Saturday 18 May 2013

Brock Stars




It’s over a year since I first wrote about the government’s proposed cull of badgers in South west England intended to reduce the incidence of bovine tuberculosis in cattle.  Although the timetable has been pushed back by around a year from the original plans because of various legal challenges, and although one environment secretary has gone and a new one taken office, the cull will go ahead starting on June 1st this year.  It almost seems as if government ministers don’t read my blog!

I don’t intend to rehash the arguments I made last year.  The blog post, “Stop This Pointless Cull”, remains as valid now as it was then.  Suffice to say that the science clearly indicates that culling will not prove effective as a means of controlling the disease. Culling has been tried before and failed.  It’s been rejected by the devolved Welsh government as cruel and ineffective.  And an alternative in the form of vaccination is available at a cost effective price.

With that in mind, I read two interesting pieces on Twitter this week.

The first is the launch of a new website dedicated to tracking and debating the issues around badgers and bovine TB. It’s called BadgerGate.  I particularly like their principles, clearly stated, which begin with the paragraph:

We are not about ‘farmer bashing’ or anyone else bashing. Bovine TB and its management are complex, sensitive and controversial matters. Not surprisingly, feelings on both sides of the debate often run high. However, that’s no reason why people shouldn’t be able to debate the issue in an informed and civil manner.”

 Part of the problem here is that both sides, the farmers and the protestors, have become entrenched in their respective positions, to the point that facts just get in the way of a good argument.  It threatens to turn in to a rerun of the fox hunting debate which became characterized, wrongly, as a fight between town and country.

The site includes a link to a Government E Petition started by Queen guitarist, Brian May, demanding a Parliamentary debate on the issue, which incidentally has now reached over 200,000 signatures, double the figure needed to force a response.




The second tweet to catch my eye was from DiscoverWildlife.com.  I confess I’ve never heard of this publication but it seems to be the digital version of the BBC’s Wildlife Magazine.  It has some nice photographs and interesting features.  The tweet was a link to a poll to nominate a ‘national species’ for the United Kingdom.

“Unlike many other countries around the world, the UK has never had a national species to call its own. BBC Wildlife Magazine thinks that Britain deserves a national plant or animal of its own – so we have launched a public poll to find a wildlife icon we can all be proud of.

Australia has the kangaroo, New Zealand the kiwi, South Africa the springbok, America the bald eagle, and Russia the brown bear. But what about Britain? What should our national species be? Which species best sums up the UK’s national character, and our history and aspirations?”

It seemed like a bit of fun so I followed the link, and guess what was the very first nomination vying for this prestigious accolade:  of course it was the good old brock!

Wouldn’t it be marvelous if in the same month that the government launched its barbaric and useless attack on badgers the British public announced that this was our national animal?

Saturday 11 May 2013

Money! Money! Money!





How is your ‘natural capital’ doing?  Are you getting good value from your ‘ecosystem services’?

If you don’t have the faintest notion what I’m talking about then it is possible that you are not at the cutting edge of current environmental thinking.  These are terms in the new lexicon of market based ecology.  According to this school of thought we have to recognize the economic value of nature in order to safeguard it.  The reason we have been so cavalier in destroying our natural environment is because we don’t recognize what it’s worth.  If you regard nature as worthless and infinite then of course it is expendable.  If you can put a monetary value on ‘green infrastructure’, forests, hills, rivers etc. in the jargon of this philosophy, then you will go a long way to ensuring their survival.

The UK government is at the forefront of this movement.  The Natural Capital Committee was established last year ‘to provide independent expert advice on the state of English ‘natural capital’.  It reports not to the Environment Secretary but to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
 
‘Natural capital’ is simply ‘nature’. ‘Ecosystem services’ are natural processes that benefit mankind, as if helping man was the whole point of nature.  For instance if bees didn’t naturally pollinate our crops as an ‘ecosystem service’ we would presumably have to get the local council to do it.  But surely man’s tendency to put himself outside the natural world, rather than as a player in it, is the root of most of our present and historical ecological issues?

There is no question, that mankind benefits enormously from natural processes in all kinds of ways.  Forests and oceans act as carbon sinks, rivers and lakes provide drinking water and places of recreation, upland moors regulate water runoff and prevent flooding of lowland cities, and so on.  In 1958 in China Mao Zedong launched a famous campaign to extirpate sparrows, which were charged with stealing the peasants’ rice.  Millions of sparrows were killed as the birds were driven to near extinction.  In the following years rice yields plummeted as the crops were ravaged by insects, and an estimated 20 million people died of starvation.  Far from being a pest, the birds had been providing an ‘ecosystem service’.

If we can adequately recognise these beneficial effects in advance then we can balance the value that nature provides alongside the proposed ‘benefits’ of destroying it.

It’s tempting to dismiss this way of thinking as some sort of neoliberal market based snake oil being peddled by right wing politicians and businessmen, the very people environmentalist have been fighting against for years.  And it’s true that when ecologists start speaking the language of economists it’s bankers who are the first to recognise the opportunities.  In Wall Street and Canary Wharf people in investment banks are trying to work out how to measure ‘blended revenue streams’ including contributions from nature along with traditional economic valuations of land.  Could such ecosystem services be securitised and then traded on a new green exchange?  If ecology can be ascribed a monetary value then it becomes possible to trade offsets.  A company can destroy a forest in one place by paying for another one to be created elsewhere.

