Rosher.Net

I seem to spend more time grinding my teeth and screaming than is strictly good for me. This latest is currently circulating on Facebook. Of course, being Facebook, it will silently disappear in the churn of waffle and wibble that is Facebook… but I’ll not be so easily distracted.

“Developers can build on nature reserves …
if they ‘offset’ the damage elsewhere, says Government review

Builders can bulldoze some of the country’s most beautiful areas – as long as they make up for the damage elsewhere, a Government review has suggested.” [Full Story]

Now, someone please tell me how you do this offset… is it like carbon credits? We’ll concrete over this meadow of endangered orchids and butterfly friendly wildflowers, but we’ll pay a sum into a conservation area elsewhere (where a Tory MP has his family home, no doubt)… Perhaps we’ll spread some GM flower seed over a bit of scrubland somewhere – entirely missing the point of the biodiversity that exists within scrub. Gah!

I feel I can anonymously quote a Facebook comment: “I remember how well they did moving the ecosystem from the top of St Catherine’s Hill above Twyford Down. Dug up all the turf and moved it to a field with different underlying geology. Unsurprisingly all the rare orchids and wildlife died.”

Funnily enough, the natural environment is not created, moved, transplanted, relocated or replicated overnight. It’s quite easy for it to be trashed overnight though. We now live in a UK where they can drive a pointless railway line through ancient woodland and rural hamlets, where they’ve relaxed planning law to the point of no restrictions at all and the law that remains is all pro-development, where neonicotinoid pesticides that kill bees are being defended by our own environment minister, where blood sports are back on the political agenda and badger baiting is an inevitable consequence of cull proposals that their own scientists and even their own back benchers argue against, where ‘they’ know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. And they don’t care much about the cost, either.

All hail the ever quicker march toward a neo-feudalist Britain.

She’s not gone; she won’t be gone for a while yet. We yet live in Twatcherite Britain.