Biodiversity Offsetting and Lodge Hill Part 2

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Miles King

At the end of Natural England’s press release confirming Lodge Hill had become an SSSI on tuesday were these words.

“The decision to extend the SSSI clarifies the environmental importance of the site but does not determine whether or not development can go ahead; this is a matter for the planning system. Natural England will continue to engage with the local planning authority (Medway Council), the landowner (Ministry of Defence) and its commercial partner (Land Securities) to contribute, as appropriate, to the planning process. In particular, and in order to contribute to sustainable development, we will consider carefully any proposals for a habitat creation scheme to offset the impacts on the special wildlife of the site, should development proceed.”

I thought  – but how can Biodiversity Offsetting be applied to an SSSI? Except in the most exceptional circumstances….

The Biodiversity Offsetting Green Paper has this to say on the subject (para 31):

“For Sites of Special Scientific Interest the conditions of paragraph 118 of the National Planning Policy Framework would have to be met. The Government considers this could only be the case, depending on the circumstances, if the offset provided the same type of habitat as close as possible to the Site of Special Scientific Interest that would be harmed.”

now does this mean “close as possible” in a geographical sense, or close as possible in an ecological sense?

The NPPF para 118 states:

” When determining planning applications, local planning authorities should aim to conserve and enhance biodiversity by applying the following principles:
● if significant harm resulting from a development cannot be avoided (through locating on an alternative site with less harmful impacts),adequately mitigated, or, as a last resort, compensated for, then planning permission should be refused;
● proposed development on land within or outside a Site of Special Scientific Interest likely to have an adverse effect on a Site of Special Scientific Interest (either individually or in combination with other developments) should not normally be permitted. Where an adverse effect on the site’s notified special interest features is likely, an exception should only be made where the benefits of the development, at this site, clearly outweigh both the impacts that it is likely to have on the features of the site that make it of special scientific interest and any broader impacts on the national network of Sites of Special Scientific Interest “

We cannot assume that the Offsetting Proposals in the Green Paper will proceed unchanged, though they may well do.

There are some key words/phrases in these policies which would benefit from more detail:

Benefit – as in benefit of the development clearly outweighing the impact on the SSSI.

Cannot be avoided – the top of the mitigation hierarchy. What circumstances would apply where an alternative location not on an SSSI was unsuitable?

depending on the circumstances – this could mean anything goes.

Vice Chair of Natural England, David Hill, who is also chairman of the Biodiversity Offset cheerleaders The Environment Bank,  asked NE grassland specialist Richard Jefferson whether it was possible to recreate an equivalent grassland to the one at Lodge Hill in “about 40 years”. Richard stated that the recreated grassland would only be a facsimile of the grassland at Lodge Hill as it would be a much simpler grassland without all the complexities of the one at Lodge Hill.  Of course, it was this very complexity that flummoxed the board in their gaining an understanding of the quality of the grasslands there.

How safe is Lodge Hill SSSI now from being developed and the impact offset?

Posted in biodiversity, biodiversity offsetting, conservation, housing, Natural England, neoliberalism, Owen Paterson, public goods, public land, scrub, the cabinet, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Another skirmish on the Lodge Hill Battle Front

