Green and Prosperous Land

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Dieter Helm 2019

Dieter Helm asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008304478

Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008304485

Version: 2019-02-04

Dedication

To Sue, Oliver and Laura, as always, and to Amelie of the next generation in the hope that the natural environment she will inherit will be in better shape for her to enjoy.

Epigraph

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot

With a pink hotel, a boutique

And a swinging hot spot

Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot

Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell, 1970

I thought it would last my time –

The sense that, beyond the town,

There would always be fields and farms,

Where the village louts could climb

Such trees as were not cut down;

I knew there’d be false alarms

[ … ]

Things are tougher than we are, just

As earth will always respond

However we mess it about;

Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:

The tides will be clean beyond.

– But what do I feel now? Doubt?

Selected verses from ‘Going, Going’

by Philip Larkin, 1972

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

List of abbreviations

Introduction: Our natural capital inheritance

PART ONE: The Prize and the Risks

Chapter one: The prize

Chapter two: Business-as-usual

PART TWO: Building a Greener Economy

Chapter three: Restoring rivers

Chapter four: Green agriculture

Chapter five: The uplands

Chapter six: The coasts

Chapter seven: Nature in the towns and cities

PART THREE: Principles, Paying and the Plan

Chapter eight: Public goods

Chapter nine: Paying for pollution

Chapter ten: A Nature Fund

Chapter eleven: The plan

Conclusions: Securing the prize

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Book

About the Author

About the Publisher

PREFACE

I have been thinking about the issues in this book for a long time. I grew up on the Essex marshes, and spent long hours around the sea walls and creeks of my grandfather’s farm. It is the place of my memories, and places are how we remember nature. It was a small farm by modern standards, around 350 acres. It was a mixed dairy and arable farm, with the traditional farmyard chickens and ducks, a big vegetable garden, a small orchard and of course beehives. It had a patchwork of more than a dozen fields, butting up to the sea wall.

In spring there were flocks of lapwing nesting so densely that it was difficult to avoid treading on the eggs. There were lots of skylarks and the full range of farmland birds, and of course a stand of great elms. House sparrows literally swarmed in the farmyard, which was often dense with flies and therefore swallows and house martins. There were barn owls. In winter, the marshes came alive with wildfowl. There were flocks of brent geese, teal and widgeon. So great were the numbers that books were written about wildfowling and punt guns and all the paraphernalia of Essex marsh life.1

Psychologists will tell you that what happens in that magic time of childhood forms the subsequent person. It is why getting children and nature together is so vital for the future of the environment. It is hard to put into a person’s mind what they never had in childhood. In my case, although most of my career has been spent in mainstream economics in Oxford, the experiences of those early years have never left me. It is one of the reasons why, in 2012 when I was given the opportunity to chair the Natural Capital Committee (NCC), I grabbed it.

By that time an enormous amount of damage had been done to the natural environment. After World War II, British agricultural policy, and then the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), had transformed the land, polluting as it went. My grandfather’s farm was sold and turned into one large field in the 1960s, with the hedgerows literally dynamited and mole drainage applied. That put an end to the lapwings, and most of the skylarks too. ‘Progress’ had arrived.

What happened to that farm was but a microcosm of what was happening everywhere at an accelerating rate from the 1960s. Alongside the intensification of agriculture, industrial development, housing and roads bisected the landscape and left fragments of nature in between. Population growth brought with it increasing consumption, and some of this has proved highly damaging. Prosperity came, built on a fossil fuel economy, bringing with it pesticides, plastics and petrochemicals.

The consumer boom drove a wedge between nature and people, and in a highly urbanised society fewer and fewer people experienced nature and, not surprisingly, cared less and less about it, except perhaps the bits they saw on television. There were exceptions and conservation successes, but the trend was abundantly clear. My grandfather’s farm, with all its biodiversity and wonder, would now be regarded by most people as something that might appear in the fiction of H. E. Bates’s The Darling Buds of May, or a nature reserve – an ‘uneconomic’ yet quaint relic of a more primitive time.

