SEE the WOOD, SEE the TREES

In his speech to the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham last week, the Chancellor George Osborne scoffed that Ed Miliband had never once used the word “deficit” in his improvised address to the Labour Conference in Manchester. Labour wonks quickly hit back with the matching charge that Osborne had never once used the word “growth” in his own speech. Game drawn.

But neither Osborne nor Miliband nor Nick Clegg nor David Cameron in their respective conference addresses made any reference to the most overwhelming issue facing the governments of Britain and every other nation on earth: climate change. Six months back, in his only extended remarks on the matter since becoming Prime Minister two-and-a-half years ago, Cameron claimed that his tenure had already fulfilled his promise to lead “the greenest government ever”. That he felt he could claim as much with a straight face only emphasises how dirt brown and smoky grey successive British administrations have been content to be.

A melting glacier

Perhaps Miliband’s failure to allude to global warming was even more disheartening, given that he was the first cabinet minister (in the last Labour government) ever to hold the title Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Instead of launching his “One Nation” rebranding in his generally well-received speech, Miliband would better have taken possession of the phrase “One World”. Indeed, he could have extended it to reflect the anti-war stance he took at the time of the invasion of Iraq but forsook over Libya. Saving the planet requires keeping the peace as well as expunging carbon emissions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that, based on the most rigorous and systematic research, the point at which global warming will begin to gather pace irresistibly and irreversibly will be reached around the beginning of 2017. It may already be too late to pre-empt this development – it may even be too late to delay it – but it will certainly transpire if governments act no more urgently than they are acting at present.

Flooding in Cockermouth, Lake District, 2009

An optimist in outlook and when contemplating my own circumstances, I yet find myself profoundly sceptical that the planet may be saved at all. I have no children and so I hold no direct stake in the survival of the human race. My line, which began in the primeval sludge, will have come to its end with my own expiration long before the lines of my friends who are parents peter out. When one dies (as I shall do some time in the next two or maybe three decades), the world effectively ends and the future must take care of itself. And I entertain no hope that the human race as a body is wise enough to recognise what is coming. The world will become lifeless, I venture, before the great-great-grandchildren of my friends have achieved a natural span, perhaps before the present century is out, and conceivably very much sooner.

The possibilities for planetary extinction have greatly increased in recent decades. There has always been the risk that some stray object will collide with us, as may well have occurred when the dinosaurs were wiped out. And it is a certainty that, at some great distance in the future, the earth’s orbit will have modulated sufficiently for it to move too near to – or too far from – the sun for life to remain sustainable.

But for nearly seventy years now we have possessed the nuclear option, a capability desired by any regime that seeks to reinforce or realign the balance of power. The global trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has dwindled sufficiently for public figures of many nationalities and philosophies to discuss unashamedly the supposed pros and cons of a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Binyamin Netanyahu has called an election in Israel in the confident expectation that his Likud-centred government will be returned, whereupon he will argue that he has a mandate to strike against the supposed nuclear capability in Iran, even though such action is opposed by more than two-thirds of the Israeli electorate. And elsewhere there is the dread – whisper it – that some terrorist organisation might get its hands on nuclear materials.

Wildfire, southern California

Then there is the danger of pandemic. We might rewrite Twain’s bon mot – “a lie gets halfway round the world before the truth gets its trousers on” – in these terms: a virus can have infected half a nation’s population before medicine has found a remedy and bureaucracy has dispensed it. The planet’s immune system has clearly been eroded by the advance of intercourse (in every sense) between peoples, the breaking down of natural barriers, the invasion of wilderness and the concomitant opening up of avenues for opportunist organisms. The bacterium that can resist all known counter measures is a phenomenon increasingly encountered by researchers. Don’t discount the likelihood of some disease emerging that is so resistant and so fast-spreading that it swiftly eliminates the population of a whole continent.

Meanwhile, chemical preparations are continually released into the environment with insufficient regard taken for the consequences of their widespread and long-term use. The Environmental Audit Committee, one of the House of Commons select committees, is beginning an examination of the effect of pesticides on honeybees. We may hope for some forthright conclusions from it, chaired as it is by the feisty Labour MP Joan Walley and including among its members the former leader of the Green Party Caroline Lucas and the fiercely independent Tory environmentalist Zac Goldsmith.

The catastrophic decline in the honeybee population, both in Britain and elsewhere, is widely deplored, but the implications of the hole made in the larger picture by the loss of these critical pollinators are yet to be fully appreciated. Beyond this manifestation of the issue, however, all of us who live in or near the countryside have heard of cases of human disease, the contracting of which appears to be linked to chemicals used in agriculture. This is a subject that is going to be aired more and more in future.

