Ecos 33 2 entire issue

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Summer 2012 issue 33(2) ECOS 33(2) 2012

Conservation meltdown Affording conservation - who should pay?

Planning policy reforms - good or bad news for nature?

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ECOS

A REVIEW OF CONSERVATION ECOS is the journal of the British Association of Nature Conservationists

www.banc.org.uk

ECOS 33(2) 2012

ecos@easynet.co.uk Editorial

Managing Editor: Rick Minter 07768 748301 ecos@easynet.co.uk

What White Paper?

Assistant Editor: Martin Spray Hillside, Aston Bridge Road, Pludds, Ruardean, Glos. GL17 9TZ 01594-861404 Acknowledgements This issue was edited by Rick Minter and Martin Spray.

Cover photo: Thames Estuary mudflats at Grain Coastal Park, by Eleanor Bentall, RSPB Images.

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ECOS is printed by Severnprint using Cocoon Silk 300gsm cover and Cocoon uncoated 100gsm text paper. Both papers have a 100% recycled content and are FSC certified. The electricity used during printing is generated from renewable sources. The magazine is printed under the SylvaPack environmental print route using no alcohol and processless plates. Severnprint donates to Tree Aid to support tree planting in sub-Saharan Africa.

Select Committee reports are a hit and miss thing. Some are safely fudged or miss their target, while others seem unconstrained, focused and hit the bull’s eye. We were blessed with the latter in July, when the Environment Food and Rural Affairs Committee (EFRACOM) pronounced on last year’s Natural Environment White Paper. We’ve all been kind about the White Paper. It captured the mood of the times, with its drive to consider all of nature’s inherent values and respect the free economic assets which come with a healthy ecosystem. But it’s delivery that counts.

Political action can quickly crash through the motherhood words of government, and Minister’s boasts about the Greenest Government have been undermined in practice. The ideology on the Right of the Coalition now uses the excuse of an ailing economy to threaten core chunks of environmental protection. The Habitat Regulations are being eyed up for treatment if they stymie infrastructure projects, new strands of the planning system may get more permissive, and a nudge from Whitehall may allow swathes of Green Belt to be nibbled at.

So will nature be paved over? Will green policies be rolled back? Our authors in this issue say it’s all to play for. Dick Bate shows how the National Planning Policy Framework is not the developer’s charter feared at the outset, but it could have downsides, maybe including for woodland, unless conservation groups are vigilant. Likewise Neighbourhood Plans will not automatically favour development over greenspace, but Jeremy Owen asks how the different effects amongst Neighbourhood Plans will be assessed. Where’s the overview and what should happen if wildlife is cumulatively taking a knock?

Returning to the White Paper, it is hard to argue with Mike Townsend’s assessment in this issue. He worries that it’s a sop, with fine words and token gestures. He sees it as “a useful device for deflecting the attention of NGOs than a genuine document of substantial intent. The paltry funding allocated to Nature Improvement Areas and the idea that this handful of projects is somehow going to deliver the Lawton Report’s vision of ‘bigger, better, more joined-up’ is demeaning.”

The EFRACOM report has spotted this concern over tokenism too. The Committee wants an action plan for all the White paper’s commitments, and proper valuing of nature taken forward by Treasury and the Cabinet Office. Bravely, it challenges the assumption that environmental regulation is a drag on the economy. There is much to capitalise on in EFRACOM’s report, across wildlife protection, planning, valuation and wellbeing measures. If we exploit this clever document, the White Paper we wanted could be unlocked.

Geoffrey Wain

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Forest politics - the battle for the status quo So the Public Forest looks set to remain in public ownership. That may feel like a victory, but to quote from the blogger Mark Avery: “The great radical campaigning victory over forestry, so far, has been to maintain the status quo”.

ROGER BODGITT The Independent Panel on Forestry was established in March 2011 by the Secretary of State, Caroline Spelman, to advise government on the future direction of forestry and woodland policy in England and on the role of the Forestry Commission in implementing it. After receiving over 40,000 submissions and visiting lots of forests and woodland projects around the country, Bishop James Jones and his eleven wise women and men published the final Report on 4 July 2012.

It’s ironic that it took a political assault on forestry as an out-dated vestige of the state, to prompt a high-profile analysis of the place of trees and woodlands in society. But given all the emotional and political energy which has been spent in the process, it would be a great shame if the status quo were all we got at the end of it.

Spirited away There is much to welcome in the Report, beyond the affirmation of the public status of the 18% of our woods which already belong to the state. There’s a call for trees and woods to become much more central to society, culturally and economically, for their ability to support much of our wildlife to be nurtured. There’s a recommendation that the grants and licensing side of the Forestry Commission should be strengthened and charged with enabling a major expansion of woodland cover in England, to raise the total from the current 10% of the land surface of England, to a new target of 15%.

And just as importantly, the Report has heart – Bishop Jones’s personal influence was clear, giving the Panel licence to openly acknowledge the spiritual dimension of woods, both for the individual and the community.

The Panel is at pains to propose a future structure and governance arrangement for the Public Forest Estate which can preserve its positive contribution to the nation, while putting it on a firmer footing for the future. It proposes that the current Forest Enterprise should evolve into a new English forest management organisation, independent of Government, able to be more entrepreneurial in maximising the value it generates from the public forest, in order to invest more in the public benefits which the forest offers. Incidentally, within days of the Report’s publication the Government announced that all of the nation’s public waterways were being transferred to a new body, the Canal & River Trust, which will take over the functions of the Government Body – British Waterways.

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Guessing the end game But this being Britain, there is a strong whiff of cynicism around. Some suggest that the main lesson for David Cameron from the original sell-off debacle was that if Government wants to off-load public assets into the Third Sector, it needs to butter them up first – not just announce its intent and hope the receiving organisations sit up and beg. At the time, in early 2011, some of those organisations did indeed sit up and beg – the Wildlife Trusts for example, who were prepared privately to start a dialogue about taking on areas of the public forest, leaving others to argue the principles. Others though, were less easily won over, and in any case, the true voice of public opinion (however well informed) carried the day. Now, a year and a half on, most of the larger NGOs have invested a good deal of valuable chief executive time in the Panel, and doubtless feel a rosy sense of grown-up involvement.

To build on this, at the official launch of the Report, the Secretary of State announced the establishment of a ‘National Forest Stakeholder Forum’ (to the surprise of the Defra staff in the audience), and invited the Panel members to remain ‘in the club’, as members of that. ‘We’re all in this together’, you could say. Having invested this effort in getting everyone to cosy-up, the time might soon be ripe (or so say the conspiracy theorists) for a more subtle, second attempt at shifting this troublesome public landholding off the books.

There are unfortunate consequences of this cynical view however – regardless of its validity. It feeds the circumspect, distrustful view that whatever government proposes, is actually a cover for achieving a sell-off by the back door. And that in turn encourages a black-and-white attitude on the vexed but crucial issue of community involvement.

The convenience of the community Those who advocate genuine community involvement in the management and governance of public forests find themselves caught in a rhetoric-strewn boxing ring between two extremes. In one corner are those who see any nod towards more community participation as a Trojan Horse for wholesale dismemberment of the estate. And in the other corner are those who use ‘community’ as a convenient cover for their commercial aspirations. A sad case in point is the proposal by Lib Dem peer, Lord Redesdale, announced immediately after the Report’s publication, to mount a bid for a ‘community-backed’ lease of Kielder Forest (which apart from anything else, is the single most commercially important element of FC’s business – without which the Commission would sink). This disingenuous use of the word ‘community’ was immediately seized upon by the likes of HOOF (the Forest of Dean action group) and others as proof that ‘community involvement’ is just a sheepskin slung over the wolf of commercial interests.

And then of course there are those who fail to see any significance in the question of ownership, and cling to the quaint notion that all that matters is how woodlands are managed, for the betterment of wildlife. Presumably they could all be bought by the Chinese, so long as they paid for the bats and birds.

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Localism whatever the landlord This polarisation in the debate makes it difficult to make valid points which fall into the grey reality in between. In truth, public ownership offers far more public benefit (at least in terms of access and timber supply) than private. However much public access is apparent in private woodlands, the fact is that although the public forest estate only accounts for 18% of woodland cover in England, it provides 40% of the available public access to woods, and 60% of the domestic timber supply.

But, public management by a state forestry service has real failings in its current form. Quite a lot of public forest is undermanaged, or subject to such broad-brush management regimes that local character and detail is lost. That is not a conscious intention on the part of FC, nor a reflection of poor ability amongst FC staff. It’s a consequence of trying to run a national estate, on a limited budget, subject to departmental budget rules, best-value contracts with big firms with big harvesters, and a lack of local flexibility. It will only change if there are opportunities for more local solutions, and more local involvement.

Beyond the Usual Suspects Meanwhile we all know that public ownership does not of itself deliver a truly public asset – for, of, and by the people. The Panel Report was a disappointment for some, in this respect. The great public uprising against the sell-off plans in 2011 reflected the sense people have that the public forest is ‘ours’. Surely for a new woodland culture to take root and flourish, policy needs to recognise that sense of symbolic ownership and make it mean something? More than any other part of the landscape, apart perhaps from public parks, allotments, and parts of the coast, woodlands lend themselves to public involvement – hands-on ownership which is genuine and tangible, not just titular. The diverse examples around the country of community woodlands which mean what they say on the tin, show there is a real appetite for this sort of local engagement. Moreover, there is no real reason why local community participation cannot go hand in hand with public ownership, through co-management agreements and shared tenure. Though it makes a passing reference to this subject, the Report fails to give community woodlands in England the boost they need, if they are to match the progress being made on this issue in Scotland and Wales.

This reflects a wider dissatisfaction with the way the Panel was loaded in favour of the big players such as the Woodland Trust, Wildlife Trusts, RSPB, and the National Trust. There was no genuine ‘public’ representation. And the stakeholder events reflected a tendency for representation to reflect those large players, plus rather narrow sectoral interests like cyclists and ramblers, leaving little room for the ‘little people’ such as the community woodlands, small owners, craft workers, firewood suppliers and the like.

Beleaguered by reform Meanwhile, outside the rhetorical boxing ring the senior officials within FC seem somewhat hapless. They have done what they were told, restructuring the Commission to accommodate the spending cuts imposed by Government on them as on the rest of the public sector, while keeping their mouths, and those of 4

ECOS 33(2) 2012 their staff, well zipped as the Panel did its work. They have a thankless task. Out there in the real world, beyond the political posturing, there is a tree disease crisis manifesting itself which could be as significant for our future woodlands as Dutch elm disease once was. But the Commission teams which are facing that and other threats are depopulated, and rather bruised.

Like the other members of the Defra family, FC will have little time to adapt to its current lot, before change overwhelms it again. Were the Government to take the Report at its word, FC would cease to exist as a single body, but would be replaced by two completely separated halves, one more distanced from Ministerial control, charged with managing an estate held in trust for the nation, and an evolved nondepartmental public body, charged with increasing woodland cover and good management outside the public forest estate.

Whatever the merits of this proposal, it fails (as do many conservation organisations) to acknowledge the good work the existing estate-managing side of the Commission has done to date – restoring more heathland than just about anyone else, and achieving 99% favourable or improving condition for the SSSIs in its care. OK, so they should never have planted conifers on the heaths and SSSIs in the first place, but foresters are blighted with having to deal with the long-term mistakes of their forebears in a way most occupations are not.

Personally, I respect the Commission as a practical, honest organisation which roles up its sleeves rather than just talks. It used to take risks too, and though that quality seems to have taken a back seat of late, it is still an organisation which warrants some respect. That said, I fear the captains of the Commission may not, as a whole, provide the best prospect for steering the evolved entity which may emerge as a result of the Panel’s recommendations. For that matter though, I would no more wish to entrust the job to any of the big NGOs. I simply wish all of them would apply themselves more to helping us, the people, to make the most of our woods.

Culture change - evolution or revolution?

The most prominent phrase in the Report is the call for a new ‘woodland culture’ in this country. Amen to that. But a culture is a consequence of people coming together, doing together, mixing their views, trying and failing, and distilling a human answer to the challenges of life. Government institutions don’t generate culture, and large organisations who think they fight for the planet, while their memberships meekly watch – they too don’t offer a culture that lasts. Cultural evolution is messy, hands-on, and real. Our woods should be those things too.

Defra has invited the public to comment, once again, on the Report and in the period between now and the delivery of a Government response, due in January 2013. The full Panel Report can be accessed via the Defra website, at www.defra. gov.uk/forestrypanel.

Roger Bodgitt is an undercover forestry correspondent and is currently gainfully employed by the Forestry Commission. The opinions here are very much his own.

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Stasis in the forest?

The final report of the Independent Forestry Panel includes some good news that is likely to become real, and some that isn’t.

MARTIN SPRAY “We’ve won!” was the gist of several reactions to the final report of the Independent Forestry Panel.1 The feeling is still quite euphoric, and I would not wish to sour this.

The euphoria, however, needs to be somewhat qualified.

The Panel deserves at least two cheers. Its final report published in early July2 makes many of the same noises as are made by access campaigners, nature conservationists, and environmentalists. It seeks an increase in forest cover in England (its geographical remit), and it urges a move to a ‘woodland culture’ where appropriate.

Access is stressed, not only for the public estate. Rather like the urgings of the (Tory chaired) Environment, Food and Rural Affairs committee for more ‘access to nature’ and – urgently – more visits to the countryside and coast, this is in order to improve the health of people in the UK. Like the EFRA Committee, too, it holds more public ’engagement with nature’ central, and doubtless supports the notion that both health and education departments “must create new ways of measuring and reporting on the links between ‘greater public participation in activities in the natural environment and improved health and educational attainment’”. This would be a highly relevant step towards a better integration of Department objectives.

The holistic forest According to the Panel’s report and in case we didn’t know, trees and woods are ‘good for people’ (pages 19 – 26); and they are ‘good for nature’ (pages 27 – 34). Nature conservation in woodland is stressed as a vital means of preventing the country‘s biodiversity disappearing up its own BAP. More effective management, which is “within our grasp”, is needed for this; and this would be alongside a new, green, sustainable, woodland economy. Trees and woods are ‘good for the green economy’ (pp. 35 - 42). A woodland economy involving coppice products, wood as fuel, woodpulp for paper, and wood as building material, is envisioned, and several times invoked. There is, however, little indication of likely conflicts between greater access and conservation; and on the details, extent, compatibility, and viability, of a ‘woodland culture’, the report is shyly naive.

ECOS 33(2) 2012 the envisaged woodland culture is supposed to be. It is also difficult to judge just what impact the Panel’s face-to-face visits had. For instance, did their visit here to the Forest of Dean show them people already engaged with the forest to a significant extent? Did it look as though people and businesses, would change – indeed, have begun to change – to wood as ‘the product of choice’?

Vision with reality Figure 4 on page 17 suggests ‘Some of the many elements and outcomes of a revitalised woodland culture’. It certainly looks like a rosy, sylvan, future: “Woods are effectively managed as part of the local economy supporting social enterprisers and providing wood for local heat and power….” “Forest-based industries are recognised as a key part of the green economy driving sustainable growth….”

“Wood is valued as a sustainable, actively used resource that fits the demand of the 21st century and is seen to power our economy and society.” But – we have recently been told that the price of wood is going through the roof, and that a wood-fuel future is viable only if we dramatically increase imports from northern America and from Russia. And how do we dramatically increase food production, in order to cut imports, while fending off timber imports, by having a woodland culture? The Panel’s report came out just before a report on the 2011 census for England and Wales,4 which shows us increased by 3.7 million in a decade. That is just one of the moving hurdles we are urged to jump…

Spiritual connections and shares Meanwhile the organisation that took root and developed as the leading antidisposal campaign, locally-grown HOOF (Hands Off Our Forest), which, while interested in such matters, is most concerned that England retains a public forest estate, in the charge of the Forestry Commission, welcomes a generally very supportive report, and the opportunity to help take it forward. The details of the proposal are unclear, but the Panel seeks “evolved Forest Services” that can deliver the greater significance of woodland that is envisaged. These services are seen as working with the public forest estate, but separate from it. One thing that quickly became clear during the ‘sell-off’ debate hereabouts was the sympathy felt for the Forestry Commission and its good works. One hopes that the ‘evolved’ services can be similarly supported.5 The Report is positive, and upbeat. It makes up for a weak connection with parts of the real world by being enthusiastic. Its value is that it is unafraid to point to a vision that many of us have glimpsed but – still – too few are willing to speak about.

“Our forests and woods are nature’s playground for the adventurous, museum for the curious, hospital for the stressed, cathedral for the spiritual, and a livelihood fort the entrepreneur”, says Bishop James Jones in his foreword. Now, we just need enough to go around…

We are nearly all impatient to show support for such statements as “There is a strong case for moving the UK economy onto a greener footing”. That support, though, must be directed to clear aims in which we can have objective confidence; and it must be given with a clear understanding of what needs to be done to make the effort likely to succeed.

