ECOLOGICAL SUSTAINABILITY

Ecology and sustainability are currently two of the most used words in news reports and discussions, generally relating to energy and food. What do these words mean in the real world?

Ecology: the OED defines this as ‘relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings’ and under ‘ecological footprint’ as ‘the amount of land required to sustain a particular person or society’. This is the crux of the problem.

What we generally forget is the fact we humans are just one ‘organism’ in an environment that includes all other species. Our survival depends on maintaining the whole ecosystem. Not only does this refer to all living organisms but to all their physical requirements:

• Water (the enduring, most important resource animals and plants need)
• Food, which includes inorganic minerals and gasses such as oxygen and carbon dioxide (mainly for plants)
• Plants, themselves being food for the lower parts of the food chain for animals.

Obviously, for humans, generally being omnivores, we need both plants and animals to eat. (Some specialised races of humans survive only on a meat diet, for example the Inuit.)

Sustainability: Simply, the OED defines this as ‘able to be sustained’.

So what is the problem?

Changes in landscape
Before the beginning of the industrial revolution, society was essentially a rural population living in hamlets and villages. Food, water and energy resources for heating and cooking came from the surrounding area, including managed woodlands. After the industrial revolution, factories required many workers so towns and cities grew, with food and energy resources being transported from the countryside.

Over time, there has been loss of species distribution and abundance owing to loss of habitats. For example, Dorset, Hampshire and Surrey heathlands, which are being converted to housing and agriculture, have poor productivity and require large quantities of artificial fertiliser. Loss of lowland riparian pasture/marshland with cereal cropping on the flood plains, plus the loss of farm ponds once found in almost every field for the watering of horses and cattle, has resulted in big reductions in amphibian populations.

Many pasture woodlands have been lost. These contain unique invertebrate fauna, many species depending on decaying wood and thus the close proximity of old trees. The loss of 250,000km of hedgerows in the last 50 years has resulted in an enormous reduction of dependent invertebrates, important to the species balance and a natural control mechanism of pests that destroy crops.

The introduction of chemicals injected into cattle to control parasites in field-living livestock is excreted in droppings, thus preventing a natural breakdown in dung, which previously provided food for a wildlife chain eaten by birds and bats, for example.

So, overall, the problem is that wildlife species have been disappearing from our landscape. Consequently, biodiversity has significantly contracted and is still declining. The network of nature reserves both national, managed by Natural England, and local, managed by the voluntary wildlife trusts and local councils, serve to protect only a few wildlife species. There have been some useful initiatives to help farmers create habitats that provide ‘corridors’ across their land, which allow species to move between suitable habitats.

In the quest for sustainability we have imposed planning constraints, which require new developments to conform to imposed sustainability codes. Ecologically, these requirements devised by the Building Research Establishment have no scientific credibility. However, they have become gospel in the planning system where developers have to provide a few plants to ‘enhance’ foraging for butterflies, for instance.

But what are we wanting as a society?
In the 1950s, when I was a teenager at school, I worried greatly about the then human population size and rate of growth in Britain and worldwide.  How were we to feed and provide necessary resources for everyone?  Clearly, there are far too many people for this island to support. There is a developing crisis over water availability, especially in south-east England; also energy resources are insufficient to sustain an ever-increasing population.

The mantra of needing an increasing population to sustain State pensions and services is flawed. The sooner the State not only recognises that the population cannot be allowed to increase indefinitely but also creates incentives to reduce our population to a sustainable level the better the quality of life will become.

Many of society’s ills, especially in the city, are stress-related caused by overcrowding. Wartime experiments led by scientists in Oxford showed how stress built up in a population of rodents because of the rapidly increasing population. With stress came fighting, disease and a breakdown in social order. These observations are mirrored in modern human societies.

What are the solutions?
We all need breathing space and places of solitude. Increasingly, voices such as those of David Attenborough, Jonathan Porritt and the Optimum Population Trust are calling for substantial reductions in populations. We now have a population of 61 million, whereas a hundred years ago there were about 40 million.

The sustainable ecology of the human race is tied into the overall ecology of all species in a sustainable landscape. There has been great progress in recognising problems and initiating environmental programmes to reinstate lost habitats. One of the real successes is cleaning up rivers, putting bends into places which 30 years ago were straightened. Now the otter can be found more or less across the land where, as recently as 10 years ago, it was largely absent. Unfortunately, building is still permitted in flood plains, which not only increases flooding but also causes the Environment Agency to spend more in protecting the new developments. However, until we have solved the problems of over-population and over-utilisation of home and world resources, there will be no solution to sustainability of the ecology of Britain’s wildlife and the human species.

Authors such as Austin Williams (The Enemies of Progress) consider the problem to be one of politics, not science or over-population, but the history of politics shows that politicians cannot solve the problem. Only people themselves can sway popular opinion; the difficulty is do we have time to turn the ship around that is heading toward disaster?

Dr Robert Stebbings
Director (Research Ecologist – Protected Species)
The Robert Stebbings Consultancy Limited, Peterborough

Tel: 017 3334 0318