|
In the free element beneath me swam,
Floundered and dived, in play, in chase, in battle,
Fishes of every colour, form, and kind;
Which language cannot paint, and mariner
Had never seen, from dread Leviathan
To insect millions peopling every wave:
Gather’d in shoals immense, like floating islands,
Led by mysterious instincts through that waste
And trackless region, …
James
Montgomery, World before the flood
Sweet is the breath of morn, her
rising sweet,
With charm of earliest
birds; pleasant the sun,
When first on this
delightful land he spreads
His orient beams, on herb,
tree, fruit, and flower,
Glistering with dew;
fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and
sweet the coming-on
Of grateful evening mild;
then silent night,
With this her solemn bird
and this fair moon,
And these the gems of
heaven, her starry train, …
John
Milton, Paradise Lost, Eve to Adam
Admiring Nature in her wildest grace,
These northern scenes with weary feet I trace;
The meeting cliffs each deep-sunk glen divides;
The woods, wild-scatter’d, clothe their ample sides;
Th’outstretching lake imbosomed ‘mong the hills,
The eye with wonder and amazement fills:
The Tay meand’ring sweet in infant pride,
The palace rising on his verdant side,
The lawns wood-fring’d in Nature’s native taste,
The hillocks drop’t in Nature’s careless haste,
The arches striding o’er the new-born stream,
The village glittering in the noontide beam –
Poetic ardors in my bosom swell,
Lone wand’ring by the hermit’s mossy cell;
The sweeping theatre of hanging woods,
Th’ incessant roar of headlong tumbling floods –
Robert Burns Verses
written with a pencil
As a young boy I had the
immense privilege of spending childhood years on the Moray Firth coast
which was then replete with aquatic and marine life. We had salmon and
trout in our rivers and lochs, and an abundance of fish and crustaceans in
the rocky pools and inlets along the shore. Near the lighthouse, just
over a mile from the edge of town, there was a small stretch of ponds we
called ‘the lighthouse lochs’. They were just shallow water bodies, - but
fascinating to a young lad as they contained stickleback, frogs, tadpoles,
caddis fly larvae in their self-made houses of tiny twigs and stalks, and
many other life forms like dragon flies, pond skaters and water beetles
that would carry bubbles of air down to hidden nests. Many a summer hour
was spent in fascinated observation of these creatures. But the lighthouse
lochs are long since gone completely, - bulldozed over to create a caravan
park.
Section of the Moray coast
where the writer grew up
Along the beach and the
rocky pools there were even more life forms. Sand eels, small plaice,
saithe, gurnards, conger eels, gobies, hermit crabs, common crabs, and
lobsters abounded, while just offshore were schools of sprat, mackerel,
and herring, feasted upon by seagulls and gannets, seals and dolphin.
That was the situation until a mere 40 or 50 years ago. Today the coast
is largely sterile and bereft of life except for a few hardy limpets,
mussels and crabs. The same is true all around Scotland’s coast. Many
hitherto productive coastal waters yield only crabs and prawns. Some
sprat and mackerel are returning seasonally, but coastal marine life has
largely died.
How did that happen? What
has caused the demise of such profusion of life in a few decades? My
guess is pollution. We have had an enormous increase in pesticide and
fertilizer use, and the run-off from our fields and farms has accumulated
in coastal waters, together with huge quantities of plastic and industrial
waste. Every housewife today uses an array of cleaning fluids and
powerful detergents that are also poured into our seas through each urban
sewage sytem. Mother nature can accommodate and deal with a surprising
amount of poisonous pollutants, but eventually its tolerance margins are
exceeded and life begins to die. That process is taking place all over
the world.
Our natural environment of
air, sea, and soil, support all of life on this planet – “spaceship earth”
as Schumacher described it. When the first American astronauts orbited
the moon at Christmas 1968, as they transmitted the awesome pictures of
earth-rise over the lunar landscape, they read together from the Genesis
account of the creation. Five times in that account we read, “and God
saw that it was good”. After the final sixth day it says that “God
saw that it was very good”. Appropriately the Apollo 3 spacemen
expressed their best wishes to all back home, - all of those back there on
‘the good earth’.
