Monthly Archives: May 2015

Green crap is coming our way – so let’s be prepared!

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The coalition government was never popular. But it did have one thing to be said for it: it represented, however imperfectly, a majority of UK voters.

In 2010 36.1% voted Tory and 23% for the LibDems, meaning that the coalition was elected by almost 60% of those that voted.

Now we have a single party government elected by just 37% of voters (and just under a quarter of the electorate), unfettered by any need to secure broader support. So for those of us now used to a more balanced coalition government, a shock is coming …

Farming and countryside

One big change that’s coming up – and probably sooner rather than later – is the repeal of the 2004 Hunting with Dogs Act, which outlawed fox-hunting and hare-coursing.  Cameron has nailed his colours to the mast on the ‘country sports’ issue and there’s probably no stopping him.

With Liz Truss remaining in place as environment secretary, badger culling is also certain to continue. But the Tories may now feel emboldened to roll out culling more widely regardless of the scientific evidence indicating that the policy is at best very marginally effective.

Also, expect more pressure to build on the countryside, including the Green Belt and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and the further dismantling of the already inadequate protections the planning system affords, as the existing policy to make economic growth the over-riding objective is developed yet more aggressively.

We also know that the Tories are keen to press ahead with genetically modified ‘GMO’ crops in England, and that new EU regulations will make this possible in fairly short order, along with GMO foods. With no legal means to prevent the rollout of GMO foods and crops, the main hope for environmentalists is to press retailers not to sell them, and to convince farmers not to grow them.

We may well also see a further attempt to sell off government land and forests. The top-down forced sell-off of Forestry Commission (FC) land proved an unpopular policy even among the Conservatives’ own supporters in rural constituencies, so they probably won’t try that again.

More likely they will just leave agencies from the FC to National Park Authorities so underfunded as to force them to sell off their landholdings on a harder to track, piecemeal basis.

The one area where good things may happen is with marine protection – not in British waters, but far away in the UK’s sprawling Overseas Dependent Territories. Recently the government created a huge marine reserve around the Pitcairn islands. Next, Ascension Island?

Outside the EU

The EU is responsible for plenty of bad stuff, but for plenty of good stuff too. The existence of powerful EU legislation on the environment – the Birds Directive, Habitats & Species Directive, Water Framework Directive, the Air Quality Directive, and the Waste Directive to name but a few – has provided an important defence against the Tories’ desire to deregulate and de-protect.

Although Cameron says he does not want to leave the EU, many of his back-benchers do, and they have forced him into promising a referendum which could take place as soon as 2016. The outcome wil probably be decided by the media coverage and Rupert Murdoch at least wants out.

Result – there’s a significant risk that we may find ourselves out of the EU and suddenly all that wildlife and environmental law will no longer apply.

But so long as we are in the EU, we can expect the UK to play an broadly anti-environment role – supporting the weakening of environmental laws like the Habitats Directive, favouring ‘free trade’ deals like TTIP, loosening regulation on GMOs, pesticides, and pollution. And of course, resisting efforts to reform the Common Fisheries Policy and keep fishing quotas within sustainable limits.

Transport – roads to nowhere

It’s now certain that the government will press ahead with major environmentally destructive transport infrastructure projects. These include the ridiculous boondoggle that is the HS2 high speed railway line from London to Birmingham, and a greatly expanded road building / improving programme.

And let’s not forget – a new runway somewhere in the south east. It may well not be at Heathrow – after all that’s strongly opposed by a couple of Cameron’s Eton chums, Zac Goldsmith and Boris Johnson, both MPs in west London. My guess is it will end up going to Gatwick.

And of course with most of the transport budget lavished on roads and high-speed rail, there will be precious little left for small scale, sustainable local transport improvements, cycle lanes, local bus services, etc.

Energy and climate

Today’s appointment of Amber Rudd to DECC, the department of energy and climate change, looks like good news in the circumstances. She accepts the scientific concensus on climate change, and recognises the huge damage it’s set to cause.

Doubtless she will ‘put up a good show’ in the Paris climate talks later this year. And she’s not about the repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act as many Tory backbenchers would like.

But how much will really change on the ground? At some point the government will probably have to withdraw from the disastrous Hinkley C nuclear project, and the sooner the better. if and when that happens, it will only be to clear the decks and move ahead with alternative designs of nuclear reactor that are not quite so terminally hopeless as the EPR planned for Hinkley.

Rudd is also unlikely to relent on Conservative hostility to Britain’s two cheapest renewable energy sources – onshore wind and field-scale solar, both of which have been starved of resources. And even if she tries to, her ambitions will probably be thwarted by the Treasury and the planning system.

Insulating homes – another no-brainer for creating jobs, reducing emissions, raising living standards, making life more affordable for people on low incomes, and reducing the dominance of the Big Six – will be under-funded, while the zero-carbon homes initiative will remain watered-down

The Tories’ manifesto promise was to insulate 1 million homes over the next five years. That may sound like a lot, but as we have the least efficient housing stock in Europe it’s nowhere near enough.

Then as for fracking, underground coal gasification, and all that, we can only expect the most rapid possible development of oil and gas resources. Our best hope is that investors decide that unconventional hydrocarbons in the UK are an expensive gamble that’s not worth taking.

In fact, DECC’s whole policy arena is one where the absence of the LibDems probably won’t make a huge difference – because, seduced by mininsterial status, they were only implementing Tory policies anyway.

Constitutional trickery

We know that the Tories are keen to push through a fast-track ‘constitutional reform’ which will give Scotland some greater autonomy, while solidifying their control of England.

