Let's use food to explain the environmental issues

On BBC Springwatch this week they explained the importance of plankton in feeding the world. Well not quite, they said that without plankton we wouldn't be able eat fish and chips.

This got me thinking - the sign of a good programme - and I wondered to what extent did understanding food chains appear in the national curriculum. So I looked it up.

The answer is not much. There's reference in the Science Curriculum to constructing 'simple food chains' and there are further references to understanding where mammals get their food from but it doesn't appear to go far enough (although I'm sure individual teachers do).

Springwatch hit the nail on the head, plankton is the start of a food chain that ends on our plate. Failure to look after the whole food chain has potentially dire consequences for us humans.

Understanding the food change is not just about understanding the building blocks of our own survival, it is also vital if we are to tackle issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss.

We all understand food, we can relate to it. Let's exploit our relationship with food to explain and put into context some of the environmental issues that we're struggling to communicate.

 

There's no joined-up thinking

The Natural Environment White Paper (2011) states that we will be 'the first generation to leave the natural environment of England in a better state than it inherited.'

The National Ecosystem Assessment (2011) stated that over 40% of priority habitat and 30% of priority species were declining.

The Biodiversity 2020 Strategy (2011) stated as its objective: 'to halt overall biodiversity loss, support healthy well-functioning ecosystems and establish coherent ecological networks, with more and better places for nature for the benefit of wildlife and people' 

There have been several other reports since 2011 but I'm not aware of any that has openly reversed or gone back on these commitments and facts. Actually I'm fairly certain that I have heard the Secretary of State and the Minister for Environment both re-affiriming the first statement very recently.

Yet a few weeks ago I drove home and on the 7 mile route between the motorway and my house I passed three lots of contractors cutting down trees, shrubs and hedging.

A few weeks ago would be the end of April. A time when birds are either busy building nests or actually sitting on eggs. And yet here in a 7 mile stretch were three lots of contractors destroying their habitat.

So I sent an email to my local council, Basingstoke and Deane. Putting aside the automatic response that says they'll respond within 5 days and didn't, I did eventually receive an email from the Principal Engineer at Hampshire County Council who very quickly pointed out that none of the works was carried out by them but at least he did bother to explain.

One scheme, where mature trees and shrubs have been removed from a large roundabout and several roadside verges, has a 'very demanding timetable and it was imperative that site clearance work was carried out so that the main contract works were not held up.'

At another smaller roundabout all the mature shrubs that were in leaf have been cut back and reduced to about 1/4 of the size and all leaf cover removed. Basingstoke & Deane council were due 'complete this work earlier but it was delayed as most of the available staff were dealing with the flooding'

Nobody apparently knows why approximately 100 metres of hedging has been removed from another road, other than we know that a roundabout is due to be created just about where the hedge was.

In conclusion, we have a large scale project being run by someone (or more likely a committee) that can't timetable it properly. A decision maker who has had since last autumn to cut back vegetation on a roundabout and a roadside hedge but decided that neither could wait until after the breeding season this year. 

How exactly is Basinstoke & Deane and Hampshire County Council going to achieve its part in halting biodiversity loss if it makes these sorts of decisions? And these probably aren't the only instances, I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of this unique appraoch to conservation all over the borough.

Local Decision Makers - if national policy is something you would rather ignore or you truly believe that nature is someting to be exploited and built over, then please have the gumption to tell your MPs so that the electorate doesn't have to listen to objectives that you can't be bothered to achieve.

And if that wasn't your intention then do a bit more joined-up thinking because the messages you are sending out are undermining your credibility.

 

What can Kotter teach us about being more sustainable?

Today I received an email from Harvard Business Review promoting the combined works of Professor John Kotter who is well known for his views on Leading Change within businesses.

To my mind the challenge that we face in society with regards to living more sustainably, addressing climate change and biodiversity loss requires a 'change programme'.

We need to change our behaviour, our attitudes and the way we live. Businesses have been managing change programmes in the workplace for years so I thought I would review Kotter's 8 Steps and see if they could work for these big national and international issues.

Below is from Kotter's website with my comments in bold.

Step 1: Establishing a Sense of Urgency

Help others see the need for change and they will be convinced of the importance of acting immediately.

The way I see it, it’s governments, some in the media, and business leaders that need to be convinced. The sense of urgency is well documented, not least in UN and Government sponsored reports that they choose not to act on.

Step 2: Creating the Guiding Coalition

Assemble a group with enough power to lead the change effort, and encourage the group to work as a team.

Plenty of groups have been set up but you need to listen to their advice and recommendations. And empower them to act, not come up with excuses NOT to implement their suggestions.

