BEACHES AND MARGINS
A familiar pictorial sign for beach shows a parasol with a strip of sand and sea, and possibly a palm tree. There’s something silly, or annoying, or patronising about it, as there is about many signs of this sort: think of the one for elderly people crossing a road which shows absurdly stooped figures with sticks. The beach sign seems to imply that all beaches are like this: places for sunning yourself, under an eternally blue sky, with a tame sea – more or less artificial environments managed for human leisure with all awkward or extraneous factors air-brushed out. The beach sign and the elderly people sign are the visual equivalent of cliches, lazily generated images which betray a lack of attention to the real thing.
The silliness of the beach sign wouldn’t much matter if reality wasn’t being made to resemble it. A couple of years ago I revisited a Spanish beach which I had got to know and love in the 1990s. I went with a heavy heart, because I knew that Playa de la Ballena (Whale Beach) had been “urbanised”. A strip of apartments, bars and restaurants had sprung up where once a long line of lonely sand-dunes marked the meeting of land and ocean.
Until recently this was one of the few remaining wild places in an increasingly built-up part of the world. Not just the beach itself, with its frisky Atlantic rollers, but the slow approach to the beach through wheat fields were beautiful. In early summer (my favourite time) you could count on seeing one or two harriers hunting low over the fields, and pratincoles like giant swallows with their extravagantly forked tails chasing insects overhead.
Now instead of harriers and pratincoles you’ll find parking bays and suburban lamp-posts. The Playa de la Ballena, like so many beaches in Spain and elsewhere, especially in the Mediterranean, has been denatured. It has lost that special feeling a beach should have of being a marginal place – indeed, of being a margin. Collins’s Dictionary defines margin as “an edge or rim and the area immediately adjacent to it; a border.” The edge or rim bit is obvious enough, but the area immediately adjacent to it is equally important. The importance is both spiritual and ecological.
A person who recognised the spiritual importance of margins more fully than most was one of Slow Lane’s patron saints, Henry David Thoreau. “I love a broad margin to my life,” he writes in the fourth chapter of Walden, ‘Sounds’: “sometimes, in a summer morning…, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacks.” Thoreau’s broad margin is something that must not be filled in, even though it may not appear to be in the least productive.
Thoreau’s radical defence of margins goes beyond the perfectly reasonable justification that they are needed for the writing of marginal notes – as I have told students, who tend these days to fill up the entire sheet of paper. Thoreau’s broad margin, which makes no sense economically (unlike a profit margin), resembles a sacrifice to the gods, of productive time and profitability, which makes life holy.
While Thoreau lived out his marginal existence on the shores of Walden pond in the 1840s, the ecological importance of margins, and beaches, had not yet become apparent, except to the unusually prescient. (A century later, the acquisition of the entire Oregon coast by the state for the “free and uninterrupted use of the people” was a great Thoreauvian gesture.) The areas adjacent to beaches turned out to be both rich and fragile as habitats for many species, especially when the beach was also a little estuary. I visited one such place last June, Iztuzu beach near Dalyan and the ruins and magnificent rock-tombs of Caunus in south-west Turkey.
Iztuzu beach is one of the last Mediterranean breeding-grounds of the loggerhead turtle, and to give the authorities their due they have closed it off between 8pm and 8am when the huge female turtles lumber ashore to lay and bury their eggs in the sand. I couldn’t help wondering though if the slow-moving beasts might not be put off by having to dodge through serried ranks of sun-loungers and by the reek of Factor Fifteen.
The vegetation adjacent to beaches has also turned out to be of great ecological and ultimately human importance. Experts now consider that reckless beachside development and loss of mangroves and other protective buffer plants, grasses and coral contributed greatly to the terrible death-toll in the Indian Ocean last December.
Beachside vegetation saved my favourite literary hero, the long-suffering Odysseus. Washed up on a beach by a river estuary, the shipwrecked Ithacan found shelter between two olive trees. Next morning he was woken by the shouting of beachball-playing girls. Nausicaa’s attendants ran screaming, but the young princess stood her ground and welcomed the naked, salt-caked, marginal stranger. She didn’t even ask if he was an asylum seeker or an economic migrant. You’d never find that happening on an urbanised beach.
