Tag Archives: Environment

Conservation, Environment, Natural History, Philosophy, Politics

What I’d like to know from every political party before the General Election

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?

Conservation, Environment, Philosophy

Nature, Politics, and the Environment

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.