It was too sunny and warm to sit at a desk writing, so I took bicycle and binoculars and went along the Thames path to the Wetland Centre. Even in a T-shirt it was warm work, feeling more like an English July (ok, that’s not saying much) than the last day of November .
Afternoon sunbeams on a very warm Halloween at the Wetland Centre
Inside the Centre I passed some diminutive witches and warlocks: they seemed to be sweating uncomfortably inside their costumes. I took a swig of water and cooled off in a hide; two rare migrants, Green Sandpipers, bobbed daintily at the end of one of the little islands, dwarfed by a Black-Headed Gull and a Moorhen, neither of them particularly large birds. Their habit is not unlike that of the Common Sandpiper, but they lack the white streak that rises in front of the wing. One of them took flight, its slender dark wings and white belly giving it something of the look of a rather large and clunky House Martin. It felt very odd to be watching autumn migrants on such a summery day.
Over at the wader scrape, a Little Egret strutted and once fluttered across the shallow water; it is an uncommon visitor here, though becoming more usual along the south coast marshes and estuaries.
A Green Woodpecker bounded over the grazing marsh in its distinctive undulating flight, its red cap and green body showing beautifully in the hot sunshine, with a loud laughing call in case anybody was in any doubt what it was.
A Cetti’s Warbler sang its bold short song, Chwit-i-pit-i-pit, Chwit-i-pit-i-pit, as usual invisible deep in a reedbed.
Out on the open water, numbers of winter ducks are (oddly, given the summery weather) building up; several Shovelers dabbled; some dozens of Wigeon grazed; a few Teal, the drakes in glorious colour, swam nimbly about with some Gadwall.
Even on the way home, I had no need of a pullover. The BBC weather report confirmed what everyone instinctively knew: it was the warmest 31st of October ever recorded in Britain, with an astonishing 23.6 Celsius in London. Of course, a cold front is forecast.
P.S. The next morning was grey and rainy, autumn on the way. Two large grey Mistle Thrushes flew overhead, rasping out their wintry calls, like a boy blowing over a comb covered in tracing paper.
P.P.S. Four days later, after a clear starry night, the sun rose over a chilly town on a fine November morning. It was winter.
In 1942 the scholar of Middle English, christian apologist and author of the Narnia books, C.S. Lewis, published The Screwtape Letters. The explanatory subtitle was Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil, indicating the purpose of the book, to educate the young devil in the most effective means of corrupting humans from the paths of goodness and righteousness. Of course, we believe (or are free to imagine) the book to have a different purpose altogether for its human readers. In that spirit, here is some Advice to a Young Property Developer.
—o0o—
Dear Frango, you are trying to get planning permission for a huge, ugly glass and concrete stump in a beautiful area that is already fully built-up with attractive rows of houses and their little gardens, small friendly shops and peaceful parks. I understand you like strolling around the area at lunchtimes. Enjoy it by all means, but do not allow your feelings for the area to intrude on your work. Professionalism must come first. Your company’s existence, your job and those of your colleagues depend absolutely on your being able to work unsentimentally and methodically towards the goal of making money through development. You must use all means at hand, within the law or where necessary without it, taking all due precautions of course, to achieve the desired ends in good time. Time is money, as you will become aware. Each month’s delay costs the company a month’s salary for all the employees involved, as well as a month’s interest on the money it has borrowed from the City. It also delays by a month the necessary returns to the company’s owners and shareholders, and your jobs depend ultimately on their confidence in your professionalism and reliability. Therefore, do everything you can not just to get the job done, but to overcome opposition quickly. Leave your feelings for lunchtimes and evenings. All the best, Nick.
Dear Nick, thank you for your letter. I’ll do my best, but we are heavily tied down by planning law, especially the need to consult widely and to provide 40% social housing. What a nuisance! It takes ages and the social housing will cut our profits down terribly. Any ideas? With many thanks again for your help, Frango.
