The State of Nature Affects Us All

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in June 2013

Published last week amid as much of a blaze of publicity that the media ever grants to environmental issues, the State of Nature report was launched by veteran documentary maker and national treasure Sir David Attenborough at the Natural History museum. The report represents a groundbreaking collaboration between 25 of the UK’s leading wildlife and conservation organisations led by big-hitters such as the Wildlife Trusts and the RSPB.

Whilst the report makes a brave attempt at striking an optimistic note by highlighting some of the conservation success stories that have occurred in recent years such as the recovery of species such as Corncrakes, Red Kites and Otters from the brink of extinction, much of the content makes grim reading: 60% of species have declined in recent decades, 31% strongly so. Some bird species that used to be a byword for the British countryside have declined alarmingly – Nightjars down by nearly 50%, 73% fewer Nightingales and a shocking 90% of Turtle Doves gone.

The existence of comprehensive baseline data against which to measure progress is patchy and varies between different species but the partnership has developed a new ‘Watchlist’ indicator, which tracks overall trends in the populations of 155 species listed as conservation priorities in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan. Since 1977 the indicator has dropped by an alarming 77% and, despite strenuous conservation efforts and the higher profile of environmental issues generally in recent years, between 2000 and 2010 there was an 18% decline.

Given that over 80% of the UK population live in urban areas (Office for National Statistics figures), we can reasonably ask what difference it makes if some species, often known only to scientists specialising in a particular field, have become extinct. Many people have never heard a cuckoo call or watched a buzzard soar on a thermal, so why is important if it becomes less likely that they ever will in the future? It is even more understandable to question why the loss of less charismatic species such as invertebrates and fungi should excite public concern.

The answer depends on whether we view nature and the diversity of species it contains in purely functional, utilitarian terms or if we believe that having more species is by definition better than having fewer (greater biodiversity). This is where approaches that attempt to place an economic value on the natural world such as the State of Natural Capital report, published in April 2013 can fall short in their efforts.

Despite its shortcomings, this approach does represent a significant step forward in attempting to assign an economic value to elements of the natural world that deliver so-called ‘Ecosystem Services’. For example woodlands planted in river catchment areas slow down the rate at which rainwater runs off hillsides and into rivers. The value of this service is the cost of the flood defences that would otherwise have to be built to achieve the same mitigation.

In order to perform this service, and so be assigned this value, it does not much matter if the wood in question is an ancient oak wood teeming with a wide range of life and supporting a complex web of ecosystems or a plantation of non-native conifers that contains a fraction of the number of species as this has no effect on the ‘ecosystem service’ that it provides. In fact the conifer plantation, being faster growing, may well be better at mitigating flood risk than the ancient oak wood. So, in terms of the ecosystem services approach, the conifer plantation is of greater value. It also probably has a higher economic value as it will produce a higher yield of timber in a shorter time than the oak wood, although it would have to be felled in order to realise this value, which is exactly what the Valuing Natural Capital approach seeks to avoid. Ask any conservationist though, and they will tell you that the oak wood is of immeasurably greater value for wildlife than the conifer plantation and therein lies the problem: immeasurably greater value.
This overly simplistic approach to calculating the real value of nature is also the reason why the Governments proposals for ‘Biodiversity Off-setting’ have been criticised. When it comes to the natural world and its complex inter-relationships between species and their habitats, the whole is infinitely greater than the sum of the parts.

It is a management cliché much favoured by proponents of management by Key Performance Indicators that “what gets measured gets done” which leads to the inevitable problem that often what is of most importance cannot be measured and therefore does not get done. This has led to a well-documented cultural crisis in the National Health Service where things that cannot be measured – such as humanity and compassion – often did not get done as staff were so busy chasing after the things that could be measured and so had a KPI assigned to them.

So the true message of the State of Nature report is not that the decline in species is bad for economic growth, that the UK’s international competitiveness will be damaged or even that some vital ‘ecosystem service’ will not be delivered. The real underlying message is that a part of our national heritage has been lost, that some of the species with which human beings have shared these islands since the end of the last Ice Age have gone, never to return. And this loss diminishes us all.

Harvest Time

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Post originally posted in the Rockingham Forest Druid blog

I am not quite sure where July went: all of a sudden it is the middle of August and the harvest is in full swing.

The old Celtic festival of Lugnassadh was celebrated at the beginning of the month (either the 1st or the 6th, let’s not get into wranglings about the calendar again). The festival is named for the Irish god Lugh, who instigated it in memory of his mother who died of exhaustion after clearing the wild forests of Ireland so that Man could have agriculture. This certainly resonates with those of us who live in parts of the Forest where the trees long since gave way to fields.

Lugnassadh, also known by the Christianised name of Lammas (“loaf-mass”) marks the beginning of the harvest season and is one of three what might be termed “harvest festivals” in the Pagan calendar. At this time we give thanks to the Earth for continuing to nourish and sustain us and we ask for the blessing of the Goddess on the harvests that are still to come – the vegetables in the garden and the fruit in the orchards and hedgerows over the next few months until we reach Samhain and we hope that the harvest is safely gathered and stored as the cold and the dark invite us and the land to rest over the Winter months.

