Matt Ridley's Blog, page 28

Low oil prices are a good thing

My Times column on the causes and consequences of low oil prices:

The continuing plunge in the price of oil from $115 a barrel in mid-2014 to $30 today is really, really good news. I know just about every economic commentator says otherwise, predicting bankruptcies, stock market crashes, deflation, political turmoil and a return to gas guzzling. But that is because they are mostly paid to see the world from the point of view of producers, not consumers. Yes, some plutocrats and autocrats won’t like it, but for the rest of us this is a big cut in the cost of living. Worldwide, the fall in the oil price since 2014 has transferred $2 trillion from oil producers to oil consumers.

Oil is the largest and most indispensable commodity on which society depends, the vital energy-amplifier of our everyday actions. The value of the oil produced every year exceeds the value of natural gas, coal, iron ore, wheat, copper and cotton combined. Without oil, every industry would collapse — agriculture first of all. Cutting the price of oil enables you to travel, eat and clothe yourself more cheaply, which leaves you more money to spend on something else, which gives somebody else a job supplying that need, and so on.

Sure, the low oil price is partly a symptom of a weak global economy (and a mild winter), and yes, it has probably overshot so that many producers and explorers will go out of business, making some rebound in the oil price inevitable. Plus, it has utterly discredited the public-finance plans of the Scottish Nationalists who would be presiding over a cold version of Venezuela now if they had persuaded Scotland to vote for independence. But lower energy prices will boost living standards.

The shale revolution is the dominant reason for the fall. I know columnists are not supposed to say I told you so, but I did: “Oil prices look set to fall as America exploits a shale cornucopia,” I wrote here in 2013, when the price was persistently high: “Shale gas is old hat; the shale oil revolution is proving a world changer.” This was at a time when pessimistic predictions that we had reached “peak oil” were still widespread, and many thought oil prices would rise even further.

A combination of horizontal drilling and much improved hydraulic fracturing, first developed for shale gas, then adapted for oil, has unleashed a gusher from North Dakota and Texas in particular. It has taken the United States right back to the top of the oil-producing league, reversing a 30-year decline (of almost 50 per cent) in just three years. This is one of the most momentous innovations of the modern world.

The Price of Oil, a book by Roberto Aguilera and Marian Radetzki (fellow and professor of economics at universities in Australia and Sweden respectively), predicts that this shale revolution has a long way to go. Although the current low oil price is bankrupting many producers and explorers in North Dakota and elsewhere, and many rigs are now standing idle with jobs being lost, there has only been a very modest fall in production.

That is because the technology for getting oil out is improving rapidly and the cost is falling fast, so some producers can break even at $30 or even $20 a barrel and it takes fewer rigs to generate more oil. It is one of the cruel features of innovation that it usually benefits the consumers more than the inventors.

This means the shale industry can now put a lid on oil prices in future. Aguilera and Radetzki argue that not only is the US shale industry still in its infancy, but that there is another revolution on the way: when the price is right, conventional oil fields can now be redrilled with the new techniques developed for shale, producing another surge of supply from fields once thought depleted. They also expect that other countries — beginning with Australia, Argentina, China and Mexico — are ripe to join the technology revolution begun in American shale.

As a result, they calculate that, barring political crises, the oil price could well stay low till 2035 — about $40 to $60 a barrel in today’s prices. This is in sharp contrast to both the International Energy Agency and the US Energy Information Administration, which forecast an oil price in 2035 of $128 and $130 respectively. As Aguilera and Radetzki point out, the shale revolution has repeatedly made fools of forecasters, who persisted until very recently in seeing the shale-oil revolution as a flash in the barrel.

Why is the price of oil so volatile? I thought I knew the answer — scarcity and Opec — till I read Aguilera and Radetzki. They make the case that depletion has never been much of a factor in driving oil prices, despite the obvious drying up of certain fields (such as the North Sea today). Nor did Opec’s interventions to fix prices make much difference over the long run. What caused the price of oil to rise much faster than other commodities, though erratically and with crashes, they argue, was the result of one factor in particular.

There was a wave of nationalisation in the oil industry beginning in the 1960s. Today some 90 per cent of oil reserves are held by nationalised companies. ExxonMobil and BP are minnows compared with the whales owned by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria and Russia. Post-colonial nationalisation affected many resource-based industries, but whereas many mineral and metal companies were privatised in the 1990s as their grotesque inefficiencies became visible, the same has not happened to state oil companies.

The consequence is that most oil is produced by companies that are milked by politicians, and consequently starved of cash (or incentives) for innovation and productivity. Lamenting “politicians’ extraordinary ability to mess things up”, the two authors note “the severely destructive role that can be played by political fights over the oil rent and its use”.

If politicians don’t get in the way, and we have two decades of relatively cheap oil it will be bad news for petro-dictators, oil-igarchs, Isis thugs, and the promoters of wind power, solar power, nuclear energy and electric cars. But it is good news for everybody else, especially those on modest incomes.

South Georgia - an oceanic wilderness replenished

My recent essay in the Wall Street Journal on South Georgia:

When you tell people that you’re going to South Georgia, some will ask if you’re changing planes in Atlanta. In fact, the name belongs to an island near Antarctica. It’s about the size of Rhode Island but with mountains rising to over 9,000 feet. It is a wilderness, uninhabited except for two small scientific stations and teeming with spectacular wildlife.

But don’t be fooled: The apparently pristine natural beauty of South Georgia is new. Like an old master painting that was badly damaged but has since been painstakingly restored, South Georgia was once utterly desecrated and is now gloriously refurbished.

The island was uninhabited when, on Jan. 17, 1775, HMS Resolution dropped anchor in what is now called Possession Bay, and Captain Cook claimed it on behalf of King George III. His men discharged their weapons “to the utter amazement of the seals and the penguins,” wrote the naturalist George Forster.

This Jan. 17, exactly 241 years later, as dusk was falling, the fishery protection vessel Pharos SG, carrying Princess Anne—a direct descendant of George III—entered Possession Bay flying the royal standard, and I had the good fortune to be on board. It was snowing gently, and the clouds hung low over the glaciers and black cliffs. Fur seals and penguins were once again the only audience.

A century ago, however, when the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his five companions landed here, after bringing a small boat through 800 miles of stormy seas following the sinking of their ship Endurance, there were no fur seals and few penguins to greet him. The reason Shackleton came to South Georgia for help was precisely because it wasn’t wilderness but was inhabited, indeed industrialized. He was heading for one of island’s four small towns, in which lived nearly 2,000 people, mostly Norwegians and Scots.

The people had come first for the fur seals (to make felt hats), but they soon took elephant seals for their blubber and penguin eggs for food. In the first half of the 20th century, it was the turn of the whales, which were all but wiped out in the surrounding ocean by 1960.

 

Yet today the island looks again much more like it was in Cook’s day than in Shackleton’s. The total human population is about 25 in summer (though some 8,000 tourists visit each summer on cruise ships and sleep on board). There are now some four million fur seals. They are everywhere, growling and moaning in crowds on the beaches, in the tussock grass and in the ruins of the towns. Elephant seals snooze and belch in heaps on every beach. King penguins abound: One colony has gone from 350 pairs in 1912 to 60,000 pairs today. Even the whales are back: Humpbacks and right whales were blowing regularly off the coast last month.

