The wild isles, p.57
The Wild Isles, page 57
One of the most telling is a plan of Medway Council and Britain’s biggest property developer, Land Securities, to erect 5,000 homes on the outskirts of Rochester, Kent, in an area called Lodge Hill. The site is Ministry of Defence land, long neglected and in transition from scrub to full-canopied woodland and perfect, it would appear, for nightingales. Today it holds 84 singing males and Britain’s largest single population of the species, which since 1970 has declined by 90 per cent.
Each side is claiming that their need for the place is of overriding significance: 5,000 homes as opposed to one per cent of the British nightingale population. It is in many ways a rerun of the Cow Green reservoir debate about industrial water versus wild flowers. One precise difference, however, is the intervening precedent that involves a half-century of destruction that has brought the nightingale to its present plight.
Each side has supplementary arguments. The developers, who have cross-party support in the local council, point out that there are 20,000 local people on the housing waiting list in the Medway area. Lodge Hill is, according to them, the only large site where infrastructure can also be created, including three primary schools, a nursing home and a hotel, creating 5,000 jobs.2
The RSPB staff who are leading the challenge point out, meanwhile, that it is not just about nightingales. The place has 19 bat roosts as well as significant scarce reptile and plant communities and rare breeding butterflies, all of which are strong indicators of its wider importance for biodiversity (this MOD location is so little known because access has been highly restricted for a century). Most significant is that it is already an SSSI and thus, theoretically, protected by legislation. The developers, however, are claiming that they must build there and nowhere else and its legal status should be overridden in the national interest. For those championing wildlife in this dispute, Lodge Hill is an acid test of the very framework on which conservation has been based since the Second World War.
Regardless of the eventual outcome at Lodge Hill, which is only a trifling part of the full national impact, when all these fresh inroads into surviving biodiversity are audited in a generation’s time they will reveal nature’s inexorable decline.a
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3. The third Truth is about understanding nature. Ecology as a formal scientific discipline has only been in existence for about 150 years. That is a short time for it to have influenced the ways in which we think and function. What ecology tries to bring into focus is the dynamic structures of natural systems – habitats, biomes etc. – which are infinitely complex. Essentially, ecology exposes how everything in an ecosystem impacts upon everything else. The usual form invoked to illustrate this level of interconnectedness is a sphere, rendered at its most simple in the circle of life in The Lion King, which, for all its Disneyfied triviality, is still an ecological parable.
A circle may be an inadequate representation of ecological complexities, but the real issue for the British environment is that the dominant pattern in our thought processes is not a circle, but a straight line. Look at the page you are reading to appreciate the fundamental line-mindedness of our species. Recall the plough lines running through the Flow Country that Magnus Magnusson likened to claw marks made by an angry god. Recall Vermuyden’s dead-straight ditch from Earith to Salter’s Lode right through the middle of the Fen. Recall those machine-drilled GPS-spaced regiments of daffodils at Gedney. Among our various capacities to express ourselves, only music, and possibly painting and poetry, come close to the complex interconnectedness of an ecosystem. The Lark Ascending or the song of a blackbird say more about the British landscape than any words ever written. Yet what we need to acquire is something that might be called ecological thinking: an ability to approximate, through our imaginations, to the processes of a real ecosystem. We need a way of thinking that apprehends the rhizome-like multiplicity of impacts that work through and upon land and nature. Farmers used to practise it because they managed a complex ecosystem – a blend of multiple, fluctuating, simultaneous harvests including hens, cattle, sheep, root crops, vegetables, fruit, pasture, hay and cereals – in one land unit. For four generations they have been urged to abandon complexity and ecological thinking in favour of the ‘logical’ straight line.
Straight-line thinking connects too few truths to be of value in appreciating ecological processes. The spraying of pesticides and the use of nitrate fertilisers are linear approaches to ecological issues. The assumption is that once the chemicals have fulfilled the single intention of a user – once they have gone away – they will cease to operate within the ecosystem to which they were introduced. As Clark Gregory argues in William Bryant Logan’s masterful book Dirt, ‘There’s no such place as “away” [my italics].’3 We, the chemicals, the land, are part of a single system. The fertilisers continue journeying through the physical environment interacting in complex ways, fulfilling their unleashed ecological destinies.
While they boost crop production they also accumulate in the aquifers and must be stripped at high cost from our drinking water. They convert to nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 200 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Ecological thinking tells us that the true costs of that ‘logical’ and linear application of nitrogen is a downstream bill of between €70 and €320 billion per annum, double the value of the original boost to crops. The damage that we have inflicted on the land of this country in the name of logic requires that all of us acquire a capacity for ecological thinking.
Ecological thinking entails that we see ourselves within nature, and that we understand how everything we do has ecological consequences. We can, in truth, never escape nature. A convicted murderer, held in a concrete-and-steel cell in solitary confinement in the bowels of the most secure prison, encircled by nothing but razor-wire and linear arrangements of man-made material, who barely has the opportunity over several decades to see a square of natural daylight, let alone walk upon the soil and enjoy all its manifold bounties, still lives within nature. Everything that he eats and breathes, all that he evacuates, everything about him, is part of an ecosystem. Ecology requires that all of us understand the privileges and blessings of those unending connections and the remorseless, possibly terrifying, scale of our responsibilities.
