The privatisation of nature: Conservation the Cameron way

“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”
- Albert Schweitzer.

In the seminal and uncompromising book Silent Spring, author Rachel Carson begins her Magnum Opus with this prophetic statement. She then goes on to graphically describe the devastation that was at the time being wrought on North America’s intricate, finely tuned ecosystems, as well as on human health, by the yearly application of hundreds of tons of organic compounds, thought by most to be relatively harmless.
The book was intended to alert a complacent public to the dangerous lack of regard for the environment and the ecological communities within it that the agri-chemical industry of the day was demonstrating.

Her aim was true. The book’s power in conveying the principle tenet of ecology: that everything in the natural world is inextricably linked to everything else captured the attention of then president John F. Kennedy, who ordered his Science Advisory Committee to investigate what impact the injurious over-use of certain pesticides and herbicides was having on both wildlife and human populations. On May 5th 1963 the committee published a report that validated Carson’s findings, and legislation was consequently introduced to limit the application of these chemicals until more research had been carried out. Ultimately DDT and PCB’s were banned outright.

To say that thousands of lives, human, bird, and insect, were saved as a result of this action is no over statement, and is a fact that Carson’s biographer, Linda Lear, uses to argue that Silent Spring must easily rank among other history-changing works by the likes of Marx, Smith, and Darwin to name a few.
Needless to say the book’s revelations were followed by some fairly vigorous attempts to silence Carson. Some well-funded parties, whose profitability rested on the continued rate of use of these pollutants, unsuccessfully attempted to sue the book’s publishers. They also spent large sums of money on a PR campaign designed to sell the benefits of their products, as well as trying to discredit the science behind Rachel Carson’s conclusions. It wasn’t long before her critics resorted to issuing personal attacks, as the science itself was racking up more and more incontrovertible evidence in support of the book’s assertions. I’ll leave you to draw your own parallels with events that have recently occupied the media spotlight.

The upshot of the book’s publication almost half a century ago is that numerous organisations and grassroots movements hastened into being soon after. Their establishment heralded a common interest in the preservation of the earth’s natural habitats, and brought to public consciousness an idea of the immeasurable value that they possess in their own right. So it is a little surprising to discover that any knowledge of these activities has thus far apparently failed to permeate the deep swaddling of privilege that cossets the leader of the opposition, as he recently unveiled his party’s plans to issue ‘conservation credits’ with the vapid assumption that they are “placing a value on biodiversity for the first time, because only if you place a value on something can you truly compensate for loss”.

In short, it seems, David Cameron has struck upon the ingenious idea of commoditizing nature itself, and plans to quantify its value and sell it off in neat little packages to the highest bidder. To this end the Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Nick Herbert has been doing the rounds and taking the message to the masses, in a dazzling demonstration that theirs truly is the party that knows the price of everything, yet the value of nothing.

Though the plan is still pretty nebulous in form, the Tories have made assurances that sites currently protected from development, and sites of special scientific interest (SSSI’s) will escape the advancing bulldozers. What they have still to make clear is exactly how they plan to place a value on the biodiversity of any area being considered for development. I wouldn’t be astonished to learn that it’ll work like some kind of giant pick ‘n’ mix; great crested newts, 40p for each one whose habitat you destroy, 30p for every fritillary butterfly, etc. Considering that new species are being discovered in people’s back gardens all the time (must be true, Stephen Fry said so on QI), how do you go about factoring in the undiscovered critters? Since the beginning of last century we’ve managed to lose 183 species worldwide. Those are just the ones we’re aware of. As eminent biologist Professor Edward O. Wilson despairingly points out, our actual knowledge of species diversity barely scratches the surface, with only 1.9 million species having been catalogued by scientists, out of an estimated 20-30 million. How can a habitat destruction compensation scheme begin to account for as yet unknown members of any habitat? It can’t.

The free market seems to my mind an odd choice of force to invoke as custodian of our biodiversity, and history contains no shortage of examples where a conflict of interest between the two has been inherent. The question of whether we should leave the protection of our natural habitats up to developers (a stratum of the business world that is often the first to suffer heavy casualties every time the economy wobbles) is not one we ought to ask lightly. Who will underwrite the loss when they have to call in the receivers, and we suddenly find that they can’t pay compensation? At any rate, some things are simply irreplaceable, established habitats being one example.