Planet earth as seen from
space
The earth’s land surface
is about 13.5 billion hectares. About 10% of land is now farmed, 20%
could be farmed, and 70% is unsuitable given present technology. Food
resources are generally abundant though scarce in particular regions.
Since 1950, cereal output has grown by 2.7% a year while population has
increased by 1.7% annually. The world’s population is now over 6.0
billion persons and is expected to level out at 11.0 billion by the year
2,200 AD. Global resource researchers like Susan George believe that with
careful environmental management, the earth could feed a population of
that size. Around 30 % of our fish production and nearly 50 % of our
cereals are fed to animals. If we cut down on meat consumption, we could
eliminate a lot of the world’s hunger and malnutrition.
One would think that
modern man with the benefit of the accumulated wisdom of the centuries,
with his much-vaunted knowledge and power, and with his oft-stated desire
to achieve sustainability and long-term food security, - would be doing
his utmost to preserve the earth’s forests, protect and conserve its soil,
and keep its waters clean and its oceans productive of fish. But sadly we
see the opposite. The greed-powered destruction of our tropical forests,
the poisoning and eroding of our soils, and the polluting of our waters
and seas, - continue, and continue if anything at an accelerated pace.
Desertification proceeds apace in Africa, Asia and parts of the Americas,
as neither governments nor UN bodies are prepared to take the substantial
actions necessary to reverse it.
Logging of tropical
hardwood forests
Some societies have been
particularly guilty of this wanton assault on our life-support system and
its wonderfully inter-connected life forms. The Soviet Union may well
have the worst record of causing serious environmental damage in the 20th
century. The logging barons of S.E. Asia and South America, have behaved
like mafia hoodlums, with the support of government and military officials
in the respective countries. The United States and some west European
countries have accumulated enormous amounts of poisonous sludge,
industrial, chemical and nuclear waste, which they regularly try to dump
on poorer countries through deception and bribery. This is not fantasy.
I have been in small African and Pacific states where local officials and
businessmen have detailed to me the approaches made by foreign interests
to get a dumping site for the waste material. I have even been
approached myself by the waste agents to see if I could identify a
compliant country or regime, and been offered handsome commissions if I
succeeded.
The world’s natural store
of genetic material that determines the characteristics of our crops and
animals, is being tampered with in the name of scientific progress, and
with the excuse that this would help to ‘feed the hungry’. Well, the
existing genetic strains of rice and maize and wheat and soya bean, have
managed to feed the world since the dawn of civilization, so I do not see
the problem. Indeed, many of them are particularly suited to the soils
and climates of the regions where they are grown. No, I see the
development of genetically altered crops and animals as a way of giving
the huge agro-business corporations control and ownership of all the seed
used in the world. Then we will see globally what American farmers saw
over the last century. The farmer becomes a serf, enslaved to the
corporation which sells him his seed and his fertilizer, which markets his
crop, - and which does so through a credit system that leaves the farmer
permanently in debt and unable to break out of the system.
Diagram of GM crops
The groundwork for the
elimination of natural plant varieties, and their replacement with hybrids
that depend on chemical inputs, was largely undertaken under the ‘green
revolution’ movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The beneficiaries are
multinational agro-business corporations that acquire ‘ownership’ of the
new strains of crop seeds the market for which they then control, along
with the related pesticides and fertilizers. In this they are supported
or protected by GATT / WTO and agreements like the Plant Breeders’ Rights
Bill. European Community farming policies appear to be designed to push
the small and medium farmers out of business in favour of the
multinational corporations. Butter mountains and wine lakes have been
tools to that end. Today, some 90% of the world’s food trade is in the
hands of five multinationals. Unilever and Nestle are the two largest of
the food giants. In the face of these monsters, ‘free trade’ becomes an
abstract idea.
