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Victor Thomas Coughtrey

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Topic 1: Death & Destruction

Environmental fascism

Seeing council workers ploughing up an area of meadow recently in my local park, I asked them what was going on. They explained that they were preparing to sow a mixture of seeds specially selected to attract small parkland birds. "It's not all death and destruction with us", joked one of them. Perhaps this referred to the recent canpaign to destroy all common ragwort in the county borough (with possible serious consequences for the cinnabar moth) and the practice of spraying weedkiller on overgrown verges ... or perhaps to something more sinister. After the men left I watched with some satisfaction as my old friends the jackdaws descended in considerable force and began the serious business of tucking in to the large amount of seed that had been scattered. The old 'daws must have been as enthusiastic as ever in their dining that afternoon, as the patch was quickly recolonised by the grass species, buttercup, lady's smock and common rush that had been there before the ploughing.

This easily-foiled attempt to lure whichever birds they'd been told they needed in the park was part of the same contemporary enthusiasm for controlling or 'restoring' the environment that is sometimes responsible for my disappointment when particularly healthy-looking specimens of fairly rare and supposedly wild flowers that I'm initially delighted to discover turn out to have been sown around the edges of fields, on roundabouts and verges and an increasing number of other places. More often, though, councils appear to spend money sowing species that are still pretty common on verges that are simply not mown too often.

These days, conservationists with a fascistic desire to play God have really got the bit between their teeth. They have constructed a palpably false religion based on the doctrine whereby 'native' species, especially the rarer ones, are the goodies and 'alien' species and even very common 'native' ones are the baddies. Their wrath is also directed towards the products of cross-breeding (isn't this an aspect of biodiversity? It certainly produces some fascinating crosses in the duck world, for example).

This religion has led them into an extreme form of anthropomorphism. Now, I'm not at all averse to a little anthropomorphism: it can be amusing and can help children in particular develop a respect for animals. However, the anthropomorphism of the more fervent wing of the conservationists has progessed all the way to a mental illness whereby the victim has exotic delusions in which animals are somehow subject to the same imaginary lines on maps, the same concepts of 'nation', 'native', 'foreign' and 'alien', that we use, wisely or insanely, to govern ourselves. Parallel to this is the attitude that all life forms apart from ourselves are stuff, to be disposed of, tolerated or cultivated according to their value - the value being based on their prevalence.

How long does a species have to have been resident before UK citizenship can be conferred? What? Since the last Ice Age? That is clearly insane. Grey squirrels, for example, have been in the British Isles for more generations, given their relatively short life span, than my lot, the Anglo-Saxons, yet they are 'tree-rats' and vermin, whereas the cuddly-looking reds are heroes. (A good point (one of many) made on this excellent website is that most red squirrels and other reintroduced animals are not native. 'Native' refers to where you were born).

Those with the mad urge to garden the British Isles along flag-waving and commodity-value lines have become adept at exploiting the demonizing and eulogizing tendencies in us all (tendencies which undeniably can be very useful in times of external threat from fellow humans). Once the baddies are identified, all manner of supplementary arguments for their persecution soon appear and the average member of the public is all too keen to have enemies to rail against. The blacklist is growing: grey squirrels, Canada geese, parakeets, muntjacs, collared doves, sycamore, Himalayan balsam – it goes on and on. Lurking in the background with their traps, guns and poison are those for ever on the lookout for official blessing to kill (sorry, cull). At least my county borough hasn't gone as far as a neighbouring one, which installed several 'spacecraft' around a lake, bearing plaques challenging children to spot the 'alien invaders' and explaing why the tufted ducks and other species to be seen on the lake were evil and and no account to be liked. There's a nasty whiff of totalitarianism in such a blatant attempt to indoctrinate children.

TV wildlife shows, though sometimes showing some ressistance to all this are nevertheless infected by it to some extent. Springwatch for example, has occasionally taken a welcome, if half-hearted, stance on behalf of some 'non-native' species and also some 'native' but abundant species, but tends to undo the good work a little with frequent references to "our native wildlife", "this iconic British species" etc. They also appear to support, in the main, the re-introduction of very long-gone species, a policy which is probably storing up trouble for the future (how long before the conservationists decide that their 'iconic' red kite is a nuisance and in need of a cull?).

There is another dimension to all this - the fear of succcess in other species. This, of course, can lead to persecution of species that are native even by the conservationists' weird definition. You can't go to the seaside without hearing or reading on tee-shirts hate-filled references to some mythical species called the seagull (I gather that any member of the gull family will do) and Springwatch has been at its best in defence of the herring gull and the urban fox. Of course, successful species, 'native' or 'non-native' (in the conservationists' sense), as well as some pretty sinister newly arrived insects and marine creatures in particular, can pose a problem to human activity and productivity and there are some highly successful species that I find it hard to defend, such as the brown rat – although someone once had a commendable try in a television series. But at the root of most persecution on grounds of 'overpopulation' is fear of too much success in other species. What is the nature of this success? It is often a superb and very rapid adaptability to a changing world, or to excellent parenting strategy such as displayed by the Canada goose. To me it seems wrong to go all out to punish success while unduly fostering those unable to adapt. There is, after all, Darwin.

Of course it's true that changes brought about by ourselves are often responsible for the greater success of some species to the detriment of others and part of the religion of the conservationist right is that it is incumbent upon them to reverse those changes and revert to some former golden age, when all creatures that on Earth did dwell were draped in the flags of their own nations.  Yes, human greed and ignorance have brought about many changes in the past that were unfortunate at the time. But a change can become a normality from which many can derive a lifetime of pleasure. I can't imagine woods and parks without grey squirrels, lakes without huge flocks of Canada geese with their 'creches' of goslings or my town without its flocks of jackdaws enjoying formation aerobatics in the gales (and they are efficient refuse operatives, too, clearing up after humans). Rather than try to undo mistakes of the past (the remote past, in terms of the life span of most species), we need to concentrate on trying to restrain ourselves from causing drastic changes in the future. Of course we need to try to protect endangered species from destruction by ourselves - but then I would like to see that protection extended to most species.

Nature is not really all that interested in biodiversity, anyway. Success is the key for her. That's not a philosophy to which we humans must ever succumb, of course, but it means that conservationists can't rightly invoke the name of Nature to explain what they are up to. What they are about is the control of some Green & Pleasant Land and all the wildlife in it. Have you spotted the irony of the 'wild' part of that term in the context of the conservationists' Garden? As a matter of fact the word is used sloppily in other contexts. Our council was fed up with all the mess made by the Canada geese in the park last year and put up notices asking people not to feed them as they were 'wild' birds and shouldn't be made dependent on humans. What a joke! Canadas are neither wild nor 'tame'. They're chancers. When they decide to be wild they'll do their own thing. When they fancy a dose of white bread (admittedly bad for them) to supplemt the abundant grass, they'll be tame. This applies to a lot of other succesful species.

As a final thought, there's the economic argument against some aspects of the neo-conservationist doctrine, which is that often the re-introduced 'natives' (who have long since lost any claim to that title, of course) can't really seem to hack it, despite all the care and attention - and money - lavished on them by the environment-makers with their relentless persecution of the winners – most of whom will carry on winning, anyway.
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