Environment

‘Please God, make me good, but not yet.’ I know the feeling. As I get older and more deeply retired, I globe-trot more and my carbon footprint is horrendous. And guilt does not result in abstinence. The brain is persuaded but the flesh is weak. Years ago I chaired Jonathon Porritt’s sustainability organisation, Forum for the Future, and I remember holding a fund-raising dinner for rich Cotswolders and hoping no one would notice my gas-guzzling old car, toasty warm house, and melon with more air-miles than flavour. I’ve tried harder since then, but it’s not easy. A couple of years ago I converted my ancient barn into an eco-friendly house

Why did David Cameron send Owen Paterson to Environment if he meant to sack him? Paterson knew and cared about his subject. He wore green wellies with panache, loathed Europe and wind turbines, and argued with everyone. He was a sop to the shires and a bulwark against Ukip. Yet like his colleague Michael Gove, he was found to be ‘toxic’. He has told the Sunday Telegraph that he blames his downfall on the ‘green blob’, on ‘highly paid, globe-trotting, anti-capitalist agitprop’. Paterson had discovered that the toughest job in government nowadays is no longer foreign affairs or defence, awash in grand crises, whirling dervishes and expensive kit. A Middle

What some people seem to forget is that Owen Paterson wasn’t (and Liz Truss isn’t) just Environment Secretary. As well as having responsibility for the environment, the role also covers food, fisheries and rural affairs. Paterson was one of the few people in Government that many farmers thought of as being ‘on their side’. As Secretary of State at Defra, he always appeared to have the interests of the rural community and the countryside at the centre of his decisions. As Melissa Kite argues in her cover piece this week, Cameron appears to have given in to ‘the animal rights lot’. As she rightly says, ‘They wanted Owen Paterson’s head

In the last few days climate scientists have found themselves back on the front pages, and once again it’s for all the wrong reasons. The furore this time has been prompted by an eminent climatologist named Lennart Bengtsson, who agreed to join the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Nigel Lawson’s sceptic think tank. Within days of his agreement, Bengtsson felt obliged to resign, apparently having been subjected to a wave of protests and threats of ostracisation from colleagues, one of whom publicly insinuated that the 79-year-old Bengtsson was senile. When it also emerged that a reviewer of one of Bengtsson’s scientific papers had recommended its rejection

History, Edmund Burke wrote, is ‘a pact between the dead, the living and the yet unborn.’ Nowhere is this pact more important than in our relationship with nature. Conservative governments have always sought to protect and enhance the natural environment – whether through Disraeli’s Public Health Act, which sought to limit the environmental impact of the industrial revolution; or Eden’s Clean Air Act, which helped lift the London smog.  We shouldn’t forget it was Margaret Thatcher’s drive to cut sulphur emissions that stopped the acid rain which was damaging our woodlands and killing the fish in our lakes and rivers. It’s not just a safe and secure environment we are

Go to Google Maps and type in Lechlade – the Cotswold town at the start of the navigable Thames. Instead of looking at it on the map, click the ‘satellite’ button in the top right-hand corner of the screen for an aerial photograph, and follow the river west towards its source near Kemble in Gloucestershire or east towards Oxford. You may notice something that is so commonplace in British river systems most people ignore it: the woods, marshes and wetlands are all but gone. Farmers have ploughed fields up to the banks. Because there is nothing – or next to nothing – to soak up the rain, water and silt

All this talk about dredging is well and good; but could the humble beaver in fact be the solution to the nation’s floods? Well, as far as the Mammal Society are concerned, yes. The animal has been extinct in the UK since the sixteenth century, but in recent years people have been pushing for its reintroduction. There are already two separate wild beaver colonies in Scotland, which have elicited a mixture of good and bad reactions from locals. But could they really help with the flooding? The Mammal Society’s argument is that beavers – ‘the master river engineer’ – create ‘impoundments’ with their damming, which help to keep water upland

If the Faroe Islanders want to eat whale, let them. So says Tim Ecott in today’s Spectator. He argues that the Faroese – who live on dramatic and remote islands in the North Atlantic – shouldn’t be victimised for killing less than 0.1% of the pilot whale population annually for food. There are far more pressing marine issues that we should be concerned about – for example the 100 million sharks slaughtered for shark fin soup, or how the EU has allowed tuna stocks to be decimated. The problem is, many people don’t agree with him. We’ve all heard that whales are highly intelligent, social and family orientated creatures, and that

Would England be the same without the sight of sheep grazing on its ‘green and pleasant land’? Most likely not; but, then again, that might not be a bad thing. That is George Monbiot’s view. Spectator readers will already know what Monbiot thinks of the humble sheep. Last summer he wrote about how we ‘pay billions to service a national obsession with sheep, in return for which the woolly maggots kindly trash the countryside’. ‘Britain’, he wrote, ‘is being shagged by sheep’. BBC Countryfile took up the subject of sheep hill farming (Monbiot’s chief bugbear) on Sunday night. This method of farming has its fair share of controversies. For starters,

Yes, yes, just to get the obligatory ‘of courses’ out of the way up front: of course ‘weather’ is not the same as ‘climate’; and of course the thickest iciest ice on record could well be evidence of ‘global warming’, just as 40-and-sunny and a 35-below blizzard and 12 degrees and partly cloudy with occasional showers are all apparently manifestations of ‘climate change’; and of course the global warm-mongers are entirely sincere in their belief that the massive carbon footprint of their rescue operation can be offset by the planting of wall-to-wall trees the length and breadth of Australia, Britain, America and continental Europe. But still: you’d have to have

This week’s issue of Country Life magazine has been guest-edited by the Prince of Wales. As long term perspectives disappear from national debate, we should all be grateful for his presence in public life, says Ben Goldsmith. It is hard to name an area of modern life which has not been overcome by short-term considerations. Companies sacrifice long-term growth for their quarterly financial reports, politicians are blind beyond the next election, and the attention span of rolling news channels is shorter than ever. In cricket, the deep satisfaction of a five-day Test Match is threatened by one day or even shorter match formats. Long termism speaks with a quiet voice; a voice that has been all but obliterated. The Prince of

Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don’t know what I am talking about, must be referring to Britain only, rather than the world as a whole, and so forth. At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realised