Former soldier, diplomat,
and senior official in the Reagan administration, Clyde Prestowitz, later
President of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington DC, wrote
eloquently and powerfully about the harm done by imposition of the USA’s
own political ends through the WTO and the IMF. He claimed that in the
past two decades, a general view developed on the global economy path,
known as the ‘Washington Consensus’. It had been popularized by Tom
Friedman under the rubric of “the golden straitjacket” which called for
balanced budgets, low taxes, free flows of capital, goods, and services;
privatization; deregulation; protection of property rights and
intellectual property; small government and liberalization of interest
rates. It was argued by the high priests of the global economy at the US
Treasury, the IMF, the World Bank, and the elite Universities, that
implementation of these measures would bring prosperity and narrow the gap
between rich and poor. This in turn would bring stability and peace.
Friedman opined that a main mechanism to bring it about would be the
“electronic herd”, that group of faceless gnomes in Wall Street, Kabuto-Cho,
The City and elsewhere who stare at computer screens and send trillions of
dollars coursing around the world at the click of a mouse.
Public protest against the
WTO
WTO protest poster. The
organization has potential for great good or massive harm, depending on
its decisions and measures implemented
Director General of the
WTO, Supachai Panitchpakdi, former University Professor, and Deputy Prime
Minister of Thailand, blamed the Asian financial crisis on American
manipulation of the global economy by these means. He said, “The
impact of the 1997 Asian financial crisis was devastating to Thailand and
Southeast Asia, and caused many to question whether the U.S. and the IMF
had a good understanding of how globalization affected Asia’s economies.”
[Clyde
Prestowitz, Rogue Nation, Basic Books, New York, 2003]
Inside a WTO symposium
WTO President, Supachai of
Thailand
Dr Supachai might well
have added that manipulation of the WTO by the big food corporations has
equal potential for evil upon the millions of small farmers in the world.
It could also impact negatively on the world’s resources of seed and
species, limiting biodiversity by facilitating agro-business monopolies or
cartels that could determine who grows what in any corner of the planet.
To illustrate how
globalization can affect the smallest activity in rural parts of the third
world, take aquaculture for instance, - the farming of fish – in the
tropics. It brought me into contact with those that wanted to acquire and
retain commercial rights to new strains of tilapia, carp and other
cultured species. They offered to assist or finance research work in poor
countries, but on the understanding that they and they alone retained
ownership of the new fish species strains that were developed. There are
also corporations that are working towards a monopoly control of feed
supplies for farmed fish.
Against this background,
there are hundreds of agriculture and soil scientists, and research
workers, who labour to protect existing species of plants and animals, and
to help poor countries to maintain ownership of their own seed sources.
In forestry, soil, water and in crop and animal production, scores of
un-named, unheralded specialists, are active in protection of species we
need for our survival, and of the soils and water they and we need to grow
and flourish. Sadly, many of these illustrious pioneers of the
environment, have been voices in the wilderness, largely ignored and
sidelined by those in power, with their fixation on power and big
business. I will mention two such, from the last century.
|
Pioneer 1: Clean water and low-tech human scale
solutions
It
was during the first five years I spent in Indonesia, that the
realization of the paramount need for clean water came to me. In
every project station and field site I visited or worked in, there was
a basic need for clean water. I saw it first in the fish markets
where dirty water was poured on to fish displayed for sale, - making
the fish seem fresh, but covering them with bacteria and pollutants.
I noticed it also in the ice plants which utilized un-filtered and
un-treated water to make blocks of rather poorly frozen ice. Fish
farms and processing plants suffered from the same deficiencies in
their water supplies. And in practically every fishing village I
knew, the people were drinking water that contained bacteria, parasite
larvae and amoebas. So I began my search for an effective and
low-cost method of cleaning available water.
