The RSPB accuses HS2Ltd of “holding nature in contempt”
The RSPB has reacted angrily following an exclusive report by Channel 4 News about HS2Ltd contractors attempting to empty woodlands of birds before tree clearance. The report showed two contractors using a hawk to try and scare birds and prevent them from nesting.
Emma Marsh, Director RSPB England said ‘This approach again shows the contempt with which HS2 has treated nature. We are facing a nature emergency and should be working to help nature, not attempting to chase protected birds out of potential nesting habitat to make way for this development.‘.
The RSPB said that flying a hawk a few times through a woodland will not clear it of birds, pointing out that woodland birds are used to living alongside aerial predators such as sparrowhawks and buzzards.
‘HS2Ltd will be destroying birds’ nests if they demolish this woodland during the breeding season. We will consider HS2 contractors’ actions to be legally and morally dubious if they clear woodlands in the breeding season and then try to claim there was no intention to destroy nests if incidents are reported to the police‘.
The RSPB also said that alongside the developers respecting the law, HS2Ltd must also propose a world class mitigation scheme that results in more wildlife than is currently predicted to be lost.
Ms. Marsh added: ‘HS2 needs a complete rethink. A recent Wildlife Trusts report laid bare the effects of this scheme. The environment seemed to get short shrift in the Oakervee review, which is now being legally challenged by Chris Packham and Leigh Day solicitors. And nowhere do we see an adequate plan to mitigate or compensate for the losses.
We need all major and large-scale infrastructure projects to be required to plan net gain of wildlife into their designs. This should be enshrined, in law, in the Environment Bill and we encourage people to contact their MPs to encourage them to support stronger legislation‘.
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Why am I not surprised. No doubt there will be exceptions, but as a species civil engineers are a disaster for conservation. You’re lucky if they are only apathetic towards wildlife many have an antipathy towards it, can be a bit of a nuisance when you want to spread lovely concrete. This was my suspicion even before I had experience with two local multi, multi million pound lottery funded civil engineering projects in my area. Once a rep for one came to give a talk to a community group I was in and began by telling us he’d just come straight from a meeting with the Scottish Wildlife Trust and proceeded to ridicule them in no uncertain terms. We had been told his project would include environmental education, it was no big surprise when that was ‘forgotten’ when the project got the funding they’d been angling for.
On this one I’m right with you, Les. There is an endemic and widespread problem with the current civil engineering – and indeed development – approach. HS2 clearly designed the railway they wanted and then started thinking about how they could most easily head off the opposition and problems it causes – no thought whatsoever of trying to genuinely mitigate or avoid. They have adopted the common approach of bidding high (here, in terms of environmental damage) and then making as few concessions as possible. Behind closed doors wildlife will just be a barrier, treated with the same contempt as anyone opposed to their project. The profession really needs a complete cultural change, not least because it loses so many big issues – HS2 was severely threatened because of its bulldozer approach and the complete ban on onshore windfarms was hard earned by developers whose only interest was whether they could connect to the grid. Sadly, many ecologists end up working for consultancies who are employed by developers imply to blast their plans through the planning system – and like the bi accountancy companies who turn out not to have done their job every time a major company collapses, there’s the problem that you don’t get the work if you don’t give the answers the employer wants. Maybe ecological reports should be commissioned by the planning authority, even if still paid for by the developer ?
Well that is really the only way to build highspeed rail. You draw a straight line between point A and point B and work out how to get that through. Really the problem with HS project has been its lack of ambition and its lack of balls in connecting these lines. It needed to go straight through more things, like golf courses and middle class housing schemes, not just the countryside. As soon as they made those first few compromises to curve around the privately well off they holed the entire project below the waterline.
Frankly, it was flawed when it didn’t go straight through from the Chunnel to Scrabster in one go, linking maybe Glasgow and Brum, to the continent and the gateway to the Northern Isles, Shinkansen style, instead of being just a Nodnol to some points not Nodnol in a slightly less tortured route than the current trains. Lack of ambition, and a lack of balls.
