Green and Prosperous Land

Faced with this onslaught, and the relative indifference of much of the population, those for whom nature really matters have been ploughing their own narrow furrow. Naturalists study in meticulous detail the declines of particular species and habitats. They band together to oppose building on sensitive sites, and they talk to each other in trusts, charities and campaign groups. It is largely a voluntary, amateur and charitable crusade, and it always has been. They feel under siege and try to hang on to what is left. They stand on the beach Canute-like and try to hold back the tide. They count the losses.

It has been a picture of comprehensive defeats, punctuated by the occasional success. These are often hugely symbolic, and where they focus on readily observable species, they garner a lot of support. Farmers may gripe about the impact on lambs, and grouse-shooters might complain about their precious game birds, but the recovery of the golden eagles, the reintroduction of sea eagles and red kites, and the sound of buzzards now over much more of the landscape are all hard-won victories for the small bands of environmental brothers and sisters.

The public can empathise with big birds of prey. They also see the merits of beavers and even lynx back in what passes as wilderness – the managed landscapes of Devon rivers and the Kielder Forest respectively. But what they do not see is the broader tide of destruction that tells a very different story – the insects that have gone; the soils that are depleted and soaked in chemicals; the rivers that are full of agricultural run-off; landscapes that are fragmented; wildlife corridors that are closed off; and the seas that are full of plastic.

In the agricultural battle against nature – to destroy everything that competes with the crops and livestock – agrichemical companies get better and better at doing their job. Now non-selective herbicides like glyphosate can kill off all the vegetation after crops have been harvested, ready for the next, and a host of genetically modified (GM) crops are specifically designed to be glyphosate-resistant. Neonicotinoids (new nicotine-like insecticides) are another chemical in the armoury, and the combination of glyphosate and neonicotinoids is now deemed by the farming lobby to be essential for maintaining crops and farm profitability, even as attempts to ban them gather momentum. Look closely at a crop of oilseed rape. Note the absence of insects and the brown, dead undergrowth. It is an example replicated for maize and other cereals, and is evident in the poverty of biodiversity in much ‘improved grassland’ too.

The technology is advancing at an ever-faster rate, as genetic engineering, precision applications and chemical advances get better at eliminating those ‘enemies of agriculture’. The collateral damage is not something that matters much: the crop is what yields the profit. The farmer does not pay for the consequences to the pollinators, for the river life impacted by the chemical run-off, and for the ‘silent spring’ predicted so long ago by Rachel Carson.[2] She focused on DDT (the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), and her silence was about birds. She was right in her dire warnings, and on a scale she could not have imagined. It is a silence not just of birds, but insects, amphibians, reptiles and small mammals. The farmers’ response is predictable: if they are to be persuaded to pollute less, they must be paid to do so. The pollution impacts are other people’s problems.

Yet technology does not need to lead to an ever-greater destruction of nature. It is not the technology itself but some of its uses that is the problem. The tide of destruction is eating away at the very economic growth that has been bought partly at nature’s expense. This recognition is also the consequence of new technologies. The extent of microplastics pollution and its consequences for marine life is now beginning to be understood because we can measure it. We have much better technologies to measure air quality, and medical advances allow us to see the link between the pollutants we put in the atmosphere and people dying from the consequences of inhaling dirty air. Just as it took several decades to prove the link between tobacco and lung cancer, so it has taken these new technologies to pinpoint the scale of the impacts on us of the destruction of nature. The impacts on mental health of a loss of nature are now becoming evident and measurable too.

In the past, diffuse pollution was often hard to pin on any one polluter. That is no longer the case. We can increasingly see down to the smallest areas who is doing what. The anonymity of the polluters that allowed them to deny specific responsibility is now being gradually blown away by GPS drones and other high-resolution mapping. While we might forgive those who know not what they are doing, it is much harder to forgive them when we and they do know. And they (the developers, the waste criminals, the packaging companies, manufacturers, service industries and farmers) do now know.

Over this century these impacts will play out and undermine our prosperity unless we actively head them off. The trade-off between more economic growth and less nature that has been the hallmark of human history so far is no longer benign. Destroying nature is beginning to eat into economic progress. Climate change is the obvious example, but in hogging the limelight it has eclipsed the myriad other impacts. The costs of polluted waterways, of polluted seas, and of soil degradation, the loss of pollinators and the impacts on humanity of the loss of nature to anchor our lives by, relentlessly keep going up. One incremental loss after another may eventually trigger systemic consequences as key thresholds are crossed. As we create an increasingly brown world, we create a less prosperous one too.