Posted on November 20, 2013 by Miles King
  • It was an exciting day yesterday. 
  • I was part of a small 5 person RSPB team giving evidence in support of the Lodge Hill SSSI notification at an Extraordinary Natural England Board meeting.
  • The opposition were  there in numbers – Medway Council (who had allocated 5000 housing units onto Lodge Hill as part of their now defunct Core Strategy); the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, who own the former engineering school site that is now an SSSI; Land Securities, who wanted to develop the site for housing and had already made a substantial investment in the site.
  • A whole bevvy of environmental consultants and others were available to push home their case for why the site should not be notified. I was surprised that any of them claimed to be making an independent assessment of the ecological value of the site.
  • Natural England specialists for grasslands, woodlands and Nightingales gave evidence in support of the notification. 
  • There was some reasonably good-natured jostling for the good seats in a packed room and some friendly glances between the opposing sides. 
  • The Board members questioned the officers and objectors closely and for prolonged periods. When we came to give our supporting evidence, Martin Harper (who blogs about the day here) gave an assured performance and I was able to hand him my ipad from which he read from the NVC users handbook on the perils of atypical vegetation.  I was disappointed not to be questioned about the grasslands as I had much to add to what had been said. 
  • When the Board came to debate whether to confirm notification of the site or not, the data on Nightingales was too strong and there was little to argue about the woodland. But the grassland got everyone hot and bothered. The issue was whether the grassland at Lodge Hill was MG5 or not. MG5 is what you might call traditional hay meadow, normally flowery and buzzing with bees and butterflies. 
  • The grassland at Lodge Hill had been, let’s say, subject to military use  by the Army for decades.  I haven been to the site but as far as I can tell, instead of the usual mowing and grazing, these fields had been dug up, had scrub planted on them, then had it removed, been blown up, had concrete pads built, then removed, had been repeatedly driven over, possibly by tanks. 
  • So hardly the typical life of a hay meadow. But, they have not been fertilised, herbicided, drained, re-seeded with ryegrass or any of the other things that have destroyed practically every other MG5 grassland in the country. So they approximate to MG5 – and are closer to it than any other grassland habitat. Of greatest importance these grasslands were unimproved, and this seemed to have been missed out of the arguments. And the juxtaposition of unimproved grassland with areas of scrub gave the site a whole added dimension of value for nature, that was entirely ignored by all present, other than as providing habitat for Nightingales. 
  • The grassland would not behave, it would not fit into the NVC and it did not provide a good fit to the NVC floristic tables! This clearly rankled with the NE Board members – they wanted straight up and down, flower-filled Meadow; and they werent happy. Several said that it wasnt good enough, didnt conform to what a proper upstanding er stand of MG5 should look like, and should be removed from the citation. David McDonald (who recently recommended the badger cull not be extended – he was over-ruled) pointed out that although parts of the grasslands were clearly not MG5, other areas clearly were, and was it right to remove all of them from the SSSI? With some judicious chairing by outgoing NE chair Poul Christensen, the Board came round to agreeing to include the grassland interest after all. Hearts were definitely in mouths (well mine was). 
  • The board approved the notification (with a minor amendment to exclude an archery club car park) with one dissenter, Joe Horwood who argued that the site was marginal in terms of its national importance, and notifying marginal sites devalued the whole SSSI system. 
  • It struck me that the Board were comfortable arguing over the validity of BTO Nightingale counts and confidence limits, of extrapolating from site counts to uk population estimates, and even things like whether nightingale territories could be double counted. 
  • But when it came to discussing the intricacies of vegetation they were all at sea. In a way this sums up where we are in conservation – we can deal with single species and their requirements, but when it comes to assemblages, or communities, and their multifaceted behaviour, the preference is to turn away, to avoid having to deal with it.
  • Thankfully the Board girded its collective loins and did the right thing.
Posted in biodiversity offsetting, housing, meadows, Natural England, public land, scrub | Tagged , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

The meat of the argument

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Miles King

At least wednesday’s debate on conservation and re-wilding at the Linnean Society, one of the questioners asked whether meat eating and conservation could be reconciled. Afterwards the same person pressed home their point – how could conservationists justify meat eating? Their argument was that as meat eating was simply unethical, it corrupted the ethicality of conservationists to support livestock production. My friend Sophie and I (mainly Sophie) tried to explain how semi-natural habitats depended on grazing, and that extensive agricultural systems did not cause the sort of suffering that industrial scale activities can cause. To no avail.

Yesterday for lunch we had a rolled and boned shoulder of Sika venison – and it was absolutely delicious. It was wild meat, free from agrochemicals, hormones and pesticides – it was incredibly lean and very healthy. It was local, produced in Purbeck where Sika deer were introduced over a hundred years ago and now have to be managed (in the absence of their predators) to reduce their impact on farmland and semi-natural habitats. Our buying it contributed to the local economy and local jobs.

It was expensive and we won’t eating it every week, but it’s probably the most ethical meat that can be eaten (apart from this).

Do we have be vegan or vegetarian in order to be conservationists?

 

Posted in agricultural pests, conservation, ethics | Tagged | 8 Comments

Conservation needs Change

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Miles King

This a continuation of the series of blogs stimulated by the re-wilding and conservation debate at the Linnean Society on Wednesday.

I looked at how people’s relationship with nature has evolved to the point now where we can more or less choose which nature we want, and which we do not want. This “can do” freedom means that for the most part, people choose a very limited range of nature, either for pleasure (pets, garden plants), food (just a few species of grass and the odd domesticated animal), fuel and fibre. Much of Nature has been increasingly “engineered out” of our lives at all levels.

