How nice to come across a politician who actually understands about human impact on the environment:
Ultimately fracking cannot be compatible with our long-term commitments to cut climate-changing emissions unless full-scale carbon capture and storage technology is rolled out rapidly, which currently looks unlikely.
Sure enough, a specially-tamed pro-fracking scientist, Quentin Fisher, accused the Committee of “putting the ‘ill-informed views of anti-fracking groups’ ahead of evidence-based scientific studies.” Quite what evidence he thinks he has for believing that carbon emissions don’t contribute to climate change is unclear. Of course gas is not as bad as coal, but since coal is on the way out in the UK anyway, the comparison is spurious: the choice is gas, nuclear, or renewables.
None of the above. It was simple bad planning, and failure to heed loud, clear, accurate warnings. Back in November last year, the area was correctly said to be “sleepwalking into water crisis“. What got done about it? Nothing. The journalist, Wyre Davies, asked rhetorically “So how does a country that produces an estimated 12% of the world’s fresh water end up with a chronic shortage of this most essential resource – in its biggest and most economically important city?” He was too polite to say “By a lot of politicians shoving their heads in the sand.” This isn’t just Brazil. Brazil’s politicians are no different from your politicians or my British politicians. ALL OF THEM have their heads in the sand. Climate change isn’t some vague, aesthetic, dilettante bit of academic test-tube arm-waving with a wussy computer model that probably proves something-or other. It’s happening now, and it’s frankly disastrous.
But surely, you’ll observe, Brazil could hardly have done much between November and January, however hard the politicians had tried. You’re right. But they were told FIVE YEARS AGO.
Back in 2009 the Brazilian climatologist Antonio Nobre announced that deforestation in the Amazon would within five years cause severe drought in South-eastern Brazil. He predicted that the lack of forest-created cloud (water is sucked up by the trees and evaporates in huge amounts forming clouds every day) would change the region’s climate.
The meteorologist Jose Marengo called the huge clouds of water vapour that stream from the Amazon rainforest “flying rivers.” They are drying up.
We – you, me, your neighbours – are by our daily choices – flying, buying petrol for cars, buying teak garden furniture, buying cosmetics made with palm oil grown where rainforest used to be, eating meat and buying petfood from cows grown on grass where rainforest used to be – causing disaster in one region after another. The Amazon. The Sahel. Sumatra. Borneo. Sounds faraway? The climate where you live is warming up. The wildlife where you live is vanishing. Not so faraway now, maybe?
She came along to Gunnersbury Triangle, together with two of her supporters to take some pictures and video clips of the occasion. I did my best to fit what I wanted to say into short bursts – I don’t think I’ve ever been asked to do soundbites before, but perhaps it will come in handy when anyone asks what I think about nature and politics, or for that matter to put into a few words what my book is about. (It’s about how crazy the English are about nature, and why.)
We talked about why nature matters and the benefits it brings (votes, of course; human wellbeing in an age of e-gadgets; education; mental health; knowledge of climate change; the value of the wild gene pool… ), and I suggested some topics that it would be nice to have as party policy.
Tiny Frogs (and a slug) hiding under a mat
We walked around the reserve, saying a little about its history, its current uses (school visits, corporate bonding days, volunteering, talks, picnics, family visits, bug-hunting and pond-dipping, days out for the mentally handicapped). We saw the variety of habitats, enjoyed hearing the Robins singing even on a chilly day in January, and looked under a mat at the tiny frogs sheltering there. Rupa certainly left with a deeper understanding of what nature can do for people and why it matters; and of the possibilities that the Gunnersbury Triangle reserve, at least, has to offer for her constituents.
In her new book she [Naomi Klein] turns her guns on capitalism’s role in climate change. She argues that “we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because these things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism… We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”
On this central point, Klein is undoubtedly right.
But it’s difficult to spot climate change as it happens, because it moves so spasmodically and is by its nature “place-based”. What do I know about the mines of Nauru or gas flares on the Niger Delta? What can I do about flooding in the Maldives or New Orleans? “Sacrifice zones” is what Klein chillingly calls the places most depredated: “Poor places. Out-of-the-way places. Places where residents lack political power, usually having to do with some combination of race, language and class.” But even in the rich world, most people don’t notice the dwindling of nature in their parks and gardens; or if they do, they are so sickened, they have to stop noticing right away. Which is why Klein sees the living wage as a climate issue. The main reason so many people are so careless is because they are worn out.
