A few weeks ago I posted about ecosystem services and the differing opinions of writers such as George Monbiot and academics like Robert Costanza, together with a link to Monbiot’s lecture on the topic. A new online lecture by Costanza has just been released, based on a webinar he presented last week. It’s well worth watching, highly recommended as a state of the art over view of the concepts and progress in this area.
George Monbiot will not like it.
Following on from my recent post about how contrasting ways in which to value nature, today sees the launch of a new interactive web site that is asking people which areas of the Nene Valley they value, and why. There is also a photography competition with a chance to win pairs of binoculars. The website link is:
Here’s the text from today’s joint University of Northampton/Wildlife Trust press release:
The Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area (NIA) project has today launched a new interactive website, which aims to encourage people to share their views on the local natural environment.
Covering over 41,000 hectares across Northamptonshire, Huntingdon and Peterborough, the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area features a variety of natural habitats, including wildflower meadows, wetlands, marshes, woodlands and wet grasslands. With fishing lakes, bird watching opportunities and children’s adventure playgrounds, the NIA is an attractive area for animals – such as otters, kingfishers and grass snakes – to call home.
Researchers from the University of Northampton have joined forces with conservation organisations and the national Sciencewise initiative to launch the new NIA website, which features a wealth of information, a virtual tour and a discussion forum.
The website provides an opportunity for local people to share their thoughts on the Nene Valley, and an online mapping survey has been developed to identify areas of the valley that are particularly valued and why these areas are important to visitors. This will provide University researchers with valuable data that can be used to inform future plans for the valley.
A photo competition has also been launched to find some of the best images of the Nene Valley and to encourage people to explore the area over the summer. Judges are looking for images of wildlife, landscapes, people, heritage, water, and the built environment taken in the Nene Valley. There are separate categories for children so everyone can enter. Images should be submitted through the NIA website, and the winners will be selected through an online vote. The most popular photos will be displayed in the Autumn as part of the Nene Valley Festival, and the photographers of the top two images will each win a pair of Opticron binoculars. The competition closes for entries and voting at 5pm on 30 September.
Project co-ordinator Heather Ball from the Northamptonshire Wildlife Trust commented: “The new website is a great way to have your say about what goes on in the Nene Valley and share some fabulous images.”
University of Northampton researcher Dr Jim Rouquette added: “We need to gather information on the local places that people particularly value and the benefits that people gain from visiting. By better understanding what is important to different people, we can start to target conservation efforts and ensure that local knowledge and values are incorporated into decision-making.”
If you would like to contribute to this important project or take part in the photo competition please go to: www.nenevalleynia.org
*carrion crow, woodpigeon, robin, coot, mallard, feral pigeon, black-headed gull, mute swan, tufted duck, magpie, swift, Canada goose, herring gull.
Is nature something that we should simply value for its own sake? Or should we take account of how nature supports our society and our economy in real financial terms? Back in 1997 Australian academic Robert Costanza and colleagues published a now classic paper in the journal Nature called “The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital” that proved to be hugely influential and has been cited more than 3,500 times by other researchers in ecology, conservation, and ecological economics. Soon after publication I began to use the paper in some of my classes, asking students how they felt about putting a monetary ($) value on how nature supports ecosystem services such as soil formation, pollination, carbon storage, climate regulation, etc. Opinions were mixed, reflecting the fact that economic valuation of nature is controversial in theory, difficult to do in practice, and results in vast estimations of the “worth” of nature that seem to be fantastical. The Costanza et al. study, for example, suggested that ecosystem services were worth $33 trillion per year to the global economy, a figure almost twice as large as the Global GDP at the time!
More than a decade and a half later, Costanza has published a follow up paper that updates the figures in the 1997 paper and arrives at a global valuation of natural capital of between $125 and $145 trillion per year, depending on assumptions made about changes to the area of biomes such as temperate forest, grassland, coral reefs, etc. This last point is critical as loss of biome area due to changes in land use from agriculture and urbanisation has resulted in an estimated loss of ecosystem services of between $4.3 and $20.2 trillion per year between 1997 and 2011. That’s a big change and, if nothing else, gives an indication of how we are altering the face of the planet at an ever faster rate, something I will come back to later in this post.