David Cameron has recently appointed eco wind-bag and fellow Etonian Zac Goldsmith as the Tory candidate for Richmond. Meanwhile, William Hague is off cosy-ing up to Europe’s climate change deniers and neo Nazis, and the famously skeptical, febrile paleoconservative Lord Lawson of Blaby is busy rounding up various sorts to form the think tank; the Global Warming Policy Foundation, with the stated intention of having an “open and reasoned debate” on the issue of climate change, on the run up to Copenhagen. The Foundation will derive funds from another body set up by Lord Lawson; the Central Europe Trust Ltd. This trust’s clients include: Elf, Total, Shell, BP, Amoco, and Texaco, and as Labour’s most rotund representative John Prescott pointed out, looks “less like a think tank and more like a petrol tank”. While the Conservative’s representatives seemingly occupy such polar and irreconcilable positions on environmental issues, it’s no wonder that the party’s stance on urgent ecological matters comes across, at best, as a bit schizophrenic.

In the interests of disclosure I feel I should point out that I’ve never, to put it mildly, been the Conservative Party’s number one fan. As startling revelations go I’m fairly confident that this won’t have anybody blindly groping for the nearest seating arrangement. But it’s a real worry for me to think that this time next year they’ll almost certainly be holding the keys to number 10. This time next year will also mark the end of the International Year of Biodiversity. Oh sweet providence.
The combined effect of the near future probability of Tory rule and the degree of public complacency about today’s pressing environmental issues (revealed by a quick scroll through any public opinion forum like Cif, and not from the usual shower of mouth-breathers either but from, you know, the normal ones, too) leaves me cold. As things stand, and with the likelihood that Copenhagen will at best yield a defanged and eviscerated Kyoto mark 2, despair is my home, fear is my landscape, and hope is the contents of my toilet cistern.
On that slightly hysterical note I leave you with the prescient words of one of my all time heroes, Henry David Thoreau:
“In wilderness is the preservation of the world”.
Read them and weep heartily.

Media Hacks interpret CRU email hacks.

“a prophetic madman is at least amusing; a superannuated fuddy-duddy is merely pitiful”
-Stephen Jay Gould.

Around the time of my conception, some 30 (-ish ) years ago, a theory regarding the mechanics of continental drift was coming into its own. The physical dynamics of the earth’s crust was being set out in a new paradigm, known today as Plate Tectonics. A mere decade earlier, the proponents of the then controversial new theory were being robustly laughed out of lecture halls the world over, some even found themselves being labelled as ‘mentals’ (probably). Prior to the mechanics of the process becoming a scientifically accepted fact, the idea of continental drift was roundly rejected by the scientific overlords of the day for being patently absurd. Nowadays it is received wisdom, and goes without question. Now we know better.

On then to the present day, and the recent fire-in-a-fart-jar guff-storm, that has eddied and intensified around a handful of agenda-pushing hacks in both the national and international media. It appears that compelling new evidence has been ‘unearthed’, coincidentally right before the eco mind-meld of the Copenhagen climate talks has had time to brainwash the world’s political leaders, and just in time to foil a global conspiracy among the world’s scientific community, who blatantly want to team up with Gordon Brown and Barack Obama in order to form an irrepressible universal authority, through which they can foist their evil communist ways upon the unwitting masses, made docile by a shortage of will-fortifying petrol fumes, and then strip them of their cars, foreign holidays, central heating systems, and shoes, before forcing them AND their children to eke out a pitiful existence making ornate hand carvings from polar bear poo and soy beans. Grrr. At least that’s the impression you may have been left with if you are A: as thick as a sea-lion sandwich, B: a regular reader of The Daily Fail/Torygraph, or watcher of Fox News, or, C: a somewhat tautological combination of the above.

I don’t really want to wade into the quagmire of opinion surrounding the validity, or otherwise, of anthropogenic climate change, to be honest I can't believe it's still regarded as a debatable issue. Except to say that what I’ve seen of the stolen information adds nothing to the debate. There are certainly some unsavoury opinions expressed that don’t reflect well on the individuals expressing them, but as they were never meant for public consumption what difference does it make? None to the science, that’s for sure.

That hasn’t stopped the likes of the Telegraph’s James Delingpole, an obsequious right-wing establishment toady; and three times divorced American Shock-Jock and self appointed guardian of morality, Rush Limbaugh, among others, from all but soiling themselves in their haste to declare a victory for the ‘skeptics’ over the publication of private emails between scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. In response to the sorry saga Rush Limbaugh has been quoted as saying: “I've instinctively known this from the get-go, from 20 years ago! The whole thing is made up, and the reason I know it is because liberals are behind it! When they're pushing something, folks, it's always bogus.”

