By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website 6th June 2013

The dam is beginning to crack, faster than I would have believed possible. Britain, one of the world’s most zoophobic nations, is at last considering the return of some of its extinct and charismatic mammal species.

While wolves, lynx, bears, bison, moose, boar and beavers have been spreading across the Continent for decades, into countries as developed and populous as ours, and while they have been widely welcomed in those places, here we have responded to this prospect with unjustified horror.

Or perhaps I shouldn’t say “we”. The population as a whole tends to be more sympathetic to reintroductions than the tiny number of people who own most of the land*. Britain has one of the highest concentrations of landownership in the world, and the big landowners are often the most conservative members of the population. Unfortunately they are the ones who have power in the countryside.

(*Erlend B. Nilsen et al, 7th April 2007. Wolf reintroduction to Scotland: public attitudes and consequences for red deer management. Proceedings of the Royal Society – B, Vol. 274, no. 1612, pp.995-1003. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2006.0369)

Despite the best efforts of the landowners, some very determined people have been trying to bring to Britain a little of what has been delighting the people of other European nations. After years of obstruction, things are suddenly starting to happen.

Following the successful beaver reintroductions in two parts of Scotland, the first release in Wales could be about to happen. The Welsh Beaver Project hopes to be able to reinstate some animals in the Rheidol valley in mid-Wales next year.

In Scotland a group of biologists called the Lynx UK Trust has now applied for a licence to release lynx – a predator which should be welcome in a country where deer numbers have gone beserk.

Unsurprisingly, the old guard – the landowners and the bodies which represent them – is doing all it can to prevent such reintroductions, and any wider rewilding.

In response to the beaver plan, a spokesman for the National Farmers’ Union said:

“I haven’t seen any evidence that they’ll contribute anything to the eco-system. The history as far as introducing mammals in particular is not a particularly good one. We’ve seen the grey squirrel, rabbits and even mink so in reality there isn’t much evidence to suggest they do any good at all.”

When people make arguments as bad as this, you know they haven’t a leg to stand on.

Unlike grey squirrels, rabbits and mink, beavers are native to the United Kingdom. They were hunted to extinction for their beautiful pelts, their meat and the chemical (castoreum) they secrete, which was of great value to the perfume industry. The last ones died out in the 18th Century. They are a keystone species, which means that they have a larger influence in the ecosystem than their numbers alone would suggest.

Their dams, burrows and ditches and the branches they drag into the water create habitats for a host of other species: water voles, otters, ducks, frogs, fish and insects. In both Sweden and Poland, the trout in beaver ponds are on average larger than those in the other parts of the streams: the ponds provide them with habitats and shelter they cannot find elsewhere*,**. Young salmon grow faster and are in better condition where beavers make their dams than in other stretches***. The total weight of all the creatures living in the water may be between two and five times greater in beaver ponds than in the undammed sections****.

(* Åsa Hägglund and Göran Sjöberg, 1999. Effects of beaver dams on the fish fauna of forest streams. Forest Ecology and Management: Vol. 115, nos 2–3 ,pp259–266. doi:10.1016/S0378-1127(98)00404-6.
** Krzysztof Kukuła and Aneta Bylak, 2010. Ichthyofauna of a mountain stream dammed by beaver
Archives of Polish Fisheries. Vol. 18, no. 1, pp33-43. doi:10.2478/v10086-010-0004-1
*** Douglas B. Sigourney et al, 2006. Influence of Beaver Activity on Summer Growth and Condition of Age-2 Atlantic Salmon Parr. Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, Vol. 135, no. 4, pp1068-1075. doi:10.1577/T05-159.1
**** Robert J. Naiman, Carol A. Johnston and James C. Kelley, 1988. Alteration of North American Streams by Beaver. BioScience, Vol. 38, No. 11, pp. 753-762. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1310784)

Beavers slow rivers down. They reduce scouring and erosion. They create small wetlands and boggy areas. They trap much of the load that rivers carry*, ensuring that the water runs more clearly.

(* Robert J. Naiman, Carol A. Johnston and James C. Kelley, 1988. Alteration of North American Streams by Beaver. BioScience, Vol. 38, No. 11, pp. 753-762. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1310784)

The NFU’s ignorance of these basic facts reinforces the longstanding suspicion that farmers’ leaders know next to nothing about the natural world. The self-styled “guardians of the countryside” are often less well-informed than the average urbanite.

Similarly misleading claims surround the plans to reintroduce the lynx. This is what the National Farmers’ Union says:

“Particular concerns would be the safety of livestock and the increased stress levels in livestock resulting from these predators as well as any impacts on local wildlife and biodiversity.”

The lynx is an ambush hunter, which lives exclusively in woodland. It will enter open spaces only with extreme reluctance. If your sheep aren’t in the woods, the lynx poses no threat to them. Only where farmers fail to keep their sheep out of the woods (something they deliberately fail to do in some places, with devastating consequences for woodland ecology) are their animals at risk.

As for the impacts of the lynx on wildlife and biodiversity, the lynx is part of our native fauna: in other words a component of our wildlife and biodiversity. Our wildlife has adapted to live alongside it. A specialist roe deer predator, it will help to control this overpopulated species, as well as some of the exotic species of deer (sika in particular) which are damaging forestry and the regeneration of woodlands in some parts of Britain.

But that’s not the worst of the scaremongering by farmers’ groups. In response to my book Feral, the Farmers’ Union of Wales has claimed that my proposals for the rewilding of parts of the uplands “would be akin to the herding of American Indians onto reserves.”

That’s quite a claim. As I’ve come to expect from these organisations, the FUW has produced not a stick of evidence to support it.

What is the fiendish device I’ve proposed to enable this act of genocide? Er, scrapping Rule 12 of the European Union’s Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition code. This rule forces farmers to clear the land of “unwanted vegetation” if they want to claim their subsidy payments. It’s a policy which has caused the pointless, taxpayer-funded destruction of habitats all over the EU.

In other words, I’m suggesting that farmers should have a choice over whether or not they want to clear their land. If they don’t want to clear it or keep sheep on it, they can still claim their payments. Terrified yet?

The other proposal I make is that the main subsidy they receive (the single farm payment) should be capped at 100 hectares of land. It’s outrageous that the dukes, sheikhs and speculators with the largest holdings are each receiving millions of pounds a year from taxpayers much poorer than themselves, merely by virtue of the amount they own.

A cap would give small farmers an advantage over large ones, making it less likely that they will lose their land and livelihoods. Very much “akin to the herding of American Indians onto reserves” in other words.

What we are seeing here is an example of how unaccustomed to challenge the farmers’ leaders have become. If their batty assertions were confronted more often, they might stop exposing themselves to ridicule. But so dominant are they in debates over rural policy, and so seldom are conflicting voices heard, that they have not had to temper their scaremongering fantasies with reality.

Governments and other agencies treat farmers as if theirs is the only rural voice that counts. Yet they are a small minority even of the rural population. In Wales, farmers (both full- and part-time) account for 1.5% of the total population and just 5% of the rural population. A similar situation prevails across the rich world. Yet, in the countryside, they have 95% of the voice, and everyone else is marginalised from decision-making.