Values

 At the same time it is becoming crystal clear that we cannot afford to live without nature – this is the basis of the Ecosystem Services argument – the argument goes that we need to place a (financial) value on nature so it can be properly accounted for in society, or perhaps more accurately, the economy. To my mind this is looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Nature has not been properly valued by society because there is a fundamental problem with the way Society places value on things ie using financial values. We need to change the way we value Nature, rather than try and used flawed economic tools to value it.

Land

How could we do this? Take land, for example. Land in Britain is incredibly expensive – farmland has trebled in value in less than a decade. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, land is an increasingly attractive asset class for investors looking for a safe haven from global economic turmoil. Secondly the Common Agricultural Policy guarantees that landowners receive a subsidy payment just for owning farmland. Thirdly, farmland is exempt from inheritance tax. All of these three factors combine to increase the value of farmland. What does this increase in monetary value mean for the nature that does or could or used to live there? The increase in value inevitably concentrates land into an ever smaller number of ownerships. As loans are taken out to purchase land, the need to repay those loans drives land-use intensification. As land-use intensifies, there is less room for nature.

CAP fail

Many millions of words have been written about the CAP and its impacts, and I will not revisit them here. Suffice to say, the CAP has been an almost unmitigated disaster for nature, notwithstanding the very limited effects of agri-environment schemes. Once again CAP reform has utterly failed to even slow down the continuing damage done by intensive farming to nature. Without a fundamental reform or indeed abandonment of the CAP, little can be done to mitigate the impact of intensive agriculture on nature.

Not our Inheritance

 Why is agricultural land exempt from inheritance tax? Is it simply to enable large rural  estates to hang onto their land from one generation to the next? Scotland has the most inequitable land ownership in the western world, but at least there is a vociferous campaign to redress this inequity. Figures are harder to come by for England, but recentish research suggests 0.6% of the population owns 50% of rural land.

George Monbiot in a previous existence ran an excellent campaign called The Land is ours.  A reduction in the value of farmland will reduce the pressure to manage it so intensively and let nature back in. So reform is needed of the CAP (how many times…); the freedom of speculators and investors to influence land management just for financial returns, at public cost; and inheritance tax reform to reduce financial incentives to manage land for private benefit at public cost.

Towns and Cities: Bringing nature back home.

Much has been written about the disconnection between people and nature, in particular our children. Yet we can do so much to bring ourselves closer to nature and we can achieve far more for nature in our towns and cities than in rural areas. Nature can be incorporated into new developments for example, through Green Roofs and high quality greenspace. We can, with the political will, transform our public spaces into nature-rich areas. I’m not a great advocate for planting pictorial meadows or beds of cornfield annuals, not because they aren’t valuable and beautiful, but because they are a pain to manage long term. It would be much easier to transform the thousands of hectares of amenity close mown grassland into wildflower-rich areas, either meadow or not – and yes why not have some scrub?

Municipal road verges could explode with a riot of perennial flowers supporting bumble bees and butterflies, cut just once or twice a year saving money too.  Such a transformation of our public spaces would not be welcomed by all – as there is a tendency to prefer tidiness over nature. Still, if Local Authorities continue to lose funding at the current rate, they will simply not be able to afford the luxury of close mown grass for much longer.

On Wednesday George suggested that every new housing development should have some wild land incorporated in it. I like the idea – but pointed out how difficult it is to “engineer” the feeling of wild. Effectively what he’s saying is let’s have some naturally-regenerated woodland in new developments – it’s a great idea.

Consumers or Citizens?

What about us, the consumer/citizens/subjects of the UK? What part do we play in this matter. Every decision we take has an impact on nature, whether it is the type of transport and domestic fuel we use, what food we buy, and how many old smart phones gather dust in the backs of cupboards. How can we decide which decisions are likely to benefit nature or not. I think it should be possible to work out a biodiversity footprint for every product, every pound of potatoes, every smartphone. The danger of course is that these get simplified to the point of being counterproductive. Take biodiversity offsetting – please – someone take it away! The “metric” is a habitat-hectare  – all the sublety of variation between different sites supporting similar habitats is lost, boiled down to a single metric.

A Biodiversity Footprint

Supposing that it was possible to create a biodiversity footprint metric that was realistic, it should be possible to develop a system whereby those products with the greatest biodiversity footprint were taxed (or banned if their biodiversity footprint was too great), leaving those with the lowest BF to be cheaper and more likely to be purchased. I have to say I am not a great fan of using market-based approaches to benefit nature, but the truth is that products are bought and sold in markets of various types; and this would go some way to redressing the  “market failure” where the external cost to nature is not incorporated into the price of a product. The cost to nature extracted through taxation would then need to be ring-fenced and returned directly back to activities which benefitted nature.

