some nice ideas ?
> History suggests that opportunistic foraging and hunting maintained an
> early hominid population in amongst an un-degrading, self-regulatory
> natural eco-system. The development and dispersal of agriculture in
> Neolithic times allowed the hominids to break free from that
> self-regulating system and become a dominant but destabilising
> influence.
Umm - History ?? We certainly don't have any history from this
early. We have evidence of a sort. However, opinions on this
evidence may have been given undue weight. An article in the
Sunday Times several months back (sorry about the quality of the
reference) talked about a group who were studying the decline of
mammoths/ woolly rhino etc. That group were becoming convinced
that man had massively contributed to their extinction. Other
species which might have been expected to survive the retreat of
the ice were also eliminated - quite possibly by hunting. In North
America the evidence was particularly appealing (unaltered by man
??). A high proportion of large mammals declined and fell -
apparently in the period following man's establishment on the
continent.
Now I am not suggesting all this is fact - merely an alternative
speculation. I am suggesting that we shouldn't rely too heavily on
the 'givens' about early man's impact on the biosphere. Primitive
tribes we see today who have an apparently symbiotic relationship
with their environment may have taken many thousands of years to
have evolved that relationship - and altered the environment in so
doing.
> The USA, that environmental
> villain, shows 50% of its landmass that is untransformed, and
> Australia plus Canada probably has 90%.
? See above.
> Research with the farming communities in the counties of Wiltshire,
> Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire (funded by the ESRC) looked at the
> benefits of farmers combining together to jointly implement 'whole
> landscape management'. This implied farmers co-operating across
> privately owned boundaries to develop the conservation and
> biodiversity value of the whole landscape through planting hedges and
> buffer zones. They were also asked to consider the reflooding of the
> Thames Valley (Designing and Evaluating Sustainable Agriculture
> Landscapes, O'Riordan et al, School of Environmental Sciences,
> University of East Anglia, 2000). The authors concluded that this
> approach would enhance farmers standing with the public and would
> provide a good principle in attracting subsidy for environmental
> objectives.
Great - but watch out that these initiatives don't get too big, too
prescriptive and too uniform.
> Chris Baines in his speech to Bradford District's Rural Renaissance
> Conference (Future Countryside, 2002) talked about the rural landscape
> being redesigned to bring about better water management. The flooding
> of the last few years could be avoided by paying for the land to
> function as a part of flood protection. Thus broadleaved woodlands
> would be planted in uplands, and farmland in lowlands could be allowed
> to flood as seasonal and permanent wetland.
I agree this is a good idea - sounds like common sense. However, I
think a lot of farmers have a right to be hopping mad if they are not
well paid for reversing investment they have made. In many cases
the problems have been caused by development - in flood plains. If
these areas were allowed to flood naturally, there would be no
problem. Developers have made a pile. The polluter pays principle
should definitely be extended to cover this situation.
What about a mitigation scheme like the US is supposed to use for
wetlands. Their objective is different - it is environmental - and the
policy does not achieve it's aim of 100% replacement by some
margin (but at least they try). Where a developer "destroys" flood
plain they should have to ensure that sufficient is provided to allow
for floods. I am not an hydrologist - so my wording is deliberately
vague. House prices would go up ? Maybe a bit - and why shouldn't
house holders pay for the problems they cause. Besides, they'll
have lower insurance and flood damage to pay. Land values will fall
? Maybe a good thing too.
> Land management also has a role in climate change. A report from the
> CLA looks at the many different activities in the rural landscape that
> could help (Climate Change and the Rural Economy, 2001). Soil acts as
> a carbon sink when soil organic matter levels increase, and as a
> carbon emitter when they decrease. Practices to increase soil carbon
> not only reduce atmospheric carbon, but also deliver many other public
> goods, such as improved biodiversity. The greatest dividend comes from
> conversion of arable to agroforestry. Significant amounts of carbon
> can be accumulated by conversion of arable to grassland and by
> improving crop and grazing management.
Oh dear :-) I can just see the next RSPB offensive. "Further
declines in birds of arable farming. Greedy farmers have been
snatching government incentives to create flood plains, grassland,
wetland and woodland from former arable land at an alarming rate.
Once common arable birds such as grey partridge, linnet, skylark
and yellowhammer, which were just beginning to recover thanks to
RSPB initiatives, have taken a further hammering and are firmly
nailed to the top of the Red List".
> -"we are living in a time when both the earth and the human species
> seem to be crying out for a radical readjustment in the scale of our
> political thought. Is it possible that in this sense the personal and
> the planetary are pointing the way towards some new basis for
> sustainable and emotional life, a society of good environmental
> citizenship that can ally the intimately emotional and the vastly
> biospheric?" from Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind
> by Theodore Roszak, Sierra Club Books, 1995
Return to _some_ old fashioned values you mean ? Like "waste not
want not"; "greed is the root of all evil". I've always thought I was
ahead of the time, rather than plain old-fashioned <g>
Mike.
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