References and notes

Is what needs to be done likely to be what Government will adopt; and does it, if adopted, appear likely to succeed? It is difficult to see how big, how widespread,

1. E.g. ‘Privatisation of forests finally axed as minister accepts defeat’, Independent 5 July 2012; ‘People power wins the day as panel backs HOOF call’, Forester 5 July 2012; ‘Public forests must not be sold, say advisers’, BBC news alert 4 July 2012; ‘Future of Forest of Dean plans ‘welcomed’ by campaigners’, BBC Gloucestershire website 4 July 2012.

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2. Independent Panel on Forestry (2012) Final report, available at http://www.defra.gov.uk/forestrypanel/files/ Independent-Panel-on-Forestry-Final-Report1.pdf.

3. ‘Visits to the countryside will improve the UK’s health, say MPs’, www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/ jul/17/mps-public-engagement-nature?CMP=EMCENVEML1631.

4. ‘England and Wales population up’, BBC news alert 16 July 2012.

5. Local MP Mark Harper welcomed the report with: “I’m delighted at the Government’s initial response […].

They have immediately agreed with the central recommendation of the Panel’s report - to keep the Public Forest Estate, including the Forest of Dean, in public ownership […] this was an important move, avoiding any worry about the future of our forests.” ‘Forest of Dean should remain in public ownership – report’, www. thisisgloucestershire.co.uk/Forest-Dean-remain-public-ownership-report/story-16480994-detail/story.html, 4 July 2012. However, a HOOF thank-you letter notes that the crucial objective – “ that our Forest must be managed on the public’s behalf by a properly resourced Forestry Commission – has still not been conclusively resolved”, www.theforestreview.co.uk/Letters.cfm?id=24099&headline=Victory, but..., 11 July 2012.

Martin Spray is an editor of ECOS and lives in the Forest of Dean. spraypludds@hotmail.com

From Rio to Devizes: a leap too far?

It is easy to take the natural environment for granted in my own county of Wiltshire, but the State of the Environment report 2012 presents worrying evidence of environment decline and the unsustainable impact of our lifestyles. This year’s Rio+20 Conference felt far removed, yet the issues raised and the actions required to address them are often the same at the local level. We must keep an eye on the international stage and remember that we are part of it.

JENNY HAWLEY Volunteers help with forestry management work.

Rio de Janeiro is a long way from the historic market town of Devizes, home of Wiltshire Wildlife Trust. International negotiations at the Rio+20 Conference held in 2012 felt even further removed from the findings of first State of the Environment report for Wiltshire and Swindon, published a month earlier. Eradicating poverty is thankfully not the same challenge in Wiltshire as elsewhere in the world; the population is generally prosperous and healthy, with a few areas of relative deprivation.

If I’d asked my colleagues about the relevance of Rio+20 to the Trust’s work, they’d probably have struggled to answer. In reality, it didn’t even occur to me to ask them.

There is much scepticism about whether these global meetings make any difference at all in terms of practical conservation. Yet, digging beneath the surface, many of the key issues discussed in Rio are the same as those facing Wiltshire and Swindon.

The state of Wiltshire and Swindon’s environment It is easy to take our natural environment for granted – even when the Environment Agency declared a drought in March 2012, clean water still flowed freely from the taps and then the rain fell steadily for three months. Many of the species and habitats in Wiltshire are of international importance, such as the uninterrupted chalk grasslands of Salisbury Plain and the chalk river systems, not to mention the rare bats, butterflies and orchids. As we look around at the beautiful landscapes and varied wildlife, couldn’t we be forgiven for assuming that all is well?

However, the State of the Environment report presents worrying evidence of decline in our local environment in recent decades and the unsustainable impact of our lifestyles. As the Rio Conference marks its 20th anniversary, Wiltshire Wildlife Trust is marking its 50th. Wildlife species are under threat and wildlife habitat is becoming increasingly fragmented. Water supply and quality are of concern. Pollution from road traffic is creating air quality problems in urban areas. Farming, which accounts for 80% of Wiltshire and 57% of Swindon Borough in terms of land area, has wideranging environmental impacts. Farmland bird populations have declined by 50% in England in the last 40 years.

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Wiltshire and Swindon’s human population has grown by 20% in the last 20 years, with corresponding demand for housing, transport, water, food and energy. The ecological footprint of individuals in Wiltshire is estimated at more than double the sustainable level, and carbon emissions per person were 19% higher than the average for England in 2009.

International concepts to local action How can the Rio+20 Conference help us to tackle these issues? From the global to the local, sustainable development is about addressing the economy, society and the environment together. The concept of a green economy was high on the agenda in Rio. So it is in Wiltshire and Swindon. Local businesses and other key players are - understandably - focused on reviving the economy in difficult times, and many of them make little time to address environmental issues. The new Local Enterprise Partnership and Local Nature Partnership must work closely together to integrate economic and environmental strategies.

A range of other issues discussed at Rio+20 resonate in Wiltshire and Swindon with specific actions required locally: Valuing biodiversity and other aspects of the natural environment and recognising that value in policy and decision-making. Delivering landscape-scale conservation to enhance biodiversity and the natural environment across whole ecosystems. Carry out an Ecosystem Assessment for Wiltshire and Swindon to quantify and place a value on our local natural environment and the services it provides. This will help provide the evidence base for a green economy.

Protecting water resources, both in terms of quality and quantity, to safeguard a healthy natural environment, agriculture and public health. Enhance Wiltshire’s chalk river systems by removing invasive plants and restoring healthy wildlife habitats. Phosphate levels in rivers must be reduced to improve water quality.

More sustainable farming practices and food systems. Expand coverage of agri-environment schemes across Wiltshire and Swindon’s farmland to encourage environmental practices and involve farmers in landscape-scale conservation.

The Wiltshire landscape at Cherhill.

Photo: Richard Ramsey.

The river Avon at Gunville Cottage is being managed for a more natural condition under the Wessex Chalk Streams Project.

Photo: David Rawlings

Sustainable transport networks, to reduce congestion, air pollution and CO2 emissions, and to improve health and wellbeing through walking and cycling.

Reduce traffic flow and congestion in Wiltshire and Swindon’s urban areas, including by providing attractive alternatives.

Sustainability of new housing and other development and achieving overall net gains in biodiversity and accessible natural green space. Implement sustainability policies contained in Wiltshire and Swindon’s Core Strategies, which include plans for 62,000 new homes between 2006 and 2026.

Some of these actions are already underway. For example, the Wessex Chalk Streams Project will work with angling clubs and landowners to restore parts of the River Avon in southern Wiltshire to a more natural state. In the mid-1900s parts of the river were heavily dredged and over-widened, with a significant impact on the quality of the chalk-stream habitat. This project will boost biodiversity and make the rivers much more resilient to the effects of climate change. The project is a partnership funded by Defra’s Catchment Restoration Fund administered by the Environment Agency and also involves Wessex Water, Natural England, Wiltshire Wildlife Trust and Wiltshire Fishery Association.

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Moving forward According to UK media reports, many participants and observers were disappointed in the outcomes of Rio+20. It is hard to judge from an outsider’s perspective what impact the Conference will have on international and national policy. At a local level, it can be hard to see the relevance of this to our work, but the issues are clearly the same and we cannot isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. If international negotiations are too weak, local action becomes all the more important. If international negotiations are successful, then local action is still a vital part of bringing about change.

The environmental challenges in Wiltshire and Swindon are by no means as great as in other parts of the world. We have much to celebrate but we cannot sit back and relax; we have to take responsibility for our local environment and the impact of our lifestyles - keeping an eye on the international stage and remembering that we are part of it.

Reference All references are taken from the State of the Environment report for Wiltshire and Swindon 2012, available at www.intelligencenetwork.org.uk and www.wiltshirewildlife.org

Jenny Hawley, Environmental Intelligence Officer at Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, funded by Wiltshire Council and NHS Wiltshire. The environmental intelligence project aims to provide a common and sound evidence base for public reference, policy development and decision making. jennyh@wiltshirewildlife.org Wiltshire and Swindon Food Champions helps people grow local food and lead healthier lifestyles. It involves teaching of horticultural skills to disadvantaged communities, with 12 community growing sites and 20 orchards.

Photo: Wiltshire Wildlife Trust

Paying our way Affording nature in hard times Is looking after the environment an act of charity, to be funded by those with the desire to do so, or is it an act of social responsibility to be funded by all? This article considers the dilemmas for conservation in linking its interests to the political priority for economic growth.

TONY WHITBREAD Funding nature – a luxury or essential The environmental movement has a problem. We get the funds to protect the environment from the surplus of a society that is causing the damage in the first place. Whether government grants, business sponsorship, donations from philanthropists or membership income, this money is likely to have come from economic activity that is responsible for environmental damage. So, the world has to get a lot worse so we can put a small amount of funding together to make it a little bit better.

This is largely inevitable as we are all the products of the society we live in. Also, maybe it is our own fault. As environmental organisations we have become more business-like: we know what to do to achieve nature conservation (petty arguments aside!), where to do it and what it should cost. All very logical but this makes us part of a questionable paradigm – nature as a cost. I’ll oppose this later, but if we do accept that nature conservation is a cost, then who should pay? This is where the relationship between the state and the charity sector comes into play.

Charity and Government – roles and relationships Is looking after the environment an act of charity, to be funded by those with the desire to do so, or is it an act of social responsibility to be funded by all. This is a polarised comparison and the boundaries can, healthily, blur, but are charities being used too much to deliver social goods that should really be funded by the whole of society? An extrapolation of this is that if nature is being funded by the concerned few then it can become the preserve of the concerned few – privileges of membership rather than the rights of everyone.

Maybe this is at the route of the back-biting we’ve seen between some environmental campaigners and NGOs over the last couple of years. Charities are trying to deliver, quite correctly according to their charitable objectives, but in the process maybe seen as trying to do much of what government or the State should be doing. Maybe this would be no bad thing if charities do things better than government. We may be more efficient, less mired in bureaucracy and closer to communities. But we might appear more efficient than we actually are as we may use our own charitable funds to magnify the effect of funding packages. Government grants only cover a 12

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ECOS 33(2) 2012 proportion of the costs. In a worst-case situation we may find that charitable funds are used to support something that should be a social responsibility paid for by the State. In this case charities are subsidising government rather than the other way around. So, if nature is a cost then it should be a cost to the whole of society as we all get the benefit. Charities may help deliver environmental goods but if we deliver too much then the support by the few is being used to deliver benefits, the cost of which should be borne by all.

Nature’s costs and value But – nature as a cost? This is the assumption we should question. We assess its cost but we ignore its value.

The value of nature is so vast that attempts to represent it seem conceptually wrong.

Nature is the system and economics a sub-system. To value nature in economic terms would be to value the system on the basis of the sub-system and this gives odd results (compare the value of diamonds with the value of water – one enormously pricey but pointless, the other essential but almost free). A poor approximation of infinity is how attempts to value nature have, correctly, been described.

With the National Ecosystem Assessment we are now seeing the concept of valuing nature being taken further. George Osborne now seems to wish to value every hill and lake as part of a plan to audit the entire nation including its landscape. This leads to the concept of biodiversity offsets, where development that damages natural capital in one area pays a tariff so that biodiversity can be enhanced in another.

If applied intelligently, and in the way intended by those developing these approaches then they could change the whole way we think about nature. There are, however, huge worries. Philosophically it could change our view of nature towards it being something of mere utility to humans – if it does not prove its worth then we can’t defend it (what value an orchid, or just the chance of seeing a kingfisher?).

“Value” implies monetary value and this implies a market – but neither is true. Most ecosystem values are non-monetary – they may be essential services impossible to value, unknown, unseen and unquantifiable (what value do we put on soil microorganisms that recycle nutrients). We often only realise these values once they are damaged. Maybe that orchid or that kingfisher are doing something vital for the function of an ecosystem. Many parts of the natural world may have a monetary value but can’t be traded, like flood prevention, water supplies and human health.

Only a small minority will respond to market forces, such as food, timber and perhaps carbon, but, as any forester will tell you, even these are subject to severe market failure.

But we’re stuck. The opposite of valuing nature is not valuing nature and this is where we are. If we think less about the cost of nature and more about its value then we can give better recognition to ecosystem services and that should be better than the current situation where we give them almost no recognition at all. A lot has been done – see the discussions in last year’s editions of ECOS on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity 14

(TEEB Report), and the National Ecosystem Assessment. These have been described as “paradigm changing” by Oliver Letwin in the current government. And he’s right – worked through to a conclusion they could change economics more than they’ll change ecology.

Clarifying growth ‘Economic growth’ is a blunt, bland mantra that is far too vague to be of any use to anything very much. Claiming that economic growth will solve all our problems is nonsense. Its very calculation is unhelpful - where all manner of activities are counted as positive, there is no sense of what is good or bad for society in just measuring economic output.

If economic growth is directly linked to resource use then the impossibility of the situation becomes clear. A 3% growth rate gives a doubling time of under 25 years.

A repercussion of this is that between now and 25 years time we will use as many 15

ECOS 33(2) 2012 resources as we have done in the entire history of the human race up to now – and we’ll use twice as much again in the following 25 years. Add to this the problems of pollution and ecosystem degradation resulting from resource consumption and we can see how a human global footprint many times the size of our planet becomes a rapid inevitability. The standard answer is that human resourcefulness will always overcome such problems but against these bold mathematical facts this requires wishful thinking on a heroic scale.

It’s easy to see the problems, less easy to see the answers. It may be that the concept of growth becomes a side-issue; it is after all rather meaningless jargon that people generally have trouble in defining. Or it may be that economic growth based on consumption changes to growth based on increasing stocks, or capital – in particular based on the increase of natural capital and the benefits we get from natural capital. So, healthy functioning ecosystems, the benefits we get from ecosystems and our stock of natural capital become key factors in any measure of wealth or well-being. In effect this might reverse some of the activities we carry out today. Consumption-based economic growth is currently done at a cost to natural capital – economic growth destroys nature and hard-nosed businessmen may insist that it is a price we must pay to have a modern society. In future, however, this might not be considered economic growth at all.

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Conservation in a time of austerity – why fund nature?

Why has an appealing subject like wildlife protection and the environment become an easy target for cuts? We should capitalise on recent measures designed to demonstrate the full and wider benefits of nature.

MIKE TOWNSEND The greenest government?

When Prime Minister David Cameron promised this would be the greenest government ever, he almost sounded like he meant it. Two years on and he actually believes they have delivered this hubristic promise. Speaking at the Green Energy summit earlier in 2012 he said “When I became prime minister I said I would aim to have the greenest government ever and this is exactly what we have”. Unfortunately, hardly anyone else seems to agree. Opinion polls suggest that only 2% of the public think this is the case, and organisations as diverse as the CBI and Greenpeace also disagree.

However, my assumption at the beginning of this piece that all economic activity is bad for the environment is also not true in detail. Impact per unit of GDP, can go down as societies become richer. Some areas of economic growth may actually reverse ecological impact (so-called green-growth). Also, some argue that, above a certain level, human well-being goes down with increasing consumption so if we ever do get wise to this then there might be a reversal in our demand patterns.

Societies that are ahead of the game might see this, the result being a reduced demand for “stuff” against an increase in demand for other values.

George Osborne’s remark that “we’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business” and that green policies were a “burden” on business, may have let the rhetorical camouflage slip to reveal the true attitudes which underlie the government’s approach to the natural environment. The pro development National Planning Policy Framework, with its open ended capacity to override the natural environment where development gains ‘outweigh the losses’ reinforces this concern.

This is not an argument to say that only the rich can afford an environment, and there are not enough resources in the world for us all to achieve western-style affluence before eventually becoming environmentally sustainable. However this, plus better recognition of the values we get from healthy well-functioning ecosystems might give us hope for the future.

Looking more widely for some comfort only brings further disappointment. The Rio+20 summit was viewed by most environmental commentators as, at best, feeble and lacking in detail. Since the original Rio summit, global emissions of CO2 have risen by 48%, 300m hectares of forest have been cleared and the population has increased by 1.6bn people. The latest summit seems to signal business as usual.

The presence of 50,000 delegates, 40,000 of them environmentalists, also handed some easy jibes to critics of the process.

Tony Whitbread is Chief Executive of Sussex Wildlife Trust. tonywhitbread@sussexwt.org.uk

Political rhetoric The strictures of austerity politics are driving restrictions to funding and a retrenchment to a focus on economic growth. So whilst the rhetoric recognises the central function of the natural environment in a sustainable economy and society, governments privately see it as a burden, slowing a return to growth, however unsustainable. It belies an ideology which excludes proper consideration of the natural environment from market transactions and thus continually undervalues it.