Dear Frango, you are quite right to ask. The good thing about the rules on consulting is that you only have to do it within a fixed distance – I think it’ll be 500 metres in your case. This may sound a lot, but if you choose a site at the boundary of a park or commercial estate, or beside a river for instance, you’ll immediately halve the area involved as you’ll only have to consult in half a circle. Even better, if you can find a place near a borough council boundary, you can forget about the people in the other council! What an excellent rule! Of course, if you’re near an administrative boundary and also beside an industrial estate, then hardly any local residents will ever get to hear about your project, until it’s too late. Things are pretty well stacked in our favour!
As for the 40% social housing, I wouldn’t get too hung up on the percentages. We can easily offer the council some cash “in lieu” of the social housing: they can announce they will be using it somewhere else, some time in the future, to build some social housing, somehow or other (certainly not with us, there’s no money in it, but I’m sure if they offer a building contract, there’ll be some builder willing to take their money off them to throw up some matchwood stuck together with spit for the deserving poor. As soon as your council smell the money – we can call it Section 106 you know, even if it isn’t exactly compensation – they’ll be eating right out of your hand. Your affectionate uncle (may I call myself that?), Nick.
Dear Nick, of course you can be my uncle if you like! Thank you so much for your helpful suggestions. They are just what I needed. My team leader was really impressed in our weekly meeting this morning. We’ve got a suitable site lined up and think we may be able to get away with a 42-storey tower! I couldn’t have imagined we’d be able to risk anything so profitable around here. All the best, Frango.
Dear Frango, delighted to hear it’s all going so well. Do be careful not to get your hopes up too early: remember there are many steps to the process, and “obstacles” to be overcome. Take things one at a time, though, and you’ll soon be in management. Your affectionate uncle, Nick.
Dear Nick, you were right. We’d hardly got started when an incredible busybody of a local nuisance – I think she’s got a lawyer for a husband – has started complaining to all and sundry, and we haven’t even put in a planning application yet. She’s pointed out that we’re in breach of the Local Plan, and that we can’t use Section 106 money to compensate for lack of social housing. If only we could shut her up… Your stressed-out “nephew”, Frango.
Dear Frango, something like this always happens. The good news is, we’re still here, and we have deep pockets. Of course we don’t want the delay and expense, but the fact is, we can cope with it, as we have done on every previous project. You’ll find a way around it. Remember that the busybody and her husband have no funds to fight us with, and plenty of other things to worry about – they have to earn their living, and fight off all our “friends” who are planning developments in the same area. Did you hear about the combined housing/office/retail development just off the high street, and the swimming pool/cinema/housing complex where the old tennis courts were? They’ll be run off their feet, you’ll see, and we can reapply with a marginally different proposal if your 42-storey tower actually gets rejected. So I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you. Your affectionate uncle, Nick.
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.
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.
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.
When I first acquired a macro lens for my camera, I raced about the meadows, photographing every insect I could: and many of them were species new to me, though I must have seen them flying past (or away) many times. For the close-up lens and detailed images gave me something I had never had: the ability to study shy insects as if I had caught them and pinned them to a Victorian collector’s card. Suddenly those speckled orange butterflies resolved themselves into Spotted Fritillaries, or for that matter Glanville, Queen of Spain, Silver-Washed, Small Pearl-Bordered and High Brown Fritillaries. It was a revelation, and a delight.
It was also sobering: in all my journeys around the British Isles, the only Fritillary I ever saw was a Small Pearl-Bordered, and that was on the north coast of Cornwall, only a few miles from Land’s End, as if almost the whole of Britain had been scrubbed clean of butterflies, but a few remote corners with the last few surviving individuals had somehow been overlooked.
But as far as rural France was concerned, once up in the wooded hills with their mosaic of old coppiced woodland, little meadows, fruit trees and ponds around old tumbledown farms and barns, or out on such steep chalk grassland hillsides as remain, the butterflies, beetles and wild flowers remained much as they must have been a century ago. I clicked away and framed a postcard-sized print of each species, 8 to a clipframe, and returned each day to the meadows to photograph more.