Tax and Regulate

Taxation and Regulation seem to be dirty words these days. Governments fall over themselves to adopt this position that regulation is bad for Society, taxation stifles growth and entrepreneurialism. Corporate cheerleaders constantly harp on about the need to remove regulatory burden from businesses. The message seems to be that Regulation (and of course taxation is a form of regulation) is like a disease in the economy – it has inculcated itself into Government and perpetuates itself, vampirically sucking life out of the economy and therefore society. The media happily play along with this charade, all too aware that regulation has come knocking on their door recently.

The truth is somewhat different. At best, Regulation protects public goods (such as nature) from private (and sometimes public) exploitation. The Wildlife and Countryside Act for example, protects our finest wildlife sites (SSSIs) from being turned into intensive farmland, quarries, housing developments and new roads. It took a very long time to actually achieve this (over 50 years since the first Act created SSSIs in 1949). and during that time countless SSSIs were lost to those very things. True, Regulation can become very bureaucratic and the bureacracy can soak up all effort leaving practically no public benefit – the BAP process is a good example of this. However, this is not in itself a good reason for getting rid of Regulation.

The combined effects of land reform and a taxation and regulation system that places nature at its heart, could see the current continuing loss of nature reversed, but this will take a long time.

As I wrote yesterday we can take action now, by re-distributing the land that is already in sympathetic, or at least potentially sympathetic hands.

 

Posted in agriculture, animism, Beavers, biodiversity, Common Agricultural Policy, conservation, ecosystem services, environmental policy, European environment policy, farming, Floodplains, Forestry, Forestry Commission, greenspace, housing, management, neoliberalism, NFU, Owen Paterson, public goods, public land, regulatory reform, semi-natural | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

What are we waiting for?

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Miles King

Reading George Monbiot’s book on re-wilding has made me think a great deal about what would need to change in Britain in order for us to restore nature to something like a sustainable level, and to give it the resilience it will need for the coming changes wrought by climate change.

I think we do need some areas that are re-natured – I prefer this to re-wilding, as wild and wilderness mean so many different things to different people. These will need to be big, really big. Mark Fisher of the Wildland Institute at the University of Leeds reckons that 250,000ha would be enough for a sustainable population of 9 wolf packs. An area this large would also sustain more of the really large-scale natural process on which our nature depends, including things like windthrow, tree diseases and possibly fires (in the warm future) and the interaction between these events and large scale wild herbivore grazing. And while we can reintroduce predators like the Wolf and Lynx, and the smaller ecosystem engineers like the Beaver, Boar, Wisent and Elk, what about the lost big boys – the Aurochsen, Straight tusked elephant, Rhino, Hippo and Giant Deer?

I think it’s hard for us to imagine what the Pleistocene British landscape would have looked like, with these giant herbivores roaming around making a real mess, when they weren’t being trophically cascaded by their predators. It does seem, in comparison, that the Holocene Forest would have been a rather quiet, closed place, without these giants. Should we introduce some large beasties into the re-nature areas, as Monbiot suggests. Could we GM a forest elephant into a Straight-tusker? Or are feral cows and ponies the best we can do. With climate change coming, should we deliberately encourage the flora of warmer climes – Holm Oak, Sycamore, European Plane, Downy Oak, Walnut and so on?

These re-natured areas could be seen as the land equivalent of marine “no take zones”, where nature could both find sanctuary and provide a source for colonisation into the rest of the country.

250,000ha is a very large area though. In fact, it’s the size of Dorset. What would happen to all the towns and villages? Would people carry on living within this mosaic of re-naturingland. And how much would it cost to acquire all this land, even if the owners agreed to sell. At a conservative £10,000/ha, that’s a tidy £2.5Bn. Still that is not beyond all possibility. I have a feeling many owners would simply refuse to sell up – but others would undoubtedly want to come and live there. Could there be a mosaic of continuing land use interspersed with “re-natured land”. That seems slightly more plausible, but with current legislation restricting “dangerous wild animals” to living only within high security fences, the logistics seem implausible, to say the least.

OK so 250,000ha is probably totally unfeasible. What about 50,000ha? That may be too small to support a viable population of wolves, unless they roamed beyond the confines of the re-natured zone, which, without a very large fence constantly repaired, they would do.