The NEWP in England promised to redress this, but so far appears more as a useful device for deflecting the attention of NGOs than a genuine document of substantial

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ECOS 33(2) 2012 intent. The paltry funding allocated to NIAs and the idea that this handful of projects is somehow going to deliver the Lawton vision of ‘bigger, better, more joined-up’ is demeaning. From the 76 expressions of interest, just 12 were successful in securing around £200,000 a year each for 3 years (the total prize money for Wimbledon this year was a shade over £16m).

The National Forest provides an example of where transformational landscape change is possible, but it also shows that it doesn’t come cheap and it requires a commitment over many years. Had it been given £200,000 for 3 years I suspect it would still be an industrial wasteland.

Changing attitudes The NatCen Social Research 2011 report on social attitudes is concerning.1 Across the five measures used to judge how people perceived threats to the environment, including climate change and pollution of rivers and streams, there was a significant drop in the proportion of people who thought they posed a danger. There was also an increase in the number of people who felt that “we worry too much about the environment and not enough about prices and jobs today” and that “people worry too much about human progress harming the environment”.

Of particular concern to funding for the environment, there was a drop in the number of people who said they had made a financial contribution to an environmental group or would be willing to pay higher prices to protect the environment. The report concludes that there is a combination of growing pressures from the recession and an increasing scepticism about environmental issues, particularly climate change – there is a rising sense of “environment fatigue”.

Despite The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) report, the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (UK NEA), the Natural Environment White Paper (NEWP) and the Lawton Review in England, the natural environment just isn’t seen as central to economic activity or people’s immediate concerns.

Easy target Part of the difficulty is that lots of aspects of environmental expenditure are too easy to cut, from Government Conservation Agencies, to grants for conservation work, corporate support to NGOs, and Local Authority Parks and Countryside services.

The problem appears compounded by the localism agenda, allowing central government to pass responsibility for key elements to local government, NGOs and other local providers, at the same time as their budgets were being cut.

The undesignated bits of countryside and urban green space, critical to many people’s local environments, are particularly vulnerable and not viewed as ‘essential services’, so often first in the firing line. It’s very difficult to persuade people to manage their nature reserves as volunteers once they have lost their jobs. Despite clear links between the state of the local environment and public health, an opportunity to save cost in the medium to long term, the posited joined-up thinking of the NEWP seems not to have extended to the Treasury.

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Balancing the budget It would, or course, be naive to suggest this is an easy call for any government.

No one wants to be in the position Greece now faces with basic services for health and education cut. These are not easy choices. The trouble is governments failed to meet the challenge of recognising and acting on the fundamental importance of the natural environment when times were good, and they now have the cloak of austerity to hide behind, as well as real pressures to balance budgets.

It would also be naive to expect things to change soon. Even when an economic recovery comes, it will have been moulded by the experience of recent years.

Funding from government is likely to remain meagre.

Restating the importance of the natural environment Maybe some responsibility lies in the way conservation of the natural environment has been portrayed, and the way it has subsequently become viewed. Conservation is seen by some as against ‘progress’ - antagonistic to development and growth.

Pockets of habitat and green space saved, protected, rescued and generally separated from mainstream land use.

This creation of a sense of otherness may mean that when times are hard it becomes easier to ignore, while the focus moves back to things which can generate wealth.

Conservation can be seen as opposed to the economic activity which, for many people, has made their lives better.

By making the conservation of nature a separate and distinct activity it has also made it more vulnerable to attack when times are tough. Perhaps there is a need to work harder to find the ways in which integration of the natural environment into the fabric of society can support the economy at a level which makes sense to individuals and to businesses?

Changing the message The wisdom is that the worse time to cut the marketing budget is when you’re in a recession and sales are dropping - the business falls into a spiral of lower sales feeding further cuts. The natural environment needs to be seen as equally central to activity - ‘whatever happens, don’t let the natural environment suffer because it underpins what we do’.

It isn’t so much a lack of evidence, but a rephrasing and rethinking of the way it is presented. Documents such as TEEB, UK NEA, the Lawton Review and the NEWP provide plenty of evidence and good intentions, but need to be translated into communications which recognise the needs and concerns of those who can deliver the change – farmers, businesses, and individual householders. Austerity at this level isn’t an abstract concept, but a daily reality, and the need to make ends meet supersedes any consideration of national interest. Anything which is not seen as essential will get cut.

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Nature conservation often fails to tell people why the natural environment matters, not just globally or nationally, but to them individually and to their families and to the economy.

People like wildlife and nature reserves and habitats, and government want to be seen supporting what people like. But people like other things more when times are hard, and nature conservation is still largely viewed by most people as something which is nice but not essential. When that happens and times are tough, governments will focus on the things people like most. Government may have hard decisions to make, but ignoring nature conservation is not really one of them.

Reference 1. British Social Attitudes 28, NatCen Social Research. Available at: http://ir2.flife.de/data/natcen-socialresearch/igb_html/index.php?bericht_id=1000001&index=&lang=ENG,

Mike Townsend is a Senior Advisor at the Woodland Trust. The views expressed in this article are those of the author.

One of nature’s basic services - more people are planning to plant for wood fuel.

Photo: Debbie Nicholls, Woodland Trust

Councils in adversity – why less isn’t more for nature This article reviews the feedback provided by wildlife staff across local councils in England, when they were asked to indicate the effects of cuts on the ability of local authorities to fulfil their work on nature conservation. The results suggest that councils will be severely constrained in their advisory role on wildlife and in their pursuit of the White Paper’s initiatives.

MIKE OXFORD Local authority resources for wildlife – the gloomy context The Association of Local Government Ecologists (ALGE) represents over 300 professional ecologists working in local government in the UK. Last year, faced with the implications of the cuts in public services, ALGE surveyed its members in England to establish how the cuts would affect biodiversity work in local government. The survey was carried out online and the results analysed automatically using Survey Monkey. The results are based on a response rate of approximately 13% of all ALGE members in England. The low sample size perhaps indicates the pressures which staff are under, but the feedback indicates some of the generic issues facing local authorities as they pursue their commitments for wildlife.

The results are from only those authorities that already employ a member of staff in an ecology or biodiversity role. There is no data from local authorities that do not employ an ALGE member. The results should also be seen in the context of another ALGE survey undertaken in 2004 of all local authorities in the UK. One of the main findings from that exercise showed that only 35% of councils in England had access to an in-house ecologist. In other words, 65% of local planning authorities had no reported expertise in ecology. There is no reason to think that this situation has improved since 2004.

The latest survey shows that while local government’s past capacity to help deliver a range of wildlife initiatives was already limited, it is now being further eroded, in some cases at a rapid rate. Also, in the absence of any contrary evidence, a large proportion of the 65% of councils that have no ecology expertise are probably not engaged in such a wide range of biodiversity projects. They simply do not have the capacity and are likely to be lagging behind.

The ALGE survey – summary results Table 1 provides a summary of the responses, indicating in column 2 the proportion of local authorities currently engaged in some key areas of biodiversity work.

Column 3 then shows how spending cuts have reduced this effort.

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ECOS 33(2) 2012 NEIL BENNETT

ECOS 33(2) 2012 Table1 Impact of spending cuts: summary of results

Area of biodiversity work facing cuts

% of respondents with an existing budget for this type of work

% of respondents with a budget (see column 2) facing full or partial cuts in the service

Biodiversity Opportunity Mapping

45%

68%

Ecological Restoration Projects

54%

46%

Biodiversity Grants and Support for Local Community’s Biodiversity Work

75%

93%

Management of Council Land for Biodiversity

78%

67%

Local Environmental Records Centres

100%

44%

Local Wildlife Sites Management

83%

57%

Marine Conservation Work

15%

75%

Countryside Management

54%

85%

LBAP Officers

86%

68%

Support for LBAP Partnerships

90%

60%

Support for Planning Services

96%

38%

Corporate BAP Work

67%

72%

Issues and implications of the results So what does it all mean? First, cuts in biodiversity services have not been uniform.

There is considerable variation between local authorities in how they have applied the cuts, ranging from as little as 5% up to a full 100% of total budget lost. However, the average has been a cut of 19%, which means that biodiversity work has been hit at least as hard as other services and in some instances has taken a bigger cut proportionately. These cuts also need to be considered in the context of the typical size of the budget, which for biodiversity is often very small, covering a handful of staff at most and very little, if any, operational budget. Therefore any loss of resources can significantly affect the authority’s capacity to undertake biodiversity work.

In terms of lost posts, 26% of authorities report that they lost one member of staff and 18% report that they lost between 2-4 staff during 2011. And one authority 22

reported that it lost over 5 of its biodiversity team. Furthermore, since biodiversity work is normally covered by only a handful of staff at most, and in many authorities by only one member of staff, any loss can have a significant impact on capacity.

Feeling the pain While it is not surprising that 96% of ALGE members currently provide support for their council’s planning service, over a third (38%) report that this service will have been cut or reduced as a result of the overall spending review in 2011. To compound things, this reduction in service across England coincides with a reduction in the level of planning advice available from Natural England.

The results in Table 1 show that much of the wider work undertaken by local government (that might be considered as key to implementing many of the initiatives in the Government’s Natural Environment White Paper) have also faced dramatic cuts. For instance, biodiversity opportunity mapping, work with local 23

ECOS 33(2) 2012 communities, ecological restoration projects, and local site management. It seems that there has been little reward for authorities engaging in such commendable effort, and consequently it now looks expendable!

Local Environmental Records Centres and biodiversity data management are also likely to feel the effects, with 44% of ALGE members reporting that their authority’s have cut or have reduced their financial support. And there is also little evidence that the Government’s localism agenda will bring greater benefits to local partnerships and local community groups. The hard truth suggests just the opposite, with: 50% of authorities reporting that they have cut all funding for local grants and local community groups and a further 43% report that their budgets have been reduced, and; 26% of authorities have cut all of their funding support for local biodiversity partnerships and 34% have reduced their budgets.

It also seems likely that local government will find it even harder to fulfil its various statutory duties with regard to the conservation of biodiversity. In particular, if current trends continue, planning authorities will have less ecological expertise and resources to work with, and the probability is that overall more planning decisions will be made without taking the natural environment into account. This issue alone presents something of a challenge for central government if it genuinely wishes to see more effective implementation of the Habitats and Wild Birds Directives.

Loss of support and advice at local levels Increased pressure in delivering these statutory duties needs to be considered alongside other changes within local government. The National Planning Policy Framework and delegation of decisions to the very local level make it all the more important that professional ecological advice is available. However, similar cuts to Natural England’s budget have reduced its capacity to support local authorities through the provision of ecological expertise, meaning that ecologists retained in local government are often supporting more than just their own authority. Current and future losses will significantly impact the availability of such expertise and any sought-after efficiencies and ‘new smart ways of working’ in terms of applying and implementing wildlife legislation, such as the Habitats Directive, will be hard won.

ECOS 33(2) 2012 • • • • • • • •

Biodiversity Offsetting Local Nature Partnerships Nature Improvement Areas Protecting natural value through the planning system Improving the quality of local wildlife sites Restoring habitat connectivity at the landscape scale Engaging and involving local communities in local projects Planning for green infrastructure

In looking to the next two years it is difficult to conceive how the small proportion of councils with ecological expertise will maintain existing services let alone engage in many of the new initiatives that are being promoted. It is even more difficult to foresee a situation where local authorities without wildlife expertise and existing biodiversity budgets will be able to find new resources which would help them to catch up.

As Winston Churchill might say: “Never before, have so few, been expected to do so much, with so little!”

ALGE intends to repeat this survey during the current financial year 2012/2013 and will report the findings in due course.

Mike Oxford is Project Officer for the Association of Local Government Ecologists. mikeoxford@btinternet.com Campain placards for defence of the Newcastle Green Belt. The Green belt threat here includes 600 new houses proposed around Gosforth Park nature reserve. CPRE has claimed that government inspectors are putting pressure on local planning authorities to allow greater proportions of new housing, meaning some tracts of Green Belt around major settlements will be targeted.

Local government is therefore at the receiving end of a mixed message from Central Government, where the latter has identified the former as a key player in the delivery of many aspects of biodiversity conservation in England. This has been emphasised in the Government’s White Paper: The Natural Choice (June 2011), the new England Biodiversity Strategy (2011), the Lawton Report: Making Space for Nature (2011) and the Report of the Habitats and Wild Birds Directives Implementation Review (2012). Indeed, many of the initiatives in these documents rely upon local government playing an active role and often taking the lead at the local level. Such initiatives include: 24

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Planning and site safeguard – time to step up for nature How can prime wildlife sites be safeguarded amidst current forces which threaten to undermine stringent policies to help nature? This article looks at the background politics and examples of some areas under pressure.

ANDRE FARRAR Early lessons in politicking My active involvement in nature conservation started with writing to my MP about some arcane amendment to the Wildlife and Countryside Bill following a briefing I’d picked up at meeting of the Leeds RSPB Local Groups – which I’d just joined. This was back in 1980. It was my first letter to an MP and I got a substantial response not just from him (Keith Joseph for the record) but from Hector Munroe the Minister.

I had no idea, at the time, that the genesis of this Bill was the need for the new Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher to get the UK’s wildlife laws in line with the new European Directive on the Conservation of Wild Birds - the first sign that this progressive environmental legislation was going to be a force for good in the UK. I started work with the RSPB in 1982 protecting hen harriers in the Forest of Bowland in what turned out to be their best year in recent times – but that’s another story.

This was followed by a varied career including six years as a conservation officer sticking the Birds Directive up the first ill-conceived proposal to build a tidal power generating barrage across the Mersey Estuary.

Recently I’ve been on the communications and campaigning end of the spectrum – but a golden thread through all those three decades is that behind the pushing and shoving, the lobbying, and the battling for nature there has, at least, been the buttress of the Birds Directive, and its more recent sibling the Habitats Directive.

Protecting the tools for the job Here at the RSPB, periodically we gather in the canteen to mark the retirement of a colleague - when Alastair Gammell left as our Director of International Operations he passed on a challenge to those of us gathered to eat cheese footballs ... ‘If you do one thing, defend the Directives’.

In the same canteen just a few months ago, there was an outbreak of high-fiving as Defra’s review of the Habitats Regulations (the means by which the Bird and Habitats Directives are translated into national law) confirmed that that they were neither gold plated nor responsible for bring our economy to its knees: something we’d known all along. Compiling our evidence to underpin the Directives and respond 26

The Thames Estuary is under considerable development pressure as this eastern corridor of Greater London.

These mudflats at the estuary are near the village of Grain.

Photo: Eleanor Bentall RSPB Images

directly to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s misplaced attack on the environment in his 2011 Autumn Statement took up the time of several of our front line staff – in effect to protect what we have already. The price of effective environmental protection is eternal vigilance.

Around the same time the outcome of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) for England was published. The impact both of vigorous campaigning, led by the National Trust and Daily Telegraph, coupled with full engagement with the developing NPPF, involving substantial contributions from the RSPB’s head of planning, Simon Marsh, and his team clearly shifted the focus of the initial draft.

Securing an effective definition of sustainable development is fundamental to a planning system that must reconcile pressures on land use. Our initial speed-read of the NPPF, backed up by subsequent close analysis revealed a lot to praise and a lot achieved by engagement with the process.

Public bodies under pressure So far so good? The ‘Habs Regs’ exonerated in the face of the Chancellor’s charges and a National Planning Policy Framework (for England) that enables effective protection of the best and perhaps paves the way for some net gain. But it doesn’t feel like we’re moving forward. Hard-won policies and promises are at real risk from inadequate implementation driven by cost cutting and the continuing failure to embed the principles of sustainable development across Westminster government departments. This could still confound progress made on securing the regulations and planning context.

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Judging by the non-scientific test of how busy my casework and site safeguard colleagues have become, then dealing with implementation is now the focus of attention. Cash-starved local authorities and beleaguered statutory conservation advisers will have a massive expectation placed on ever narrowing shoulders.

To make the system work at a more local scale requires access to expertise and appropriate resources – these are thinly spread at the moment.

Report after report piles on the pressure; the Independent Panel of Forestry makes many recommendations and sends local authorities off in search of expertise on forestry and arboriculture matters. These are all challenges to which our conservation organisations will need to respond. The recently published Wildlife Trusts and Town and Country Planning Association guide to Planning for a Healthy and Natural Environment1 has involved a lot of practitioners and is a welcome contribution, but it’s only a start. But with only around a third of local authorities equipped with inhouse ecologists the gap is extreme, and it will be a challenge even to make sense of advice received. (See Mike Oxford’s article in this issue).

A recent report by Defra itself adds weight to the pattern of concern.2 It shows that at headline level the policies are in place but that, regularly, there is a failure to implement them effectively. The report highlights failings of culture and capacity to weigh nature in the decision making process unless it is backed by statutory protection. The role of Natural England is highlighted as an important source of ecological expertise – an aspect of the forthcoming triennial review that it is essential to address. To underline the point, in Defra’s study 72% of applications were found to have had a good outcome for biodiversity when there is access to ecological expertise, 33% in the absence of it.3 The ability of local authorities and the statutory advisers to step up to the challenge will be a significant factor in meeting the 2020 target of stopping and reversing the loss of nature especially (but not exclusively) beyond the realm of protected sites.