BRAKING A GOLD RUSH
Readers with elephantine memories may recall the case of a proposed open-cast gold mine in Romania which I took up in this column nearly three years ago. The mine would the largest of its kind in Europe and would involve flattening four mountains and obliterating much of Romania’s oldest recorded settlement and one of the most important Roman archaeological sites in Europe.
Normally open-cast mining, designed to exploit poor quality ores and deposits, is confined to remote and uninhabited areas of the world. As the physician and epidemiologist Professor Julian Tudor Hart has written, “open cast mining is indeed a degradation of the environment generating minimal employment at maximal environmental cost.” Rosia Montana happens to be situated in Romania’s equivalent of the English Lake District. The saga has taken all sorts of twists and turns and is proving even more intriguing and instructive than I anticipated at the time.
The classic forward-looking development-versus-backward-looking conservation storyline peddled by the mining company, Rosia Montana Gold Corporation (RMGC), a subsidiary of Gabriel Resources, and apparently bought by the Romanian government, always seemed too simplistic. Environmental considerations, including a truly sustainable approach to development, have moved up the scale of priorities for governments at least in the developed world in the last three years. They need no longer be considered anti-economic – as Sir Nicholas Stern among others has argued. Romania joined the EU on 1 January this year, so the case has become not just one about the role of extractive industries but also one about governance and democracy.
Much seemed to hang on the publication of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), an official sounding document which is meant in theory to evaluate the environmental impact of a large-scale and potentially damaging proposed development and to suggest ways of mitigating the effects. People I spoke to involved in Rosia Montana’s local amenity association, Alburnus Maior, which is opposed to the mine, pinned quite high hopes on this document: I did not, partly because I spent a year at the London School of Economics studying environmental policy.
One quarter of the entire MSc was devoted to EIA, which seemed rather excessive to those of us who weren’t contemplating a career in environmental consultancy. But the EIA module turned out to be the most fascinating of the lot, revealing the sheer barminess of the way laws designed to protect the environment end up functioning in practice. Unforgettable was the man who turned up to speak to us and announced that he’d switched from local government to environmental consultancy in part so that he could acquire a bigger company car. He also had a startlingly pragmatic approach to relocating great crested newts threatened by a housing development (“one option was to knock the buggers on the head.”)
A curiosity of the system is that EIAs are commissioned and paid for by developers. You might think this would lead to a certain institutional bias: environmental consultants compiling the reports (which often run to several volumes and are impressive at least in their physical bulk) would be unlikely to operate in a manner which went against the interests of their paymasters. I read a study by the environmentalist and founder of India’s Centre for Science and Environment, Anil Agarwal, which concluded that not a single project in the developing world had been halted as a result of an EIA.
But this is where democracy comes in. The Rosia Montana EIA has been strongly criticised and challenged by experts from Romania, Hungary, the UK and other countries. Its conclusions on the biodiversity of the proposed site have been challenged by two British botanists, Dr John Ackeroyd and Dr Andrew Jones, who conducted a field study last summer. They argue that whereas the EIA implies that Rosia Montana and its hinterland have little or no conservation value, “Rosia Montana is a national treasure, a place of considerable value that in other parts of Europe would be a primary candidate for protection and conservation in an international context.”
On the archaeological front, ICOMOS, the archaeological consultant to UNESCO, has expressed grave concerns about the project. A comparable Roman gold mining complex in northern Spain, Las Medulas, is classified by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
At a national level, the Romanian Academy, the country’s highest scientific body, has stated that “the gold mine project is not in the public interest and the collateral negative effects as well as the risks involved are not justified.” The Romanian parliament has commissioned an opinion poll: 97% of respondents have expressed opposition to the mine.
Beyond Romania, scientists and public bodies in Hungary have voiced their strong concerns about possible contamination from the cyanide laced tailings dam. A cyanide spill at the Baia Mare gold mine in Romania in 2000 caused one of the worst environmental disasters in Europe in recent times, polluting the Tisza and Danube rivers in Hungary, contaminating water supplies and killing 1200 tons of fish.
The UNECE or Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters came into force in October 2001 and has been ratified by the EU. Another piece of self-strangulating UN and Brussels red tape? Or a genuine extension of democracy into areas with a crucial effect on people’s lives, such as the quality of air, water and the wider environment? An alliance of NGOs is taking RMGC to the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee on the grounds that public access to the EIA has not been provided. Rosia Montana is becoming a test case not just for Romania’s nascent democracy but also for environmental democracy in the wider world.