The main mechanism they will use to achieve the latter is ‘English votes for English laws’ (EVEL). That is, to pass a low that excludes MPs from parts of the UK with devolved powers, from voting on laws that apply only to England.

And this does matter – because these ‘English laws’ are likely to include planning, energy, farming, forestry and other matters with powerful environmental implications.

The EVEL idea does have a certain superficial logic. But that’s not why the Tories like it. They like it because it could, thanks to their political dominance in England, give them the power to legislate for England even under a future coalition or Labour government of the UK.

But there is a serious flaw: the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are all elected by proportional representation. This means that any government must, in effect, represent the wishes of a majority of voters.

But under EVEL, England would be stuck on the manifestly unfair First Past the Post system, which can give absolute power to a party elected on barely over a third of the votes.

Second, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are presiding over far fewer people. If we are to have any form of ‘devolution’ to England from the UK, this needs to go far beyond EVEL to encompass the aspirations of English citizens for a greater say in their cities and regions.

Elected by just under 25% of the electorate of the UK, the current government clearly has no mandate to embark on far-reaching constitutional reform in the absence of a broad, inclusive and representative process, or ‘constitutional convention‘. If they try, they must be challenged and the exercise denounced as illegitimate and an abuse of democracy.

 

 

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

 






Detroit: 25,000 households face water shutoff this month

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Detroit, the poorest large city in America, is set to resume mass water shutoffs for tens of thousands of households in the coming weeks.

Residents who are 60 days behind or owing $150 or more on their water bills will have shutoff notices placed on their doors beginning tomorrow, 11th May. They will be allowed only 10 days to pay their bills or file for assistance before their water is turned off.

City officials have said that as many as 25,000 households are behind on their water bills. Assuming an average household size of three, the shutoffs could affect more than 10% of the city’s population.

Last year, more than 30,000 households had their water service disconnected. The city temporarily suspended shutoffs over the winter, as cold temperatures made them impracticable.

The city has already begun shutting off water service to 8,000 accounts it claims are receiving water illegally.

A human casualty of Detroit’s bankruptcy

Detroit’s water shutoff policy is intimately connected with the city’s bankruptcy, which slashed retirees’ health care and pension benefits while privatizing city services and handing over public assets to well-connected speculators.

The bankruptcy paved the way for the spin-off of the city’s water department to a regional authority, in preparation for its ultimate privatization. This process has been accompanied by a draconian program of water shutoffs and rate increases aiming to make the future water authority attractive to investors.

This year, the Detroit water department announced a rate increase of 3.4% for Detroit residents, including a 16% increase for the sewerage portion of the bill. The surrounding municipalizes will have water rate increases of as much as 12%.

Detroit’s water shutoff policy has drawn condemnation from international human rights organizations, including the United Nations, which declared that “Disconnection of water services because of failure to pay due to lack of means constitutes a violation of the human right to water and other international human rights.”

In a stunning example of Orwellean doublespeak, DWSD Director Sue McCormick said in a statement last month that the goal of the water department was “to make sure that our customers can keep their water on.”

Gary Brown, the city’s chief operating officer, told the Detroit Free Press that assistance is available to anyone who needs it. He declared, “The bottom line is whether you are in that [shutoff] category or not, you need to come in and get on a payment plan.” Brown added, “Then you will be assured that your water will not be cut off.”

A totally inadequate assistance program

He did not mention the fact that while the total amount of unpaid water bills in the city is estimated at $42 million, only some $4.2 million is available in relief. Mathematics dictates that the available funds will only help a small share of those in need, leaving the rest without one of the most fundamental requirements of civilized life.

The Detroit News noted that the assistance program has received only 3,800 applicants since August, a fraction of the tens of thousands of households whose water was shut off during that time. Only half of the applications were approved. Furthermore, more than 30% of qualified households have been unable to make payments, placing them in danger of shutoff

Facing widespread criticism of the completely inadequate assistance program, the Duggan administration introduced certain tweaks to its rules, including raising the maximum balance covered by the assistance program.

However, none of this changes the fact that the resources provided are woefully inadequate to the need, and that tens of thousands of households will inevitably be left without water as a result.

Officials are also working on a new income-based assistance program, with the collaboration of various community and civil rights groups, to be rolled out in July under the new Great Lakes Water Authority. But even this program would offer a pittance in aid: $6 million, or slightly more than is currently available.

Judge: ‘There is no right to affordable water’

Last year, US bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes ruled against a challenge to the city’s water shutoff policy, declaring that there is no “fundamental enforceable right to free or affordable water … Just as there is no such affordable right to other necessities of life such as shelter, food and medical care.”

As the WSWS had warned, the decision to carry out mass water shutoffs in Detroit has set a precedent for other cities throughout the United States. Earlier this year, the city of Baltimore announced that it would begin shutting off water to as many as 25,000 residents.

A resolution was last week introduced to the City of Detroit to consider a Water Affordability Plan originally crafted by the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization (MWRO). As reported by the Detroit Water Brigade, it would mandate

“that further residential water shut offs by DWSD and/or GLWA or any contractors retained by either entity, be suspended pending an adequately supported independent evaluation of the actual, or reliably estimated, costs of a true, proactive water affordadility rate structure based on ability to pay … “

But campaigners are not hopeful that any change in policy will take place in time to help the 25,000 at risk of water cutoffs this month.

 

 

This article was originally published by the World Socialist Website – WSWS. Additional reporting by The Ecologist.

 






The real lessons of the Tory victory

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There’s much that could be said about the Conservative party’s victory today in Britain’s election. Not least David Cameron has emerged stronger.

He now has a small but absolute majority in Parliament, compared to his last government, in which he had to share power, a little of it anyway, with his minor coalition partners, the Lib Dems.