Yet the idea has gained traction with some deep green environmentalists too.  Tony Jupiter is a former Executive Director of Friends of the Earth (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) with a string of green credentials to his name.  In his recent book, “What Has Nature Ever Done For Us”, he argues that he and others have spent decades campaigning for the protection of nature for its own sake and, despite occasional victories, the trend has been one of managed retreat.  The moral argument does not seem to be enough.  Only by recognising that the environment has an economic value that can facilitate economic growth will we prevent the further destruction of forests, loss of soils, depletion of aquifers, extinction of animals and plants and plunder of the oceans.

This way of thinking is increasingly common in environmental debates.  In the recent fight to get the EU to apply restrictions on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, various bodies calculated the potential economic loss to Europe if bees and other pollinators were not available to provide free pollination as an ‘ecosystem service’.  (The Soil Association put the figure at £430m per annum for the UK alone.)  Indeed these arguments may have helped sway the argument in favour of a limited ban.

In making the case for new Marine Protected Areas on the Scottish seabed, the Marine Link Taskforce claimed that MPAs could be worth £10bn to the Scottish economy by “mitigating against extreme weather impacts, boosting fisheries and securing Scotland's tourism appeal.”

While I definitely do not think the environment is worthless or infinite I have a number of serious concerns with this approach.

While it is theoretically possible to put an economic value on ecosystems or large geographical features, how do you calculate the ‘natural capital’ of individual species?  Would the Kenyan safari industry collapse if there were no rhino left to satisfy the tourists?  Of course not, as long as there are lions, giraffes and all the rest.  What about butterflies or penguins or cowslips?  Are any of them worth saving for their economic value?

What happens if you calculate the value of ‘natural capital’ of a given environmental feature and it doesn’t outweigh the economic benefits of its destruction?  By this measure the Dutch sailors who drove the dodo to extinction while hunting them for meat made the right decision.

One such test will be Lodge Hill in Kent.  This former MoD training ground is home to one of the largest populations of nightingales in the UK, a species which is on the RSPB’s Endangered List.  The government is keen to develop the site.  5,000 new homes will provide jobs and growth, yet Natural England, the government’s own environmental watchdog, has declared the area a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) which effectively precludes development.  Supposedly the issue has had Chancellor George Osborne complaining about ‘feathered obstacles’ to development, and somewhat sinisterly Prime Minister, David Cameron, has told Environment Minister, Owen Paterson, to ‘get it sorted’.  If either the nightingales or Natural England survive, clearly it will not be because of their economic benefit.

Arguably humans have always put an economic value on the environment.  Many invasive species were introduced specifically to enhance that value, to increase the ROI in contemporary financial parlance. Pheasants were introduced to England, and are now fiercely protected by the shooting industry to the direct detriment of our native raptors. Rabbits, originally brought to Australia to provide food for European settlers are now regarded as the most significant known factor in species loss in that continent.  Surely, both of these initiatives were attempts to enhance the value of ‘ecosystem services’ provided by nature. What if you read the arguments about trees providing a carbon sink but decide that imported, non native varieties do it better?  Exposing nature to free market forces is not guaranteed to achieve ecologically sound outcomes.  In fact it’s almost guaranteed not to.

As Joni Mitchel observed, it is very often easier to see what you’ve lost than to understand the true value of what of you are destroying.  Plus, it is quite normal that the people who potentially benefit from environmental destruction are rarely the same as those who lose out.  Everyone’s personal cost benefit analysis looks different. Many adverse environmental changes are brought about with only good intentions.  Farmers in the North Yorkshire Moors who were encouraged to drain peat bogs to improve the land for sheep grazing had no notion that their efforts would cost the denizens of Richmond and York millions in repairing flood damage.

We are getting better both at modeling potential unintended impacts of environmental changes, and at ensuring that those companies who destroy landscapes pay for their restoration.  To this extent, factoring the whole life cost in to a project and not merely calculating the profits to be made say from extracting oil or metals are welcome.  But you can’t replace a thousand year old forest or replace an extinct species when the wells run dry. Nightingales migrate for thousands of miles and then return the precise tree where they were born.  How will we explain to them that their home has now been relocated 100 miles down the A3? Turn right at Petersfield, you can’t miss it!

However, my greatest concern is that commoditising nature and reducing everything around us to its dollar value, is to lose sight of the very thing we are trying to preserve, and also to lose sight of our own humanity. I want to conserve the planet and every living thing on it not because it may have some potential use of value to me, but because nature is beautiful and wonderful in its own right.  We may have evolved to the point where we no longer see ourselves as part of nature.  All the more reason then, that we should regard ourselves as stewards of the environment and do what we can to protect and nurture wildlife for its own sake.

 For me environmentalism is about values not value. I admire the King James Bible as a wonderful piece of literature, and the phrase that comes to mind the most readily in this context is this one:
“For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?”