INVISIBLE PATHWAYS IN THE SKY
Of all natural phenomena, the migrations of animals and birds stir me most viscerally.
As a young child learning to read, bored witless by a series of books about a pair of horribly normal children called Jack and Jill, I was captivated by the tale of the Pacific salmon Red Tag. Following the dauntless fish on its journey from the upper reaches of a Washington State river down into the ocean, its life there avoiding sharks and trawlers, and then its return up rapids and ladders to spawn and die, was exactly the cue I needed to start me off on my own imaginative journeys. After Red Tag, I became fascinated by the great pilgrimages of reindeer and caribou over the tundra, and the treks of wildebeest across the savannah. But the most amazing and imaginatively compelling of all migrations were avian.
At my first school, we were encouraged to do a piece of free writing every week, and I wrote something about the migrations of the Arctic tern (a bird I knew from visits to the nature reserve of Scolt Head in Norfolk, where nesting terns dive-bomb intruders). Its astonishingly long-range and far-flung annual migration from the Arctic to the Antarctic made it a symbol of world-spanning freedom, or a small creature just setting out on a mission to traverse endless and exciting space.
Since the latest bird flu outbreak I’ve been worrying not just about a possible human pandemic but also about the implications for the birds themselves, who somehow never get considered in the risk assessment scenarios. My fear has been that at some point the government, or many governments, would start widespread culls of wild birds (the UK government has already done something similar with badgers).
So far I’m glad to say this hasn’t happened. At the time of writing the World Health Organisation and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN concur with bird conservation groups that “culls of wild birds are highly unlikely to stop the spread of the disease”, and might actually make matters worse. Health and conservation agencies consider the risk of transmission of the deadly virus from wild birds to humans to be low (and no case of such transmission has yet been recorded).
Actually what has happened has been the opposite. The fatal H5N1 strain seems to have originated in domestic poultry through the mutation of less pathogenic sub-types, spread rapidly in unhygienic conditions and then been passed to wild birds. In other words the apparently inexorable economics (which run counter to any true nomos/law of the oikos/home) of cheap food production for humans have ended up putting wild birds as well as ourselves at risk. The RSPB reckons than 5-10% of the world population of the beautiful bar-headed goose has been wiped up in this latest bird flu outbreak.
I still can’t dispel my fantasy that deep in some bureaucratic labyrinth a government task-force is working out ways of restricting the free movement and migration of birds. That freedom has always been admired and envied by human beings. Increasingly we seem to try to copy it, but in ways which generally lack the joyful naturalness of bird migration.
The Brazilian photographer Sebastiao [NB second a should have tilde] Salgado has recorded what he calls “the current population upheaval across the world” in his series Migrations and Children: these are mainly images of economic migrants, people displaced to all corners of the globe by a sort of whirlwind, “a revolution in the way we live, produce, communicate and travel.” The results are apocalyptic and desolating: many of these migrants end up living in slums and shanty-towns, cut off from their indigenous culture and deprived of what we would consider basic dignities.
Other human migrants are more fortunate. But even those of us with the luck to be able to dodge the cold and the mirk (as well as the guilt that our pursuit of the good weather may be changing the very nature of weather) face endless tedious obstacles – queues, delays, congestion, circling over the airport. Whatever we do we cannot quite match that instinctive rightness and beauty which Yeats experienced in the autumn arrival at Coole Park in Galway of the Bewick and Whooper swans, which he saw “suddenly mount/ And scatter wheeling in great broken rings/ Upon their clamorous wings.”
Yeats is candid in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ about his envy of the “mysterious, beautiful” birds. He sees them as unageing, untiring, passionate, in contrast to the ageing man he described elsewhere as a “tattered coat upon a stick”. He also anthropomorphises a little when he says “Passion or conquest, wander where they will,/ Attend upon them still.” Swans mate for life. But what we can say is that wild swans, and other migrating birds, inhabit the same earth as ourselves but experience it in a completely other, non-human way. They follow invisible pathways in the sky and across continents which are more ancient and (I hope) more long-lasting than any laid down by us.