Step 3: Developing a Change Vision

Create a vision to help direct the change effort, and develop strategies for achieving that vision. 

That’s a rounded vision, a holistic vision, not just one focussed on a single issue like economic growth.

Step 4: Communicating the Vision for Buy-in

Make sure as many as possible understand and accept the vision and the strategy.

Seems sensible enough, although you may want to prioritise efforts towards those decision makers who are more cynical and could undermine your strategy, such as politicians and certain parts of the media.

Step 5: Empowering Broad-based Action

Remove obstacles to change, change systems or structures that seriously undermine the vision, and encourage risk-taking and nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions.

Remove obstacles, change systems if they don’t work with the strategy and encourage people. Less is more. No need to spend hundreds of millions on IT systems or create working groups to procrastinate and create unecessary processes. 

Step 6: Generating Short-term Wins

Plan for achievements that can easily be made visible, follow-through with those achievements and recognize and reward employees who were involved.

But only if they are recognised as short-term wins and not tokenistic gestures that appear to show progress but haven’t really achieved very much at all.

Step 7: Never Letting Up

Use increased credibility to change systems, structures, and policies that don't fit the vision, also hire, promote, and develop employees who can implement the vision, and finally reinvigorate the process with new projects, themes, and change agents. 

In other words let those that can make change happen, make it a reality. Don’t stifle them, don’t create process that will impede them and don't take them off the job until it’s complete.

Step 8: Incorporating Changes into the Culture

Articulate the connections between the new behaviors and organizational success, and develop the means to ensure leadership development and succession.

Don’t let a future Prime Minister, Secretary of State or CEO cock it all up and undo everything at a later date.

 

Give me the money!

In 2010 the Prime Minister said "The Big Society is about a huge culture change...

...where people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace...

...don't always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face ...

...but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities”

Since then the government has directly funded Academy Schools to be set-up and managed at a local level. £3.8bn has been allocated to Health and Wellbeing boards to encourage integrated health and social services. Local Enterprise Partnerships have been given the task of distributing and prioritising tens of billions of pounds to stimulate the economy, create jobs and encourage enterprise at a local level.

But to my knowledge no-one has been given any money to sort out the environment. 

We’ve had The Lawton Report, The Natural Environment White Paper, The Ecosystem Services Market Task Force reports, The Natural Capital Committee reports, the Natural Childhood report, the State of Nature report, not to forget the IPCC’s latest report on climate change. Plenty of evidence for the need for radical change and investment in our natural environment and yet the Big Society which has funded education, health and business stops short of the environment. Why?

Perhaps it’s because no-one has come forward, so let me put my hand up and say ‘I’ll do it’. Of course there will need to be terms of reference and I will gather around me the relevant qualified people and cross-sector representation but there’s plenty to do so let’s get on with it.

Dave? Owen? George?

What is this thing called Biodiversity?

Biodiversity, or biological diversity, is how scientists describe what the rest of us understand to be ‘nature’. Plants, flowers, trees, insects, birds, mammals, fish and all the other species that we can and can’t see that make up the living natural world.

‘Biodiversity value’ relates to the amount and abundance of different species. An area with high biodiversity (ie different types of species in healthy numbers) is indicative of the health of the environment in general.

Biodiversity Loss

The natural world is suffering, primarily because of the actions of humans. We have dug up, built over, knocked down, polluted and hunted and it is acknowledged globally that the loss of birds, butterflies, wildflowers, trees and others from our environment is at crisis point.

In 2011 the UK government published its Natural Envrionment White Paper, a 50 year vision for the environment and ultimately stated a goal to halt biodiversity loss by 2020. 

The Secretary of State for the Environment, Owen Paterson, has stated several times that economic growth should not be at the expense of the natural environment. Alas, he hasn't done much to ensure that this actually happens.

In the past nature conservation has focused on creating nature reserves but now the challenge is: ‘landscape scale conservation’, which really means that we need to make space for nature in every corner of a cities, towns and villages, not just in fenced nature reserves.

This means that landowners from house builders, to retailers, to local authorities, to farmers and everyone in between has a responsibility to be much more considerate of their impact on the environment.

So what if we lose a few butterfiles and flowers?

Everything in the natural world is connected and can be said to have a purpose. If you think about it nothing goes to waste in nature, everything is used and has a use. It’s a complete system and we break it at our peril.

We are breaking it and we are starting to see the consequences.

Soil erosion that isn't preventing rain water from flooding our streets, lack of green spaces that have contributed to physical inactivity and mental health problems, decline of insects that threaten crop pollination, these are all warning signs telling us to change our ways.