Disasters on a massive scale do long-term – perhaps irreparable – harm to significant areas of the planet. In the light of the damage to the Fukushima nuclear plant caused by the earthquake off the coast of northern Japan eighteen months ago, I wrote a piece asking some (I hoped) pertinent questions about the astonishing proportion of the world’s nuclear plants that are constructed on or near the fault lines where tectonic plates meet: the piece has been by a huge margin the most visited posting in the history of this blog (Nuclear and Present Danger March 17th 2011).

The mighty ash

Accidents involving contaminant materials will grow more common as multinational corporations embrace diversity and size but cut costs incurred in safety and expertise. After the examples of Bhopal and Chernobyl, they know that there is a fair chance that they will be able to get away with merely wringing their hands over loss of life, maiming of children and long-term genetic effects, provided the victims are poor and have no one to fight for their rights.

As the polar ice-caps melt and the seas rise, rather more sophisticated and litigious people will be affected. No corporations or governments will lose sleep over the loss of islands in and coastal regions on the Indian Ocean, but when Southeast England, the eastern seaboard of the United States and thousands of miles of western Europe are submerged, there will be a scramble to escape blame. Do not doubt that the rich and powerful, having relocated their governments and offices to higher ground, will not hesitate to shrug responsibility onto world leaders who are now dead and lobbyists and consultants who moved on long ago.

Vested interests such as multinational corporations and free marketeers discount climate change as an issue but no credible scientist does, unless he is in the pay of vested interests. The vested interests are in climate change denial because research into safeguards both incurs present expenditure and implies reductions in future profit. Capitalists have precious little interest in the long-term. They invest and speculate in the hope of lining their own pockets, not the pockets of their descendants.

In any case, capitalism increasingly deals in services rather than goods, in intangibles rather than products. When natural disasters strike, such businesses are only tangentially affected. It is residential areas, stuffed with vulnerable stuff, that suffer most.

I reached for the familiar term “natural disasters” but increasingly the disasters that befall the planet are man-made. The clearing of rain forest, the rise in carbon emissions, the consumption of fossil fuels and the pollution of the environment on land and sea all contribute to a distortion of the conditions in which nature operates, such that weather patterns are significantly in flux. In Britain, everyone has been aware of and has grumbled about the lack of so-called traditional summer conditions. The rainfall in April, June and September was the highest ever recorded. There have been fewer sunny days than even those with the longest memories can recall.

An extremely unwelcome keel slug

And the changes are global. This year alone, widespread flooding has struck Fiji, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Peru, Romania, North Korea, Nigeria, Myanmar, New Zealand, Australia, Russia, China, Nepal and India as well as Great Britain and Ireland. Conversely, this year drought has plagued eight countries on the African continent as well as stretching from Mexico to Canada with devastating impact on agriculture across the United States. Global food shortages are bound to follow.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations warned seven weeks ago of the economic consequences for the region if far more is not done to halt climate change. Monsoon patterns are being disrupted with incalculable consequences for agriculture and the region’s capacity to feed its people. Myanmar MP Kyaw Thiha said of floods in his country “this is what climate change looks like”.

Extreme weather conditions create opportunities for the destruction of habitat. As well as the rising waters, the warming of the planet sparks more wildfires that, like floods, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, destroy indiscriminately and comprehensively.

Fire and flood, quake and storm create great damage and vast disruption and take many lives. People are saved and rescued as a matter of priority but wildlife is simply wiped out by these events. Even birds cannot fly without rest: if there is nowhere to perch and floodwater or flame to the horizon, they drown or incinerate along with everything that cannot fly.

Wildlife extinction gathers pace as habitat is destroyed and as poaching and over-hunting go unchecked. Extreme weather also disrupts the natural life cycles of wild creatures, particularly because the availability of food becomes so irregular. In a limited and anecdotal way, we observe this in our garden and our field. This year many fruits have failed: there have been no pears, plums or damsons, very few cooking or crab apples, raspberries, currants, nuts and acorns. The squirrels are driven to eating conkers, a phenomenon we have not observed in our field before.

On the other hand, the rain has greatly encouraged slugs and snails, which attack many crops and which have been so emboldened that their hitherto nocturnal activity has extended right through the day. Keel slugs, the largest and most dismaying variety, have become epidemic across our land at the same time that their predators – hedgehogs, frogs – are much more rarely seen than before. A combination of rain, lack of sun and slug attack has seen off our hopes for potatoes, carrots, pumpkins and strawberries this year. The lack of sun in the greenhouse has reduced our tomatoes too.

