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Conservation & Ecology T


he Environment, our environment, that thin layer that surrounds our globe known as the biosphere where all known life exists. We have been part of that environment for many thousands of years and, as we all know, that is only the blinking of an eye in Earth’s long history. I’m sure most of us have heard the eulogy that “if the sum total of time here on Earth since its birth was condensed into one hour, that humans would have only appeared here in the last second.” Nonetheless, in a fraction of that time, we have altered our environment so immensely that leaders of the global community decided it was high time to act.


It was during 1992, when the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development met at Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Around the world this was known as the “Rio Earth Summit” where one hundred and ten world leaders, representatives from one hundred and fifty three countries and over two thousand five hundred non-governmental organisations united with a common cause; a plan for “sustainable development”. Now, twenty-one years later, we are seeing the concept of sustainability beginning to become established within our profession, with many greenkeepers and course managers now embracing the challenge of becoming more so. However, how did we get to this present state of the environment? And does the golf industry have a part to play in the environment’s recovery?


It is, without doubt, that man (and woman) has had an undeniable impact upon the world around us and has radically altered the environment for his own use. The felling of the original wild wood that once covered the whole of the British Isles is one example where land was cleared of woodland for agriculture and a source of timber to sustain the swelling population. In fact, now there is no part of our islands that have not been modified to suit our needs. However, staying with population, our population is undergoing an explosive growth as we have learned to utilise agriculture, domestication, civilisation and, more recently, industrialisation. Great medical advances, improved health care, greater food availability are all examples of this trend becoming more sophisticated, and current estimations of the world’s human population reveal that there are 7.1 billion of us inhabiting this planet. Whilst this may be just another statistic, it only really means anything if it is put into some kind of context; with only one million people inhabiting the Earth by the end of the last ice age, it took us a further 10,000 years to reach the one billion mark. This milestone was only reached during the nineteenth century and the population has since continued to grow exponentially with, incredibly, a one billion increase in the last decade alone. Average population growth projections


This bunker at Thorpeness GC clearly shows how local native flora can be used to enhance the playing experience whilst preserving disappearing habitats


now predict the world’s current population is doubling every forty or so years, and there will be between eight or nine billion humans on the planet by 2020. This growth can only have more of a negative


impact upon our environment and surely cannot be sustainable.


Genuine concerns about our rising population were first voiced over 200 years ago by an English clergyman, Thomas Malthus, who made the dire prediction that the Earth could not indefinitely support an ever-increasing human population and said that “the planet would check population growth through famine if humans didn’t check themselves”.


This train of thought lends itself well to a well-known and widely-accepted concept of ecology known as “carrying capacity”. This involves a very basic idea and describes that maximum carrying capacity is reached when a population of a species gets to a point where the environment can no longer support them. In the natural world, animals and plants always find a balance. This is exemplified by birds that hold small territories during the breeding season that contain just enough resources to sustain them and their offspring. This keeps the population in check and prevents the population from suffering the consequences of overburdening their environment.


In our case, at the present state anyway, we will continue to grow in number until our carrying capacity is reached, which lies at about ten billion according to a UN report. How long will it take us to reach that figure? I’ll let you do the maths! An increase of human population and


resource consumption will inevitably lead to further impacts upon the environment, albeit most of them will be negative. One such negative impact that is also widely known is the change in our climate or, to be more to the point, the unprecedented rise in global temperatures over the last century. This is generally accepted to be due to excess burning of fossil fuels and, since the 1860s, average temperatures have risen 0.5O


The last decades of the twentieth century were the hottest on record, and data from ice-cores indicate we are now living in the warmest century for six- hundred years, with current projections estimating a rise in temperature of 4.2O


C and, as a result, sea levels


have risen by between four and ten inches (both of these figures are highly significant).


C,


and a rise in sea level of twenty-six inches within the century.


The affects of these rising temperatures can be seen here in the UK by looking at some of the best indicators of our environment - and what better indicators are there than yes, you’ve guessed it, birds. They rapidly react to any changes in their environment, and populations have been closely monitored here for over a century. However, in recent years, there have been a few species normally to be found in the warmer Mediterranean climes that are starting to colonise our shores. One example that deserves mention is of a trio of heron species that have adapted and exploited the warmer temperatures by moving in. These are Little Egret, Great Egret and Little Bittern, all of these normally seen when I am on holiday in Mallorca or some other Mediterranean country. First to move in was the Little Egret, which first settled on the south coast some


DECEMBER/JANUARY 2014 PC 107


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