In this summer’s newsletter we will be reporting and marking the landmark environmental case, in which ELF intervened, the Manchester Ship Canal Company Ltd v United Utilities. We waited 16 months for the judgment; idle chatter speculated that we were waiting so long because the judges did not agree. As it turns out it was a unanimous decision of the seven judges. For the potential nuisance and trespass claims that follow, against water companies for illegal sewage discharge, evidence will be key. More on this later.
The other reflection to be made this summer is the growing drum beat of alarm over the missing insects from our environment and nature spaces. We know insect numbers have been in massive decline but this year has been stark. Walking in the South Downs National Park I have been struck again and again by their literal absence, not explained away simply by the inclement weather. The diversity of the insect world, staggering beyond imagining, it was the beetles that Darwin reflected must be the most beloved of all God’s creatures, such was their diversity. But beset by a multitude of devasting impacts wrought by humans, combinations of poisons unbounded on much of our agricultural lands, climate change, habitat loss, unsympathetic development, an increasingly electrically lit world, it feels like the start of the end. I read today that bat numbers are down this year, juveniles found malnourished. It doesn’t take much to work out the links.
And yet despite the nature crisis, at ELF we see so much development proposed on our most important and protected nature spaces. The Crossness Nature Reserve, a major infrastructure project for a carbon capture storage plant, proposed to be built on 6 hectares of amazingly diverse grazing marsh, a nature reserve in Belvedere where ancient grazing rights are held by the local gypsy and traveller community. The natural and cultural capital of these places are not ours to lose. Nature has a right to exist and thrive, we need to be giving nature more space, not taking it away.
Another matter, so tragic and heartbreaking it is beyond reckoning, the cocklepickers of Bury Inlet in Wales. Sustainable cocklebeds hand picked by licence and cultural care for centuries, a thriving local economy exporting cockles all over the world... the cocklebeds now dying, mass mortality events, a local economy destroyed, social and cultural history extinguished, the cockles swilled in sewage cannot survive and thrive. And yet the communities behind both these matters are strong and capable and determined. As ever at ELF the communities fighting for their nature are the inspiration our small team works with.
And so the fight for nature intensifies. Those who can do more to assist the communities on the front line of local nature recovery, must. Not only does ELF help these communities, we also support and encourage the environmental rights lawyers of the future. In this most quiet of summers, absent insects, I take heart from an amazing entomologist I met, Dr Lynn Dicks, who works at Cambridge University; she said to take heart, nature bounces back “pretty forcefully” if you give it a chance. We have to give nature a chance, our survival as a species depends on it. Lest we forget we are part of nature, not separate from it.