As our material and interior lives become supercharged with new sources of stimulation we have compensated by succumbing to another linear simplification. Our entire value system, the ways in which we think and talk about life, society, morality, etc., in any public and most especially in any political forum, have been rendered subservient to a single dominant scale as the capitalist model intensifies its hold on all parts of ourselves. It is as if the only qualitative measure of human happiness and experience is money. The entire national political conversation has been canalised into one debate. Yet the economy of a country is nothing but a way of disguising or, rather, one should say, a way of talking about, ecology – since all money comes only from nature. It is just ecology entirely devoid of responsibility for the rest of the living system.
We need somehow to recover a sense of responsibility for the non-linear structures of real life. We live on a planet where life is only to be found in about a fifteen-mile-deep veneer that is wrapped around the surface of the Earth. As far as we have been able to establish in the last 4,000 years, this is the only planet that bears life. We spend our days among the greatest event in all the galaxies; but many people would seem to prefer to play with their iPhones. Isn’t it time that we built an appreciation of life into the very foundations of who we are?
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4. The fourth horseman of the environmental apocalypse in our island is something identified in Oliver Rackham’s The History of the British Countryside, where he wrote of ‘all the little, often unconscious vandalisms that hate what is tangled and unpredictable but create nothing.’ Among the list of hateful measures, he included the destruction of ivy-tods or ‘misshapen trees’, the annual cutting of hedges down to the ground, the levelling of churchyards – and here I cannot help but recall the regime at St Mary Magdalene’s in Gedney – and what he described as pottering with paraquat.4 The real problem is that an ever-expanding arsenal of chemicals and equipment allows us all – not just farmers – to intervene almost to the point of nature’s annihilation. In short, we are, as an entire people, guilty of excessive tidiness.
It is this that drives much of the sterilisation of Britain’s public space, because what it aspires to is uniformity and, invariably, uniform lifelessness. The classic location is not farmland, but our gardens. The signature sound is the seemingly innocuous drone of the Sunday-morning mower, whose use is ritualised almost to the point of piety. Recall the sit-on mower near Gedney reducing ten acres to a short-back-and-sides of rye-grass monoculture. Ten acres could, correctly managed, support thousands of species of organism, in an explosive mix of colour and texture, across the full spectrum of life.
However, it must be added that lawnmowers are now possibly at risk, because the latest must-have of the tidy-minded is plastic grass, which is spreading with viral intensity. In London, where 3.6 million domestic gardens occupy about a quarter of the entire city area, an estimated third are already obliterated under concrete or other synthetic surfaces. And what happens in the capital happens everywhere. I have relatives who have just laid plastic grass.
If plastic grass is not ubiquitous already, then it soon will be, judging from the state of so many of our civic and public spaces – road verges, roundabouts, the curtilage to municipal institutions such as schools, offices, hospitals, churches and sometimes even our recreational parks, which all obey the same deep concern for rectilinear design and abiotic uniformity.b It is not uncommon to see, in such places, maintenance staff in white space suits, chemical drums upon their backs, spraying herbicides on the minute creases of green life that dare extrude from the cracks between concrete slabs. The closest thing that these outdoor spaces resemble is not anything in nature, but the interiors of buildings, which is presumably the largely unconscious intention.
As a result of the broad interpretations placed upon the word environment, which is taken to mean anything and everything connected to our surroundings, it is often assumed that tidiness is an important environmental goal in its own right. It finds expression in the mania for litter-picking and keeping Britain tidy, etc. Not that anyone should condone thoughtless litter; it is not just illegal, it is morally disgraceful, especially fly-tipping. Yet in a list of ten important environmental issues, litter would be tenth and in a list of twenty it would be twentieth. The perfect cure for this ‘environmental’ concern would be a visit to West Thurrock Lagoons and Canvey Wick nature reserves in Essex. They are two of Britain’s most famous biodiverse brownfield sites, which are smothered in flowers and packed with rare bumblebees and beetles, but which are also described in Dave Goulson’s recent book as a paradise of ‘dog faeces, graffiti, discarded beer cans and broken bottles’.5
Litter may be a social problem, but it is seldom a real enemy of biodiversity. Excessive tidiness, however, entails a massive loss of potential wildlife. If we could free ourselves as a society from this neurosis then it offers an extraordinary and, as yet, barely tapped dividend for nature. We may have destroyed 4 million acres of flower-rich meadow. We could recover at least half that figure if only our gardens, both civic and private, were freed from chemical interventions and turned back primarily to native flowers and shrubs. Instead of the work-intensive grass monoculture, we could have virtually labour-free pocket-sized meadows that require only a single cut in late summer. Instead of fitted grass carpets we could have zones of colour and diversity, rich in pollinating insects such as bumblebees, butterflies and hoverflies.
