishmonger’s slab. Supermarkets are often not so careful
With the possible exception of dynamite fishing, it would be hard to devise a more effective means of destroying both living creatures and their habitats. Scallop dredges operate by raking through the seabed with long metal teeth, dislodging the shellfish from the sediments and trapping them in a net whose underside is made of chain mail. The teeth rip through any sedentary creatures in their path, as well as the fish, crabs and lobsters unable to escape in time. The steel mesh smashes animals missed by the teeth. Where they are used, divers publish heartbreaking photographs of the seabed before and after they have passed. It looks, where the dredges have worked, like a ploughed field, lifeless, covered in fragments of shell.
— George Monbiot. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. Penguin, 2014. Page 252.
Eating Swordfish, Halibut, King Prawns is Hypocrisy
King Prawns
We rightly deplore the apparent unconcern with which [Bluefin Tuna] is being driven to extinction. But it is not a world apart from the habits of liberal, well-educated people I know in Britain – friends and relatives among them – who, despite widespread coverage of the impacts of unsustainable fishing on television and in the newspapers they read, continue to buy species such as swordfish, halibut and king prawns, which are either in dire trouble or whose exploitation causes great ecological damage.
— George Monbiot. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. Penguin, 2014. Page 246.
Today, down at the nature reserve, it was a day for work and weather rather than natural history. A vigorous Low was working its way across the top of Britain, with a brisk, freshening southwesterly wind bringing little showers across town. The water table had risen appreciably in two days, and I was glad of my gumboots, as I had decided it was time to do something about the overgrown ‘Mangrove Swamp’ in the middle of the reserve.
I should explain at once that we don’t have any coral reefs or fringing banks of Rhizophora mangroves here in Chiswick: that would be a fine thing. What we do have is a wet hollow – probably once a tributary of the long-gone Bollo Brook, one of London’s lost rivers – with attractive carr vegetation. Carr means wet woodland: we have willow of various species (probably mainly crack willow), birch and an assortment of other trees in the drier places – sycamore, hazel, holly, rowan, cherry, oak. But down in the Mangrove Swamp the willows predominate, their feet in the water for half the year. They grow rapidly, and then fall over; or branches get shaded out and die. The result, quite soon, is a tangle of lodged trunks and dead wood that cuts off the view and fills up the hollow, part of the natural succession, but tending to make the reserve less diverse (I think) and less interesting to look at. (I’m reflecting on whether one should be “managing” a “nature reserve” at all, given what George Monbiot says in Feral – he’s all for leaving nature to itself – but in a small reserve in town, management does seem necessary. Perhaps it’s a nature garden or something, not really a reserve at all.)
I cleared a mass of broken or cut dead wood from the wet floor, putting it to one side – it will still be available for fungi and beetles to consume. I then cut several long, heavy willow branches, mostly dead or dying, that had fallen most of the way to the ground across the mangrove swamp. A couple of hours hard work (I completely forgot about the brisk wind) had the main area cleared. We then set to and cleared what seemed to be a dark shrubbery near the boardwalk, but which was actually a large fallen tree shrouded in a six-foot thick mass of ivy. It was satisfying to get it clear; the tree trunk will need chainsawing, however.
After a well-deserved cup of tea, I pruned the hedge that was overhanging the street, pulling down a mass of strong twining hops that had scrambled all over the hawthorn. Blood-red haws rained down but there were plenty left when I had finished. Around the reserve, the rowans were in fine fruit, with some roses covered in scarlet hips.
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.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
— Maureen Duffy. England. The Making of the Myth from Stonehenge to Albert Square. Fourth Estate, 2001. Page 250.