Constant rain greatly reduces creatures that move through the air. We have noticed far fewer flying insects of all kinds this year. It is a measure of desperation that on a relatively mild day like today, one may see a few dragonflies and butterflies still active so late in the season. Bats and birds are clearly less numerous. We are lucky enough that an extensive colony of wrens makes its home in our grounds and the cover we provide has helped them survive two successive severe winters – small birds in particular are vulnerable to the cold – but we fear that another testing winter will leave its mark.

Slugs routinely attack brassicas

In another part of the forest, a fungus from the continent is threatening our native ash trees, no doubt rendered more virulent by a concomitant reduction in the ability of the trees to fight invasive fungi. The ash is the most numerous of the trees on our property and its loss has not seemed like a threat before – indeed, we have taken down several full-grown specimens, including one that was undermining the foundations of the house, while pulling up ash seedlings and saplings by the dozen (they are by no stretch of the imagination difficult to cultivate). But the sudden possibility that they will all go is extremely disheartening. I recall the rapid spread of so-called Dutch Elm Disease some 45 years ago. It accounted for upwards of 25 million trees in Britain, including the majestic row that bordered the cricket field at my old school, a ground so well thought of that the county team played a home fixture on it every season.

The reduction and eventual extinction of flora and fauna may be thought of as an aesthetic issue – merely an aesthetic issue – or (if you want to be grandiloquent about it) a moral issue. But these matters should also give pause to those only detained by severely practical considerations. For the global system may only operate efficiently – or indeed at all – if every component is in place. As soon as we, in our preoccupation with our own “more important” concerns, ignore the tears in the fabric of the intricate interweave of the natural world, we risk setting off chains of harm that may well harm us too.

Leaders from Aung San Suu Kyi to Merkel, from Obama to Zuma are – perhaps understandably – preoccupied with concerns of global and national economy, of citizens’ rights and imagined political scandals. But unless they raise their heads from these small concerns, they will not be addressing the matter that should be the first consideration every day of their working lives.

Modern leaders are peculiarly mindful of their so-called legacy, of the benisons that will be credited to them in years to come. Only if the present generation of leaders manages to save the planet can they hope to go down in history, for otherwise there will be no history in which they will be able to go down.

A GHOST STORY RETAILED

Act III: BIG TROUBLE

In the previous canto of this lamentation for the independent, individual retailer, I limned the way department stores have been subsumed into uniform chains, like Debenhams and House of Fraser. But some of these chains are not all that they seem. For instance, BHS, Burton, Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and others have been herded together under the ownership of that ornament on the British scene Philip Green, knighted for his services to tax avoidance, and his fellow entrepreneur and wife, Tina. This is where liberal capitalism leads: a handful of billionaires who decide everything that the marketplace will trade, just as Marx anticipated.

JK Galbraith expounded the privileged position of captains of industry more than fifty years ago. He was writing of a very different sort of economy, driven by productive rather than service industries. The billionaires with whose reputations he had grown up in North America – Henry Ford, EH Harriman, Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller, JP Morgan, William Randolph Hearst – had generally either made things (automobiles, railroads, steel) or constructed enabling empires (oil, personal banking, publishing).

The Romford branch of Sainsbury's, more than a century ago

“Without question,” wrote Galbraith, “the individual with the greatest stake in the present economic goals is the businessman – more precisely, perhaps, the important business executive. If production is of preoccupying importance he, as the man with the traditional and established right to the title of producer, will be the dominant figure in the social constellation. Society will accord him prestige appropriate to the role he plays; what may well be less important, he will be able, without difficulty or criticism, to command an income that is related to his prestige. As production has increasingly monopolized our economic attitudes, the business executive has grown in esteem. So long as inequality was a matter of serious concern the tycoon had, at best, an ambiguous position. He performed a function of obvious urgency. But he was also regularly accused of taking far too much for his services. As concern for inequality has declined, this reaction has disappeared. The businessman is no longer subject to a serious challenge of any sort” [The Affluent Society, 1958].

Prof Galbraith’s description of inequality as being formerly “a matter of serious concern” refers to a now far-distant time. Socialism was effectively dead in the USA by the end of the 1930s, in Britain by the end of the 1950s and in Galbraith’s native Canada by the mid-1960s. And now of course production no longer has any monopoly on the economy either side of the Atlantic. These days, a producer is usually understood to be someone in charge of movies, adverts, software, music, television programmes. Most of us in the west toil in service industries. The making of machines, vehicles, implements, garments, furnishings and toys is almost entirely confined to the Far East. Our billionaires are the asset strippers, speculators, venture capitalists and money manipulators who produce nothing but who feed off the toil of low-paid workers in the teeming nations of the developing economies.