You can see the impacts of this dominance in England’s impending badger cull. Professor John Bourne, who conducted the government-funded study which showed that badger killing is a waste of time and money, recalled what he was told by a senior politician:

“Fine, John, we accept your science, but we have to offer farmers a carrot.  And the only carrot we can possibly give them is culling badgers” .

For too long, farmers’ leaders have come to see their interests and that of the countryside as synonymous, and for too long the rest of us have accepted that view. It’s an aspect of what I call agricultural hegemony: the exercise of the cultural hegemony Antonio Gramsci identified, but in the countryside. It’s time we challenged it.

George Monbiot’s book Feral: searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding is published by Allen Lane.

Made for the Guardian by Scriberia, Matt Hill and Paul Boyd. Narrated by George Monbiot. 3oth May 2013

I’ll get this right in a while – a couple of technical glitches to sort out. Sorry! In the meantime, you can watch it here.

And there’s more on rewilding here.

Posted by George Monbiot, 30th May 2013.

Here is the film Newsnight made about my work on rewilding. I make the case that rewilding could restore the ecology of Britain’s uplands, which have been reduced to little more than bowling greens with contours, I excoriate sheep and the British conservation ethos and argue in favour of the reintroduction of wolves. A sheep farmer is very rude about me, and the head of the local wildlife trust makes some extraordinary (and untrue) statements about the horrific threat posed by … trees. Which supports my contention that conservationists here often seem to be terrified of nature. All good fun in other words.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22706729

Much more on this in Feral: searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding, published today.

Published in The Big Issue, 20th May 2013.

RM: Aldo Leopold, the great American conservationist, wrote in 1947 that ‘wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow’. Feral argues otherwise: can you explain the book’s chief premise?

GM: Leopold was right. But ecosystems don’t have to be primordial wilderness to be diverse and fascinating. The rewilding I would like to see involves allowing natural processes to resume. It means pulling down the fences, reintroducing missing plants and animals, and then stepping back. At sea it’s even simpler: excluding commercial fishing and other destructive practices from large areas. Rewilded areas of land and sea, I think, would be better described as self-willed than as wilderness: governed by their own processes, rather than by human agency.

RM: Feral is, in part, a counter-factual: it imagines the lives we no longer lead but might, the species that no longer exist but could, and the faculties we no longer engage but should. How did you think (research, explore, experience) it into being?

GM: It took me by surprise. When I started writing it, I had no idea where I was going. I had a powerful sense that I was suffering from ecological boredom. This sense was heightened by two powerful experiences. In the first case I had picked up a deer that had just died and slung it across my shoulders. In the second, I was trying to spear flounders in an estuary. In both cases I was suddenly overwhelmed by two sensations: profound familiarity with something of which I had no prior knowledge and a sense that I had stumbled across something magnificent and thrilling. I believe I had tapped into vestigial emotions, essential psychological equipment which evolved to guide us through more interesting times.

I started writing about my attempts to live a more exciting life, which meant seeking the least disturbed fragments of forest, taking my kayak far out into the Irish Sea to find fish and birds and dolphins, diving for spider crabs. But I soon found that the thrills I sought were limited in ecosystems as depleted as ours. Then I stumbled across the word rewilding and I knew, for the first time, what I was writing about.

RM: ‘Hope’ is a key word and vital concept in the book, which describes your own return to hopefulness. Leopold (again), wrote that the price of being a conservationist or ecologist is that you ‘live in a world of wounds’, able to see damage that is invisible to others. How do you reconcile hope and wound?

GM: Again, he’s not wrong, and another motivation was to seek to dull the pain of seeing so much that I love being lost. It was not wholly successful, because in researching the subject I discovered that the losses have been far greater than I had imagined. Every continent except Antarctica had a megafauna until modern humans arrived. With the exception of Australasia, elephants dominated the habitable landmass of the planet. Britain and Europe had a megafauna similar to the remnants in Africa today: forest-dwelling elephants, rhinos, lions, hyaenas, hippos.

But I also came to see the great potential for restoration, not least as farming retreats from the less fertile parts of Europe and North America. So great is this retreat on both continents that we might consider reintroducing not only wolves, lynx, bison, moose, and bears to places from which they have been extirpated, but also, perhaps, members (or closely related species) of the lost megafauna.

RM: Where is the most hopeful place you know in Britain?

GM: The Dundreggan estate in Glen Moriston, which has been bought by a remarkable organisation called Trees for Life. It wants to restore the Caledonian forest to much of its former range, and reintroduce missing species, including, within 30 years, wolves.

RM: Cancer is wild in the sense of being ‘self-willed’, ‘irrepressible’, ‘disobedient to human control’, and so forth. The common cold is wild; we might even argue that capital – self-willed, emergent in its properties – is wild. How do you fold certain desirable kinds of wildness into your account, and keep others out?

GM: What I have sought in Feral are freedoms whose exercise does no harm either to other people or to the natural world. I feel that in rewilding I have found some of these: that the mass restoration of ecosystems can enhance the opportunities for people to lead wilder lives than might otherwise be permitted in our crowded, buttoned-down world. But, as you suggest, not everything that is wild improves our lives.

RM: The ideal of re-wilding as a dynamic process with no fixed outcomes or deliverables is appealing, but as soon as you select the species you plan to re-introduce, surely you are engaged in a highly directive form of management? Can you give an example of how re-wilding works most ideally?

GM: For me, the aim of rewilding is to restore to the greatest extent possible ecology’s dynamic interactions. In other words it’s about enhancing the opportunities for animals, plants and other creatures to feed on each other: to re-build the broken strands in the web of life. That means bringing back species which are able to restore this dynamism. So yes, there’s some direction there, but its aim is to facilitate the free and unpredictable development of ecosystems. Without large disruptive herbivores and carnivores, ecosystems have almost nowhere to go: successional processes are arrested.

But I’d also like to see missing species of all kinds restored: blue stag beetles, pelicans, sturgeon, grey whales and night herons, all of which once lived in Britain, as well as wolves and lynx and boar and bison.

RM: Have you initiated or become involved in any new re-wilding projects recently? Is the book itself stimulating new initiatives or networks?

GM: I’ve decided to wait until the book is published (as I write there are still three weeks to go). With luck there will be enough enthusiasm to start generating new projects. In the meantime, I’d urge people to support Trees for Life.

RM: How do people figure in your vision of a re-wilded landscape? How does it escape the old and dangerous deep-green dream of extreme population reduction?

GM: I believe that rewilding must be compatible with human rights and social justice. There’s a chapter in the book in which I look at the terrible human histories behind the creation of some of the most magnificent rewilded ecosystems, and strongly urge that they should not be repeated.

My approach differs in this respect from that of some anarcho-primitivists, who imagine a time in which people in industrialised nations might return to hunting and gathering. You need only discover that the maximum population of Britain during the Mesolithic (the last period in which we lived only by those means) appears to have been around  5,000 to see what thist would entail. For me, rewilding is not about abandoning civilisation but enhancing it.

