hot air
This is where I sound off about something from time to time. You are welcome to join in.
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Topic 1: Death & Destruction Thoughts on environmentalism 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 selection of seeds specially designed 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 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 area quickly returned to the same grasses, buttercup and common rush as were there before the ploughing. This easily-foiled attempt to determine which birds to encourage 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 along the edges of fields by farmers, presumably paid to do so. In fact money has even been spent sowing species that are still pretty common in the wild because someone got the idea they were 'endangered'. These days, environmentalists with a penchant for playing God and bending nature to their will (while claiming to be working with her) have really got the bit between their teeth. They have constructed a palpably false religion based on the doctrine of biodiversity, in which 'native' species are the goodies and 'invasive' species 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). The problem is that you don't actually need a passport if you're a squirrel, goose or seed. But even if you did, how long does a species have to have been resident before citizenship is conferred? 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. The biodiversifiers have become adept at exploiting the demonizing and eulogizing tendancies 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 blacklist is growing at a nauseating rate. Grey squirrels, Canada geese, mountain goats, moles, magpies, common ragwort, sycamore, Himalayan balsam it goes on and on. Lurking in the background with their traps and guns are those for ever on the lookout for official blessing to kill. Of course, successful species, given their huge numbers, 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 had a commendable try in a recent television series. At the root of the persecution 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. To me it seems wrong to go all out to punish success while fostering those unable to adapt. There is, after all, Darwin. Environmentalists certainly recognize that changes brought about by ourselves are often responsible for the greater success of some species to the detriment of others and part of their religion 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 native to their own patch. Never invoke the name of Nature to justify a strict devotion to biodiversity while in reality trying to reconstruct the world according to a doctrine which will inevitably be discredited in time, like all doctrines. Nature is not really all that interested in biodiversity, anyway. Success is the key for her. The reintroduced 'natives' can't really seem to hack it, despite all the care and attention 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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