The Semi-Natural
It is less ambitious to argue that 20% of the UK should be managed semi-natural habitat – that means that farming, forestry and other land-uses continue but at a sufficiently extensive level to enable sustainable populations of native species to thrive. 15% of England supports priority habitat at the moment, so this is not an unrealistic target. There will be a small amount of semi-natural habitat lost within the “re-naturing” areas, but overall the gains will outweigh the losses. “re-naturing” areas and semi-natural areas should form a coherent network, as Making Space for Nature has recommended.Further, many of our semi-natural habitats are in tiny patches which are unsustainable (the lifeboats are sinking). We need much larger patches of semi-natural habitat.

High Nature Value Farming
Outside these areas, we should support the maintenance of High Nature Value farming areas (HNV). These areas do support some priority habitat, but within a matrix of extensively managed farmland. Roughly a third of agricultural land in the UK is HNV farmland: this needs supporting – ideally through reflecting the natural value of the products it produces, rather  than through subsidy support.

Letting Go
If we reduce (to zero) land-use intensity to benefit nature in some places, does that mean that we have to increase land-use intensity elsewhere to make up the difference? The unpalatable answer is yes. I think there are strong arguments now to say that for large areas of lowland farmland, there is practically no nature left, apart from the extremely adaptive species. Would it not be better to concentrate on producing food from these areas, and focus effort on those other areas where nature still survives? That may mean letting some species go extinct and that is definitely controversial. Figures in State of Nature show that specialist species continue to decline despite all our efforts and that decline will eventually lead to extinction. That process may well accelerate with climate change.

Who owns what, where?
It’s worth remembering that the Forestry Commission own of manage over a Million Hectares, Defence Estates owns or manages 240,000ha. What’s left of the country conservation agencies own probably over 100,000ha of land as National Nature Reserves.The National Trust owns 267000ha in England and Wales, and NTS owns another 76000ha. The Wildlife Trusts collectively manage nearly 100,000ha and RSPB itself owns c150000ha. Prince Charles’ Duchy of Cornwall owns 54000ha and the Church of England another 50,000ha. These two landowners profess to place nature at the core of their value systems.

Over 1.3 Mha of land is in public hands, and nearly 600,000ha in wildlife charities or similar. The problem is that too much of the resource is scattered, surviving as islands in a sea of hostile land-use. Could there be some process of land-swapping to agglomerate the land-holdings into large clusters within a network? There would need to be some complicated land transfers but there is no reason why this area of land could not be used as the basis for new re-naturing areas, a coherent network of large semi-natural areas, and a sustainable area of HNV farmland.

What are we waiting for?

Posted in agriculture, biodiversity, conservation, environmental policy, farming, Floodplains, George Monbiot, grazing, management, public land, rewilding, semi-natural, uplands, wolves | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Re-Naturing or Re-wilding

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Miles King

It was a great debate yesterday evening at the Linnean Society. The only thing that would have made it better is if we had carried on for another two hours. I think pretty everyone in the audience had a question to ask, and only about five were asked.

George was a bit under the weather with a bug he had picked up from his toddler, but he spoke eloquently and passionately. Aidan and Clive had brought powerpoint presentations, which, with only five minutes to present their case, limited their impact. I look forward to seeing the slides again when they are up on the Linn Soc website. I read out my prepared speech as it was the only way I could be sure to get the necessary points across in the time.

There were some excellent questions and we really tried to find some ground over which we could debate, but in truth there was a lot of common ground between us.

I have written a piece about re-naturing (I prefer that to re-wilding) on Martin Harper’s blog today. I’ll reblog it on here when I get home at lunchtime.

Posted in conservation, forest elephant, George Monbiot, rewilding, semi-natural, straight tusked elephant, wolves | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Age of Can Do

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Miles King

Here’s the piece Mark Avery published on his blog this morning. It encompasses some of the thinking I’ve been doing in preparation for this evening’s debate. Let me know what you think.

Can Do

We are living in the age of Can Do. We haved moved on from “I think therefore I am”, and now we are “I do because I can”. Smart phones are a good example. Not so long ago, people on trains or the tube would read the paper, listen to music on their walkmans, read a book or stare at their feet. Now most of them play games, listen to music, read the paper, stare into space, all on their smart phones (or tablets). Not because it is a better thing to do, but because they can. It’s the path of least resistance.