ACEQUIAS
Spain, along with much of southern Europe, is going through a severe drought – one of the worst in fifty years. Travelling through Andalucia [note: I should have acute accent] in June, from Malaga [note: first a should have acute accent] to Almeria [note: I should have acute accent] and up to Granada and Jaen [note: e should have acute accent], I was struck by the umber tones of the landscape even before high summer had begun in earnest. Almeria [note: I should have acute accent] is always dry, but parts of the Sierra Morena looked desperately brown and flammable, as I accompanied a forlorn landowner putting out maize for the wild red deer which would otherwise not survive through to the shooting season in the autumn.
One part of Andalucia [note: I should have acute accent], though, remained miraculously verdant: I spent a few days staying with friends in the village of Mecina in the Alpujarra, on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Here, in the landscape portrayed by Gerald Brenan in South from Granada, I marvelled at the Spanish chestnuts in flower and the tall poplars shading the fertile terraces carved from steep slopes.
Nothing supernatural makes the Alpujarra green – just a combination of natural abundance and sophisticated and ecologically sensitive technology. The natural abundance is of water, or rather snow falling on Spain’s highest peaks which melts to form various rushing streams and rivers. The technology (to use that word in its broadest sense) is the elaborate system of irrigation channels called acequias which distribute that water as widely and gently as possible through eighty odd villages to enable crops, fruit and vegetables to be grown and animals to be pastured.
Acequias are a relatively low and old form of technology. They were devised more than eight hundred years ago by the Muslims (both Arab and Berber), then among the world’s greatest experts in irrigation and horticulture, who lived in these parts for over seven hundred years. As an apparently old-fashioned kind of technology, they have recently come into conflict with a hydrological scheme more in keeping with the modern age. My friends told me about a long and intense campaign which they, together with hundreds of neighbours from several villages, had waged against a plan to divert the water of the Rio [note: I should have acute accent] Trevelez [note: second e should have acute accent] (which feeds the local acequias) through a massive concrete pipe across the mountains to Almeria [note: I should have acute accent].
Fortunately this scheme, like the even more drastic National Hydrological Plan involving syphoning off the waters of the river Ebro, has been abandoned. The cherry and almond orchards of Mecina will survive a while longer; the orange and lemon trees which Lynda and Lars planted in the winter (and which were nearly killed off in Spain’s coldest snap for half a century) have a chance to fruit and flourish in the decades ahead.
The Muslims’ expertise in irrigation and horticulture, which left such a mark on the Iberian peninsula, was, I imagine, an example of necessity being the mother of invention. The Bedouin are desert dwellers and water has always been a precious commodity in most of the Arab lands. Al-Andalus, the name given by the Arabs to the south of Spain, was long regarded by them as a kind of paradise, and the expulsion of the Moors from Spain culminating in their final eviction from the Alpujarra in 1571, is lamented in Arab literature in terms reminiscent of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden.
One of the aims of the extreme Wahhabi sect of Islam associated with Osama Bin Laden and his followers is said to be a return to the 9th century Caliphates. This is portrayed (probably correctly) as a reactionary desire for a pre-modern world from which developments such as western science and technology and rights for women have been expunged. But the Umayyad dynasty based in Cordoba [note: first o should have acute accent] from the 8th to the 11th century presided over a society utterly different from the Taliban’s oppressed Afghanistan. “Umayyad rule in al-Andalus,” writes the hispanist Michael Jacobs, was marked by “prosperity, religious tolerance, relative stability, and intense cultural and scientific activity…The great natural resources of Andalucia [note: I should have acute accent] were brilliantly exploited…The Muslims…allowed Christians and Jews freely to practise their religions.”
After the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews by the Catholic Kings, the agriculture and horticulture of al-Andalus changed radically. As early as the 1520s, the Venetian ambassador to Granada commented on the “ruinous state of countless gardens and plots of land” (Jacobs). Andalucia [note: I should have acute accent] became the land of latifundias, huge estates owned by absentees and worked by desperately poor day-labourers.
The beautifully engineered acequias of the Alpujarra show that high achievements of culture and cultivation, not to mention tolerance and diversity, are by no means a monopoly of Christian civilisation. A version of Christian civilisation brought ethnic cleansing and a fanatical and disastrous belief in racial purity to Spain. Now a kind of techno-fanaticism threatens to destroy the natural environment as thoroughly as that other fanaticism laid waste to the human diversity of al-Andalus. The acequias of the Alpujarra tell me that civilisation is not a brittle, one-dimensional growth but a richly spreading, many-rooted tree.
