When our economic interests are at stake, the war on nature resumes

[marmar]

from the Guardian UK:




When our economic interests are at stake, the war on nature resumes
All this badger cull will prove is that our relations with the natural world have scarcely altered since the dark ages

George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 January 2010 20.00 GMT


There's a story that almost all of us believe: that beyond a certain state of development, we relearn a respect for nature. It is true that some of the excesses of the early modern age – attempts by gamekeepers to kill all competing species, mass slaughter by white hunters in the colonies, the grubbing up of hedgerows and ancient woodlands – have lessened, though we still eat endangered fish and buy timber from clear-cut rainforest. It is also true that we give more money to conservation projects and spend more time watching wildlife films than we have ever done before. But as soon as we perceive that our economic interests are threatened, our war against nature resumes.

2010 is the International Year of ­Biodiversity. The Welsh assembly is celebrating the occasion by launching a project to exterminate the badger. I won't pretend that this story ranks alongside the catastrophe in Haiti or the meltdown in Afghanistan, but it casts an interesting light on humanity's continuing impulse to conquer nature, and shows how, even when cloaked in the language of science, our relations with the natural world are still governed by irrationality and superstition.

Last week the Welsh rural affairs minister, Elin Jones, announced what her government calls "a proactive non-selective badger cull" in west Wales. What this means is the elimination of the species, beginning when the cubs emerge from their burrows in May. Badgers carry the bacterium which causes bovine tuberculosis. The purpose of the experiment is to discover whether the number of cows with the disease is reduced when the badger is exterminated. It it works, the method might be applied elsewhere. But even before the experiment begins, I can tell you that it's a waste of time and money.

In 2007, after nine years of research, the Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB sent its final report to the UK government. It discovered that "badger culling cannot meaningfully contribute to the future control of cattle TB in Britain". Rather than suppressing the disease, killing badgers appears to spread it. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jan/18/war-on-nature-badger-cull

[Lorien]

1. Biodiversity loss. I always liken it to removing parts from a vehicle;

You can take away the rear view mirrors, the seat belts, the floor mats, the overhead light, the door to the glove box...and on and on and on. The car continues to run even though it's a more unpleasant and difficult car to drive. But eventually that one nut or bolt is removed, and it all comes to a grinding halt. That's what we're doing now; removing the nuts and bolts of Gaia and crossing our fingers, just hoping that she continues to run, to provide for us as we brutalize her. Who knows what the long term implications of badger extermination will be? Plagues of the rodents badgers prey upon? They are there for a reason; they have their place in the ecology that we share. How is it that we continue to behave as unthinking Gods, dismantling our world piece by piece and learning nothing from either history or the laws of the natural world?