28 Aug 2014
Here is a recent piece I wrote for The Guardian’s Living Better Challenge:
Putting a stop to water waste: why local initiatives are key: Cities facing drought can generate water and jobs by planting trees, and installing tanks and rainwater harvesting systems
Los Angeles imports 89% of its water. Every year it spends over $350m (£211m) disposing of the perfectly acceptable rainwater that falls upon it, water valued at between $300-400m. At the same time, it spends $785m importing the water it needs from many miles away, a process that uses the largest amount of electricity in California.
Meanwhile, here in the UK, as the climate warms the likelihood of drought is increasing. If the raised beds in my garden are anything to go by, this is turning out to be a very dry summer already. A recent Water Resources Management paper by researcher Muhammad Rahiz and Professor Mark New, looked at future drought trends and concluded that “both drought intensity and the spatial extent of droughts in the UK are projected by these climate models to increase into the future”. The South East of England is of particular concern.
Perhaps we should be looking to places where drought is a more regular fact of life, for inspiration for how to develop a more resilient relationship with water. Although LA may lack a coherent city-wide strategy for rethinking its water system, it doesn’t lack people working on solutions. Andy Lipkis has spent 20 years looking at LA in its wider context as a water catchment. California is currently suffering an historic drought, the worst for 500 years, which has brought to the fore many of the issues that TreePeople, the organisation he founded over 40 years ago, has been working on for years. With support for widespread conservation slow to emerge, and growing pressure for energy-intensive desalination plants which can cost up to $4bn a piece as the solution, Lipkis visited Australia to see what lessons could be learnt from the country’s recent 12-year drought.
Rather than the linear thinking that underpins LA, Australian cities such as Adelaide have started to think of themselves more as forest ecosystems. When rain falls on a forest, the impact of its fall is broken by the trees. An oak tree with a 100ft canopy can hold more than 57,000 gallons of water just in its rootmat, like a sponge, and more in its leaves which act almost as a floating lake. Flooding downhill is reduced, water is filtered and aquifers are replenished. Could our cities shift their relationship with rainwater in this direction? Rather than seeing rainfall as a problem, might each downpour be the opportunity to capture and store as much of it as possible?
This was the approach taken in Australia. People were incentivised toharvest and store rainwater, with tanks and cisterns being heavily discounted. As a result, 45% of homes in Adelaide now have rainwater harvesting. In Brisbane, average water use fell from 80 gallons per person per day to 33. In Sydney, the installation of water cisterns is one of the sustainability changes required in order to get planning consent for changes to existing buildings.
Back in LA, Lipkis tells me: “Essentially the model we’re intending to overlay onto the city is a model of how a forest ecosystem works, within which all energy, all water, all nutrients are recycled.” It’s an approach which, he argues, could create 50,000 new jobs. TreePeople are busy working towards a target of LA generating 50% of its own water (today it’s 11%) through unpaving neighbourhoods, planting trees, installing tanks and rainwater harvesting systems.
So where do the garden fences come in? One of the strategies TreePeople is promoting is the ‘cistern fence’, replacing garden fences with long thin water tanks. 100 feet of cistern fence could hold 5,000 gallons of water. While not yet available, Lipkis proposes that these tanks be made in the city using locally recycled plastic. “The key innovation I’m promoting is to have the tanks electronically networked with remote control technology so you can have a fully decentralised system, but manage it very nimbly as a huge networked reservoir – making it functional for water supply, flood protection and stormwater quality protection. The technology now exists to network one million tanks as a single system,” he tells me.
It’s this decentralised thinking that is increasingly coming to the fore. Does it make more sense to build large power stations, or local networks of interlinked renewable energy systems combined with ambitious energy conservation? Similarly, does it make more sense to build new reservoirs, or even – as was proposed during the UK’s last drought – a pipeline from Scotland heading south? Or would smaller distributed ‘reservoirs’ in hundreds of thousands of gardens make more sense?
Lipkis believes that great things are possible. Indeed, as he puts it, “A new, resilient, local water supply is not only possible, it’s beginning to happen.” Cistern fences as standard in all new-build housing developments in the UK? It may not be as far away as you might think. I’ll drink to that.
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28 Aug 2014
In July I had the great privilege of chairing George Monbiot’s presentation on rewilding at the Ways With Words literary festival at Dartington Hall. Before the talk we found a quiet corner and chatted for about half an hour about the book, and some of the ideas and issues it raises. If you’d rather download or listen to a podcast of our conversation, you’ll find it at the end of this post. I started by asking George to give a sense of what his new book Feral is all about.
“It’s about ‘rewilding’ which is a mass restoration of ecosystems. That’s a very different approach to the natural world to that of mainstream conservation in Britain which is all about protecting what’s here and maintaining the ecosystems that we possess. What rewilding does is to try to create opportunities for ecosystems we don’t possess yet; ecosystems of the kind that perhaps we used to but will be different to anything that went before and for the species that we don’t yet have and could have again.
Instead of trying to create particular habitats and particular species compositions, what rewilding seeks to do is bring back some of the missing elements and then allow nature to do what it does best which is to develop its own dynamic processes and its own outcomes. What we are missing desperately in Britain is process, ecological process. Just about every conserved habitat here is kept in a state of arrested development where succession and other processes are effectively prohibited. We are missing almost all the function and structure of ecosystems.
But it’s not just about ecology. It’s also about us. It’s about enabling us to enjoy a rather richer and rawer existence than is permitted to us at present in Britain where everything seems to ordered and regulated and buttoned down, and it’s very hard to escape from that, even if you go into what are supposedly the wildest parts of the countryside. We have nothing that really resembles self-willed land or sea in this country. Our national parks are basically sheep ranches. They differ markedly in this respect from the national parks of nearly every other country on Earth. Most of the world’s national parks are classified under the IUCN guidelines as category 1 or category 2 which basically means governed by ecological processes and set aside largely for nature.
Every national park in Britain is category 5 which means no fundamental difference between that and the surrounding farmland. There’s nowhere to escape from it. It’s even worse, if that’s possible, where just 5 square kilometres out of the 48,000 square kilometres of our territorial waters are closed to commercial fishing. Everywhere else is ripped apart several times a year and life has no foothold there.
We are surrounded on all sides by a remarkably depleted and impoverished ecosystem which I believes helps to create a remarkably depleted and impoverished set of human experiences as well. So what ‘rewilding’ is about is the restoration of wildlife and the functional wildness of the natural world but also about a restoration of wonder and enchantment and delight and hope, which are all things which are seriously lacking in this country.
You’ve spent many years writing your column and your books, such as Heat, about climate change, a subject that’s rarely mentioned in Feral, other than a few times in passing. Does rewilding represent a lateral, alternative route to the changes we need to see or a resignation that an adequate response will never be possible?
What I hope that rewilding does is to produce an inspiring vision which can be one strand of a positive environmentalism, which then I hope will help to transform much more effectively environmental politics into an unstoppable force than only campaigning against the things we don’t like. We’ve been very good as a movement at identifying what we don’t want, and very bad as a movement, with a few honourable exceptions of course, at identifying what we do want. You cannot sustain campaigning on that basis.
You have to have a vision, something better than the standard environmental vision which is – follow us and you’ll get a slightly less crap world than you would otherwise have got. That cannot work for long because it is not sufficiently inspiring. Whereas – follow us and here’s a wonderful, fascinating, engrossing, enchanting world which we could conjure up, which Transition is doing in it’s different way as well. That is a vision that has got legs, if a vision can have legs!
I’d never really had you down as a nature writer before. But Feral contains some of the most beautiful nature writing I’ve read, like Henry Thoreau or Aldo Leopold. Are we seeing a new, softer George Monbiot?
I don’t think some of the people who become the targets of my column would agree that I’ve mellowed much in my decrepitude! I suppose part of what has happened in researching and writing this book is that I’ve rediscovered my roots as an environmentalist. It’s very easy to forget why you become an environmentalist because you get bogged down in data, in parts per million, in Watts, in kilometres and kilogrammes and you succumb to the language and the framing of what Paul Kingsnorth calls “the quants rather than the poets”.
Like a very large number of environmentalists, I came to this through a profound love of the natural world. That was always my motivating force and I was almost ashamed of it, because it seemed wooly and romantic and emotional by comparison to the hard, empirical pursuit of trying to work out the best solutions for climate change or any of the other problems that assail us. Now I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that we should stop doing that as well. We desperately need people to do that, but there’s a great danger of forgetting why we’re in this.
That danger is best manifested, for example, in the “natural capital” agenda, where people pretend they love the natural world because it makes money. I don’t know any environmentalist who became an environmentalist because they were worried about the state of their bank balance. It wouldn’t be a very rational decision if that was their motivation. To claim that we should be preserving and protecting the natural world because it is the economically rational thing to do, while that may be completely true, is also a form of lying. It misrepresents our real motivation and our real interest in protecting it.
For almost all the environmentalists I know, the reason for wanting to protect the natural world if you push them on it is because they love it. It’s because it’s wonderful. It’s delightful. It’s astonishing. It’s marvellous. To spend our lives pretending that we’re in it for some other reason is to lie to ourselves and to lie to other people, but at the same time to miss the greatest opportunity there is for reaching people, which is through wonder and enchantment and the invocation of intrinsic values rather than extrinsic values.