Well whoop-de doo to you and your instinctive knowledge, Rush, you bastion of reason, you font of wisdom, you. There's a clear lesson to us all here, as the instincts of a rabidly right-wing militant republican talk radio host, who spends his waking life shitting boiling venom on anything and everything good and decent in the world, largely for the benefit of like-minded yee-haw redneck types, who never let facts get in the way of forming a livid opinion on anything, shows. Obviously such instinctively gleaned knowledge automatically trumps the findings of rigorous scientific method applied to data collected and collated by an international community of highly respected, independent experts of climatology and meteorology. Yeah, you go, girl!

Really though, the notion that scientists from institutions such as CRU, the Met Office Hadley Centre (HadCRUT3), The National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC) of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), The Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), part of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) have colluded to deceive the world by collecting analogous data, then falsifying conclusions to reach a broad consensus, is beyond satire. And if anybody doubts there is a consensus, then they should take the issue up with The Royal Society.

There have already been calls, from both sides of the debate, for the head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones to resign over the emails. Even eco-champion George Monbiot has started to bang his drum to this effect, on the grounds that it all “could’ve been handled better”. Wouldn’t that set a marvellous precedent? After giving a “no comment” comment to the press (a de facto admission of guilt, apparently) this valued scientist should be forced to lose his professional position over a handful of cherry-picked, out of context quotes stolen from private departmental emails, from a period spanning over a decade, should he? Settle down, George. Don’t expect members of the scientific community, unaccustomed to the spotlight, to win much ground in a PR battle against the sort of media-savvy arse wipes so intent on destroying the credibility of what-or-whoever they take exception to. A statement explaining the emails’ contents has been issued by the university; anything further to that just diverts energy and focus away from the important stuff. Let the science speak for itself.

“Kids will do anything for the taste of dairylea”

Unbelievably, not the triumphant rallying cry of an international paedophile ring, as your jaded, tabloid-addled mind may have inferred. It is, however, a pretty typical example of the kind of trite assumption advertising execs might have boldly asserted, in the days before the ASA would have demanded evidence in the shape of a peer reviewed meta-analysis into the infant inhibition-busting properties of dairy by-products, before it allowed such a claim to be trumpeted. Those were the days. I for one remain unconvinced of the powers of congealed buttermilk, and have always maintained a healthy indifference towards any such products. I’m also unaware of any incidences where juvenile acts of atrocity have been committed with the intention of securing a steady supply of the insipid little wedges.
I am, however, fairly convinced that most kids could be persuaded to do a great many things for a free custard cream. A conviction formed through personal experience, no less...

‘Sandra’ was our village’s very own screaming hysterical woman. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most provincial little backwaters have at least one loony-tune to call their own, and Sandra was one of the very many inhabitants of our locality coveting that prized title. If it’s true that every village gets allocated an idiot then ours was evidently being used as some kind of candidate holding pen.
Anyway, Sandra was hard to miss, even when she wasn’t stood at the top of her driveway, squawking obscenities at some poor, unsuspecting passer-by who’d had the temerity to glance in her general direction. She had an assortment of mysterious ailments that necessitated her being attired on a full-time basis in a Day-Glo pink dressing gown. In combination with her lurid orange hair which, thanks to the short thrifty style of chop favoured by Trish, the village’s resident mobile hairdresser, gave her head the appearance of a pixellated pumpkin, the violent clash of this two-toned effect could induce vertigo at fifty paces.

It went without saying then, that we children generally gave Sandra a wide berth. One day during the summer holidays of ’89 when heat and youthful insouciance got the better of our judgement, a small group of us were playing outside her house when she sprang, like a funnel-web spider from its lair, wielding a biscuit tin from which she invited us each to take ONE custard cream. It all felt so wrong; her rictus smile, the unsolicited generosity of her offer of confectionery. In spite of my instinct to resist, I took a biscuit, we all did, and proceeded to be lured into her hallway with promises of better treats to come. Possibly a Tunnock’s tea cake, I can’t be entirely sure now. Once inside, the façade quickly fell away, as did any further offers of cookies, and she promptly launched into a thirty minute invective about how callous and thoughtless we all had been for playing in full view of her living room and her two housebound offspring. I should mention at this point that her two children would, if left to their own devices, have happily joined us outside were it not for their mother’s total neuroticism about it being too wet, too dry, too hot, too cold etc, for her loins’ fragile fruits to safely venture. As a result these two poor little fuckers were condemned to languish in the chemical mist of their mum’s OCD-driven cleaning frenzies, with nothing but the biscuit tin for comfort. Consequently, they also ‘enjoyed’ morbid obesity, permanent upper respiratory tract infections, and a matching pair of perennial Hitler moustache-style snot sculptures on their upper lips.