One final observation is that our reluctance to live with nature’s creative disorder is an attempt not just to subordinate the life around us, but also to control something within ourselves. This moral imperative is present on the first page of the Old Testament:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
As troubling in its way, for me, is that these issues play out even in the branding of the RSPB, which illuminates how human dominion over nature is, in the words of John Livingston, concreted into ‘the very foundations of western thought’.6 The organisation’s present strapline is ‘Giving Nature a Home’. One can understand the very positive intent. Permitting presence may be the absolute inverse of enforcing absence, but both rely on the same basic solipsism that we are the agents and nature is the passive external recipient of our agency. We cannot give nature a home: nature is a home – ours. We live within it. As long as we see ourselves as outside it, then in those powerful words of John Fowles, ‘it is lost both to us and in us’.
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5. Environmentalism is part of what you might call soft politics in Britain. Even writing this line of words is a form of political activity. But hard politics in this country converges in a very specific form of psychological architecture, which we know as the Houses of Parliament. Those structures were designed to fulfil an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century process, whereby two relatively similar landed communities exercised power in their own interests. These tribal groupings were known as the Whigs and the Tories, or the Liberals and the Conservatives. Much later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a process of displacement as the Labour Party supplanted the Liberals as the broadly progressive grouping in parliament. The pattern has obtained until today.
Its fundamentally binary structure is indisputable. The very vocabulary of our system – both sides of the House, yah-boo politics, the benches opposite, upper and lower chamber, Her Majesty’s Opposition and Her Majesty’s Government, divisions, the ayes to the left and the noes to the right, the contents and the not contents, the two-horse race – reinforces the essential kinesis of our public life. If you cannot hear the central dialectic in those words then conjure its physical analogue: two rows of raked wooden benches in diametrical opposition.
At the heart of the process is a winner-takes-all, first-past-the-post arrangement. It squeezes the body politic of a twenty-first-century nation into an eighteenth-century whalebone corset. Some say this is beneficial since it delivers strong, disciplined government and has avoided internal civil conflict for the last 330 years (if one discounts the Jacobite uprisings of the eighteenth century). And we had a chance to change it by referendum in 2011. By more than two to one we rejected the most basic form of proportional representation. Yet no one can doubt that our peculiar political dispensation acts as a powerful drag upon change in Britain.c Recall how it took 114 years and more than twenty separate submitted bills before people acquired a legal right simply to walk on non-productive land. Should we really believe that this legislative entanglement was a clear expression of the will of the nation?
The same restrictive process acts as an immense, regressive filter upon our entire imaginative life. It is very difficult to find ways to talk about environmental issues except outside the main architecture of hard politics because of the binary clamp that the system places over us. For 150 years ‘green’ politics have remained in the margins of our national conversation or have tried to adapt to the prevailing conditions. As one small illustration of the contortion that this entails, at the 2015 election it took 34,343 votes to elect each Conservative MP and 40,290 votes for each Labour MP, but 1,157,613 votes to elect a single Green MP. And spare a thought for the United Kingdom Independence Party, which needed 3,881,099 votes for its solitary representative.
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6. This political system dovetails with another part of the country’s political mindset, which we can call ‘land-blindness’. As we have seen, the British, more than almost any other country in Europe, are a landless people. In excess of 53 million of us possess an average of just seven one-hundredths of an acre. In 1072, at the drawing up of the Domesday Book, 4.9 per cent of England’s eleventh-century population controlled 99 per cent of the land. Today just 0.3 per cent of Britain’s 65 million own 69 per cent of it all. In Scotland, which has the most concentrated pattern of land ownership in Europe, three-quarters of the entire country is held in estates of 1,000 acres or more.7
Land is the business of a tiny minority, and because it has been outside the mental horizon of so many people for so long, it seems not to register with the British public. How else can we explain the inertia and lack of a sense of injustice that for the last seventy years we have had, in the form of farm subsidies, a feudal system of transfer from the poor to the wealthy? At its worst this process delivers huge amounts of taxpayers’ money to millionaire landowners for no other reason than the fact that they are millionaire landowners. In the twelve years to 2011 just fifty Scottish farmers received £230.6 million in subsidy between them, an annual average of £383,000.8 Should we not even ask why?
It is odd that in all the brouhaha about Brexit, neither from the remainers nor the leave campaign has there been much if any discussion of the 40 per cent of the EU budget which still goes in these feudal payments. Kevin Cahill, in Who Owns the World, pointed out that at the heart of the annual giveaway of €46 billion are the 77,000 landowners in the EU area, who own 112 million acres and receive an annual €12 billion of taxpayers’ money.9 Nor is the CAP the only measure of our land-blindness. As Andy Wightman observes, ‘Rural landowners have successfully secured the abolition of all taxes on land and, despite professing to be rural businesses, still enjoy exemption from business rates.’10
We have somehow contrived to discount land as a significant subject for public debate, yet continued to view land ownership as an instinctive measure of social and cultural merit. The landed lord it over us still. Until the early part of this century, 750 hereditary peers sustained a central place in Britain’s political life. Even now ninety-two of them – unelected and unrepresentative, except perhaps of the peculiar interests of their community – retain this same inexplicable privilege. Yet we seem embarrassed to talk about it.