Many environmentalists had reached a point of despair by 2011 when the coalition government published its White Paper, ‘The Natural Choice’.2 The National Infrastructure Plan, the house-building targets, and the overwhelming emphasis on coping with the fallout from the financial crisis of 2007/08 set other priorities, with nature very low down the pecking order. A quick read of the 2011 White Paper confirms this: it is largely without content. With little to actually contribute to turning the tide on environmental damage, it took the classic Yes Minister approach: it set up a committee to think about it. This was the origin of the NCC.

Why, then, take on the chair of the NCC, apart from sentiment? Why try to work on the inside rather than protest on the outside? Or simply give up? There are several reasons. The past approaches have not worked, despite occasional Pyrrhic victories, and hence the NCC could hardly make matters worse. But the main reason was that I was optimistic that the NCC could really make a difference. For all the vacuity of the 2011 White Paper, there were two elements that could be built on: the clear aim to integrate the environment into the heart of the economy; and the overarching political commitment to leave the environment in a better state for future generations.3

Perhaps naively, I thought both worth taking seriously. I am an economist, not a scientist, and what interests me is the allocation of scarce resources. That is what economics is all about – making the best of what we have, and investing in the best possibilities to improve our lot. While humans have so far got by very well by pitting progress against nature, and especially in agriculture, this does not seem to me a good option going forward. The damage has gone too far, and our prosperity is likely to be compromised if we go on as we are. Put negatively, the environmental damage is going to make us all poorer. Put positively, we can be much better off if we protect and enhance our environment. It is not nature versus the economy; it is investing in nature to increase prosperity. My grandfather’s farm might not have turned out to be so ‘uneconomic’ as was easily assumed in an agricultural context riven with perverse (uneconomic) subsidies.

This is beginning to be understood on the global stage, even if little is being done to address the problems. The climate change penny has dropped, and people are beginning to understand that the mass extinction under way is unlikely to have a happy ending for us. At the local level, the challenges of mental health, of obesity, and of the loss of beauty and wonder in our lives are getting more bandwidth. Added to this broad dawning of understanding, there are lots of specific costs to the pollution we are continuing to cause. Plastics are now headline news. Water companies have reached the end of the treatment road and recognise that it is cheaper to pay farmers not to pollute. The loss of soil is leaving farmers exposed. Poor air quality carries on killing people. None of this makes much sense even on narrow economic grounds.

Perhaps even more encouraging is the recognition that nature has value in itself, and not just for the ways in which it indirectly underpins our economy. Nature is the main organised interest in this country, way beyond football and trade unions. There are literally millions of members of nature organisations. Enjoying the great outdoors is the main leisure activity, whether it be a walk in the park or along the canal or riverbank, or visiting a National Park. People like nature and they care about it. They have what E. O. Wilson called ‘biophilia’.4 The BBC series Blue Planet II was watched by 17 million people in the UK. Gardening, that intimate engagement with plants and wildlife close up, is a national obsession. All of this great energy and enthusiasm can be harnessed to protect and enhance our natural capital.

Upon its creation as an independent advisory committee to the government, the NCC set about two main tasks: first, defining what natural capital is, identifying which bits matter most, and creating a conceptual framework around science and accounting; and second, putting the overarching generational objective into a practical and deliverable framework. Against the odds, and in the face of much scepticism from environmentalists, we did this.

The NCC has already achieved a great deal. It established natural capital as the way of thinking about our natural environment, as a hard and rigorous concept, and not simply another slogan that can mean anything to anyone according to their vested interests. Crucially, the NCC proposed a 25 Year Environment Plan, and this has now been published, with broad political support.5 It remains to be seen whether it is fully implemented.

In the early years of the NCC I wrote Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet to provide an accessible account of what the concept means, how to measure it, and the broad policy implications that follow.6 Now we have the 25 Year Environment Plan, I want to set out the prize that this could offer, and what the environment could look like mid-century. Most of all I want to show why this is in our economic interests, why it will enhance our prosperity, why we can be green and more prosperous at the same time, and why we don’t have to accept as inevitable a world without our insects, our birds, our wild flowers and fungi, and our mammals, reptiles and aquatic life. We don’t have to have the poverty of a silent spring and of monotone landscapes.