Holding the line and joining up nature The twin drivers of the Lawton Review, a clarion call for bigger sites, better protected and managed and interconnected, and the article 3 of the Birds Directive (the one that obliges member states to carry out various habitat conservation activities to maintain bird populations across their range) risk foundering on the rocks of implementation. There have been welcome announcements, such as funding for Nature Improvement Areas (NIAs) in England and resources for the establishment of Local Environment Partnerships, but will the limitations of capacity affect achieving real outcomes?

The job of fighting to protect the best places for nature continues and is likely to increase as the pressures for economic growth dominate. And it’s not just in terms of numbers, at the major infrastructure end of the scale, the complexity of individual cases coupled with accelerated processes is adding to the challenge of holding the line. Kent seems to be shaping up as crucible to test how the pressures for development will play out; we all await the outcome of the public inquiry into the 28

RSPB’s Northward Hill on Hoo Peninsula, where housing proposals threaten this prime site for birds, including nightingales.

Photo: Eleanor Bentall RSPB Images

proposed extension of Lydd Airport on the wildlife (and designation) rich Dungeness peninsula. In the autumn of 2012 consultations into airport capacity in the South East will begin and proposals for a four runway airport on the Hoo peninsula will, we expect, set unconstrained growth against the climate, communities and a worldclass natural environment.

At a domestic level, and still on the Hoo Peninsula, Lodge Hill sets a 5,000 house allocation against probably England’s premiere location for breeding nightingales.

Surveys justify extending the SSSI designation – making this potentially the greatest loss of SSSI in one go since before the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act slowed the rate of attrition of our most important wildlife sites.

I’ve restricted myself to an English terrestrial perspective – move offshore and the woeful rate of progress at sorting out the sea remains an embarrassment for the UK – the ‘hold on until we get better information’, jam tomorrow position of successive Governments is wearing thin and progress on marine protected areas is now beyond patience. And the uncertainty that results in terms of what to protect causes knock-on problems for everyone interested in increasing the roll-out of renewables offshore to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

But that won’t be enough – the campaigning and casework agenda for the next few years will be significant and will require mobilisation across the conservation 29

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community and beyond. It will require engagement locally to help shape our own visions of a future rich in wildlife, community by community. It will mean recognition that Governments can only do so much; making the case across society involving business and industry becomes evermore essential. At the EU level CAP (properly reformed) and the Directives (properly implemented) remain at the heart of so much environmental ambition.

But there is a bigger positive that should give cause for real hope. The public have noticed, and if the activism around forests and planning show anything, it is that the public’s connectedness with their environment is a powerful force ... one that neither Governments nor ourselves should ignore.

Unplanning the countryside Governments often consider softening up the planning system at times of economic strain, and the present Government is now implementing more measures to this effect than others have dared to. This article looks at the background forces which are trying to dilute planning policy and considers the implications for the natural environment.

RICHARD BATE “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.” Groucho Marx

References 1. http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/news/2012/07/06/planning-healthy-and-natural-environment 2. http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Default.aspx?Menu=Menu&Module=More&Location=None&ProjectID=17509 &FromSearch=Y&Publisher=1&SearchText=wc0791&SortString=ProjectCode&SortOrder=Asc&Paging=10%23Description%20 3. http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/publications/category/item/nurturing-nature

Andre Farrar is the RSPB’s Campaign manager. He is currently involved in developing the RSPB’s latest (and biggest) campaign, Stepping Up for Nature – which brings together the roles of individuals and the RSPB and will, as well, keep the pressure on decision makers to save nature. He regularly contributes to the RSPB’s Saving Special Places blog: http://www.rspb.org.uk/community/blogs Follow him on twitter @andrefarrar

The wilderness amongst the Thames Gateway regeneration the Thames Estuary near the village of Grain.

Photo: Eleanor Bentall , RSPB Images

The planning system under fire Who said in 2010 that local authority planning departments are “the last bastion of communism and bloody-mindedness”? And who said in 2011 “We are taking on the enemies of enterprise. The bureaucrats in government departments who concoct those ridiculous rules and regulations that make life impossible for small firms. The town hall officials who take forever to make those planning decisions that can be make or break for a business.” Who said also in 2011 “Our planning reforms strike the right balance between protecting our countryside while permitting economic development that creates jobs, but we need to go further to remove the lengthy delays and high costs of the current system, with new time limits on applications and new responsibilities for statutory consultees. We will make sure that the goldplating of EU rules on things such as habitats do not place ridiculous costs on British businesses. Planning laws need reform.” (Answers at the end of the article1) Land-use planning will always be at risk when the prevailing political ideology is driven by such notions as ‘less government must be good’, ‘local people know best’, ‘financial incentives will produce the results intended’, and ‘any intervention in what the market wants must be bad’. If on top of that you have decided in advance of any proper assessment that planning is the cause of many of the nation’s ills (e.g. insufficient development taking place and house prices being too high), you are probably open to persuasion that planning should be got out of developers’ hair.

At times like this media space opens up to those who provide sympathetic cover for these political prejudices, such as the Policy Exchange think tank with its war on the planning system, and the professorial economic wonks in residence at LSE and Reading University, who come up with hilarious numbers about the costs of the planning system. As the apparent ‘rightness’ of today’s political masters feeds on itself, those with other ideas can too easily be characterised as ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’ Lobby groups are finding that achieving the results they want is not so easy.

Liberal Democrats have grumbled about the neutering of the planning system but are stuck with it in their Coalition role. They have a weak bargaining position in

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any event as Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, is a signed-up anti-planner. The Country Land and Business Association’s enthusiasm for relaxing planning control over what its members want to do is well represented in the Conservative old guard, who in turn cut little ice with the new economic right which runs the party. The Labour Party has picked off some detailed arguments but has been virtually silent on the big principles being played out. It gives the impression more of admiration for the Government in achieving what it failed to do itself when in office.

Lessons in ‘policy backfire’ So it’s back to the lobby groups for the action, where the battleground is for the hearts and minds of the great British public. Broadly speaking, if enough people can make enough fuss then the Government will back down and move on to something else, but if they can’t then the Government will push its agenda through. The normal campaigning approach is to try to hold on to what you have when the political winds are unfavourable, and push the boat out when the opportunities present themselves. So there’s a lot of defending going on.

However, an interesting feature of government proposals which fail the public credibility test is that they often provide an opening to secure the reverse of what government intended. The Government’s attempt to weaken Green Belt policy in 1984-85 ended up with Green Belt policy being stronger. The recent failed attempt to sell off the forestry estate left forestry in a more powerful position than it was beforehand. The half-hearted attempt to abandon the preference for development on previously used ‘brownfield’ sites in favour of allowing it on greenfield sites produced one policy change of real environmental merit (see below).

There’s plenty of opportunity to assess progress with environmental campaigns, not least because the Government has chosen to pick environmental fights on so many fronts. The remainder of this article illustrates the lobbying experience with reviews of countryside in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), followed by two NPPF cases studies, and an infrastructure project.

Protecting the countryside: size matters The NPPF makes a virtue out of fulfilling legal obligations towards National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty – which will be given the same landscape protection as they previously enjoyed under Planning Policy Statement 7 (PPS7).

Part of the debate on the draft NPPF concerned the future of the undesignated countryside, with the final policy stating that planning should “take account of the different roles and character of different areas,… recognising the intrinsic character and beauty of the countryside and supporting thriving rural communities within it”.

This result was much less convincing than the policy it replaced from PPS7: “New building in the open countryside away from existing settlements or outside areas allocated for development in development plans, should be strictly controlled; the Government’s overall aim is to protect the countryside for the sake of its intrinsic character and beauty, the diversity of its landscapes, heritage and wildlife, the wealth of its natural resources and so it may be enjoyed by all” (paragraph 7).

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A threat to the integrity and setting of a protected landscape. Six wind turbines 125m high are proposed in the setting of the Kent Downs AONB near Sellindge. Being based on a ridge, they will be higher than the scarp of the Downs. Should prime parts of the natural environment which future generations will crave be sacrificed for just a trickle of electricity from imposing new infrastructure?

Photo: Richard Bate

The outcome was, though, a far cry from the draft NPPF, which stated that “Decisiontakers at every level should assume that the default answer to development proposals is “yes”, except where this would compromise the key sustainable development principles set out in this Framework”, and there was no reference to any intrinsic merit in the countryside. It was also a U-turn from the explanation given only two months beforehand to the British Property Federation by the Planning Minister’s parliamentary secretary John Howells: where local authorities development plans were out of date, developers would be able to build “what they like, where they like and when they like”.

The howls of protest which greeted the draft NPPF were led in the public eye by the National Trust (with about 4m members) and the Daily Telegraph (the largest circulation quality daily newspaper in Britain). What amounted to the mobilisation of the Tory voting heartland had the desired effect of taking some of the sting out of the draft policy. Power came from size. In particular the role of local development plans was reinforced, local planning authorities were given a year to revise local plans before reliance would be placed on the NPPF alone, and the conceptualisation of ‘sustainable development’ was improved so that the presumption in favour of it did not mean simply ‘development’.

Nonetheless, reducing the accumulated wisdom of national planning policy to the basics in just 49 pages inevitably pushes the interpretation of it to the implementation 33

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stage. There is pressure for accompanying guidance from the Government to flesh out what the brief commentaries on each issue mean in detail, but equally the Government is resistant to undoing its achievement of simplifying policy by making it more voluminous again. For the time being the lobby groups have mainly decided to claim victory and try to create a climate of opinion in which the expectation is that the countryside will be protected. They would have looked curmudgeonly had they done otherwise, though their position was engineered by the Government’s appalling draft NPPF. The RSPB even claimed that the final NPPF provided a net gain for nature.

It is far from clear that the text of the NPPF supports this positive response, and developers are trying their luck with schemes which significantly challenge the environment. Some of the key risks ahead are that: • the arbitrary convictions of local politicians to allow developments may prove as much of a challenge as the policy; • the abolition of strategic planning (in regional plans) will leave a void, not least as the replacement mechanism, the unenforceable ‘duty to co-operate’ amongst neighbouring authorities, is not a ‘duty to agree’ anything; and • the Government’s determination to secure development (yes, that’s centralised and top-down, whatever the localism rhetoric) may override countryside protection, especially in those areas least able to accommodate development due to having the largest extents of designations.

Meanwhile the impending abolition of regional plans will generate collateral damage. Local authorities have been urged in recent years not to include in their local plans topics already covered regionally, so many environmental issues are barely represented locally. For example, many regional plans aim to protect the ‘settings’ of designated landscapes which are often as valuable as the protected landscapes themselves when, for instance, the view from a vantage point was a reason for designation. The NPPF is silent on this and local authorities can lack determination to fill the policy gap.

Housing pressure on the western edge of Dover. A new vilage is proposed in the Kent Downs AONB on the terraced field and land beyond it.

Photo: Richard Bate

118). Compared with the previous Planning Policy Statement 9, the underlined word is new and the word in square brackets was removed.

The Woodland Trust used the opportunity of the emerging NPPF to campaign to protect ancient woodlands once and for all. It pointed out that local claims of need for development could easily be held to outweigh the merits of ancient woodland, and stated that there were 225 ancient woodlands threatened with destruction at the time. 85% of ancient woodland is not designated for protection (e.g. as SSSIs).

The improvement of the NPPF over its draft was achieved at some cost to the National Trust: the gentle giant used up its goodwill in Government (which was hacked off by the Trust’s effective campaign) and will not be able to repeat interventions so readily on other issues. We should all be grateful it chose this issue to fight on.

Verdict: three cheers for the National Trust.

The barely altered final NPPF policy led the Woodland Trust to complain there would be “more destruction ahead as planning policy leaves England’s irreplaceable ancient woodland unprotected”. The mood music around the new policy was an improvement on the draft NPPF but not on PPS9. The Woodland Trust’s campaign had forced Ministers to promise that the NPPF would retain the protections already in place, but did not secure the improvements sought. Verdict: the outcome could have been better – or worse.

Ancient woodlands: a glass half empty

Brownfield land recycling: mixed messages

The new planning policy on ancient woodlands in the NPPF states: “planning permission should be refused for [any] development resulting in the loss or deterioration of irreplaceable habitats, including ancient woodland and the loss of aged or veteran trees found outside ancient woodland, unless the need for, and benefits of, the development in that location clearly outweigh the loss” (paragraph

One of the 12 core land-use planning principles of the NPPF is that planning should: “encourage the effective use of land by reusing land that has been previously developed (brownfield land), provided that it is not of high environmental value” (paragraph 17).

Also, “Local planning authorities may continue to consider the case for setting a locally appropriate target for the use of brownfield land” (paragraph 111).

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ECOS 33(2) 2012 This policy represented a U-turn by the Government. The draft NPPF failed to mention brownfield land at all, though it did aim to minimise adverse effects on the local and natural environment. The widely-held fear was that this was a signal to developers and local authorities to allow building on greenfield sites without any pressure to consider brownfield site options first. While the aim was allegedly to avoid encouraging development on brownfield sites with high biodiversity value, Wildlife and Countryside Link argued that this desirable objective could readily have been achieved by selecting a definition of brownfield land which excluded categories of high biodiversity land.

In 1995 the Conservatives had introduced a policy of securing 50% of housing supply on brownfield land, raised to 60% by Labour in 1998. Actual rates rose to 78% by 2008 (80% including conversions). After coming to power in 2010, the Coalition Government twice changed Planning Policy Statement 3 on Housing, but retained heavy emphasis on using brownfield land: the June 2011 edition – one month before the draft NPPF – mentions this 33 times. Then the policy was dropped. The heavy hand of the Treasury seems evident.

The fight back was led by the Campaign to Protect Rural England with commissioned work2 and lobbying, and was supported by the CLG Select Committee’s inquiry into the NPPF. The final policy only offers ‘encouragement’ with no specific measures requiring brownfield sites to be considered first, and the national target 60% of housing on brownfield land was dropped a month after reaffirming it in PPS3. On the other hand, a new policy on ‘windfall’ housing sites was reintroduced after it had been dropped by Labour in the 2006 version of PPS3. Windfall sites are brownfield sites which unexpectedly become available for development and which could not reasonably have been planned-for in advance.

In many urban areas such sites account for the large majority of land supply for housing, so not being able to make an allowance for them has forced authorities unnecessarily to allocate greenfield sites instead. On the recommendation of the Select Committee, the NPPF now provides that “Local planning authorities may make an allowance for windfall sites in the five-year supply if they have compelling evidence that such sites have consistently become available in the local area and will continue to provide a reliable source of supply” subject to conditions (paragraph 48).

The outcome was a major improvement on the draft NPPF and restored a benefit not seen since 2006, but somewhat weakened the core policy. Verdict: mixed results with campaigning opportunities created.

High Speed 2: infrastructure or vanity project?

Rail travel has bucked the recession with growth in passenger numbers. The West Coast Main Line (WCML) between London and Birmingham is heavily used and approaching capacity. What to do? The response of the previous Government and the Coalition has been to promote a completely new high speed rail line, making a step-change in the capacity available and freeing other lines for freight – for which capacity is also limited in the corridor.

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ECOS 33(2) 2012 And won’t this be so environmental? It will attract people out of aeroplanes onto carbon-efficient trains, save travel time and therefore business-people’s money, and regenerate northern cities. Actually, no. These will be bullet trains at 225mph, using huge quantities of energy. The airlines have said they will continue providing short-haul connections to Heathrow, but if they didn’t the Heathrow slots would be taken by kerosene-guzzling long-haul aircraft. Travel time will be reduced but the financial implications are unclear: how much is time worth, and why is time spent on trains assumed to be wasted? Regarding regeneration, more people will want to come to London than go the other way, while being able to service northern cities from London reduces rather than enhances the benefit of locating in those cities.

Local authorities bypassed by HS2 are especially worried. Train-loving lobby groups should think a little harder.

The assumptions underpinning the project include: • faster trains will attract more customers: new customers will generate 27% of the trips on HS2; • demand will continue rising on the WCML at pre-recession rates until at least 2032; • saving business people’s time is critical, accounting for 89% of the economic benefits; • the service would be more costly than others, with fare rises 3%pa above inflation; • the project would be uneconomic if any of these assumptions proved wrong.

Neglecting for a moment where the extra 100,000 people per day will come from to make the project stack up (filling the 1100 seat trains 18 times every hour), shifting this number of people through a London terminal is not practicable: there would need to be more connecting tube lines, but none are planned. The mitigation is to have a London-edge stop on Crossrail, so that business people can connect between HS2 and the City/Canary Wharf without burdening Euston. Going that way ties into the political prejudice of linking HS2 to Heathrow, even though studies show there is hardly any demand for this.