While our bollocking was being issued, I couldn’t help staring at the subdued siblings, wondering if they were going to raise any objection to their mother’s paroxysm. Sat passively, the two tiny, pudgy prisoners of love, with their coryzal tributes to the fuehrer, barely raised a section of heavy mono-brow. It occurred to me that this was business as usual for them. It also occurred to me that we were being held hostage.
In due course we were frogmarched out into the garden and forced to play with the unfortunate pair. Before long we were able to stage our escape by clambering over the chain-link fence, once Sandra had finally disappeared from view – presumably to liberally apply Dettol to any surfaces we’d touched – and we lived to play another day. The desperate beseeching look on those children’s clumsy hulk-like features as I made a final backwards glance before fleeing haunts me still.

Quite aside from incidences like this, which were far from isolated, life growing up in the midlands’ industrial countryside was on the whole a happy experience for me. Bordered by chocolate-box Cotswold villages, our little enclave was unlikely to appear in any guide to the region’s scenic loveliness, being, as it was, basically a giant cabbage patch. What wasn’t under a sea of artificially heated glass was under intensive crop cultivation, and as a child, naïve to the mechanics of the free-market and the commoditization of food, I failed to understand why we bought the same food at the supermarket, shipped in from far-flung reaches of the globe, as that which was growing right on our doorstep. If only someone had explained the intricacies of Capitalism and the Common Agricultural Policy to me, all would have become clear. All of which leads me, in a highly contrived and convoluted way, to a discussion I had with my friend Paul, down the pub t’other night.

Since the publication of the Stern review earlier this year, the debate around food security and sustainability has been pretty well hijacked by individuals driving their own agenda. As trite assertions go, the frontrunner so far for fatuous, myopic declaration to rival all others is the notion that the world’s population would have to become vegan in order to be sustainable. My initial, facetious response was that I’d like to see how that would be enforced anywhere inside the Arctic Circle, but in all seriousness, this is exactly the sort of solipsistic vacuum logic that leads to nothing more than a sense of superiority from its espousers. I’m still not entirely certain what the founding argument behind this one-size-fits-all pseudo-solution is, but I can guarantee this: in a world where the breeding, feeding, slaughter, and export of lamb from New Zealand to Britain consumes considerably less resources than the cultivation of the glasshouse crops in my home town – even if they were sold in-situ, the simplistic option of not eating meat/animal-derived protein doesn’t hold any water in the argument surrounding the sustainability of food production.

Some very real and pressing concerns over animal welfare and the health implications of eating too much meat aside, the idea that vegetarianism/veganism is somehow a moral imperative for humankind is built on a shaky premise indeed.

On the subject of finding a way to feed ourselves that doesn’t exacerbate the suffering of the many, many people this world has teetering on the brink of starvation, I would just like to say this: the world already produces enough food to feed every person on the planet adequately. Those who lack the means to acquire sufficient food today will still be in the same position tomorrow, regardless of any decision you individually make as to what dietary regime to follow.

As of April 15th 2008 an obligation on the part of all suppliers of fuel to the U.K to include a percentage of ethanol in their diesel became enshrined in law. Any of the human grade food crops that don’t get fed to livestock will be fed into our cars instead. With the number of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition set to push the 1 billion barrier this year, this is nothing short of scandalous. That said, please bear in mind that, where you find yourself in the privileged position of having a choice about whether to eat this or that foodstuff, arguing about the relative merits of one choice over another, given the appalling depths of privation faced by so many, is a perversion of grand proportions. However well-meaning it may be, a decision to avoid eating meat barely begins to tackle the raft of truly epic humanitarian crises over food and energy security facing us all in the near future.
Until patterns of land ownership – barely changed in this country since the feudal era – see a more equitable distribution among the world's population, until the invisible hand of market forces becomes severed from the production of food, and until there is radical reform of the CAP, there are going to be children in this world who’ll do anything for the taste of, well… anything, really.
That’ll be all.