The plunder of South Georgia’s seas has also been halted. Fisheries regulation arrived with the declaration of a 200-mile limit around the island in 1993. In exchange for a hefty fee a handful of licensed vessels fish these waters for krill, ice fish and Patagonian toothfish (known on menus as Chilean sea bass). Each boat has a beacon transmitting an automatic identification system and carries an observer on board. No boat may fish in water shallower than 700 meters or in certain closed “boxes,” where the young toothfish live. Illegal fishing has almost entirely ceased.

In the 1990s, the long lines of baited hooks used to catch toothfish had begun catching albatrosses as well. Soon the populations of black-browed, gray-headed and wandering albatross were in free fall. Today simple devices for preventing albatrosses getting hooked have completely solved that problem locally. The toothfish fishery has won coveted accreditation as sustainable from the Marine Stewardship Council. Far from boycotting “Chilean sea bass” in restaurants, as some marine preservationists advocate, you should go for it, so long as it comes with MSC certification.

Today, the fishermen have a new problem: Orcas and sperm whales have learned to steal their catch. Orcas bite the toothfish off the hooks as they are retrieved. Sperm whales find the lines on the sea floor and strip them of fish, apparently not bothered that this leaves hooks pierced into their own skin. Devices that transmit deafening sounds to deter the orcas proved counterproductive: The whales soon realized that the unpleasant sound was a dinner bell.

Most remarkable of all, the island is now free of rats. Between 2011 and 2015, the South Georgia Heritage Trust raised and spent more than $10 million to buy helicopters and spread poisoned bait over all the rat-infested parts of the island. This was a unique logistical achievement on a large mountainous island, accessible only by ship through the world’s stormiest seas. Even a few years ago, many people thought it was a mad plan. But it worked, and petrels and pipits can breed freely again here.

Like the rats, the reindeer that were introduced here a century ago to provide food for the whalers have also been exterminated. The last one was tracked down while I was on the island. This will allow the native vegetation to recover, and scientists are now hard at work spraying the invasive plants that humankind has introduced.

A spectacular ecological restoration has occurred, a wilderness replenished—on a scale probably unmatched anywhere else in the world. Last month, as I sat at the dining table of Pat Lurcock (one of three government officers for the whole island) at King Edward Point, eating potted krill and watching the light fade on the glaciers, I surveyed a wondrous scene: Stormy petrels flitted up the bay to feed their young, fur seals porpoised through the water, king penguins cooled their feet on the snow, and plump elephant seal pups snoozed on the steps of the laboratory.

Of course, challenges remain for South Georgia’s ecology. Rats or other pests may yet escape from ships that dock here (one rat jumped ship last year, but it was soon spotted and dispatched). So all cargo is minutely inspected and all visitors must wear clean, preferably new, clothing and thoroughly clean out their backpacks. Gentoo penguins have failed to breed at all this year, for lack of krill nearby. This may or may not be a symptom of climate change, which is responsible for the retreat of many of South Georgia’s glaciers since the time of Cook and Shackleton.

But after centuries of foolish plunder, pause to reflect what an astonishing transformation has been achieved by wise management. We can now see what Captain Cook saw: an ice-capped island looming over verdant bays teeming with wildlife. There is a lesson here for the whole planet: With prosperity and technology and determination, we can restore wilderness.

Staying in the European Union could be the riskier option for Britain

My column in The Times on Britain's EU membership referendum:

Public opinion about the European Union is divided, like Gaul, into three parts: one third are already firmly in the “leave” camp, one third would remain in whatever happens, and the tussle is over who gets the middle, undecided third. It’s like pulling a Christmas cracker — part of it will go one way, part of it the other; it’s what happens to the middle bit that matters.

The infighting that has broken out among those campaigning to leave is partly about personalities, of course, but it is also about how to appeal to those swing voters in the middle. Specifically, do you win these people over by talking about immigration, the issue that dominates the news, shows the EU at its most incompetent and reverberates strongly outside the metropolis, where people worry about the effect it has on houses, hospitals, schools and local services? That seems to be the view of the Leave.EU campaign, led by Arron Banks and with Nigel Farage as its best-known spokesman. They make the case that the metropolitan elite is out of touch with the bulk of public opinion.

Or are most such people in the “leave” section of the Christmas cracker already, and the ones in the middle would be positively spooked by too much emphasis on immigration? Instead, or so argue Dominic Cummings and Matthew Elliott, of Vote Leave, what counts to these people is whether leaving the EU would threaten their jobs. Most of these middle-opinion people do not like Brussels, and probably want to leave, polling suggests, but they could hesitate before voting “leave” if they think it means they, or their children, will find it harder to get work. Neutralise that argument — “project fear” as they call it in Downing Street — and Leave will win.

In some ways the ideal situation is to allow the Farage faction in Leave.EU to mobilise the core vote, while the more bipartisan Vote Leave faction focuses on the economic arguments that appeal to the undecided.

The gossip about who hates whom within and between these two groups may deter donors — and some Conservative members of parliament who are weighing up whether to go with their anti-Brussels instincts or listen to the whips who tell them they will never get promotion under George Osborne if they campaign to leave. But it largely goes over the head of ordinary voters in Redditch or Renfrew. However, the moment of “designation”, when the Electoral Commission anoints one group as the official Leave campaign, could soon be approaching. Vote Leave looks far more likely to get that designation because of its broader, bipartisan nature. So it just needs to keep calm and carry on until David Cameron’s renegotiation concludes later this month.

At that point there is a real possibility of big beasts breaking free from the cabinet to join the Vote Leave campaign and give it the frontman it lacks. No 10 is spinning that they have all the big beasts “in the bag” in order to herd the party towards accepting the prime minister’s deal. I don’t buy the spin and I think there remains a reasonable chance that Vote Leave will get major reinforcements when the deal goes public, from inside and outside the cabinet.

After all, the difference between the fundamental reform that the prime minister promised in his Bloomberg speech three years ago and the trivialities he is now reduced to arguing about must be making some fellow cabinet members distinctively uncomfortable.

Mr Cameron presumably thought he would never have to go through the motions of these renegotiation talks without the heat shield of Lib Dem coalition partners. He’s now reduced to deciding whether to accept an offer of a temporary brake on benefits for migrants, if other countries agree and if there is a crisis. This would do little or nothing to calm people’s worries about migration, not least because people come here mainly for the jobs, and in future the living wage, not for benefits.

In order to defeat Project Fear, and reassure the average voter in Morpeth and Monmouth that she can vote “leave” and not lose her job, the Leave campaign will have to use the ten weeks of campaigning to paint a lifelike picture of life in Britain outside the European Union.

They will have to persuade people that we will not be insular and insecure, but a big country with a flexible and thriving economy attracting international investors and innovators because of our good relations and free trade with both the EU and the fast-growing economies of Asia and elsewhere. The Japan of the West, only more open. On the other hand, the campaign will also have to neutralise fear by entrenching in people’s minds the point that there is no status quo: staying in carries just as many uncertainties and risks as leaving. For example, the migration crisis could lead to the collapse of the Schengen agreement, just as the euro could also collapse. And if either is to be averted, then it will probably require vastly more centralisation of political decision-making, worsening the democratic deficit.

