“It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the [U.S.] Indians” – Jair Bolsonaro, President-elect of Brazil
In the view of the charity Survival International, which campaigns to save tribal peoples everywhere, Bolsonaro’s “racist views represent the gravest threat to Brazil’s tribal peoples in decades. ”
May I urge you to join Survival’s mailing list now. And tell your friends to do the same. Thank you.
What’s the best way to tell a lie? Mix it with a bit of truth.
In my previous post, I mentioned the creeping threat of development to nationally important places for nature like Lodge Hill.
On one side, is some target for new homes; on the other, irreplaceable resources for education, scientific study, recreation, and last but not least, some very special species and some increasingly rare habitat.
Michael Gove wants to put into law the idea that every bit of nature has a price (“natural capital”). That means that anything can be destroyed, just by putting together some swift and specious spreadsheet that indicates some “mitigation”, as if you could mitigate the loss of Britain’s nightingales by digging a pond and planting a couple of trees in a housing estate somewhere: if the pond is worth £1000 and the trees £100 each, then they mitigate the loss of 12 nightingales at £100 each.
The hell they do, it’s utter nonsense, and dangerous too.
For the spreadsheet-minded, consider this: each thing is an independent variable – how many swallowtail butterflies are there? How many lizard orchids? How many primroses? How many wildcats? Oh, but you’d like to add them all together to get one number? Well, you can’t, they don’t fit on one axis of a graph: each species, each landscape, each ecosystem is a separate thing, and its loss is a disaster, pure and simple. You can’t add apples and oranges, or chalk and cheese. Giving each one a “value” and then discounting it and fiddling about with a spreadsheet is just dishonesty masquerading as caring.
And another thing: saying look, here’s a bit of heritage, a nice National Trust country house with a gracious park: that’s another form of the same disaster. Because, now you’ve got a bit of Heritage, yeah. So you can trash the towns and countryside and villages for miles around the Heritage, because you’ve Done Your Bit, you’ve Conserved your Heritage, it’s All Right to trash everything else because your spreadsheet shows that you’ve mitigated the loss with your bit of conservation. The hell you have, it’s smoke and mirrors. Trashing a thousand-year-old landscape and townscape is wickedness and folly: once you’ve done that, it’s gone for ever, and what will your spreadsheet get in return? A tick in a box, instantly to be forgotten.
And what do we, the public get? Cheated. Lied to. We and all future generations deprived of contact with nature, beauty, wildness, life.
And you say that’s ok because you mitigated it by landscaping the new housing estate. You’re a liar, and you know it.
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.
A million people voted Green and got one MP.
11 million people voted Conservative and got 331 MPs.
Notice anything wrong with that system? Yes, it’s grossly, absurdly, disgustingly unfair.
Perhaps you don’t care much about the Greens, favour the right of British politics? OK, try this:
Nearly 4 million people voted UKIP and got one MP. You know how many voted Conservative already. It takes 100 UKIP voters (or 30 Green voters) to balance one Tory.
The British first-past-the-post electoral system is delivering a parliament which doesn’t even pretend to be properly representative. It just does its best to dump a majority of seats in the lap of the largest party. That has given the Tories, Labour and as it happens the completely-concentrated-in-Scotland Scottish Nationalists far more seats than they deserve (the SNP got over 50, their share of the vote would give them 25), at the expense of democracy and all other parties.
During the campaign, no party other than the Greens so much as mentioned the environment in any of the voluminous “literature” that fell through my letterbox. So now, the 24 Green candidates who should have been elected are unable to transmit the British people’s declared voice to Parliament. And, yes, 82 UKIP candidates were similarly cheated of their voice.
Don’t be surprised when Nature and “the environment” barely get a mention for the next five years. You million Greens, be happy you’ve given Cameron’s Tories a new “mandate”. You’ve even got an MP, what more could you want?
Ah, the irony. Do you remember when Cameron used to talk about leading the “greenest government ever”? (It was Friday, 14 May 2010, to be exact.)
