Conservation & Ecology
Pearl‐bordered fritillary (Boloria euphrosyne)
Spotted flycatcher (Muscicapa striata)
27th February with a consultation on the future for food, farming and the environment.
Both these documents offer to put British agriculture on a wholly new basis (partly made possible by the anticipation of Brexit): the state will continue to pay farmers, but not according to the amount of food they produce, as the EU’s common agricultural policy first ordained, or according to the amount of land they own ‐ the situation at the moment.
They will, instead, be paid according to the amount of environmentally friendly measures they can put in place on their land. The new philosophy is “public money for public goods”, and the environment is explicitly recognised as the principal public good. Senior conservationists are enthusiastic about these proposals. If you’re on the left, you might allege that this is mere greenwashing, a renewed attempt to detoxify the Tory brand and, of course, there will be votes in this ‐ those vital young votes especially. But you only have to read the documents to see that this is in no way a political stunt, a crude photo‐op like David Cameron with his huskies in the Arctic. These are proposals that have been deeply thought through.
As they stand, they’re great. The principal problem will be holding the government to them. For instance, the £3.1bn in EU subsidies that British farmers currently receive, if converted into payments for agri‐ environment measures, would go a very long way to reversing the destruction of our wildlife; but that sum is only guaranteed until 2022. What happens after that? What’s to stop the Treasury clawing a huge chunk of it back?
What is needed is political pressure on the government to stand by these promises. It has to come ultimately from the base, since ordinary people’s feelings are the beginnings of political will. So what must happen first is that long overdue recognition, by the public as a whole, of just how terribly our
countryside has been devastated.” Michael concludes by saying that we all enjoy singing William Blake’s Jerusalem ‐ with its reference to our green and pleasant land ‐ at the Last Night of the Proms, England cricket internationals and the like ‐ but the time has now come to acknowledge that, whilst it may still be green, much of it, alas, is now a lifeless landscape, pleasant no longer.
His article is clearly a ‘call to arms’ and, if the reaction to the BBC’s Blue Planet II series is anything to go by, then the public will exists; it just needs to be triggered. It is beholden on our media outlets to highlight the above concerns, not in a sensationalist way, but in a clear and educated manner, as was the case with David Attenborough’s empassioned final episode.
That one man has the power and, indeed the love of a nation, to trigger action by the government here in the UK (and also further afield) is remarkable.
Sadly, David may not be around too much longer to act as our voice; our conscience. It is surely time to stand up and be counted, before it is too late.
Michael ‘Mike’ McCarthy is a British environmentalist, naturalist, newspaper journalist, newspaper columnist and author.
He worked as a journalist first on the Bolton Evening News and then on the Daily Mirror. After seventeen years in local and tabloid journalism, he moved first to The Times, then to The Independent on Sunday, and then to The Independent; he worked twenty‐seven years for those broadsheet newspapers. He was Environment Editor of The Independent until 2013.
He is passionate about nature which, he says, has many gifts for us, but perhaps the greatest of them all is joy; the intense delight we can take in the natural world, in its beauty, in the wonder it can offer us, in the peace it can provide ‐ feelings stemming ultimately from our own unbreakable links to nature, which mean that we cannot be fully human if we are separate from it.
In his book, The Moth Snowstorm, Mike proposes this joy as a defence of a natural world which is ever more threatened, and which, he argues, is inadequately served by the two defences put forward hitherto: sustainable development and the recognition of ecosystem services.
Drawing on a wealth of memorable experiences from a lifetime of watching and thinking about wildlife and natural landscapes, The Moth Snowstorm not only presents a new way of looking at the world around us, but effortlessly blends with it a remarkable and moving memoir of childhood trauma from which love of the natural world emerged. It is a powerful, timely, and wholly original book which comes at a time when nature has never needed it more.
PC JUNE/JULY 2018 I 119
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