The Struggle to Understand

The same is true of our relationship with the rest of nature. We used to depend utterly on nature in a real and very direct way – if we didn’t gather wild plants and hunt wild animals we starved. We muddled along before and after the Neolithic, learning to live with the nature we could live with (domestication); avoiding the nature we couldn’t live with – with varying success – and cursing the nature that created problems for us. Weeds, that were originally wild food, became things that prevented us growing better crops; predators that once threatened to eat us, became demonised and/or worshipped, but still ate our livestock. Disease took our children, crops and livestock – and we created gods to channel our grief, assuage us and allowed us to express our desires to control that which we could not. We made sacrifices, precisely because we could not afford to, of our children, animals, harvest, and material goods, in the hope we could appease the deities we had created, to avoid further loss or perhaps to provide favour. Providence held sway in our minds.

Gloria in Excelsis

 It wasn’t all bad. We also gloried and wondered at nature and its beauty (when we weren’t cursing it) and  created deities to explain the inexplicable pleasure and wisdom nature provided us.  That relationship with nature also created music, art, dance, poetry and epic stories to encapsulate that glory, pleasure and pain and to provide explanations for the inexplicable. What we know from that which has survived from eg Palaeolithic art (like my favourite, the spotty horses of Peche Merle) indicates this relationship has been there for over 30,000 years, possibly far longer.

Pleistocene landscapes

 That relationship has gradually changed. The changes started at a pace we would now think of as glacial. It’s difficult to know just how far back, though Palaeolithic peoples were already managing drylands by fire 50,000 years ago (and previous species of Homo used fire many millennia further back). Even in the UK only a few short steps after recolonising the land after the Ice, the first tentative efforts to manage the land included the creation of hunting grounds by burning areas of upland heath that were already partly open, to encourage prey animals to visit or improve sight-lines for missile-based hunting. Before cereal crops arrived with the Neolithic, there is evidence we were already increasing the production of key wild plant resources, favouring hazel growth over other understorey shrubs in the Holocene forest.

Speedy Neolithic

 The Neolithic certainly speeded things up. Though there were plenty of setbacks along the way; and with each ebb and flow as civilisation rose and fell, techniques were developed then lost, then returned. By the enlightenment there was a clear philosophical (and theological) basis to “improve” the land, to break out of the Malthusian trap of development, overpopulation, starvation and decline. With each technological improvement, the relationship between us and nature (not a balance but a dynamic interplay) has shifted incrementally in our direction. What, for example, did the shift from the Ox to Horse power in the 18th century do, for our heaths, woods, cereal fields and grasslands? What did the introduction of gunpowder to Europe from China do for our effectiveness at hunting down and finally exterminating those denizens of our Palaeolithic nightmares, the Wolves.

Change in Power

 Fast forward to the 20th Century where on land the creation of potent agrochemicals combines with the shift from horse to Tractor; and at sea, sailing trawler gives way to steam trawler then diesel trawler in a historical eye blink; monofilament plastic replaces hand woven fabric nets and horsetail, silk or linen lines.

After all those centuries of having to make do, of toiling to grow more crop than weed, of watching cattle die of the mysterious Murrain, of making sacrifices to appease the gods, of losing fishermen to storms and watching woven-grass nets disintegrate: Now we are in charge! We have reached that sunlit plateau, we have the dominion over nature the Bible (other religions are available) has taught us is our birthright.

Vacant Possession

We can choose to evict nature from “our” spaces, and increasingly all spaces. We don’t have to accommodate wild flowers in our meadows – we can create meadows and pastures of pure grass, full of the nutrients we know produce more meat, more milk, faster and cheaper. We don’t have to bother with wild trees in forests, we can produce pine rapidly and cheaply, in neat rows that are easy to harvest. We can forget about all those pesky weeds (many of which started out as our wild harvest remember) in our crops and focus on producing more of the plants with the highest levels of energy. We will not go hungry or die from devastating infections like our forebears did.

Rid us of this Pox

 In our gardens we can choose whether we want dandelions and daisies in our lawn, or not. We quickly chose not to harbour parasites in and on our bodies (no surprise there) and we can consign many infectious diseases to the history books if we choose to: Smallpox is already consigned to a Level 5 biosecurity facility or two – Polio will be next.

For some elements of nature, such as Smallpox, we have deliberately chosen to eradicate this species. The same is true of those elements we call diseases of livestock and crops. But in the totality of nature, these are an infinitesimally small proprtion of the lost or disappearing species. The others are just collateral damage to a greater or lesser extent. There is no conspiracy to exterminate nature, we just do because we can.