What first struck me was how expensive it was to clean dirty water,
and how sophisticated was the equipment required. In cost and
complexity, these ‘modern’ systems were totally unsuited for
application in poor rural villages. It appeared that the only
companies involved in the sector were ones that focused all their
attention on expensive large scale projects that were designed to
serve city centres, luxury hotels, holiday resorts, and housing
schemes for the affluent. The poor rural village was simply not
considered. So it had to make do with deep wells or shallow wells
that were easily contaminated, or to utilize river water that was
replete with pollutants. In fact, during the period I was mostly in
Indonesia (I hope it has changed now), there were hundreds of miles of
canals that served as communal baths, sewers, laundry places and
sources of domestic water for hundreds of thousands of Javanese.
One
day I came across a small item in a British Council newsletter
obtained from the embassy in Jakarta. It showed a smiling
bespectacled gentleman holding aloft a model of a unit that the
article said could provide clean water from a polluted source. The
man’s name was George Cansdale which rang a bell in my memory. I
wrote to him and eventually made contact, and asked him, by the by, if
he was the Cansdale I recalled who had been the TV “zoo man” of the
1950’s and ‘60’s.
He
replied that he was indeed the same person. He had been a forestry
officer in Ghana before the war (the Gold Coast as it then was).
After the war he became Director of Whipsnade Zoo in London. Later he
moved into work with marine aquariums and fish farms, and it was in
that connection he developed his water filtration equipment.
Cansdale’s units were simple, low-cost, and very effective. Rather
than being filters per se, they were devices that converted the local
river bed or pond bed into a filter. The unique design of the filter
plates ensured that crystal clear water was obtained within 2 hours of
installation, and biologically clean water was produced after several
days of continuous use. No chemicals were required, and the filter
plates did not need to be changed. The clean water had no parasites
or larvae, and over 97 % of bacteria had been removed. Because the
resulting water was not 100% sterile by Geneva standards, the World
Health Organisation refused to approve use of the system. Apparently
they would rather see the people continue to die than have them obtain
water that was immensely better than what they had known before. It
was silly, as a little chlorine or similar treatment could have made
the added difference.
Cansdale at work
We
had Cansdale install units effectively throughout Indonesia, and then
in the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore. OXFAM and Rotary also
later bought thousands of units for use in Africa. He even installed a
unit that successfully excluded all crustacean seed from the intake
pipe of the Marine Laboratory in Aberdeen. He offered to supply a
World Bank financed marine university in the Philippines with all its
fresh and salt clean water needs. The cost then was $ 50,000
installed. But the local authorities, with World Bank agreement,
decided instead to install a $500,000 system that they thought would
be more reliable. It never worked, and today, 25 years later, the
campus and laboratories still have impure and inadequate water
supplies.
George Cansdale, with
my wife Margo, Manila, 1979
George was 65 when he worked for us in S.E. Asia. I believe he
continued working till he was over 80. His son Richard now carries on
the business. He had written several books, and while in Africa had
produced a lexicon of local languages, and become quite an authority
on snakes. A most cheerful and congenial person, George was a
committed Christian, serving as the Warden at All Souls Church,
Langham Place London, where Dr John Stott, a leading evangelical
teacher, scholar and preacher in the Church of England, continued to
minister and lecture into the 21st century. George
recorded much of the Bible on tape for use by the blind, and often
visited homes for deformed and handicapped children to entertain them
with an animal from the zoo. As he told me later, he would drive home
from these havens for children with serious birth defects to whom he
had brought a little fun and laughter, - with a very heavy heart. For
me George Cansdale was one of life’s “most unforgettable characters”. |
Respect for nature and for
its importance, - even sacredness, - is found in many societies in
different parts of the world. Globalisation and westernisation has
weakened these beliefs and reduced awareness of them among subsequent
generations. Anthropologists have to help us dig for them among the myths
and proverbs and taboos of times past. They can be seen to some degree in
the prohibitions of the Polynesian groups, in the seasonal rituals of
early religions, and in the poetry, songs and oral histories of native
peoples in all continents. Few peoples have expressed their respect for
the earth’s environment more eloquently than the Red Indian tribes of
north America. Here are some of their hallowed statements:
"Treat the
earth well:
It was not given to you by your parents,
It was loaned to you by your children.
We do not inherit the Earth from our
Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children."
