Bashing Bats and Nuking Newts

I’ve previously blogged about my personal paradigm shift where I realised, after a lifetime of worshipping at the altar of logical, predictable, universal science, that science is, in truth, unpredictable and irrational. I explained, “For me to say this is like a Christian turning away from God, a Tory voting Labour, or a once-fun person becoming a vegan.”

Well, I’ve recently experienced another shift. This one’s a bit trickier to articulate because I run the risk of angering some environmental campaigners and nature lovers whom I admire immensely as well as those campaigners/lovers I do not. I don’t mind angering the latter lot; in truth, sometimes I go out of my way to anger them because a) I’m bad and b) they’re badder.

The alternative to writing this blog, and therefore not angering those I admire, would be to not write it (that statement is an example of me worshipping at the altar of logic), but by choosing not to write it, I’d be self-censoring. According to Wiki, self-censorship is “the act of censoring … one's own discourse, typically out of fear or deference to the perceived preferences, sensibilities, or infallibility of others”. In other words, self-censorship is giving in to bullies. Like, I’m going to do that! In addition to I will survive, Gloria Gaynor sang, I am what I am, which includes the immortal phrase, “I bang my own drum. Some think it's noise, I think it's pretty.” Therefore, I’m going to write what I want to write, because what I write is what I am, warts and all. If, by expressing an alternative point of view to theirs, I happen to alienate those whom I admire, then perhaps my admiration is misplaced.

Here goes. My recent paradigm shift involves moving away from my long-held adherence to the idea that the ‘mitigation hierarchy’ is THE approach to developing land for housing, industry, transport, utilities, whatever. First, you do no harm to the natural world. If that’s not possible, you minimise the extent, intensity and duration of adverse impacts. The third-best option is to restore and rehabilitate the site as far as possible. The measure of last resort is ‘off-setting’, which aims to compensate for any loss that can’t be prevented per the first three steps and involves improving the natural environment elsewhere, which could be thousands of miles away. For example: fly from Heathrow to New York and offset your share of greenhouse gas emissions by paying for a tree to be planted in, say, Greenland. Vance can turn the first sods … I’ll resist the temptation to make a joke about Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart.

Ideologically I still prefer the mitigation hierarchy, but I now believe that, in many cases, it does more harm than good in a national context. The paradigm-penny dropped while I was trashing the £100m-cost of the bat tunnel over a stretch of the HS2 railway. I said that if I had £100m with no strings attached, I could protect a lot more bats and other species than that ruddy tunnel ever would. Never mind a penny dropping, that was an apple-on-the-Newtonian-head moment. If – and many times it’s a big if – a development project has to just has to go ahead (the Whitehaven coalmine is one such) then the timeline for and cost of submitting a planning application and completing the project must be significantly lowered, thus freeing up cash for more productive endeavours like a more efficient way to protect nature, constructing backup power supplies (à la Heathrow) or increasing shareholder dividends (tee hee). This could be achieved by developers paying a varying sum of money into a national environmental mitigation pot. This pot would fund independent, standardised, proportionate ecological surveys of development sites that inform subsequent proportionate (that word again) enhancements to the natural environment, underpinned by a systemic national strategy. I have a shedload of additional details and caveats, but you get the gist. 

Not convinced by the bat-shed example? How about this one. Every penny and every second that water companies spend on environmental reports, planning consultants, FoIs, lawyers, etc. is one less penny and one less second available for the installation of a new sewage treatment plant that would prevent untreated sewage spilling into our rivers and seas. What on earth is gained by a protracted fight to protect a common badger colony when sewage is decimating rare native crayfish? I love badgers, but I live in the real world which ain’t pretty and compromises must be made.  I’ve quoted Thomas Sowell before: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs”. 

It'll come as no surprise to anyone when I say I was mortified when the Labour Government proposed a ‘national pot’ scheme in its Planning and Infrastructure Bill (PIB). Forget pennies dropping and apples falling, for me to agree with a socialist government, Chicken Licken must be ruling the roost. My sin – agreeing with Labour – is absolved, however, because I wouldn’t develop anywhere near as much land as Rabid Rayner and Moribund Miliband have proposed, especially on ‘green’ sites or in the ‘wrong’ areas.

Nah thin sithee environmental campaigners – those I admire and those I don’t – have universally dubbed the PIB a ‘cash to trash’ charter, and they’re throwing their prams out with their toys. There is indeed plenty to dislike about the PIB, but the national-pot proposal stands out as something that might be fleshed-out and improved before the Bill is implemented. Maybe campaigners and professional ecologists have tried to engage with Government and have been ignored, so they believe that their campaign to maintain the extant regime that leads to £100m bat-tunnels is justified.

And here is my second disagreement with the campaigners – their actual campaign, the concept and catchphrase of which is ‘#TeamBat #TeamNewt’. The logo, in various shades of sn*t-green, incorporates a cute cartoon-bat hovering over a cute cartoon-newt, both smiling vacantly. Any minute now, I expect them to say “sausages” (1970s’ TV joke). You can even buy branded merchandise. You can. I won’t. Bat and newt-memes were adopted because these particular critters have come in for stick from Government for allegedly holding up developments. The green lobby is countering such attacks with commensurate clucking noises. Thank goodness that the hitherto unknown (and, in my eyes, repulsive) ‘distinguished jumping spider’ didn’t get blamed for a compromised development in Kent until after the campaign launch. I don’t think I could have coped with #TeamSpider.

As part of the campaign, various ‘cuteoids’ are being drip-fed into public consciousness to try and build momentum towards a day-long ‘national celebration of nature’ in late-May (if they’d hung on until late-June they could’ve jumped on the Glastonbury bandwagon – talk about a missed opportunity). One cutey, revealed for Shrove Tuesday, is the eponymous cartoon-newt. He’s wearing a chef’s hat and apron while tossing pancakes. Yes he is. I kid you not. I wish I were. The next one involves a short picture-story of stuffed toy animals, like the ones toddlers drag around by their ears, being evicted from their soon-to-be-destroyed habitats. I tried to find out more but these campaigners tweet, re-tweet, reply and retweet replies so obsessively about so many topics that I scrolled down to Australia without finding anything useful. There was some verbiage hidden somewhere on some website but, honestly, who has the time?

How did it come to this? In the red corner, the Government and pro-development lobby are controlling the discourse around blocking bats and nuisance newts. In the green corner, environmental campaigners are trapped in a discourse that (by design) has no room for the bigger picture, so they’re stuck with bats and newts, anthropomorphising them, which is the ecological equivalent of reverse cultural appropriation. I’m sure they’re appealing to their entrenched supporters, but I can’t see cynical politicians, civil servants and planners, astute businessmen, switched-on construction workers or hard-pressed Joe Public being won over or impressed by a tossing newt moralising about £100m bat tunnels over social housing, public transport and new reservoirs. It’s a dog-eat-#TeamDog world, and the dogs are unfortunately winning.

Fellow environmental campaigners might think I shouldn’t say things like this but, honestly, guys, if you want to beat the opposition, you have to first get inside their heads. You’re welcome! Nevertheless, am I being too blunt? Should I make my message more palatable by sprinkling it with icing sugar and lemon juice? Flipping heck! I can’t get that tossing newt out of my mind. It’s the visual equivalent of an earworm. Ooooh, #TeamWorm! 

My advice? Bash the (cartoon) bat and nuke the (cartoon) newt. Hijack Glastonbury for the ‘National Nature Day’. Study Thomas Sowell and be prepared to (#Team)Horse-trade with ‘strange bedfellows’.

And don’t shoot the messenger. I’m riddled already.