Once these buccaneers have grown rich, they naturally like to own things that bespeak their wealth: property, private jets and yachts, customised cars, fine art, trophy wives and, most important of all, businesses. There are some assets, both the initial acquisition and the continuing upkeep of which may only be afforded by multi-millionaires, because they are apt to bleed money and require constant feeding: newspapers, football clubs, hotels, theatres, and movie and television production houses. A safer bet, provided the owner is a shrewd re-investor, is the retail chain. But the biggest chains have been built over generations, mostly within a family: Sainsbury, Walton, Morrison. So my argument comes finally to the biggest kind of chain store.

Of all the perfectly horrible developments in the retail trade since the Second World War. the relentless swamping of the world by superstores has been both in itself the worst and the one chiefly responsible for all the other most horrible developments. The boards of superstores (and their shareholders) seek only to maximize their profits. Look at the regular lists of the richest people in Britain and you will note how many of the names near the top of the list are those of directors of superstores or of companies engaged not in the production of items but in the packaging of items sold in superstores.

Packing 'em in: trolleys at Morrisons

The big stores oversee the permanent buyer-for-retail’s market they have stimulated. They are so powerful that they fix prices, determining the fates of every area of the farming effort, both in this country and throughout the world’s producing nations. They require blemish-free, regular-shaped produce all year round and in predictable quantity. Any wholesaler unable to guarantee this unnatural supply is simply squeezed out of the business. The big stores settle for nothing less than exactly what they want on their own brutal terms.

I once met a former supplier to the supermarkets who told me horrendous tales of the profound ignorance of the buyers – even the chief buyers – who represent the big stores. Characteristically, these tribunes of the shopping people know nothing of seasonality, growing conditions, available varieties or any other practicality of agriculture, by this man’s account. They form categorical, non-negotiable conclusions based on whim, even about items the taste of which they personally do not care for. This at any rate was what he found and he quoted chapter and verse that had the smack of lived experience, gnawing at him in his enforced, premature retirement.

So what these stores, in their ignorance, don’t want falls out of production and customers are obliged to settle for what the superstores have determined that they will have. You can whistle if you want an item that doesn’t confirm to the supermarket’s crass standards. It isn’t profitable so it is ruthlessly culled or made palatable to the taste of the lowest common denominator and so of no interest to you.

It isn’t any use you preferring fruit with the beautiful taste that can only be produced by the natural ripening process in season. Such fruit is only available if you grow it yourself or travel to where it grows plentifully or have access to one of the small-scale specialist growers grimly hanging on to provide those who are willing to go to some trouble for decent merchandise and to be patient for the appropriate time of year. Those who cannot wait until weeks after Wimbledon and who have never tasted a truly delicious strawberry full of in-season juice (especially a tiny wild one) will buy their oversized, flown-in, force-ripened ones in, say, January and imagine that is what a strawberry is like.

Farmers who cannot get by on a large enough fan-base for organic, local and seasonal produce need to be ruthless themselves in order to maximize their yields to satisfy the stores. Pesticides and other chemicals must be applied in industrial quantities to preserve the eerily perfect appearance of the fruit and vegetables. These treatments have their nuclear effect on the insects that feed on the crop margins. They also prevent birds, small mammals and other creatures from taking their share both of the crops and of the insects. These creatures are poisoned or genetically altered by imbibing the chemicals through the flesh of either the crops or the insects. When they do not take the adulterated flesh, they starve.

A branch of Safeway in Cardiff, closed at the end of last century

Denied a healthy food source, the wild creatures die out. The buyer of the unearthly orange-coloured carrot, perfectly straight and with no blemish on its skin but tasting only of rinsing water and slightly of chemicals is unconcerned that a sub-species of shrew or a variety of field butterfly or a type of shrike disappears from its last habitat. But the world is poorer for it. The world is poorer for the decline of good taste in the carrot too.

The appearance of the countryside has radically altered in my lifetime. Modest fields of mixed, rotating crops that fell to the plough in time for the Harvest Festival have been replaced by vast vistas of fast-growing animal fodder. Thanks to the ubiquitous spread of the brassica appropriately called rape, Blake’s England has become an acid yellow and unpleasant land.

Animal farming has changed too. Pandemics of disease – foot and mouth, bovine spongiform encephalopathy – are spread readily in factory-farming conditions and so have wiped out flocks and herds. Consequently, local bloodlines are disrupted and abandoned. Additionally, the narrow demands of supermarkets have put a premium on the meat, milk and other by-products of specific strains. So, for instance, what the Scots call the “heeland coo” is now common in many parts of Britain and no longer a beautiful beast peculiar to the Highlands. The countryside has become like the high street: physical character may distinguish one part from another but the introduced elements are the same all over the country so that a field in Dorset sustains the same inhabitants as a dale in Yorkshire.