This is a time of reckoning as we reap the fruits, bountiful or meagre, that have been produced by the seeds that we sowed and the care with which we tended them. This is an allegory for what takes place in our own lives; the projects that we began earlier in the year may now be bearing fruit, or not, according to the effort and commitment that we put in. There is nothing that we can do now to change the nature of our harvest. We can only reap what has grown and then, as we enter the time of reflection ushered in by the darkness, decide what we will plant, in our gardens and in our lives, in the coming season and how our cultivation of the crop might be different from this year.

Wilderness or Wasteland

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This article was originally published in The Magical Times magazine in July 2013

The concept of wilderness is often defined in a negative sense by what it is not: wilderness represents an absence of orderliness and control by human beings. This failure of Nature to remain within the bounds set for it by people has been viewed as deeply disturbing and somehow indicative of some kind of moral deficiency. In the Bible (Book of Genesis), God gave Man dominion over all the plants and animals of the Earth and the taming of the wilderness and the domestication (or elimination) of wild animals has often been seen as a kind of sacred duty by agricultural societies.

What is referred to as wilderness in Britain is often nothing of the sort but rather a manmade wasteland that has been denuded and impoverished by past forest clearance and subsequent farming practices, usually over-grazing by large flocks of sheep that eat any vegetation that grows and halt natural processes such as recolonisation by trees.

True wilderness, by contrast, is characterised by vitality and abundance as plants and animals multiply until they reach a natural equilibrium. The remaining areas of wilderness on the Earth differ from those places touched and tamed by the hands of people by having complete ecosystems and food chains: a wide variety of plant life is consumed by a range of herbivores who in their turn are preyed on by carnivores both large and small. The British Isles have seen the predators at the top of the various food chains – species such as the bear, lynx and wolf – driven to extinction by the most successful predator ever to walk the surface of the planet: the two-legged one. The ruthless hunting to extinction of our large native carnivores has left Man and his livestock physically safer but, as many people are beginning to realise, spiritually impoverished.

As our material lives have become increasingly contained within safe, neat and orderly boundaries, so our spiritual lives too have shrunk and become controlled, regimented and compartmentalised. Whatever religious or spiritual path we follow, it is easy to allow the stresses and strains of daily life, of earning a living and caring for home and family, to push our practice into a convenient box, where it can be managed like the rest of our lives with the diary and to-do list.

The practice of leaving behind the daily routine, and its associated safety and physical comforts, in search of spiritual growth has a long history in both Eastern and Western traditions. The Buddha achieved enlightenment after leaving behind a life of privilege and meditating for extended periods beneath a Bodhi tree. Many prominent figures in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, such as the Prophet Elijah, Jesus and John the Baptist all turned to the wilderness for inspiration and to hear more clearly the voice of God. Indeed, the entire nation of Israel had to spend 40 years wandering in the desert after fleeing captivity in Egypt before they were permitted to enter the Promised Land.

The Native American Vision Quest is another example of this practice, which seems to reinforce the fact that the use of wilderness to facilitate spiritual awakening and transformation is not confined to a single culture or geographical location but is part of our common human experience. In the Vision Quest the quester spends time alone in the wilderness away from the community, often depriving themselves of food, drink and sleep, in order to see a vision or encounter a spirit guide that will give purpose and direction to their life.

In the Native British tradition, the practitioner of this type of shamanic communion with the Otherworld was the Awenydd, a word which derives from the Welsh word Awen, generally translated as ‘flowing spirit’, which has been described as the inspiration of the Bard or Poet and, by the British Druid Order, as ‘the Holy Spirit of Druidry’.

So we can see that the urge to ‘get away from it all’ and ‘find ourselves’ is not merely a New Age response to 21st Century angst but rather something that has been recognised for thousands of years as a prerequisite to achieving our spiritual potential. From every tradition and every part of the world the mystical experience reported by these wanderers in the wilderness is the same: an overwhelming feeling of unity with all other beings and an insight into the inter-connection of all existence.

This inter-connectedness of the natural world and the individual works both ways and, as we shall see, this idea has a long history.

In the Celtic, and many other traditions, the King was seen to personify the life of the land. In numerous cultures, in the Middle East as well as in Ireland, the King would symbolically marry the land, as personified by one of the land’s patron goddesses. If the union was fruitful and the land provided bountiful harvests, then all was well. On the other hand, a poor harvest or famine would be viewed as a failure on the part of the King or a waning of his vital powers and the only solution was that the King should die in order to be born again in a stronger and more vibrant form, just as the vegetation that grows on the land dies in Autumn and is reborn in Spring.

This connection between the life of the King and the life of the land persisted in the Western Tradition through the Arthurian imagery of the Wasteland. Here the Fisher King has suffered a grievous wound and, while he lies stricken, the land is barren. Only the achievement of the Holy Grail by Arthur’s knights can restore both the wounded King and the land to health once again.

To put this into a contemporary context, if we replace the Fisher King with our modern, consumerist society, the link between the life of society and the life of the land becomes clear. The wounds inflicted by our exploitative, materialistic lifestyles have turned large parts of the land into a Wasteland and, until the Holy Grail of a fairer and more sustainable way of life more in tune with the natural world is achieved, there is no hope for either the King (society) or the land to be made whole again.