If you live in a house, expect your shit to be drained away and treated, ever use a road, or a train or cross a bridge, not to mention countless other aspects of every day life, then you depend on civil engineers. It seems a bit harsh to damn them all as a disaster for conservation (except perhaps in the sense that they have contributed to our increased life expectancy and therefore the population growth of us all as a species – our combined ‘success’ is certainly to the detriment of virtually all other wildlife). Civil engineers also play a critical part in significant conservation projects such as the RSPB’s Wallasea Island and other wetland schemes.
As with any other profession or group of people there will be some who are more environmentally enlightened than others . As a profession they are arguably too cautious making them resistant to environmentally innovative solutions to problems sometimes when these go against the tried and tested concrete pouring they are accustomed to but I guess the possibility of being held liable for the potentially lethal failure of a bit of infrastructure does perhaps make that caution understandable.
HS2 was a bad decision but one that was taken not by the engineers but by the government who decided to prioritise arguments for the scheme over those against including the conservation arguments. Boris Johnson has demonstrated time and again that he is very readily seduced by major vanity projects.
As it now seems that the project is going ahead it is important that the RSPB and others should monitor how it proceeds very closely and call-out – as in this case – any failure to carry out the work in accordance with the law and good practice.
Sorry Jonathon I know there are civil engineers who don’t automatically think real progress is equated to acreage of concrete spread, but the profession has a lousy reputation among conservationists and it’s well deserved I’m afraid from my experience and that of all too many others. Going out of your way to NOT make provision for environmental education has got absolutely nothing to do with building sewers or water supplies. Civil engineers don’t seem to have been at the forefront of looking at natural ways to reduce flooding to replace/complement hard engineered flood defences and how many mega engineering projects have gone ahead when looking at other options would have done more for people and less harm to the environment? I’m unrepentant I’m afraid in no small way due to there once being a civil engineer in my family. As I’ve been typing this more examples have sprung to mind I’d forgotten, there’s definitely a change of third needed here as Roderick said.
I agree with much of what you say Les. There are certainly far too many engineering projects that have done huge damage to the environment that was not justified by the benefits they eventually brought about. HS2 is looking on track to be a case in point.
I suppose the point I was trying to make was that, except for the tiny number of people who live genuinely and completely off-grid, we are all dependent on civil engineers and implicated in the impacts of their works. For example, I agree engineers need to be more open to natural flood management methods than they are (and, though progress is too slow, I think there is some progress in that direction: there is slightly less tendency to think that every river has to be strait-jacketed in concrete from source to sea than used to be the case) but they reflect the society they are in. Every time we have floods there are angry calls from residents, farmers and politicians for bigger flood banks, more dredging and so on. It is easier to go with the populist flow than to stand against it and so the powers that be tend to decree more concrete.
I would also make a distinction between the engineers who design and build stuff and the developers who commission it and pay for it. I would personally place more of the blame on the latter for riding roughshod over environmental objections to any particular scheme (though I recognise the distinction between developer and builder may not always be clear-cut).
I don’t in any way condone the company your referred to who failed to provide the promised environmental education. It is deplorable when developers fail to carry out all of the agreed conditions of a planning consent and should not be tolerated.
Sorry Jonathon I know there are civil engineers who don’t automatically think real progress is equated to acreage of concrete spread, but the profession has a lousy reputation among conservationists and it’s well deserved I’m afraid from my experience and that of all too many others. Going out of your way to NOT make provision for environmental education has got absolutely nothing to do with building sewers or water supplies. Civil engineers don’t seem to have been at the forefront of looking at natural ways to reduce flooding to replace/complement hard engineered flood defences and how many mega engineering projects have gone ahead when looking at other options would have done more for people and less harm to the environment? I’m unrepentant I’m afraid in no small way due to there once being a civil engineer in my family. As I’ve been typing this more examples have sprung to mind I’d forgotten, there’s definitely a change of third needed here as Roderick said.