Among the many reasons why nature matters, one is that it is part of the economy. It is a vital element of the resources that the economy allocates, and the economy can no longer get by with less and less of it. Technology brings with it an increased capacity for destruction, but it also brings routes to a better and greener world – and a more prosperous one too. We can have a greener and more prosperous country. Conserving (and enhancing) nature increases our prosperity. Economic growth, properly measured, is driven by developing human ingenuity, placing in our hands technological tools that previous generations lacked. It need not be in conflict with the environment. We can be green and prosperous.

There is no lack of ideas and projects to make this transition to a greener and more prosperous state. At the national level we know what to do. The river catchments need integrated management, reducing costs at the same time as improving outcomes. The way forward in agriculture is pretty clear too. Just stopping the perverse subsidies and enforcing the law would be a good start. Making polluters pay, and focusing subsidies on the public rather than private goods would greatly improve economic efficiency and transform the agricultural landscape, capture and retain carbon in the soils, and protect the pollinators. Enhancing rather than encroaching on the Green Belt would bring nature next to people, with big health and leisure benefits. Ensuring that there is net environmental gain from development would transform the impacts of new housing. Landscape-level wildlife corridors would give nature a chance to recover.[3] The railway lines, road verges and canal paths are obvious ways to build green corridors that millions of people can enjoy. Getting serious about Marine Protected Areas, including prohibiting fishing in them, would allow fish to bounce back and provide more sustainable stocks. Turning the coastal paths around Britain into major wildlife corridors would be good for people, tourism and nature.

At the local level, there is a cornucopia of economic and environmental opportunities. Initiatives here are often specific and highly focused, including restoring village greens; protecting and enhancing urban parks and green spaces; planting trees along the streets; getting children to participate in local environmental projects; enhancing the biodiversity of churchyards; cleaning up the litter on beaches; taking responsibility for local footpaths; and planting wild flowers in every garden.

In between the local and the national, the environmental organisations all have a checklist of preferred measures, from restoring particular habitats, to making road verges and railway lines havens for nature, to bringing back beavers. The general bodies have lots of great ideas for plants, birds and bugs. The national bodies, like the Wildlife Trusts, have plans for key habitats, from the Brecklands and managing the grazing now that the rabbit populations have collapsed,[4] to restoring wetlands in the Upper Thames like Otmoor by keeping the floodplains of the River Ray wetter,[5] creating and enhancing green spaces in cities, and managing and enhancing woodlands.

All of this makes very good economic sense. It can all be done. This is not only a prize worth fighting for because nature matters in its own right, but represents good mainstream economic policy. We can stop doing stupid things like wasting £2 billion per year on paying farmers to own land;[6] wasting money on cleaning up water for drinking, which should not have been polluted in the first place; wasting money on creating hard flood defences when natural flood management can be much cheaper; and wasting money on cutting down urban trees, as in Sheffield. All of this money can be much better spent on actually enhancing nature. This is why we should do it – because we should care about nature, and because we will collectively be better off as a result.

Part one of this book sets out these great opportunities – the prize. The prize is what nature could look like by the middle of this century. It is all about what we could have, what a greener Britain could look, smell and sound like. It identifies the value of halting the declines and moving towards a richer natural environment, and explains how we can all be more prosperous as a result.

Set against this great green prize is the brown alternative: what happens if we don’t seize the opportunities, and what happens if we allow the destruction of nature to continue. The prize of sustainable economic growth is not the same thing as the fool’s gold of GDP. It is all about harnessing technology and human ingenuity to make us all better off, by maintaining the natural environment and seizing the opportunities to get much more out of nature. The brown alternative of business-as-usual is literally a waste of money. It is also ugly and often nasty, as beauty is translated into lifeless monoculture fields and bleak housing estates. The sounds and sights of nature are diminished, replaced by ever-more noise and vistas of the man-made. The scale of the destruction of nature coming down the track if we do nothing should terrify everyone.

Part two is the practical part. It is all about how to secure the prize, what can be achieved, and why it is sensible economics to do so. Pragmatically, it involves five key areas of the natural environment: the river catchments (chapter 3); the agricultural land (chapter 4); the uplands (chapter 5); the coasts (chapter 6); and towns and cities (chapter 7). For each you are asked to imagine what an enhanced nature might look, sound and feel like. For each a practical framework to achieve the greener outcomes is provided, and why we will be more prosperous as a result is explained. To whet your appetite, and to move from the wonders of the imagination to reality, in every one of these areas a few practical examples of initiatives and projects already under way, and potential new ones, are identified.

It is all about river catchment system operators and ensuring the polluter and not the polluted pays; about a new agricultural policy based on public money for public goods, not perverse subsidies for owning land; protecting and enhancing the uplands for their beauty, health and leisure, and the biodiversity, and again not damaging them through perverse subsidies; opening up the coasts and coastal fringes for their full public potential, and stopping destructive fishing practices, most importantly in Marine Protected Areas; and greening towns and cities with trees, parks and Green Belts to improve air quality, childhood experiences, and health and leisure. What is not to like about this, not just from a conservationist’s perspective, but also for the economic prosperity of Britain?