RM: The book’s subtitle is ‘Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding’. But ‘enchantment’ is never explicitly defined, existing rather as a kind of atmosphere. You speak at one point of nature’s ‘endless capacity to surprise’: is that at the heart of enchantment?

GM: I would struggle to define it. I suppose the closest I come to a definition in the book is being “filled with wild yearning: of the kind that used to afflict me when I woke from that perennial pre-adolescent dream of floating down the stairs, my feet a few inches above the carpet”. Or of detecting a “high, wild note of exaltation – after a drought of sensation that had persisted since early adulthood; a drought I had come to accept as a condition of middle age, like the loss of the upper reaches of hearing.” I see that in both cases I’m harking back to sensations that were more familiar when I was younger. Perhaps enchantment means the recovery of an openness to emotion and experience that is often lost as we age.

RM: Could you briefly describe your ideal re-wilded Britain of 2050?

GM: I would be surprised if by 2050 farm subsidies still exist. If they go, then a great deal of unproductive land which is farmed only with the help of public money becomes available for other uses. I would like one of those uses to be rewilding. But how the land will develop once it has begun is impossible closely to predict, which is one of the reasons why I find rewilding enthralling. It’s likely though that there will be a lot more vegetation, and much of it will evolve into woodland, creating habitats into which wolves, lynx, bison and other species could be released. I would not like to see a mass rewilding of productive land, which will become ever more important for feeding people.

At sea, reefs of corals, oysters, sea fans and other species would regenerate themselves, fish and crustaceans could breed and grow once more to the great sizes they reached in antiquity. The ecosystem could begin to support the whales, bluefin tuna and large sharks which were once abundant around the coasts of Britain.

George Monbiot’s book Feral: searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding is published on May 30th by Allen Lane.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 28th May 2013

Until modern humans arrived, every continent except Antarctica possessed a megafauna. In the Americas, alongside mastodons, mammoths, four-tusked and spiral-tusked elephants, there was a beaver the size of a black bear: eight feet from nose to tail(1). There were giant bison weighing two tonnes, which carried horns seven feet across(2).

The short-faced bear stood thirteen feet in its hind socks(3). One hypothesis maintains that its astonishing size and shocking armoury of teeth and claws are the hallmarks of a specialist scavenger: it specialised in driving giant lions and sabretooth cats off their prey(4). The Argentine roc (Argentavis magnificens) had a wingspan of 26 feet(5). Sabretooth salmon nine feet long migrated up Pacific coast rivers(6).

During the previous interglacial period, Britain and Europe contained much of the megafauna we now associate with the tropics: forest elephants, rhinos, hippos, lions and hyaenas. The elephants, rhinos and hippos were driven into southern Europe by the ice, then exterminated around 40,000 years ago when modern humans arrived(7,8,9). Lions and hyaenas persisted: lions hunted reindeer across the frozen wastes of Britain until 11,000 years ago(10,11). The distribution of these animals has little to do with temperature: only where they co-evolved with humans and learnt to fear them did they survive.

Most of the deciduous trees in Europe can resprout wherever the trunk is broken. They can survive the extreme punishment – hacking, splitting, trampling – inflicted when a hedge is laid. Understorey trees such as holly, box and yew have much tougher roots and branches than canopy trees, despite carrying less weight. Our trees, in other words, bear strong signs of adaptation to elephants. Blackthorn, which possesses very long spines, seems over-engineered to deter browsing by deer; but not, perhaps, rhinoceros.

All this has been forgotten, even by professional ecologists. Read any paper on elephants and trees in East Africa, and it will tell you that many species have adapted to “hedge” in response to elephant-attack(12,13,14,15). Yet, during a three-day literature search in the Bodleian library, all I could find on elephant adaptation in Europe was a throwaway sentence in one scientific paper(16). The elephant in the forest is the elephant in the room: the huge and obvious fact that everyone has overlooked.

Since then much of Europe – especially Britain – has lost most of its mesofauna as well: bison, moose, boar, wolf, bear, lynx, wolverine, even, in most parts, wildcat, beavers and capercaillie. These losses, paradoxically, have often been locked in by conservation policy.

Conservation sites must be maintained in what is called “favourable condition”: which means the condition in which they were found when they were designated. More often than not this is a state of extreme depletion: the merest scraping of what was once a vibrant and dynamic ecosystem. The ecological disasters we call nature reserves are often kept in this depleted state through intense intervention: cutting and burning any trees that return; grazing by domestic animals at greater densities and for longer periods than would ever be found in nature. The conservation ethos is neatly summarised in the forester Ritchie Tassell’s sarcastic question: “how did nature cope before we came along?”(17).

Through rewilding – the mass restoration of ecosystems – I see an opportunity to reverse the destruction of the natural world. Researching my book Feral, I came across rewilding programmes in several parts of Europe, including some (such as Trees for Life in Scotland and the Wales Wild Land Foundation) in the UK, which are beginning to show how swiftly nature responds when we stop trying to control it (18,19). Rewilding, in my view, should involve reintroducing missing animals and plants, taking down the fences, blocking the drainage ditches, culling a few particularly invasive exotic species but otherwise standing back. It’s about abandoning the Biblical doctrine of dominion which has governed our relationship with the natural world.

The only thing preventing a faster rewilding in the European Union is public money. Farming is sustained on infertile land (by and large, the uplands) through the taxpayer’s munificence. Without our help, almost all hill-farming would cease immediately. I’m not calling for that, but I do think it’s time the farm subsidy system stopped forcing farmers to destroy wildlife.

At the moment, to claim their single farm payments, farmers must prevent “the encroachment of unwanted vegetation on agricultural land”(20). They don’t have to produce anything: they merely have to keep the land in “agricultural condition”, which means bare. I propose two changes to the subsidy regime. The first is to cap the amount of land for which farmers can claim money at 100 hectares (250 acres). It’s outrageous that the biggest farmers harvest millions every year from much poorer taxpayers, by dint of possessing so much land(21). A cap would give small farmers an advantage over large. The second is to remove the agricultural condition rule.

The effect of these changes would be to ensure that hill farmers with a powerful attachment to the land and its culture, language and traditions would still farm (and continue to reduce their income by keeping loss-making sheep and cattle(22)). Absentee ranchers who are in it only for the subsidies would find that they were better off taking the money and allowing the land to rewild.

Despite the best efforts of governments, farmers and conservationists, nature is already beginning to return. One estimate suggests that two thirds of the previously-forested parts of the US have reforested, as farming and logging have retreated, especially from the eastern half of the country(23). Another proposes that by 2030 farmers on the European Continent (though not in Britain, where no major shift is expected) will vacate around 30 million hectares (75 million acres), roughly the size of Poland(24). While the mesofauna is already beginning to spread back across Europe, land areas of this size could perhaps permit the reintroduction of some of our lost megafauna. Why should Europe not have a Serengeti or two?

Above all, rewilding offers a positive environmentalism. Environmentalists have long known what they are against; now we can explain what we are for. It introduces hope where hope seemed absent. It offers us a chance to replace our silent spring with a raucous summer.

George Monbiot’s book Feral: searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding is published by Allen Lane.