AM I ENTERTAINING MY CAT OR VICE VERSA?
A aesthete friend at university used to become incoherent with frustration when I said that I loved watching nature programmes on TV and that they were a justification for the medium’s existence. For him television was the epitome of all that was moronic and infernal about late modernity, and “the David Attenborough effect” as he called it induced a kind of trahison des clercs in people who should know better.
I still love watching nature programmes, though I may be more aware of the politics behind them and what they leave out, and so Sunday evenings have found me glued to the new series on BBC TV narrated by the evergreen Attenborough, Planet Earth. This series employs new technical wizardry which allows natural marvels which hardly any human has ever witnessed to be seen by millions. Something called a telegimbel, a zoom lens like a football attached to the nose of a helicopter, made possible amazing sequences of wolves hunting caribou and wild dog pursuing antelope.
Unlike earlier BBC nature series, which deployed an omniscient narration, hiding from view all the intricate means by which the images were gathered and stitched together, Planet Earth nods towards self-reflexivity by including a substantial postlude to each programme about the processes of research and film-making. Perhaps you’d only idly wondered how you came to be witnessing a feeding frenzy of piranhas as if right in the middle of it, or 2-metre caymans meeting you nose to nose. Technology may help but it takes a brave cameraman who can continue filming while a seven-foot croc nibbles his hood, or spend three weeks searching for polar bears at –40C.
Never before had a snow leopard been filmed hunting wild goat, chasing its prey down sheer mountainsides with superhuman agility. (It may have been the first and last time, as there are only 40 left in the wild.) The chase was thrilling but the most touching moment came when the mother leopard returned to her cub empty-handed and the two exchanged what seemed like a rueful nuzzle.
The term empty-handed may not have sounded quite right. Of course snow leopards don’t have hands, they have paws. No animal, not even an ape, can have hands, insisted Heidegger, because the hand is essentially not a grasping organ but that which enables us humans to think. An abyss separates us from the animals, which are so close to us, because only we humans can point to what is.
Heidegger’s argument sounds convincing, especially when you witness that marvellous moment when a child starts pointing to things (pointing and naming), but is it quite so easy to say that apes don’t have hands? This is a point where Jacques Derrida took issue with his master; he called Heidegger’s notion of the abyss between human and animal an “idiocy”. If this philosophical spat sounds abstruse, bear with me: I think it could have an influence on whether Planet Earth turns out to be “the ultimate nature programme” in the wrong sense, or something more hopeful.
One of the ways in which Derrida seeks to deconstruct Heidegger’s paradoxically thoughtless distinction is by meditating on an uncanny moment in which he catches his cat watching him. Here Derrida is echoing an earlier French philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, who once asked whether he was entertaining his cat or the other way round.
A problem with nature programmes, at least the old-fashioned kind, is that they either bring us too close or not close enough to nature. We may see more panoramically, or peer ever more closely into things, but we are always separated from them by the notion of scientific objectivity. The moments when something rather different happens, as when Attenborough once allowed himself to be preened by a female gorilla (but continued imperturbably to narrate in his confiding whisper), stand out in the memory with extraordinary vividness.
There are changes afoot. I don’t mean the genre of programmes in which Australians in shorts wrestle with venomous snakes; this, as Richard Mabey has said, seems firmly set in a gladiatorial tradition. March of the Penguins, especially Jordan Roberts’ narration, may have seemed to some like a return of the worst anthropomorphism, but I loved the film for what I can only call the heroism and the tenderness shown by those amazing creatures. Such language crosses the abyss between human and animal with reckless abandon.
Perhaps what is needed is a more subtle kind of reciprocity – an awareness that the animals may be watching us as much as we watch them, but in a completely other way. And together with that awareness might come ethical responsibility. The BBC programme Springwatch, whose presenters are less masterful and knowing and more emotionally involved than Attenborough, is encouraging viewers to be not just vernal voyeurs but participants in nature’s great ringing of changes. All the marvellous scientific nature programmes seem not to have halted the march of extinctions and extirpations one step. Now, as Marx almost said, the task is not just to observe the natural world but to save it.
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