"They Will Move Themselves To Tears, Then Turn Their Computers Off And Sign Another Mining Lease"
It’s the hope I can’t stand. Every few years, governments gather to make solemn promises about the action they will take to defend the living world, then break them before the ink is dry. Today, at the virtual UN summit on biodiversity, they will move themselves to tears with the thought of the grand things they will do, then turn off their computers and sign another mining lease.
Ten years ago, at the last summit, world leaders made a similar set of “inspirational” promises. Analysis published a fortnight ago showed that, of the 20 pledges agreed at Nagoya in Japan in 2010, not one has been met. The collapse of wildlife populations and our life-support systems has continued unabated: the world has now lost 68% of its wild vertebrates since 1970. It sounds brutal to say that these meetings are a total waste of time. But this is a generous assessment. By creating a false impression of progress, by assuaging fear and fobbing us off, these summits are a means not of accelerating action but thwarting it. No one will be surprised to hear that the promises Boris Johnson has made at this week’s summit are worthless. But you might be surprised by how cynical they are. One of his pledges is that 30% of the UK’s land will be protected for “the recovery of nature” by 2030. This sounds astonishing, in one of the most depleted nations on Earth, until you discover he considers that 26% of our land is already used for this purpose.
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On the contrary, while many of these places – the Lake District is an example – are topographically spectacular, if we saw them anywhere else on Earth, we would recognise them as ecological disaster zones. The Lake District lies within our temperate rainforest belt, but its fells have been almost entirely denuded by centuries of grazing (sheep selectively browse out tree seedlings, ensuring that when the old trees die there are no young ones to replace them). These “protected” lands are wildlife deserts, sheepwrecked, grousetrashed or reduced to blasted wastes by the deer kept on overstocked “sporting” estates. Our national parks are a national disgrace, dominated by elite hunting interests and highly destructive forms of grazing that are wholly financed by taxpayers.
Every promise the government has made to offer such “protected” areas some actual protection has been broken. Tomorrow, the burning season begins on Britain’s grouse moors. Hang on, wasn’t the government going to ban this vandalism? It was – but did it then remember that some of its lavish donors and Johnson’s friends are grouse moor owners, or that there are grouse moors in Rishi Sunak’s constituency? The pledge has been delayed, perhaps forever. Wildlife in our paper parks will continue to be torched, and the peat that underlies the heather exposed and oxidised, releasing great plumes of carbon. Perhaps for the same reasons, grouse shoots were granted a special exemption from the government’s coronavirus rules, and taxpayers continue to subsidise shotgun licences to the tune of £10m a year.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/30/johnson-pledges-environment-un-biodiversity-summit