That is what this book is all about. It is deliberately broad in scope and content, providing a framework and illustrating what sort of outcomes there might be, and most importantly showing how we can not only deliver on all these individual projects, but also how they can be combined in a great national effort. Most of the examples are already well known to naturalists and ecologists. Many very good people have come up with myriad plans for their own patches. The aim here is to think big, to think about Britain as a whole, and to consider how it can be made to work better for the next generation. I make no pretence of having the scientific expertise to fill in the details – that is for others much better qualified than me. What I do lay claim to is showing how this all works economically and how to implement it.

There are those who decry economic approaches to the environment; who claim that they overlook the beauty and spiritual values and intrinsic nature. They make a good point when the target is a narrow and crude cost–benefit analysis. But they are wrong in two key ways: prosperity is a broad, not a narrow, concept; and the value to people of nature and all its beauty is every bit as important as the health benefits of clean water. The conventional metric of economic success, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is a pathetically poor measure of what we get out of nature; and if conservation and enhancing the environment does not make economic sense then the evidence from the last two centuries at least is that it will be neglected. Sadly, appealing to intrinsic nature and spiritual values has not worked so far.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AI, artificial intelligence

AONB, Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty

BBOWT, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust

BEIS, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

BSE, bovine spongiform encephalopathy

CAP, Common Agricultural Policy

CFP, Common Fisheries Policy

CLA, Country Land and Business Association

DDT, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane

DEFRA, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

DWI, Drinking Water Inspectorate

EEC, European Economic Community

GDP, Gross Domestic Product

GM, genetically modified

GPS, global positioning system

HMIP, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution

HS2, a planned high-speed railway project

NCC, Natural Capital Committee

NFU, National Farmers’ Union

NGO, non-governmental organisation

NRA, National Rivers Authority

OFWAT, Water Services Regulation Authority

ONS, Office for National Statistics

RSPB, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds

SEPA, Scottish Environment Protection Agency

SSSI, Site of Special Scientific Interest

TB, tuberculosis

Introduction

OUR NATURAL CAPITAL INHERITANCE

Britain’s natural environment is shaped by its past and its biodiversity. Few locations on the planet have had such a turbulent past visibly carved into the landscape. In the Hebrides, some of the oldest rock formations on the planet, dating back 3 billion years, have broken the backs of crofters for generations. The Carboniferous age left coal and limestone not only in the Pennines, but also in the pavements of our cities and the industrial landscape that coal enabled. In the Lake District, the glaciers’ ghosts are all around, while the South Downs show the ripples of the distant collision of Italy and the African tectonic plate into Europe.

The more recent physical severing of the land link to the European Continent, as the rising waters in the North Sea broke through between what is now Calais and Dover, cut off the migration of terrestrial species. The Irish Sea opened up, cutting Britain off from Ireland too. The snakes never made it to Ireland as the ice melted. In a smaller Britain (and even smaller Ireland) without many migratory replacements, it made it all the easier to exterminate some of Britain’s fauna. There are no bears, bison or wolves left. There is no land bridge to return on.

Being cut off has had its climatic effects too. Surrounded by sea, warmed by the Gulf Stream, Britain does not experience the deep freezes of Continental Europe. Its winters are comparatively mild. And its shorelines attract many winter visitors.

This is our inherited natural capital. It is what nature has endowed us with. Yet most of us are unaware of most of this for one very crucial reason. Our natural environment has been massively modified by humans over the last 8,000 years, and mostly in the last 200 years. Where once the Lewisian gneisses and the limestone and U-shaped glacial valleys would have been the hard constraints that people had to work with and around, now these hardly matter at all. We have so modified our world that, for many, nature appears hardly relevant. We may still rely on the land for agriculture, but agriculture is no longer the overwhelming driver of our economy. While, before 1800, the economy was mostly about farming and the trade in agricultural produce, with an empire built on food and crops, this is no longer the case. Farming now represents less than 1 per cent of GDP, and at least half of that is propped up by subsidies. A bad farming year no longer induces hardship and famine. In economic terms it just does not register. Fishing is now an even less consequential part of the economy, employing only a few thousand people.