Ancient
Indian Proverb
“The great
mass of our people think only of the love we have for our land,
we do love the land where we were brought up. We will never let our hold
to this land go, to let it go it will be like throwing away (our) mother
that gave (us) birth.”
Letter
from Aitooweyah
Principal Chief of the Cherokees
"When we
Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. When we dig roots, we make little
holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for
grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pine nuts. We
don't chop down the trees. We only use dead wood. But the white people
plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything. ... the White
people pay no attention. ...How can the spirit of the earth like the White
man? ... everywhere the White man has touched it, it is sore."
Wintu Woman, 19th century
I fully supported the rise
of the ‘green’ movement in all of its forms, and believe it was very
necessary to awaken us to the dangers of destroying our environment and
going beyond the tolerance levels of benign nature. I still support
every sane and humane effort to protect species and maintain or enhance
the natural environment. I do this despite the way that some elements of
the green movement have become dictatorial and have begun to follow
political agendas that are determined more by the prospect of power or
finance than by the protection of nature. The more extreme appear to want
to protect every species except the human species. Some are very
selective in their targets and programmes, wishing to provide absolute
protection to overgrown populations of seals or some seabirds, yet
ignoring the horrible mistreatment of battery hens, veal calves, or cows
made to eat the infected bodies of their own kind. I supported the
innovation of “dolphin friendly” labels on canned tuna, which led
to the demise of much of tuna purse seine fleet based on America’s west
coast. But I do not support efforts to ban all harvesting of seals, or to
prevent small Eskimo communities from killing a few marine mammals for
their own consumption. It would be an education for those promoting such
agendas to spend a year or two in a genuine Innuit community and discover
the enormous respect for nature and for marine mammals that these Arctic
peoples traditionally possess.
Inuit Indian lady
Inuit Eskimos skinning a
seal carcass
Some green advocates
display astonishing contempt for the folk in rural communities, and for
their way of life. The small population of Barra, Scotland, have had to
fence the whole island to keep two breeds of rabbit separate, though they
did not seem to suffer from free movement in the past. The islanders of
Islay were threatened by David Bellamy who said he would organize a
boycott of all their produce if they did not give up their peat bog for
the exclusive use of migratory geese who only stayed a few days. The
geese had survived well for thousands of years, and continue to survive
today despite the little bit of peat that is dug out of the bog. But that
is the brutal face of much of the intimidating and control mind-set of the
extreme members and NGOs in the green movement.
The Island of Islay in the
southern Hebrides
The Island of Barra,
southernmost of the Hebrides
In Britain and
particularly Scotland, there is a growing anti-green lobby that has built
up around opposition to the control of emissions, high taxes on transport
fuel, and even more so, on the proliferation of electricity generating
windmills. The main objection is that these installations damage our
scenic landscape, but there other objections ranging from their capital
and operating costs, and their potential to kill some birds. While
recognizing that some of the objections have a degree of merit, one gets
the impression that few of the protestors have thought the whole energy
question through. Given all the costs they entail, from research to waste
disposal, nuclear power stations are by far the most expensive energy
systems we have. And given the ongoing and unresolved problem of disposal
of nuclear waste and decommissioning of the reactors, they are also the
greatest environmental threat of all the energy producing systems. But we
prefer to pass these dangers and disposal / decommissioning costs on to
our children and grandchildren, and pretend that we have solved nuclear
power’s inherent problems when we have only passed the pandora’s box on to
future generations.
One of the most articulate
spokespersons for environmentally friendly industry and energy, has been
Professor Barry Commoner of the USA, still active in his late 80’s. Here
are some of his reflections on the environmental and energy issues: [Barry
Commoner, Interview, New Scientist, 23 June 1997]
“The
environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of
production--in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation--essential
as they are, make people sick and die. The modern assault on the
environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World
War II.
The sharp rise
in environmental pollution in the 20 years following World War II could be
traced to such new technologies of production: new ways of producing
electric power, transportation and food that, while they generated these
valuable goods, now violently assaulted the environment as well. The
changes were massive and fast: in less than two decades the total amount
of automotive horsepower increased fourfold, of inorganic fertilizer
nitrogen sevenfold, of synthetic organic chemicals 20-fold.