Lady Orchid in Dordogne
It was the same with the flowers, especially on the chalk, as soon as I finally managed to get down here in springtime to see the orchids, rather than in high summer to see dry brown grass (and perhaps burnt-out orchid seed-heads, the colour of well-cooked toast). Everywhere there were Pyramidal Orchids and Chalk Fragrant Orchids, so numerous as to have a wealth of variation in size, shape and height, evidently frequently hybridizing. In damper places were Early Purple Orchids; and here and there were species I had never seen in Britain – Lizard, Military, Lady, Green-Winged, Fly, and Butterfly Orchids. They all went on the wall, printed as close-ups.
A green longhorn beetle with black spots: I’m delighted to learn from the Romanian Longhorn Project that it’s Saperda punctata (Linnaeus, 1767)
As for the beetles, the only really large species that I’d seen at all frequently in England was the Stag Beetle. Here, I photographed at least 8 species of Longhorn, from the mighty Tanner to two kinds of wasp-coloured beetle (Clytus and Strangalia) and a magnificent green kind with black spots, Saperda punctata. The Romanian Longhorn Project kindly identified it from the photo, saying that it is protected in Central Europe: such splendid insects are becoming rare, and not only in England.
Waspish beetle: Strangalia maculata on Mint
Yet perhaps it was really the wasps that caught my eye and stole my heart. Yes, wasps. As well as ordinary-sized social wasps, the area was home to great spherical nests of the European (Red) Hornet and the new, darker, slimmer and far more aggressive Asiatic Hornet. And besides those were Sphecid or Digger Wasps of many kinds, all solitary and often handsome; Ichneumons with narrow waists and enormously long ovipositors like overgrown stings (though wasp stings are actually modified ovipositors, so only females have them); and marvellously beautiful and imposing Potter Wasps with black and yellow legs and long slender yellow waists. These are shy and wary of large animals, so photographing them was always a challenge: but eventually I managed it.
Now, as the years go by, I find I recognize these insects not only by their size and shape and patterns, but by their habits of flight, the kind of weather that brings them out, which plants they like to visit, where they nest. In short, they have become familiar: and with familiarity has come a comfortable feeling of friendship and of being at home, of things being in their right places. The excitement of the new has been replaced by the appreciation of this particular ecosystem, where ‘eco’ means what its Greek etymology implies: οικος (oikos), house: this is my and their home, the place where we live together.
One of the constant difficulties with talking about nature is deciding whether man is part of it or not. People constantly talk about liking nature, or working with nature, or conserving nature, as if it were a separate thing like clay or copper that one could consider objectively, and might interact with or not according to taste and profession. And when people choose to watch a nature film instead of a Nordic detective series, they are exactly choosing to reflect on some aspect of nature when they otherwise would not do so.
But if we instead appreciate that nature is all-encompassing: that the environment begins at the end of my nose and continues to the end of the universe (as some wag of an ecologist had it in the 1960s), then we have no choice but to interact with it, for good or ill. And if we observe that, like other animals, we eat other organisms – animals, plants and fungi, and occasionally bacteria and algae too – then we are clearly part of the global ecosystem. Further, the insects that bite us, the worms, flukes, parasitic amoebae and bacteria that cause us disease, and the bacteria that break down our bodies after death show that we play many roles in that ecosystem, not simply that of consumer or top predator.
In short, man is in many ways a part of nature, and one could say that the main problem with the natural vs artificial distinction is the idea that anything is outside nature. Bees make honeycombs; potter and mason wasps make houses of mud; chimpanzees and crows make tools; man makes spears and hand-axes and wheels and computers and nuclear weapons: it’s all part of nature.
