A fascinating report, The State of Nature, was launched to fanfare in May. It revealed that 60% of the 3,148 UK species assessed have declined over the last 50 years.
Half of the species assessed have shown strong changes in their numbers or range in that time – indicating that environmental changes are having a dramatic impact on nature in the UK. And, because that is the bit that interested me most, it recorded our latest data on changes in hedgehog numbers. We now know that there has been a 37% decline in hedgehog numbers in the UK in the last ten years.
But the most worrying thing about this ground-breaking collaborative project, I believe, was that it had to be done by NGOs. The UK government is obsessed with the economy, while appearing to care not one jot for ecology. And that is not as barking-green as it might seem. Because the two words are very closely related – and a closer look will lead you to see why it is an issue.
The ancient Greek for home is oikos – which has become anglicised as eco. Economy is the management of the home, ecology is the study of the home. It is a road to madness to manage something that is not studied. We do not study our planet home with the attention we should. If we were to invest as heavily in trying to bail out our degraded ecosystems as we did the debased economy, maybe we would be getting somewhere.
Hedgehogs are the perfect way in to looking at the importance of a better understanding of our ecosystem, which, in turn, allows us to better understand how to protect them.
The British Hedgehog Preservation Society and the People’s Trust for Endangered Species are working together for the benefit of hedgehogs – we are investing heavily in research to better understand the causes of the population decline and also to identify land-management strategies that will help to reverse the decline. The work is not being assisted by government – it is not being assisted financially (as with all of the other wildlife groups, we rely upon the generosity of the public – and just as an aside – while the public are willing to donate to help save hedgehogs and other wildlife from collapse, I wonder how many would do so voluntarily if it were the banks that needed support?)
But the lack of funding – for a thorough wildlife monitoring programme for example – is only part of the problem. The lot of the hedgehog is being directly hampered by government policy. The relaxation of planning laws, as an attempt to stimulate the economy, has been undertaken with little consideration for the ecosystems that will be destroyed. Hedgehogs are very affected by habitat fragmentation – which appears to be a concept not high on the list of planning guidance. Too much attention is given to birds and insects, which have the obvious advantage of flight, as measures of biodiversity. More attention needs to be paid to animals like hedgehogs who will find a new road or housing development splitting already diminished habitat into yet smaller fragments.
A specific example can be seen in the suggestion of increasing the limit of the size of extensions for terraced houses from 3 metres to 6 metres. This would see the eradication of a great swathe of potential wildlife habitat under bricks and mortar. At the time when we have launched a project to try to increase the connectivity of the suburban landscape, Hedgehog Street, this change in rules seeks to further fragment an already heavily divided habitat.
We know that hedgehogs need connectivity – and the only way that this will be achieved is if there is a little connectivity in thought at a government level. Of course, what is good for hedgehogs is also good for so much else in the natural world – and the societal benefits accrued from exposure to wildlife are now well known. In fact there are some who argue we would be better shifting the care for nature out of the hands of DEFRA and into the hands of the NHS – thanks to the amazing healing qualities of time spent in anything approximating to the wild.
Science needs to be at the heart of government thinking. Currently that does not seem to be the case. There are no ecological justifications for launching a doomed badger cull; for increasing air and road transport infrastructure while claiming to be the ‘greenest government’; for ignoring the call to ban bee-killing neonicotinoid toxins or to allow the destruction of native raptors and buzzards to appease those who get their kicks from our own canned hunt – when 35 million (non-native) pheasants are released into the wild.
I can imagine hedgehogs being easily dismissed by ranks of policy advisors in grey suits as just too cute and whimsical to be taken seriously. Yes, they do feature heavily in children’s stories, but they are also real, wild, native mammals that there should be a governmental duty of care to protect and encourage. At the moment that work is being done by NGOs – not just without the support of government, but in the face of a set of policies that seem designed to undermine all those efforts. We need to ensure that there is a connectivity of thought – between the independent wildlife experts and the decision makers. Remember that it is not just the economy – it is also the ecology – in which we need to invest.
Hugh Warwick is an ecologist and author (A Prickly Affair and most recently, The Beauty in the Beast). He is also the communications manager of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society.
Fri Jun 07, 2013 12:36 pm
