Greenpeace have just published a fold-out poster listing how well the British supermarket chains have done with their supposedly “sustainable” Tuna in cans. There are no percentage scores, though some must have been calculated: instead, the supermarkets are ranked from deepest green (presumably near 100% sustainable, i.e. you could go on doing that forever – isn’t that the only plain meaning of the word?) through to brightest red, cheerfully labelled “Unsustainable and harms marine life” (one might say that applies to all scores less than 100%, no?).
In the green corner is Waitrose, “Your go-to #JustTuna brand for 2016”, I guess that hash sign is a snappy little address for some American web gadget or other, maybe a teenager can help me out on that one.
In the red corner (boo! hiss!) is an old-established brand, John West. According to the poster, “More than 98% of John West’s tuna is caught using destructive fishing methods”. Naughty step: copy out “I must not use enormous nets that catch sharks, turtles and rays” 1000 times neatly without smudging now.
Seriously, it’s disgraceful that a famous old company should be taking so little care of a resource on which its commercial well-being, its very existence as a company, depends. Properly managed – truly sustainably – Tuna fishing will last forever, or until the human race wipes itself out (delete as preferred). Badly managed – as now – the ocean’s Tuna fisheries will go the way of Cannery Row in Monterey (now the marvellous aquarium there), of the Tonnara of Scopella in Sicily (remembered wonderfully by Gavin Maxwell), indeed of Britain’s long-gone North Sea tuna fishery —and yes, it sounds unimaginable now, doesn’t it? That’s how “canned tuna” will sound in a few years’ time if we don’t sort our ideas on sustainability out.
We sat down in neat rows on elegantly stiff, lightly-made wooden chairs in the beautiful Nash Conservatory, the sun streaming right into our eyes; Monbiot’s first words were to apologise humorously for the rather bright lighting. The two large computer screens displayed the festival’s welcome screen, and stayed that way: Monbiot spoke without slides, and without notes. He was clear, sharp, warm, and where appropriate really quite entertainingly rude about government policy.
Britain’s “trashed” uplands
He told us how his excitement at moving to the Cambrian Mountains turned to puzzlement and then despair as he realized there were no trees: no birds: no butterflies: no bees: no flowers except Tormentil, indicator of poor soil. He directly and simply told us complicated stuff, like the Structural Heterogeneity of the rainforest, a whole architecture of ecosystems with multiple niches for species of every description. He reminded us that Britain has less tree cover than almost anywhere else in Europe – 12% against an average of 37%. His mountains had been shagged to death by sheep, ruined by the white plague; other mountains (Scotland, say) had been just as well trashed by management for shooting grouse or red deer. Britain had the second biggest landholdings of any country – after Brazil. Why? Because farm subsidies reward the largest landholders, the oil sheikhs and Russian oligarchs, the world’s luckiest landlords, paid for doing nothing but keeping the land in “agricultural condition”. And that meant? Keeping it free of what the bureaucrats call “permanent ineligible features”, in other words, trees. Britain’s mountains are wet deserts, profitable only to the rich. And they are paid to keep the land species-poor.
Even the nature reserves have “key indicator species” (Monbiot was really warming to his theme now, putting the boot in) like Red Grouse, Ring Ouzel, Skylark, Meadow Pipit: the few birds that thrive in bare open moorland (and there were hardly any of them, he said). Montgomeryshire’s claimed “really wild” jewel in the crown reserve was “identical” to the rest of the cold wet desert. It, like the rest of it, was maintained by a programme of cutting, burning and grazing to prevent trees and bushes from taking over. The “undesirable species”? They were, erm, native trees like Hawthorn and Birch, the pioneering colonisers that pave the way for all the trees of the forest, all the way up to, um, the beautiful natural primary forest of the Wildwood, complete with glorious epiphytic ferns like Polypody, great trailing beards of lichen, all the mosses and liverworts and flowers and invertebrates and beasts of every size that you’d find in a rainforest. It’s a circular argument: you need grazing to maintain “favourable condition”; and that is measured by indicator species which are the ones found on bare moorland; which you’ve defined as what favourable condition is. Only, that isn’t what the Eurocrats actually asked for: they specified “favourable ecological situation”, which might mean … wildwood. Quite the opposite.