After a chilly grey start, the clouds dispersed and it turned into a brilliant winter’s day, the sky crisp blue, the air clear. I grabbed the telescope and went down to Wraysbury to see if the winter ducks had finally arrived.
Snapped tree (Poplar) over path
The first thing I saw was a sign of the violence of the recent storms; a Poplar, always a fast-growing and short-lived tree, had snapped off and fallen over the path. But a way had already been cut beneath it.
Soapy Pollution in River Colne
The next sight was a sad one: for the first time I can remember, the River Colne was obviously polluted, with lumps of foam drifting rapidly by, or caught on branches in the normally clean water. The river supports Kingfishers, wagtails and assorted waterfowl, so I hope the cause is a brief one-off event.
On the lake were four or five Goldeneye, the males waving their heads up and down to signal to the females – or to warn off rival males – the bold white patches on the sides of their heads visible without binoculars.
A little further on was a small party of Goosander, a male and two redhead females, their long serrated hooked bills and distinctive long bodies instantly recognisable, a sign of winter in this part of the world as they come down from their chillier breeding grounds.
Then, just as I was moving on, the bold whiteness of a male Smew caught my eye. With him was a redhead female, both ducks far smaller and shorter than the rather big Goosanders. A few grebes and tufted ducks vied unsuccessfully for my attention.
Ramalina lichen on Poplar
Some of the poplars, half-fallen, offered normally out-of-reach branches for close inspection. Along with the usual Common Orange Lichen and the grey leafy lichens (Parmelia sulcata and such) were a few bristly tufts of Ramalina, easily told for being rather stiff, slightly forked, and the same grey-green on both sides. You’ll probably have seen the genus on rocks just above the high-tide mark by the sea, or on big old stone-age megaliths. It’s a lichen that demands clean air, so it’s rather a nice surprise to see it so close to Heathrow Airport. Perhaps the prevailing Westerly winds keep most of the atmospheric pollution away. There is no doubt, though, that London’s air quality is far better than it was a generation ago: hardly anyone burns sulphurous coal any longer, and while there are hotspots of nitrogen oxides (Heathrow for one, Oxford Street for another) and diesel particulates, these aren’t as harmful to lichens as sulphur dioxide was.
Red Kite
Around the corner into the area of wet grassland and scrub, I was delighted to be surprised by two Red Kites circling silently overhead against the brilliant blue, their long wings and forked tails a welcome sight that would have been familiar to Shakespeare but was missing until their recent reintroduction to lowland Britain. There was plenty of professional angst about whether the new Chiltern population should be encouraged to interbreed with the remnant Welsh population: but in the event, the birds easily dispersed the couple of hundred miles involved, and soon the gene pools mixed all by themselves.
Ponies and Hay
Up on the smooth green hill that was the old rubbish mountain and is now home to a dozen ponies and horses, the distant chack-chack of Fieldfares drifted to my ears. At least fifty of them were standing, watchful but constantly feeding, on the bare grass, flying up and chattering at the least warning. A solitary Mistle Thrush stood big and grey with its boldly spotted breast among them; a flock of a hundred Starlings moved flightily between trees and grass. A Wood Pigeon panicked and all the Fieldfares flew into the trees, still chacking. I splashed through the ankle-deep mud and puddles on the somewhat flooded path to the road.
“We have a clear signal that our climate is changing, and when you look at the evidence it’s because of human activities. The evidence is so strong I don’t know why we are arguing any more”.
So said Don Wuebbles of the University of Illinois. He pointed out that the world has just had the hottest year for 1,700 years, very probably for 5,000 years.
NOAA 1880-2014 global average temperature anomaly: recent decades, and especially the most recent twenty years, have been the warmest since records began. Global warming is under way
Thirteen of the fifteen warmest years ever recorded in Britain have been since 2000: the others were just before then. 2014 had the hottest summer for 350 years (when local records began). There is no doubt that we are experiencing climate change in these islands.