Having ruined the food industry, the supermarkets went after other businesses to undermine. First there was a return to the high street with an explosion of small-scale marts, also located in residential areas and small towns – Tesco Express was the leader of this trend. This initiative was a direct challenge to second-rank chains like 7-Eleven (now extinct in the UK), Spar and Budgens as well as to individual corner shops. Then, in September 2005, Tesco opened in Manchester its first non-food supermarket. This upped the anti even further. Whatever you sell – yes, you sir, the ironmonger who used to be the star of your high street, and you madam, the modest draper whose shop has been adored by its regulars since the 1920s – you are powerless against the big guys.

The conventions established in superstores have spread to other retailers that have sufficiently large branches to adopt them. For instance, many stores have done away with the old-fashioned counter system and replaced it with supermarket-style checkouts. Typically, they have found that the checkouts require fewer staff, because all the transactions are concentrated in one place. Thus, as long as at least one of the tills in a row even of ten or twelve is in operation, customers are only likely to complain about being made to wait to complete their purchase if ungrateful people like me are in the queue.

Superstore policies have done damage far beyond the field of diverse retail. Because these stores buy in bulk and sell at speed and in quantity – “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” to quote the founding motto of Sam Walton’s Walmart megaliths n the US – they require produce to be transported, delivered, stored and sold in regular-sized units – what restaurant chains call “portion control”.

The display of loose, unpackaged produce takes a very lowly second-place to regulation quantity packs, inevitably pitched at the conventionally-sized family. As with the siting of venues for the benefit of car-drivers, so this packaging culture discriminates against the single person or the household whose members have divergent needs and tastes. It also discourages those who prefer to pick over the selection and choose what they want. With some fruits and vegetables, this is critical. Only a nincompoop buys an onion that is less than hard as nails because as soon as it softens an onion is past its best. When you may only buy a sealed bag containing eight or ten onions, it is impossible to determine whether all the onions are sufficiently hard (if indeed any of them are) and anyway you are probably being obliged to purchase more than you require.

Pitsea landfill site

Packaging is not designed to help the customer, save for those who have been conditioned by the superstores – and in the nature of things, these are an increasing proportion of the total – to settle for what they are given. And packaging as an industry has grown fat on the backs of the superstores’ requirements. Most of this packaging, even that part of it that is recyclable, is added to the mountain of landfill garbage that the world generates in self-defeating quantities. Much of it ends up polluting the oceans as well as the land and much of it is fatally ingested by wild creatures. Once again, Tesco and co are making a decisive contribution to the extinction of the planet’s dwindling wildlife.

What can be done to curb the dominance of the superstores? In the last few days, we have seen that they may already carry the seeds of their own destruction. Tesco suffered a much poorer Christmas season than it had anticipated, was obliged to issue a profits warning and saw as much as £5bn wiped off the value of the company in a single day’s share trading. That it can sustain such a loss without being consigned to the same basket-case basket as HMV, Thorntons and Mothercare says a lot about its expectation of continuing profit and its vast size: it employs almost half a million people worldwide.

Why did Tesco have such a bad Christmas? Part of it is down to governmental manipulation of the economy. The Tories prefer to squeeze hardest those social groups least likely to support the party, so the C2 and D groups – for whom shopping for daily food and household basics comprise their big-ticket spending – are the ones having to cut that kind of spending. (Argos, the down-market catalogue chain, has seen a comparable decline in its profits). By contrast, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, whose customer base is more middle class, have been less affected by the recession.

But there is also a technological ingredient in the changing fortunes of the supermarket giants. John Lewis, along with its subsidiary Waitrose, has prospered not only from the relative resilience of better-heeled customers but also from anticipating the nature of the growth of on-line shopping. Andy Street, the John Lewis managing director, told The World at One the other day that the secret was to manage a combination of on-line ordering and in-store collection: “bricks and clicks” he calls it. Tesco may not yet have devoted enough planning to what is called a “multi-channel strategy”.

Nevertheless, Tesco is still comfortably the market-share leader, the 30 percent that it takes of the market remaining nearly double that of its nearest rival, Asda (which is the British identity of Walmart). Despite a healthy Christmas, Sainsbury’s remains about 0.5 percent behind Asda. The superstore sector as a whole grew by nearly five percent last year.

Monopoly legislation defines a “classic monopoly” as 25 percent of market share in a given sector. But when the Competition Commission considered the case of Tesco in 2007, it did nothing to threaten the company’s position. This despite that, when Morrisons bought Safeway in 2004, the Commission obliged Morrisons to part with 52 of the acquired stores, ten of which were bought by Tesco. It seems that there is one rule for Tesco and one for everyone else.

