Want to Save the Planet? 

Then Make Me Your Not So Benevolent Dictator 

SIMON BARNES / The Times (UK) 9apr2005

MARGARET THATCHER summed it up for all time in 1982, as the Falkland conflict erupted all around her. “It’s exciting to have a real crisis on your hands when you have spent half your political life dealing with humdrum things like the environment.” It seems that both the leading parties agree: neither places this humdrum matter very highly on its agenda. They don’t think it’s what the electorate wants: a MORI poll states that voters place the environment a mere 14th in importance.

Perhaps this is because voters don’t see the environment as a political issue. And perhaps that is because all politicians, Thatcher-like, find the issue so unrewarding. I remember visiting a place where they were trying to re-create the ancient giant kauri forest of New Zealand: a project with a 2,000 year timespan. Politicians want to make a mark with short-term projects and to be linked with instant success. A five-year time-frame is the wrong mind-set for a coherent environmental philosophy.

Now hear another statistic: 100 per cent of voters live in the environment. The environment isn’t a bolt-on extra for birdwatchers, it is something to do with the way we all live. The environment is an inextricable aspect of health, education, the economy and, above all, quality of life — all those issues that are rightly at the top of the political agenda.

Politicians think short-term, the political debate is short-term, so voters are schooled to think short-term. It is a pity that we can’t give a vote to our grandchildren’s grandchildren. I am not easy with the thought of our distant descendants looking back and cursing the people of the early 21st century: the last people who had a choice, and who blew it.

I am not sure about the way to resolve the problem of short-term thinking, unless it is to install me as a not entirely benevolent dictator. But it important to realise that the most important item on the agenda — the world that we bequeath to our descendants — is not going to be part of the debate over the next few deafening and depressing weeks.

HUMAN BEINGS love an animal they can hate, an animal they can blame, an animal they can kill. It seems to gratify something very deep in our natures: the idea that by slaying these sinister enemies of mankind, we can establish a tenuous control over a wild and ferocious world. This atavistic feeling can be banished by a look out of the window, at a world that has not inadequate but too much human control. But logic doesn’t come into it: humans need an enemy. For anglers, the enemy is the cormorant: a bird that looks big and dark and forbidding and which holds its wings as if posing for heraldry. And the Government caved in to anglers and now allows a cull, under licence, of more than one tenth of cormorants that winter in England. This is regardless of the fact that research, much of it funded by tax-payers, does not support the need for a cull.

The science behind the decision is, it is claimed, fundamentally flawed. But what’s logic got to do with it? Anglers find the idea of killing cormorants profoundly gratifying. And so they have been gratified.

LAST SUNDAY I was out on the marshes, with three marsh harriers messing about just beyond naked-eye vision: and there in front of me, impossibly early, impossibly brave, impossibly foolish, the first swallow. It flew low over the reeds, hawking for insects, refuelling after that absurd and impossible journey. I felt like Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army: “Do think this is quite wise?”

The return of the migrants is perhaps the most thrilling part of the year, and the chiffchaffs have been chiffing and chaffing all around me — the Germans call them zilpzalp, which is even better. But so often it seems that the first thrilling migrants arrive with a burst of spring weather: and then overnight the weather retreats a whole month and half. The week since I saw the swallow has been horrible, wet and cold and windy: not the weather to bring small flying insects up into the air above the reedbeds, the worst possible news for a swallow. Good ornithology is about species and numbers, not about getting sentimental about individuals, but then I am not a good ornithologist. I keep thinking about that brave lone pioneer, recklessly gambling his life on the British climate.

source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-1086-1561104,00.html 9apr2005