Around the world, the pattern is as clear as crystal: rapid, global warming, especially strong in the furthest northern climes, as in Alaska. There, the warming is drastic. Permafrost, which stores enormous reserves of carbon locked away in frozen peat, is melting: and the fossilized plant material, exposed to the air for the first time in millennia, is starting to oxidize. There is nothing to stop all the rest of it melting away.
Actually, the story up in the far north is more frightening than that. The warmer it becomes, the more three different positive feedback cycles collaborate to speed up global warming even more.
First, as mentioned, the permafrost is melting. That releases carbon to the air, as the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which accelerates the warming and melting.
Second, as the ice vanishes, the albedo (reflectivity) of the once-frozen north goes down dramatically, from icy white (reflecting most of the sunlight that hits it) to muddy brown or black (hardly reflecting anything). The ground absorbs more sunlight, so it becomes warmer, accelerating the melting and oxidation of carbon; and it directly contributes to having a warmer planet.
Thirdly, as the lakes and pools lose their ice cover, enormous amounts of methane hydrates, chilly masses of carbon-rich material in the icy mud, collapse and release streams of bubbles of methane gas, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. If it were to be burnt, carbon dioxide would be released; unburnt, it accelerates global warming still more rapidly.
Back in Britain, everyone noticed that the weather in late 2014 was exceptionally warm. October and November in my childhood were leafless windy months with what seemed to be incessant grey skies and driving rain that churned football pitches into cold greasy mud. This time around, it was possible to work outside in shirtsleeves to the end of November. The change? Out of all recognition. It was a wholly new climate.
But the weather is not the climate. Britain is now in winter’s grip. Scotland shivers down to -15 Celsius. Here, under clear blue skies, the Birch trees glitter in the nearly horizontal sunlight. A greater spotted woodpecker, calling “Chik!” loudly, flies into the canopy of a Birch, clings to the elegant white trunk, the few remaining triangular leaves shining a rich yellow. The woodpecker bounds off, its wings whirring in short bursts.
The cold weather, like the increasingly violent storms that brought down two trees in the reserve last week, is part of the warming pattern too. The atmosphere has more energy than before: warmer air masses meet cold ones with a higher difference in temperature, releasing more powerful storms than we ever used to see. Winters can be colder, wetter, and windier as a result: more trees fall; more valleys flood. It may not feel warmer, but this is a direct consequence of climate change. Feel like denying it? Look at the evidence. It’s all around you.
Crustose and Foliose lichens on a street tree in West London
Amidst the grim news of habitat loss and species in retreat or going extinct, it is pleasant to be able to observe a small conservation success story. Lichens, which had almost disappeared from Britain’s cities by 1970 – I was there, and I remember looking about in Hyde Park with some disappointment – are creeping back into London’s streets, and (I don’t doubt) streets all over Britain.
Back in 1970, if you wanted to see a lichen in Britain, you basically had to travel westwards, to Cornwall, Wales, the Lake District, or the Highlands and Islands. Those places had what lichens need: good rocky habitat, or old forest trees; and one special ingredient: clean air. For, we had unintentionally discovered, lichens are sensitive indicators of air quality.
Or, to put it bluntly, air pollution. Tiny concentrations of sulphur dioxide gas are enough to kill all the lichens in an area. Britain today has rather few volcanoes belching out clouds of dangerous sulphurous gases. The sulphur came from fossil fuels, mainly coal. When it was burnt, the sulphur was oxidised to sulphur dioxide (SO2) , and when mixed with rainwater, it fell as sulphurous acid (H2SO3). Where did it fall? Initially it just trickled out of small chimneys, of homes and factories, polluting the cities and creating “London fog” – in reality, a poisonous yellow photochemical smog, a witches’ brew of sulphur and nitrogen oxides.
This problem was interestingly addressed by the Tall Chimneys policy. The smoke was carried up much higher than before, so Britain’s prevailing Westerlies blew the stuff much further afield. The concentration of noxious gases around our factories fell satisfactorily; London’s romantic Dickensian “fogs” disappeared. The gases travelled across the North Sea, causing acid rain in Scandinavia, and depriving Stockholm and the beautiful clean-looking pine forests and islands of its Archipelago of their lichens. I know, I looked for them in 1986, and I remember finding one small colony in a morning’s walk.