References:

1. Castoroides ohioensis.

2. Bison latifrons.

3. Arctodus simus.

4. Nancy Sisinyak, no date given. The Biggest Bear … Ever. Alaska Department of Fish and Game. http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=232&issue_id=41

5. San Diego Zoo, April 2009. Extinct Teratorn, Teratornithidae. http://library.sandiegozoo.org/factsheets/_extinct/teratorn/teratorn.htm

6. Oncorhynchus rastrosus.

7. The animals I’m referring to are the straight-tusked elephant and the Merck’s and narrow-nosed rhinoceri. Woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos, which were mostly grass-eaters, living in cold dry steppes without trees, moved in with the cold weather.

8. Dick Mol, John de Vos and Johannes van der Plicht, 2007. The presence and extinction of Elephas antiquus Falconer and Cautley, 1847, in Europe. Quaternary International, Vols. 169–170, pp.149–153.

9. Peter Taylor, June 2009. Re-wilding the grazers: obstacles to the ‘wild’ in wildlife management. British Wildlife Vol.51, no. 5 (special supplement), pp50-55.

10. Hervé Bocherens et al, 6th December 2011. Isotopic evidence for dietary ecology of cave lion (Panthera spelaea) in North-Western Europe: Prey choice, competition and implications for extinction. Quaternary International, Vol. 245, no. 2, pp 249–261. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2011.02.023

11. The last record of a lion in the region is a bone from an animal that lived in the Netherlands – then still connected to Britain – 10,700 years ago. Derek Yalden, 1999. The History of British Mammals. T and AD Poyser, London.

12. Jonas Chafota, 1998. Effects of Changes In Elephant Densities On the Environment and Other Species: How Much Do We Know? Cooperative Regional Wildlife Management in Southern Africa.  http://agecon.ucdavis.edu/people/faculty/lovell-jarvis/docs/elephant/chafota.pdf

13. J. J. Smallie and T. G. O’Connor, 2000. Elephant utilization of Colophospermum mopane: possible benefits of hedging. African Journal of Ecology. Vol.38, pp352-359.

14. Peter Baxter, 2003. Modeling the Impact of the African Elephant, Loxodonta africana, on Woody Vegetation in Semi-Arid Savannas. PhD dissertation. University Of California, Berkeley.

15. And in South Africa: Graham Kerley et al, 2008. Effects of elephants on ecosystems and biodiversity. In: RJ Scholes and KG Mennell (eds) Elephant Management: A Scientific Assessment of South Africa. Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg.

16. Oliver Rackham, no date given. Ancient Forestry Practices. In Victor R Squires (ed). The Role of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in Human Nutrition, Volume II. Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems.

17. Ritchie Tassell, pers comm.

18. http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/

19. http://www.permaculture-wales.org.uk/index.php/guest-writers/209-blaeneinion-permaculture-with-beavers-in-it

20. Official Journal of the European Union, 31st January 2009. Council Regulation (EC) No 73/2009 of 19 January 2009, establishing common rules for direct support schemes for farmers under the common agricultural policy and establishing certain support schemes for farmers, amending Regulations (EC) No 1290/2005, (EC) No 247/2006, (EC) No 378/2007 and repealing Regulation (EC) No 1782/2003. Annex III. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2009:030:0016:0016:EN:PDF

21. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/28/utilities-aristocrats-eu-agricultural-policy

22. In Wales, on 2010 figures, the average subsidy for sheep farms on the hills is £53,000. Average net farm income is £33,000. The contribution the farmer makes to his income by raising sheep and cattle, in other words, is minus £20,000. Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences, Aberystwyth University, 2011. Farm Outputs – all sizes. Table B3: Hill sheep farms, 2009/2010. http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/media/0910Iy_11d.pdf

23. Elizabeth Taylor, 16th November 2012. Heeding the coyote’s call: Jim Sterba on the fight with wildlife over space in the sprawl. Chicago Tribune. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-11-16/features/ct-prj-1118-book-of-the-month-20121116_1_wild-animals-wildlife-wild-game-meat/2

24. The Institute for European Environmental Policy, cited by Rewilding Europe, 2012. Making Europe a Wilder Place. http://www.rewildingeurope.com/assets/uploads/Downloads/Rewilding-Europe-Brochure-2012.pdf

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 22nd May 2013

Even before you start reading the devastating State of Nature report, you get an inkling of where the problem lies. It’s illustrated in the opening pages with two dramatic photographs of upland Britain. They are supposed to represent the natural glories we’re losing. In neither of them (with the exception of some distant specks of scrub and leylandii in the second) is there a tree to be seen. The many square miles they cover contain nothing but grass and dead bracken. They could scarcely provide a better illustration of our uncanny ability to miss the big picture:

The majority of wildlife requires cover: places in which it can shelter from predators or ambush prey, places in which it can take refuge from extremes of heat and cold, or find the constant humidity that fragile roots and sensitive invertebrates require. Yet, in the very regions in which you might expect to find such cover (trees, scrub, other dense foliage) there is almost none. I’m talking about the infertile parts of Britain, in which farming is so unproductive that it survives only as a result of public money. Here, in the places commonly described as Britain’s “wildernesses”, almost nothing remains. And the “almost” has become radically smaller over the past 20 years.

Britain is poor in wildlife for a simple reason: we do not possess the wide reserves of unexploited land that remain in most other nations, even in the rest of Europe and North America. That’s the big picture. Like almost everyone, I missed it – until I started researching Feral, my new book calling for a great rewilding.

On the Today programme on Wednesday, Sir David Attenborough named the rising human population as the first of the factors causing the loss of the UK’s wildlife. Though in general he has done an excellent job in promoting the State of Nature report, on this issue he is wrong. That an increasing number of people makes a contribution is undeniable, as more land is used to build houses, and as other amplifications of our lives – cats, cars, mowers, garden chemicals – radiate from our dwellings.

Yet the places from which much of our wildlife has been disappearing fastest are almost uninhabited. Two friends of mine once walked for six days across the Cambrian Mountains in mid-Wales, and did not see another human being. Yet there is scarcely any wildlife either. Cross that bleak plateau and you will see plenty of moorgrass, some tormentil and moss, a few crows, perhaps the odd pipit and skylark, but almost nothing else, except sodding sheep. The hills have been grazed to destruction.

The Cambrians are worse than most places, but there’s a similar story to be told in almost all the uplands of Britain: Dartmoor, Exmoor, the Black Mountains, the Brecon Beacons, Snowdonia, the Shropshire Hills, the Peak District, the Pennines, the Forest of Bowland, the Dales, the North York Moors, the Lake District, the Cheviots, the Southern Uplands and the Highlands. The desertification of our uplands, in common with most of our wildlife losses, has nothing to do with population pressure and everything to do with farming.

You could argue that an intensification of farming is a response to rising population pressure: the need to produce more food has caused greater damage to wildlife. But this is where the madness kicks in: much of the habitat destruction for which farm policies are responsible has little or nothing to do with producing food.