These were
manmade mistakes that were therefore within our power to remedy. The
mistakes were made by the auto companies when they decided to build bigger
cars with high-compression engines that for the first time emitted
nitrogen oxides, which in turn triggered the smog reaction; by the
petrochemical industry that persuaded farmers to spread huge amounts of
toxic pesticides -- many of them carcinogenic -- into the environment; by
electric utilities that, believing propaganda that nuclear power would be
"too cheap to meter," built the plants that generate highly radioactive
spent fuel, which is yet to be dealt with.
I
am grateful that my own adult life has covered this span of time, so that
I have witnessed most of the notorious environmental blunders that led to
the crisis--sometimes as simply a bystander, other times as an attentive
observer, and at least once--in the case of DDT--as an unwitting
perpetrator.
Scientists,
engineers and technologists who designed and built the new
technologies--not to speak of their corporate masters--gave no public
notice of their environmental faults, because they were unaware of them,
uninterested in them or, in some cases, deceitful. The vaunted sorcery of
modern technology was hard at work, but environmentally, it was in the
hands of apprentices.
Outsiders were needed to set things right--or at least to help the
American people learn what went wrong and why. In every case, the
environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who
were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the
hazards. The result of grassroots action was that the American people were
informed, became concerned, and sought ways to act.
There are
existing pollution-free alternatives to the production technologies that
brought on the postwar environmental crisis. The major source of
photochemical smog--petroleum-fueled vehicles--can be replaced by
emission--free electric vehicles. In turn, many power plants now fueled by
oil, natural gas or uranium can be replaced by zero-emission photovoltaic
cells or wind generators.
What is needed
now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound
than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology.
Restoring environmental quality means substituting solar sources of energy
for fossil and nuclear fuels; substituting electric motors for the
internal-combustion engine; substituting organic farming for chemical
agriculture; expanding the use of durable, renewable and recyclable
materials--metals, glass, wood, paper--in place of the petrochemical
products that have massively displaced them.
The new
production technologies may be more economical than the ones they replace.
For example, a recent CBNS study shows that in the states adjacent to the
Great Lakes the impact of trash-burning incinerators on the airborne
dioxin deposited in the lakes can be reduced to zero by diverting the
trash to intensive recycling programs. The net economic effect would be a
$500-million reduction in disposal costs, including the cost of paying off
the incinerators' existing debt.
I believe that the first step is to extend the
environmental issue into the relevant social, economic and political
arenas. Consider, for example, the decision to replace conventional cars
and light trucks with electric vehicles, powered, ultimately, from solar
sources. The relevant corporations are reluctant to make this change
because, compared with conventional ones, electric vehicles would
initially be more costly and more restricted in their uses. Such a shift
would damage a corporation's economic interests, they argue, in comparison
with firms that refrained from making the change. This issue can be dealt
with by establishing, as a national industrial policy, that all suitable
vehicles are to be powered by electricity, placing all of the auto
industry's firms on the same level playing field, economically.
A useful
approach to this question is to think about it in economic, rather than
purely environmental, terms. Seen that way, the wholesale transformation
of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention
creates a new surge of economic development. But this would touch on other
social concerns as well. The wave of new productive enterprises would
provide opportunities to remedy the unjust distribution of environmental
hazards among economic classes and racial and ethnic communities. For
labor unions it would represent a source of new jobs and opportunities to
advance the cause of a healthy work environment and worker retraining.
Indeed, the transformation, although environmentally mandated, may be much
more powerfully inspired by the vision of an economic renaissance that
would be generated by the new more productive technologies. The most
meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power,
may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and
growth associated with the effort to improve it.”
