the natural world to heal our minds – a point made repeatedly down the ages.
This art and literature, often dismissed as ‘romantic’, has a hard scientific foundation. Over the twentieth century the colour and vitality of the British landscape has been replaced by monotones of green, yellow and brown. There are dark and dense conifer forests, vivid green fertilised fields of grass, and the yellow and brown of cereal landscapes. The people have gone too: farmland, which makes up 70 per cent of the country, is now managed largely by fertilisers, agrichemicals and machines, and in time it might be autonomously farmed by robots. To the silent spring of the birds has been added the silence of people.
It has not all been downhill. The pea soup fogs have gone from the cities and the gross pollution of the mid-twentieth century has been gradually unwound. There are few rivers now that could be called biologically dead, as the Mersey and even parts of the Thames have been until relatively recently. Sewage is no longer dumped at sea, and DDT has been banned.
Some species have recovered, and these are often trumpeted as ‘successes’. The peregrine falcon is becoming quite common again (albeit as much in cities as in the uplands where illegal persecution remains); the buzzard has broken out of its southwestern enclaves; and the odd salmon has even made it up the Thames. The red kite is back in the Chilterns and mid-Wales, and is spreading fast. The cirl bunting has been pulled back from the brink of extinction in the southwest of England. Even the pine martens are showing tentative signs of recovery, and the fortunes of the otter have been transformed.
The optimists get terribly excited about these very visible improvements. Such success stories can be tracked, filmed and shown on screens, unlike the bulk of the biodiversity that lies beneath our feet in the soils. But welcome though they are, they don’t tell us much about the underlying adverse trends; nor do they indicate some quick and miraculous improvement. Like the climate sceptics who point to the odd colder year, or even just a cold snap, they mistake exceptions for the trend. It simply is not true to suggest that as people get richer, they reverse the declines and get back to anything like what has been lost. Ecosystems are complex; they require firm foundations, and many of the building blocks have been knocked away, diminishing resilience to what is coming. There is not much chance of simply going in reverse gear back to the status quo ante. We can’t just have a couple of hundred years of industrialisation, take a big environmental hit, and then, Humpty-Dumpty-like, try to put it all back together again. Nature doesn’t work like that: much has gone for good – because of us, and the inefficient short-term economy we have built.
The fundamental building blocks of natural capital – the soils, groundwater, the river catchments and the air – are not getting much better. Soils are still deteriorating from a terrible baseline; groundwater will continue to deteriorate for at least another 60 years even if we limit current pollution;[3] the carbon in the atmosphere has exceeded 400 parts per million and does not appear to have peaked;[4] and the mayflies in many rivers are now scarce. Statistically, adding more and more aliens as the globalisation of species plays out may increase the narrow measure of species biodiversity, but this is not the same thing as improving ecosystems. Counting species does not tell us much about the health of our environment. Zoos have lots of species, but not lots of nature.
While it is true that the chemicals applied to the land are sometimes used to a lesser extent than they once were, and in a narrow sense water quality has improved, in a dynamic ecosystem stopping pollution inputs does not halt the decline in the underlying assets. A tanker can stop its engines, but it will plough on for a long way before coming to a halt.
What is missing, and what matters, is the aggregate measure of the overall state of our natural capital, as well as the constituent parts, and the overall state of the natural environment that has been lost since the Industrial Revolution, and especially since the coming of industrial agriculture. A full picture will have to wait until proper national natural capital balance sheets have been developed and populated with good data. In time and with the explosion of new digital technologies to do the measuring, this will be possible and the numbers for the past can be added, in the way in which numbers for populations and economic performance in past centuries have been added to the national statistics by painstaking research.
In the absence of an aggregate, the best that can be done is to piece together the evidence for the main categories of our natural capital. This is something that naturalists and conservationists and ecologists have been doing for a long time. There are bird atlases, plant atlases, insect and butterfly atlases, and reptile and amphibian atlases, and there are New Naturalist studies on specific species and habitats. The non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have brought much of this together in the ‘State of Nature’ reports, led by the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds).[5] Steps to develop more comprehensive databases, using the full panoply of digital mapping techniques, will shortly give us a real-time and extremely detailed understanding of exactly what is going on.
This is not the place to try to provide a comprehensive summary. It is both beyond the scope of this book, and well beyond the abilities of an economist to construct. The direction of travel is, however, pretty clear, and it is this that we need to bear in mind in being realistic about the baselines, the scale of the challenges, and the disastrous consequences that will follow if we do nothing to hold the line.
More declines
The easy bit is the non-renewables which, as the name implies, can be used once.[6] Nature has endowed us with them – they are natural – but they do not renew themselves except over geological time. They include the coal, iron ore, tin, oil and gas upon which our economy has been built and remains utterly dependent. Unsurprisingly, we know a lot about them. There are detailed measurements of the volumes mined and extracted, and there is also price data. This least interesting dimension of natural capital is the easiest to measure. It is also the dimension of which, by 2050, much will have been exhausted or, in the case of coal, oil and gas, hopefully left in the ground. In chapter 11, we will see that we should compensate future generations for what we have consumed, and for the legacy of carbon and other mineral pollution we have left behind from our largely selfish use of these non-renewables.
When it comes to the really important stuff, the renewables – the natural capital that nature can keep on giving us for ever – there are two obvious starting points. The first is the bits we are familiar with: the birds, plants, mammals, fish and invertebrates. The second, the one we concentrate on throughout, is the habitats and ecosystems, including the river catchments, the farmed lands, the uplands, the coasts and the urban areas.
How bad could the river catchments get in a business-as-usual scenario? Think of the stresses they already face. If you drink tap water in London it is often said that it may have already been through up to seven people.[7] That water will have been abstracted from rivers and cleaned of all the chemicals that have leached into it, and will be again after your sewage has been collected, processed and discharged back into the river. It might also include raw sewage from storm overflows. The sewage, before it is treated, will be contaminated with pharmaceutical products. Take a look in the cupboard under your sink. See the cleaning fluids you put down the sink and the toilet. Take a look in your bathroom at all the products you use. Many of these end up down the plughole, and we all just expect the environment – in this case the rivers – to absorb them. You turn on the tap and you expect clean water to flow. You water your garden and wash the car with this costly, treated water, and you don’t want to pay much for it.
Yet that is just the beginning. We go on tipping more and more fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides into our watercourses, and allow the silt to run off the land from intensive farming practices. Industry adds its pollution too. Add all the plastic and other rubbish that gets thrown in and you can see the results alongside any major river.
Now add another quarter-century of all this. Add more and more chemicals,