From that point of view, everything we make is natural, and any judgement on a thing must be on grounds of taste (aesthetics) or efficiency (how well does it do its job, at what cost). It isn’t possible to do anything that isn’t part of nature, part of the world, but things can be done well and attractively, or not. The question of what ‘cost’ means is a large one, but one cost on a planet of fixed size is the use of non-renewable materials. We may, for example, use as much paper as we like, as long as we plant as many trees as we cut down, and the processing does not poison the rest of the ecosystem. Similarly, we may use as much glass as we like, as long as we recycle it after use, preferably efficiently (by washing it out and refilling it, rather than smashing it up and re-melting it, though melting and reusing is better than nothing).
Ceramics, on the other hand, are more problematic. Like glass, they are made from quarried materials; but once fired, they can generally not be re-melted, so they are hard to recycle. We should have very good reasons to use such materials; and we should find ways to recycle them.
Rooves across much of the south of Europe are traditionally made of moulded terracotta, an Italian word that descriptively means ‘cooked earth’, ‘fired earth’. The traditional variety comes in many colours and varying shapes. The colours range through whitish buff; pale or deep ochre; reddish brown; brownish purple, and combinations and intergradations of these basic tones. The shapes vary from quite sharply cambered to rather flat, specially at the broader end; and both size and weight vary rather considerably. The effect on a roof – still better, on a whole town of such rooves – is of diversity of colour and line, with overall harmony of tone and style. The speckled and dithered appearance of such a roof is reminiscent of the ‘abrash’ that makes a traditional, hand-made, vegetable-dyed Turkish carpet such a lovely and valuable thing. Nothing is exactly uniform or mechanical; but the whole is a skilfully-crafted work of art, strong, colourful and useful, and to many people’s eyes much finer than anything that can be made in a factory in imitation of it.
Modern clay roof-tiles are made in identical moulds, filled by machine with a fixed amount of evenly-mixed and coloured clay, and fired for an identical period in an oven of exactly-controlled temperature. All the resulting tiles are the same orangey-red, and you might expect them to be stronger and more durable than traditional tiles, in compensation for their deficiency in colour and abrash.
But they’re not. The new tiles are many times more vulnerable to frost damage than traditional terracotta. Why this should be is a matter of speculation: perhaps the factory uses any clay it can get, with no regard to frost resistance; perhaps indeed it uses the cheapest clay on the market, who knows. Or perhaps it tests a sample of its tiles for a short period – say, 5 years – and is happy to sell its products certified as having passed such a test, knowing they are of that specific quality. The traditional tiles carried no such certificate: their badge of quality was that the maker, like his father before him, was known and trusted to produce strong, durable tiles that could last a lifetime, and they did. Perhaps ‘harmony with nature’ means having a long-term, personal business relationship with your roof supplier.
Factory-made roof tiles flaked by frost
The tiles shown in this photo have worn thin as frost has successively split flakes from their surfaces. Once the initial surface has flaked off, water penetrates more easily, and frost breaks more and more of the tile until it shatters in wind, rain and especially hail. To be sure, a severe (50-year) hailstorm can smash strong new tiles, but it will do far more damage to an already weakened roof.
On the recycling front, I found the split and broken tiles ideal for filling in holes in a track. It’s quite a humble form of reuse, but reuse it certainly is.
The rest of a traditional house, too, was made of local materials – stone, lime rather than cement (perfect for allowing lizards and solitary bees to nest in the walls), timber from the forest. When anything needed replacing, further materials were close to hand, and the old materials hardly needed recycling: they simply returned whence they came.
Maybe modern construction has something to learn from traditional methods. And maybe true sustainability is rather harder than glib talk of ‘sustainable development’ would suggest.
Aah. Ducks with ducklings. Coots with Cootlings. Geese with Goslings. Swans with Cygnets. Moorhens with … chicks. Whatever the charmingly mediaeval diminutive nouns, it was a day for walking around the London Wetland Centre, enjoying the ‘sunny spells’ and the bright display of wild flowers, artfully seeded, and delighting in Mother Nature’s ability to conjure up fluffy sentimental feelings about roughly duck-shaped balls of fluffy down feathers.
Coot with Cootling
I’d gone alone to see if there were any interesting dragonflies, but there weren’t many about: a warmer day is always better. But there was a Black-Tailed Skimmer basking on one of the ‘wildside’ paths.
