Give us a Green Government

Geneva Virasami
Year 12

With the 2015 general election just around the corner and all party leaders gearing up for May 7th, a nation-wide conversation has been sparked on the economy, our national health service, immigration – the list goes on. It seems though, that the elephant in the room stands to be protection of the environment (or lack thereof.)

It is no secret that the pursuit to spread awareness of the implications of climate change is an ongoing effort, but with scepticism rife and one blind eye too many, it has become a challenging feat.

Joshua Sowden, Assistant Ecologist in an ecological consultancy, alleges that “Cameron’s promise for ‘The Greenest Government Ever’ has turned into a sick joke.”

“As the Conservatives have been in power for the last 5 years, I have the opportunity to criticize their record. Rather than go into depth about their policies I think a clearer picture can be gained if you consider some of their ‘achievements’. They tried to sell off publicly owned forests to the private sector, luckily public backlash prevented this. The first thing the Environment Secretary Owen Paterson did in office was to increase subsidies to the owners of grouse moors. Grouse moor management is terrible for nature and the environment- protected birds of prey are shot, management increases runoff and flooding and they often burn the moors which kills reptiles.
It was only a last minute intervention by Nick Clegg that stopped the scrapping of Natural England.
Finally, the advocacy for fracking is worrying: at a time when we are supposed to be lowering our carbon emissions the government has invested millions into squeezing every last drop of fossil fuel out of this country.”

It is clear, then, that the Conservatives have effectively failed to create the ‘Greenest Government Ever.’
We would think that it would be safe to assume that the greenest party would be the Green Party itself.
Yet Joshua challenges this idea. “Needless to say, much of the Green policy on the environment is positive and radical. However I do have a bit of a problem with the Greens; they are an idealistic and radical party and because they know they are very unlikely to actually be in a position of power they make commitments that they are unlikely to have to keep. For example the Greens have very idealistic ideas about food production- they say they would like to have small, organic, community led farms and under no circumstances would permit GM crops. But there is simply not enough space and organic farms are not always necessarily better for nature than conventional farms.”

Arguably, the largest factor in poor protection of the environment is the issue that economic growth has a detrimental effect on the environment, and the main parties view economic growth as essential.
As Joshua argues, however, “England’s position as the 6th richest country in the world means we do not need economic growth, rather a more equal distribution of wealth.”

The UK does have a very high level of inequalities in income, compared to other developed countries. ‘People in the bottom 10% of the population have on average a net income of £8,628. The top 10% have net incomes almost ten times that (£80,240),’[1] as written by The Equality Trust.

The knowledge of such inequalities, and their relation to the disregard of our environment paints a very bleak picture indeed.

What can be done?

“I think we must increase the education and awareness in children, because our current generation of adults don’t care enough about the environment. Children instinctively love to explore their natural environment through climbing trees, watching nature programs or catching bugs, but eventually they will be told by others that it’s somehow weird to take pleasure from interacting with nature. Too many people see the natural world as something that belongs to humans.”

Joshua surmises his views and ends our interview with a Cree prophecy:

"Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.”

[1] http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/about-inequality/scale-and-trends/scale-economic-inequality-uk