The uplands of Britain are astonishingly unproductive. For example, 76% of the land in Wales is devoted to livestock farming, mostly to produce meat. But, astonishingly, by value Wales imports seven times as much meat as it exports. Six thousand years of nutrient stripping and erosion have left our hills so infertile that their productivity is miniscule. Even relatively small numbers of livestock can now keep the hills denuded.

Without subsidies, almost all hill-farming would cease. That’s not something I’m calling for, but I do believe it’s time we began to challenge the system and its outcomes. Among them is a policy that’s almost comically irrational and destructive.

The major funding that farmers receive is called the single farm payment, which is money given by European taxpayers to people who own land. These people receive a certain amount (usually around £200 or £300), for every hectare they own. To receive it, they must keep the land in what is called “Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition” (GAEC). It’s a term straight out of 1984.

Among the compulsory standards in the GAEC rules is “avoiding the encroachment of unwanted vegetation on agricultural land”. What this means is that if farmers want their money they must stop wild plants from returning. They don’t have to produce anything: to keep animals or to grow crops there. They merely have to prevent more than a handful of trees or shrubs from surviving, which they can do by towing cutting gear over the land.

If they want to expand the area eligible for this subsidy, and therefore make more money, they must get their tractors out and start clearing vegetation. From my kayak in Cardigan Bay I have often watched a sight that Neolithic fishermen would have witnessed: towers of smoke rising from the hills as the farmers burn tracts of gorse and trees in order to claim more public money. The single farm payment is a perfectly designed scheme for maximum ecological destruction.

A survey by the Grasslands Trust documents the destruction of rich and rare wildlife habitats all over Europe as a result of the GAEC rules: wooded meadows in Sweden, limestone pavements in Estonia, coastal scrublands in Corsica. In Germany, pastures are disqualified from subsidies by the presence of small areas of reeds. In Bulgaria, the existence of a single stem of dog rose has rendered land ineligible. In Scotland farmers have been told that yellow flag irises, which for centuries have gilded the fields of the west coast, could be classed as “encroaching vegetation”, invalidating their subsidy claims.

The government of Northern Ireland has been fined £64 million for (among other such offences) giving subsidy money to farms whose traditional hedgerows are too wide. The effect of these rules has been to promote the frenzied clearance of habitats. The system ensures that farmers seek out the remaining corners of land where wildlife still resides, and destroy them.

A farmer can graze his land to the roots, run his sheep in the woods, grub up the last lone trees, poison the rivers with sheep dip and still get his money. Some of the farms close to where I lived in mid-Wales do all of those things and never have their grants stopped. But one thing he is not allowed to do is what these rules call “land abandonment”, and what I call rewilding. For no good reason, public money is used both to engineer the mass destruction of habitats through grazing and clearing, and to prevent any significant recovery.

There is a second tranche of subsidies, which pay farmers to undo some of the damage inflicted by the first tranche. It’s a crazy use of public funds. First farmers are forced to destroy almost everything; then they can apply for a smaller amount of money to put some of it back.

But only a little. The “green” subsidies (known as Pillar 2 payments) reward farmers for making marginal changes, and only in certain places. The Welsh government, for example, assures farmers that these payments “will require at most minor modifications to farming systems.” In fact it expressly forbids them to restore more than a few tiny corners of their land. For instance, the payment for allowing land “to revert to rough grassland or scrub” applies only to areas of one third of a hectare or less.

The results can be seen in the State of Nature report: in the uplands there is an even faster average rate of loss (65% of species are declining) than there is in the rest of the country. But more importantly, the destruction of habitats on infertile land ensures that there is nowhere left to hide. There are no refuges from the intensive farming and development which have erased most wildlife from the more productive lowlands.

I believe that the best means of restoring our native wildlife is to decide that some parts of the country – the least productive places – should be handed back to nature. If we must keep paying people for owning land (a policy which demands far more debate and examination than it has received so far), we should pay some of them to stop trashing it, and to start restoring our missing native wildlife, reintroducing trees, insects and the large mammals of which Britain is almost uniquely deprived. In other words, to reverse the heart-breaking figures exposed in the State of Nature report, and then to go much further.

This doesn’t mean that I believe there should be no change to farming practices in the lowlands. Unlike some people I don’t see rewilding as a substitute for the protection of farmland wildlife. While I would argue against a mass rewilding of high-grade farmland, because of the threat this could present to global food supplies, we lose little by allowing nature to persist in small fallow corners and unexploited pockets of fertile land. If farmland fails to produce enough food, it won’t be because we’ve allowed a few wild species to live among our crops, as agro-chemical companies and their supporters often claim. It will be because fertile land which should be feeding people is instead used to produce biofuels and feed for rising numbers of livestock: issues on which the enthusiasts for intensification remain strangely silent.

In my column next week I will explain how a mass rewilding could take place. There is hope to be found among the ruins, hope of faster and wider transformations than most people would believe possible.

George Monbiot’s book Feral: searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding is published on May 30th by Allen Lane.

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 1st May 2013

 
Here’s something remarkable I stumbled across while researching my column on Monday, but did not have room to include. I hope you’ll agree that it is worth sharing.

I was trying to understand the context for the new chief scientist’s cavalier treatment of scientific evidence, in an article he wrote opposing a European ban on neonicotinoid pesticides. These are the toxins which, several studies suggest, could be partly responsible for the rapid decline in bees and other pollinators.

Just one month into the job, Sir Mark Walport has, I believe, disgraced himself: by misrepresenting the science, misinforming the public about risk and uncertainty and indulging in scaremongering and wild exaggeration in support of the government’s position. I believe he has seriously damaged his standing and that of the office he holds.

Among the many problems with the article he wrote was the way he defined the precautionary principle. Interpreting and upholding this principle is fundamental to the chief scientist’s role. Yet he doesn’t seem to understand what it means. Here’s what he said about it:

“This simple idea just means working out and balancing in advance all the risks and benefits of action or inaction, and to make a proportionate response.”

Oh yes? Here’s how the Rio Declaration, which the UK, with 171 other states, signed in 1992, defines it:

“Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

The difference is critical to an understanding of the government’s environmental responsibilities. As if to underline the fact that he hasn’t grasped it, Sir Mark used his article to do the opposite: he used a lack of full scientific certainty as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.

The precautionary principle, as defined by the Rio Declaration, has, in the words of the European Commission, “become a full-fledged and general principle of international law.”

In other words, it’s not something you would expect a chief scientist to make up as he goes along.

So the question that occurred to me was this. If the government’s chief scientist doesn’t know what the precautionary principle is, does the government know?

On Monday morning I passed my list of questions to the press office at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). When its spokesperson rang me back, after four hours and two further phone calls on my part, she fluently recited the government’s position on neonicotinoids, but didn’t mention my question on how the government defines the precautionary principle.

When I pressed her on this issue, the result astonished me: flat panic. She said she’d get back to me. It took a further two hours. Eventually she sent me this in an email:

“The precautionary principle applies when there is evidence of serious or irreversible damage. In evaluating the evidence it is necessary carry out a scientific evaluation, identify the extent of scientific uncertainty and identify any potentially negative impacts of taking action. Decisions also take into account whether an action is proportionate and what the benefits and costs of an action are.”