Mini-Tescos invade the high street: this one is in Bedford

What can be done to curb the over-mighty superstores? A widespread determination among shoppers to support independent retailers, local traders and small, specialist chains would be the most effective weapon, but contemporary society has learnt to believe that it values convenience above all else – and remember that an early name for the multi-purpose chain was “the convenience store”. One might think that the surprising popularity of food programmes on television would encourage viewers to favour locally-grown and seasonal produce. But the telly chefs themselves do not follow the implications of their trade. The most depressing aspect of Antony Worrall Thompson’s recent shameful shoplifting escapade was that it took place at his local branch of Tesco.

The government could support the independent and small-scale retailer against the huge conglomerates by adjusting the business rate. Why not abolish the taxation altogether for enterprises whose premises and workforce are below a certain size? Another route to restricting the power of the superstores would play its part in a piece of social engineering that I have long advocated. My argument goes like this:

Whenever governments attempt to intervene in private activities that have a deleterious effect on those who pursue them (and, though this is routinely ignored in the argument, on others too), people complain about “the nanny state”. Oddly enough, the same people scamper to nanny NHS when they begin to suffer the diseases caused by smoking, drinking, obesity and so on. This point might usefully be made more often.

The logo of an anti-Tesco website

Recurrent proposals for price controls and consumption restrictions, advertising and sponsorship bans and other such measures (ones that also punish responsible consumption and adversely affect enterprises that are innocent third parties) are always fiercely fended off by vested interests. Rather than fixing a minimum price for alcohol, a simpler measure would be to revoke the licences of all supermarkets and non-specialist chains to sell alcohol and indeed smoking materials. This would also be a useful counter-balance to the all-purpose chains that have driven so many off-licences, pubs and newsagent/tobacconists out of business. Many young people find an off-licence a rather more daunting outlet than a corner Costcutter with its discounted plonk and strong beers.

Then, an enlightened Chancellor might impose new, swingeing duties on smoking materials and alcohol that are strictly and accountably ring-fenced for payment direct to the NHS, so that smokers and drinkers may know that they are contributing towards the treatment that they will themselves require. A similar imposition might be made on processed foods, using a sliding scale dictated by objective nutritional assessments, with more stringent tests and surcharges imposed on catering supplies, the contents of which are not (but could be and should be) vouchsafed to consumers. If that works well, all foodstuffs that cannot demonstrate that they are organic might subsequently be surcharged in the same way. Food producers will have an incentive to put themselves in a position where they can demonstrate the healthy nature of their ingredients and processes. This is taxation as organic carrot rather than as resented stick.

A further useful intervention by government would be the imposition of a surcharge on non-recyclable packaging, payable both by the supplier and by the retailer. This would favour, for instance, the greengrocer who sells loose vegetables in paper bags and the delicatessen dispensing cheese in greaseproof wrapping and other items in card tubs. The charge for a plastic bag should be increased vertiginously so that everyone painfully understands the virtue of the re-use of bags issued by the stores and the acquisition by the shopper of old-fashioned shopping bags and baskets constructed of natural materials.

It is not beyond the powers of ministers to restore a balanced cohesion to the state of British retail. Being realistic, though, it may be beyond their powers of imagination. CONCLUDED.

“EVERYTHING THAT LIVES is HOLY

… life delights in life” declared William Blake in America. A little more than 200 years after he wrote those words, the only seriously holy item on earth is profit. Dozens of the orders of creature that lived holily on the planet in Blake’s day no longer exist. The dodo was the proverbial extinct bird in my childhood, but by now the dodo is just one of many casualties of the greed of man.

At the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, Japan these last few days, delegates were advised that one fifth of all animal and plant species are now classed as endangered. The CBD decided to adopt some targets. They agreed to halve the rate of loss of habitat, including forest, by 2020. Note that there is no notion of making up the loss already sustained. Halving the rate of loss merely extends the period during which habitat may be destroyed and be assured that the destruction will continue.

Going ... the orangutan ...

The British coalition government, with that cynical sense of timing that has become its habitual method of making announcements, has just now revealed that it will put Britain’s national forests up for sale. Expect Epping Forest – renamed Tesco ‘Every-Little-Helps’ Woods – to be cleared for potato cultivation so that the supermarket chain can grow its “own-brand oven-ready chips” at a knockdown price, thus making the loss of the forest well worthwhile.

... going ... the cheetah ...

Also agreed at Nagoya was that by 2020 “at least 17 percent” of “terrestrial water bodies” and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas will be protected as biodiversity zones, under a measure known as the Aichi Targets. Given the nature of most everything in water – including water itself – to move freely, unaware of zonal restrictions, it’s difficult to see how the protection will be of much use. As soon as a minke whale swims out of protected water, some Japanese profiteer will harpoon it. The only (theoretical) beneficiaries of the protection will be those organisms that are anchored within the zones – coral reefs, for instance – but as such organisms are characteristically destroyed by pollutants and as the drift of pollutants will not be inclined to recognize the parameters of protection zones, it seems doubtful that such decreed protection will actually protect anything for very long.