If HS2 has to point west out of London to reach Birmingham, it is committed to a route through the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and probably to carving a fresh corridor of development, noise and destruction of amenity through the heart of rural England. Because the assumptions behind the project hinge on extraordinarily fast trains, the line taken can barely waver laterally or vertically, so avoiding sensitive places becomes a nightmare. The National Trust would lose the benefit of the magnificent Grade I listed Hartwell House with its Capability Brown landscape near Aylesbury, and the Woodland Trust reports destruction of 21 ancient woodlands and damage to 27 more, for example.

Salutory experience is provided by the National Audit Office, which analysed the completion and later sale of HS1 which runs between the Channel Tunnel and London 37

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ECOS 33(2) 2012 St Pancras. HS1 cost the Government £6.16bn to build and has recently been sold for just £2.05bn on a 30 year lease. Total costs to the taxpayer are estimated at £10.2bn. Passenger numbers in 2007-11 were only one third of the number forecast in 1995 at the planning stage. The NAO recommended that government departments should ensure that demand forecasts are subject to rigorous scrutiny and scepticism.

Departments should assess the benefits under a range of different scenarios, perform a sensitivity analysis of key assumptions and a sense check to understand the reality of meeting forecast demand.

Meanwhile on HS2, isn’t there another way to fix the WCML capacity problem for less than £18bn (just to Birmingham)? Yes there is, according to HS2’s opponents. The HS2 Action Alliance is a particularly impressive umbrella group working with over 70 community groups affected, with arguments galore on all aspects of the project, but was 18 months too late starting.

Unfortunately, the Government shows little sign of listening to the arguments. It’s a close call whether the Government will realise its errors before or after signing the project into existence. Verdict: campaign failure but self-destruct option remains.

References and notes 1.

The three quotations in the opening paragraph are respectively from Eric Pickles (reported in the Birmingham Post), David Cameron (to the Conservative Party spring conference), and George Osborne (in the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement to parliament).

2. Green Balance, Building in a small island? Why we still need the brownfield first approach, November 2011, CPRE.

Richard Bate is a partner of the planning and environment consultancy Green Balance. richardbate@greenbalance.co.uk

Neighbourhood planning fresh powers for local conservation?

Reforms to the planning system could bring major change to directing development and managing the environment at the local level. This article looks at the emerging issues for wildlife and the natural environment as the reforms begin to bite and the first generation of neighbourhood plans take hold.

JEREMY OWEN Political agonising over planning Greg Clark MP, Minister for Cities, Decentralisation and Planning made an impassioned speech to the Planning Officers Society in January 2011, including these words: “Planning is more than a job: it is a vocation. It helps people articulate their aspirations and ambitions for the place where they live. It promotes local prosperity, safeguards the environment, and expresses the unique character that makes different places special. This is a unique and incredibly valuable form of public service.

So it’s a tragedy that over-centralisation has led many people today to see the planning system in a poor light. Regional strategies and housing targets have succeeded not in boosting development but in generating antagonism.

The Government is committed to profound reform. The Localism Bill [now Act], currently before parliament, will scrap regional targets, do away with unnecessary bureaucracy, and allow people at a very local level to exercise more power than ever before.

Instead of imposing on people, we want to give them the opportunity to make their own choices through neighbourhood planning. Our aim is to give people real choice, real influence, and real reasons to say “yes” to development”.1 On the one hand the Minister was praising a system that, by and large, has maintained so much that is loved about our country. On the other hand, he was condemning the system as broken and not fit for purpose. So does this ‘power to the people’ herald a new dawn for planning, and what does it mean for nature conservation?

Planning’s heritage Before looking forwards, it is worth reflecting on the past. The planning system has come a long way since the landmark Town and Country Planning Act 1947, 38

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which established the principle that land ownership by itself should not confer the right to develop land as the landowner saw fit. The Act introduced the need to apply for planning permission, in effect nationalising the right to develop land. The requirement for local authorities to prepare development plans was introduced.

ECOS 33(2) 2012 NEIL BENNETT

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There have been several refinements to the planning system since the 1947 Act, not least the concept of the plan-led system (introduced by the Town & Country Planning Act 1990 which changed the presumption against development unless it was in accordance with the development plan for an area except in exceptional circumstances). In addition, a myriad of complementary legislation and policy has grown up around it. Much of this has been concerned with protection of the environment, such as the introduction of Green Belts (under a 1955 Circular), the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, the Environmental Protection Act 1990, and legislation on the need for certain development projects to undergo Environmental Impact Assessment and more recently development plans to be subject to Sustainability Appraisal and Strategic Environmental Assessment.

The need for more than simply local planning was recognised, ironically, by the Margaret Thatcher-led Conservative administration through the issuing of strategic guidance, later known as Regional Planning Guidance, in 1986. This was further refined by the introduction in 2004 of Regional Spatial Strategies, under the Tony Blair-led Labour administration. Regional planning did not replace local planning (although county Structure Plans were abolished at the same time that Regional Spatial Strategies were introduced) but complemented it. Unitary, district and borough local planning authorities were still required to prepare local plans, such as Core Strategies, under the plan-led system, but these had to conform to the higher level regional plans and national planning policy.

We are now on the verge of doing away with regional planning altogether, leaving local authorities and local people to their own devices. The Government believes that this will speed up planning and both local planning authorities and local communities will welcome the opportunity to plan for themselves, rather than rely on somebody else higher up to tell them what to do.

A system which works – the evidence Inevitably, given the intricacies of the planning system, and the important role of public consultation, the planning system can grind quite slowly, but not as slowly as some people might imagine. Government statistics2 for the year ended September 2011 in England show that 62% of major applications were decided within thirteen weeks, and 72% of minor applications were decided within eight weeks. Furthermore, 86% of all applications were granted planning consent, suggesting that the planning system may not be quite as anti-development as some commentators would like to think.

Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the preparation of development plans has not been as speedy as successive Governments would have liked. Even now, eight years after the introduction of Local Development Frameworks, only 39% of local 40

planning authorities have adopted core strategies.3 But is this really that surprising?

The UK is the 33rd most densely populated country in the world with 656 people per square mile, more than double that of France.4 In western Europe, only the Netherlands and Belgium are more densely populated. This places tremendous and competing pressures on land and its resources. Development is often controversial – any proposal is almost bound to affect someone.

Yet the planning system is expected to deliver almost everything. It is supposed to identify land for housing, industrial and commercial development, shops, schools and hospitals. It has to provide for transport, water and energy infrastructure, ports and distribution facilities. It has to cater for mineral extraction, and waste facilities.

It has to make sure that people and property are not put at risk of flooding, and it is required both to ensure that places are adapted to cope with the impacts of climate change, and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, it has to protect and enhance our countryside, our green spaces and public amenity, our wildlife and biodiversity, and our heritage. Ironically, the one thing that planning has little control over is how agricultural land is used and managed, which is rather ironic given that this is by far the most significant land use of all, and arguably the most important for nature conservation.5 So when dealing with big numbers, as the Regional Spatial Strategies had to do for housing, planning is bound to provoke strong reactions. Some draft Regional Spatial Strategies generated tens of thousands of consultation responses. And it wasn’t just the number of comments that challenged planners, it was the range – from those who complained that the Strategies wouldn’t deliver the housing and economic development that is desperately needed, to those who pleaded that development on the scale proposed would dramatically change their town or countryside for ever.

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If nothing else, planners have to perform a fine balancing act, attempting to steer a course through a mix of often conflicting agendas, all within a national policy framework, in order to deliver land-use change that is in the public interest.

planning above the local plan level. This is significant for nature conservation because the Regional Spatial Strategies were able to take a cross-boundary approach, planning at a regional and sub-regional level.

The neighbourhood level – what will this mean for planning?

A strong feature of Regional Spatial Strategies was the inclusion of policies, not only for the protection of biodiversity, but also for its enhancement through policies that sought to encourage the development of green infrastructure. Nature does not recognise political boundaries, and the now defunct regional assemblies understood that it needed to be planned for strategically to ensure that multifunctional biodiversity networks could be developed to reverse the slow but inexorable fragmentation and erosion of habitats and wildlife corridors.

By and large the planning system hasn’t done too badly in the face of all these competing pressures, and certainly the country is a whole lot better than it would have been had development been left unchecked. As Greg Clark MP said in his speech to the 2012 Royal Town Planning Institute Planning Convention “Britain would not be the place it is today if it wasn’t for the planning profession” (a compliment, I am sure, to my chosen profession!).

Well the Localism Bill is now an Act. The National Planning Policy Framework6 (NPPF) is now in place. And local communities are starting to beaver away on their neighbourhood plans. The Government is supporting over 200 neighbourhood plan ‘front runners’ with grants of up to £20,000 to support and facilitate their preparation. But what does it mean in practice?

Neighbourhood planning will not result in communities doing whatever they like – they will have at least one if not both hands tied behind their back. Neighbourhood plans will have to conform with policies in the NPPF and with the strategic policies in the local plan in which the neighbourhood lies. Neighbourhood plans cannot be used to reduce the amount of housing and other types of development that is contained within a local plan – they are definitely not supposed to be a NIMBY’s charter.

Steering local development – how will it happen?

What communities can do through neighbourhood plans is decide where development should go in the community, what it should look like, and what should accompany development, such as the protection of open space and the delivery of community facilities. With a neighbourhood development order in place, a community can even grant planning permission for new buildings they want to see go ahead without the developers having to apply to the local planning authority.

Indeed, the Government is confident that local communities do want new homes, and new economic development. It believes that by giving communities greater powers to plan for themselves, coupled with incentives such as the new homes bonus (whereby the Government provides additional funding or a ‘bonus’ for new homes by match funding the additional council tax raised for new homes and empty properties brought back into use, with an additional amount for affordable homes, for six years) will mean that house building rates will start to increase again.

Room for nature?

So where does nature conservation fit in? Good question. First, let’s consider what has been lost as a result of the changes. Perhaps most significantly, the proposed revocation of the Regional Spatial Strategies (which has still yet to happen pending completion of the Strategic Environmental Assessment process, and the placing of orders before parliament) means that there is now little in the way of strategic 42

So now that regional and sub-regional planning has gone, what do we have in its place?

There is now a ‘duty to co-operate’ placed on local planning authorities as a result of the Localism Act. Local planning authorities are required to work collaboratively with other bodies to ensure that strategic priorities across local boundaries are properly coordinated and clearly reflected in individual local plans. One of the strategic priorities listed in the NPPF is the conservation and enhancement of the natural environment.

But most attention to date has focused on development and infrastructure, such as identifying housing market areas and planning for waste, rather than nature conservation. Nonetheless, it is now up to local planning authorities to decide how nature should be planned for strategically across administrative boundaries. No longer can they look to a higher plan for guidance.

Getting nature into Neighbourhood Plans The NPPF does provide some pretty strong hints on what the Government expects local planning authorities to do. They are required to plan positively for the creation, protection, enhancement and management of networks of biodiversity and green infrastructure, recognise the wider benefits of ecosystem services, and minimise impacts on biodiversity and provide net gains in biodiversity where possible, contribute to the Government’s commitment to halt the overall decline in biodiversity, including by establishing coherent ecological networks that are more resilient to current and future pressures.

So many of the national policy ‘hooks’ are there, but whether local authorities have the resources and expertise to deliver is another matter. Planners are adept at turning their minds to many subjects but understanding and planning for ecological networks is pretty challenging stuff, especially when there is so much else for planners to grapple with. Natural England and other bodies with the skills and knowledge are under similar resource constraints and will struggle to engage meaningfully with such a large number of local planning authorities, rather than concentrate on getting it right at the regional and sub-regional level first, in the belief that this would filter down to the local level.

At the neighbourhood planning level, attention is likely to focus on what local people hold dear. There is little doubt that neighbourhood plans will seek to identify important areas of open space to protect, whether or not they are important for 43

ECOS 33(2) 2012 nature conservation, but it is very unclear whether neighbourhood plans will provide the planning mechanism needed to stimulate significant improvements in ecological networks. To encourage local communities to think about such issues the statutory agencies have issued guidance to local communities on how to take environmental matters into account when preparing neighbourhood plans.7 Similarly, voluntary bodies, such as the Somerset Wildlife Trust, have made available on-line advice.8 To look at one example, in Somerset in April 2012 one of the first draft Neighbourhood Plans emerged. Amongst a range of objectives for the village is one that focuses on improving wildlife potential of its open spaces. The draft Plan calls for ‘Wild Life Refuges’: “Wild life refuges provide breeding grounds for pollinators and other beneficial fauna and feed for wild birds.

“Existing large green areas in the village should be managed with wild headland boundaries. This reduces the energy of space maintenance and encourages beneficial wild life activity.”

“We would like a sustained consideration of small landscaping grassed areas and nature strips in the village to be managed sustainably to include wildlife refuges including the planting of fruit trees.”

It is too early to judge whether or not things will really change as a result of neighbourhood plans. Many are in their formative stages, although emerging examples such as Much Wenlock9, Thame10, and Lynton & Lynmouth11 all demonstrate that communities care about their local environments and are keen to ensure that it is protected and enhanced. But whether this is enough to make a difference is difficult to tell.

ECOS 33(2) 2012 join up to provide a seamless, coherent mosaic of habitats and corridors across the country? Who knows? I don’t. Does the Government?

References and notes 1. Greg Clark, Minister for Cities, Minister for Decentralisation and Planning in a speech to the Planning Officers Society, 24 January 2011, ‘The opportunity of neighbourhood planning’ http://www.gregclark.org/ articles~speeches/articles~speeches/the-opportunity-of-neighbourhood-planning-a-speech/16 2. Table P122 at http://www.communities.gov.uk/planningandbuilding/planningbuilding/planningstatistics/ livetables/livetablesondevelopmentcontrolst/ 3. The Planning Inspectorate Annual Report and Accounts 2011/12 4. http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/populations/ctypopls.htm 5. 18.6 million hectares is classified as agricultural land in the UK, over 70% of the total land area.

See http://www.ukagriculture.com/the_importance_of_agriculture.cfm 6. Department for Communities and Local Government (March 2012) National Planning Policy Framework 7. English Heritage, Environment Agency, Forestry Commission England, Natural England (no date) Planning for the environment at the neighbourhood level 8. http://www.somersetwildlife.org/article129.html 9. http://beta.wenlockplan.org/themes-and-issues/built-environment/ 10. http://www.thametowncouncil.gov.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1136&Itemid=111 11. http://www.lynplan.org.uk/

Jeremy Owen is a chartered planner and a Principal of the environmental consultancy LUC. He prepared guidance on neighbourhood planning on behalf of CPRE and the National Association of Local Councils (see http://www.cpre.org.uk/resources/housing-and-planning/planning/ item/2689-how-to-shape-where-you-live-a-guide-to-neighbourhood-planning). The views expressed here are entirely his own. jeremy.owen@landuse.co.uk

Will neighbourhood planning be joined up?

It is unclear whether neighbourhood plans will need to undergo sustainability appraisal or strategic environmental assessment, although they will require independent examination. Many local communities will know and value the nature in their neighbourhood, but this is not the same as understanding its condition, or what needs to happen in ecological terms to support certain species, or how development proposals in one location may have knock-on effects on wildlife in another. Even qualified planners and environmental professionals can struggle to identify and understand such issues, so why should members of the public with no particular training be able to fare any better?

It seems to me that neighbourhood planning requires a lot of faith. Yes, local people do know their neighbourhoods best, although they may not always agree on how to plan for their future. They know which parts of their village or their town that they value. But do they understand whether that bit of derelict land is ideal for rare invertebrates, or that area of unsightly scrubland is important for breeding birds.

Will it be the most pristine areas that are protected or those that are most important for nature conservation? Will the thousands of neighbourhood plans somehow all 44

The Lynton and Lynmouth Neighbourhood Plan is one of the first generation of such plans. It has a strong focus on identifying sites for local needs housing whilst conserving the area’s sensitive environment and protected landscape.

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Rat Island – lessons from ancient Aotearoa for middle England today This article began as a book review of William Stolzenburg’s Rat Island (Bloomsbury 2011). However, the narrative of past misdeeds as the backdrop to the current extinction crisis juxtaposed with my own experience of trying to conserve habitats as a local councillor, inevitably pitted the culpability of the present generation of middle England against that of ancient peoples exploring untrammelled lands; it asks whether lessons will ever be learnt and what if anything can be done to turn extinction’s tide.

SIMON LEADBEATER Stolzenburg’s Rat Island

Far from giving us ‘new reason to hope’ as the publisher’s description of Rat Island suggests, this was one of the most desperately sad reads I have had for a long time, and the deaths of Stolzenburg’s heroes, Don Merton and Richard Henry Kakapo (see page 48), left me feeling far from optimistic for the future of species’ conservation despite the undoubted successes detailed in this book. My overall impressions are of irretrievable loss coupled with a sharpened focus on how our species continues unabashed and unabated to exterminate others.

