NOT PLAYDOUGH: DEFRA consultation, white paper
(Following from http://findantonia.livejournal.com/2815.html)
DEFRA issued 'An invitation to shape the Nature of England'
http://ww2.defra.gov.uk/environment/natural/whitepaper/
Shaping is an interesting word because it doesn't carry the implications of finality, of irreversibility that actual changes to our landscape and its non-human inhabitants involve. We can pour resources in to shore up some links in a disturbed area, baby an individual species at risk where there is still a healthy support environment, but, like a crushed cobweb, once warped and severed the connections of an ecosystem are too delicate to be restored.
This centuries-stripped island has only small very isolated pockets and a skimming of its landscape and biodiversity left to us today. Our 'nature' has already gone and no one expects to restore prehistoric forests, but what we have left may already be too little keep going under pressure from the ever-crowding human populations, or at least not without at least the recent level of human intervention for protection, maintenance and restoration. Two species are already going extinct in the UK each year - a decade ago there were 93 species of breeding birds in the Charnwood Forest area, but 10 or more of those can no longer be found in even that protected system.
Countries with greater boundaries, more wild land within them, or just a shorter history of asset-stripping nature can make poor decisions now and be left with a margin for at least partial recovery at some later date, but with such tiny scattered ecosystem remnants, and pressure as our clustered villages and cities crowd toward one another, every change may well be a catastrophic one. Considered separately as smaller units, with no influence over local development planning and with business priorities to serve before conservation ones, it is highly unlikely that current biological complexity, or the fragments themselves, could survive - there is little enough material available now for restoring anything we value and everything rare needs active, co-ordinated work and investment if it is to be kept.
The potential effects of hurried and economically-driven decisions likely to be made in the next few years on the security (or otherwise) of the few remaining natural (or near-so) refuges for plants and wildlife in Britain staggers me. I know that this is an echo of what is happening across the globe. The difference between the environmental damage of previous centuries and that today is that at last we have some understanding of how delicate a balance we disrupt, how wide the web of dependencies, and the very narrow limits of our abilities to reverse any major changes - we even know that economically the short term gains are usually belied by the long-term losses.
While there are many changes going on in Britain that will affect lives across the generations breathing today and beyond, there are few which will have such an irreversible impact on hundreds of human generations to come (and countless non-human) as those on our national nature.
DEFRA issued 'An invitation to shape the Nature of England'
http://ww2.defra.gov.uk/environment/natural/whitepaper/
Shaping is an interesting word because it doesn't carry the implications of finality, of irreversibility that actual changes to our landscape and its non-human inhabitants involve. We can pour resources in to shore up some links in a disturbed area, baby an individual species at risk where there is still a healthy support environment, but, like a crushed cobweb, once warped and severed the connections of an ecosystem are too delicate to be restored.
This centuries-stripped island has only small very isolated pockets and a skimming of its landscape and biodiversity left to us today. Our 'nature' has already gone and no one expects to restore prehistoric forests, but what we have left may already be too little keep going under pressure from the ever-crowding human populations, or at least not without at least the recent level of human intervention for protection, maintenance and restoration. Two species are already going extinct in the UK each year - a decade ago there were 93 species of breeding birds in the Charnwood Forest area, but 10 or more of those can no longer be found in even that protected system.
Countries with greater boundaries, more wild land within them, or just a shorter history of asset-stripping nature can make poor decisions now and be left with a margin for at least partial recovery at some later date, but with such tiny scattered ecosystem remnants, and pressure as our clustered villages and cities crowd toward one another, every change may well be a catastrophic one. Considered separately as smaller units, with no influence over local development planning and with business priorities to serve before conservation ones, it is highly unlikely that current biological complexity, or the fragments themselves, could survive - there is little enough material available now for restoring anything we value and everything rare needs active, co-ordinated work and investment if it is to be kept.
The potential effects of hurried and economically-driven decisions likely to be made in the next few years on the security (or otherwise) of the few remaining natural (or near-so) refuges for plants and wildlife in Britain staggers me. I know that this is an echo of what is happening across the globe. The difference between the environmental damage of previous centuries and that today is that at last we have some understanding of how delicate a balance we disrupt, how wide the web of dependencies, and the very narrow limits of our abilities to reverse any major changes - we even know that economically the short term gains are usually belied by the long-term losses.
While there are many changes going on in Britain that will affect lives across the generations breathing today and beyond, there are few which will have such an irreversible impact on hundreds of human generations to come (and countless non-human) as those on our national nature.