... going ... the white pelican ...

It was the Brazilian delegation, representing one of the most enlightened and progressive governments currently in office, that pressed hardest for this measure. Such crumbs are the best that enlightenment can secure. The convention was told that the goal on biodiversity loss sustainable by this year, agreed at an earlier CBD summit, had not been met by a country mile. On the contrary, biodiversity loss has increased more sharply than all predictions had anticipated. It just fills you with confidence, doesn’t it?

... going ... the black lemur of Madagascar ...

Does it matter if the creatures that innocently share the planet with us die out? You tell me. I would argue that it is not a moral issue. For half a century, I have cleaved to the view – and argued the case whenever I was granted the platform on which to do so – that “moral issues” are really nothing of the kind. A moral argument, I venture, is just an aesthetic response tempered by a judgment concerning practicality. Take abortion for instance. The mountain of morality that is built upon this matter consists largely of a confrontation between those who are repelled by the idea of “a life” being sacrificed (viz the anti-abortion lobby calling itself “Pro-Life”) and those who favour a woman being permitted to control her own destiny. It’s a pretty straightforward confrontation between an assertion concerning what is tasteful in polite (and particularly religious) society and what human beings can – and therefore “should” be able to – determine about their own condition.

... going ... the high brown fritillary of Great Britain.

The supposed morality – as to whether disposing of a foetus is “right” or “wrong” – is, I would contend, wholly beside the point. Anybody of any sort of sensibility might be repelled by a newly pregnant woman determining that, even supported by a wholly responsible and sensitive partner, she cannot, in a phrase, “be bothered” to “go through the hassle” of carrying a child to term – quite how many impregnated woman promulgate such a rationale for abortion I cannot guess. But at the other end of the spectrum there are individuals standing for public office in the US as I write who would not allow the victim of a gang-rape by HIV-positive, drug-addled psychopaths to terminate a resultant pregnancy. Neither of these extremes deserves to be subsumed under any notion so elevated as “morality”.

Gone in the last five years ... the golden toad to the effects of global warming ...

Does it “matter” if the tiger, say, or the mountain gorilla or the honeybee or the seahorse ceases to be? I think it may be argued urgently that it matters terribly if it may be demonstrated persuasively that the loss of such creatures imperils the survival of all of life on earth by skewing the balance of natural forces. The climate change deniers will no doubt argue that, as long as the car industry doesn’t take any kind of hit as a result, the polar bear may happily go the way of the passenger pigeon. But I maintain that, in a perfectly coherent and comprehensible sense, the world and we humans in it are “the poorer” for the loss of those creatures with whom we share the habitat and who depend on our benignity to be permitted to survive.


... gone ... the black-faced honeybird or poo-uli of Hawaii to starvation and disease ...

It may be merely sentimental to fear that succeeding generations – if indeed they are any such – will abominate ours for having the carelessness to allow the black-footed albatross and the sea otter to die out. But what we cannot know – and the tragedy would be to know it when it is too late to retrieve the damage – is the long-term impact of the loss of any species or sub-species. “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil” as the title of Edward Lorenz’ famous paper on chaos theory demanded to know “set off a tornado in Texas?” The demise of the Indian elephant would, I venture, set off a far more far-reaching ripple effect that the flap of a butterfly’s wing.

...gone ... the black rhino of west Africa to poaching and loss of habitat ...

Science will endeavour to preserve the DNA of species so that, if and when (big if, big when) the time is propitious, a lost species might be restored. But the carnage individual by individual is vile, quite as much as the falling of whole orders. I know that creatures in the wild live severely circumscribed existences, even without man’s interventions. Wild creatures do not die of old age. They do not live to suffer the indignities of longevity – heart disease, cancer, dementia, organ failure – as pets do. The great majority of wild creatures, left alone by man, yet perish by starvation, extreme weather or being eaten alive. Man’s baleful additions to these fates embrace hunting, “pest control”, poisoning both deliberate and incidental, habitat destruction, food denial and the inadvertent results of unchecked global warming. If millions of people are killed, maimed, disease-ridden and starved by “natural disasters” – flooding in Pakistan and China, earthquakes in Haiti and China, wildfires in Greece and Australia, drought in East Africa and China – imagine the numberless, unregarded creatures that perish also. No one attempts to rescue any of them.

... gone ... the Madeiran large white to pollution and loss of habitat ...