Early chapters in the extinction story For those unfamiliar with this story it is a truly shocking one. Knowing, for example, that in the UK the larger predators had been extirpated one by one – with the last wolf being killed in around 17431 - was no preparation for learning the scale of the violence which drove literally thousands of animals to extinction, a high proportion of them on islands as “20 per cent of [the] Earth’s terrestrial animal species [lived] on just 5 per cent of its landmass”.2 The first wave of extinctions were caused by Polynesian seafarers – the Maori – who in antiquity wiped out 2,000 species as they travelled between 800 islands in the South Pacific eventually reaching Aotearoa; the Maori can lay claim to exterminating the Giant Moa. One of the most appalling atrocities was committed by Commander Bering’s Russian sailors, stranded on what is now known as Bering Island near Alaska in the early 1740s.

As Bering’s men began to run out of otters and seals they turned to the sea cows; at first they were unsure of how to kill them, but eventually perfected their art of bludgeoning and harpooning them, pulling them onto the shore and slicing them up alive. The sea cows lived in tight-knit family groups and pairs and would attempt to save stricken family members, to the extent of crawling up the beach and remaining there for days after their mates had been killed. Within 27 years Steller’s Sea Cow was extinct.

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ECOS 33(2) 2012 The majority of Stolzenburg’s book describes attempts by Merton and others to eliminate introduced ‘invasive’ animals from a series of islands. These were mainly rats, but included foxes, weasels, cats, even mice, and farm animals left behind by Europeans. The non-natives mostly eradicated birds and other animals because they had not evolved to cope with the former’s predation. Was this necessary and does Stolzenburg demonstrate that the ends justified the means? The author does not really ask or answer this question, and there are some aspects of this book which either trouble me or which could have delivered its message more effectively.

Almost en passant Stolzenburg discusses animal welfare. The uncomfortable fact is that the cats and pigs caught in traps, and the rats being poisoned, suffered very considerably. The author cites Marc Bekoff’s concerns about the suffering inherent in using lethal means and also quotes Jaak Panksepp’s experiments in which rats express ‘joy’. “And where there was joy, could such emotions as fear and anxiety, sorry and empathy, be far away”.3 An emphatic no, according to Bekoff, who goes further and argues that animals have morality, “just like we have it”.4 The rats’ ultimate downfall derived from what Bekoff describes as their “intricate networks of relationships”,5 allowing ‘king rats’ to eat Brodifacoum without any apparent ill effects so ensuring that all the remaining rats followed suit. One of the ironies of Stolzenburg’s account is the conservationist hunters’ respect for their prey, and in particular rats; the animals needing to die for conservation exhibited behaviour rather closer to us humans than the avifauna and the other species their deaths required.

Overall the book could establish context rather better. The background to the current extinction crisis is very powerful, but knowing where all the islands were was a struggle (a map would have been a great help) and early in his book Stolzenburg moves effortlessly from the Maori term Aotearoa to New Zealand which may be confusing to readers not familiar with this part of the world. The book has no conclusion or summary, and while it describes how individual islands were restored to their near pristine glory, the reader does not learn how many islands remained dominated by rats and other ‘invasives’.

We are not told to what extent this new more muscular approach to conservation had worked across the world or of how much unfinished business is left.

The passing of a hero There are some issues with Stolzenburg’s writing, which is generally lucid and engaging. He occasionally should have listened to Dr Johnson and struck out his ‘particularly fine passages’ such as “the clouds billow on approach…a sphere becomes a scythe, a serpent, a genie emerging from a lamp”.6 He repeatedly uses the word ‘decimate’ when he means significantly more than one in ten. These are, however, minor points in a generally fine book, which pulls together different strands of the extinction story to unfold a tale we all should know. My main criticism is the lack of synthesis and instead a dénouement comprising the death of a flightless parrot numbering some 200 of his kind, beloved by one of the principal saviours of his species, Don Merton, who died in April 2011.

So why don’t I sense any hope in this book? First, it is the lack of context – there is no indication of what has been achieved globally or of how much there is left to do.

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ECOS 33(2) 2012 harboured wildlife-rich habitats. At my first planning meeting I tried to persuade the Council to recommend refusing the development of an old orchard and meadow – at the meeting I was astonished to hear one councillor state that “he would like the landowner to realise his opportunity”. Fortunately the planning authority refused permission, but the developers appealed and the decision is pending. This was my first realisation that, no, most local politicians are not concerned about the environment, the street scene, the way local neighbourhoods are being disfigured by over development – in fact they usually vote for it. This is because, they say, they are in a quasi-judicial role and must follow the planning criteria set down in the Local Plan. Nothing in their demeanour suggests voting against their conscience; environmental considerations do not weigh heavily if at all.

After his retirement in 2005 Dr Don Merton went back one more time to the Kakapo reserve in Codfish Island to visit Richard Henry Kakapo (so named after the first conservationist who tried to save his species). Don Merton was 72 when he died and Richard Henry - who was found dead on Christmas eve 2010 - perhaps 30 years his senior.

Photo: Margaret Merton

Second, we live in the age of what Richard Leakey has called the Sixth Extinction,7 so despite the efforts of Merton et al we are still in one way or another expunging other species from this planet without let and scarce hindrance - on our own island one species becomes extinct a fortnight.8

A hopeless cause – trying to conserve habitats in middle England

Being invited to review Rat Island had a particular poignancy. Conservationists need little reminding of what Charles Elton called the ‘importance of cover,9 but the pressure on habitat where I live – be it suburban gardens or the surrounding countryside – is significant and growing.10 My local town in Hertfordshire is the ninth most affluent community in the UK11 where the average detached house is priced at more than £900,000.12 Predictably the local planning authority is busy with applications proposing the demolition of characterful 1930s houses set in spacious grounds with one or more replacements and much larger footprints. This pressure may be being felt particularly strongly in Hertfordshire, but it is not unique; in London 6,400 acres of gardens were converted to hard surfaces between 1998 and 200813 and on a larger scale perhaps some 100,000 gardens gave way to in-fill developments between 2000 and 2010.14 Invariably when I sat on the Town Council’s advisory planning committee I cut a lonely figure opposing in-fill developments. What surprised me was how immune my fellow councillors were to arguments in favour of preserving gardens because they 48

Where my Town Council has a direct responsibility concerns the development of its own land in the shape of a former allotment where a habitat survey discovered Roman snails and slow worms. Their protection under the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981) is unlikely to prevent their habitat’s destruction. The battle for the former allotment – characterised by near weekly skirmishes in the local paper’s letter page – has a number of dimensions, some of which are unprintable. What is on public record is the wrangle between the Town and District Councils; the latter owned a ransom strip precluding access, but following local elections in May 2011 and with the Tories gaining control of both councils access is now permitted.

The Town Council will financially gain from this development; this presents a clear incentive. The Council naturally prefers, however, to emphasise the proposal to build accommodation for people with learning difficulties and affordable housing.

In isolation this presents a much better case than the destruction of characterful homes and their replacement with £3m plus (sic) Range Rover Sport equivalents of the housing world. But it is not a one or either situation – it is both. There can be only one cumulative outcome. All species suffer, from birds and invertebrates15 to charismatic animals like hedgehogs, which from their 1950s population of some 30m have declined to perhaps 750,000; some commentators predict their extinction in the next decade. 16 Where do the snails and slow worms feature in the allotment argument? A local action group’s efforts to defend their habitat are derided within the Council as insincere and cynical; there is quite an industry in Roman snail jokes.17 I probably did well to extract a handshake from the previous Leader of the Town Council committing him, privately at least, to include consideration of the rare species living on the site. Now that the Leader has changed (which happens annually as the mayor and leader roles are conflated) I have made my case all over again; I am searching for at least some understanding and compensation measures, but the habitat will go.

For all the party activism there is much that is quietist in local government and a surprising dearth of prescience. I became a councillor to at least influence the shape of things to come and remain astounded at how little my colleagues care about the most obvious threats. Two illustrations evidence this assertion. First, there is the Town Council’s initial reluctance to respond to the Coalition Government’s 49

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draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) in 2011. Implicitly this document aimed to bully District Councils into assigning parts of the countryside – including greenbelt – for development within their Core Strategies or Development Plans as if councils failed to do so independent inspectors could reject their plans.18,19 Even where the NPPF appeared to protect the countryside - “planning permission should be refused for development resulting in the loss or deterioration of irreplaceable habitats…” - developers and councillors simply had to explain how “the …benefits of the development outweigh the loss”.20 At the time I argued that Hertfordshire’s towns would become separated by, if anything, ribbons of parks and sports grounds which our descendants would consider countryside as they would know little else.

My colleagues repeatedly fail to see beyond their own lifetimes and to appreciate the consequences of successive generations of councillors giving up areas of countryside even though the pattern of schools successfully building on erstwhile playing fields and then converting countryside into replacement playing areas is an established pattern and source of much angst ridden controversy in the District.

I am glad to say an official response to the NPPF was made through my insistent lobbying of the Leader and personally drafting some of the text.

Second, and as recently as late June 2012, the Town Council decided to change its position in respect of Luton Airport’s expansion. Formerly the Council had agreed to “contest the expansion of Luton Airport” and now it has decided to “seek to influence plans to expand Luton Airport, reflecting the concerns and aspirations of residents”. The Town Council did make the case for improved infrastructure, but in fact that is the antithesis of what the area needs – would residents really want their local roads turned in dual carriageways? For me a key issue is that expansion will further erode the tranquillity of the surrounding countryside where it is already most keenly felt. And the scale of the threat? Luton airport currently manages some 9m passengers per year – the plan is to expand more than threefold to 30m which is nearly the size of Gatwick. To move from outright opposition to ‘seeking to influence’ breaks one of the most elementary rules of negotiation.

If councillors at their various levels in local government cannot adequately react to threats of this nature, never mind shape the future of their communities and the environments they will inherit, is it any wonder that the graver underlying problem of species’ extinction continues, largely unspoken, but nonetheless inexorably? The inability of town halls to both protect and predict, to will and direct the future, is inextricably linked to the fate of other species; by failing to control the environment for ourselves, councillors are hardly likely to be able to protect it for others. And while I lament the demolition of beautiful town houses and the loss of their gardens, and the creeping suburbanisation of the countryside where I live, what makes me angrier still is the crowding out of other species in the process.

Lessons from Aotearoa What lessons can be drawn from ancient people’s behaviour? The Maori were perhaps unaware of the consequences of their actions, but that does not hold for the situation in England today. Equating extinction with development is not wholly fair and its causes in the UK are no doubt complex and multifaceted. Nonetheless 50

The countryside around Ayot St.Lawrence, the home of George Bernard Shaw, is already blighted by aircraft noise and a threefold increase in passenger numbers if Luton airport expands as proposed will further erode the tranquility of the countryside.

Photo: Simon Leadbeater

the type of unsustainable development epitomised by, inter alia, most in-fill housing is a key driver. David cannot always beat Goliath in the form of insurmountable economic and demographic forces and Central Government planning dictats. But this is not where the problem lies. Trying and failing would be a good start, but not recognising the problem reinforces the unsettling feeling that in the main councillors do not reflect the capability inherent in the communities they serve. There are also, of course, malign influences and officer careers tied up with development and growth, but perhaps the failure lies in local politicians’ inability to link unsustainable development with extinction – and much else besides.

Baring’s sailors, while upsetting modern day sensibilities might – if they could – excuse their behaviour by saying they were fighting to survive. In contrast modern day councillors, with their officers’ reports supplemented by aboricultural and environmental impact assessments, have the time and resources to weigh nature in the balance. There is no parity here – greater culpability must lie with the decision makers who are incrementally acceding to the removal of habitats essential for the survival of a dwindling range of species.

This is the context within which I read William Stolzenburg’s Rat Island, and so no, the book has not given me much hope; at a personal level I feel powerless to stop extinction’s relentless progress. Is there an answer – do we need to find another Don Merton? If the truth be known saving iconic species from extinction – difficult 51

ECOS 33(2) 2012 though it is – may be easier than halting extinction’s tide in middle England, where we have already lost so much of our species diversity and where local politics does not recognise the plight of what little remains.21

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Mrs Margaret Merton for permission to use this previously unpublished picture of her husband holding Richard Henry, and also thank Mr Julian Fitter for contacting Mrs Merton on my behalf.

References and notes 1. UK Wolf Conservation Trust. Original Source: Harting, J.E., (1880) British Animals Extinct Within Historic Times By James Edmund Harting 2. Stolzenburg, W., (2011) Rat Island p.2.

3. Rat Island Op.cit. p. 147.

4. Bekoff, M & Pierce, J., (2009) Wild Justice. The Moral Lives of Animals. p. xi.

5. Ibid 6. Rat Island Op.cit. p.4.

7. Leakey, R. & Lewin, R., (1995) The Sixth Extinction 8. Hambler, C., Henderson, P.A., Speight, M.R., (2010) Extinction Rates, extinction-prone habitats, and indicator groups in Britain and at larger scales. Biological Conservation 9. Quoted by Hambler, C. and Speight, Martin R., (February 1995) Biodiversity Conservation in Britain: Science Replacing Tradition. British Wildlife 6 pp.137-147 10. The predicated increase in the UK population to 100M by the end of the century, much of the increase being in the south east, is an obvious factor.

11. Church Urban Fund (May 2012), Poverty in Numbers 12. www.home.co.uk/guides/sold_house_prices.htm?location=al5&month=01&year=2012 13. Smith, C., (2010) London: Garden City?

14. Leadbeater, S.R.B., (2010) ‘Do the Environmental Benefits of Gardens outweigh the need for Affordable Housing.’.

The Ecologist. http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/other_comments/638940/ do_the_environmental_benefits_of_gardens_outweigh_the_need_for_affordable_houses.html 15. Pointed out by Richard Bashford of the RSPB http://www.communities.gov.uk/news/corporate/1665630 16. Daily Telegraph of 18th June 2012 quoting gardener David Domoney 17. An email of 15 July 2012 from a councillor inspecting the allotments is not untypical. That this email was copied to me is also not a coincidence. “In an East allotment it seems a lonely Roman snail has wandered all the way from Westfield to find a new home. Little did it realise that there are perils in an allotment site such as slug pellets. Of course we didn’t get a second opinion as to it’s [sic] true nationality. Perhaps the place is crawling with them but we never noticed before.”

18. Department for Communities and local government (2011), The Draft National Planning Policy Framework. p.5.

19. NPPF Op.cit. p.13.

20. NPPF Op.cit. p.48.

21. There will be exceptions to this argument.If,as reported by Richard Black, a coup creates the vacuum for indiscriminate hunting combined with deforestation on an island with a unique species such as Madagascar, then this creates a very difficult situation. However, in a sense Britain has already been through this extinction phase and what I am describing is how it is embarking on another. BBC News, Black, R. (13 July 2012) Lemurs Sliding Towards Extinction http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18825901

Dr Simon Leadbeater is a woodland owner and town councillor in Hertfordshire. simon.leadbeater@btinternet.com

ECOS 33(2) 2012

Lapwing futures – a plea for evidence-based policy Farmers and conservationists have a common cause in doing their utmost to halt and then reverse this seemingly relentless fall in farmland bird numbers. To do this conservation policy makers need to take a cool hard look at the real reasons for the decline.

PHILIP MERRICKS The lapwing crash The farming seasons have a ceaseless rhythm of routine. Haymaking and harvest is followed by the dominance of paperwork. This is a timeless annual cycle to which in recent years a new event has been added: the annual press release from conservation NGOs detailing yet another decline in farmland bird numbers. I have in front of me a desperately sad joint press statement from RSPB, BTO and JNCC dated 25 July 2012 and its headline reads “Lapwings hit new low – further declines in breeding waders revealed.”

A close study of the lapwing, the iconic farmland bird which has suffered one of the steepest declines, reveals that adult mortality has remained broadly constant. This is confirmed by Professor Ian Newton, former Chairman of RSPB and currently BTO Chairman, when he wrote to me recently: “The finding that makes me think that the British lapwing population as a whole has suffered a net reduction in breeding success is that an analysis of BTO ringing data in the 1990s showed no change in adult mortality over several decades, so declining numbers could only have been due to reduced reproduction. From this, it follows that much of the present habitat in lowland Britain must be acting as ‘sink’ in which reproduction is insufficient to offset the normal adult mortality”.

This ties in very closely with our own experience at Elmley National Nature Reserve in Kent, when for a four year period in the late 1990s we hosted a lapwing chick ringing project. During these years 695 lapwing chicks were ringed and some 12 years later there has been only one adult recovery.1 Normal lapwing recovery rates are approximately 0.85% which indicates that we might have anticipated around six recoveries. This indicates, in hindsight maybe, that at a time when our conservation management closely but somewhat naively followed the Defra and English Nature prescriptions, our breeding lapwing chicks were suffering large mortality between hatching and fledging.

