Conservation & Ecology
PCoul Links “ 118
This is a quite remarkable historical event; it has altered the character of Britain just as profoundly as the other changes of the past half-century, such as the end of social deference, the rise of
multiculturalism and the coming of sexual equality
conservation groups and, whilst it is vitally important to protect small pockets of environmentally sensitive land, the ‘bigger picture’ needs addressing, otherwise all those efforts will be in vain. Writing in The Guardian, journalist and naturalist, Michael McCarthy commented that modern farming has wiped out billions of insects and birds and that plans to restore them will only work with public pressure. Here is a precis of his article: “No one, young or old, marches in the street to protest about the impoverishment of our countryside; no one hoists banners crying out against the turning of our green fields into sterile wildlife wasteland. Yet, in the past fifty years in Britain ‐ since the Beatles broke up ‐ through the intensification of agriculture, we have destroyed well over half of our biodiversity, and the populations of birds, butterflies and wildflowers that once gave the landscape such animation and thrilling life have been utterly devastated; the figures are there. Most notable is the case of farmland birds which, by the government’s own admission, declined by 56% between 1970 and 2015; it is estimated this represents a loss of at least forty‐four million individuals. Over huge swaths of the land, once beloved species such as the lapwing, the spotted flycatcher, the cuckoo and the turtle dove, as well as many once common butterflies, such as the pearl‐bordered fritillary, and once familiar blooms such as cornflowers, have simply vanished. The fields may still look green in spring, but it is mostly lifeless scenery, apart from the pesticide‐saturated crops: it is green concrete.
I PC JUNE/JULY 2018 Cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus)
This is a quite remarkable historical event; it has altered the character of Britain just as profoundly as the other changes of the past half‐century, such as the end of social deference, the rise of multiculturalism and the coming of sexual equality. Yet its most remarkable aspect is this: people still do not perceive it. In the past decade, specialists in conservation have come to understand the
magnitude of the loss but, for the public at large and indeed for most politicians, it is simply not on the radar; we are faced with a sort of mass cognitive dissonance, a nationwide unawareness of what is obvious. Recently, the French woke up in a dramatic way to the fact that their own farmland birds, their skylarks and partridges and meadow pipits, were rapidly disappearing: Le Monde, the most sober of national journals, splashed the fact across the top of its front page. French bird populations in general, two reports indicated, had fallen by a third just in the past fifteen years, and the next day scientists said that this was symptomatic of a future facing Europe as a whole, of “biodiversity oblivion”.
Intensive farming is the problem. Three generations of making agriculture more industrial has given Europe cheap food on a mammoth scale, but a terrible environmental price has eventually been paid, which we are only now understanding. The heart of the matter is universal pesticide use: we benefit from farming wholly based on poison, which has exterminated more and more of the insects at the base of myriad food chains in the natural world.
In the recent past, few have cared about insect decline, because people in general don’t care about insects, but the numbers are becoming too big to ignore. The startling disclosure last October that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the number of flying insects on nature reserves in Germany had dropped by at least 76% ‐ more than three‐ quarters ‐ went round the world. Can anything be done to get us off the road to biodiversity oblivion? The perhaps surprising answer is that yes, it can. We can reorder the basis of our farming, and here we stand at a major crossroads, because that is what the present Conservative government has just promised to do. On 11th January it launched a 25‐year environment plan, and followed it up on
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