We are living in fantasy land if we think that under those circumstances vague promises made to Britain about ever-closer union, or on not making decisions that hurt non-euro countries, are worth any more than the paper they are written on.

I keep hearing talk from those who want to remain about the “retribution” that might be meted out to us if we left. Don’t count on negotiating a favourable trade treaty with the EU, they say, or getting associate status in EU research programmes (as Norway, Switzerland, Turkey and Israel have), because Brussels will be so sore at our having left that they will drag their feet over every deal, or do everything they can to spite us, even if it is not in their interests to do so.

Well, my friends, I am increasingly worried about retribution if we stay in. Feeling grumpy with us after we made such a fuss over renegotiation, but having successfully called our bluff by conceding so little, our partners and Eurocrat masters will say to us (in courteous diplomatic language, of course): right, you pestilential Brits, like it or lump it, you are now in for good. We never need pay any attention to your worries again. We’re off to integration and you are locked in the back of the car. There is no alternative. You see: two can play at Project Fear.

Reflections on The Selfish Gene

My Retrospective article on Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, published in Nature magazine:

 

Books about science tend to fall into two categories: those that explain it to lay people in the hope of cultivating a wide readership, and those that try to persuade fellow scientists to support a new theory, usually with equations. Books that achieve both — changing science and reaching the public — are rare. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) was one. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is another. From the moment of its publication 40 years ago, it has been a sparkling best-seller and a scientific game-changer.

The gene-centred view of evolution that Dawkins championed and crystallized is now central both to evolutionary theorizing and to lay commentaries on natural history such as wildlife documentaries. A bird or a bee risks its life and health to bring its offspring into the world not to help itself, and certainly not to help its species — the prevailing, lazy thinking of the 1960s, even among luminaries of evolution such as Julian Huxley and Konrad Lorenz — but (unconsciously) so that its genes go on. Genes that cause birds and bees to breed survive at the expense of other genes. No other explanation makes sense, although some insist that there are other ways to tell the story (see K. Laland et al. Nature 514, 161–164; 2014).

What stood out was Dawkins's radical insistence that the digital information in a gene is effectively immortal and must be the primary unit of selection. No other unit shows such persistence — not chromosomes, not individuals, not groups and not species. These are ephemeral vehicles for genes, just as rowing boats are vehicles for the talents of rowers (his analogy).

As an example of how the book changed science as well as explained it, a throwaway remark by Dawkins led to an entirely new theory in genomics. In the third chapter, he raised the then-new conundrum of excess DNA. It was dawning on molecular biologists that humans possessed 30–50 times more DNA than they needed for protein-coding genes; some species, such as lungfish, had even more. About the usefulness of this “apparently surplus DNA”, Dawkins wrote that “from the point of view of the selfish genes themselves there is no paradox. The true 'purpose' of DNA is to survive, no more and no less. The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite.”

“Dawkins's ideas helped to explain what was going on inside genomes long before DNA sequencing became routine.”

Four years later, two pairs of scientists published papers in Nature formally setting out this theory of “selfish DNA”, and acknowledged Dawkins as their inspiration (L. E. Orgel and F. H. C. Crick Nature 284, 604–607 (1980); W. F. Doolittle and C. Sapienza Nature 284, 601–603; 1980). Since then, Dawkins's speculation has been borne out by the discovery that much surplus DNA consists of reverse transcriptase — a viral enzyme whose job is to spread copies of itself — or simplified versions of transposons dependent on it. Thus, Dawkins's ideas helped to explain what was going on inside genomes, as well as between individuals, even though the book was written long before DNA sequencing became routine. The complexity of the structure of the gene itself has since grown enormously, with the discovery of introns, control sequences, RNA genes, alternative splicing and more. But the essential idea of a gene as a unit of heritable information remains, and Dawkins's synthesis stands to this day.

On The Selfish Gene's 30th anniversary, many of Dawkins's admirers, including writer Philip Pullman and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, contributed essays to the book Richard Dawkins (Oxford University Press, 2006) edited by his former students Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley (no relation of mine). In this Festschrift, the philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that the book was not just science, but “philosophy at its best”. In my contribution, I pointed out that the success of the book had spawned a gold rush for popular-science writers, as publishers began offering large advances in the hope of finding the next Selfish Gene. James Gleick's Chaos (Abacus, 1988), Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (Bantam, 1988) and Pinker's The Language Instinct (William Morrow, 1994) were among the nuggets mined before the boom petered out.

Although his book brimmed with original thoughts, Dawkins was quick to acknowledge that he was building on the discoveries and insights of others, notably the evolutionary theorists William Hamilton, George Williams, John Maynard Smith and Robert Trivers. They were equally quick to appreciate that he had done something more than explain their ideas. Trivers wrote the foreword, and Maynard Smith narrated a television documentary about the book soon after it was published. Williams said in an interview that Dawkins's book had “advanced things a lot further than mine did” (see go.nature.com/21j1mt); Hamilton wrote that The Selfish Gene “succeeds in the seemingly impossible task of using simple, untechnical English to present some rather recondite and quasi-mathematical themes of recent evolutionary thought” in a way that would “surprise and refresh even many research biologists” (W. D. Hamilton Science 196, 757–759; 1977).

As a first-year undergraduate in the zoology department at the University of Oxford, UK, where Dawkins was about to teach me computing and animal behaviour, I found the book exhilarating and bewildering. Until then, my teachers had helpfully divided the world into right ideas and wrong ones. But here was a writer turning some settled science upside down and inviting me to join him on a journey to discover a truth that seemed to him “stranger than fiction”. Was he right or wrong? I was being shown the arguments, not the answers.

The origin of The Selfish Gene is intriguing. Dawkins revealed in the first volume of his memoirs, An Appetite for Wonder (Bantam, 2013; see E. Scott Nature 501, 163; 2013), that the idea of selfish genes was born ten years before the book was published. In 1966, the Dutch biologist Niko Tinbergen asked Dawkins, then a research assistant with a new doctorate in animal behaviour, to give some lectures in his stead. Inspired by Hamilton, Dawkins wrote in his notes (reproduced in An Appetite for Wonder): “Genes are in a sense immortal. They pass through the generations, reshuffling themselves each time they pass from parent to offspring ... Natural selection will favour those genes which build themselves a body which is most likely to succeed in handing down safely to the next generation a large number of replicas of those genes ... our basic expectation on the basis of the orthodox, neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that Genes will be 'selfish'.”

Dawkins began writing the book in 1973, and resumed it in 1975 while on sabbatical. At the suggestion of Desmond Morris, the zoologist and author of The Naked Ape (Jonathan Cape, 1967), Dawkins showed some draft chapters to Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape, who strongly urged that the title be changed to 'The Immortal Gene'. Today, Dawkins regrets not taking the advice. It might have short-circuited the endless arguments, so beloved of his critics and so redolent of the intentional stance (in which we tend to impute mental abilities to unconscious things, from thunderstorms to plants), about whether selfishness need be conscious. It might even have avoided the common misconception that Dawkins was advocating individual selfishness.