Part three turns to the money – how to pay for it all. Chapter 8 considers public goods, why they matter, why the market won’t deliver them, and how they should be paid for. Chapter 9 looks at the polluter-pays principle, compensation and net environmental gain, and perverse subsidies. The place to start is with the sheer inefficiencies of current policies. An efficient economy is one that internalises all the costs and benefits of economic activities into prices and decision-making. In an efficient economy pollution is charged: it is inefficient not to charge for pollution, resulting in a lower level of economic prosperity. This is both 101 economics, and rarely followed. Not even carbon has a proper price yet. Making polluters pay is the single most radical and effective policy that could be adopted, for economic prosperity and for the environment. The British countryside would be radically different, and radically less polluted, were this simple economic principle adopted. It would not cost anything to the economy in aggregate, and at the same time it would yield lots of revenue, some of which could go to repairing past damage and enhancing our natural environment.

Instead of demanding more public expenditure, conservationists would be better advised to home in on this fundamental economic principle. Why should it be any more acceptable to pollute than to steal? Both take something from others that they do not pay for. Polluters steal people’s health and they force the polluted to pay for what has been done to them. Expecting more public expenditure is something that might motivate protests and campaigns, but most conservationists know that if they wait for the Treasury to open its coffers they will be disappointed. While money is needed, getting to a more efficient baseline is an urgent necessity, making us all better off.

The converse of making polluters pay is to get rid of perverse subsidies. More than £3 billion is spent annually on subsidising Britain’s farmers, £2 billion of which goes on paying them to own land. This absurd policy has been perverse not only for the natural environment but for the farmers themselves, inflating land prices. It came about as a result of trying to get away from the even more absurd consequences of subsidising the prices of agricultural products, resulting in the infamous European wine lakes and butter mountains, and the intensive sheep grazing that has done so much damage to the uplands. Getting rid of perverse subsidies would save a lot of money. It could be better spent. But even if it were just withdrawn, Britain would be greener.

Next comes the fraught subject of compensation for damage to the environment. While there are conservationists who believe that there should be no damage at all, the reality is that there will be. Faced with a population increasing by around 10 million by mid-century, and with more than 200,000 new houses per year for over a decade, more land will be concreted over. Add in the new roads, railways, and energy generation and networks to service all these extra people and the wider growing economy, and damage is inevitable.

Can this damage be squared with enhancing the natural environment? Only if there is compensation over and above the damage to the natural environment elsewhere. This is the net environmental gain principle: any damage must result in not just offsetting it, but by a positive margin. The positive margin is the precautionary principle in action.

Nowhere is it more important to apply these three principles than to climate change and net zero. But to meet the climate imperatives, and at the same time be mindful of the natural capital dimensions, requires us to integrate all of these into the wider environmental context. Net zero might be an environmental disaster if it means planting the wrong sorts of trees in the wrong places. Chapter 10 shows how the smart use of natural carbon sequestration and the creation of natural capital markets can bring the net zero agenda into this broader creation of a green and prosperous land. Markets help to ensure that polluters do in fact pay, public goods are efficiently provided, and that compensation is paid. Money is currently spent in silos, notably the agricultural subsidies. Winning the prize, and making sure we hang on to it, requires cementing the money into a comprehensive and integrated framework. Chapter 11 sets out how to do this within a Nature Fund. This acts a bit like sovereign wealth funds do for oil- and gas-producing countries. It should include the economic rents from these non-renewable activities like North Sea oil and gas production, mirroring other sovereign wealth funds, but it can also bring together the monies from pollution taxes and charges, from subsidies directed towards public goods and the net gain payments. Crucially it would be for nature, not general public spending.

The net gain principle set alongside the polluter-pays principle together ensure that there is enough money to pay for an enhanced natural environment. Add the money previously spent on perverse subsidies, instead going to environmental public goods, and the numbers stack up. We can have a greener and more prosperous Britain, without extra public expenditure.

A Nature Fund would need to be protected from the host of vested interests and from political opportunism. These interests are not just those opposed to the conservation of nature. They include nature organisations, which are notoriously fragmented and quarrelsome. With a pot of money, the Nature Fund will become a target for each and every interest to look after its own, whether specific species or specific habitats and locations. Its constitution matters, as do the rules of engagement. A Nature Fund should encourage cooperation and coordination for the prize as a whole.