Nature may not be man-made, but we as the ultimate eco-engineers increasingly shape it. Britain is a leading exemplar of the Anthropocene, a new geological age defined by human impact. There is nothing truly wild left. Much of the fauna has ingested plastic of one form or another, and the fashion for rewilding is best seen as just another form of eco-engineering, a switch from one man-made landscape to another. Wild, as a concept, has lost its practical meaning, even if its cultural power remains.

For all the angst this human transformation of nature causes environmentalists, it is not only a fact on the ground, it is also one that has proved remarkably successful from a human perspective. Over the last couple of centuries, we have broken out of thousands of years of virtually zero economic growth. The Industrial Revolution, and then the Age of Oil in the twentieth century, ushered in a wholly new historical experience. A cornucopia of new technologies raised the population out of poverty and into a material existence that has got better for each generation. Even two twentieth-century world wars could not dent the march of economic growth and prosperity. As nature declined, GDP kept going up.

For the bulk of the population, what was not to like about this? True, there might be fewer swallows and flycatchers, and the sound of the cuckoo might get rarer, but very many people have never seen or heard any of these anyway, and probably never will, except on a screen. They might watch the BBC’s Planet Earth and be sad that so much is being lost (and angry about the pollution), but in our democracy access to housing and health services counts for much more. When it comes to actual spending, the environment comes way down the list of priorities, and where spending does come into play, it has often been to pay farmers to do sometimes dubious things to what is left of nature. The planned high-speed railway project, HS2, has a budget of over £50 billion; the core annual budget for DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and its associated agencies – spent on foods and farming, rural interests, and the environment – is less than £3 billion. In other words, it would take more than 15 years of DEFRA environmental spending to exhaust the HS2 budget. Already, before even starting, HS2 has burnt through more than one year’s total DEFRA spending.1

Faced with this onslaught, and the relative indifference of much of the population, those for whom nature really matters have been ploughing their own narrow furrow. Naturalists study in meticulous detail the declines of particular species and habitats. They band together to oppose building on sensitive sites, and they talk to each other in trusts, charities and campaign groups. It is largely a voluntary, amateur and charitable crusade, and it always has been. They feel under siege and try to hang on to what is left. They stand on the beach Canute-like and try to hold back the tide. They count the losses.

It has been a picture of comprehensive defeats, punctuated by the occasional success. These are often hugely symbolic, and where they focus on readily observable species, they garner a lot of support. Farmers may gripe about the impact on lambs, and grouse-shooters might complain about their precious game birds, but the recovery of the golden eagles, the reintroduction of sea eagles and red kites, and the sound of buzzards now over much more of the landscape are all hard-won victories for the small bands of environmental brothers and sisters.

The public can empathise with big birds of prey. They also see the merits of beavers and even lynx back in what passes as wilderness – the managed landscapes of Devon rivers and the Kielder Forest respectively. But what they do not see is the broader tide of destruction that tells a very different story – the insects that have gone; the soils that are depleted and soaked in chemicals; the rivers that are full of agricultural run-off; landscapes that are fragmented; wildlife corridors that are closed off; and the seas that are full of plastic.

In the agricultural battle against nature – to destroy everything that competes with the crops and livestock – agrichemical companies get better and better at doing their job. Now non-selective herbicides like glyphosate can kill off all the vegetation after crops have been harvested, ready for the next, and a host of genetically modified (GM) crops are specifically designed to be glyphosate-resistant. Neonicotinoids (new nicotine-like insecticides) are another chemical in the armoury, and the combination of glyphosate and neonicotinoids is now deemed by the farming lobby to be essential for maintaining crops and farm profitability, even as attempts to ban them gather momentum. Look closely at a crop of oilseed rape. Note the absence of insects and the brown, dead undergrowth. It is an example replicated for maize and other cereals, and is evident in the poverty of biodiversity in much ‘improved grassland’ too.