Hello world

Well, this is just what the doctor ordered, isn’t it? Another shrieking twit filling the blogosphere with unsolicited, inconsequential tripe.
Ah, well.‘Tis a mere drop in a groaning, vast online ocean of similarly moronic outpourings, and so I shall proceed.
To remain in keeping with that fine British tradition of breaking the ice with a good old moan about subjects of universal repugnance, I’m going to start with one of my very own pet hates. Literally.
I’m talking shit here (and not for the first time, many might be tempted to interject, ho ho). Specifically, dog shit.
And so with metaphorical ice pick at the ready, and only a sleepy spaniel, a warm mug of tea, the nihilistic drawl of Thurston Moore, and the plate-glass clatter of a million kamikaze raindrops for company, here goes nothin’…

Shit happens. Neither you or I need the tenets of Scientology, or any other major religion to point this out, we just knows it. But a strange thing happens at this time of the year, and, as a result, those of us in the business of dog walking for pleasure or profit invariably end up in the business of a dog, as it were. The strange thing in question is the advent of autumn.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not attempting to blame that most ephemeral and, arguably, most beautiful of the four seasons itself for any aforementioned scatological mishaps. No way. I am easily autumn’s number one fan, and as a long-suffering victim of my immune system’s martyrdom to pollen, I begin to keenly anticipate its arrival any time after April. You couldn’t begin to imagine the sheer joyous relief I feel as autumn cuts its first swathe of crisp freshness through the oppressive, sweaty fug of summer’s protracted death throes. It might as well come wearing tights and a cape, as it puts paid to the heady excesses and indulgences of the previous season’s tyranny: the sticky sweltering days and nights; the crippling self-consciousness of feeling simultaneously under and over-dressed at any given moment; wasps; televised sport; beer gardens and T.V adverts full of people loudly declaring their love of cider; the temporary suspension of civilisation as those self-same types labour under the misapprehension that I might actually want to see them half dressed and singing; the photo-reactive-chemical laden air that hangs motionless, like a stillroom suspension, and laced with the stench of zealously applied BBQ lighter fluid, the inevitable asthma which ensues… I could go on. I won’t.
Thank goodness then, for autumn. Sweeping through the city’s parks and tree-lined streets, bringing with it a friendly melancholy, a warm nostalgia, and dignity to the death of chlorophyll’s monochromatic monopoly.
As far as I’m concerned summer officially sucks. But that’s not to say that autumn is a hazard-free seasonal utopia, and I feel duty bound to warn you, my dear fellow pedestrian, of the perils that lie beneath its picture postcard edifice.
You may, like me, be inclined to succumb to the irresistible allure of cavorting gaily through the drifts of unfeasibly massive leaves that envelop the urban landscape at this time of year; shovelling toe-fuls of the amber piles into the air with infantile abandon, or crunching a path through dry, ochre hued windfalls. But proceed with caution, I urge you, as, inviting as these tracts of fallen leaf litter are, they conceal a multitude of ills and minor civil infractions. Chief among which being poo. (Hopefully) Dog poo, to be precise. Apparently, the atmospheric clarity, and overwhelming instinct to gather and harvest that runs deep in the psyche of cultures founded in these cool temperate zones, doesn’t extend to the very many dog owning citizens, who are quite at ease using the earth-toned groundcover as an effective camouflage for their canine cohorts colonic output, thereby saving themselves all the unnecessary hassle and effort that scooping the poop requires. And you’d be amazed at how rapidly those child-like feelings of nature inspired awe will drain away, to be replaced with soul-chilling horror the second your foot finds and flings up one of these aromatic enemies of joy. Consider yourselves warned.
Staying on the subject of autumnal assaults on one’s ambulatory health and safety for a moment, given the number of municipal and private fruit trees that overhang the city’s thoroughfares, heavy with an abundance of produce, it’s not unusual at this time of year to be the unfortunate subject of Newtonian Law, and find yourself directly in the path of un-harvested fruit’s inevitable descent, as happened to me not so long back (Alas, no revolutionary new scientific paradigm was born, it was only a crab apple after all). But, I ask you, in these times of increased awareness over food security, and the implications of waste, could we not find a better use for this bounteous by-product of the Town and Country Planning Act’s aesthetic sensibilities? Rather than hurriedly avoiding a cranial confrontation with one of our plummeting five-a-day provisions every time we take a stroll, could we honestly not collectively think of a more appropriate destination for these free-falling comestibles? Food for thought indeed. Peace out, catz.