According to the rules of the British system, he has won a supposed mandate to carry out all his party’s policies, even though the Tories gained the support of slightly less than 25% of the total electorate, and little more than a third of those who actually voted.

That in itself should be enough to discredit the idea that Britain is a democracy in any meaningful sense. But I want to focus on two issues that this particular election highlighted. Although this refers to the British election, the lessons apply equally to US elections.

The first is a debate that gripped some on the far left after Russell Brand interviewed Labour leader Ed Miliband and subsequently gave Miliband his backing.

Video: The Trews in which Russell Brand supports Labour.

The dark legacy of Thatcher and Blair

This was quite a surprise – and disappointment – given that Brand had shaken up British politics over the previous 18 months by arguing that the whole political system was inherently flawed and undemocratic. He had called on people not to vote as a way to show that the system had no popular legitimacy, and invest their energies instead in a different kind of grassroots politics.

Britain’s two main parties, Brand and others argued, represented the interests of the big corporations that now dominate Britain and much of the globe.

The labels of Conservative and Labour are the misleading vestiges of a time when there was some sort of class politics in Britain: the Tories representing the unalloyed interests of the capitalist class, and Labour the interests of organised labour.

But the  Tories under Margaret Thatcher long ago destroyed the power of the trade unions. Labour became a shell of its former self, its finances and ability to organise workers crumbled as the corporations entrenched their power, assisted by the Tories.

Under a power-hungry Tony Blair, Labour allowed itself to be captured by those same corporations, famously illustrated by his Faustian pact with media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Labour sold what was left of its soul, becoming a Tory-lite party, and winning the support of Murdoch and his media empire as a result.

Brand seemed to understand this, arguing that what we needed was to turn our back on sham elections every five years between two parties representing the interests of the 1%. Instead the people needed to foment a non-violent political revolution, and take back power.

Can’t we aim higher than the ‘lesser evil’?

How did voting for Miliband, a man who had largely adopted the Blair credo, make sense in the light of Brand’s earlier claims?

Brand justified his change of mind using a familiar argument. He admitted Miliband was far from perfect but was still the preferable choice because he was prepared to listen to the people, unlike Cameron’s Conservatives. He was the “lesser evil” choice.

The problem with his logic – aside from its faith-based component – was that the same argument could have been used about any recent British election. It was an excuse to avoid engaging in real politics.

Supporters of Tony Blair, even after he committed the supreme war crime by invading Iraq, could have argued quite convincingly that the Tories too would have invaded Iraq – plus they would have done worse things at home, inflicting greater damage on the health and education systems.

Thus, on the lesser-evil argument, it was legitimate to vote for the war criminal Blair. A man like Blair could destroy another nation, cause suffering on a scale unimaginable to most of us, and yet still claim the moral high ground because the alternative would be even worse.

The faulty logic of the lesser-evil argument is apparent the moment we consider the Blair case. If there is no political cost for committing the ultimate war crime, because the other guys are worse, what real leverage can the electorate ever have on the political system.

Video: The Trews in which Russell Brand responds to the election result.

The two parties of capital

The ‘left’ vote will always gravitate to the slightly less nasty party of capital. No change is really possible. In fact, over time the political centre of gravity is likely to shift – as has in fact happened – ever more to the right, as the corporations accrete ever greater power.

Further, where does Brand’s logic take us now that Miliband has lost. If we were supposed to have faith that Miliband would have listened had he achieved power, then why not extend that faith to his successor?

If we are satisfied by the lesser-evil argument, why not wait till the next election to see if we can get another slightly less nasty candidate into Downing Street? We can defer the choice to demand real change indefinitely.

The second point is that the programme of extreme austerity at the heart of Cameron’s manifesto has been fully discredited by most economists over the past few years.

Not only does it penalise the overwhelming majority of the population by redistributing wealth away from the working and middles classes to the financial elite, but it also inflicts great damage on the long term health of the economy.

In other words, British voters look like supreme masochists. They voted to seriously harm their own, and their country’s, interests. Are Britons collectively insane?

Where Miliband went wrong …

Of course, not. So how can we explain their insane choice this week? The answer is staring us in the face. In fact, Blair showed us what was required to win a British election. A party hoping to win power needed first to seduce the corporations, and their media divisions.

Without most of the media on your side, no party stands a chance of winning because the media subtly controls the narrative of the election: what count as ‘the issues’, how the leaders and their platforms are presented, what and who is considered credible.

Miliband’s failure was that, unlike Blair, he looked a little half-hearted about his desire to be the 1%’s mouthpiece in Parliament and Downing Street. Maybe what seduced Brand about Miliband was the sliver of humanity that was still just visible below the surface of the corporate employee the Labour party had groomed their leader to become.

The revolution that we need in Britain and the US has to start with a disengagement from the mainstream media’s representation of events. We have to discard their narratives.

Video: The Trews in which Russell Brand exposes the Conservative-Sun tie-up..

We need an independent grassroots media

Even more important than an overhauled electoral system, one that fairly reflects the electorate’s preferences, we need a grassroots media that is free of the control of fabulously wealthy proprietors and major corporations, that does not depend on the massive subsidies of corporations (in the form of advertising), and that does not rely, like the BBC, on funding from government.

We need independent journalists, and we need to demand a new funding model for the media. And we need to do all this while the mainstream media entirely control the narrative about what a free media is.

It is a huge challenge – and one that reflects the extent of our own ideological confinement. Just like the political parties, we have been captured by the 1%.

