An Emergency Ordinance comes into force in Germany today restricting neonicotinoid pesticides in order to protect agains the mass die-off of bees.

The Ordinance prohibits the trade and the sowing of winter cereals and canola seeds treated with plant protection products containing certain neonicotinoids.

“It is important to protect the vitality and health of the whole of nature and us humans, and the fate of our bees is a great concern”, said Federal Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt, shorly after signing the regulation yesterday.

“With this regulation we are protecting the bees against dust-borne insecticides. This benefits both the bees as an important part of nature, as well as the farmers, who depend on the pollination of their crops by the bees.”

Since 2013 the EU has prohibited the three neonic agents clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam for seed treatment for spring-sown canola (oilseed rape), corn and sunflower. The ban is maintained by Germany, and the Ordinance now extends the EU ban to include winter-sown crops treated with the same insecticides. 

Indications of problems with neonics first surfaced in Germany in 2008, when 700 beekeepers on the Upper Rhine suffered the sudden deaths of their bee colonies after farmers planted maize seeds treated with the insecticide clothianidin.

This neonic insecticide damages the brood in beehives, destroys bees’ memory and the sense of direction, and disrupts their thermoregulation. Researchers concluded that the wind had blown the neurotoxin to the neighboring wild flower, rape seed and fruit blossoms.

But in England, neonic ban is relaxed

By contrast with Germany UK Agriculture Secretary Liz Truss yesterday approved an application by the National Farmers Union (NFU) to use neonic-dressed seeds this autumn to protect oilseed rape crops from the ‘cabbage stem flea beetle’.

The treated seeds will be permitted over an area of around 30,000ha mainly in the east of England where the pest poses the biggest threat, covering roughly 5% of England’s oilseed rape crop. The emergency permission allows two products, Syngenta’s ‘Cruiser OSR’ and Bayer’s ‘Modesto’, to be used for a 120 day period.

According to a Defra spokesman, “We have fully applied the precautionary ban on the use of neonicotinoids introduced by the EU, and we make decisions on pesticides based on the science only once the regulators are satisfied they are safe to people and the environment. 

“Based on the evidence, we have followed the advice of the UK Expert Committee on Pesticides and our Chief Scientist that a limited emergency authorisation of two pesticides requested by farmers should be granted in areas where oil rape crops are at greatest risk of pest damage.”

The NFU’s vice president Guy Smith said he was “glad to finally see a positive result”, adding: “However, we know that this isn’t enough – flea beetle threat is widespread problem on a national scale and the extremely limited nature of this authorisation is not going to help many farmers in need of the protection.”

But Friends of the Earth bees campaigner Paul de Zylva attacked the decision: “It’s scandalous that the Government has caved in to NFU pressure and given permission for some farmers to use banned pesticides that have been shown to harm our precious bees.

“Ever more scientific evidence shows just how dangerous these chemicals are to bees and other pollinators – they should have no place in our fields and gardens.”

Why the secrecy?

The process whereby the Committee on Pesticides reached its decision has also been criticised as the detailed proceedings of a crucial meeting on 20th May, normally published after three weeks, have been withheld at government request, in a breach of the committee’s terms of reference.

According to a report in the Guardian, the committee actually advised against granting the NFU the permission it sought in the May meeting. It would appear to have now consented to it in a meeting of 7th July, however the agenda and minutes remain unpublished.

The report accuses the government of having “gagged its own pesticide advisers, after they refused to back an application by the National Farmers Union to lift a ban on bee-harming chemicals. The gag is intended to prevent campaigners lobbying ministers on the issue.”

Even the NFU’s application forms are being kept secret, despite requests from MPs for their publication. The farming minister, George Eustice claimed that this was because the information in the applications was “commercially sensitive”.

De Sylva commented: “The threat to Britain’s bees from rising pesticide use is of huge public interest. But the secrecy and lack of information surrounding this crucial issue is astonishing. If the government and farmers put as much effort into reversing bee decline as they do playing politics over pesticides and bee health we might have less of a bee problem.”

Scientific evidence

Scientific research has proven that the ‘neonics’ are highly toxic to bees even at very low concentrations, and most especially to wild species including bumblebees.

In January 2013 the European Food Safety Authority announced that neonicotinoids pose “an unacceptable risk” to bees, and in April the EU approved a two-year moratorium on the most damaging uses of three of the chemicals, clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam, to take effect in December.

Earlier this year the European Academies Science Advisory Council concluded that these banned pesticides don’t just kill bees, they wreak “havoc” with other insects and plants in the wider countryside too.

This followed earlier work published in July 2014 showing that the impact of neonics reverberated through the entire food chain, even hitting bird populations.

The restoration of natural ecosystems – ‘rewilding’ – ought to be a chance to create inspiring new habitats.

However the movement around it risks becoming trapped by its own reverence of the past – an overly nostalgic position that makes rewilding less realistic and harder to achieve.

The recent launch of Rewilding Britain is certainly exciting and timely. However George Monbiot’s vision of bringing back 15 iconic species falls short of the rewilding visions being discussed in universities.

These are emerging from advances in functional ecology and Earth system science. The vision of rewilding is more ambitious: it is about restoring ecological processes through reassembling the species that drive them. For example rooting by wild boars has repercussions throughout a woodland ecosystem.

Such animals shouldn’t be reintroduced simply because they were once there, but because they could do something productive in future.

Don’t go native

Monbiot’s quest to restore ‘lost’ species harks back to a past age. However many conservation scientists are more relaxed concerning the question of ‘nativenes’. They are willing to consider introducing non-native species if they contribute a functional role in ecosystems, and they view the past not as a benchmark to preserve or replicate but as an inspiration for ecosystem restoration.

For instance, ‘Monbiot’s 15’ omits the auroch and tarpan which are classed as extinct. However in the 1980s progressive Dutch ecologists realised that their functional analogues survived as cattle and ponies and their ecological role could be restored through ‘de-domestication’.

They set about de-domesticating them at the famous Oostvaardersplassen reserve (see photo) located a 40 minute drive from Amsterdam. This produced a ‘Serengeti-like’ landscape: a type of nature unknown to Europe since humans settled down and started farming.

The OVP, as it is known, made nature conservation political again and has become a landmark public experiment in ecology. I first visited it with a group of students in 2003 when we travelled to the Netherlands to meet the radical ecologist Frans Vera and engage with the controversies created by rewilding.

The reserve is created on reclaimed land and opponents argued that the fences and flood control created an artifical landscape that undermined any claims to its authenticity as a restored ecosystem.

More seriously the policy of allowing the cattle and ponies to die of ‘natural’ starvation enraged animal welfare and farmer groups who believed they should be subjected to the same welfare standards applied to animals in labs, farms and zoos.

The controversies surrounding the experiment, Vera’s hypothesis that Europe’s original vegetation was wood-pasture rather than high-forest, and other radical rewilding visions are inspiring a re-examination of the fundamental premise of nature conservation.

Rewilding’s big chance

I recently published a Rewilding agenda for Europe in the journal Ecography, as my contribution to the European Council’s ‘fitness check’ of its nature legislation. The Birds and Habitats directives under review derive from the science and policy context of the 1970s. They are ageing. Both science and society have moved on.

Any revisions to European nature legislation should support the creation of experimental rewilding sites. Across the UK we could imagine the creation of wild cattle and pony steppe-lands on the Ridgeway, wild boar and deer-driven woodland ecosystems in Wales, and a Scottish arcadia of bison, moose, wolves and pine forest.

We also need many more OVP-like public rewilding experiments close to urban areas. These would be contained sites that inspire and inform the public about scientific advances, and provoke us all to ask: what sort of nature do we want for the future?

Rewilding might offer fresh solutions to intractable conservation problems. For example, conservationists want to remove pine trees introduced to the Sefton Coast dune system near Liverpool but local residents love them for their scenic grandeur and red squirrels.

The famous Formby footprints dating from 2500 BC show that humans, wild cattle, deer and wolf once inhabited these coastal areas. Suggesting the reintroducing of wild cattle and companion herbivores and seeing what happens might prompt a unified vision for the dunes.

Reinvigorating conservation

In practice rewilding is constrained by regulations on biohazards, public access and animal husbandry – and rigid and powerful 20th century conservation legislation and agencies which have no real incentive to innovate.

Conservation institutions need to modernise but no one wants to dismantle them and start over. We need designated spaces with regulatory flexibility – experimental rewilding sites – where we can plan future natures that will improve the quality of life for people and the planet.

Ordinary people are disenfranchised. Conservation policy is influenced by a coordinated lobby of a few big charities who have built their organisational models on the institutional structures of the late 20th century. George Monbiot’s vision catches the attention but advocates of rewilding need to develop realistic policy mechanisms to take their ideas forward.

Rewilding experiments would give space for wider reflection and debate and give our conservation institutions time to adapt. Crucially they would reinvigorate conservation as a cultural force in the 21st century.

Paul Jepson is Course Director, MSc Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at University of Oxford.

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