Barry Commoner
Following the tragic
tsunami wave disaster that hit S.E. Asia on Boxing Day 2004, the UK
fishing industry wanted to help the fishers of the stricken region to get
operational again. Together with Association and Government
representatives, I attended a meeting in Whitehall to discuss the best
approach. A representative of WWF was present, and she advised us
strongly (a) to refrain from rebuilding the inshore fleets as this would
cause over-fishing (though there was hardly any excess fishing in the
stricken areas before), and (b) not to let them build the replacement
boats from wood as this would destroy the mangrove forests (though it
is quite impossible to build a boat from mangrove wood)!
I found it difficult to
reconcile the representative’s air of superiority with the depths of her
ignorance. Fishermen throughout the north Atlantic today have grave
concerns at the way WWF and other ‘green’ bodies are colluding with the
European Commission and the United Nations to destroy fishing fleets and
fishing communities in the name of conservation.
So, while advocating a
respect for and protection of nature, based on proven science and
practical approaches, I believe such approaches must be based in the
communities concerned, and must involve human ecology, and a respect for
traditional lifestyles, whether hunting as for Eskimos and fishers, or
crofting as in west Scotland, or subsistence agriculture as in much of
Africa.
Possibly the finest
example of a naturalist who was also concerned about human ecology, is the
late Sir Frank Fraser Darling who like most true prophets, had his work
and advice ignored by the powers that be in his lifetime, yet was honoured
later as if they had really listened to what he had said. His vision and
ideas impacted on much of the world, but his epic work on the highlands
and islands of Scotland, was treated with disdain by successive Labour and
Tory governments in the country.
|
Pioneer 2: A true visionary who was a
practical environmentalist
The
bare hills, rugged peaks and lonely lochs of Scotland that are
pictured on our calendars, and give much of the impression of the
country to both locals and visitors, do not represent pristine
unspoiled nature as some imagine. It is largely a despoiled
landscape. At one time, the hills were covered by the forest of
Caledon, and in prehistoric times, mammoths, elk, wolves, musk ox,
bears, wild boar and other hardy mammals, populated the wild
countryside. Climate changes and hunting gradually eliminated most of
the mammals, and the needs of rapacious kings for timber to build
naval ships, wiped out the once magnificent forest. Then came ethnic
cleansing or the ‘Clearances’ that removed tenant farmers to make way
for sheep and later deer.
Both the sheep and the deer further despoiled the landscape, and
without a farming people to till the soil, it degenerated into what we
see today. All is not lost, but it could take 100 years to restore
the environment. The redoubtable highland environmentalists, Ron
Greer and Derek Pretchell say of the future, “left alone, it will
become like Iceland. With the proper long-term investment, it could
be like Norway”.
But
Scotland has not been blest with rulers of much vision or long-term
commitment. Poor Ramsay MacDonald, facing the depression with an
ideological Chancellor, Philip Snowden, who clung tenaciously to the
gold standard, had only one minister in his cabinet with any
inspiration for putting the unemployed to work and investing in the
land and its fauna. A proposal was made to have the unemployed plant
trees all over the country, including the Highlands of Scotland. But
the suggestion was rejected, and its proponent left to join the
fascists. He was Sir Oswald Mosley.
The
Attlee Government however, had appointed as Secretary of State for
Scotland, Tom Johnston, a man of immense ability and broad
understanding. He in turn had asked an outstanding naturalist to
study the “highland” problem, and advise on what could be done to
improve the region, its natural resources, its crofting communities,
and its economy. The naturalist was Frank Fraser Darling.
Sir Frank Fraser
Darling, naturalist and ecologist
Darling’s two best known works were, Natural History of the
Highlands and Islands, 1947, and West Highland Survey,
1955. He was ahead of his time in envisioning an integrated approach
to the management of natural resources, and its relation to human
ecology. Had his advice been taken in 1955, the region would have
been put on the road to recovery, and would have avoided the
depopulation and economic depression it has experienced since. But
Tom Johnston had been replaced, and the new regime in Scotland was
interested only in big industry for the central belt. The visionary
economist, E.F. Schumacher was treated similarly by our government, in
the 1970’s.