Black-Tailed Skimmer
Apart from that, I glimpsed one Hawker dragonfly – probably a Hairy dragonfly, as the only kind other than the Emperor seen there in the past month; and there were plenty of Common Blue and Bluetail damselflies about.
As for butterflies, it was alarmingly empty: a couple of meadow browns, a small white or two, and a female brimstone the highlight. My alarm at the lack of insects in general in England is growing. If it’s neonicotinoids – hot on the heels of all the earlier insecticides, many now rightly banned for their destructive side-effects on wildlife – then we are watching a manmade calamity. The BBC noted that some ditch water was toxic enough to be used, just as it was, as an insecticide spray for crops. The effect of that on dragonflies can only be imagined: a sad thing, as (living in rivers and ponds rather than on farmland) they have to some degree escaped the disaster that has all but eliminated our farmland birds, bees and butterflies.
But on a dead tree, wildside, was another fluffy-duckling sight, this time from a distinctly arboreal bird.
Parent and juvenile Green Woodpecker
Two Green Woodpeckers, presumably a parent and a newly-fledged juvenile, were clinging to a dead tree, the parent a little higher up, the youngster apparently begging for food with open beak. The family drama went on for several minutes.
Two different Hoverflies on Burnet
Tiny wildlife shows were visible on the flowers: here, two hoverflies of different species, busy being Batesian mimics of dangerously stinging wasps (but harmless as doves) are feeding, slow and relaxed in the sunshine, on the small flowers in a Great Burnet’s flowerhead. They didn’t seem at all bothered by each other, or by any risk from predators. But despite their glorious colours, it was duckling day today.
People laugh at the Victorian taboo on talking about sex, while prostitution was rife in London at the time. Today, too, we have curious taboos: people don’t talk about death, for instance. But the taboo I have in mind is different: population control. It’s just not done to speak about it. But I’m going to, and I’m not sorry. It’s vital.
Back in 1972, Donella and Dennis Meadows and Jørgen Randers published a book that, even at the time, I found distinctly curious. It was called The Limits to Growth.
The Limits to Growth, by Donella and Dennis Meadows and Jørgen Randers, 1972
It was commissioned by the Club of Rome, a non-profit think tank. It argued, in a nutshell, that a model of the Earth’s resources and human usage of them predicted, under certain scenarios, ‘overshoot and collapse’ of the whole system in the 21st century. The model was called World3 and it contained subsystems for agriculture, industry, population, non-renewable resources, and pollution.
The basic idea of The Limits to Growth was Malthusian, after Thomas Malthus’s 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus argued that population would continually increase; assuming the ‘means of subsistence’ started ‘equal to the easy support of its inhabitants’ – that food supply and consumption were in balance – then consumption would always tend to run ahead of food supply (and of wages), leading straight to poverty, though war, famine and disease could also intervene.
Malthus observed that either the death rate could increase to cut down a population through positive checks like famine, disease, and war; or birth rate could be lowered by celibacy, late marriage, birth control or abortion, to prevent population growth. He attacked the idea that agricultural production could grow indefinitely. He was attacked, unjustifiably, for being uncaring of the poor, and replied that it was ‘vicious and cruel’ of a government to allow population to grow without preparing to feed (and we might add, to house, educate, and care for) it, in other words for society to rely on human misery instead of proper planning for a stable and happy population.
The Limits to Growth was similarly attacked, perhaps with rather more justification. What seemed to be its ringing certainty about how we would really soon now run into unalterable limits imposed by nature was shredded by the critics. Its over-reliance on what was, after all, only a model into which one could put different numbers was in hindsight distinctly naive. By making itself look like a cranky doomsday prophecy, it became only too easy to dismiss.
But the Malthusian argument, updated a little, is unanswerable. If you have a finite planet and exponential growth – heck, ANY growth – then you must run into limits eventually. If growth is rapid, that ‘eventually’ will be soon. In 2011, Ugo Bardi’s The Limits to Growth Revisited argued that reality seemed to be following the 1972 prediction after all.