 Farmers can choose whether to have wildflower meadows or not. Not surprisingly they choose not to – And 98% of all the meadows that existed just 75 years ago, when they did not have that choice, have gone. Fisherman can now choose whether or not to remove all the fish from the sea. Not surprisingly they choose to do so; not because they actively want to see the seas devoid of fish, but because it provides them with a living. They can and therefore they do.

The End of An Age

 I think this can-do approach is leading fairly rapidly to the end of an age; the age of the semi-natural, when human endeavour combined with nature to create post wilderness landscapes and seascapes. The habitats and communities of species that co-existed in this semi-natural realm were mostly derived from what went before; and would re-emerge in slightly less tangible form with each civilisational collapse, plague, war or agricultural depression. Such post-war “wildernesses” have emerged in Europe, as described in George Monbiot’s book and this essay. How long they will survive is anybody’s guess, but history would indicate their all too temporary nature.

 This semi-natural age was not some Romantic ideal of harmony, more like a long battle front, some places seeing little action, others with skirmishes and occasional full-scale battles along the way. The semi-natural age, that has lasted, 15000, 30,000, perhaps 70,000 years is coming to an end. We can now choose which of nature to retain – for example we can create a cacophony of different versions of the ancient Denizen Canis Lupus, from forms which help us protect our stock against their wild cousins, down to infantilisms like the tiniest Chihuahua – how about that as a testament of our Success? Or we can choose to re-create a modern version of the pre semi-natural Pleistocene age, perhaps re-engineering a few extinct megafauna, like the Straight-tusked Elephant or the Glyptodont. We can do what we like. Or at least we think we can….

Nature Conservation

 Where does that leave nature conservation? What are we trying to conserve and why? We are certainly trying to conserve the last vestiges of the semi-natural, or at least its most recent incarnations – perhaps to assuage our guilt at what we now know we have done. We try and conserve farmland birds, even though they have been engineered out of the system. Just like the farmland birds, desperately seeking some place vaguely reminiscent of the niches they occupied just 50 years ago, our meadow flowers have already found there is nowhere to go; maybe the odd churchyard, or road verge, but mostly now just living in the leaky-lifeboats we call nature reserves and protected areas.  I say leaky lifeboats because they are all too small to sustain populations of any but the most mobile and adaptive; they gradually leak the more demanding species away. Extinction debt is I think one of the most powerful concepts to arise for nature conservation in recent years. Climate Change is magnifying its impact.

Landscape Scale Dreams

 So we grasp at straws such as landscape-scale conservation. Yes there are success stories (butterflies), but mostly we talk aspirationally and airily. We believe that through the power of persuasion and with the Righteousness of the enlightened, we can turn back this tide and that, magically, farmers and other landowners will willingly reduce their income and output, fighting against every sinew in their body and soul (helped by their High Priests in the NFU and CLA) telling them to produce more. In truth Society offers scant compensation for these losses, through Agri-Environment Schemes for example (another sacrificial offering?), and offering badges of honour. Wealthy landowners who have excellent cashflow and the motivation of long-standing paternalism, are happy to make sacrifices of production to see nature return, albeit temporarily and on their terms. But watch them take the lion’s share of those compensation payments, divvied up with the conservation charities which campaigned so vociferously for their creation “to support hard-up farmers to protect nature”.

Museum Pieces

 Is it wrong of nature conservation to wish to conserve the semi-natural? Or course not. Apart from anything else that is what we have, and why would we not want to try and protect and cherish things of great  beauty and wonder, things that provide meaning to so many of us? To criticise nature conservation for trying to conserve the semi-natural is like criticizing an apple for not being an orange. We all live in this age where nature, other than the domestic and their close companions the adaptive, is ebbing away, being forced into ever darker and smaller corners. And we do what we can to slow down the process, perhaps occasionally achieve a small reversal. Arguably what’s left of the semi-natural are indeed museum pieces – but is that really a pejorative? Museums, libraries and their ilk are essential repositories of culture and collective memory; they can teach us so much about our past and help us influence our future for the better.

Calling in the Debt

 We are starting to appreciate that nature provides our life support system and without it we will perish. Ecosystem Services are fashionable and the other neoliberal market-based approaches to valuing nature are modish now, but they are a side show. It really doesn’t matter how much something is worth economically, if you’re not there to realise its value. You can’t take it with you, either as an individual or as a species. Until we change our attitude to nature, as individuals, societies and as a species, we will continue down the road to a point where our extinction debt is called in.