Capitalism, the home of climate change denial, cares nothing for wildlife as long as there remain the tastier flesh providers and the more satisfying “sport” victims (huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ “bags”). But the indifference to animal catastrophe extends to human disaster too, provided the victims are of no account. The accidents at Chernobyl and Bhopal show that ordinary people unfortunate enough to be affected by industrial or nuclear spillage have little hope of proper recompense. Even in powerful and enlightened countries, authorities are tardy in helping to put back together the lives of those in the path of disaster: consider the insensitivity of Washington towards the city of New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina and the weak reaction of the Hungarian government when tons of toxic sludge poured free of a metals plant at Kolontar earlier this month.

... but not forgotten: the dodo

The media generally finds such diversion as the soap opera of Wayne Rooney more compelling than the fate of the planet. Those who aspire to stay considerably wealthier even than that pudden-headed ball-kicker hope that the day is far off when people with whom they identify and particularly people with powerful lawyers find their lives overwhelmed by the accumulating disasters of global warming. Meanwhile, the mute creatures die out order by order, leaving an increasingly gaping void in the beauty of what was once a natural paradise.

*****************************

When Showtime's Dexter began transmission on FX in Britain, I was intrigued by it but found most of the characters wholly unsympathetic. Some of the habitual aggression has been toned down – Keith Carradine's elegant (and sadly curtailed) participation helped with this – but the compelling imagination of the writing has gradually raised the series to a pretty high level. Michael C Hall's central performance has become infinitely subtle – I always liked his work in Six Feet Under – and perhaps his game has been raised by the quality of the actors called in to play the successive serial killers: Jimmy Smits in the third series, John Lithgow in the fourth just ended here. The sequence in which Lithgow, coolly feigning innocent curiosity, strolled into Miami Police HQ and confirmed Dexter's identity was a masterpiece of controlled cunning in its execution. The resonances rippled in multiple directions and the tension was screwed up wholly psychologically and without any action-movie tricks. Brilliant.

The WORLD MUST BE PEOPLED … MUSTN’T IT?

On Monday night, Channel 4 showed a programme, laughingly called a documentary, entitled Life After People. Though it pulled down a good deal of opinion, most of it seemingly of scientific repute, it was more like an apocalyptic Hollywood vision without any actors. There couldn't be actors. As the title indicates, the programme posited a world beyond humanity.

The narration offered no rationale for a people-less world and so the entire exercise was built upon sand. The first concern of the story, chronologically, was the fate of animals. The survival of domestic pets was understandably – if unrealistically gently – addressed. Most mysteriously, the cities of the world appeared to be overrun by escaped zoo animals too. How did they escape? We were not told, any more than we learned how so many dogs got out to roam when you know that, in the endless absence of its owner, almost every dog would starve to death shut in a building. The exotic animals in city settings allowed for interesting computer-generated juxtapositions and these heralded the primary concern of the programme, which was to get to the computer simulations of great landmarks degenerating and eventually toppling. If we saw Brooklyn Bridge collapse once, we saw it six times. It wasn’t so much a science-based documentary, more a video game.

Now what kind of Armageddon will it be that wipes out humans and only humans and leaves all the buildings standing? Not a nuclear war, obviously. Not a global biological incident. Not even a viral epidemic: after all, it’s hard to imagine a virus that only affected humans yet could not be contained either medically or physically. The reason that bubonic plague took hold is the same reason that avian flu was so scary: it’s spread by uncontrollable creatures and it can jump species. A virus that jumps species will mutate sufficiently to infect at least all mammals, if not cockroaches, the most likely survivors of any catastrophe.

The day after the Channel 4 programme, BBC News reported the extent of the global threat to animals. “A third of the world's animal species have become extinct in the last three decades, figures show” the BBC website announced, a claim also made by Roger Harrabin in the report. I’m as pessimistic as anybody about the future prospects for those creatures with which we share the planet but this estimate seems way over the top. What “figures” are these that show such a thing? Harrabin cited only one creature “thought to have become extinct this year”, the Yangtze River dolphin, a rather specialized, limited example, you would think. If a third of species have gone since 1978, wouldn’t some of them be familiar, wouldn’t we have heard about them? The lion, the emu, the bullfrog, the haddock?

Of course, all life on earth, all evidence that there was ever life on earth will eventually be swept away when the sun explodes or fizzles out or the planet gets hit by a rogue meteor. Shakespeare knew this, long before all but some old tortoise somewhere was alive and he had Prospero describe it:

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep" [The Tempest Act IV, Scene 1]

The makers of Life After People, Americans who allowed Channel 4 to part-anglicize their work, might pay a little more attention to the giants of literature and a little less to CGI geeks.