We cannot imagine a different world, a different economic system, a different media landscape, because our intellectual horizons have been so totally restricted by the media conglomerates that control our newspapers, our TV and radio stations, the films we watch, the video games we play, the music we listen to.

We are so imaginatively confined we cannot even see the narrow walls within which our minds are allowed to wander.

As long as the media represent the span of interests of the 1% – from the psychopathic Murdoch empire to the capitalism with a little heart of the Guardian Media Group – our politicians will range from the Blue Tories of the Conservative party to the Red Tories of the Labour party.

And we will remain enslaved.

 

 

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

In 2011 Jonathan was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. The judges’ citation reads: “Jonathan Cook’s work on Palestine and Israel, especially his de-coding of official propaganda and his outstanding analysis of events often obfuscated in the mainstream, has made him one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East.”

This article was originally published on Jonathan Cook’s blog.

 






Cullers beware – killing ‘pest’ animals can increase their abundance

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Australia has suffered more than most countries from invasive species. Predators such as the red fox and feral cat have been especially destructive, threatening native wildlife and imposing huge costs on farming.

The usual response to these problems is ‘culling’: killing or otherwise removing pest animals from wild populations with the aim of reducing their abundance and impact, or even eradicating them.

But a recent study shows that culling can backfire badly. Wildlife biologists in Tasmania decided to test their ability to reduce abundance of feral cats. They surveyed cats in four large areas of native forest, and then trapped and removed animals for a year in two of those areas.

This seemed to go really well: at first they caught lots of cats, then trap success rapidly dropped off, suggesting most cats had been removed. The problem was that monitoring with remote cameras showed that as resident cats were taken out even more new cats appeared. These newcomers did not enter traps. As a result the abundance of cats actually went up in areas being trapped.

This is not an isolated bit of weirdness: similar effects have been found elsewhere. For example, a study of ferrets on a British island showed that trapping and removal resulted in a doubling of the size of the ferret population over pre-culling levels.

What went wrong?

What seems to have happened in these cases is that young animals quickly moved in from surrounding areas to replace dominant adults removed in the cull. Most of these young animals would normally have died. The sudden increase in their survival allowed abundance to overshoot pre-cull levels.

The challenge this creates for pest managers is a bit like the one faced by Hercules when he was told to go and slay the hydra, a monstrous many-headed serpent which sprouted two heads in place of each one that Hercules cut off.

The more general problem is that removing some animals from a population creates more space and food for those that are left, and can disrupt social controls on breeding. Survival, reproduction and immigration all increase as a result, and the population quickly rebounds.

For culling to produce a lasting reduction in abundance, it is essential not just to accomplish the relatively easy task of removing animals from a high-density population. We also need to be able to continue removing animals at rates that equal or exceed the capacity for increase of a population with improved survival and reproduction.

Often, this can’t be done, so the initial knockdown in abundance has no lasting benefit. People often defend culling programs by pointing to the numbers killed and saying something like ” … and those X thousand cats / foxes / rabbits that we killed are no longer out there damaging the environment.” That is a fallacy.

Choose your battles wisely

This does not mean that it is never possible to reduce or eradicate populations of pest species. Australia can chalk up some recent successes in this.

Two of the most significant are the reduction of camels across central Australia and the eradication of cats, rabbits and rodents from Macquarie Island. But successes like these are most likely to be won under quite particular conditions.

These include choosing situations (like islands) where culled animals won’t quickly be replaced by immigrants, and using methods or combinations of methods that can not only take animals out of abundant populations but are also efficient in continuing to remove them from low-density populations.

In any case it is essential that culling programs have clear goals, are well co-ordinated and target species and places where achieving those goals is justified by the environmental and economic benefits. Most importantly, the effectiveness of culling should be evaluated by monitoring the activity and impacts of pest populations.

Unfortunately, a lot of culling activity falls well short of these standards. A current example is the Victorian government’s fox bounty scheme which supports widespread and unco-ordinated culling that is unlikely to significantly reduce fox populations anywhere, let alone in the places where they cause most damage.

There is no evaluation of the program’s effectiveness. Given the recent study of cats in Tasmania, it could be doing more harm than good.

All we know for certain is that it costs millions of dollars. We should be able to do better than that.

 

 

Christopher Johnson is Professor of Wildlife Conservation and ARC Australian Professorial Fellow at University of Tasmania.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 






Cullers beware – killing ‘pest’ animals can increase their abundance

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Australia has suffered more than most countries from invasive species. Predators such as the red fox and feral cat have been especially destructive, threatening native wildlife and imposing huge costs on farming.

The usual response to these problems is ‘culling’: killing or otherwise removing pest animals from wild populations with the aim of reducing their abundance and impact, or even eradicating them.

But a recent study shows that culling can backfire badly. Wildlife biologists in Tasmania decided to test their ability to reduce abundance of feral cats. They surveyed cats in four large areas of native forest, and then trapped and removed animals for a year in two of those areas.

This seemed to go really well: at first they caught lots of cats, then trap success rapidly dropped off, suggesting most cats had been removed. The problem was that monitoring with remote cameras showed that as resident cats were taken out even more new cats appeared. These newcomers did not enter traps. As a result the abundance of cats actually went up in areas being trapped.

This is not an isolated bit of weirdness: similar effects have been found elsewhere. For example, a study of ferrets on a British island showed that trapping and removal resulted in a doubling of the size of the ferret population over pre-culling levels.

What went wrong?

What seems to have happened in these cases is that young animals quickly moved in from surrounding areas to replace dominant adults removed in the cull. Most of these young animals would normally have died. The sudden increase in their survival allowed abundance to overshoot pre-cull levels.