Back to here and now. Nearly all our coal mines have closed, and with them most of the shipyards and steelmakers too. Houses are heated by clean natural gas – nearly pure methane. Houses are no longer blackened by smoke; a shirt worn in the city for a day does not have a black collar in the evening. And lichens are creeping back into the streets.
In the photograph, you can see at least four species of lichen. There are the large rounded colonies of crustose lichens in the centre, with olive-disked apothecia (fruiting bodies containing masses of spores) rimmed with white. There are small grey foliose (leafy) lichens of the kind I still call “Parmelia“. There is a much larger, greyer “Parmelia”. And there are many small colonies of an orange foliose lichen, probably the Common Orange Lichen, Xanthoria parietina. Perhaps there are more. (If you are a lichen expert, I’d love to know what they all are. Do contact me.)
Apparently there are now 17 urban lichens, up from, well, one rather tough species – Lecanora conizaeoides. It’s a tiny, rather flat grey species, and it alone can tolerate a moderate dose of sulphur dioxide; at least, it could be found in sheltered places even in London, even in 1970, away from the worst of the smog.
Is this a conservation success? The Tall Chimneys were a health measure; the death of Coal was mainly an economic matter. Still, it’s nice to see the lichens coming back. Perhaps in a few decades’ time (lichens are rather slow-growing) we may see big yellow splashes of lichen on roofs, walls and trees in every street. Let’s hope so.
On the PM programme on Radio 4, the presenter Eddie Mair regretted the long, long wait until polling day, given the inevitable length of the campaign with a fixed-term parliament. He sympathized with listeners at having to endure the same old party political ding-dong as the rivals seek to batter each other into submission. He suggested that we listeners tell him what we would like to know about the next general election.
What politicians want to talk about
The parties seem to want to tell us about the NHS (Labour) and the Economy (Conservative) and Immigration (all of them), so I’d like to hear about, well, anything else: especially nature.
Politicians don’t even call nature by its name any more.
They burble about “Sustainability“, but making our cities larger every year is not sustainable: that would mean a steady state. Think about it. Sustainable living is imaginable, but it would be nothing like how we live now. Everything – I mean everything – would be recycled. We’d use glass not china, so it could be melted down and reused when it broke. We’d burn no coal, oil, or gas. We’d design every product to be broken down into its components for recycling, as they’ve started to do in Germany. In short, current politico-talk about sustainability is just waffle, greenwash. You may have a ruder word for it.
They mumble about the “Environment“, as if nature impinged on our lives solely through dirt or noise in the places where we live. But our impact on the natural world is far, far greater than that. We have ravaged every habitat, every ecosystem on the planet. The African bush, home to elephants, rhinos, gazelles? It’s in free fall. Grasslands and meadows? We’ve lost 98% of ours. Wetlands, marshes, reedbeds? Disappearing everywhere. Mangroves and coral reefs? In crisis wherever they (used to) occur. Rainforest? You know the answer.
They waffle about “Biodiversity“, as if the word were a charm or mantra, calling for impact assessments for each major building project, which the planners then immediately ignore. But the diversity of life in England, like that of the whole world, is in crisis. Many people alive today will witness the mass extinction of perhaps a third of all the species now alive; man-made global warming and the resulting changes to the climate; the catastrophe being visited on all the oceans through overfishing; pollution, overpopulation, deforestation: the worldwide destruction of nature.
They ramble on about “Conservation“, as if nature would be fine if limited to a few nature reserves here and there, and try to change the conversation to the economy/the NHS/immigration (delete according to taste) as soon as possible. But nature is the whole of our planet (including us, if you prefer, but that’s another story). We depend on plants and algae for the oxygen we breathe. We depend on plants and animals for the food we eat. We depend on bees and other insects to pollinate many of our crops. We depend on bacteria to detoxify our sewage and rubbish. We depend on plant genomes for our medicines and our crops’ resistance to disease. We depend completely on nature.
What I’d like the politicians to tell me
I’d like to know what they will actually do for Nature, for everyone’s benefit:
what each party’s policy on nature really is
how they will prioritize nature
how children, NHS patients, and old people will be given access to nature for education, rehabilitation, wellbeing
how fisheries will be protected
how the decline of wildlife on farms will be reversed
Direct answers, please.
Well, I’d like to know a whole lot more, given the global disaster I’ve outlined, but that should be enough to start with. What would you ask?
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.