Agri-environment flaws It is becoming increasingly apparent that the lack of chick fledging success needs closer examination. Conservationists, scientists and policy makers appear to avoid this issue as it reveals a failure of conservation management policy for this aspect

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53

ECOS 33(2) 2012 of agri-environment schemes. I am a great supporter of the principle and practice of agri-environment as it represents the best hope we have of protecting and enhancing our wildlife. By and large agri-environment has been a great success.

But in just a few areas, for example farmland birds in general and breeding waders in particular, it is evident that agri-environment is failing to deliver the conservation outcomes to the extent we all hoped.

One reason for this failure appears to be that at present, the current Higher Level Schemes (HLS) have yet to fully address the crucial need for chick fledging success.

The current HLS management requirements are to create, restore and maintain wet grassland for breeding waders. At present little is done to ensure that lapwing fledge the biologically necessary number of chicks, now generally accepted by a consensus of scientists to be approximately 0.7 per adult pair. To maintain a stable population each pair of adult lapwing need to fledge approximately two thirds of a chick each year. Any less than this and the population is in serious, if not terminal, decline.

Evidence and monitoring

ECOS 33(2) 2012 exception that on the Elmley RSPB reserve the fieldworkers were accompanied by the RSPB warden, so that in effect there was extra monitoring manpower and effort on this area. All monitoring was carried out from 4WD vehicles, as this is considered much more effective and time-efficient than undertaking monitoring on foot and causes less disturbance.

The key difference between this lapwing chick monitoring programme and those carried out by RSPB and GWCT was that we commissioned the fieldworkers, whilst they were counting the 1177 breeding lapwing and the 837 fledged chicks, to assess the components (factors) of conservation management thought to be necessary to ensure the biologically required chick fledging success. The components that are included in HLS prescriptions are marked “HLS Yes” and those that are excluded are marked “HLS No”. All components were assessed as satisfactory (green), fair (amber) or poor (red). The results are given in the attached tables:

2010

As I have a great belief in the value of science, I have spent long hours in trawling through the published literature on breeding waders and gathered a collection of more than 70 specific articles. Extraordinarily, of these 70 papers, only one gives any facts and figures on chick productivity. This relates to a study carried out by eight RSPB scientists, who monitored 291 adult lapwing that fledged 83 chicks during the years 2003/4/5 and published their results in 2011.1 This study revealed that of the 25 breeding lapwing sites monitored during this period, only 2 produced the required number of 0.7 fledged chicks per adult pair. In other words 23 of the 25 sites were acting as population sinks. Even more depressingly 10 of the 25 sites raised no lapwing chicks at all.

Further investigation has revealed that the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) monitored 519 breeding lapwing which produced 236 fledged chicks in the years 2007/8/9/10/11, an average of 0.45 chicks per adult pair. This work has yet to be published, but is referred to in the GWCT Annual Review of Conservation Science.2 This concluded that “In the Avon Valley not enough (lapwing) chicks are produced each year and productivity has been too low in recent years to maintain a stable breeding population”. More damningly the report goes on to say “We found no statistical difference in lapwing chick productivity between fields managed under HLS and fields not entered into an agri-environment scheme.”

2011

As we have responsibility for managing an NNR as a Natural England Approved Body, this means that research is a part of our statutory function. Hence with the support (attitudinal rather than financial) of Natural England we commissioned experienced, independent field workers to monitor lapwing and fledged chicks on four sites on the South Sheppey Marshes during the years 2010/11/12. The monitoring followed the excellent methodology devised by RSPB scientists1 which has now become the standard. In brief, this methodology involves five counts of adults and close-tofledged chicks at exactly three-week intervals through the wader breeding season.

There was the same intensity of monitoring on each of the four sites, with the 54

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2012

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Conservation assessment The methodology for the assessment of the components (factors) of conservation management for Lapwing breeding productivity is set out below.

Grassland/Grazing before nesting Satisfactory: predominantly very short vegetation with some longer patches with tussocks producing a heterogeneous sward. Grazing with any type or class of herbivore capable of creating tight grazed conditions. No use of fertiliser, natural or artificial. No use of persistent anthelmintics as veterinary products for grazing livestock.

Poor: overlong vegetation or uniform homogeneous sward likely to have resulted from under-grazing.

Grassland/Grazing in nesting season Satisfactory: vegetation as above. Grazing carried out only by sedate suckler cows with or without calves at foot, gradually introduced into wader breeding areas in well controlled small numbers. No sheep or yearling cattle used. No use of fertiliser. No use of persistent anthelmintics.

Poor: under-grazed creating overlong grass sward or over-grazed by use of inappropriate livestock (sheep or yearling cattle) or too high a stocking density, creating risk of disturbance, nest abandonment or nest trampling.

Water provision before nesting Satisfactory: all rills, creeks, foot drains, wet patches and back-up reservoirs filled with water to field level.

Poor: low water levels in all above-listed wet features.

Water provision in breeding season Satisfactory: constant management effort made to transfer water by pumping from reservoir or other external sources to maintain, when necessary, wet features and wet margins throughout the fledging period.

Poor: little or no effort made to pump water to maintain wet features or no reservoir capacity.

Micro-topography Satisfactory: high density of natural or artificial rills, foot drains, creeks etc throughout the breeding wader areas creating a heterogeneous field surface that is capable of holding water throughout the breeding season and which will increase invertebrate rich water-mud margins within the field.

Poor: flat uniform fields that will not hold surface water for any period of time resulting in the site drying out rapidly during the breeding season.

Predator control before nesting Satisfactory: impact from predators much reduced through habitat manipulation, predator fencing in strategic areas, removal of perching posts and sustained effort taken to remove site specific, problem predator species using only legally approved methods.

NEIL BENNETT

Poor: little or ineffective attempt to reduce predator impact by failing to use above techniques.

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Predator control in breeding season Satisfactory: as above with addition of selective use of individual nest protectors and the inclusion of corvid control.

Poor: as above.

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Conclusions From the three year (2010 – 2012) monitoring programme on the South Sheppey marshes, it is clear that suitable natural conditions for good lapwing chick productivity occurred only in 2010. It is apparent that for a relatively long-lived bird such as the lapwing, the natural reproductive strategy is to rely on good productivity in favourable years to enable populations to cope with unsuitable natural conditions in other years.

Book Reviews

A number of conclusions can be drawn from this research: First: it is necessary for each and every component (factor) of conservation management that determines reproductive success, to be in place to enable lapwing to produce a biologically viable number of chicks, in order to maintain a stable or increasing population on these sites.

Second: sites where management follows the current HLS breeding wader prescriptions are very unlikely, even in naturally good years, to produce sufficient fledged chicks to maintain stable populations.

All of this points to a final and inescapable conclusion. Until HLS agri-environment prescriptions are altered to embrace all components of management that determine the outcome of a biologically viable number of chicks, lapwing populations are condemned to continue to decline.

I am grateful to Rod Smith and Andy Mckee who undertook the survey work during the three breeding seasons of the research programme. Thanks also go to Steve Gordon, Elmley NNR manager. Finally, I am indebted to Professor Ian Newton FRS for his very full and constructive comments on a draft of this article.

References 1. Bolton, M., Bamford, R., Blackburn, C., Cromarty, J., Eglington, S., Ratcliffe, N., Sharpe, F., Stanbury, A. & Smart, J. 2011. Assessment of simple survey methods to determine breeding population size and productivity of a plover, the Northern Lapwing Vanellus vanellus. Wader Study Group Bulletin, 118: 141-152.

2. Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust Scientific Review pages 28-31– Declining Lowland Waders in the Avon Valley

Philip Merricks is a farmer and nature reserve manage on the South Sheppey and Romney Marshes. He was appointed MBE in 1999 for services to nature conservation. jmerricks@fwi.co.uk

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possible from such crudity. There is an idea to the book. It had meant real serious walking (and cycling, mountaineering and sailing) and uncut experiences. The distillate of all these romantic voyages is then blended with intellectual spices, literary essences and matured in a mash barrel of old socks from personal walking heroes. This is a fine 15 year-old single malt of a book. It is smooth but also has the component tones of the soils in which it was soaked, the sweetness of contemporary life and the odd twang of chalk, seaweed or Mesolithic mud to shock the palate with the unexpected.

Robert Macfarlane also carries the theme of homage to both his grandfather and the poet Edward Thomas which might be considered a distraction were it not so well crafted. I like the poetry of Thomas to the extent that I carry a printed copy of ‘Adlestrop’ in my wallet but I have so far never met anyone who could Top Trump this secret perversion until now.

Third: the linking of the assessment of components of conservation management on each individual site to the numbers of successfully fledged chicks, demonstrates that the current HLS prescriptions for breeding waders are creating ecological traps which inevitably lead to population sinks. Thus the HLS agri-environment scheme leads to the creation of excellent breeding wader habitat which attracts breeding birds prospecting for nesting sites. And then, due to HLS prescriptions placing little attention to all of the components of conservation management that ensure chick fledging success, productivity is too low to maintain stable populations.

Acknowlegements

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THE OLD WAYS A journey on foot Robert Macfarlane Hamish Hamilton, 2012, 448 pages Hbk, £20, ISBN10: 0241143810 At first, I thought that this was a book conceived at a boozy literary dinner, the sort that seems to stimulate the conceptualisation of so many awful TV programmes featuring celebrity figures talking bollocks to camera in beautiful locations, missing the cultural gems of their surroundings in favour of jokes about farting donkeys and similar inanities. The Old Ways is as far away as

There is also an undercurrent of the land artist Richard Long, for not only does the cover bear a Richard Long photograph but there is a feeling that this is the Long credo in prose rather than photographs, mud artworks and cartographic cutouts. There is much of Nature in this book from gneiss to wild garlic and avocets to black vultures and enough neat observation to stop a twitcher in their tracks to share notes.

This is intellectual artwork. It is not a travelogue, nor a guidebook and it has no real practical use other than to remind us that we are soulful, bipedal animals and walking has always been our perfect means of making sense of our surroundings and ourselves.

I read the book whilst camping on a Scottish beach. I was taking my 59

ECOS 33(2) 2012 own journeys along half remembered pathways through bilberry woods foraging for chanterelles or walking the edge of estuary shorelines seeking the casual pickings of edible seaweeds, erratic cockles, barnacle-free mussels and sporadic samphire. As I was to discover, these journeys of physicality, of memory, of remembrance in the natural world are the major insights of ‘The Old Ways’. Scotland is indeed the perfect place to read this book as many of the journeys are set in Scotland either with the Hebridean sea ways or the Cairngorm land ways. All of them are poetic, lyric descriptions of people (some more eccentric than others) and the mental topography they create, plus jottings of random path experiences of Nature both simple and complex. Other journeys are far away in Palestine, Nepal and Spain, in keeping with the theme of pilgrimage but also the idea of keeping alive the dreams of fellow travellers and the paths they have created despite the depredations of warfare, politics and religious disputes. I’m sure many other soulful beings will find connections with this book and will relate to Macfarlane’s style of communing with the land.

Duncan Mackay

SURVIVAL OF THE BEAUTIFUL Art, Science and Evolution David Rothenberg Bloomsbury, 2011, 311 pages £14.99 Pbk ISBN 978-1-4088-2882-3 Some books save their best to last, and are perhaps best read backwards.

This is one such book, ending strongly after much probing, questioning and indeterminacy. The author, an American professor of philosophy and music, examines Darwin’s feeling that animals, 60

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ourselves included, have some innate appreciation for beauty, the mastery of which leads to biological advantage. His basic thesis is that evolution produces beauty, and does not just ensure the survival of the practical.

So, the book contains much about bower birds and the like, juxtaposed with numerous ventures into the world of American contemporary art and its commentators. There is little discussion of the broader philosophy and psychology of art (Ruskin is mentioned only briefly, Roger Scruton not at all) and no reference to the poetry of beauty, a particularly rich seam. An awful lot of questions are asked along the way, many of which are not especially pertinent and even disengaging. Rarely is a simple answer provided, or revelations made.

To the question, “So what can art really offer science…?” comes the plain and obvious answer: “Perhaps an alternative

way at looking at the world”. Later, the author admits that we prefer thorny questions to answers.

remains an enduring mystery that takes us to the origin of man and the nature of creation.”

In the concluding chapter Rothenberg starts to hit some nails on the head.

“Science” he states, “can reveal beauty but is often uncomfortable with it”. He adds that art is more fortunate than science, in that it does not need to explain or reveal anything real at all – suggesting that science does. He goes on to challenge Darwin: “What Darwin called sexual selection I would like to call aesthetic selection … not because I don’t think sex is important but because the phrase ‘sexual selection’ deflects our attention away from its beautiful results and back to the necessity of desire”. He then adds, significantly, “Perhaps the important thing about desire is that it generates beauty”.

The literature canon in this subject area is growing rapidly, though as yet few answers have been offered. Perhaps, as an old line from the Incredible String Band has it: “The answers are the questions, sir”.

His conclusion is worth quoting in full: “We have to investigate, to delve deep into beauty; rather than pick it apart in such a way that it dies, we must inhabit the wonder that is the world, recognise it, love it in moments both of bliss and of investigation. The beautiful is the root of science and the goal of art.”

This book follows on from the likes of Dennis Dutton’s The Art Instinct (2009), which looks at beauty and pleasure in human evolution. There are also parallels with Philip Howse’s Butterflies Messages from Psyche (Papadakis, 2010), which examines the role of the beautiful and wonderful in mimicry and warning on Lepidoptera wings – without losing itself in modern American art and futile questions. Howse’s conclusion may be more significant: “We do not rely on colour and design to survive, as do animals, but as a doorway to pleasure and enlightenment. Why that should be

Matthew Oates

SOCIAL ECOLOGY Applying Ecological Understanding to our Lives and our Planet David Wright, Catherine Camden-Pratt & Stuart Hill (Eds) Hawthorn Press, 2011, 336 pages Pbk ISBN 978-1-907359-11-8 This book, from the School of Education at the University of Western Sydney, draws on the experience and wisdom of 27 people “seeking more ecological and humane ways to live and relate to one another and the environment”. Most contributors address the question of how we might transform our behaviour and equip ourselves to make the right response to what is happening in the world we have made.

ECOS readers will not need to be reminded that, as Bernie Neville points out, “We have known for decades that the resources of the planet are running out, yet this information has had minimal impact on behaviour. We do little in our day-to-day lives to address the crisis, and political attempts to confront it at a global level meet with uncompromising resistance. Indeed, our political masters keep expressing their delight at rising production and consumption, when rising production and consumption are 61

ECOS 33(2) 2012 what is killing us. The stresses on our planet and our personal and collective pathology are deeply connected”.

Being unfamiliar with nearly all the (mainly Australian) contributors to this book, I turned first to a chapter near the end, ‘The Religion of Economics’ by John Seed, an environmental activist and a singer-songwriter I first met in 1993 when I spent a year in Queensland. Like many of us, John is “troubled by the irrationality, perhaps even insanity, that is destroying the biological fabric from which our lives are woven”. After 30 years of campaigning for conservation, especially of rainforests, he’s clear that “there is no way to save the planet one forest at a time. We need now to address the underlying psychological or spiritual disease that allows humankind to imagine that we can profit from the destruction of our own life support systems… only a deeply religious faith allows us to ignore the absurdity of perpetual growth on a finite planet. The market is the tool of that faith”.

One chilling example John uses is the way deregulation of food market prices in the 1990s allowed “The world’s wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won” (quoting journalist Johann Hari of The Independent). Things will only change if we acknowledge what is really going on, and cease to be complicit; John sees Deep Ecology as the best approach for individuals to develop the necessary understanding of the environmental crisis. Based on the writings of Arne Naess in 1973, this movement encourages us to examine and question our behaviour in relation to all other beings, living and inanimate, on earth.

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ECOS 33(2) 2012 This was a good place to start the book, going straight to the heart of the underlying causes and challenges of our current situation. I continued to read it in reverse, so by the time I reached the introductory, more academic chapters defining social ecology and documenting its development, it was with keen interest, having read about many creative and innovative approaches to teaching and exploring the subject. The case studies demonstrate that using art, drama, creative writing, story telling, journeys into wild land and time spent simply listening to each other, trying to understand cultures and perspectives that differ from our own, can nurture transformative learning experiences, leading to the increased awareness and understanding necessary for behaviour to change.

Co-editor Stuart Hill explains why this subject has great appeal for me: “Social ecology brings together so many poles that rarely meet: the arts and sciences; critical thinking, reflexivity, passion and intuition; rationality and spirituality; the stories of the ancients, systems theory and chaos theory”. The editors anticipate random readers like myself in declaring that: “Both the book and the subject matter encourage an eclectic, intuitive and wandering engagement… Issues of creativity, transformation and sustainability form the spine, and the future teases with learning”. Social Ecology is rooted in lived experience, practical action and critical reflection, in the context of our social and ecological responsibilities.