Yes, that was just as he came to power. Since then he’s done next to nothing for nature, and plenty against (silencing Natural England from protesting about anything, giving planning authorities a presumption in favour of “sustainable” development – i.e. intentional unfairness of process, to name but two; but I digress).
But on coming into office, he did keep one small promise. He set up a Natural Capital Committee to look into the value of nature to the economy. In the dismal jargon of political bureaucracy, the committee had to investigate what the natural environment would be worth as if it were an investment of money — capital — by adding up what it contributes each year to the economic benefit of the country, considered as a financial return — interest.
So, for example, if we had an acre of woodland and it allows a class of schoolchildren to do a bug-hunt for which the school pays the wood’s manager £100, the woodland has earned £100 per acre. At 5% interest, that would value the acre of wood at (at least) £2000. If ten school classes can visit each year, the value jumps up to £20,000. If we can now find other ways to value the wood — perhaps it helps to clean the air in the city; perhaps it provides a place for a beehive full of hard-working pollinators; perhaps it allows city-dwellers a relaxing walk — then we can add those “services” (I told you the jargon was dismal) to the interest earned, and tot up the “natural capital” value.
Whether it makes the slightest bit of sense to try to put a price on Nature (no, of course not – see George Monbiot’s The Pricing of Everything) is not questioned by either Cameron or the Committee. Anyone who thinks about it for a minute can see that treating nature in this way is absurd. How can we add up the value of all that is, all around us? We depend absolutely and totally on the “environment”, in other words the world, the universe. We have “only one Earth”, “one small planet”. Its value is infinite. But I digress.
Anyway, the young, fresh-faced Cameron of five years ago set up the said Committee, presumably with the general intention of kicking the green issue into the, ahem, long grass, and instantly forgot all about it.
Now, five years later, the Natural Capital Committee (Cameron: Eh? What’s that?) has reported. It says that the “natural environment” is in deep decline (yeah, what a surprise) and the “natural goods and services” it can provide: clean breathable air; clean drinkable water; food; recreation (i.e. fun) are all in steady long-term decline too.
The good Committee, noting that food, water, air and fun are pretty much all the essentials of life, wrote a truthful report saying that investing in nature for say 25 years would give returns as good as any Cameronian mega-infrastructure project like high-speed railway lines (and be a lot more popular, but they tactfully didn’t mention that).
They pointed out truthfully that
Labour (in the form of Maria Eagle, who hopes to become Environment Secretary) jumped on the bandwagon to remind Cameron of his broken promises and the continued decline of nature in Britain. She conveniently forgot to mention that it had declined all through Labour’s time in government too, and promised that Labour would “make public access to green spaces a priority” and that she would “take real steps” (is there any other kind of step?) to “give communities power” (what’s a community? a local authority perhaps?) “to protect and improve the natural environment”.
Anyway, here we have the amusing sight of Cameron being confronted with some truths about nature, and his own broken promises, as a result of an investigation that he ordered. And of Labour talking up the value of nature, which they ignored while in office, and have pretty much forgotten in their election campaigning too.
Ah, the irony.
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.
Joan Walley, MP, chair of Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee.
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.
“Brazil’s most populous region facing worst drought in 80 years” screams the BBC News headline. The three states with the largest populations, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais are all desperately short of water.
Bad luck? A natural disaster? Act of God?
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.
It did.
Nobre warned that if deforestation continued, there would be disastrous water shortages.
It did, and there are.
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?
Having lobbied the sitting Member of Parliament for the local constituency, Angie Bray, a few weeks ago, I thought I’d invite the Labour candidate, Rupa Huq, and see what she thought about nature.
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.
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.
Stanley Johnson, This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, review: ‘undoubtedly right’, The Telegraph, 7 October 2014.
Klein advocates
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.
Jenny Turner: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein – review. The Guardian, 19 September 2014
Turner also mentions Is Earth Fucked? —in which Geophysicist Brad Werner says yes, definitely, unless (Klein adds) citizens seriously oppose capitalism (and yes, that’s really the title of his paper)