whether it is fully implemented.
In the early years of the NCC I wrote Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet to provide an accessible account of what the concept means, how to measure it, and the broad policy implications that follow.6 Now we have the 25 Year Environment Plan, I want to set out the prize that this could offer, and what the environment could look like mid-century. Most of all I want to show why this is in our economic interests, why it will enhance our prosperity, why we can be green and more prosperous at the same time, and why we don’t have to accept as inevitable a world without our insects, our birds, our wild flowers and fungi, and our mammals, reptiles and aquatic life. We don’t have to have the poverty of a silent spring and of monotone landscapes.
That is what this book is all about. It is deliberately broad in scope and content, providing a framework and illustrating what sort of outcomes there might be, and most importantly showing how we can not only deliver on all these individual projects, but also how they can be combined in a great national effort. Most of the examples are already well known to naturalists and ecologists. Many very good people have come up with myriad plans for their own patches. The aim here is to think big, to think about Britain as a whole, and to consider how it can be made to work better for the next generation. I make no pretence of having the scientific expertise to fill in the details – that is for others much better qualified than me. What I do lay claim to is showing how this all works economically and how to implement it.
There are those who decry economic approaches to the environment; who claim that they overlook the beauty and spiritual values and intrinsic nature. They make a good point when the target is a narrow and crude cost–benefit analysis. But they are wrong in two key ways: prosperity is a broad, not a narrow, concept; and the value to people of nature and all its beauty is every bit as important as the health benefits of clean water. The conventional metric of economic success, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is a pathetically poor measure of what we get out of nature; and if conservation and enhancing the environment does not make economic sense then the evidence from the last two centuries at least is that it will be neglected. Sadly, appealing to intrinsic nature and spiritual values has not worked so far.
AI, artificial intelligence
AONB, Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty
BBOWT, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust
BEIS, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
BSE, bovine spongiform encephalopathy
CAP, Common Agricultural Policy
CFP, Common Fisheries Policy
CLA, Country Land and Business Association
DDT, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane
DEFRA, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
DWI, Drinking Water Inspectorate
EEC, European Economic Community
GDP, Gross Domestic Product
GM, genetically modified
GPS, global positioning system
HMIP, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution
HS2, a planned high-speed railway project
NCC, Natural Capital Committee
NFU, National Farmers’ Union
NGO, non-governmental organisation
NRA, National Rivers Authority
OFWAT, Water Services Regulation Authority
ONS, Office for National Statistics
RSPB, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
SEPA, Scottish Environment Protection Agency
SSSI, Site of Special Scientific Interest
TB, tuberculosis
OUR NATURAL CAPITAL INHERITANCE
Britain’s natural environment is shaped by its past and its biodiversity. Few locations on the planet have had such a turbulent past visibly carved into the landscape. In the Hebrides, some of the oldest rock formations on the planet, dating back 3 billion years, have broken the backs of crofters for generations. The Carboniferous age left coal and limestone not only in the Pennines, but also in the pavements of our cities and the industrial landscape that coal enabled. In the Lake District, the glaciers’ ghosts are all around, while the South Downs show the ripples of the distant collision of Italy and the African tectonic plate into Europe.
The more recent physical severing of the land link to the European Continent, as the rising waters in the North Sea broke through between what is now Calais and Dover, cut off the migration of terrestrial species. The Irish Sea opened up, cutting Britain off from Ireland too. The snakes never made it to Ireland as the ice melted. In a smaller Britain (and even smaller Ireland) without many migratory replacements, it made it all the easier to exterminate some of Britain’s fauna. There are no bears, bison or wolves left. There is no land bridge to return on.
Being cut off has had its climatic effects too. Surrounded by sea, warmed by the Gulf Stream, Britain does not experience the deep freezes of Continental Europe. Its winters are comparatively mild. And its shorelines attract many winter visitors.
This is our inherited natural capital. It is what nature has endowed us with. Yet most of us are unaware of most of this for one very crucial reason. Our natural environment has been massively modified by humans over the last 8,000 years, and mostly in the last 200 years. Where once the Lewisian gneisses and the limestone and U-shaped glacial valleys would have been the hard constraints that people had to work with and around, now these hardly matter at all. We have so modified our world that, for many, nature appears hardly relevant. We may still rely on the land for agriculture, but agriculture is no longer the overwhelming driver of our economy. While, before 1800, the economy was mostly about farming and the trade in agricultural produce, with an empire built on food and crops, this is no longer the case. Farming now represents less than 1 per cent of GDP, and at least half of that is propped up by subsidies. A bad farming year no longer induces hardship and famine. In economic terms it just does not register. Fishing is now an even less consequential part of the economy, employing only a few thousand people.
Nature may not be man-made, but we as the ultimate eco-engineers increasingly shape it. Britain is a leading exemplar of the Anthropocene, a new geological age defined by human impact. There is nothing truly wild left. Much of the fauna has ingested plastic of one form or another, and the fashion for rewilding is best seen as just another form of eco-engineering, a switch from one man-made landscape to another. Wild, as a concept, has lost its practical meaning, even if its cultural power remains.
For all the angst this human transformation of nature causes environmentalists, it is not only a fact on the ground, it is also one that has proved remarkably successful from a human perspective. Over the last couple of centuries, we have broken out of thousands of years of virtually zero economic growth. The Industrial Revolution, and then the Age of Oil in the twentieth century, ushered in a wholly new historical experience. A cornucopia of new technologies raised the population out of poverty and into a material existence that has got better for each generation. Even two twentieth-century world wars could not dent the march of economic growth and prosperity. As nature declined, GDP kept going up.
For the bulk of the population, what was not to like about this? True, there might be fewer swallows and flycatchers, and the sound of