What the critics seized on in The Limits to Growth was, especially, its naive assumption that resources were known and fixed. Big Oil argued that new discoveries would (always) be made, only to find that discoveries declined rapidly, and became steadily more inconvenient, polluting or dangerous – far out at sea, high in the Arctic, or as dirty and difficult oil shale, necessitating the invention of fracking.
Big Oil and the economists argued, correctly up to a point, that when a resource becomes scarce, its price rises, and that enables formerly too-expensive alternatives to be developed. In the case of oil, that begins with deep, dangerous and dirty ways to get more oil. Failing all of those, it continues with alternatives to mineral oil, which might include synthesising oil from plant materials, or perhaps directly from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. Failing that, it could continue with alternative forms of energy, such as wind and solar power used with batteries, and so on, as the excess of demand over supply pushed prices steadily upwards. All of this is pretty basic economics, but it overlooks the real attachment of today’s economy to resources such as oil, and the pain that is starting to result as resources start to run short. Wars and tensions in the Middle East over both oil and water (especially for irrigation) illustrate the point.
The economists further argued that economic growth was not ineluctably tied to population growth, nor to growth in the use of resources. The economy might grow (we could phrase it today) through services like insurance, or banking, or software, or games, or videos, none of which in themselves logically entail physical resources, however much bankers build themselves flashy headquarters and huge IT centres full of hot computers and power-hungry air-conditioning systems. In theory, wellbeing and the economy could improve without using more resources. So while it looks and feels as if every industry and service depends hugely on oil today, in theory, argue the economists, you could have one without the other. So, oil, qua energy, isn’t quite the solid roadblock that it appears, nor are mineral resources like copper, or tantalum, or germanium, or gold, however vital they each may look to today’s world of electronic devices. I hope I’ve stated the economists’ case fairly.
Oil as a chemical feedstock is another matter: many years ago one of my science teachers observed that when we have burnt all the world’s oil, our descendants will bitterly regret our folly in using millions of years of chemical wealth just for energy. Paint, plastics, dyestuffs, fertilizers, medicines (yes, and pesticides and explosives) – oil has a hand in thousands of manufactured substances and materials that we all rely on every day. It sounds grim: no oil, no feedstock. Well, not quite: we already have ‘plastic’ bags made of cellulose from plants. With enough effort, chemical feedstocks like methanol can be made from wood, or carbon dioxide and water: we could one day learn to recycle carbon endlessly, and carbon will then be enthusiastically scavenged from the atmosphere as a vital resource.
Ah, carbon. The outpouring of carbon dioxide has already warmed the planet, changed the climate, moved ecological zones towards the poles, acidified the oceans. It is apparently in the process of sending perhaps half of all the species on the planet to extinction in the coming centuries. It seems incredible that such verifiable facts should be disputed; or that such urgent warnings should be ignored. But disputed they are, and ignored too, drowned out by the incessant tinnitus of wars, elections, recessions, politics, selfishness and greed, and simply the sheer bustle of daily life.
But carbon contributes to one thing that humans are definitely tied to: food. If the population rises, more food is required. Even this, though, is not a straightforward 1972-style equation, N people x C kilos consumed = F kilos of food required. If we all became vegetarians with the modest diet of a traditional Indian villager (just rice or chapatis every day, with a little oil, a few onions and chilis, rarely anything else) then the world could sustain many more of us than if we all demanded Texan portions of steak made from methane-producing cows, each animal guzzling the grain that might have fed dozens of vegetarians.