Biodiversity isn't a particularly user-friendly word so let me put it like this: We are destroying nature and in doing so we are making ourselves ill. It's like slowly being poisoned, you don't notice at the start but as the cumulative effect takes hold the signs emerge and then it's too late.

To value or not to value

In The Guardian this week George Monbiot argues that you cannot put a price on nature and Tony Juniper responds by saying that valuing nature is the only way to afford it some protection.

Actually they are both right.

In a capitalist world that measures success by growth and therefore unsustainable consumption, monetary metrics is the only language that the boardroom and cabinet office understand. Therefore we have to put a price on nature just to get it on the agenda. What we cannot allow to happen is for the value to be 'bargain basement' or 'but one get one free'.

However the problems associated with value would not arise if we really did appreciate nature for its own sake. A number of us see beauty in nature and are heartened at the return of migrating birds or seeing a species of flower or butterfly for the first time that year but far too many people only see beauty in branding, personalities, cars, phones, computer games and apps.

Putting a monetary value on nature isn't a panacea, it isn't suddenly going to reverse the trend of habitat loss but it might make people stop for a second and think about nature. Something that Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast Thinking Slow, calls System 2 thinking, which means we give a situation proper consideration rather than just jumping to a quick conclusion, such as "It's only a tree."

The longer term challenge is to help people understand that nature is foundation of all life, not just the economy.

Less nature leads to less exercise

The opening statement of the report from the All Party Commission on Physical Inactivity states:

 

'The UK faces an epidemic of physical inactivity. Over the last half century we have simply stopped moving—in our schools, our work places, our towns, cities—and how we get between them. In all human history, we have never been so inactive.’

 

The report goes on to list the cost of physical inactivity to health and the economy, because the two are inextricably linked.

 

Of course the problem starts in childhood where physical inactivity is leading to childhood obesity but adults are no better.

 

Nearly a quarter of all adults fail to achieve 30 mins activity over the course of a week so it’s no surprise then that heart disease, diabetes and mental health problems have all increased by 25% 45% costing the UK economy £20 billion per year.

 

The cost to business has been put at nearly £6 billion per year through absenteeism and the associated costs of employees being off work through illness.

 

What is not fully measured or accounted for is the rate of decline in an individuals ability to perform at work as the effects of physical inactivity take hold. Mental ill health for example might impair a persons ability for months before reaching the point that they require treatment and time off.

 

The All Party Commission on Physical Inactivity (APCOPI) talks about the need for exercise at school and in April 2014 the government pledged £150m to help schools facilitate and embed physical activity but what about adults?

 

Those adults who are in their 40s and 50s probably did have plenty of exercise at school so whilst I understand the need to create a culture that encourages activity at en early age that is no guarantee that we’ll see a decline in any of the above mentioned diseases.

 

In its first report into the value of the natural environment in 2011 the government stated that looking after our ‘green space’ better would be worth £30 billion a year to the economy including health and wellbeing benefits. It also highlighted the loss of green space since the 1980s: 10,000 less playing fields, 90% decline in allotments. And it stated that failure to look after, improve and enhance our green spaces would cost us £20 billion a year. The very same figure that the APCOPI arrived at. 

 

Could there be a link between green space and our health and wellbeing?

 

Dr William Bird certainly thinks so and has published numerous reports linking green space with increased physical activity and a decline in the diseases identified by APCOPI as being in the ascendency.

 

Proximity to green space is a factor as is the variation of habitat. The closer to green space we live the more likely we are to get out and visit it. The more interesting the space is the more we will visit it. This means that a patch of grass is somewhere we will go but if it also has trees, shrubs, ponds, birds and other wildlife, we will visit more frequently.

 

To me that sounds very logical and ties in with the 2011 report that stated better green spaces would have result in an economic return. Therefore, investment in green spaces would pay for itself by reducing the healthcare costs associated with illness as a result of physical inactivity and save businesses the known and unknown costs of employees becoming ill and needing time off.

 

We all work much harder and unfortunately we only measure success on the wealth of businesses and individuals. We see it as shame that heart disease and mental health are on the rise but we don’t knock anything off the ‘bottom line’ to reflect this failure in society.

 

Are we going to work less? Probably not so we really do need to address the problem of physical inactivity and it seems to me that more, better and bigger green space is required if we are to give hard working people a chance to relax and exercise. It’s also no coincide that ‘more, better and bigger’ was the plea from the Lawton Report: Making Space for Nature. 

 

You see we are connected to nature, however cynical you may be. The more ‘natural’ the environment, the more we’ll benefit from it and looking at the figures being stated I would say that an investment in the natural environment will not only pay for itself, they’ll also be big fat bonuses as well.