The way to do this is to bring the opportunities together into an agreed practical plan to make it happen – a plan of how to integrate the myriad opportunities into coherent actions, and the necessary institutions to deliver this wonderful opportunity. It is about the full delivery, in spirit and letter, of the 25 Year Environment Plan published in 2018.[7] Some will say that this is too radical, but the real radicalism is in doing nothing, in allowing the business-as-usual to continue. This radically worsens the opportunities of the next generation, who will not only be deprived of swallows and flycatchers but, in the process of the continued destruction of nature, find the basic necessities of their lives increasingly compromised.

The 25 Year Environment Plan needs to integrate the principles behind it into the fabric of the economy and government. These are the two aims of the earlier 2011 White paper, ‘The Natural Choice’:[8] putting the environment at the core of the economy; and leaving the natural environment in a better state for the next generation. Although much may be achieved immediately and a number of reforms will help us along this path, to stand the test of economic crises and recessions and the sheer power of the hostile lobbyists, there needs to be an overarching legal and constitutional framework. As with climate change, politicians are good at the rhetoric, and they may well mean what they say, but permanently delivering it requires something more. The 2008 Climate Change Act changed the game. It is very hard to get out of its targets and the carbon budgets. We need something similar, a proper Nature Act that enshrines the principles in the 2011 White Paper and the 25 Year Environment Plan.

There is a choice: we can impoverish ourselves by continuing down the current path, or we can have a greener and more prosperous land, and one that is pleasanter too. The book concludes with this choice.

PART ONE

1

THE PRIZE

Imagine what our natural environment could look like in 25 years. Imagine bright colourful hay meadows full of wild flowers, birdsong and butterflies. Imagine cities with green trees along the streets, green parks and green Green Belts. Imagine the sounds of uplands, of golden plovers and curlews. Imagine beaches without plastic, and the loud noise of winter waders in the estuaries and marshes. Imagine wildlife corridors all around the coastline and across the land and along the rivers, roads, railways and canals. Imagine a marine world full once again of fish and free from the harrowing of the seabed by trawling. Imagine colour and beauty restored to the landscape. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?

This prize is not just a dream. It is perfectly practical and achievable, within our reach, and it would greatly enhance our lives and our economy. We don’t have to ‘go back to nature’, become austere and abandon capitalism. None of that is likely to happen anyway. Instead we need to embrace the most important type of capital: natural capital – the stuff nature gives us for free. We would be much more prosperous as a result. To make this possible, stand back and think big.

The prize comprises two parts: holding the line against further deterioration of existing natural capital; and creating and enhancing more of it. That is what leaving the environment in a better state for the next generation means. Not to go down this path is to court a significant loss of prosperity and make the next generation worse off. The question is just how much worse off. This chapter is about that prize; the next is about what happens if we don’t halt the destruction.

No more declines

The natural capital that really matters is the renewables – the stuff that nature keeps on giving us for free for ever, provided we don’t deplete it below a threshold so it cannot continue to deliver its free bounty. Nature at threshold risk is the stuff of red lists and endangered species, and some of it is well known. To hold the line means that the sounds of cuckoos and turtle doves and nightingales and corncrakes are going to continue – for ever. But it also means protecting those renewables that are less obvious to the casual eye, and those assets we take for granted but that are actually in considerable danger. It is about the things we no longer see so often, like insects and butterflies, and about the once-common that is slipping from our grasp. How many people realise that the rabbits, which were ubiquitous, have now almost vanished from some areas? That the hares may follow? And how many have failed to notice that the swallows are harder to sight now? It means fertile and productive soils, lots of pollinators, clean water and clean air, and natural flood defences too. These rely on a host of creatures at the more microscopic level, and beneath the soils and under water.

The focus is often on the more iconic species at risk, since these are usually easy to measure and easy to design conservation strategies for. In almost every case, what is required is a habitat within which they can thrive, and an end to persecution. Species protection is all about these underlying critical natural infrastructures, which are every bit as important as man-made infrastructures in energy and transport. Although it might not actually matter greatly in the scheme of things if there are no bitterns or ospreys, it would matter if the reed bed ecosystems are gone and there is more eutrophication of rivers and lakes. Protecting particular species on the brink of their thresholds is typically good conservation generally, and the result is all sorts of other species benefits.[1]

Holding the line is not straightforward for the obvious reason that we are going backwards. Simply stopping more direct damage would not stabilise the natural environment. It is clearly on a downward path, notwithstanding a host of projects to turn things around in specific areas and for specific species. So much damage has been done over the last half-century that resilience is low. Even where there are attempts to halt the declines, as in the case of river quality, the cumulative damage means the underlying conditions could continue to worsen. In the case of rivers, the fly life continues to decline and groundwater pollution will worsen even if the polluting stops now. It is not enough to cease further damage. We need to stop the slide through remedial actions – the natural capital maintenance we should have done long ago.