Fraser Darling’s
epochal book, Natural History in the
Highlands and Islands
I
did not have the privilege of meeting Sir Frank, but my Chief
Fisheries Officer in Zambia, Jim Soulsby did. He and his wife Liz
entertained him during his Africa tour 1956 – 1961. For Jim, the
encounter with Fraser Darling was one of the most memorable of his
life.
Darling was uniquely equipped to pioneer analysis of the complex
relationships between man landscape and wildlife, which he did in
regions as far apart as west Scotland, north Canada, central America
and east Africa. In his search for the principles that underlie the
complexity of nature in its widest sense, he combined a remarkable
intuition with rigorous scientific investigation, and a gift for lucid
writing that informed and inspired scientists and laymen alike.
Writing to Edward Goldsmith, editor of the Ecologist, in 1978,
a year before he died, Darling made some profound and weighty
observations: “… one of your shortcomings is that you are not
pessimistic enough and perhaps you are in too much of a hurry. To
change man is going to take more time than we have. I have tried to
for 40 years – but despite small strugglings, Man goes on his own
way. (It) seems to me … God gave Man free will too soon. Having got
this gift of God, compassion, we can’t brush off two-thirds of
humanity despite earthquakes in Persia and floods in the Indian
valley, exacerbated by economic exploration of the Himalayan forests.
We continue to fell the Mato Grosso and kill the indigenous Indians,
but we subscribe to the notion of “the sanctity of human life”. (The
phrase seems to mean less and less when applied to some poor child
whose cry we don’t hear). So am I without hope? Not really. We can
be learning all the time. May compassion stay with us, despite our
apparent human determination to cut it in two.” |
Discussing land use with
international bank and government officers
Planting trees in the Tonle
Sap basin, - Margo with the Provincial Governor
Flooded forest areas of
the Tonle Sap basin
Our brutal treatment of
the natural environment which we have raped and despoiled to satisfy our
appetite for hardwood timber, petroleum, hydro-powered energy and
expansion of global industry into the most remote and most delicate parts
of the earth, has impacted destructively on indigenous cultures, human
lives, and thousands of species of animals and reptiles, birds and fish,
insects and plants. We have been undermining the source and sustainers of
our fresh air and our water, and even more, of our very souls and man’s
spiritual links with the rest of creation. A writer who formerly worked
for the corporations that bribed and seduced countries into debt and then
used that tool to gain control over their natural resources, has described
the ongoing battle with global corporate emptires.
“The Ecuadorian rain forests no more precious than the mountains of
Java, the seas off the coast of the Philippines, the steppes of Asia, the
savannas of Africa, the forests of North America, the icecaps of the
Arctic, or the hundreds of other threatened places. Every one of these
represents a battle line, and every one of them forces us to search the
depths of our individual and collective souls.” [Ecuador
Revisited, from Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins,
Penguin Plume Books, 2006]
Ecuadorian waterfall and
rain forest
Cambodian river and forest
area
Tropical rain forest, -
one of so many under threat today
Gary Bernacsek and myself in Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2002
Over a number of years I
workec with with a remarkably able, committed and visionary biologist from
Canada, Garry Bernacsek, in FAO, Rome, in Sierra Leone, in Sri Lanka, and
latterly in Cambodia. His reports on ecosystems and fisheries management
are much valued and utilized today. His last appointment was a regional
one with the Mekong River Commission which he was looking forward to with
enthusiasm. Sadly he barely was into the job when he was hit by more than
one tropical illness, and he died in Bangkok on July first 2006. Along
with his family and close friends, I was devastated at the news. I want
to close this chapter on the environment with a few lines from a poem
about nature Garry wrote and sent to me before he died.
O Nature!
How foolish you have been,
What a silly thing you have done,
Crowning eons of work and experiment
With a creation that
Can now destroy you.
. . . . . . . .
But I can see your
Foolishness and patience
May be at an end.
Your attempts at self preservation
Have been too feeble
You must take more seriously
The task of ensuring your own survival.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Foolish Nature, be foolish
no more
Be cunning and unpredictable
Like your best creation.
Garry Bernacsek 15 July
1999 |