In this new paper Costanza and colleagues have also responded to some of the criticisms of the earlier work, particularly by journalist and activist George Monbiot who, as I’ve previously discussed on this blog, has a genuine, but I feel misguided, aversion to the whole notion of ecosystem services and natural capital. Monbiot’s been repeating these criticisms in a lecture, a video and text of which is available on the Guardian website. I won’t go into a detailed discussion of his position, some of which I agree with, but I do believe that his major criticisms fail on two points.
The first is that Monbiot mixes up some very different concepts, bundling ecosystem services (a reasonable way of thinking about nature in relation to society) with biodiversity offsetting (a load of bollocks), green infrastructure (the importance of green space to urban development), carbon trading (dubious in theory and practice), and payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes (which can work on a regional scale, as in the case of South West Water’s upland catchments project), as if they were all the same thing, which they are not. In the Nene Valley NIA Project, for example, we are using an ecosystem services approach and are trying to develop a PES, but are wholly against biodiversity offsetting.
The second is that Monbiot sees all of this as some kind of neoliberal agenda to sell off the natural world to the highest bidder. That’s really not the case and ecosystem services are being promoted as a concept by conservationists, NGOs and scientists whose motivation is saving the natural world, not selling it. As Costanza et al. (2014) rightly state: “It is a misconception to assume that valuing ecosystem services in monetary units is the same as privatizing them or commodifying them for trade in private markets”
In his lecture Monbiot uses the classic rhetorician’s device of using partial quotes to support his point. For example he quotes Dieter Helm as saying that:
“The environment is part of the economy and needs to be properly integrated into it so that growth opportunities will not be missed”.
Sounds bad, I agree. But the full quote actually gives a very different and more profoundly “green” message:
“Over the coming decades, there will be a major programme to develop the UK’s infrastructure. The National Infrastructure Plan 2013 sets out ambitious plans – for new railways, roads, airport expansions, energy systems, water resources, sewerage investments, flood defences and a major increase in house building …….. In taking forward this major investment, it is important not to lose sight of natural infrastructure and the integral part that natural capital plays in delivering sustainable economic growth. …… the environment is part of the economy and needs to be properly integrated into it so that growth opportunities will not be missed. Integrating the environment into the economy is hampered by the almost complete absence of proper accounting for natural assets. What is not measured is usually ignored.”
Monbiot does make some good points in relation to how power can trump any environmental monetary valuation, and how political influence works, but his solution of “mobilisation”, is most effective at a relatively small scale, for example the defeat of Derby Council over plans to develop a nature reserve. Mobilisation by passionate environmentalists has failed to protect large swathes of Brazil’s natural environment, but arguments about the link between vegetation and rainfall, underscored by financial assessments of agricultural crop reductions, just might.
What is interesting about the lecture (which I encourage you to watch, Monbiot is a great speaker and it’s more entertaining than the transcript) is that not one of the audience questions afterwards actually dealt with the main topic of the lecture, namely the pricing of nature. Is that because he won over the audience completely with his arguments? Or is it because the ecosystem services approach to nature conservation is too recent a concept for its technicalities to have embedded themselves within public consciousness, and a general audience such as this might not feel confident enough to make challenging comments? I suspect the latter because whenever I give public lectures to gardening and wildlife groups, for instance, I always ask who has heard of “ecosystem services”, and invariably it’s a minority of the audience.
If Monbiot was correct and it’s possible to sell off natural capital in the way he describes, then we would expect the coalition UK government, for one, as well as big business, to buy into the concept wholeheartedly and to invest much more than they currently do in order to make a quick buck out of biodiversity. But they aren’t, and in fact this government has a track record that shows it has only the most cursory of interests in the UK’s natural ecosystems, and is willing to ignore scientific evidence to placate special interest groups who happen to be Conservative Party supporters (witness the recent badger cull debacle and the lack of action over illegal activity on grouse moors).
This is no doubt a debate that will continue but time is running out for the natural world and we don’t have many options: in Table 3 of Costanza et al. (2014) the authors present worrying data on how some biomes have greatly reduced in area since 1997 (e.g. coral reefs, wetlands) whilst croplands and urban settlement has increased. That can’t go on: the natural world is too valuable, in all senses of that world, to lose, something I’m sure George Monbiot would agree with even if he doesn’t believe that monetary valuation is the way to do it.
Day 1 of the British Ecological Society Macroecology Special Interest Group ended with a drinks reception, kindly bankrolled by the International Biogeography Society, and a stark choice: dinner in a pub with good food and no television on which to watch the Brazil v Germany World Cup semi-final; or dinner in a pub with crappy food but a television.
The split amongst meeting delegates was about 50-50. As I get older I’m being drawn to things in which I previously had only a passing interest, amongst them bird watching and football. So I opted for the latter, and was one of only two Brazil supporters in the whole pub, the other being our guest speaker Cathy Graham, largely because we both have more Brazilian than German friends and colleagues. We were rewarded with one of the most excruciatingly clinical dissections of a major international football team that I’ve ever witnessed. And the food was indeed crappy, but the lager was cold and plentiful.
The next morning, impelled by an uncomfortable mattress on a steel-framed bed in one of the student halls of residence, I woke early enough to do a little bird watching around the University of Nottingham’s Park Campus, which is not unlike the University of Northampton’s Park Campus, except much larger. There was a modest diversity of birds flying and calling, the highlight being a large grey heron patrolling the edge of a circular pond. As there were no fish in the pond it seemed to be mainly eating the slugs crawling on the adjacent lawn. Not a behaviour I’ve ever seen before, though this year’s BBC Springwatch showed footage of parent tawny owls bringing back large slugs for their chick, so perhaps it’s more common than we realise.
Following a mediocre breakfast and disgusting coffee, it was time for the first lecture of the day, the second keynote by Cathy Graham. Once again she focussed on her hummingbird research and presented some fascinating unpublished data on the structure of bird assemblages along an altitudinal gradient in Ecuador. Cathy’s team has been using cheap digital cameras which take one frame a second to amass data on infrequently visited rainforest flowers, an approach that trades off time and space: it’s possible to get a long set of data, but for only a limited number of plant species and individuals.
After coffee there were papers by Katie Leach on her PhD work on competition between co-occurring species of Lagomorpha (rabbits, hares, pikas, etc.) and from Richard Field on altitudinal effects on the endemism of plants which chimed with my experiences in Tenerife. Both of these neatly demonstrated one of the strengths of macroecology: the 21st Century tools it can marshal to use secondary data for understanding ecological patterns and processes at very large spatial scales.
But secondary data can also be a weakness of the field if the quality is poor and it is limited in scope. This was the subject later in the day of a polemical lecture by Shai Meiri entitled “Laziness in macroecology: a crime and no punishment” that railed against researchers who sometimes fail to augment ready-made data sets with even the most rudimentary of additional data. My favourite of Shai’s examples was a study which had used a mammalian ecology data set in which the diet of anteaters was coded as “unknown”! The tee-shirt Shai wore during his often very funny rant read: “If you are not outraged, you were not paying attention” and there was plenty for the audience to feel outraged about, not least his suggestion that we “ban taxonomy” and (even more controversially) get away from our computer screens and into the libraries to source information to fill in the gaps in data sets.
I’d go further and say that some field work would not go amiss as well! In comparison with using ever more sophisticated analyses, developing better software, and building ever more complex models, collecting field data seems to be low on the list of priorities for many macroecologists, particularly some of the PhD students. Not all of them by any means, and hopefully Cathy Graham’s talks will have inspired them to get into the field, but it strikes me as a trend. That’s worrying on many levels, and good data are hard won, but then I’m an old-fashioned, muddy boots kind of ecologist who realises that our knowledge of biodiversity is built up from a very small set of data in comparison to what we don’t know: we’ve scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg as a colleague used to say.
In the afternoon there was an unscheduled talk by Olivia Norfolk on the biodiversity of plants and pollinators of Bedouin gardens in the mountains of Sinai, which included a lot of field data. This was followed by a second set of seven minute “lightning talks”. I was third on a diverse bill, sandwiched within research on amphibians, Tyrannosaurus rex, North American lizards and microbial communities. Seven minutes passes quickly and I overran slightly, but hopefully managed to convey the gist of our work on the relative frequency of wind versus animal pollination across the globe. No one threw missiles at least and there were a couple of good questions that probed the scope and limitations of the current data, but were nowhere near as challenging as the questions in Copenhagen (though I’d had much more time for that lecture).
Following a hasty set of goodbyes I headed to Nottingham station to catch the 1810 back home, once again via the desolation of Birmingham New Street. Reflecting on the meeting on the way to Northampton I was struck by the fact that of the forty-odd attending, I was the oldest delegate by some margin, which was even more sobering than Brazil’s loss to Germany. I consoled myself with a bit of “train spotting” (identifying as many bird species as possible through the windows of the train), and ended up with a respectable 21 species* during the two hours or so of travel.
Thanks to the organising committee of the BES Macroecology SIG, and especially to Adam Algar and his team in Nottingham, for a great meeting. I look forward to next year’s in Copenhagen.
*Blackbird, buzzard, swift, house martin, tufted duck, mute swan, mallard, jay, goldfinch, collared dove, wood pigeon, feral pigeon, starling, crow, magpie, grey heron, Canada goose, common tern, back-headed gull, common gull, pheasant, (22 if you count chickens in a run).
It has been a week for rational explanations, for assessing evidence in a logical way, a subject on which I have posted in the past and which goes to the heart of the scientific endeavour.
There was a lot of media attention about a study published in PNAS that claimed to show that hurricanes with female names (Katrina, Sandy, etc.) cause more damage than those with male names, because (to quote the abstract of the study) “hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action”. In other words, people take feminine words less seriously than masculine words. Is that true? Are people really that socially attuned to gender-specific language? Turns out that the original study may have made too many assumptions with regards to data and the statistical model they used, according to a re-analysis by Bob O’Hara and GrrlScientist on the Guardian science pages. However in a further twist, a re-analysis of the re-analysis by Florian Hartig on the Theoretical Ecology blog found some (although very, very weak) support for a gender effect. Florian makes an interesting point, however, that “the authors would have probably found it much more challenging to place this study in [a top science journal such as] PNAS if they would have done a more careful and conservative statistical analysis”. In other words, science is certainly not immune to the effects of hyperbole and controversial findings.
Speaking of “hyperbole and controversial findings”, Richard Dawkins made headlines by apparently suggesting that reading fairy tales to children is not in their best interest: “Is it a good thing to go along with the fantasies of childhood, magical as they are? Or should we be fostering a spirit of scepticism?” Not surprisingly there was a big backlash against Dawkins who clarified his views on Twitter (!) and claimed they had been taken out of context. Perhaps so, but he has a track record of increasingly controversial views that he surely knows will raise his profile. But then he’s an author with books to sell, who long ago gave up being a practising scientist by not publishing any peer-reviewed papers in science journals for over 30 years. Dawkins’ role at Oxford was as Professor for Public Understanding of Science and unfortunately he gives the impression that scientists are all about rational thought and logical arguments in every facet of their lives. Which we’re not, I can assure you: I possess a whole raft of personal, irrational idiosyncrasies, including sending a little prayer to the Gods of Science every time I submit a new manuscript to a journal. Which they often ignore, the f**kers.
There was also an odd quote from Dawkins in relation to the logic of fairy tales, that there is “a very interesting reason why a prince could not turn into a frog – it’s statistically too improbable”. Nope, it’s not statistically improbable – it’s biologically impossible! “Statistically too improbable” suggests that it could happen, given enough time. Not sure that this helps with public understanding of science….
Something which is statistically improbable, but which does happen occasionally, is finding new fossils which make us rethink our understanding of the biodiversity of species interactions. Such a find was published recently in the journal Biology Letters: a 47 million year old fossil bird of a previously undescribed group that provides the earliest evidence of flower feeding, and possibly pollination by a birds. The evidence in this case is the presence of pollen grains preserved in the gut area of the fossil, which could also represent flower eating (a range of birds do this, for example bullfinches) rather than nectar feeding and legitimate pollination. Nonetheless it’s a stunning find and links nicely with a February post of mine.
Another new discovery this week, for me at least, was that (contrary to rumours, errr, started by me….) Dr Georges Aad does indeed exist. Apologies to him, though it was fun while it lasted.
Finally to the intriguing photos that grace the start and end of this post. I took these from the garden a couple of evenings ago. It shows a plane apparently flying into a dark tunnel that stretches out ahead of it (click on the images for a better view). We watched the plane for several minutes and the “tunnel” appeared to be moving ahead of the plane as it travelled across the sky. Karin had a plausible explanation, that what we were seeing was the shadow of the contrail because of its position relative to the low angle of the setting sun. This was confirmed by a web site showing other examples of this phenomenon, which apparently is not uncommon, though judging from the comments on the site, some people prefer US government covert chemical spraying as a rational explanation. Evidence and data will always be open to interpretation.
In a post back in February I asked the question “Who protects our biodiversity?” and highlighted the disgraceful behaviour of Derby Council in wanting to build a cycle track that would destroy a large proportion of The Sanctuary Local Nature Reserve. Despite petitions and strong public protest, the Council voted to go ahead with the development and site clearance work quickly began. However a High Court injunction was taken out, forcing them to pause the work until the legal ramifications of using Lottery funding for such a project were investigated.
Well, despite the odds and a seemingly bloody minded council determined to push ahead with the project, all of these efforts have worked: Derby Council has abandoned its plans for the site – it’s been saved! I learned the good news this morning in an email from Nick Moyes from the Save Our Sanctuary coalition. Nick writes:
“I am delighted to tell you that very late yesterday afternoon we were stunned and delighted to learn that Derby City Council had announced it was abandoning plans to build a cycle race track on top of The Sanctuary Bird Reserve and LNR at Pride Park in Derby.
This vindicates all the reasoned arguments and effort that everyone in our coalition of wildlife groups has put in over the last few months, and shows we can all work together to make a difference, and affect decisions that harm the environment. It’s just such a shame that a lot of damage has already been done to the LNR, though this should recover in time, if managed correctly.
I think we all believed this was a flawed project from the start. Well, everyone that is, except for one deputy chief executive and one councillor responsible for Leisure who made it their objective to push through this ill-conceived scheme at almost any cost (plus a Labour leader who publicly gave his support, too). In statements in the press, Derby Council now appears to be trying to blame its sudden decision to pull out on the delays and additional costs caused by the successful granting of a Judicial Review following brave action in the High Court by Derbyshire Wildlife Trust. Perhaps this is to be expected – it’s easier than admitting it was a flawed project with dubious funding sources which could so easily have been built elsewhere in the city. But they only have themselves to blame for creating this mess by choosing to ignore all the advice and objections offered to them right from 2011 – with inevitable consequences.
It would be a shame if Derby Council cannot admit it simply ‘got it wrong’. It certainly needs to quickly put right the damage it has already done to the LNR. There are so many people to thank, as everyone played their part in one way or another. Over 1000 people wrote letters and lodged online objections, lobbied councillors, flew aerial drones, published blog posts, wrote to the papers, emailed people, wrote press releases, sent tweets, attended consultation events, made placards, organised demonstrations, lobbied people in the streets, joined a coalition, wrote to the papers and so very much more.
No doubt there is still much more of this story to play out. But for now we can all celebrate the fact that a coalition of wildlife groups came together for the first time in this way, mobilised its arguments and its supporters, and collectively managed to defeat a Labour-controlled local authority which was determined to go back on its public commitment to protect a Local Nature Reserve that it once declared as of great importance to biodiversity. Not only that – but there are no doubt many other LNR support groups around the country that will now breathe a collective sigh of relief that this terrible precedent of a council so easily choosing to vote itself powers to destroy and develop a large part of its own LNR has been lifted.”
This is such good news to receive on a beautiful early spring morning! I’d like to think that Tony Benn, who died this week, would have approved of this example of people power in action.
In an earlier posting I briefly mentioned George Monbiot’s current fascination with the concept of rewilding and provided a link to an animated video he had narrated. As my first year lectures on species interactions and community structure have come to an end, one of the students on the course has pointed out that George has recently narrated another video called “How Wolves Change Rivers”, which deals with the effects of the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the USA. Following a 70 year absence, the presence of the wolves resulted in a trophic cascade which significantly changed, in a positive way, both the biodiversity and the functioning of the Yellowstone ecosystem, as well as aspects of the physical geography of the National Park, notably river behaviour.
It’s only a short video (four and a half minutes in length) and I strongly recommend that you watch it. Not only is it powerful in its imagery and its music, but it’s also underpinned by some powerful, peer-reviewed science. For example see this review by William Ripple and Robert Beschta, from Oregon State University, of the positive effects cascading from the presence of wolves in just the first 15 years following reintroduction.
At the end of my lecture on Thursday I showed the video to my class and the response was very positive; the students seemed to be impressed and I hope it brought home the importance of what I’d been talking about this term, that ecological interactions matter. Given the flooding problems we’ve experienced in Britain this winter, some of which seems to be related to how our rivers and flood plains are (mis)managed, perhaps there’s a case to be made for reintroducing wolves, bears and beavers to the Somerset Levels or the Thames Valley. Given that these areas lie in the heartlands of Conservative and Liberal Democrat voting, it’s not likely to happen under the current coalition government. But we can dream.
Biogeography has been on my mind of late, in part stimulated by thinking about the work we’re writing up on the frequency of wind versus animal pollination in plant communities in different parts of the world that I mentioned in one of my earlier Brazil posts. André has added more communities to the data set following some field work in Uruguay, and we are collaborating with Bo Dalsgaard and his colleagues in Denmark on analysing how historical and contemporary climates may have shaped the patterns we’re seeing. It follows on neatly from the previous work Bo has done on climate and hummingbird-flower interactions. I’ll report back when we have more to say.
The other reason for thinking about biogeography is that a couple of recent scientific reports have captured my attention. The first dealt with new fossil discoveries of species related to that enigmatic South American bird the hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin). The report can be read here but in summary, the evidence suggests that the bird family to which hoatzins belong was once much more widespread and may have originated in Europe. Hoatzins are not the only such example: hummingbirds, which are also currently restricted to the Americas, were found in Europe in earlier times, according to reports from back in 2004 and more recently in 2007. It appears that contemporary biogeography may not reflect past biogeography for some (perhaps most?) groups of species.
As a lesson in contemporary biogeography, it’s often been pointed out that the famous Vera Lynn song The White Cliffs of Dover falls short in its scientific accuracy:
There’ll be bluebirds over
The White Cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow, just you wait and see
Bluebirds are members of the genus Sialia, a group of three species which do not naturally occur in Britain, in fact are not present in Europe at all. So you’re not likely to hear them singing in southern England. But perhaps the genus was present in the distant past? Who knows? In the meantime we may have to change the lyrics to the song. Unless the writer was predicting what might happen in the future when continental drift means that Europe and the Americas will be much closer together.