 

Posted in agriculture, animism, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, ecosystem services, environmental policy, farming, George Monbiot, grazing, management, Mesolithic, neoliberalism, rewilding, semi-natural, straight tusked elephant, wolves | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Today’s Blog

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Miles King

Here’s the link to today’s blog, which is on Mark Avery’s website.

 

Posted in agriculture, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, environmental policy, farming, fishing, George Monbiot, management, rewilding, semi-natural, spiritual value | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Blogs here there and elsewhere

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Miles King

Tomorrow I am heading up to London for a debate about nature conservation at the Linnean Society, with George Monbiot, Aidan Lonergan and Clive Hamble.

I have written something which will go on Mark Avery’s blog tomorrow morning – this is my personal view on where we have come from and what that means for conservation.

And I will have written something else for Martin Harper’s blog, looking to the future, which will go out on thursday morning. I will probably reblog these here later in the week.

The debate I believe is being video’d and the Linnean Society will post the video on their website.

Posted in anti conservation rhetoric, biodiversity, George Monbiot, rewilding, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The fallacy at the heart of the Governments biodiversity offsetting proposals

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Miles King

I have been thinking a bit more about last week’s Biodiversity Offsetting debate at the All Party Parliamentary Group on Biodiversity, which I blogged about here. Something was niggling away at the back of my mind and I couldn’t quite work out what it was until the weekend.

As I mentioned, the proposals as they stand apply only to built development within the planning system. This would be the regulatory framework to make offsetting mandatory, at least for larger projects. But the offset suppliers would not necessarily sit within the same framework. The Minerals Products Association suggested that they would be ideal people to supply offsetting because they take land, remove the minerals, then put it back to some after-use which can include benefitting biodiversity. Their activities sit squarely in the planning system. That all sounds ideal, except that they are doing that already – Nature after Minerals, an excellent partnership project, is doing this. Section 106 agreement are the long standing, though still flawed, mechanism to require developer to “make good” the environmental and social impacts of their developments. Section 106 has probably been used to best effect in restoring mineral sites. What would a switch to a biodiversity offsetting approach achieve beyond what is already happening? It’s difficult to see it as anything other than a move to wriggle out of statutory restoration requirements and into a market-based approach.

Where else could offsets be supplied? how about Nature Reserves! Well, the organisations that own nature reserves (mostly conservation charities and statutory agencies) should be looking after them in an exemplary way anyway, since that is what they were set up to do. Again it’s difficult to see how offsetting would add much to what is already being done there.

Ok we’re running of choices here – I know, farmland. That would be ideal. It’s mostly lost all its biodiversity already, so offsetting is bound to achieve an improvement on what’s currently there. Farmers could either use offsets to create entirely new habitat (within the maximum 32 years time span available in the Defra offsetting proposals) or use it to restore habitat that has been degraded.

Creating entirely new habitat is always very attractive. OK, so a farmer gets paid loads of money through the offsetting market, to create a new, say, meadow, for example. Meadows of BAP quality can be created within 10 or 20 years. Of course they won’t be anything like ancient meadows, but that’s another story. Great – mission accomplished. Except that if an offsetting agreement lasts only 20 years (and its funding only lasts 20 years), what happens then?

I can see 3 options for the future of that meadow.

1. the farmer, out the goodness of their heart, continues to manage the meadow sympathetically because they just love having it on their farm.

2. the farmer successfully finds more offsetting credits to continue to pay for its management, if the rules allow.

3. the farmer ploughs up the meadow and returns it to intensive agriculture.

1. is possible but unlikely. 2. may not be allowed within the rules. 3. in theory, if the meadow has reached BAP quality, would be prevented by the EIA (agriculture) Regs. Of course there’s nothing to stop the farmer temporarily abandoning the meadow until it loses its BAP quality, at which point the EIA Regs no longer prevent them from ploughing it. That might take 2 or 3 years.

So the problem I see with this approach is that there is a fundamental mismatch between the Regulatory Framework within which sits the Offset buyers ie the developers, and that which applies to the Offset providers, the farmers.

 

Posted in agriculture, biodiversity, Biodiversity APPG, biodiversity offsetting, EIA, farming, housing, meadows, Owen Paterson, regulatory reform | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments