We like hedges, lots of other people like hedges and wild birds particularly love a good, chunky hedge with lots of cover for spring nesting and berries for winter nosh. But to suggest, as Radio 4 did yesterday, that a nice hedge is needed to justify crop production is nonsense. The claim was construed from a report from the Royal Agricultural Society, which said that heavy machinery, dry summers and changing growing seasons had left England's soil in bad shape. According to the BBC, the report also said that research into soil had lost out to study of the environment. It was noticeable that Professor Dick Godwin, author of the report, did not say this in his Today Programme interview. Wildlife has been disappearing from farmland for about 50 years. New figures from Defra, due next week, will show whether some birds are declining even quicker than we thought. The loss of set-aside and delay in replicating its wildlife benefits will only make matters worse. The RSPB has thoroughly researched wildlife losses and has offered numerous sturdy proposals for boosting up the populations of farmland birds. Some suggestions have been adopted but others, even some of the simplest, are being taken up too slowly. Skylark plots are one example. These 4x4 metre scrapes, left free of crop seed but otherwise treated like the field they're in, need only the press of a tractor button to get them established. They need no maintenance, the effect on harvest is negligible and farmers are even paid to put them in their fields, yet only a handful have done so. If more farmers took the cash available for green farming and soil conservation – farmers can be paid for ploughing less on steep slopes - wildlife would be doing much better with no sacrifice by farmers, healthier soil and more money in the pot to boot. Hedges are good and so are skylark plots, ponds, wild flowers and narrow earth banks where insects can roam. But none are responsible for the condition of farmland soil. Do more research by all means, but don’t blame the birds and bees for the condition the soil is currently in.
British Airways this week lambasted the Tory Party on aviation, claiming its policies were ‘all over the place’.
Today it seems it is Labour that most deserves to be slammed.
The government is allowing thousands more flights from Stansted, where councils and campaigners have joined forces to fight the airport’s expansion plan.
Stansted’s owner, BAA, will now increase the number of flights from 190,000 annually to 265,000 – a massive 40 per cent rise. BAA also wants an extra runway.
To our knowledge, no-one has worked out how many emissions those 75,000 extra flights will generate, or the damage of 50 per cent more flights from London City airport, an increase also sanctioned yesterday. Maybe someone should.
An Inuit politician told the Stansted public inquiry that emissions from aircraft were already damaging his home, close to the Arctic’s precious ice.
We are keen to be told how the government plans to meet its target for cutting the UK’s carbon when Stansted gets and busier and possibly bigger too. Its 60 per cent goal will be out of the question, the 80 per cent recommendation from experts this week, which the RSPB strongly backs, will seem like a bad dream.
The world needs a leader brave and influential enough to direct action to combat climate change. Gordon Brown could be that man – he has hinted that 80 per cent could be the UK’s new target and has a new man in a new climate change ministry ready to act to achieve it.
But both the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband will be foiled if Stansted - and Heathrow - are allowed to expand any further. There’s no point being the globe’s business hub if global warming has scuppered the business.
Stansted to get busier
Tory policy ‘all over the place’
Vultures are ugly, there are no two ways about it. But does that mean we should let them go extinct? Marcel Berlins, writing in the Guardian yesterday, suggested that it does. In India, vultures have declined catastrophically, by 99.9 per cent in 15 years. Their loss is affecting millions of people.
They are nature's best scavengers, picking clean roadside carcasses and reducing the chance of human disease. Bone collectors rely on the bones that remain for their livelihoods. The Parsi community uses vultures to dispose of their dead. Or at least they did. There are so few vultures now that none of these roles is being fulfilled. Feral dogs roam carcass dumps threatening public health; bone collectors, and leather tanners, are out of work; sky burials are no longer an option for Parsis.
We don't save endangered wildlife species by species, but in their hundreds or thousands by protecting their habitats and their health.
When we do that, we help ourselves. Rainforests host majestic tigers and nasty, unnamed creepy crawlies but also store carbon and water - helping combat climate change and preventing flooding - and clean that water for human use. Saving threatened wildlife is a big job but one that helps us too. Looking nice just doesn't come into it.
Read about the RSPB's work to save Asian vultures here