Still, for any given agricultural productivity and any given area of land there is a maximum population that can be sustained. Let’s try a thought experiment: say we achieved optimal efficiency in converting sunlight to grain, over the whole land surface of the earth, deserts, forests and all, we might increase productivity fivefold, and the productive area fivefold, for a 25fold increase. Perhaps we could grow food all over the oceans, hard as that might be; the production would double again. If we could reduce our food needs through genetic engineering (I am not advocating this) or other means, more people could be fed. Now, the human brain accounts for about 20% of our energy intake, and can hardly be changed; but let’s suppose we could halve the food used by the rest of the body, we’d then use just 60% of what we eat today: the population could increase by 100/60 or 1.66fold. So how many people would that be? Much more than now. If the current population is 7 billion then we could have 7 x 25 x 2 x 1.66 = 580 billion people on the planet; it could be more if the proportion of vegetarians increased, rather than decreasing as it is doing today. No doubt you can argue for still greater numbers. The theoretical limit is enormous (nothing at all like the 1972 view), and full of uncertainties: still, it is an extraordinary prospect. And it ignores what we are already seeing, which is increasing shortage of resources.
But even assuming that the agriculturalists and engineers did their work splendidly, and none of the terrible shortages of oil or water or minerals, or fights over shortages that The Limits to Growth implied ever occurred, I should not like that world, and I can’t believe you would. There would be no room for wildlife or non-food plants: no place to go for a walk in the sunshine: indeed, no call to go to the agricultural surface at all, except to drive a tractor, if humans still did such a job in a robot-rich world. For with the land all devoted to growing food, we would all live underground (but for a few super-rich, who would still enjoy unimaginable luxuries like fresh air and sunshine and flowers), work, play and probably fight down there. For any mass emergence on to the surface would spell starvation for billions as crops were crushed underfoot. Unbearable? If so, that is the limit to growth.
We could ask, why should all the planet’s resources flow to just one species, us? What makes us so special that we should take the shares of all other species, for that is what the grow-as-we-like until the hundreds-of-billions scenario means? At the least, it is a bit selfish.
For we have one more professional to convince, after the oilmen and economists, and all the work to be done by agriculturalists and engineers to set up such a world. It’s the ecologist.
A famous book on this subject was also published in 1972: Barbara Ward and René Dubos’s Only One Earth.
Only One Earth argued (much more solidly than The Limits to Growth) that development should be limited to ensure basic human rights, an ‘inner limit’ within the ‘outer limit’ of the Earth’s carrying capacity. Much later talk has grossly diluted the idea of ‘sustainable development’ to allow almost anything: it is much easier to claim that something is sustainable than to stop consuming more. Ward and Dubos argued for ‘the careful husbandry of the earth’, sharing wealth fairly and conserving wildlife carefully. It was pretty radical stuff for an economist like Ward. In effect, she broadened economics to include human wellbeing – a domestic and individual ‘economy’ – as well as ecology – the wellbeing of animals, plants, and ecosystems.
I would like to imagine that the arguments for healthy ecosystems rich in life of every kind are becoming obvious: I feel they are already painfully clear to anyone who looks at the question. Still, here they are, very briefly. Crops need pollinators, like bees, bumblebees, moths and butterflies, flies, beetles. Pests need to be controlled by predators, parasites, and pathogens. Materials need to be recycled by saprophytes. We need genetic diversity – wild plants, old cultivated varieties, not to mention animals and fungi too, to combat pests and diseases, to supply unknown future crops and crop varieties, medicines, and other useful substances. In short, all ecological roles, species of every sort, are needed, not just crop plants, our primary producers, creators of food: they can’t survive alone.
More than that, more than those desperate agricultural and economic requirements, we need beauty and delight; birds, bees, butterflies, dragonflies and Komodo dragons, tigers and tiger-lilies. Without them, life isn’t worth living.
We are already in serious danger of losing all these things, as neonicotinoid insecticides join the already long list of disastrously dangerous substances we have created, manufactured in stupidly large amounts, and released onto the land with blithe ignorance (or worse, reckless lack of concern, with contrary evidence left unpublished, covered up to preserve profit). Already neonicotinoids are proving as deadly as the organochlorine insecticides of the 1950s and 1960s, that led Rachel Carson to write her 1962 classic Silent Spring.
The veterinary drug Diclofenac has destroyed almost all the vultures of the Indian subcontinent; now its use is spreading disastrously to Africa, as countries that should know better are doing the cheapest and dirtiest thing, in the face of incontrovertible evidence of harm. We do seem to be a terribly stupid species, like Douglas Adams’s mindless military robot.
Are there limits to growth? Of course there are. It’s more than time we started acting as if there were. The taboo on population control did have some slight justification: of course we cannot want a world with compulsory sterilisations, euthanasia, even a China-style One Child policy. But there’s no need for such drastic and terrible methods. Population can be controlled far better by persuasion, by taxation, by education, by informing people of the consequences of their choices, by understanding the pressures on nature and man’s place in the world.
Let us decide how much room we want to give to forests, to prairie, to tundra, to wetlands, to deserts.
Let us decide where we want seabirds by the million to have undisturbed cliffs and seas full of fish to feed on.
Let us decide that we shall have a world full of lions and bears and howler monkeys and sparkling damselflies, of buzzing bumblebees and naturally-pollinated fruit trees, of pristine forests full of undiscovered species, rich in species and substances whose uses we have not yet even imagined.
Let us choose life, and start to live lightly on this beautiful planet.
I had the good fortune to get down to West Wiltshire in hot if sometimes humid summer weather.
Pyramidal Orchid in Flowery Meadow
It was a pleasure to find the Pyramidal Orchid in a flowery meadow near a town: despite the dog-walkers, the increasingly uncommon flowers were clearly spreading from a small patch across the meadow, which is mown annually.
Less pleasantly, there were next to no insects pollinating the flowers: we saw one Small Tortoiseshell, a fly or two, and one (white/buff-tailed) bumblebee. It was a stark contrast to the masses of bees and beetles I’ve seen on the reserve in London. Of course, in London there is now very little use of pesticides, and basically none on an industrial scale.
This year (2014) does seem to be particularly poor for butterflies. It was an extremely warm winter and a very wet and windy spring, so I wonder if the result has not been a bad spring for insect pests … and perhaps, whether England’s farmers have not sprayed insecticide especially heavily? It’s a question that could clearly be answered by someone. If the answer is yes, then our ‘useful insects’ have suffered very heavily as a consequence.
The next day we went to Cley Hill, a western outlier of the Salisbury Plain chalk downs, sticking up above the plain below the chalk escarpment.
Bee Orchid
In the short grass, full of lovely flowers – Sainfoin, Milkwort, Horseshoe Vetch – were Bee Orchids, and happily both bumblebees in this special place protected by the National Trust and Burnet Moths – mostly Five-Spot Burnet, with some Transparent Burnet too, quite a treat.
Five-Spot Burnet MothTransparent Burnet Moth
On the top of the hill, above the Iron Age earthworks, we came across a group of about five Wall Brown butterflies, all very tatty and worn: perhaps they had been blown across the Channel from France on the warm southerly wind that is accompanying this anticyclone (centred to the east). Nearby were a few Brown Argus, small butterflies in the Blue family: not uncommon in France, far from common in England. Their coloration may seem odd for the Blue family, but females of quite a few species are brown, contrasting with their bright blue males, so the genes for ‘brown’ are clearly available: perhaps it takes just one or a few genetic switches to turn on brownness in both sexes rather than in just one.
In several places on the hill, often on bare chalk paths or short grass, we saw the glowing blue and purplish blue of Adonis Blue butterflies, with their chequered wing borders. So we saw some rather special butterflies, though with the definite feeling that they are only just hanging on in the area.
Milkwort, once a common plant in (cow) meadows
The hill is also host to Chalk Fragrant Orchid, Pyramidal Orchid, Spotted Orchid and more: it was lovely to see them all, though we were moved on swiftly by an anxious pair of Skylarks circling rather low overhead, trying to get back down to their nest, clearly not far from where we were sitting. All around in the thorn bushes were Tree Pipits, singing away, with some twittering Goldfinches and one Yellowhammer, my first of the year: yet another species that was once commonplace in every hedge.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
