The line-up for the Birders’ Choice Guano Award for Environmental Harm is a strong field:
- litter bugs
- HS2
- Boris Johnson
- Trump administration
- Water companies
Well, I found this quite easy – how about you? Water companies aren’t all bad, litter is annoying but its apparent resurgence in lockdown was more an eye-opener of the fact that there were fewer people cleaning up in public spaces and the two politicians won’t really take any notice (and one should be gone, I so hope, by the time the poll reults are known) so that leaves us with HS2.
And HS2 would be a very worthy winner – an expensive project which goes up in price and down in value daily and whose ecological impacts are severe and much more severe than they should be. There is still a chance it won’t go ahead – would you vote for a quicker escape from Birmingham or more nurses paid better salaries in Birmingham?
It’s HS2 for me – but you can make your own choices – click here.
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I think one needs to have two piles of guano, an international pile, which would undoubtably be won by Trump and a national pile which would be won by Johnson/HS2. I put these two as one because it is Johnson who is driving the totally farcical HS2 project. Never before has such an environmentally destructive project been totally unnecessary/redundant before in has hardly commenced.
I must say I agree with you on this one Alan, there should be international and nation al sub categories to this one.
Let’s put New Labour in there as well because it seems that everyone forgets that they instigated all this back in January 2009
Sadly Keir Starmer’s Labour Party back it – seems to think that it is a road to recovery. Must be something in Westminster’s water.
There are always plenty of deserving candidates for the guano award but I agree that HS2 would be a worthy winner this time round. The reasons you give justify the award but I would add that the way this project acts as a flagship for the wrong-headed notion that you can simply recreate complex habitats like ancient woodland with a little bit of gardening is another reason to give it the award.
Personally, I’ve gone for water companies. £800 million in dividends whilst failing continuously on targets for leaks and pollution. The water companies demonstrate very clearly what we’ve known all along: near-monopolies simply don’t work in the private sector where companies legal first duty is to shareholders. That £800 million is also a rather significant message to conservation NGOs who keep going on about the new money they want for biodiversity and will never get: the money is already there, in the water companies, in the spectacular civil engineering budgets for flood defences that don’t work and in what should be our land support systems but instead are just agricultural subsidies.
It’s HS2 for me, but I can’t see any reason for your view Mark that there is still a chance that it won’t go ahead.
Wigsthorpe – hi! Thank you for your first comment here. In a world where we are picking up thebill for COVID for years to come, and loads of people are travelling less for both work and pleasure, a high speed railway whose costs keep rising will eventually look like a bad way to spend our taxes.
Oh Mark if only you would stick to campaigning and writing about wildlife!
So a modern high speed railway won’t be required by future generations?
There is a history of people lacking vision and understanding about what required in the future. In the late 1800’s John Ruskin was equally contemptuous of the Matlock to Buxton/Manchester line being built in Derbyshire viz his famous complaint at the desecration of the Derbyshire Dales. ‘Every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton,’ Ruskin thundered. You hardly notice the route of the railway today by the way.
If only short sighted transport policies in the 1960’s hadn’t closed that line, it would provide an environmentally friendly access to the 100,000’s of tourists who visit Bakewell and its environs by road.
Todays Luddites it seems think the same of HS2, now I make no claims that it’s planning and implementation have been best practice, perhaps thats where so called environmental campaigners should have addressed their efforts? Realistically development will continue, what we should be doing is ensuring that its done in a way that takes account of and work with and enhance the local environment.
I notice two glaring pieces of misinformation in your rant! First its purpose is not simply to shave 20 minutes off the journey time between Birmingham and London, its actually about creating capacity on the railways, for more freight, remove long distance express train paths from the WCML (Euston – Glasgow), the ECML (Kings Cross to Edinburgh) and the Midland mainline (ST Pancras to Nottingham/Sheffield) and you create capacity for more freight to be carried by rail and more local stopping train services. It would be much more costly, disruptive and have a greater environmental damage to upgrade those lines with less benefit overall.
Given as we go forward towards a low carbon future, more goods are going to have to go by rail, this is essential.
The second piece of misinformation is that there is a choice between HS2 and more nurses! I know your a scientist, but really even you should know that HS2 is a capital project, whereas nurses are paid from revenue! So stopping HS2 won’t mean money diverted to nurses. it makes perfect sense to improve the infrastructure in this country at time of low borrowing cost. it would make more sense if those who opposed HS2 diverted their attentions to the proposed road building programme, which makes no sense.
As for the destruction of ancient woodlands – yes I know many of you gnashing your teeth on this issue, live in houses, drive on roads, fly from airports and ride on trains that in the last couple of centuries have destroyed ancient habitat., I take it future generations aren’t to be allowed that luxury? The proposed Lower Thames motorway crossing 14 miles takes 54 hectares of such woodland. The entire 345 miles of HS2 (including the northern extension) takes just 58 hectares – thats 0.01% of all the UK’s ancient woodlands.
I see you are also being a “super forecaster” – predicting that the pandemic will mean less travel by people in the future! Mm really? So future generations won’t be travelling for business, leisure, family visits and so on?
Yes there may well be a change in commuting every day to the office, BUT whatever happens human beings like to conduct business face to face indeed to work effectively its essential to have collaborative meetings. There will be an upsurge in travel once the pandemic is over and it is likely that people will live further away from places like London and Birmingham, but be going into the office or meetings once or twice a week. That would mean more journeys not less! HS2 is not a commuter railway so that argument is unsubstantiated.
HS2 is essential for improving the connectivity of the UK, it will redcue jounrey times between the North and Scotland (it should be followed by HS3 across the Pennines but hey ho) to reduce the London centric economy and it will when complete mean that domestic air services will be unnecessary, another plus on the environmental side.
I shan’t ever get to use it and I suspect neither will most of those who are against it, but its very easy to oppose something that will not affect oneself in anyway, other than the negative perceptions. Its less easy to understand that in the future generations will be thankful we have built a fast carbon neutral non polluting transport system, that frankly should have been built 20 or 30 years ago instead of more motorways.