The other report that caught my eye was of an interesting study that has compared plants and birds in cities across the globe, and looked at how urbanisation reduced the diversity of the native species compared to non-urban areas nearby. However I do hope that the lead author was being misquoted when she said that: “Owing to the fact that cities around the world share similar structural characteristics – buildings, roads etc – it is thought that cities share a similar biota no matter where they are in the world”. She goes on to say that they had discovered that some species: “are shared across cities, such as pigeons and annual meadow grass, but overall, the composition of cities reflects the unique biotic heritage of their geographic location”. Well yes, of course: any of our undergraduate students taking the second year module in biogeography could have told you that! As a serious hypothesis to test it lacked rigour: few tropical birds and plants could survive in temperate-zone cities, for example. There’s more to the study than just this, of course, as you can see from the abstract. Nonetheless it was an odd statement to make in my view.
The Wikipedia definition of biogeography that I linked to at the beginning of this post is perhaps a little limited in its scope: “the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through geological time” doesn’t cover the species interactions that have been a focus of my research, for instance. Perhaps “macroecology” fits it better, though (as I’ve mentioned before) there’s been a lot of debate in the scientific literature about where biogeography ends and macroecology begins, or whether the two are synonymous. My own view is that the two overlap considerably, but that macroecology is bringing a lot of new tools and approaches to the study of organisms at large spatial scales. Whether that warrants the definition of a different discipline is debatable, but like all such debates (e.g. the difference between ecology and natural history as recently discussed on the Dynamic Ecology blog) it provides us with a way of reassessing our own views on the work we do, which is always a good thing.
Our elected politicians and councillors regularly pay lip service to the environment, to the need to be “sustainable”, and to the importance of conserving biodiversity. How many of them really believe this?
Fewer than half, if Derby Council is a representative sample. Last night they decided (by one vote) to destroy almost fifty percent of The Sanctuary Local Nature Reserve, to build a cycle track. Whilst not the most critical area for nature conservation in the country, The Sanctuary is nonetheless an important local urban site for a wide range of nesting birds, some of them rare and declining in the UK. There’s a great video from a drone flight over the Reserve that gives a sense of the place, which I’ve never visited but nonetheless feel aggrieved at losing. It diminishes us all when decisions such as this are made.
The fact that this was designated as a Local Nature Reserve by Derby Council in 2006, following a much-trumpeted opening ceremony, presided over by the then-Home Secretary Margaret Beckett MP in 2004, shows what a shower of hypocrites some of our local politicians really are. I was first made aware of the campaign to save The Sanctuary by a guest post over on Mark Avery’s blog. As requested, I wrote to Derby Council as follows:
To whom it may concern,
Following recent national publicity about the proposed development of The Sanctuary Local Nature Reserve (LNR) at Pride Park in Derby, I wish to object in the strongest possible terms about this initiative.
The Sanctuary LNR is a site of county-level importance for nature conservation and its disturbance would be a sad indictment of the council’s attitude towards the environment. It would also set a disturbing precedent for other councils to ignore nature conservation designations purely for economic development.
I look forward to hearing in the national media that this development will not go ahead.
I also posted links on all of the Facebook groups of which I’m a member, sent it to students, and so on. And despite strong objections to the Council from local and national sources, councillors decided that it was better to follow the money rather than listen to the people.
So much for democracy. But as I said above, it also sets a precedent for the loss of Local Nature Reserves nationally: apparently they are dispensable. In a recent post I gave an indication of how I feel about biodiversity offsetting and the mind set of politicians who support it. The events of Derby don’t give me any more confidence that our elected representatives really care about nature, beyond sound bites and posturing. Protection of sites for nature conservation seems to be as much a throw of the dice as any rational strategy in the UK.
Prof. Jeff Ollerton - ecological scientist and author 