BCIB NEW blog spot
No, Hilary Benn – a lynx is not just for conference
Charles Clover
I happened to spend a day on a farm in Mallorca last week, amid olive groves, terraces and ripening vines. It was enjoyably Mediterranean and splendidly unlike home, except for one thing. As evening fell, I noticed a cheeky, once-familiar face cocking its head from one of the flowering creepers around the stone courtyard and chirping at me: a house sparrow.
It was joined by another, and then another. This was our cockney sparrow, Passer domesticus, the only kind found in the Balearics, and it was there in numbers, as it is across southern Europe. When I happened to mention to my host that we in Britain were in mourning for our sparrows, that they had virtually died out in London and the southeast for some mysterious reason, and that they were now on a red list of endangered birds, he could not contain his mirth.
Apparently, sparrows are the bane of his life. Though a passionate conservationist, he just can’t sleep through their insistent cheeping and brawling. He has tried plastic owls. He has tried all sorts of technological bird-scaring techniques to keep the sparrows away from his windows. None of them works. He was greatly taken with the idea that there might be a market for exporting sparrows to Britain.
How quickly we forget the nuisance value of wildlife, I reflected when I returned to Britain and heard that Hilary Benn, our bespectacled, vegetarian environment secretary, had been talking about “re-wilding” the place. What on earth was he doing suggesting the reintroduction of such species as the lynx and elk to built-up, crowded, congested England, a place with far fewer tracts of nearly wild land than there are in Scotland or Wales?
The short answer was that Veggie needed something for his party conference speech and he knew instinctively that the reintroduction of beavers, lynx and elk — and by extension wolves and bears — made political theatre, enough anyway to stop them snoring in the aisles while he announced a review of England’s wildlife areas in the light of climate change and other pressures.
Like Tony Benn, his father, Veggie knows that there is an ideological divide in conservation. His urban constituents are instinctively going to side with the reintroduction of sea eagles in places where none of them owns sheep. Conversely, the idea of losing livestock to predators such as the lynx is going to strike confusion into the landowning classes and prompt them to say such ideas are “misconceived” — as they duly have done. So re-wilding contains just the right hint of Prescottian class conflict for a party conference speech.
The danger of re-wilding ideas, though, is that they are often based on rampant political naivety. It is not reassuring that the inspiration for the present study is Holland's Oostvaardersplassen reserve, 25 miles east of Amsterdam. There, in 14,000 acres of uninhabited fen and scrub woodland reclaimed from the sea, naive bureaucrats attempted to recreate the plains of northern Europe just after the Ice Age. They introduced primitive breeds such as Heck cattle, Konik horses and red deer — only to find that large numbers starved. They had calculated the carrying capacity on summer grazing, not on the amount of forage that would be found in winter. Offers from shooting people to cull the imprisoned wildlife were rejected. The animals were left to die of hunger.
It is frankly doubtful whether it is possible to recreate ecosystems with top predators anywhere in modern Britain. That is, not without the kind of invasive management that would make them little more than zoos or theme parks. Veggie Benn’s suggested reintroduction of beavers, lynxes and elk is somewhat disingenuous as it would require massive changes, such as the replanting of Atlantic oakwoods. How is that consistent with his colleagues’ policy, which is to cover more of England in airports, houses, wind turbines, supermarkets and nuclear power stations? It is not even consistent with his own, which is that Britain should grow more of its own food. This has meant the ploughing-up of set-aside land, which in turn is likely to hasten the decline of farmland birds, unless farmers do something themselves to stop it. And what would he do about the rampant invasion of alien species such as the grey squirrel, which could devastate his woodlands? Cull them? When it comes to nature, Benn is not a man who intervenes.
All the same, there probably will be vast changes in the landscape over the next century, whether Benn likes it or not, as a result of climate change. This is where his study — which will report in summer 2010, long after Benn has gone — will have value in focusing minds on how to save what wildlife we have left. I suspect the answer will be to mix things up in a multifunctional landscape that preserves wildlife as well as housing people and growing food. And in that landscape the perfect creatures for reintroduction are ones used to living in man’s shadow, rather than in wild places. The great success story is the red kite, thought to be a bird of wild land until it colonised the Chilterns.
I have another suggestion if Benn or his successor wants to please urban voters without obviously persecuting country ones: the cockney sparrow. And I happen to know a man who wants to get rid of some.
The Sunday Times : 4th October 2009