In the end, it was Michael Rodgers of Oxford University Press who enthusiastically published The Selfish Gene, after demanding “I must have that book!” when he saw early draft chapters. It was an immediate success, garnering more than 100 reviews, mostly positive. Dawkins went on to write books that were better in certain ways. The Extended Phenotype was more groundbreaking, The Blind Watchmaker more persuasive, Climbing Mount Improbable more logical, River out of Eden and Unweaving the Rainbow more lyrical, The Ancestor's Tale more encyclopaedic, The God Delusion more controversial. But they were all variations on the themes he so eloquently and adventurously set out in The Selfish Gene.

The ecological restoration of South Georgia

My column in The Times on how South Georgia's environment has been repaired:

In claiming the Falklands, the Argentinian government also claims South Georgia, even though it is 700 miles further away from its coast, was unambiguously claimed by Captain Cook when uninhabited, and is run as a separate territory by the British government. Indeed, as I found out last week when I was lucky to visit courtesy of the island’s government, it is a place where something truly astonishing has been achieved in the world of conservation.

In summer South Georgia teems with wildlife: four million fur seals crowd its shores, elephant seals are piled in somnolent heaps on beaches, penguin colonies boggle the mind in their scale, the cliffs and slopes are alive with more than 50 million albatrosses, prions and petrels, while whales once again blow in the surrounding ocean. This wealth of wildlife is the result of changing economic incentives plus regulation— to stop sealing, whaling and penguinning and to control fishing.

But a few years ago, conservationists decided that protection was not enough. Rats and reindeer also thrived on the island, introduced by sealers and whalers more than a century ago. The rats had driven certain birds extinct on the main island, while the reindeer had altered the vegetation, suppressing some indigenous plants. Around the world invasive species such as these are the source of more extinctions than any other cause.

In an unusual combination of private-public enterprise, the South Georgia Heritage Trust and the government of South Georgia decided that every rat and every reindeer must go. This was almost absurdly ambitious: in the 1980s one expert wrote about the prospect of rat eradication on South Georgia: “regrettably, this is virtually impossible”. But the New Zealanders had pulled it off on the smaller Campbell Island and the Australians on Macquarie Island, so valuable experience existed. Bold people began to think it might be done on the much larger, colder and more mountainous South Georgia too.

A poison called brodifacoum, which is irresistibly tasty to rats, had been developed in Wisconsin; helicopter pilots had learnt to spread the bait from buckets slung below their aircraft (if necessary flinging it sidewise on to cliffs); and GPS allowed the choppers to ensure that they covered every square metre of the island and revisited those they had missed.

The trust raised £7 million, mostly from private sources, bought three helicopters, found skilled pilots and set to work. Led by Tony Martin, of Dundee University, they first tackled two large but fairly accessible peninsulas of the east coast, separated from the rest of the island by glaciers too large for rats to cross. Two years later they returned and did the western half of the island, and in 2014-15 they completed the eastern half. As feats of flying, logistics and digital mapping go, the achievement was unique.

Rat tracks in the snow vanished. To check that it had worked, monitoring devices have been spaced all around the island, with peanut-flavoured bait formulated in such a way as to show if it had been gnawed. To date there has been just a single breach when last summer, soon after two ships had berthed there, rat footprints were found by builders in the snow in the British Antarctic Survey station at King Edward Point. The area was blitzed with rat poison and no more signs were found.

The collateral damage was minimal. Predatory skuas suffered briefly from eating the poisoned rats, but their population has already bounced back. Mice lived in one part of the island and these too were exterminated.

The reindeer project began in 2012, funded by the government — it’s probably harder to raise donations for wiping out reindeer than rats. Led by Dr Jennifer Lee, the team first herded about 1,000 deer into a specially built corral on one peninsula, where they were humanely stunned and butchered to provide excellent steaks for the visiting cruise ships. A few had been previously removed alive to two ranches in the Falklands.

The remaining 6,000 reindeer were hunted down within two years by Norwegian deer stalkers. Last summer just 47 remained and were soon shot. This summer a single male has been found, spotted by Sarah Lurcock, the island’s museum director, on a camping trip in a remote spot. It was dispatched last week: conservation cannot be a sentimental business.

Keeping South Georgia free of alien pests is now an obsession. Visitors must have clean footwear and clothing, while every ounce of cargo brought onshore is inspected in a small room in a building that can be sealed in an emergency. It’s not just rodents that they are trying to keep out: earwigs have become a pest on the Falklands, whence supplies come. Every object — even every potato — that comes ashore is inspected, and broccoli and leeks are banned (their leaves are too good at concealing earwigs or soil).

The conservationists are now focusing on introduced plants, trying to spray them with herbicide wherever possible. Some such as dandelions are too well established and will have to stay, but others have not yet gained much of a foothold and should soon be eradicated — though seeds may remain for some time.

South Georgia may be logistically difficult, but it is politically simple. The population is a handful of scientists, the government a handful of multi-tasking officials under the commissioner, Colin Roberts, who is also the governor of the Falklands. In Britain if you propose radical measures to get rid of (say) the signal crayfish, an American species that has ruined the insect life, fish life and water quality of my local river, you enter a bureaucratic maze of cautious regulation and delay. We need to be bolder.

Spraying, shooting and poisoning are not what most people think of as conservation. But South Georgia teaches the lesson that wildlife preservation is not just a matter of slapping on legal protection but requires active intervention to eradicate invaders. Rat eradication has been tried, so far without success, on Henderson, a remote Pacific island whose birdlife has suffered. Gough island, northeast of South Georgia, has an epidemic of mice, which gnaw young albatrosses to death and is next on the list. We have a duty to undo what we have done wrong to nature.

Britain's flooding is a land management issue

My Times column on the winter floods in Britain:

 

My invitation to serve on the government’s flood defence review seems to have got stuck in the Christmas post. So here’s a memo, based on Northumberland gossip as well as published papers, for how it should go about its job.

You have been asked to review why Britain has yet again been hit by extremely damaging floods, as it was in Staines in 2014, Somerset in 2013, Cockermouth in 2009, Gloucester in 2007, Carlisle in 2005, Boscastle in 2004 and York in 2000. You will get a lot of advice, much of it delivered by hobby horse. You’ll need to decide how to allocate blame between four things: extreme weather, budget cuts, green priorities and land management.

First, I hope you will give the Environment Agency a hard time. The rain is not its fault, of course, and the quango seems to have done a reasonable job of responding. The fact that its chairman flew off to his home in Barbados between visits to the north of England is a red herring.

But if this were a private company, chartered to manage rivers, it would lose the contract. After York was inundated in 2000, Carlisle in 2005 and Cockermouth in 2009, the least we could expect is that the agency responsible for flood management would either prevent a re-occurrence, or publicly admit that this was impossible. Instead, it spent a fortune on measures that it said would work and didn’t. This is what an EA spokesman told the BBC in January last year: “You can never say never to flooding happening, but what we can say is Carlisle is a well-protected city. The flood defences we have put in place would accommodate and defend against the flooding of 2005. The city would be safe from flooding.”

As for budget cuts, I hope you will challenge the idea, all too common in the public sector, that success is measured by the amount of money spent. The EA was proud that it had spent £38 million on flood defences in Carlisle since 2005, but was it well spent? It’s well known in my part of the world that contractors adore the Environment Agency. Jobs that a local digger driver would do in a couple of days in exchange for a bottle of whisky and a few hundred quid end up getting discussed by committees for months and costing the taxpayer six-figure sums.

While thinking about budgets, please have a really good look at the change in priorities that came with this country’s gold-plated implementation in 2000 of the EU Water Framework Directive. In my experience, the EA talks of little else, and explicitly admits that it and other directives changed its incentive from river management to biodiversity and water quality. Here’s what the National Flood Risk Management Strategy says: “In all instances, flood and coastal risk management should avoid damaging the environment . . . and wherever possible work with natural processes and always seek to provide environmental benefit, as required by the Habitats, Birds and Water Framework Directives.”

The directive was one of the first times the European Union invited the big green environmental organisations to get directly involved in policymaking. As one study of the episode concluded: “The environmental lobby was swift to capitalise on recent changes, and is in as strong a position as it has ever been to shape European water policy.”

Lord De Ramsey, who was the first chairman of the EA and retired in 1999, has this week criticised John Prescott’s decision to appoint the head of the RSPB as chief executive of the EA after he left, since she — Barbara Young — “put environmental concerns before timely maintenance”. This is a serious charge.

In some places dredging rivers to get the water away downstream does help. The people of Cockermouth used to dredge the river Cocker regularly to prevent its bed rising with gravel washed down from the hills. Yet in other places dredging makes things worse. The EA is right about one thing: we need to let rivers spread where they don’t flood houses, and that means getting farmers in the lowlands to pull down flood banks and let the water on to their land. Put flood banks round housing estates, not along rivers. Above all devolve the decision down to local level: revive the local internal drainage boards that used to take these decisions.

Next, don’t believe everything the forestry lobby tells you. It’s true that in general mature trees soak up rainfall and release less during storms than bare hills do. But the opposite is true of newly planted forests, especially as practised by the Forestry Commission in the uplands. A long running experiment at Coalburn in the Kielder forest established that the ditching and ploughing necessary to establish commercial trees such as sitka spruce actually increased peak storm run-off.

Throughout the Cheviots and Pennines, owners of heather moorland have been getting grants to block ditches (which were dug with grants in the 1960s) in order to hold up water and preserve sphagnum bogs in accordance with Natural England’s instructions. Yet they watch with bemusement as the forestry industry just over the fence digs ditches through the very same bogs.

Lightly grazed heather moorland, managed with grouse in mind, and with no forestry ditches, is good at holding back water. Worst is heavily grazed sheep fields and “improved” (ie, drained and re-seeded) land. So please do a fair comparative study of run-off from the three kinds of habitat: those managed for trees, grouse or sheep.

Finally, please resist the cheap excuse of climate change. It was Britain’s second wettest December: the same month in 1929 was wetter, so this kind of saturation could easily have happened even if climate change was not occurring. Besides, if global warming does exacerbate flooding slightly, we still have to deal with it.

As a group of 17 senior climate scientists said in 2013: “Blaming climate change for flood losses makes flood losses a global issue that appears to be out of the control of regional or national institutions. The scientific community needs to emphasise that the problem of flood losses is mostly about what we do on or to the landscape and that will be the case for decades to come.”

Author’s note: Since this article was published the Met Office has issued a statement that for the UK as a whole 2015 was the wettest December since records began in 1910 (230mm vs 211mm for Dec 1929), though the Central England weather data goes back much further and show several wetter Decembers in England.

How Capability Brown recreated the African savanna

My Times column on the Capability Brown tercentenary:

Next year marks the 300th birthday of Lancelot Brown at Kirkharle, in Northumberland, the man who saw “capability” in every landscape and indefatigably transformed England. In his 280 commissions, Capability Brown stamped his mark on some 120,000 acres, tearing out walls, canals, avenues, topiary and terraces to bring open parkland, with grassy tree-topped hills and glimpses of sinuous, serpentine lakes, right up to the ha-has of country houses.

Brown was not the first to design informal and semi-naturalistic landscapes: he followed Charles Bridgeman and William Kent. But he was by far the most prolific and influential. His is a type of landscape that is now imitated in parks all round the world, from Dubai to Sydney to Europe: it’s known as “jardin anglais” and was admired by Catherine the Great and Thomas Jefferson.

Frederick Law Olmsted laid out Central Park in New York in conscious emulation of Brown — as John Nash did with St James’s Park (Hyde Park is by Bridgeman). Golf courses nearly always pay unconscious homage to Brown. There is something deeply pleasing about a view of rolling grassland punctuated with clumps of low-branching trees and glimpses of distant water.

Mountains may have more majesty, forests more fear, deserts more danger, townscapes more detail, fields more fruitfulness, formal gardens more symmetry — but it is the informal English parkland of Capability Brown that you would choose for a picnic, or for a visit with a potential lover. It feels natural.

And yet of course it is wholly contrived. One of Tom Stoppard’s characters explains to another in his play Arcadia, as they contemplate the view of a park from a country house:

BERNARD: Lovely. The real England.

HANNAH: You can stop being silly now, Bernard. English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour. Here, look — Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil. Arcadia!

Hannah’s right. Claude Lorrain’s paintings of scenes from Virgil were all the rage in the 1730s. By the 1740s, when Brown started work at Stowe under William Kent, prints of 44 of Claude’s landscapes were on sale in London. The landscape at Stourhead (not by Brown), with its Grecian temples seen across lakes, is little more than a copy of Claude’s Aeneas at Delos. Kent’s genius, inspired by Lord Burlington and Alexander Pope, was to supply this craving for classical rural Arcadia.

Brown brought something else to the party. His modern equivalent and a fellow Northumbrian, the landscape architect Patrick James, points out that Brown would have walked to school at Cambo every day across the open landscape of Northumberland and through the park at Wallington, then being remodelled by Sir William Blackett. The land between the Roman wall and the Scottish border where Brown grew up is big-sky country with long views across open, grassy landscapes dotted with clumps of trees, neither hilly nor flat, but ridgy and rolling. It is an evolved, rather than a designed, version of a Capability Brown landscape. So Brown made Arcadia wilder and wider than Kent did, with fewer temples.

But some have argued that there is another step beyond Virgil and the border country to explain Brown’s appeal — back to the Pleistocene savannas of Africa. Gordon Orians, an ecologist, has congealed this idea as the “savanna hypothesis”; that people’s preferred landscapes bear an uncanny similarity to the most welcoming parts of East Africa’s savanna, where humanity arose.

In a Claude painting or a Brown landscape there is a pleasing combination of what the geographer Jay Appleton called “prospect and refuge”: you can see a long way, but you can also hide. There is a long view over grassland, but there are clumps of low-branching trees to hide among (and up), and to supply your needs there are bodies of water and herds of game.

When I first saw an African savanna at the age of ten, something stirred within me. The great open grassland, the flat-topped fever trees by the distant lake, the herd of grazing antelope — did it feel like a Stone Age ancestral home? Our antecedents spent two million years hunting and gathering in such a habitat, compared with just 40,000 in the damp, dark forests of the north, less than 10,000 in fields of corn and a few hundred in streets. It is our natural habitat as a species and it would almost be odd if, somewhere deep in our natures, there were not an evolved tendency to feel at home in it, as monkeys do in trees and fish in water.

In his 2014 book Snakes, Sunrises and Shakespeare; how evolution shapes our loves and fears, Professor Orians notes, for example, that designers of Japanese gardens have selected and pruned trees in such a way that they are more like those of African savannas. He also showed images of African acacia trees to people and asked which ones they preferred. They chose those with low trunk height, canopy layering and wide canopies — ideal for shelter and climbing and reminiscent of Brown’s signature tree, the cedar of Lebanon.

Professor Orians and a colleague also compared Humphry Repton’s “before and after” drawings in his red books. These showed clients how Repton (who was later than Brown) would change their parks. He generally added features like those of desirable savanna: he opened up wider views but planted clumps of trees on hilltops or near water; he depicted herds of cattle, sheep or deer; and, of course, he introduced water features.

In the 1990s two Russian artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, commissioned opinion polls in many countries to ask people what they wanted to see in a painting — and then painted the results. All over the world people came up with grassland savannas with water, easily-climbed trees, happy people and large animals. Think golf course with fallow deer, or the Brown parks at Petworth and Burghley, Blenheim and Chatsworth, Longleat and Highclere.

The satirist Richard Cambridge joked that he wanted to die before Capability Brown so that he could see heaven before it was “improved”. In 2016 — the date of Brown’s birth is unknown; we have only the date of his baptism, August 30 — I shall raise a glass to a humbly born county boy, who mixed Northumberland with the Serengeti to produce Arcadia and gave us the archetypical English landscape.

The long shadow of Malthus

My article on the misuse of Malthus appeared in Standpoint magazine. It is an edited extract from my book, The Evolution of Everything. It is worth asking how John Gray could have reviewed that book and accused me of social Darwinism after reading this!

 

For more than 200 years, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, based on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale. It centres on the question of how to control human population growth and it answers that question by saying we must be cruel to be kind, that ends justify means. It is still around today; and it could not be more wrong. It is the continuing misuse of Malthus.

According to his epitaph in Bath Abbey, the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus, author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), was noted for “his sweetness of temper, urbanity of manners and tenderness of heart, his benevolence and his piety”. Yet his ideas have justified some of the greatest crimes in  history. By saying that, if people could not be persuaded to delay marriage, we would have to encourage famine and “reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases”, he inadvertently gave birth to a series of heartless policies — the poor laws, the British government’s approach to famine in Ireland and India, social Darwinism, eugenics, the Holocaust, India’s forced sterilisations and China’s one-child policy. All derived their logic more or less directly from a partial reading of Malthus.

To this day if you write or speak about falling child mortality in Africa, you can be sure of getting the following Malthusian response: but surely it’s a bad thing if you stop poor people’s babies dying? Better to be cruel to be kind. Yet actually we now know, this argument is wrong. The way to get population growth to slow, it turns out, is to keep babies alive so people plan smaller families: to bring health, prosperity and education to all.

Britain’s Poor Law of 1834, which attempted to ensure that the very poor were not helped except in workhouses, and that conditions in workhouses were not better than the worst in the outside world, was based explicitly on Malthusian ideas — that too much charity only encouraged breeding, especially illegitimacy, or “bastardy”. The Irish potato famine of the 1840s was made infinitely worse by Malthusian prejudice shared by the British politicians in positions of power. The Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, was motivated by “a Malthusian fear about the long-term effect of relief”, according to a biographer.  The Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, Charles Trevelyan, had been a pupil of Malthus at the East India Company College: famine, he thought, was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population” and a “direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence” sent to teach the “selfish, perverse and turbulent” Irish a lesson. Trevelyan added: “Supreme Wisdom has educed permanent good out of transient evil.”

In India in 1877, a famine killed ten million people. The viceroy, Lord Lytton, quoted almost directly from Malthus in explaining why he had halted several private attempts to bring relief to the starving: “The Indian population has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil.” His policy was to herd the hungry into camps where they were fed on — literally — starvation rations. Lytton thought he was being cruel to be kind.

Even Charles Darwin briefly succumbed. In an explicitly Malthusian passage in his 1871 book The Descent of Man he noted that the “imbecile, the maimed and the sick” are saved by asylums and doctors; and that the weak are kept alive by vaccination. “Thus the weak members of civilised species propagate their kind,” something that any cattle breeder knows is “injurious to the race”. It was a hint that was enthusiastically embraced by several of Darwin’s followers, notably his cousin Francis Galton and his German translator, Ernst Haeckel. Galton wanted people to choose their marriage partners more carefully, so that the fit would breed and the unfit would not. “What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly,” he argued, “man may do providently, quickly and kindly.”

Galton’s followers were soon outdoing each other in their prescriptive rush to nationalise marriage, license reproduction and sterilise the unfit. Many of the most enthusiastic eugenicists, such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis and H.G. Wells, were socialists, who thought the power of the state would be necessary to implement this programme of selective human breeding. It became politically incorrect in elite circles in Britain, France and the United States not to urge eugenic policies. To be against eugenics was to be uncaring about the future of the human race.

Incidentally, “social Darwinism” is the doctrine that we should encourage biological evolution to assist social progress: that we should prescribe natural selection among people through licensing marriage, and sterilising or killing “unfit” people. It could not be more different from modern theories of cultural evolution, which I champion in my new book The Evolution of Everything (Fourth Estate, £20), and which argue that ideas themselves evolve by trial and error: that ideas can die so that people do not have to.

In Germany, Haeckel used a phrase taken directly from Malthus in an influential lecture at Altenburg in 1892: “Here it was Darwin, especially, who thirty-three years ago opened our eyes by his doctrine of the struggle for existence, and his theory of selection founded upon it.” (My emphasis.) In 1905 four of Haeckel’s followers founded the German Society for Racial Hygiene, a step that would lead pretty well directly to the Nuremberg laws, the Wannsee conference and the gas chambers. This is not to blame the innocent mathematician-clergyman for the sins of the Nazis. There is nothing morally wrong in describing a struggle for existence as a feature of human population. What is wrong is prescribing it as deliberate policy.

Leonard Darwin, son of Charles, made no bones about the switch from description to prescription in his presidential address to the First International Congress of Eugenics in London in 1912: “As an agency making for progress, conscious selection must replace the blind forces of natural selection.” America, led by California, took the hint. By the time eugenic laws were struck down in the early 1970s, some 63,000 Americans had been forcibly sterilised and many more persuaded to accept voluntary sterility. By 1933 California had forcibly sterilised more people than all other states combined.

It was to California that Ernst Rudin of the German Society of Racial Hygiene looked for advice when he was appointed Reichskommissar for eugenics by the incoming Nazi government. By 1934, Germany was sterilising more than 5,000 people per month, and it soon moved on to killing them instead. The California conservationist Charles Goethe returned from a visit to Germany overjoyed that the Californian example had “jolted into action a great government of 60 million people”.

After the Second World War, with the revelation of the horrendous results of these policies taken to extremes in Auschwitz, eugenics fell from fashion. Or did it? The very same arguments resurfaced in the movement to control world population. In 1948 a bestselling book by the American biologist William Vogt, Road to Survival, praised the “clear-sighted clergyman” Malthus and lamented that British rule in India had contributed to making famines ineffectual, which was a pity because it led to Indians “breeding with the irresponsibility of codfish”.

The link was just as explicit on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1952 Sir Charles Galton Darwin, nephew of Leonard and grandson of Charles, published his own pessimistic book, entitled The Next Million Years, in which he wrote: “Those who are most anxious about the Malthusian threat argue that the decrease of population through prosperity is the solution of the population problem. They are unconscious of the degeneration of the race implied by this condition, or perhaps they are willing to accept it as the lesser of two evils.” He recommended sterilisation, which he feared would be “vehemently resisted”.

Sir Julian Huxley, the first head of Unesco and an early advocate of population control, as late as 1962 lamented that “at the moment the population certainly wouldn’t tolerate compulsory eugenic or sterilisation measures, but if you start some experiments, including some voluntary ones, and see that they work and if you make a massive attempt at educating people and making them understand what is at issue, you might be able, within a generation, to have an effect on the general population.”

Paul Ehrlich, an ecologist who shot to fame in 1968 with his gloomy Malthusian book The Population Bomb, wanted President Johnson to make food aid to India conditional on forcible sterilisation of all those who had three or more children: “coercion in a good cause”, he called it. The fact that Johnson’s linking of aid to India with population control had sparked criticism at home left Ehrlich “astounded”.

It is not as if these views were uncontested. The Brazilian diplomat Josué de Castro, in his book The Geopolitics of Hunger, wrote: “The road to survival, therefore, does not lie in the neo-Malthusian prescriptions to eliminate surplus people, nor in birth control, but in the effort to make everybody on the face of the earth productive.” The economist Julian Simon attacked Ehrlich’s population pessimism, arguing there was something badly wrong with a thesis that the birth of a baby is a bad thing, but the birth of a calf is a good thing.

China’s one-child policy also derives directly from neo-Malthusian writing. As Susan Greenhalgh, a Harvard anthropologist, recounts in her book Just One Child, in 1978 Song Jian, a guided-missile designer with expertise in control systems, attended a technical conference in Helsinki. While there he heard about two books by neo-Malthusian alarmists linked with a shadowy group of environmentalist bigwigs called the Club of Rome: The Limits to Growth and A Blueprint for Survival.

The Limits to Growth had applied control systems theory, of the kind Song was an expert in, not to the trajectory of missiles but to the trajectory of population and resource use. A Blueprint for Survival, written by Zac Goldsmith’s uncle Teddy but signed by a veritable Who’s Who of the scientific establishment, including Sir Julian Huxley, Sir Peter Medawar and Sir Peter Scott, echoed Malthus: “It is unrealistic to suppose that there will be increases in agricultural production adequate to meet forecast demands for food.”

Back in China, Song republished the main themes of both books under his own name, and shot to fame within the regime. General Qian Xing Zhong was put in charge of the one-child policy. He ordered the sterilisation of all women with two or more children, the insertion of IUDs into all women with one child (removal of the device being a crime), the banning of births to women younger than 23, and the mandatory abortion of all unauthorised pregnancies up to the eighth month.

What was the international reaction to this holocaust? The United Nations Secretary General awarded a prize to General Qian in 1983, and recorded his “deep appreciation” for the way in which the Chinese government had “marshalled the resources necessary to implement population policies on a massive scale”. Eight years later, even though the horrors of the policy were becoming ever more clear, the head of the United Nations Family Planning Agency said that “China has every reason to feel proud of its remarkable achievements” in population control, before offering to help China teach other countries how to do it. A benign view of this authoritarian atrocity continues to this day. The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China’s lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time.

We now know that Malthusian misanthropy — the notion that you should harden your heart, approve of famine and disease, feel ashamed of pity and compassion, for the good of the race — was wrong pragmatically as well as morally. The right thing to do about poor, hungry and fecund people always was, and still is, to give them hope, opportunity, freedom, education, food and medicine, including of course voluntary contraception, for not only will that make them happier, it will enable them to have smaller families.

Badgers are driving hedgehogs extinct

My Times column on the hedgehog decline, and the effect of badgers:

Hedgehogs, subjects of the Times Christmas Appeal, are to get their own summit, the Environment Secretary Liz Truss said last week. Hedgehogs really are in trouble. Their numbers have plunged, their range has shrunk and they have disappeared from large parts of the countryside altogether. The population has probably at least halved during this century and may now be 3% of what it was in the 1950s.

Yet when asked why this has happened conservation organisations nearly always talk of habitat loss and urban development. This makes no sense because hedgehogs now survive mostly in suburbs, not rural areas. The one thing the pressure groups hate mentioning is badgers. Yet the scientific evidence that an increase in Mr Brock may well be the chief cause of Mrs Tiggywinkle’s demise is – as I have been discovering by reading the scientific literature – overwhelming.

The evidence comes in many forms. There’s the direct evidence – the hollowed-out prickle-bearing skins left behind after a badger eats a hedgehog. Only badgers can open a hedgehog after it rolls up in defence with prickles on the outside. Foxes and dogs cannot. Badger predation is often found to be the main cause of hedgehog death in studies in this country.

There’s the timing evidence. The decline in hedgehogs coincided with the rise in badgers since the latter’s protection began in the 1970s and was strengthened in the 1990s. Anecdotally, there are clear-cut cases to show this is likely to be cause and effect, not coincidence. Kew Gardens had a thriving hedgehog population until the mid 1980s when badgers first arrived there. Today, says the Royal Botanic Gardens’ website, “Kew is teeming with badgers”. There are now more than 20 badger setts and hedgehogs are hardly ever seen, and if they are don’t last long. Habitat change and development cannot be the cause in Kew, because there has not been any.

There’s the spatial evidence. Throughout England hedgehogs (great worm eaters) have vanished from worm-rich pastureland, where badgers thrive, and cling on only in suburban gardens and amenity grassland, where badgers so far have not penetrated much. Even here, as one study put it: “the probability of hedgehog occurrence in suburban habitats declined towards zero in areas of high badger density.” As a general rule, wherever badgers are present at a density higher than about one main sett every four square kilometres, hedgehogs are absent. In most of rural England, sett density is two or three times higher.

There’s the behavioural evidence. Back in the 1990s, ecologists discovered that the smell of badgers alone is enough to deter hedgehogs from entering an area. And hedgehogs released into areas of excellent habitat high-tailed it out of there if they smelt badger. They do not wait to be eaten.

There’s the international evidence. Sweden has also blamed its decline in hedgehogs on rising badger numbers. In the Netherlands, scientists reported this year that hedgehogs are now confined mostly to urban areas, despite roads and development, because of the spread of badgers in rural areas.

There’s the experimental evidence, which is the clincher. The randomized badger control trials, carried out between 1998 and 2006 in 30 different parts of the country, provided an opportunity to see what happened to hedgehog numbers if badger numbers were reduced.