This book left me feeling hopeful. I fear it may be too little, too late, but we need a lot more of the kind of teaching, action and reflective learning described here. In the words of contributor Bruce Fell, to counteract the pervasive ‘Buy

Now Pay Later’ pressure to consume 24/7, we need “to be embossed with flourishing reminders of the Earth’s centrality to our existence”.

motivated towards problem-solving and creative action to support the flourishing of community life, human and otherthan-human.

Tess Darwin

This combination of practical action with metaphysical and ethical concerns is evident in each of the 20 essays. The historical and theoretical background is set by Ulrich Leoning. Other theoretical bases are provided by Makere StewartHarawira writing about indigenous ontologies and Ullrich Kockel writing about ‘place’.

RADICAL HUMAN ECOLOGY Intercultural and Indigenous Approaches Lewis Williams, Rose Roberts & Alastair McIntosh (Eds) Ashgate Publishing, 2012, 424 pages Hbk, £80, ISBN: 978-0-7546-7768-0 The appeal of a radical human ecology is in the questions it raises about human life and in the ways it sets about investigating them. The questions start with the philosophical and pragmatic: how, where and whether humans can continue to live on the earth. The means for addressing them combine myriad disciplines, approaches, methodologies, practices and human capabilities.

Grappling with the relations between these varied forms of knowledge and experience, like the scientific, poetic, academic, political, psychological and spiritual, distinguishes a human ecological approach from that of, for example, environmental and economic resource management.

The editors have focussed on the way human ecology reflects on inter-cultural experience, on the spiritual aspects of ecological interdependence, on the trauma of colonisation and on indigenous knowledge as transformative. This focus is reflected in the definition offered by Alastair McIntosh, that human ecology is the study and practice of community with others, community with the earth, and community with the divine. As an approach to knowledge-making, and as a life practice, human ecology is

Most of the book’s essays are narratives or case studies offering an insight into how a human ecology approach changes the course of a project, or the methodology of research or the workings of an organisation. The praxis of human ecology is seen in projects as varied as international peacebuilding; the development of a community of practice supporting rural resilience in the UK; the Scotland-based MSc in Human Ecology; a public health project in the Amazonian region; generational migration studies in China; teaching marginalised aboriginal youth in Australia; and the Transition movement in the UK. Many chapters tell of lives caught between cultures.

Indigenous cosmologies and knowledges, primarily from peoples in Canada, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, as well as the Sufi path and Orthodox Christianity are shown as possibilities for remaking more enduring relations between humans and with the other-than-human.

The auto-ethnographical approach is a familiar academic method.

Over many chapters, though, the narrative of personal experience 63

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begins to read as formulaic and not as revelatory as it could be. More critical perspectives on cross-cultural views of knowledge would have sat well with the contributions from writers from indigenous communities. In addition, there is a tendency to set a human ecological approach in opposition to another approach, institution, political condition. This is a helpful marker, but can become repetitive, and the oppositions can get locked into defining each other.

mucking it up?” The book starts with the premise that human choice is always going to be a part of decision making in ecological restoration – a theme that reoccurs through the book, with cultural, scientific and conservation traditions all considered. There follows a brief history of ecological restoration with an impassioned argument for restoration, concluding that we “have a duty to clean up our mess is a powerful argument in favour of ecological restoration”.

I benefited greatly from the Masters programme at Edinburgh University, and have found in academia subsequently how, even within a disciplinary structure, the ideas, actions and calling of these approaches open up new knowledge.

This collection is one configuration of what a radical human ecology looks like as it deepens and evolves.

Chapters on the impact of climate change and novel ecosystems caused by invasive species follow, with interesting consideration of how much we will have to incorporate environmental change and how we cannot try and impose static ecosystems. Throughout the book the themes of ecosystem services and resilience reoccur. The author then looks at his experience of geographical variance in attitudes to ecological restoration and the pivotal reasons for significance or “why it matters”.

The human element is considered and throughout the book examples are given from both the author’s native North America but also across Europe where he has obviously travelled extensively.

The concept of what is ‘wild’ is also discussed and while it is acknowledged that people will be an integral part of any restored ecosystem a more handsoff approach is considered.

Wallace Heim

ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE Renewing damaged ecosystems Stuart K Allison Earthscan (Routledge) 2012, 252 pages Hbk £49.99 ISBN 1849712859 This is a helpful review of the issues that arise when pursuing ecological restoration projects. The author is obviously passionate about the subject and as well as having an academic approach (he is a Professor of Biology) he has hands-on experience which gives life to his arguments.

Throughout the book he asks and attempts to answer important questions such as “how can we manage our desire to manage and restore Nature without 64

There follows a section on ‘renewed restoration’ which includes a useful discussion on the tensions between academic and practical approaches and the need to bridge the gap between humans and the environment – we need to re-engage people with Nature if we are to enlist them in the massive task of restoring damaged ecosystems.

This section also makes the important point that “each ecosystem is unique.

Solutions that apply in one may not apply in another” - a lesson that those who impose tick-box agri-environment prescriptions in the UK need to learn.

The concluding chapter pulls together the many themes of the book. It looks at the concept of ‘integrity’ of ecosystems – which means the system has to work properly with all its components in place.

There is a discussion of ethics, steps we need to take and finally an upbeat final section called ‘Reasons to be cheerful’ suggesting that ecological restoration will be one of our most effective tools to address the environmental challenges of the 21st century. Indeed he concludes “it is the only sensible choice”.

The whole text is well argued and contains many quotable lines and is well referenced. It deserves a wide readership from all those trying to restore Nature.

Mick Green

ANIMALS ERASED Discourse, ecology, and reconnection with the natural world Arran Stibbe Wesleyan University Press, 2012, 194 pages Pbk, £22.50, ISBN 978-0-8195-7232-5 The difference between the animal as it lives its life, full with sentience, intentions and agency, and the animal as it lives in the human imagination finds expression in art, philosophy and everyday customs.

Arran Stibbe discloses how, when human representations and language reduce the animal to commodity, to only the collective species, and when this combines with human technological and social power, the effect is to erase

the animal as it lives its life from human consciousness, and to make cruelty and the extinguishing of life possible.

Critical discourse analysis exposes how commonplace, unquestioned clusters of words and discourses carry and enforce ideological meanings that may be oppressive. The analysis is not a neutral investigation. Stibbe holds an eco-philosophical view centred on the intrinsic value of the individual animal, on allowing the animal to maintain its own well-being and agency during the course of its life. Against this view, the discourses that Stibbe critiques elide the experience of the human with the individual animal, objectify the animal as a component of a production process, or use the species as a signature representation. For counter examples Stibbe offers the writing of Rachel Carson, but more fully, the representations of animal-human relations found in Japanese traditional haiku.

The discourses critiqued are those in publications by industry, organisations and the media. The discourse of the pork industry objectifies the animal as if industrial machinery, to be ‘processed’, extending the derogatory patterns of associations for the pig found in everyday speech, ‘to pig out’. Similarly, the fishing industry aggregates the individual salmon into an indistinguishable mass for whom the degradation of habitat is a hazard to profits, not to the animals’ lives. The metaphors of ‘war’ and ‘fire’ served the interests of those who benefited economically from the mass slaughter of cattle during the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak.

Environmental and ecological economics discourses represent the animal as separate from humans, as species, resource, and stock. Conservation discourse, 65

ECOS 33(2) 2012 exemplified by the WWF website, shows the human as a detached observer and uses headline species to appeal to fund-raising, rather than showing the interdependence of humans with animals. The limitations of these discourses to promote changed attitudes is seen in animal liberation discourse, which objectifies animals; and in animal rights discourse, which extends human capabilities to animals to give them value, without regard for their singularity. The metaphors and models used in biodiversity discourses serve varying goals generally at the expense of the animal.

Stibbe leaps from these critiques to the damaging effects of Western discourses on Japanese environmental education. He finds displays of respect in Japanese traditional culture, like the saying of ‘itadakimasu’ before a meal, expressing thanks for the lives of the animals and plants who died to become food. Traditional haiku is offered as an alternative to the destructive discourses.

The qualities of the poems that achieve this are shown by examples, drawing out how the poems convey the immediate reality of the moment and how they represent animals as singular, as agents.

The poems’ appreciation of the ordinary, their lack of explicit metaphors, their simplicity, their empathy with the animal and positive regard for the congruence of the human with the animal are set as qualities that could be developed in conventional publication writing.

There is a chapter on the Japanese animation Tonari no Totoro which needs a stronger visual analysis. The comparison between translations of the dialogue, though, shows vivid crosscultural differences. “Grandma’s field is like a mountain of treasure” becomes, 66

ECOS 33(2) 2012 a Thames estuary airport at Foulness defeated. But oil spills continued and agricultural change and in particular drainage schemes were wrecking cherished lowland landscapes.

in the Disney version, “Wow, Granny, your garden is just like a market”.

The book is a collection of previously published essays, and would benefit from a more developed transition between them. The collection does not propose to consider the effect on the human imagination of the erasing discourses, nor to explore beauty and aesthetics in writing. It does provoke speculation on how writing within a field, such as conservation, could change in a way that brings about clarity and immediacy, rather than, for example, using subjective confessionals or emotive accounts more associated with a European romanticism. Stibbe is not suggesting project reports are to be written in three phrases, but does constructively point to qualities of haiku which translated into other discourses could change perceptions of animals.

A poem by Buson: caught in a sudden shower / huddling sparrows / vie to get at the grass leaves Wallace Heim

SILENT SPRING REVISITED Conor Mark Jameson Bloomsbury, 2012, 288 pages Hbk, £16.99, ISBN 10 1408157608 One man’s impressions of the fate of wild birds over the last half-century are recorded in Silent Spring Revisited. Conor Mark Jameson, a writer living in middle England, assesses how things have changed since the publication of Rachel Carson’s landmark book in 1962.

Anyone looking for systematic analysis will be disappointed. This is effectively

In the 1980s, Jameson’s record shows conservationists concentrating with limited success on the Sites of Special Scientific Interest system of the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act. In the following decade he finds parallels between the GM debate and that over pesticides in Carson’s day. He also mentions the increasing reliance on land purchase by conservation bodies to prevent wholesale landscape destruction, as well as the emergence of phrases open to endless misappropriation, such as ‘sustainable development’.

a cuttings job interwoven with one individual’s not particularly interesting experiences. The incorporation of more census and other research data would have made this a more worthwhile exercise.

Nonetheless, Jameson’s impressions provide an effective reminder of what has changed in an eventful period. In the early 1960s, he notes, the western world was still in thrall to the belief that although development was hurtling ahead, in Carson’s words, “much of Nature was forever beyond the tampering reach of Man”. The RSPB had fewer than 10,000 members and devoted much of its energy to fighting the trade in wild birds. Still, the beginnings of unease about bird deaths caused by pesticides were already there.

During the 1970s, RSPB membership rocketed to a quarter of a million, the European Union’s Birds Directive was signed and the proposal to build

In touching on many subjects but failing to examine any of them in depth, Jameson will raise many questions in the mind of the reader. For instance, should the leading conservation bodies have been so ready to accept the agricultural industry’s argument in the 1980s that the only way in which the farmed landscape could be conserved was by paying farmers large sums of money to conserve it, rather than by extending planning controls to the farmed and forested landscape?

Big issues go unexplored. For instance, one of the most striking changes in the conservation world over the last half-century has been the fundamental change in attitude of the Forestry Commission. It has shifted from encouraging mass coniferisation of open moorland to becoming a beacon of best practice in showing the way in which commercial forestry can be combined with wildlife conservation and the provision of public access.

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BACK COPIES OF ECOS

ECOS 33(2) 2012 Jameson reminds us of forestry causes célèbres such as the battle over plans to plant up Sutherland’s Flow Country, and describes the privatisation proposals of Mrs Thatcher’s government in 1993. Yet he fails to follow through this unfolding drama by mentioning the recent struggle to prevent mass sell-off of Forestry Commission land in England. Still less does he celebrate the championing of conservation and recreation objectives which probably did more than anything else to save the Commission’s estate from disposal.

Jameson is more struck by the negatives than the many positives of our own era.

Nonetheless he concludes with a striking image encapsulating one of the most remarkable avian comebacks of the age – an evocative snapshot of a peregrine perched on Tate Modern’s tower against the backdrop of the building’s light box being serenaded by a busker playing ‘Waterloo Sunset’. There’s been plenty to rejoice about as well as to mourn.

Marion Shoard www.marionshoard.co.uk

The following back copies are available for purchase. Costs range from £8.30 (inc p&p) for issues from the current and previous year’s volume, to £5.30 for older issues.

Up to date prices and order forms for back copies are available at www.banc org.uk.

Saturday 10 November 2012, 11am to 5pm Woods, Wildlife and Community Care at Wyre Forest NNR The 2012 field visit and AGM will take place in the Wyre Forest National Nature Reserve, in the Severn Valley on the border of Worcestershire and Shropshire. The forest, which is jointly managed by Natural England and the Forestry Commission, is one of the largest ancient lowland oak woods in England, boasting a wide variety of habitats from forest to open grassland and old orchards. The area has recently been the location for a successful Landscape Partnership Scheme, including a large environmental education programme, and is also home to the Wyre Community Land Trust which delivers Care Farming for people recovering from mental health difficulties, and is founded on the principles of John Ruskin.

BANC members are encouraged to attend the day, which will include a visit to parts of the NNR, the formal AGM meeting, and a discussion on the future development of BANC. Please bring your own packed lunch.

The nearest train station is Kidderminster, and lifts can be arranged. If you would like to attend please email enquiries@banc.org.uk, and state whether you will be driving or coming by train.

Lynx, Badgers, Bees & Beavers; Do we need new groups? o 32 (3/4) The Woodland Edge essays from the wildwood

o 32 (2)

o 32 (1)

White Paper review, Ecosystem Assessment verdicts, Red Tape rebuff Public Forests Campaign, Big Society, Beavers, Big Birds

in conservation.

President:

Adrian Phillips

Chair:

Gavin Saunders Ruth Boogert Jeremy Owen

o 31 (3/4) Lawton Report, Big Society, Nature

in Austerity

Treasurer:

o 31 (2)

Strategies for boar, big cats, dog owners, & wild goats

o 31 (1)

Natural aliens; climate resilience; tips for the recession

o 30 (3/4) Ecological skills; Getting started

in conservation

o 30 (2) Nature at our service? o 30 (1) 30 years back – and forward o 29 (3/4) New nature – old creatures o 29 (2) Nature’s tonic o 29 (1) Walking the talk in conservation o 28 (3/4) Climate Change adaptation –

helping nature cope

o 28(2) o 28(1) o 27(3/4) o 27(2)

Nature’s Id

o 27(1) o 26(3/4) o 26(2) o 26(1) o 25(3/4)

Loving Nature?

Accepting the wild?

Shores and seas – the push for protection Species reintroductions Aliens in control Carbon, conservation and renewables

John Bowers

Vice-Presidents: Marion Shoard

Secretary:

Other Members of Council: Emily Adams Mathew Frith Lisa Schneidau Peter Taylor

Subscriptions/BANC membership Subscriptions for ECOS are: £25.00 for individuals £80 for corporate/institutional rate £15 for students (colour pdf file).

Subscriptions should be sent to: Hallam Environmental Consultants Ltd Venture House, 105 Arundel Street Sheffield, 1 2NT Tel: 0114 272 4227 info@hallamec.plus.com Subscription form available at www.banc.org.uk

The extinction of outdoor experience

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ECOS & BANC - keep in touch on the web 68

BANC inspires innovation

o 33 (1)

BANC Field visit and AGM 2012

www.banc.org.uk

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following year.

ECOS 33(2) 2012

Summer 2012 issue 33(2) www.banc.org.uk

Feature Articles 1. What White Paper? Geoffrey Wain 2. Forest politics - the battle for the status quo. Roger Bodgitt 6. Stasis in the forest? Martin Spray 9. From Rio to Devizes: a leap too far? Jenny Hawley 13. Paying our way – affording nature in hard times. Tony Whitbread 17. Conservation in a time of austerity – why fund nature?

Mike Townsend 21. Councils in adversity – why less isn’t more for nature. Mike Oxford 26. Planning and site safeguard – time to step up for nature.

Andre Farrar 31. Unplanning the countryside. Richard Bate 39. Neighbourhood planning - fresh powers for local conservation?

Jeremy Owen 46. Rat Island – Lessons from ancient Aotearoa for middle England today. Simon Leadbeater 53. Lapwing futures – a plea for evidence-based policy. Philip Merricks

59. Book Reviews • • • • • • •

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The Old Ways Survival of the Beautiful Social Ecology Radical Human Ecology Ecological Restoration and Environmental Change Animals Erased Silent Spring Revisited

2012 British Association of Nature Conservationists.

ISSN 0143-9073.

Graphic Design and Artwork by Featherstone Design Cheltenham.

Printed by Severnprint Ltd, Gloucester.