cull, kul, v.t. to gather; to select; to pick out and destroy, as inferior members of a group, e.g. of seals, deer. — n. an unsuitable animal eliminated from a flock or herd [Fr. cuellir, to gather — L. colligere — col-, together, legere, to gather]

It’s been a bad few days for wildlife. Hot on the heels of South Africa’s announcement that it is to raise a 1995 ban on killing elephants, the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee has just published its report on badgers and bovine tubercolosis, recommending limited culling of badgers in selected areas.

These are very different scenarios, of course. Compared with other regions of Africa, the elephant population in South Africa is booming, having reached 18,000, including more than 12,500 in Kruger National Park, one of the country’s major tourist attractions. There are serious concerns over the effect this success story is having on other species and habitats. The reintroduction of culling is a conservation decision, which actually goes against economic concerns such as the impact on tourism. The UK’s vendetta against the badger, however, is purely economic, driven by prolonged pressure from the farming industry based on dubious evidence of badgers’ role in transmitting bovine TB to herds.

What both culls have in common is their misuse of the word ‘cull’. As the definition above suggests, it has connotations of selection and precision, a scientific ‘pruning’ of individual animals to improve the health of the population as a whole. This sanitises the fact that both ‘culls’ will be indiscriminate slaughter on a disgusting scale. Elephants are usually culled by shooting entire herds. This is presented as the most humane option, on the grounds that elephants are social animals who mourn their dead and whose young need to be taught social behavior by adults in order to survive. The badger report fails to shut the door completely on gassing as a kill option, which is just about as indiscriminate and unselective as you can get. To their credit, the committee admits concern that disorganised culling could make matters worse. However, their way around this is a co-ordinated cull covering a large area, sustained for at least four years. Again, no precision, just killing all badgers in the area, young or old, weak or strong, sick or healthy.

Perhaps if I start a badger farm, I can ‘badger’ the government into approving a cull of cattle herds to prevent them infecting my cuddly charges with their foul disease. It is, after all, cattle tuberculosis. Farmers should put their own affairs in order before decimating wildlife.

L.A. Times: ‘South Africa to resume killing elephants’ [registration required]

‘Badgers and cattle TB: the final report of the Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB’

Tonight, The History Channel broadcasts a two-hour documentary special ‘Life After People’. The program speculates:

“What would happen to planet earth if the human race were to suddenly disappear forever? Would ecosystems thrive? What remnants of our industrialized world would survive?”

A mix of science fiction and science fact, using expert testimony from a range of disciplines, we are shown how the world as we have made it would change if the human race were no longer there to ‘maintain’ it. Judging by the accompanying History Channel web site, the program follows quite closely the general thread of a 1996 New Scientist article, ‘Return to Paradise‘, which traces the changes in a deserted London over 5, 10, 50 and 500 years.

The thing about ‘What if?’ scenarios is that they often raise more questions than they answer. In this case, one has to ask how the human race disappeared, because the manner of our departure could have a strong influence over how, or if, the planet and its remaining occupants survive us. The web site describes a number of possible causes: pandemic, nuclear winter, asteroid impact. Several of these would be relatively quick, but indiscriminate, possibly leaving a totally dead planet. The premise of the show seems to be an instantaneous vanishing, leaving all physical traces of our civilisation intact. This kind of begs the question, who turns the lights off? Who makes the nukes safe, and closes down industrial processes? What about the mess?

I suppose this is outside the scope of the program. As another New Scientist article ‘Imagine Earth Without People’ put it in 2006:

“Imagine that all the people on Earth – all 6.5 billion of us and counting – could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let’s not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses).”

Cheery stuff. Inevitably, ‘Life After People’ concentrates on the decay and collapse of our built environment, because it makes more dramatic visuals than watching grass grow, which I imagine would be a major activity if this were to happen for real. It should be remembered that there’s very little of the planet’s surface left that doesn’t bear the mark of human activity, and very few ecosystems that wouldn’t change once we went.

A North Wales house builder has spent £140,000 on creating a special habitat for great crested newts on the site of a 26-home development. When environmental specialists arrived to move the newts to their new home, they could find only two. The same builder has already spent £300,000 at another development where a much larger colony of newts was discovered close to the site of 320 homes and a school.

‘ Two newts given £140,000 new home’

The great crested, the largest of the three British newt species, is a European Protected Species , listed under the EU Habitats and Species Directive 1992. It is protected under UK law by the Conservation (Natural Habitats etc) Regulations and the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. It is an offence to deliberately kill, capture or disturb a great crested newt or damage its environment, carrying a penalty of six months in prison.

Conservationists estimate the UK has about 18,000 colonies comprising almost half a million individuals. Newts like to establish themselves in precisely the kind of spot that builders are being encouraged to build on: brownfield sites. If newts are discovered, planning applications must be withdrawn to allow a full environmental survey to be carried out. A special licence must be obtained from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. If it is granted, an alternative home has to be found and the newts trapped and relocated by wildlife experts, work which is permitted only during the newts’ spring and summer migration between land and water. The process can last up to two years from start to finish.

With Britain in need of millions of new homes, and builders’ costs for newt relocation and other environmental work certain to be passed on to the customer, it’s no wonder there’s a dire shortage of affordable housing.

It’s official, we’re in trouble again. Or still. You’d be forgiven for thinking the latest report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is more of the same old same old. It is. The Synthesis Report of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is effectively a summary of three papers published earlier this year, and is intended to lay the foundations for worldwide agreement on emissions. You’ll have heard much of this before:

Snow and ice melting, sea levels rising by up to 0.59m by 2100, Arctic sea ice shrinking by 2.7% a decade, heatwaves and hurricanes increasing, human greenhouse emissions up by 70% between 1970 and 2004 and set to double by 2030, atmospheric CO2 at its highest level for 650,000 years, up to 30% of species at risk of extinction.

Despite all the doom and gloom, there’s still a surprising degree of confidence that if decisive action is taken now we can mitigate the worst of the projected impacts. In particular, not only do we have current or imminent technologies that will enable us to do this, but prompt action will be cost-effective and will have a minimal economic downside. In other words, it’s possible and it’s affordable.

It seems the UK government is having trouble balancing the books to make this happen. On Saturday the Guardian reported that DEFRA, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is planning reductions in key environmental services to generate savings of at least £300 million. The cuts are driven by the huge costs of a series of recent disasters such as foot and mouth disease, severe flooding, and mismanagement of agricultural subsidy reforms. All fifty DEFRA agencies are expected to be affected, hitting areas such as National Parks, sustainable development, forestry, fisheries, energy saving, waste management, environmental protection and, last but not least, the fight against climate change.

Coinciding with the publication of the Climate Change Bill and constant re-affirmation of emissions commitments, the conclusion must be that the government is struggling to meet its targets. Concentrating efforts on climate change and neglecting wider environmental obligations is bad news for nature conservation, with Natural England facing budget cuts of 30% for new conservation projects. Spending cuts are under consideration for some of the country’s most valuable wildlife sites.

It’s time that someone realised that it’s not just about carbon, stupid. Making environmental policy around a single issue is short-sighted and short-term thinking. We must continue to support our natural resources, our habitats and wildlife, to keep them robust and resilient against the effects of climate change. Without a holistic view of the environment , we may win the battle to reduce carbon emissions, but we will lose our natural heritage. A landscape consisting of nothing but windmills set in fields of biofuel source crops is not somewhere I would want to call home.

Summary for Policymakers of the AR4 Synthesis Report

“Climate change department faces £300 million cuts” (Guardian)

Presenters Billy Bragg and Mark Viduka show their emotional involvement in the issues

Well I’ve ploughed through the first part of CNN’s much-vaunted eco-documentary ‘Planet In Peril’, and I wasn’t that impressed. A series of episodes filmed around the world, loosely linked by a cobbled-together ‘theme’ of interlinked ecosystems under threat from human exploitation, it kicked off with a slot about illegal wildlife trading in Thailand. After 15 minutes of shaky footage of sad caged creatures and police raids, we were off to Madagascar, a biodiversity hotspot with only 10% of its natural environment remaining. We followed a Conservation International RAP (Rapid Assessment Program) team as they surveyed the forest for rare species. Inevitably, a tiny lizard was found which might or might not be a completely new species. After a brief aside on the economic pressures driving the locals to over-exploit their environment, we were off again, this time to the US.

Yellowstone Park is a “pristine ecosystem”, and we reviewed the progress of the re-introduction of the grey wolf in 1995. A natural predator for elk and bison, the wolf has brought about a ‘trophic cascade’ benefiting all levels of the ecosystem. After establishing the vital role of the high-level carnivore in maintaining ecosystems, we went to Cambodia where a small team of park rangers funded by the Wildlife Alliance are struggling to keep tiger poachers at bay. Collateral damage from indiscriminate laying of snares has reduced the population of wild elephants in Cambodia to 2-3000. The Asian elephant is a “keystone species”.

Tigers are hunted for their supposedly therapeutic body parts, so our next visit was to China, the world’s number one destination for illegal wildlife. Apparently, “the Chinese will eat anything”. Despite swift punishment and hefty fines for selling endangered species, the trade continues to grow. Traditional Chinese medicine is driving species to extinction, leading on to a discussion of general resource exploitation, shortages, pollution and health problems. Cancer is the leading cause of death in China. Finally, back to the USA for a slot on “body burden” testing, highlighting the accumulation of pollutants and toxins in the human body and their effects on health.

All a bit of a muddle really, but how refreshing to see a 90 minute (excluding adverts) documentary about the environment that didn’t mention global warming once. That is still to come in Part 2. Sadly, I can’t find any trace of that having been uploaded to P2P. Perhaps the guy who uploaded Part 1 lost the will to live after watching it.

http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/planet.in.peril/

[slideshare id=32915&doc=sustainable-food-lab-6679&w=425]

Thousands of badgers will be gassed or snared if the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) gets its way. Until the 1980′s, gassing of badger setts was routinely employed as a means of controlling the spread of bovine tuberculosis (TB). British farmers and successive UK governments have long believed that TB was spread by badgers and infecting the national dairy herd. Badgers are protected in the UK by the Protection of Badgers Act 1992. They may not be killed, nor their setts interfered with, except on license from the government, the only exception being for TB control.

On June 18th, the Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB (ISG) published its Final Report, Bovine TB: The Scientific Evidence, after nearly ten years work. In a press release, the ISG stated:

“… no practicable method of badger culling can reduce the incidence of cattle TB to any meaningful extent, and several culling approaches may make matters worse. The ISG also conclude that rigidly applied control measures targeted at cattle can reverse the rising incidence of disease, and halt its geographical spread”.

Despite compelling scientific evidence that badger culling is useless and in some scenarios worse than useless, and we’d be better off controlling TB through the cattle herds, the farming community is still calling for the elimination of badger populations. Although the work of gassing, snaring or shooting would have to be done under licences issued by the government, wildlife groups fear that this will be unpoliceable and result in widespread cruelty and suffering. Gassing is an indiscriminate killing method that affects many other wildlife species.

The Black and White Campaign website has more details on the issues. Please sign their online petition.

In an Energy and Capital article, Chris Nelder does some rough calculations to determine what oil is really costing the United States, factoring in all the externalities.
Crude Cost: $69 a Barrel
If the U.S. daily crude oil consumption, 21 million barrels, were bought at the market price (roughly $69 per barrel), it would cost the economy $1.5 billion per day, or $529 billion per year.
Cost of Dependence: $233 Billion a Year
A 2000 study for the Department of Energy reported that supply disruptions, price hikes, and loss of wealth caused by oil market upheavals cost the U.S. economy around $7 trillion (1998 dollars) between 1970 and 2000. The study focused on macroeconomic adjustment costs, the potential loss of GDP, and wealth transfer, but noted “These cost estimates do not include military, strategic or political costs associated with U.S. and world dependence on oil imports.”
All Economic Costs: $480 a Barrel
After taking into account the direct and indirect costs of oil, the economic costs of oil supply disruption, and military expenditures, Milton Copulus estimates the true cost of oil at $480 a barrel, equivalent to an annual expenditure of $10 trillion.
Government Subsidies
Depending on how you figure it, what you leave in and what you leave out, direct and indirect subsidies come to between $584 billion and $1.9 trillion per year. Typical hidden or disregarded costs include:

• Loss of income from leasing public lands to oil companies for minimal rents
• Tax-funded programs that directly subsidize oil production and consumption
• Health costs from pollution, reduced crop yields
• Direct and indirect costs of traffic delays, traffic accidents, subsidized parking

Environmental Costs
Burning fossil fuels has serious environmental costs: water and soil pollution, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. A 1995 article from the Union of Concerned Scientists arrived at a 1991 figure for environmental externalities of between $54 billion and $232 billion. Allowing for inflation, the current cost could be as much as $345 billion a year.
Climate Change Cost
Using a figure of $35 per ton as the cost of CO2 emissions, burning oil and gas is costing the U.S. $56 trillion per year.

The author Chris Nelder freely admits that these figures are ‘back of a fag packet’ stuff, and frankly to my eyes some of the numbers are inconsistent to put it mildly. Even so, there’s enough here to call into question the mantra that renewable energy is too expensive compared with ‘cheap’ oil and natural gas. As he says, “No wonder $71 billion of new capital was poured into the renewables sector last year”

Recently, The Coffee House has given coverage to Cool Earth, the fundraising initiative to protect the Amazon rainforest (“Cool Earth-revisited“) . While acknowledging the value of the biodiversity within the rainforest, the prime driver for this project is its function as a carbon sink. For between £70 and £100, depending on location, you can ‘buy’ an acre of rainforest and lock in 260 tonnes of CO2.

You don’t really ‘buy’ the land, of course. You don’t own it, you can’t exploit it and you can’t sell it. If you go out to have a picnic on it, you get pilloried for the air miles and emissions associated with getting there. So basically, you are giving a charitable donation. From Cool Earth’s Terms and Conditions:

“Cool Earth Action is not offering for sale any land or biomass. Donors will not receive title to the land sponsored or to the ‘emissions reductions’ achieved by any of Cool Earth Action’s projects.”

I’m not knocking Cool Earth, but when it was suggested that The Coffee House team club together to sponsor their own corporate acre, I had reservations. My doubts were crystallised when an appeal letter from the Woodland Trust, a charity working to protect and expand native woodlands in the UK, came through the letterbox.

Woodland Trust have 3 months to raise £750,000 to acquire 649 acres of Brede High Woods, a large complex of ancient woods and heathland in East Sussex. A designated Site of Nature Conservation Interest within the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Brede High Woods contain a rich mosaic of habitats, including rare heathland, and an astounding variety of threatened and unusual species.

This irreplaceable landscape will be parcelled up and auctioned off to private bidders if the £750,000 target is not met. It may be a little strong for the Woodland Trust to say that “ancient woodland is our rainforest”, but it’s probably the closest we can get. If we fail to act to protect sites such as this on our own doorstep, how can we justify sending our money halfway round the world to manipulate the use of natural resources in Brazil? And should we really be surprised when the locals say we should put our own house in order before telling them how to run theirs?

In recent weeks The Coffee House has reported on the phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) , which has seen large-scale disappearances of honey bees across the US and lately in Europe. If the problem continues to spread, there are massive implications for crop pollination and agricultural production. New theories on the causes of CCD are put forward on a regular basis. The latest contributions to the debate suggest that modern beekeeping practices may be to blame.

Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island. In a widely circulated email, as reported by the Organic Consumers Association, she wrote:

“I’m on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies.”

The Bush Bees web site reports that it is common practice among commercial beekeepers to run hives with cells much larger than are found in nature. Bees bred in these hives can be up to half as big again as is natural. By reverting to a ‘normal’ cell size, incidence of varroa mites has been virtually eliminated.

“Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem?”

We’ve been pushing bees too hard, says Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, in an interview for CBC. We’re starving them out by feeding them artificially and moving them great distances. Given the stress commercial bees are under, Kevan suggests CCD might be caused by parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or long wet springs, or pesticides, or GM crops. Maybe it’s all of the above…

Ring or Buzz? , The Vanishing Bee