The challenge this creates for pest managers is a bit like the one faced by Hercules when he was told to go and slay the hydra, a monstrous many-headed serpent which sprouted two heads in place of each one that Hercules cut off.

The more general problem is that removing some animals from a population creates more space and food for those that are left, and can disrupt social controls on breeding. Survival, reproduction and immigration all increase as a result, and the population quickly rebounds.

For culling to produce a lasting reduction in abundance, it is essential not just to accomplish the relatively easy task of removing animals from a high-density population. We also need to be able to continue removing animals at rates that equal or exceed the capacity for increase of a population with improved survival and reproduction.

Often, this can’t be done, so the initial knockdown in abundance has no lasting benefit. People often defend culling programs by pointing to the numbers killed and saying something like ” … and those X thousand cats / foxes / rabbits that we killed are no longer out there damaging the environment.” That is a fallacy.

Choose your battles wisely

This does not mean that it is never possible to reduce or eradicate populations of pest species. Australia can chalk up some recent successes in this.

Two of the most significant are the reduction of camels across central Australia and the eradication of cats, rabbits and rodents from Macquarie Island. But successes like these are most likely to be won under quite particular conditions.

These include choosing situations (like islands) where culled animals won’t quickly be replaced by immigrants, and using methods or combinations of methods that can not only take animals out of abundant populations but are also efficient in continuing to remove them from low-density populations.

In any case it is essential that culling programs have clear goals, are well co-ordinated and target species and places where achieving those goals is justified by the environmental and economic benefits. Most importantly, the effectiveness of culling should be evaluated by monitoring the activity and impacts of pest populations.

Unfortunately, a lot of culling activity falls well short of these standards. A current example is the Victorian government’s fox bounty scheme which supports widespread and unco-ordinated culling that is unlikely to significantly reduce fox populations anywhere, let alone in the places where they cause most damage.

There is no evaluation of the program’s effectiveness. Given the recent study of cats in Tasmania, it could be doing more harm than good.

All we know for certain is that it costs millions of dollars. We should be able to do better than that.

 

 

Christopher Johnson is Professor of Wildlife Conservation and ARC Australian Professorial Fellow at University of Tasmania.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 






Cullers beware – killing ‘pest’ animals can increase their abundance

Leave a reply




Australia has suffered more than most countries from invasive species. Predators such as the red fox and feral cat have been especially destructive, threatening native wildlife and imposing huge costs on farming.

The usual response to these problems is ‘culling’: killing or otherwise removing pest animals from wild populations with the aim of reducing their abundance and impact, or even eradicating them.

But a recent study shows that culling can backfire badly. Wildlife biologists in Tasmania decided to test their ability to reduce abundance of feral cats. They surveyed cats in four large areas of native forest, and then trapped and removed animals for a year in two of those areas.

This seemed to go really well: at first they caught lots of cats, then trap success rapidly dropped off, suggesting most cats had been removed. The problem was that monitoring with remote cameras showed that as resident cats were taken out even more new cats appeared. These newcomers did not enter traps. As a result the abundance of cats actually went up in areas being trapped.

This is not an isolated bit of weirdness: similar effects have been found elsewhere. For example, a study of ferrets on a British island showed that trapping and removal resulted in a doubling of the size of the ferret population over pre-culling levels.

What went wrong?

What seems to have happened in these cases is that young animals quickly moved in from surrounding areas to replace dominant adults removed in the cull. Most of these young animals would normally have died. The sudden increase in their survival allowed abundance to overshoot pre-cull levels.

The challenge this creates for pest managers is a bit like the one faced by Hercules when he was told to go and slay the hydra, a monstrous many-headed serpent which sprouted two heads in place of each one that Hercules cut off.

The more general problem is that removing some animals from a population creates more space and food for those that are left, and can disrupt social controls on breeding. Survival, reproduction and immigration all increase as a result, and the population quickly rebounds.

For culling to produce a lasting reduction in abundance, it is essential not just to accomplish the relatively easy task of removing animals from a high-density population. We also need to be able to continue removing animals at rates that equal or exceed the capacity for increase of a population with improved survival and reproduction.

Often, this can’t be done, so the initial knockdown in abundance has no lasting benefit. People often defend culling programs by pointing to the numbers killed and saying something like ” … and those X thousand cats / foxes / rabbits that we killed are no longer out there damaging the environment.” That is a fallacy.

Choose your battles wisely

This does not mean that it is never possible to reduce or eradicate populations of pest species. Australia can chalk up some recent successes in this.

Two of the most significant are the reduction of camels across central Australia and the eradication of cats, rabbits and rodents from Macquarie Island. But successes like these are most likely to be won under quite particular conditions.

These include choosing situations (like islands) where culled animals won’t quickly be replaced by immigrants, and using methods or combinations of methods that can not only take animals out of abundant populations but are also efficient in continuing to remove them from low-density populations.

In any case it is essential that culling programs have clear goals, are well co-ordinated and target species and places where achieving those goals is justified by the environmental and economic benefits. Most importantly, the effectiveness of culling should be evaluated by monitoring the activity and impacts of pest populations.

Unfortunately, a lot of culling activity falls well short of these standards. A current example is the Victorian government’s fox bounty scheme which supports widespread and unco-ordinated culling that is unlikely to significantly reduce fox populations anywhere, let alone in the places where they cause most damage.

There is no evaluation of the program’s effectiveness. Given the recent study of cats in Tasmania, it could be doing more harm than good.

All we know for certain is that it costs millions of dollars. We should be able to do better than that.

 

 

Christopher Johnson is Professor of Wildlife Conservation and ARC Australian Professorial Fellow at University of Tasmania.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 






Cullers beware – killing ‘pest’ animals can increase their abundance

Leave a reply




Australia has suffered more than most countries from invasive species. Predators such as the red fox and feral cat have been especially destructive, threatening native wildlife and imposing huge costs on farming.

The usual response to these problems is ‘culling’: killing or otherwise removing pest animals from wild populations with the aim of reducing their abundance and impact, or even eradicating them.

But a recent study shows that culling can backfire badly. Wildlife biologists in Tasmania decided to test their ability to reduce abundance of feral cats. They surveyed cats in four large areas of native forest, and then trapped and removed animals for a year in two of those areas.

This seemed to go really well: at first they caught lots of cats, then trap success rapidly dropped off, suggesting most cats had been removed. The problem was that monitoring with remote cameras showed that as resident cats were taken out even more new cats appeared. These newcomers did not enter traps. As a result the abundance of cats actually went up in areas being trapped.

This is not an isolated bit of weirdness: similar effects have been found elsewhere. For example, a study of ferrets on a British island showed that trapping and removal resulted in a doubling of the size of the ferret population over pre-culling levels.

What went wrong?

What seems to have happened in these cases is that young animals quickly moved in from surrounding areas to replace dominant adults removed in the cull. Most of these young animals would normally have died. The sudden increase in their survival allowed abundance to overshoot pre-cull levels.

The challenge this creates for pest managers is a bit like the one faced by Hercules when he was told to go and slay the hydra, a monstrous many-headed serpent which sprouted two heads in place of each one that Hercules cut off.

The more general problem is that removing some animals from a population creates more space and food for those that are left, and can disrupt social controls on breeding. Survival, reproduction and immigration all increase as a result, and the population quickly rebounds.

For culling to produce a lasting reduction in abundance, it is essential not just to accomplish the relatively easy task of removing animals from a high-density population. We also need to be able to continue removing animals at rates that equal or exceed the capacity for increase of a population with improved survival and reproduction.

Often, this can’t be done, so the initial knockdown in abundance has no lasting benefit. People often defend culling programs by pointing to the numbers killed and saying something like ” … and those X thousand cats / foxes / rabbits that we killed are no longer out there damaging the environment.” That is a fallacy.

Choose your battles wisely

This does not mean that it is never possible to reduce or eradicate populations of pest species. Australia can chalk up some recent successes in this.

Two of the most significant are the reduction of camels across central Australia and the eradication of cats, rabbits and rodents from Macquarie Island. But successes like these are most likely to be won under quite particular conditions.

These include choosing situations (like islands) where culled animals won’t quickly be replaced by immigrants, and using methods or combinations of methods that can not only take animals out of abundant populations but are also efficient in continuing to remove them from low-density populations.

In any case it is essential that culling programs have clear goals, are well co-ordinated and target species and places where achieving those goals is justified by the environmental and economic benefits. Most importantly, the effectiveness of culling should be evaluated by monitoring the activity and impacts of pest populations.

Unfortunately, a lot of culling activity falls well short of these standards. A current example is the Victorian government’s fox bounty scheme which supports widespread and unco-ordinated culling that is unlikely to significantly reduce fox populations anywhere, let alone in the places where they cause most damage.

There is no evaluation of the program’s effectiveness. Given the recent study of cats in Tasmania, it could be doing more harm than good.

All we know for certain is that it costs millions of dollars. We should be able to do better than that.

 

 

Christopher Johnson is Professor of Wildlife Conservation and ARC Australian Professorial Fellow at University of Tasmania.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 






Cullers beware – killing ‘pest’ animals can increase their abundance

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Australia has suffered more than most countries from invasive species. Predators such as the red fox and feral cat have been especially destructive, threatening native wildlife and imposing huge costs on farming.

The usual response to these problems is ‘culling’: killing or otherwise removing pest animals from wild populations with the aim of reducing their abundance and impact, or even eradicating them.

But a recent study shows that culling can backfire badly. Wildlife biologists in Tasmania decided to test their ability to reduce abundance of feral cats. They surveyed cats in four large areas of native forest, and then trapped and removed animals for a year in two of those areas.

This seemed to go really well: at first they caught lots of cats, then trap success rapidly dropped off, suggesting most cats had been removed. The problem was that monitoring with remote cameras showed that as resident cats were taken out even more new cats appeared. These newcomers did not enter traps. As a result the abundance of cats actually went up in areas being trapped.

This is not an isolated bit of weirdness: similar effects have been found elsewhere. For example, a study of ferrets on a British island showed that trapping and removal resulted in a doubling of the size of the ferret population over pre-culling levels.

What went wrong?

What seems to have happened in these cases is that young animals quickly moved in from surrounding areas to replace dominant adults removed in the cull. Most of these young animals would normally have died. The sudden increase in their survival allowed abundance to overshoot pre-cull levels.

The challenge this creates for pest managers is a bit like the one faced by Hercules when he was told to go and slay the hydra, a monstrous many-headed serpent which sprouted two heads in place of each one that Hercules cut off.

The more general problem is that removing some animals from a population creates more space and food for those that are left, and can disrupt social controls on breeding. Survival, reproduction and immigration all increase as a result, and the population quickly rebounds.

For culling to produce a lasting reduction in abundance, it is essential not just to accomplish the relatively easy task of removing animals from a high-density population. We also need to be able to continue removing animals at rates that equal or exceed the capacity for increase of a population with improved survival and reproduction.

Often, this can’t be done, so the initial knockdown in abundance has no lasting benefit. People often defend culling programs by pointing to the numbers killed and saying something like ” … and those X thousand cats / foxes / rabbits that we killed are no longer out there damaging the environment.” That is a fallacy.

Choose your battles wisely

This does not mean that it is never possible to reduce or eradicate populations of pest species. Australia can chalk up some recent successes in this.

Two of the most significant are the reduction of camels across central Australia and the eradication of cats, rabbits and rodents from Macquarie Island. But successes like these are most likely to be won under quite particular conditions.

These include choosing situations (like islands) where culled animals won’t quickly be replaced by immigrants, and using methods or combinations of methods that can not only take animals out of abundant populations but are also efficient in continuing to remove them from low-density populations.

In any case it is essential that culling programs have clear goals, are well co-ordinated and target species and places where achieving those goals is justified by the environmental and economic benefits. Most importantly, the effectiveness of culling should be evaluated by monitoring the activity and impacts of pest populations.

Unfortunately, a lot of culling activity falls well short of these standards. A current example is the Victorian government’s fox bounty scheme which supports widespread and unco-ordinated culling that is unlikely to significantly reduce fox populations anywhere, let alone in the places where they cause most damage.

There is no evaluation of the program’s effectiveness. Given the recent study of cats in Tasmania, it could be doing more harm than good.

All we know for certain is that it costs millions of dollars. We should be able to do better than that.

 

 

Christopher Johnson is Professor of Wildlife Conservation and ARC Australian Professorial Fellow at University of Tasmania.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 






Before the day is out – we must unite and demand fair voting!

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If there is any lesson to be taken from yesterday’s election, it is that the very term ‘British democracy’ has become a contradiction in terms.

There are many things wrong with our electoral system, of course, but as we survey today’s election results the most striking fact is the disconnect between votes won, seats in Parliament, and who has emerged with complete political power in their grasp.

On the basis of a share of the national vote that went up by a mere 0.7%, the Conservatives took an additional 22 seats, gaining an overall majority in Parliament.

Thus they have gained the absolute right to govern the UK and its peoples for the next five years, on the basis of just 37% of the vote – slightly under 25% of the electorate. The only effective opposition to their one-party rule is likely to come from disidents within the Conservative party itself.

The Labour vote went up twice as much as the Conservatives’ – by 1.4%. But that increased vote somehow translated into the loss of 26 seats.

One clear measure of the ‘fairness’ of the electoral system is the number of votes taken to elect an MP of any given party. On average, it takes 48,000 votes to elect an MP. But there are wide variations – here is a quick calculation (to nearest 1,000) based on interim results today:

DUP: 23,000
SNP: 26,000
SDLP: 33,000
Conservatives: 34,000
Labour: 40,000
Plaid Cymru: 61,000
LibDems: 300,000
Greens: 1,138,000
UKIP: 3,830,000

4 million votes for two MPs

Most egregious, clearly, is the case of UKIP and the Greens, whose combined vote of almost 5 million won them precisely two MPs. On a proportional basis UKIP would have won 80 MPs and the Greens 24.

At the other extreme, the DUP – which may well play an important role in cushioning out the Conservatives’ narrow majority – got twice as many seats than deserved by their proportion of the vote. Likewise the SNP ‘should’ have won 30 MPs, not 56.

The Conservatives and Labour should have won 233 and 193 seats respectively. And in order to form a government – one which would have to have the support of enough MPs represent a majority of the population – either would have needed to combine forces with other parties and make compromises accordingly.

But in fact, under a proportional system the vote would have come out very differently anyway – as the outcome we face today is in large part the result of tactical voting.

Under the ‘first past the post’ system, not only do our votes not translate fairly into elected MPs, but in an even deeper injustice, many of us feel forced to vote against our beliefs – to support the ‘least bad’ with a perceived chance of victory, or to keep out the greater enemy.

Why it’s time for proportional voting

If people knew their votes would turn into MPs in a proportional way, many more people would have backed the Greens without worrying that to do so would ‘let in the Tories’ in Labour-Conservative or Labour-LibDem marginal constituences.

More people would have voted for UKIP as well – but perhaps not so many more. Many of its voters really did believe that their electoral breakthrough was about to take place. How wrong they were.

And don’t forget the even greater number of electors who don’t vote at all – about 34% in this election. Many of them don’t bother out of frustration with the unfair voting system, and a sense that their vote would make no difference anyway. If they knew their votes really counted, a great many of yesterday’s absentees would have found it worth showing up at the polling station.

But as things are our democracy is deeply, badly broken on multiple levels, a relic of past ages that’s unfair, unrepresentative and blatantly unfit for purpose. It’s well past time for a system in which we know that our vote will contribute directly to the election of MPs in Parliament, and of the government that will rule over us.

And that’s something that democratic forces from across the political spectrum – from UKIP to the Greens, from the LibDems to Occupy Democracy – must now come together in common cause and demand – beginning today!

 

 

Twitter: #FairVotesNow

Petition 1: ‘Make the seats match the votes!‘ by Unlock Democracy & Electoral Reform Society.

Petition 2: ‘Fair votes now!‘ by Avaaz & 38 Degrees.

Campaign: Occupy Democracy.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.

 






Don’t let our nightingales go quietly!

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We have all heard of the ‘canary in the coalmine’ and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. But in the case of the British nightingale, we have both rolled into one.

It is the signature voice of spring and yet it is falling silent, vanishing from one copse, thicket and wood after another, year on year.

Because so few people have now heard a real live nightingale – something everyone should experience at least once – I have been running a campaign to try and get the BBC to re-start its former annual May live broadcast of the bird. So far with no effect – but you can help by signing here.

I’ve also set up a website, Nightingale Nights, where you can hear the bird, hear a remarkable singer (Ziazan) who sang to one and it sang back, and find places to hear them and events to join, as well as a Soundcloud site of nightingale songs (birds and humans).