Three things interest me about this response. The first is how long it took. The second is the syntactical error it contains (“it is necessary carry out”). Government documents are rigorously copy-checked, so it seems unlikely that it was lifted from existing advice to ministers. These two features suggest to me that the government’s “definition” was cobbled together for my benefit and did not exist before. A search of the government’s public database produces no matching results. Next time I have six hours to spare, I’ll pursue this question with Defra.

The third is that it is not in fact a definition. It’s a statement of how the precautionary principle might be used, but not of what the precautionary principle is.

So here’s the provisional but disquieting conclusion I draw from this encounter: the government of the United Kingdom appears not to possess a definition of the principle which sits at the heart of environmental protection and environmental law. This could explain quite a lot.

Instead it seems to deploy what I call the Providential Principle: if there’s even a one percent chance that our policy will not cause catastrophe, we’ll take it.

You could see this principle at work in its attempt to sell off the national forest estate.

You could see it at work in the government’s strenuous and successful efforts to prevent reductions in the amount of fish caught in our seas.

You can see it at work in the government’s abandonment of the marine protection it promised: striking out most of the proposed marine conservation zones, and reducing those which survive to nothing more than paper parks, in which trawling, dredging and other destructive activities can continue.

You can see it at work in George Osborne’s attempts to scrap or delay our targets for cutting carbon emissions.

You can see it at work in the government’s enthusiasm for biodiversity offsets, and its abandonment of the checks and balances which were supposed to have prevented this scheme from becoming a developers’ charter.

You can see it at work in the news that the environment secretary appears to be about to relax the rules on the dredging of streams, allowing landowners to send in the diggers to turn them into featureless gutters.

And you can see it at work in the government’s efforts, assisted by its new chief scientist, to sabotage the belated attempts to control the use of neonicotinoids.

The government of the United Kingdom seems to understand the providential principle very well and the precautionary principle not at all. It is hard to think of a worse basis for the protection of the natural world.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 30th April 2013

What happens to people when they become government science advisers? Are their children taken hostage? Is a dossier of compromising photographs kept, ready to send to the Sun if they step out of line?

I ask because, in too many cases, they soon begin to sound less like scientists than industrial lobbyists. The mad cow crisis 20 years ago was exacerbated by the failure of government scientists accurately to present the evidence. The chief medical officer wrongly claimed that there was “no risk associated with eating British beef”. The chief veterinary officer wrongly dismissed the research suggesting that BSE could jump from one species to another(1).

The current chief scientist at the UK’s environment department, Ian Boyd, is so desperate to justify the impending badger cull – which defies the recommendations of the £49m study the department funded(2) – that he now claims that eliminating badgers “may actually be positive to biodiversity”, on the grounds that badgers sometimes eat baby birds(3). That badgers are a component of our biodiversity, and play an important role in regulating the populations of other species, appears to have eluded him.

But the worst example in the past 10 years was the concatenation of gibberish published by the British government’s new chief scientist on Friday. In the Financial Times, Sir Mark Walport denounced the proposal for a temporary European ban on the pesticides blamed for killing bees and other pollinators(4). He claimed that “the consequences of such a moratorium could be harmful to the continent’s crop production, farming communities and consumers.” This also happens to be the position of the UK government, to which he is supposed to provide disinterested advice.

Walport’s article was timed to influence Monday’s vote by European member states, to suspend the use of three neonicotinoid pesticides. The UK, fighting valiantly on behalf of the manufacturers Syngenta and Bayer(5,6), did all it could to thwart the nations supporting this partial ban, but failed. Here’s how he justified his position.

First he maintained that “there is no measurable harm to bee colonies … when these pesticides have been applied on farms following official guidelines.” This statement is misleading and unscientific. The research required to support it does not exist.

The government carried out field trials which, it claimed, showed that “effects on bees do not occur under normal circumstances”(7). They showed nothing of the kind. As Professor Dave Goulson, one of the UK’s leading experts, explained to me, the experiment was hopelessly contaminated. The nests of bumblebees which were meant to function as a pesticide-free control group were exposed to similar levels of neonicotinoids as those in the experimental group. The government “might have been wise to abandon the trial. However, instead they chose to ‘publish’ it by putting it on the internet – not by sending it to a peer-reviewed journal. This is not how science proceeds.”(8)

What this illustrates is that these trials have taken place far too late: after the toxins have already been widely deployed. The use of neonicotinoids across Europe was approved before we knew what their impacts might be.

Experiments in laboratory or “semi-field” conditions, free from contamination, suggest that these toxins could be a reason for the rapid reduction in bee populations(9,10,11,12,13,14,15). We still know almost nothing about their impacts on other insect pollinators, such as hoverflies, butterflies, moths, beetles and midges, many of which are also declining swiftly.

Walport went on to suggest that the proposed ban would cause “severe reductions in yields to struggling European farmers and economies.” Again, this is simply incorrect: in its exhaustive investigation, published last month, the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee concluded that “neonicotinoid pesticides are not fundamental to the general economic or agricultural viability of UK farming.”(16) In fact they can prevent a more precise and rational use of pesticides, known as integrated pest management. The committee reports that all the rape seed on sale in this country, for example, is pre-treated with neonicotinoids, so farmers have no choice but to use them, whether or not they are required(17).

He then deployed the kind of groundless moral blackmail frequently used by industry-funded astroturf campaigns. “The control of malaria, dengue and other important diseases also depends on the control of insect vectors.” Yes, it does in many cases, but this has nothing to do with the issue he was discussing: a partial ban on neonicotinoids in European crops. This old canard (if you don’t approve this pesticide for growing oilseed rape in Europe, children in Mozambique will die of malaria) reminds us that those opposed to measures which protect the natural world are often far worse scaremongers than environmentalists can be. How often have you heard people claim that “if the greens get their way, we’ll go back to living in caves” or “if carbon taxes are approved, the economy will collapse”?

But perhaps most revealing is Walport’s misunderstanding of the precautionary principle. This, he says, “just means working out and balancing in advance all the risks and benefits of action or inaction, and to make a proportionate response.” No it doesn’t. The Rio declaration, signed by the UK and 171 other states, defines it as follows: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”(18) This, as it happens, is the opposite of what his article sought to do. Yet an understanding of the precautionary principle is fundamental to Walport’s role.

Among the official duties of the chief scientist is “to ensure that the scientific method, risk and uncertainty are understood by the public.”(19) Less than a month into the job, Sir Mark Walport has misinformed the public about the scientific method, risk and uncertainty. He has made groundless, unscientific and emotionally manipulative claims. He has indulged in scaremongering and wild exaggeration in support of the government’s position.