And so for me – some people have called my book a Midlife Crisis. I would call it a midlife awakening in that I’ve remembered what it’s all about for me and why I’ve gone into this in the first place. It doesn’t mean I’m going to stop engaging in aspects of quantification, and it doesn’t mean I’m going to drop the grinding, aching process of continuing to oppose the bad stuff. But I feel that I cannot sustain it, let alone ask people who read me or listen to me to sustain their interest if all I talk about is the bad stiff and how to combat it rather than the good stuff and how to achieve it.
Have you seen, since the book came out, have there been any examples of people saying “right, I’m going to rewild this”? What’s your sense of the impact it’s had?
It’s been remarkable. I’ve been really surprised by it. Before the book came out, I went to see all the major conservation groups in this country to explain what was coming, because I was quite critical of them all in the book, and to see what their attitudes were and what traction there might be. While most of them weren’t overtly hostile, one or two of them were. Generally their interest was quite muted and it was clear they didn’t have much intention of acting on any of the issues that I was raising.
Since then it has really changed. It’s changed quite dramatically. The National Trust is already rewilding some substantial areas of its own land. The RSPB is now talking quite openly about rewilding and about a much broader vision of what it should be achieving. Even the Wildlife Trusts, which in some ways are the furthest behind, are mostly committed to what I see as an unambitious, anally retentive and rather ecologically illiterate form of conservation, are beginning to change.
They are beginning to see that what they’ve been doing, in many cases, is much closer to gardening, is obsessed with the composition of plant and animal communities rather than by function, and misses the big picture of what is missing and what would need to be done to restore anything resembling a healthy ecosystem.
Most people who are involved with Transition and most Transition groups don’t tend to own large estates in Wales and Scotland. What does domestic-scale rewilding look like?
Let’s take this back a step, because owning large estates is not the prerequisite for being active in rewilding. There’s a group of us halfway through the process of starting a rewilding campaign for Britain for which we’ve done the exploratory phase. We’re now raising the core funds, setting up a charity and we’ll soon be appointing a director. The idea is to catalyse rewilding across the country, to mobilise in favour of it and that means campaigning through the media, through public forums, lobbying, fundraising, making it easier for those who do have opportunities to rewild to do it.
There are already groups who are raising money through public subscription and using very large numbers of volunteers to get land rewilded, for example Trees for Life in Scotland. In the Highlands of Scotland and in the Southern Uplands, Carrifran who are very strongly reliant on public involvement.
But it’s also true that you can contribute to rewilding on very small areas of land. While our focus is on large core areas big enough to support top predators which turn out to be ecologically critical to anything resembling effective function, those core areas can’t function without a permeable landscape through which animals can move. That requires smaller pockets of wild habitat as well as wildlife corridors and a more general permeability because otherwise the animals in the large core areas become genetically isolated. So we need rewilding on all scales if it’s going to be effective.
You wrote recently in an article about ‘positive environmentalism’, that “an ounce of hope is worth a tonne of despair”. How deep a shift does this feel for you?
I should say that I’ve always sought to propose solutions. I always feel a sense of failure if I’d raise a problem without at least being able to hint at a solution. It’s not always possible to do that of course, some problems either are just at the beginning of being understood or don’t have obvious solutions. But in a lot of cases I’ve worked hard to try to find some ways forward and I’ve written one book which was entirely about possible means of change which was The Age of Consent.
In my other books, they’ve all had chapters about how to move forward. But to be going back to my roots and writing entirely about the natural world and of course its interactions with the human world, but the focus being very firmly on the natural world, and at the same time to be proposing an entirely positive vision, that feels new and that feels very exciting to me. I feel inspired by it and other people seem to be as well.
You wrote in the book that “the slowest and most reluctant of any European nation to begin rewilding the land and reintroducing its missing species is the UK.” Why is that? What are we afraid of, on a cultural level, what are we so terrified of?
It’s a good question. There’s a couple of ways of answering it. The first is we have been literally cut off from large animals for longer than most other European countries. We expiated our large mammal fauna more thoroughly than any other country except Ireland within Europe. Having done so, we have tended to regard any prospect of the re-establishment of those missing large mammals as an alien intrusion which is to be feared rather than to be marvelled at.
But this is greatly compounded by the fact that our land is owned by so few people. We have on estimate the second highest concentration of land owning in the world and those people are far more conservative than the population as a whole. Not all of them, but on average far more conservative and far more resistant and reluctant to contemplate any kind of positive change, let alone the return of large animals, than most of the population would be.
For instance, the only survey I’m aware of showed that 86% of respondents were in favour of the return of beavers, but the landowners whose land might be suitable for the return of beavers on the whole are fiercely opposed to the idea and invoke a rich mythology in trying to justify their opposition which suggests that they learnt their ecology from the Brothers Grimm in which the beaver somehow takes the place of the Big Bad Wolf.
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26 Aug 2014
It’s dusk. The family who arrived earlier in the day and pitched their tent next to ours have just asked us if we’d like to join them for a short walk to see “something magical”. We walk in the near-darkness down a grassy track to a lane with hedgerows on either side, the sea away to our right and the lights of Plymouth giving the clouds ahead of us an apricot-coloured underbelly, until something catches our eye. Two dots of greenish light in the hedge. Glowworms.
I struggle to remember the last time I saw a glowworm. A memory awakens that it was when I was a child, on a family holiday to Devon, when my parents took my sister and I out down a similar lane at dusk with a similar sense of reverence. As we approach the tiny lights, the group of about 10 of us, more than half of us under 12, fall into silence. The glowworms aren’t perturbed by our presence, they just keep glowing. Our guides were right about the “magical”. Nobody speaks, other than the odd “wow”.
I find myself feeling delighted and thrilled and honoured to be standing there. I find that these two pinpricks of light are acting as a powerful kind of reminder. A reminder of amazing things I’ve seen during my life when I’ve seen nature at its most alive, its most unexpected, its most beautiful. I am reminded of the fireflies I saw (occasionally) when I lived in Italy, the closest thing to seeing fairies I could imagine. Watching the seal that comes up the River Dart to hunt for fish toss salmon into the air. The owl that flew past me in total silence as I stood hoeing in my garden in Ireland. The snow monkeys I saw in the forest in northern India, wise old men of the trees. The thirty minutes I spent spellbound by a river in Wiltshire watching a kingfisher fly in and out in search of fish, his dazzling turquoise feathers glinting in the sun. Moments that I recognise, as I stand in that quiet lane, that I experience less and less as more and more of my life is spent in front of a computer.
I subsequently discuss it with Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, in an interview to be published here later this month. I tell him the story of our glowworm moment, and how magical it was and ask him, from his perspective, what it was that was happening in that moment. “Wonder”, he tells me. It is in those moments of wonder that we really connect to the world, that our senses are heightened, that our inquisitiveness and creativity are at their most vibrant. In Last Child in the Woods he quotes Rachel Carson as saying:
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts”.
And what could be more useful for Transition groups in search of “reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts” than looking more deeply into the question of how Transition initiatives might weave that sense of wonder for the natural world into what they do. It brings to mind Wendell Berry’s poem The Peace of Wild Things:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
So our theme for this month is ‘Making Space for Nature’. We will be framing the month around five key questions. Might a separation from Nature be at the root of our problems? Is it possible to make a healthy culture without connection to Nature? What are the impacts of losing that connection? Why is contact with Nature essential to raising healthy children? And finally, what does making space for Nature bring to a Transition group?
We’ll be talking to George Monbiot about his book Feral, to Richard Louv, to ecopsychologist Mary-Jayne Rust, to writer Caspar Walsh and to permaculture activist Pandora Thomas, and quite possibly a couple more too. We will also be hearing from some Transition initiatives about how they create space for nature in what they do and the impacts they see it having on people. We’d love to hear from you too if you have something you’d like to add to that.
For me, one of my ways of making space for nature is drawing. I don’t tend to draw cities, roads, buildings. When I have time to draw, I tend to head with my pens, pencils and paper to the woods, the fields, the rivers. Vincent Van Gogh once said “if you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere”. He might also have said “if you truly observe nature, you will find beauty everywhere”.
It is the process of sitting and really looking at what’s in front of you, looking at the same tree for several hours, how the light changes on it, how shapes relate to each other, sitting in the quiet just watching, that really creates that space for me. Here are a few of my holiday drawings from the last month:
In my visits to Transition initiatives, I see time and again projects that are making space for nature in the local community. Whether they are Community Supported Agriculture projects that connect people to what becomes ‘their’ farm, community gardens on train platforms, in corners of parks, in school grounds, getting people out on bikes, spending time outdoors socially, all of it creates opportunities for wonder. They are directly responding to the trend identified by the great ecologist Aldo Leopold in his A Sand County Almanac in 1949:
“Our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a ‘scenic’ area, he is bored stiff”.
Transition does a great job of addressing this, finding creative, possibility-shifting, community-building ways of getting people together, out of doors and away from their computers. For example, on July 26th in London, Crystal Palace Transition Town, together with a couple of other local organisations, opened ‘The Sensible Garden’, named after local resident and punk legend Captain Sensible (of The Damned and also a solo artist). The group had taken an unloved corner, covered in rubbish and old mattresses, harnessed the ‘power to convene’ that Transition does so well, and transformed the space into a garden. Here’s a film about the day:
To return to our glowworm story, as it turned out, our guides were, as well as introducing us to a bit of magic, also trying to get on our good side in the knowledge that people are less likely to be grumpy when your kids wake them up running around and shouting at 6am if you’ve met them before. It was a good trade-off though.
I’ll leave the last word to Aldo Leopold, who wrote:
“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot. Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech”.
Enjoy the month.
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