VILLAGEAugust/September
G
EORGE Orwell warned that “the log-
ical end of mechanical progress is
to reduce the human being to some-
thing resembling a brain in a bottle”. This
is a story of how it happens.
On the outskirts of Sheffield there is a
wood which, some years ago, was used
by the monks of Kirkstead Abbey to produce
charcoal for smelting iron. For local peo-
ple, Smithy Wood is freighted with stories.
Among the trees you can imagine your way
into another world. The application to plant
a motorway service station in the middle of
it, wiping out half the wood and fragment-
ing the rest, might have been unthinkable
a few months ago. No longer.
When the environment secretary, Owen
Paterson, first began talking about biodi-
versity offsetting – replacing habitats you
trash with new ones created elsewhere –
his officials made it clear that it would not
ENVIRONMENT
Also in this section:
How it will happen 62
Dick Roche hits out 64
Parklife 67
Those who cost nature
fall into the trap.
By George Monbiot
Trees and
trees
August/September VILLAGE
of wonders will not be missed. Integrating
the environment into the economy, Helm
believes, is hampered by a lack of “proper
accounting for natural assets”, which is
what his committee seeks to redress.
So come with me into the faery
realm. The government’s targets
for protecting freshwater eco-
systems, the committee claims,
would deliver an aesthetic
value of around £ million.
The enhanced wildlife value
of well-managed semi-natural
grasslands is £ million. An
appropriate disclaimer would
be: these figures are total rub-
bish, but we’re printing them
anyway.
I can understand the tempta-
tion. I can see how a financial case might
be heeded by people who otherwise take no
interest. But it’s not just that the output is
mostly gibberish. More importantly, like
the offsetting of ancient woodland, it re-
frames the urge to protect nature – an urge
that springs from wonder and delight – as
something completely different.
In his interview with the Guardian a few
weeks ago, George Lakoff, the cognitive lin-
guist who has done so much to explain why
progressive parties keep losing elections
they should win, explained that attempts
to monetise nature are a classic example of
people trying to do the right thing without
understanding frames: the mental struc-
tures that shape the way we perceive the
world.
As Lakoff points out, you cannot win an
argument unless you expound your own val-
ues and reframe the issue around them. If
you adopt the language and values of your
opponents “you lose because you are rein-
forcing their frame.” Costing nature tells
us that it possesses no inherent value; that
it is worthy of protection only when it per-
forms services for us; that it is replaceable.
You demoralise and alienate those who love
the natural world while reinforcing the val-
ues of those who don’t.
To expect the committee’s phoney figures
to swing the argument is worse than naïve
in a world in which cost-benefit analyses
are systematically rigged. For example, the
financial case for new roads in the United
Kingdom, shaky at the best of times, falls
apart if you attach almost any value to the
rise in greenhouse gases they cause. Case
closed? No: the government now insists, in
its draft national policy statement, that cli-
mate change cannot be taken into account
when deciding whether or not a road is
built.
apply to ancient woodland. But in January
Paterson said he was prepared to drop this
restriction, as long as many more trees were
planted than destroyed.
His officials quickly explained that such
a trade-off would be “highly
unlikely” and was “very hypo-
thetical”. But the company
that wants to build the serv-
ice station wasn’t slow to see
the possibilities. It is offering
to replace Smithy Wood with
“, trees … planted on
hectares of local land close to
the site”. Who cares whether a
tree is a hunched and fissured
coppiced oak, worked by peo-
ple for centuries, or a sapling
planted beside a slip road with
a rabbit guard around it? As Ronald Reagan
remarked, when contemplating the destruc-
tion of California’s giant redwoods, “a tree
is a tree”.
Who, for that matter, would care if the
Old Masters in the National Gallery were
replaced by the prints being sold in its shop?
In swapping our ancient places for generic
clusters of chainstores and generic lines of
saplings, the offsetters would also destroy
our stories.
So we turn for relief to Natural England,
the official body whose purpose is “to
conserve and enhance the natural envi-
ronment”. Whoops. Its new chair, Andrew
Sells, a major donor to the Conservative
Party, made his fortune in housebuilding,
the industry most likely to benefit from bio-
diversity offsetting. Its deputy chair, David
Hill, is also chairman of Environment Bank,
a private company set up “to broker bio-
diversity offsetting agreements for both
developers and landowners”. The success
of Environment Bank is partly dependent
on decisions taken by Natural England. How
many people believe it is acceptable for Hill
to hold both posts?
But this is the way it’s going now: eve-
rything will be fungible, nothing will be
valued for its own sake, place and past and
love and enchantment will have no mean-
ing. The natural world will be reduced to a
column of figures.
That is the hope expressed in the latest
report by the government’s Natural Capital
Committee, whose chairman, Dieter Helm,
claims that “the environment is part of the
economy and needs to be properly inte-
grated into it so that growth opportunities
will not be missed.” This, to me, is the
wrong way round. The economy is part of
the environment and needs to be steered
so that opportunities to protect our world
Do you believe that people prepared to
cheat to this extent would stop a scheme
because one of the government’s commit-
tees has attached a voodoo value to a piece of
woodland? It’s more likely that the account-
ing exercise would be used as a
weapon by the developers. The
woods are worth £x, but by pure
chance the road turns out to be
worth £x +. Beauty, tranquil-
ity, history, place, particularity?
Sorry, they’ve already been
costed and incorporated into x
– end of discussion. The strong-
est arguments opponents can
deploy – arguments based on
values – cannot be heard.
This is why the government
set up the Natural Capital
Committee. This is why it pro-
motes biodiversity offsets,
even for ancient woodland. It
is reframing the issue. Those who believe
they can protect nature by adopting this
frame are stepping into a trap their oppo-
nents have set. •
This article first appeared in the Guardian.
www.monbiot.com
what price a tree in the
way of a road?
Place and past
and love and
enchantment
will have no
meaning
“
“The
environment
is part of the
economy”.
This, to me, is
the wrong way
round
“