In defending science against political pressure, he is, in other words, as much use as a suit of paper armour. For this reason, he will doubtless remain in post, and end his career with a peerage. The rest of us will carry the cost of his preferment.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/oct/27/bse1

2. John Bourne et al, June 2007. Bovine TB: The Scientific Evidence. Final Report of the
Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB. http://archive.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/farmanimal/diseases/atoz/tb/isg/report/final_report.pdf

3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/countryside/10015391/Badger-culls-could-help-songbirds.html

4. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9045f86e-ab51-11e2-8c63-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2RYjCpCUI
5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/28/europe-insecticides-ban-save-bees

6. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2013/apr/04/bees-pesticides-neonicotinoid-europe-ban

7. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, March 2013. An assessment of key evidence about Neonicotinoids and bees.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/181841/pb13937-neonicotinoid-bees-20130326.pdf.pdf

8. Dave Goulson, pers comm, 26th April 2013.

9. eg Penelope R. Whitehorn et al, 29th March 2012. Neonicotinoid Pesticide Reduces Bumble Bee Colony Growth and Queen Production. Science Vol. 336 no. 6079, pp. 351-352. doi: 10.1126/science.1215025

10. Mickaël Henry et al, 29th March 2012. A Common Pesticide Decreases Foraging Success and Survival in Honey Bees. Science Vol. 336 no. 6079, pp. 348-350. doi: 10.1126/science.1215039

11. Mary J. Palmer et al, 27 March 2013. Cholinergic pesticides cause mushroom body neuronal inactivation in honeybees. Nature Communications Vol. 4, no.1634.
doi:10.1038/ncomms2648

12. Richard J. Gill et al, 1st November 2012. Combined pesticide exposure severely affects individual- and colony-level traits in bees. Nature Vol.491, pp.105–108. doi:10.1038/nature11585

13. Christof W. Schneider et al, 11th January 2012. RFID Tracking of Sublethal Effects of Two Neonicotinoid Insecticides on the Foraging Behavior of Apis mellifera. PLoS ONE 7(1): e30023. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030023

14. J. Bernal et al, December 2010. Overview of Pesticide Residues in Stored Pollen and Their Potential Effect on Bee Colony (Apis mellifera) Losses in Spain.
Journal of Economic Entomology, Vol. 103, no. 6, pp.1964-1971.

15. Sally M. Williamson and Geraldine A. Wright, 7th February 2013. Exposure to multiple cholinergic pesticides impairs olfactory learning and memory in honeybees. The Journal of Experimental Biology, 1477-9145. doi:10.1242/jeb.083931

16. House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, 25th March 2013. Pollinators and Pesticides. Seventh Report of Session 2012–13, Volume I.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmenvaud/668/668.pdf

17. As above.

18. Principle 15. http://www.unep.org/documents.multilingual/default.asp?documentid=78&articleid=1163

19. http://www.bis.gov.uk/go-science/chief-scientific-adviser

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 25th April 2013.

Warning: this article begins with a spoiler. If you have not read The Road already and intend to do so, please skip the first three paragraphs.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, which I still believe is the greatest environmental work ever written, ends with the shock and beauty that runs through so much of the book:
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

 
The trout are a cipher for all that has gone, in this novel about a world that has lost its biosphere. I think I know why McCarthy chooses to invest them with this role: in a way that is hard to explain, trout seem to be more alive than most other animals. Perhaps it has something to do with their flickering changes of mood – extreme caution, then bold display, skulking in the shadows, then splashing on the surface of the river, sometimes leaping clear of the water – their great speed, their extraordinary beauty, their ability to disappear then flash back into sight, their remarkable range of colour and pattern and shape. And the presence of trout means that other things are alive: they cannot survive and breed without clean, clear water, clean gravel beds and an abundant supply of insect life.

RS Thomas also uses the trout as a metaphor for life and loss, in his beautiful poem Song for Gwydion:

“When I was a child and the soft flesh was forming
Quietly as snow on the bare boughs of bone,
My father brought me trout from the green river
From whose chill lips the water song had flown.

Dull grew their eyes, the beautiful, blithe garland
Of stipples faded, as light shocked the brain;
They were the first sweet sacrifice I tasted,
A young god, ignorant of the blood’s stain”

The trout is the subject of a remarkable intensity of feeling for some people, among whom I count myself. Those who fish for them sometimes seem to understand their moods better than they understand the moods of their partners. (Though perhaps that isn’t saying very much).

These people will go to great lengths to protect and nurture the fish they seek. To this end, they have preserved many thousands of miles of river from pollution, over-abstraction, diversion and canalisation.

This is not to suggest that all activities which boost the number of trout are good for the rest of the ecosystem. Electrofishing to remove competing species of fish, the persecution of cormorants and goosanders and – in the past – otters, herons, ospreys, white-tailed eagles and anything else that ate fish, the ecologically-illiterate campaign by the Angling Trust to kill any beavers returning to England, the clearance of bankside vegetation to facilitate casting: all these impoverish the ecosystem. These practices often betray a lack of imagination and inventiveness in the keeping of the rivers. But I think it is fair to say that trout fishermen have, in ecological terms, done more good than harm, as many of the habitats they value would not exist in any form without them.

Thanks in part to their efforts, trout are now re-appearing in the most unlikely settings. Theo Pike’s book Trout in Dirty Places is illustrated with photos taken amid shopping trolleys and behind housing estates, under flyovers and beside derelict factories, even in a tunnel under Manchester airport. Trout are rapidly returning to revitalised rivers flowing through towns and cities. Last week I travelled to London to see how it is done.

The River Wandle rises in Croydon, among wooded hills and drowsy pastures – sorry, I mean shopping centres and railway lines, tower blocks and junctions. It then flows through Lambeth and Merton, before joining the Thames at Wandsworth. Not very long ago it was an urban sewer. William Morris and Liberty’s built their factories on the river and, betraying their wholesome image, filled it with bleach and mordant dyes. Theirs were among the 90 mills the Wandle supported. In 1805 it was described as “the hardest worked river for its size in the world.”

It was also straightened and canalised in many parts to speed the flow of water away from houses and businesses. Until just 20 or 30 years ago, the National Rivers Authority used to send earthmovers into the river to remove any natural features that had the audacity to develop on its bed, to ensure that it was smooth and even and featureless. Starting in the lower reaches, moving ever further upstream as industry and urbanisation spread south, the river was gradually killed: the last trout was caught, close to the source, in 1934.

Since the Wandle Trust (whose chair of trustees is Theo Pike) was founded in 2000, mostly by local anglers, it has been pulling rubbish out of the river, building structures which change its shape and flow, negotiating with people whose outflows affect it, and restocking it with fish. Now, astonishingly in view of where it has come from – historically and geographically – it looks in places like the kind of chalkstreams you would expect to find flowing through some of the most bucolic landscapes in England. Large numbers of freshwater shrimps and insects live in the river. Brown trout now spawn in its reconstructed gravel beds and grow to a weight of five or six pounds. Wading upstream through the urban jungles of south London, people pursue them with tiny dry flies.

The most interesting of the trust’s projects is the one it calls Trout in the Classroom. Every year it supplies local schools with fish tanks and other equipment and fertilised trout eggs. The children must change the water, ensure the temperature remains steady, and feed the tiny trout once they’ve hatched. I went to watch them releasing the fish into the Wandle at Morden Hall Park.

Their results were mixed: one college had managed to raise 60 trout, another school just two. But everyone seemed thrilled by the project.

One boy told me “We really love these trout and I’m sad we won’t have them any more. But I also feel very happy because they will be free now.”