In pasture land, where hedgehogs are mostly extinct, there was of course little effect. But in “amenity grassland” – parks, lawns, gardens, playing fields etc – there was a dramatic explosion in hedgehog numbers in those areas where badgers were culled: hedgehog density almost trebled from an average of 0.9 per hectare to 2.4 per hectare in just five years. By contrast in the control areas where no badgers were culled, the hedgehog density remained unchanged at 0.3 per hectare over the same period. 

So we know one way to increase hedgehog numbers: reduce badger numbers. No other approach has been demonstrated to have such an effect. Given that badgers are highly effective predators of bumble bees (those who try to study bumble bees complain that most of the nests they find get dug out and eaten by badgers) as well as of ground nesting birds, and that they carry bovine tuberculosis, there is little doubt that lower badger densities would be good for the ecology of the British countryside as well as for farming.

After all, even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds accepts that that foxes and crows need to be controlled on its reserves because of the impact they have on wildlife, so why not badgers? The key point is that there is nothing natural about the density at which badgers and foxes live in Britain today. In a natural system wolves, bears and lynx would control their numbers to the benefit of hedgehogs, bumble bees and birds.

This general pattern is known as the “mesopredator-release problem” and elsewhere in the world, wildlife managers are much less squeamish about confronting it. If top (“apex”) predators are missing, then middle-ranking (“meso”) predators thrive with devastating results for species on which they prey. For example, in southern California where coyotes are absent, foxes, skunks and domestic cats are more numerous and many bird species suffer badly. In the north Pacific, a decline in sea otters (caused by killer whales) unleashed a population explosion of sea urchins resulting in overgrazing of kelp to the detriment of many fish. The return of wolves to Yellowstone park benefited many plants, insects, rodents and birds by suppressing numbers of elk (not that elk can be described as predators). 

The hedgehog’s plight is only going to get worse. As social memories of persecution fade, badgers are moving into suburbs, the last refuges of hedgehogs. Providing hedgehogs with ideal homes in our gardens, and love tunnels under garden fences, may slow their decline, but it won’t stop them going extinct from much of the country altogether. Unless we are prepared to unleash brown bears, lynx and wolves into the English countryside to control badgers and help hedgehogs, which seems unlikely, then we are under an obligation to do the apex predator job ourselves, and control badgers for the sake of birds, bumble bees and hedgehogs. For sentimental reasons we may decide not to do so, but then we will have the decline of the hedgehog on our conscience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where shall we eat dinner?

My Times column on the underwhelming results of the climate conference and Britain's renegotiation with the European Union:

 

There’s an uncanny similarity between the climate negotiations that climaxed in Paris at the weekend and David Cameron’s European Union reform negotiations, which continue in Brussels this week. The original aims of both plans were far bolder than the outcome. Multilateral negotiation, however well intended, really is one of the great flops of the modern world.

Have you ever sat down with ten friends and tried to agree where to go to dinner? Even with everybody saying, “No, it’s fine, you decide”, it usually proves frustratingly difficult to agree. Now imagine that instead of being helpful, everybody is looking after his or her own interest. Donald knows of a good Polish restaurant, Narendra prefers Indian, Jinping likes Chinese, Barack wants a hot dog, Vladimir is vegan, Angela recommends Wurst, François insists there must be crème brûlée and Dave has a craving for fish and chips. And then imagine that there are 28 people in the room. Or 195. The larger the group, the harder it is going to be to decide on anything.

The great Paris climate treaty is a world away from what was promised just four years ago. In Durban in 2011, world leaders solemnly agreed — after 17 years of trying — that they would definitely commit to legally binding limits on emissions for all countries in the world no later than 2015. They reached an agreement at the weekend only by abandoning this goal altogether.

True, the agreement’s champions are claiming that it is legally binding after all, but this is just verbal sophistry: what’s legally binding is that each country must come up with its own voluntary, “intended” plan — in five years’ time. The 2C limit of warming must also now be obeyed, but this is meaningless. At the rate warming is happening, and on the basis of what we know about climate sensitivity, that threshold is many decades away, and depends on many unknown factors.

What world leaders have actually signed us up to is: voluntary emission limits with no enforcement mechanism, voluntary progress reviews and voluntary contributions to a trillion-dollar green climate fund. Nothing is binding except that each country must resubmit its voluntary national goal every five years and even that does not apply to the G77 developing nations.

After four years any country can opt out with a year’s notice. Plus, just in case anybody gets any ideas, there is a clause effectively banning countries from suing each other for failing to cut emissions: “Article 8 of the Agreement does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation.” The whole thing is just a statement of promises.

World leaders essentially solved the problem of where to go to dinner by changing the topic of conversation to how much they would all like to go to dinner. On this they were all triumphantly agreed. For the poor people of the world, the vagueness of the Paris agreement is good news: it means development can continue, making them less vulnerable to all harms, including weather. Those who think climate change is a huge threat should be worried, but those of us who think climate change is not such a big threat should still be concerned about just how bad the world would be at responding when a really big collective-action problem comes along: mega-volcano, alien invasion, etc.

The dinner plans of David Cameron and his 27 fellow European Union leaders are in no better shape. The prime minister promised a “complete opt out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights” in 2009, promised in his Bloomberg speech in 2013 “fundamental change” and “treaty change”, and promised just a year ago that “we want EU jobseekers to have a job offer before they come here”.

None of this is now on the table, and he is reduced to various demands that boil down to four vague requests: to protect the single market for non-euro countries, to boost competitiveness by setting targets for red-tape reduction, to exempt the country from “ever-closer union” and to restrict European Union migrants’ in-work benefits.

The first three are sufficiently vague to be easily circumvented by determined Europe-integrators. The fourth is proving indigestible for several member states. Since this measure would do little to slow within-EU migration, which is driven chiefly by our strong economy, our vibrant jobs market and, looking ahead, our high living wage, even this is a pyrrhic defeat that will make little difference.

In the case of the European Union, it is not just that there are 28 diners trying to decide where to eat, but that there are others interfering in the decision: the European parliament, with its obsessive insistence that more Europe is the answer to every problem.

But Mr Cameron’s team will no doubt learn from Laurent Fabius’s presentation of the Paris climate treaty how easy it is, with a mostly pliant media, to portray a humiliating damp squib as a mighty victory against all odds. So next February when heads of state finally agree at 2 in the morning to some non-binding (and probably insincere) words about limiting European integration to just two degrees of “ever closer union”, expect hosannas of excitement.

The dinner problem is of course the chief reason that the European Union is in such a mess: it is run through multilateral negotiation. Its dismal failure to deal with the Mediterranean economic depression, the migration crisis, the continent’s declining economic competitiveness and the bias against innovation are all symptoms of a group who cannot decide where to eat, so end up going nowhere. In that sense, the only hope is ever closer union for those who wish, and greater independence for those who don’t.

Agreements reached in the glare of publicity by scores of world leaders do not have a great track record: remember Versailles. For a sharp contrast, cast your mind back to October 1986 in a white, wooden house on the outskirts of Reykjavik where two men (Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev) almost reached agreement to rid the world of nuclear weapons, going far beyond their original negotiating positions. There is no way that would have been remotely feasible with 28 people in the room, or 195. Multilateral negotiation, whether over European economic policy, climate mitigation or world trade, really has been a spectacular failure. Do let us stop pretending otherwise.