Protecting the ranchers from the rainforest
Now for the sting: if the ranchers of Brazil start a program of cutting, burning and grazing to destroy the rainforest, leaving bare meadows for their cattle, there’s an international outcry. But in Britain, it’s the required management regime for our best nature reserves! We’re protecting the ranchers from the rainforest. Why is mid-Wales bare and open? Because for 200 years it was devastated by lead mining; and after that, grazed to nothing by sheep. The white death only need to be present at one sheep per ten Hectares (hardly any, basically) to kill all the new tree seedlings: young saplings are delicious and nutritious, and sheep greedily and selectively seek them out.
Well, I’m not going to try to recap the whole talk, let alone the whole book, which I’ve already reviewed for you. Rewilding, Monbiot says with simple and direct plausibility, is informed by Remembering. And our memories are terribly short. Back in the 18th Century, Oliver Goldsmith described the massive shoals of Herring in our waters; harried by enormous numbers of Tuna, Porbeagle, Sperm Whale, Fin Whale. Yes, there was in the past few centuries, recorded by careful scholarly intellectuals, a thriving Tuna fishery at Scarborough. Not the Tonnara in Sicily, now defunct; not the Tuna fishery of Monterey Bay with its Cannery Row, now a marvellous Aquarium (I have the T-shirt to prove it); but right here. Like our coast-to-coast temperate rainforest, it’s practically all gone.
Trophic cascades
BUT… we can have it back! “Amazing things can happen”, said Monbiot. There are Trophic Cascades, life pouring down from the top in an ecosystem. How? The classic example is from America’s Yellowstone National Park. The wolves were removed in the 1920s to “improve” on nature, allowing more deer (and better hunting). Only, it didn’t work out like that. The park, deprived of the wolf, became steadily poorer in wildlife. Then in 1995, after lengthy argument (very lengthy argument, in fact), the wolf was brought back in small numbers.
The effect was dramatic. Within six years, the trees were FIVE TIMES taller. The wolves had scattered the deer from their grazing haunts down by the rivers. Saplings sprouted. Trees shot up. Beavers felled trees to make dams and lakes. Waterside plants flourished. Fish, invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles and muskrats appeared all over. The wolves killed coyotes. Small animals appeared all over. The trees stabilised the banks of the rivers. The rivers meandered less; erosion patterns altered. Bison multiplied among the larger trees. Fruiting shrubs blossomed and bore berries; bears ate quantities of them, and fish. The wolves changed the landforms, planted trees, made flowers bloom. Everyone, including professional ecologists, was astonished.
Rewilding Britain
What could we have here? Getting the moose, bison, bear and wolf back may take some time here in tightly-buttoned Britain. Elsewhere in Europe, wolverines are coming back from the far north; millions of beavers are making dams in dozens of countries; lynx are being reintroduced with minimal fuss. Everyone except us thinks it’s NORMAL. Everyone except the British governing elite (and their landowning friends and relatives) wants to see beavers and wild boar in our countryside: lynx, too.
Can we have wildlife and people? Sure.
Can we have wildlife and subsidies for grouse moors and a “stupid” Common Agricultural Policy? No. Even the supposedly “green” part of the CAP is insane – we pay 55 billion to farmers to do nothing with the land (except destroying trees), then we pay them a bit more to put a tiny bit of wildlife back on a tiny part of it: and even that part is basically worse than useless.
Conservation sites have to be resilient, argues Monbiot, self-willed, running nature’s own processes, if they are to survive the shocks that are coming. All we have to do is to let nature get on with it.
At the end we all trooped to a table where Monbiot signed our copies of Feral (here’s my book review), in my case a clean but pretty well-thumbed copy. He wrote “To Ian, with hope, George Monbiot”, and I went home in the sunshine thinking, yes, with hope: “conservation” sounds worthy and dull, like aunties with conservatories in their garden, or conservative opinions, or carefully conserving dusty artefacts against moth and museum beetle. But hope: hope that Britain will gain new and better kinds of nature reserve, full of deer, and beaver, and wild boar, and lynx, a sparkle of excitement at glimpsing what the wildwood was really like.