The Ecologist is based in Oxford – which for a piece about the nightingale, is a shame, as they have all but disappeared not just from the city, but from the whole county of Oxfordshire, as they have over so much of England and even from their former corners of Wales.

In his book The Nightingale and Its Song and Other Familiar Songbirds, written in 1932, naturalist and film-maker Oliver Pike described the nightingale as “common in suitable places” in Oxfordshire and stated: “I have seen more nightingales close to the city of Oxford than in any other part of England.”

That could not be said now. Indeed there are probably more environmental film-makers than nightingales around Oxford today.

Fewer nightingales than people called ‘Nightingale’

In 1980 a survey by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) found 79 singing Nightingales in Oxfordshire: another survey in 1999 found just 17. The BTO believes that if nothing is done to change current trends, the Nightingale could be extinct in Britain within 20 or 30 years.

They calculate that it has already lost 43% of its former range, and has declined over 90% since the late 1960s. The latest estimate is that there are around 5,850 singing (only the males sing) nightingales in Britain, which is fewer than people named ‘Nightingale’ (around 10,000).

Nightingales have always been found mostly in the south of Britain but old studies (and perhaps the distribution of people named Nightingale) show they used to be found as far north as Cheshire, South Yorkshire and Derbyshire.

They were also quite common across much of the Marches, parts of Wales, the Midlands and into Somerset, Dorset and Gloucestershire, as well as the Home Counties and East Anglia. Now they are increasingly confined to SE England – and getting rarer even there.

The decline continues. In recent years, researchers at the magnificent Ancient Woodland of Bradfield Woods in Suffolk, uncovered one factor in the disappearance of nightingales: deer are literally eating their key habitat, low dense growth such as that created by coppicing. But by the time their studies were published in full, the birds themselves had gone.

Over the past two or three decades, Southern England has seen a massive explosion in the numbers of deer, especially the small introduced muntjac which escaped from Whipsnade Zoo. They are literally eating nightingales ‘out of house and home’, as well as eliminating many wildflowers such as orchids, primroses and bluebells.

Lynx could help. Also, we could stop blitzing their habitat

That’s one undoubted cause, and the only solution is to shoot or otherwise control muntjac and roe deer, and for landowners and managers to fence their woods, which is expensive. There are proposals to re-introduce lynx into England which could help but they’d have to get very busy. Until then, eat wild venison to help nightingales in Britain.

With a warming climate you might expect nightingales to be spreading north as some other birds are but the reverse is true. They are retreating south.

One reason maybe that in common with some other summer migrant visitors to Britain that winter in the African ‘humid forest zone’ near the equator (such as spotted flycatcher and turtle dove), the nightingale is not getting a ‘climate signal’ that spring is coming earlier in the Northern Hemisphere.

So these birds, unlike those wintering in North Africa, may still turn up at the ancestral time, only to find that key food items have gone. They could be ‘out of synch’. Their wintering places too are changing, with forest converted to intensive farmland.

Other possibilities are that pesticides such as neonicotinoids may play a role, or even that hitherto uninvestigated factors such as the parallel decline of the southern wood ant, which old nightingale catchers and keepers used to use as bait and food, might be involved. But that’s me speculating.

What is certain, is that nightingale homes have been cleared away, thickets tided up or grubbed out, and coppicing of woodland is far less widespread than it once was. Britain’s biggest single population of nightingales at Lodge Hill in Kent, is even under threat from housing development.

It’s also true that a host of insects from moths and butterflies to ants, are far rarer than they used to be. With government funded research into most of our native flora and fauna almost abandoned, we may never get to nail down all the causes until the nightingales are ‘in the coffins’.

With action comes hope

There are some glimmers of hope. With help from Anglia Water, last week the BTO published a guide for landowners on how to manage ‘scrub’ – thickets of blackthorn and hawthorn – to maximise its suitability for nightingales.

Grafham Water near Peterborough is one place where Anglia Water has done this successfully: they deserve credit for it. If enough land mangers acted on this advice we might possibly turn the tide. The 3,500-acre re-wilding project at Knepp in West Sussex is another big success story.

Then there’s the lynx, deer fencing and venison burgers, and tackling climate change, and organic farming. They’d all help.

What would it matter if the nightingales disappeared? We’d still have nightingale culture: a phalanx of poets led by Keats, endless literary references from Chaucer and Shakespeare, not to mention the Anglo Saxons (nightingale means ‘night-singer’ in old English), people called Nightingale, pubs called The Nightingale and a lot of Nightingale Lanes and Nightingale Closes.

Plus the BBC would have its historic recordings featuring a celebrated cellist (1924) and the painfully evocative lone nightingale singing against the drone of bombers in 1942 (Youtube video above) – the year the BBC abandoned the nightingale live broadcasts – plus David Attenborough’s’ tweet of the day.

Our children would still have plenty of British nightingales to listen to, only they’d all be dead. But that would leave something important forever missing from the heart of our country.

Let’s not allow the nightingale to slip quietly into the night and never be heard again.

 

 

Petition: ‘BBC, Please bring the magic of Nightingale song to people all over Britain this May, by broadcasting it live on local and national radio and TV!‘

Over 2,500 people have signed so far. Please join us so we can stop this loss of experience, and focus the attention needed to rescue this magical, extraordinary creature.

Chris Rose lives in North Norfolk and is a campaigns and communications consultant and former campaigner for WWF, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

Website: Nightingale Nights tweeting as @NgaleNights contains a list of nightingale events around the UK.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Moonlit melody – the resurgent nightingales of Knepp‘ by Hazel Sillver.