Nature versus culture

Apollo, July, 2005

The most pernicious vandals of churches in Britain have the legal right to continue to cause damage-because they happen to be bats. It is only one of many absurd contradictions in conservation policy.

'The regard for conservation in its widest sense raises some very difficult issues, where cultural and nature conservation conflict'. So concludes an English Heritage leaflet, Bats in Churches. Far from being a holistic, enlightened, conservative respect for both the man-made and natural worlds, held in balance, conservation is, indeed, full of internal conflicts and fraught with the often incompatible aims of particular pressure groups. And such conflicts can even occur within the same general area of interest. The Georgian Group, for instance, would like to see Barrington Park, a fine house in Gloucestershire, restored to its original 1730s state and shorn of the later good but overweening wings that the Victorian Society is bound to defend. Who is right? Who decides? As for those who are concerned with the English countryside, as we all know all too well, the romantic conservatives who claim that hunting is part of a traditional rural way of life and those who purport to care about foxes could not detest each other more.

Potential conflict between architectural and nature conservation is illustrated by the case of St George, Bloomsbury. As I discussed in this column in APOLLO for June 2004, this great church by Nicholas Hawksmoor is being carefully restored, partly with the help of public money. Yet the public will not be able to admire the cleaned and repaired north elevation of the church as the view is obscured by two tall, straggly plane trees in the churchyard that, unfortunately, despite mutilation by pruning, probably have a century of life in them. So will the nature conservation officer for the London Borough of Camden allow the World Monuments Fund to remove these ugly trees, or even to replace them by carefully sited new young ones? No; absolutely not. Now I am all in favour of trees, and am alarmed by such catastrophes as the escalating destruction of the Brazilian rain forests, but trees live and grow and can be planted while a building by Hawksmoor is unique and irreplaceable. Besides, its setting is urban, not rural, and Camden is being ridiculous. Then there are wind-farms, which generate strong passions both for and against. Wind turbines are big, obtrusive and, for some, frightening things that, when grouped together, can disfigure and trivialise wild landscapes--and the truly wild is becoming all the more precious and rare. On the other hand, if wind power can, in fact, reduce our dependence on burning fossil fuels for electricity generation (although this seems to be disputed), perhaps we should tolerate them. After all, they will not be permanent and in due course may well go the way of the electricity pylons that once seemed ubiquitous but may eventually become so uncommon that a few will have to be listed. There are more serious threats to landscapes than wind farms: yet more roads and motorways, enlarged airports, swathes of new housing, to name but three being so enthusiastically promoted by Britain's blinkered government.

What seems clear to me is that anyone who genuinely cares about conservation, whether of historic buildings, endangered species or the countryside, should also be deeply concerned about C[O.sub.2] emmissions and global warming and thus support any political means to try to ameliorate its evident causes. Nobody who is not in the pay of the oil industry or the United States government can surely have any doubt about the reality of climate change, and its potential, terrifying consequences. After all, well-meaning efforts to preserve for posterity a medieval church or an avenue of oaks, say, are rather pointless if Britain is to be utterly transformed--culturally as well as physically--over the next century by rising sea levels, higher temperatures, the extinction of species, food shortages, irresistible pressure for immigration and social breakdown. We must hope that governments might take action, but altering the profligate and destructive way we live is also the responsibility of every individual. That is to say, knowing that jet airliners are major polluters, anyone who flies off for a cheap holiday by Ryanair or Easyjet to, say, Venice to admire the Tintorettos or to drool over Palladio is, if not stupid, a hypocrite.

But I began with a slightly less momentous issue: the problem of bats. Now bats are nice, mysterious, furry creatures who seem to have many influential friends. All bats in Britain are now protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, which requires that no work can be done to buildings that might affect bats or their roosts without consulting English Nature. And English Nature considers that bats are more important than buildings. Such sentimentality means, as the late lamented Auberon Waugh constantly complained, that it is illegal for a householder whose loft is infested with bats to try to protect the property by getting rid of the wretched creatures. Now bats may be furry but they are also filthy; they fly about cheerfully defecating and urinating anywhere and everywhere, and bat droppings, as well as being disgusting, cause pitting and staining to porous materials while bat urine is powerfully alkaline and dissolves wooden, metal and painted surfaces.