London does look beautiful at night when seen across the river, whether you look at the classical outlines of St Paul’s Cathedral – not the one that Shakespeare knew, of course – or at the brash towers of the City, the slick take-your-money confidence of quick men who know all the patter and have the steel, glass and concrete to prove it.
All the World’s a Stage (Globe Theatre set for As You Like It)
Everyone knows Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” speech from As You Like It, and when that appears on stage as it did yesterday, it’s striking to see how well the strutting and fretting of the actors can work on that big wooden rectangle “in the round”, surrounded by the beautifully reconstructed circle of the Globe Theatre with the long-suffering audience standing in the pit. As you can see, we decided on the more comfortable course of seats in the upper gallery, affording a fine view of the pit audience reaction as the actors come right up to them, sit with legs dangling over the edge of the stage, walk round behind them, or actually push straight through the crowd.
But perhaps the Nature’s Book aspect of As You Like It is not so obvious:
Nature speaks to the (banished) duke in the Forest of Arden (Act II, Scene 1): the trees talk, the brooks babble as if reading, the stones deliver sermons. Here is the voice of Nature with a capital N, “the classroom, the library, and the church“, figured if not quite personified as pastoral wisdom.
In Shakespeare’s time, the Book of Nature was a “theological commonplace” (Paul J. Willis; JSTOR, library or subscription needed). The curious concept of nature more or less literally as a book
‘”originated in pulpit eloquence, was then adopted by medieval mystico-philosophical speculation, and finally passed into common usage,” where it was “frequently secularized”‘.
Nature is described as good in Genesis chapter 1, and Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans argues that God’s power is seen by the creation of the world and in his works. Willis observes that this is a bit difficult to reconcile with Paul’s assertion that nature is utterly fallen and sinful, but no matter. Willis concludes by noting the “often recurring comment” that As You Like It mocks the pastoral while basically enjoying the pastoral quality, and suggests that Shakespeare similarly mocks the rather lofty Book of Nature theme “without tossing it aside”. The comedy comes from realizing that the forest is an imperfect divine text, just as we are “faulty readers” of that book. “The result in this rich comedy is the book of nature as you like it, a forest that exposes both God and man.”
One of the delights of living near the River Thames is a winter walk at low tide. The sides of the river – many feet deep at high water – are exposed as wide, gently shelving slopes of mud, sand, and grit. On closer inspection, much of the gritty material is anthropogenic. The implied natural history is full of interest.
There are mutton bones, rabbit bones, chicken or larger bird bones, probably swan or goose: these must usually be the remains of meals, or perhaps butchers’ or poulterers’ waste. Sometimes a bone is cleanly sawn or hacked across (there’s one in the picture).
Also of animal origin are the shells: the commonest are sea-shells – oysters, cockles, scallops, mussels. All of these were widely eaten and cheap throughout the Middle Ages, up to the 18th or 19th century. As the river here is not saline enough for these species, they must, like the animal bones, represent the remains of meals, most likely thrown out into the river by servants doing the washing-up.
Most of the remaining pieces are ceramic: thee are thick chunks of earthenware, from massive flowerpots to handsomely decorated glazed household pots. There are mass-produced pots such as Victorian marmalade jars of MALING ware from NEWCASTLE. There are glimpses of writing on fragments of fine bone china, some of it delicately moulded with leafy patterns. There are shards of blue-and-white Willow Pattern, in imitation of real but costly “China” from China. Thee are neat pieces of plates, cups, saucers. There are circular bases of bottles, jars or jugs. There are handles of teacups, carefully shaped to a standard pattern. And there are stems and bowls of unglazed clay (tobacco) pipes, sometimes plain, sometimes fancifully moulded, and thrown away when they broke, which was often.
