Tag: Environment Agency

The Greens, Zionism, the Tories – and Brazil

I wake this morning to hear that the Tories in their blissful ignorance plan to abolish the Environment Agency and Natural England. We assume it’s because they’re deemed to have green credentials. According to a writer in the Spectator it’s down to his local river not getting cleared of weeds as it used to be. Wading birds and frogs take priority. The main problem, as the rest of us see it, is underfunding. Thinking of my own backyard, Natural England administer, on a day-to-day basis, our local common, which we own: what would happen without them, we wonder?

It is always so much wiser to help find solutions rather than create or exacerbate problems.  This would apply to another news story, the Green Party conference passing a motion asserting that Zionism is racism. For sheer stupidity that takes some beating. There is a vast 120 and more year issue here: where might there be a homeland for a Jewish population, and how could that be squared with settling a territory where people were already living?

Tenant farmers back in the 1930s were displaced by Arab landowners selling territory to incoming Jews. The ultimate outcome was the displacement of vast populations, the nakba, in 1948. Also, over time, the development of a prosperous and proud and high-achieving Jewish state. The 1990s saw a chance for coming together, but moderates were pushed aside. The politics of Hamas and Likud left little room for compromise. But – none of this makes Zionism of itself racist. The attacks on Palestinian settlements and villagers by Jewish settlers with the connivance (and indeed active support by some members of) the Israeli government are another matter.

I have long supported the Palestinians. But if I was Jewish I would, I’m sure, be a supporter, right or wrong, of Israel. And, speaking as an Anglo-Saxon, originally out of Manchester, the courage and the sheer genius of the Jewish people have had a huge impact on my life.

The Economist describe the Greens’ decision to support the motion as ‘shameful’. ‘The party thereby deserves to fade back into irrelevance.’ I have to agree. I’d also add that having heard the Green mayor of Hackney outline her policies, all of them well-meaning, with no mention at all of promoting local business, I was left wondering how the community could generate the jobs and income that a prosperous local economy requires.

We need the Greens to pick up and run with their old agenda. We need them. The likely election of another Bolsonaro in Brazil could have terrible consequences for the Amazon, with loggers and farmers spreading deeper into the forest. Reading that wonderful travel writer Norman Lewis recently I was made aware of how, over many decades, bible-toting American evangelists brought notions of sin and salvation to Amazonian tribes, displacing and resettling, allowing the forest to be felled and given over to agriculture feeding American and European markets. Protestant evangelists have also brought American-style mega-churches and an effective funding model to Brazilian cities. The bonds of the old Catholic communities have been fractured. The evangelical right is little focused on environment and heavily focused on money and the immediacy of salvation.

If you detect cynicism on my part, you would be right. In my book, care and compassion, in their widest sense, come before sin and salvation. Without the former the latter are worthless. In the words of a 17th century Quaker, ‘sin … means losing he way of the heart’. 

We have of course the same evangelical and funding model in this country, and they surface in such people as Paul Marshall, proprietor of GB News and the Spectator, and the recently disgraced (attempting to bypass electoral law by enlisting American funding) head of policy at Reform, James Orr. This brings us, almost but not quite, full circle back to the Tories and their conference, trying to make a mark by trashing old institutions. There are many older, more centrist Tories who are horrified by what’s happening. Maybe the current crew will implode over the next few years and wiser folk regain their party. But as things stand I don’t hold out much hope.

Wildwood

In a previous blog I mentioned Roger Deakin’s Wildwood…

He makes habitable the Tudor farmhouse he buys by keeping out the wind and rain but still allowing at least partial free passage for the animal and insect life who had been its previous owners. He sleeps in a caravan to listen to the rooks, he’s part of the moth-makers circle as they cluster round the bright lights that draw the moths in, he recounts the stories of willow-men and the basket-and bat-makers who work the willow.

His is a wonderful but all too little known counter-balance to all the damage we do to our world, to our climate, to our landscape. I wonder at times whether we could impose a back-to-nature requirement on all road-builders, all architects and town-planners, anyone who would spread bricks and especially concrete over the landscape without a thought for future generations who will be left with it when lifestyles and domiciles and transport have moved on. Where once we felled trees in Britain at least we now have open pasture and hedges and copses which hide and nurture their own wildlife. Where we put down concrete nothing can grow, save after decades in the slow-wearing interstices where weeds find a scraggy home.

It would be good to have a long-term damage assessment built into every new project, with a minimum threshold in terms of decay or decomposition, to remind ourselves of the duty we owe not just our children, but to many generations hence.

It seems that the Environment Agency haven’t a clue when it comes to considerations of this kind. Deakin quotes their indifference to the withy (willow) growing tradition in the Somerset Levels. Floods brought poisoned water which ruined the crop one year, and no-one from the agency visited, and now it seems they have plans to flood the withy beds permanently. When I’ve heard stories about the agency in other flood situations I’ve always put it down to shortages of staff, or local misunderstandings, but it seems that it goes deeper, to an institutional level.

On a lighter note, Deakin notes that cricket bat willow only grows really well in England, to the frustration of Australians who must import English willow wherewith to thrash, they hope, the Poms.  Louis MacNeice writes of the drunkenness of things being various. Here we have the singular, the co-incidence of place and time to play which led to a game where the spring of willow and the resilience of cork and leather make for a game perfectly matched to human strength and capabilities. A more stolid bat would propel the ball much less far, and vibrate the hand, a softer bat and the ball would die before it left the square. Without willow where would we be, without the game that’s an antidote to all the frenetic activity which characterises most popular sports. With maybe the exception of snooker, but that’s about paralysis rather than relaxation of mind. But I digress.

20:20 cricket is another game altogether, although it still requires the magic of the willow wand, which however brandished remains something it seems modern materials can’t replicate. Long may it remain so.