All the children seemed to be aware that the river had been revived, and many of them now come to the Wandle to paddle and play in the water. “I hope one day I might see these fish when they’ve grown a lot bigger”, one of the girls told me. Some of those who released fish a few years ago now help with the monthly clean-ups, pulling tyres and traffic cones and shopping trolleys out of the river. The trout project seems to have established a connection that wasn’t there before. Similar schemes are starting up in other parts of the country: children as well as rivers are being rewilded.

The Wandle is one of several recovering London rivers being restocked with fish and other wildlife. It is true of course that our demand for ever-escalating quantities of stuff is now being met by industrial production elsewhere, with catastrophic results for ecosystems in those countries. But de-industrialisation in Britain and other rich nations seems inexorable and probably irreversible. If we live in a post-industrial nation, we might as well make use of that fact. If the Wandle can be restored after such punishment, almost anywhere can.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23rd April 2013

In other ages, states sought to seize as much power as they could. Today, the self-hating state renounces its powers. Governments anathematise governance. They declare their role redundant and illegitimate. They launch furious assaults upon their own branches, seeking wherever possible to lop them off.

This self-mutilation is a response to the fact that power has shifted. States now operate at the behest of others. Deregulation, privatisation, the shrinking of the scope, scale and spending of the state: these are now seen as the only legitimate policies. The corporations and billionaires to whom governments defer will have it no other way.

Just as taxation tends to redistribute wealth; regulation tends to redistribute power. A democratic state controls and contains powerful interests on behalf of the powerless. This is why billionaires and corporations hate regulation, and – through their newspapers, thinktanks and astroturf campaigns – mobilise people against it. State power is tyranny; state power is freedom.

But the interchangeable middle managers who call themselves ministers cannot wholly dismiss the wishes of the electorate. They must show that they are doing something to protect what people value. They resolve the contradiction between the demands of the electorate and the demands of big business by shifting their responsibilities to something they call “the market”. This term is often used as a euphemism for corporations and the very rich.

To justify the policy of marketisation, they invest the market with magical capabilities. It can reach the parts that the ordinary scope of government can’t reach; it can achieve political miracles. I don’t believe that market mechanisms are always wrong. I do believe that they fail to solve the problem of power. In fact they tend to compound it.

Last week the European Emissions Trading System died. It was supposed to create a market for carbon, whose escalating price would force companies to abandon fossil fuels and replace them with less polluting alternatives. In principle it was as good a mechanism as any other. What it did not offer was a magical alternative to political intervention.

The scheme collapsed on Tuesday, after the European Parliament voted against an emergency withdrawal of some of the carbon permits whose over-supply had swamped the market(1). Why were too many permits issued? Because of the lobbying power of big business. Why did MEPs refuse to withdraw them? Because of the lobbying power of big business.

If a market is to serve a wider social goal than simply maximising corporate profits, it must operate within a tight regulatory framework. Pricing mechanisms do not magic away the need for regulation: if anything they enhance it. To make them work, politicians still have to confront and overcome powerful interests. They still need to govern and decide. Yet everywhere markets are invoked as an alternative to dirigiste and decisive government.

To make a significant impact, the price of carbon needs to be in the region of €30 or 40 per tonne. It needs to be incapable of falling far, and likely to rise. At the time of writing the price is €2.8(2), and it’s going nowhere. The Economist reports that this puts European carbon permits “below the level of junk bonds.”(3)

In an important respect the scheme has been worse than useless. New airports and roads and power stations have been justified with the claim they they will not raise emissions, as the greenhouse gases they produce will be absorbed by cuts made elsewhere. The one lasting impact of the European carbon market has been to rationalise polluting projects which might not otherwise have been built.

But even as this scheme collapses, governments are launching new ones, creating markets which are far less appropriate – even in theory – than the trade in carbon. Last month, the UK’s Ecosystem Markets Task Force, a body set up by the government but largely composed of corporate executives, published its final report(4). It invokes the magic of the markets to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of democratic governance.

Not everything it proposes is dangerous and wrong. Creating incentives to reforest the hills from which our rivers flow, or for farmers to use anaerobic digesters to process waste makes sense: as long as it redeploys rather than augments farm subsidies. But in other respects an attempt to reconcile the protection of the living planet with commerce simply turns the biosphere into another corporate asset.

For example, the task force revives the old myth that nature is best served by harvesting timber. As long ago as 1995 a paper by the biologists Clive Hambler and Martin Speight showed that of the woodland insect species listed as threatened in Britain, 65% are threatened by the removal of old and dead wood, while just 2% are threatened by a reduction in this management(5). But the task force maintains that bringing “unmanaged woodlands into active, sustainable management for woodfuel … is a win-win for business and nature.”(6) Just as the myth was at last being laid to rest, it has been revived by the need to make nature and markets appear compatible.

This is an example of what happens in a market-based system: any clash between generating profit and protecting the natural world is resolved in favour of business, often with the help of junk science. Only those components of the ecosystem which can be commodified and sold are defended(7,8,9). Nature is worthy of protection when it is profitable to business: the moment it ceases to be so, it loses its social value and can be trashed. As prices fluctuate or crash, so do the fortunes of the ecosystems they are supposed to protect. As financial markets move in, with the help of the environmental bonds and securitisations the task force champions(10), the defence of nature becomes ever more volatile and uncertain. The living planet is reduced to a subsidiary of the human economy.

When governments pretend that they no longer need to govern; when they pretend that a world regulated by bankers, corporations and the profit motive is a better world than one regulated by voters and their representatives, nothing is safe. All systems of government are flawed. But few are as flawed as those controlled by private money.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/16/meps-reject-reform-emissions-trading

2. http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/reutersnews/1.2307050?&ref=searchlist

3. http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/04/carbon-trading

4. Ecosystem Markets Task Force, March 2013. Realising nature’s value: final report.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/ecosystem-markets/files/Ecosystem-Markets-Task-Force-Final-Report-.pdf

5. Clive Hambler and Martin Speight, 1995. Biodiversity Conservation in Britain: science replacing tradition. British Wildlife, Vol.6, no.3, pp137-148

6. Ecosystem Markets Task Force, March 2013. Realising nature’s value: final report.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/ecosystem-markets/files/Ecosystem-Markets-Task-Force-Final-Report-.pdf

7. See also Kent Redford and William Adams, 2009. Payment for Ecosystem Services and the Challenge of Saving Nature. Conservation Biology, Volume 23, No. 4, pp785–787. DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01271.x

and

8. Sian Sullivan, 2012. Banking Nature? The Spectacular Financialisation of Environmental Conservation. Antipode, Volume 45, pp198–217. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.00989.x

and

9. Esteve Corbera, 2012. Problematizing REDD+ as an experiment in payments for ecosystem services. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Volume 4, pp 612–619. doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2012.09.010

10. G Duke et al, 14th June 2012. Opportunities for UK Business that Value and/or Protect Nature’s Services. Ecosystem Markets Task Force. http://www.defra.gov.uk/ecosystem-markets/files/EMTF-VNN-STUDY-FINAL-REPORT-REV1-14.06.12.pdf