On this evidence, the natural history of Man in London included eating meat and shellfish; storing assorted solids and liquids; and smoking a great deal of tobacco. Unlike all other species, however, Man shaped a great many artefacts; and wrote symbols on to them, apparently conveying meaning, such as the names of the artefacts’ makers. Man in London thus seems to have been both a typical species with a varied diet; and a unique, symbol-using one.
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?
The Apollo butterfly, Parnassius apollo, extinct in Britain
One of the odd things about British attitudes to nature is that the right-wing [Daily] Telegraph newspaper has such good graphic coverage of many issues, such as the ongoing extinction of species in England over the past two centuries. The gallery of beautiful photographs is shocking for its immediacy: there are species I’ve seen, and others I feel I should have, like the Red-Backed Shrike (1988). The Scottish Wildcat is not quite extinct in Scotland — I’ve been lucky enough to glimpse one, as far from anywhere with domestic cats as is now possible in Britain — but has gone from England. Here are birds and butterflies, weevils and the handsome Blue Stag Beetle (1839). The lovely Apollo butterfly is one of 421 species we have already lost.
Local extinction isn’t quite as bad as the ‘real thing’ — extinction from the planet, the fate of the unhappily flightless Great Auk (1820s), hunted until it was gone. It was simply too easy for anyone with a boat to collect a bird or two for their dinner, and this magnificent bird was gone for ever.
That’s the point, really: the reasons for each extinction are banal, stupid. The Red-Backed Shrike was wiped out by three things.
First was the steady nibbling away of its heathland habitat for farmland and housing.
Alongside this was the intensification of agriculture — destroying “useless” and “waste” corners of scrubland, “improving” grazing with fertilizer and so (unintentionally or not) allowing taller grasses to outcompete all the flowers of the meadow; and in turn that did away with many of the insects on which Shrikes prey, if they had not been destroyed by insecticides applied to nearby arable crops.
Finally, the illegal collection of eggs, of what was towards the end a very rare and therefore perversely tempting target, helped to eliminate what conservationists, nature-lovers and egg-collectors all presumably agreed was a beautiful and exciting species.
In short, progress or development (call it what you like), greed and stupidity — in equal measure — threw away something we all loved.
Trichodes alvearius, still common enough in the Dordogne
A handsome Soldier Beetle like Trichodes alvearius, for instance, is common enough in continental Europe. When I photographed it in France, I knew I’d never seen it in Britain, but supposed it had never lived here. Discovering that it went extinct in the 19th century — that my great-grandfather might well have seen it as he strode about the countryside as a boy — is poignant.
In fact another species of Trichodes, T. apiarius (if this reminds you of bees, you are right: the name means ‘of bee-hives’, as does ‘alvearius’: both species frequent hives, their larvae growing there, feeding on bee larvae), was also driven to extinction here (1830).
The corncrake (1990s), the chequered skipper (1976), the Mazarine blue (1903), the large copper (1864), the large tortoiseshell (about 1953), the Norfolk damselfly (1958), the Burbot (1900s), the greater mouse-eared bat, mosses, moths, sawflies, shrimps, spiders, snails, flowers, grasses, ferns, solitary wasps, the roll-call of doom drones on and on.
If we do nothing there is no doubt at all what will happen, not only in Britain but across the planet. In the plain words of the Lost Life Project:
The world is currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction event, caused largely by human activities that continue to damage and destroy biodiversity across the globe.
But the point is, there is hope. If we press for help for our rarest species, we may yet save them. Some species like the corncrake have with help come back from the brink, and can be found in a few lucky places.
How to press? Lobby your local MP. Speak to the other candidates. Ask them what they will do for nature. Will they ensure that all the schoolchildren in their constituency get a chance to see a nature reserve, go pond-dipping, hear birdsong? Will they insist on gardens for hospitals, hospices, and old people’s homes to assist with healing and wellbeing? Discuss it on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, with your friends. Join a conservation group, a pressure group. Give some money. If you can’t think of anything better, sign a petition! There are plenty more sharp questions you can ask (feel free to ask me for some more suggestions).
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.
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.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
