The multitudinous seas incarnadine



Algal bloom, Sydney



Natural globalisation

The orthodox view is still, especially in hard times, that economic growth is a Good Thing, indeed an essential thing. See what misery it produces when it slips into negative territory by only a few percentage points. And it's not just for our own comfort; it's needed in poorer countries on distant shores to 'lift people out of poverty' (and much else besides).

Cultural globalization follows economic globalisation inevitably and there are still plenty of commentators to make a case for that. Cultural interaction has always led to cultural vibrancy and creativity has it not? Just think of Shakespeare's time, and indeed of the whole English language. But perhaps we are reaching the endpoint where there is nothing left to stir into the soup.

Then follows linguistic globalisation - but we're not so happy about the growing extinction of minority languages. There is little talk of social globalisation - perhaps the increasingly dramatic polarisation of poverty and wealth will preserve us from that.

What of natural globalisation, as manifested most topically in ash die-back here - or Dutch elm disease, or sudden oak death, or the threat to the Scots pine? Globalisation is the other side of the coin of extinctions. Man is the great globalising species. It will be us and the slugs.

In my adult lifetime

50 lost each hour

A new report produced by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the British Trust for Ornithology, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, Birdlife International and other organisations including government agencies estimates that the number of nesting birds in the UK has declined from 310 million in 1866 to 160 million today. That's one pair a minute, or one for every adult human in England and Wales over the whole period. The decline is especially marked in farmland birds, whose population is less than half what it was in 1970.

To anyone of my generation who walks in the country or by the sea this report will be a sad confirmation of personal observation. Rockpools no longer teem with life, beaches are no longer littered with empty shells, the stubble fields are no longer covered with lapwings. All gone. Never mind: we have more slugs than we used to, and we hear there is more oil in the ground than we thought.

Existing cash resources

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18673220

http://inhabitat.com/glaxo-smith-kline-will-build-largest-rooftop-solar-array/

Indulgence craved

Early carbon offset trading

In pre-Reformation Europe one could, one was encouraged (pre-cursor of sub-prime mortgages) to buy, in effect, virtue. The Church had appointed itself the arbiter of virtue, and thereby the effective owner of virtue. For a payment, the laity could acquire an indulgence, an official forgiveness of past sins that might otherwise exclude one from heaven.

Well, actually, that is a gross over-simplification. It was all much more complicated:

To facilitate explanation, it may be well to state what an indulgence is not. It is not a permission to commit sin, nor a pardon of future sin; neither could be granted by any power. It is not the forgiveness of the guilt of sin; it supposes that the sin has already been forgiven. It is not an exemption from any law or duty, and much less from the obligation consequent on certain kinds of sin, e.g., restitution; on the contrary, it means a more complete payment of the debt which the sinner owes to God. It does not confer immunity from temptation or remove the possibility of subsequent lapses into sin. Least of all is an indulgence the purchase of a pardon which secures the buyer’s salvation or releases the soul of another from Purgatory. The absurdity of such notions must be obvious to any one who forms a correct idea of what the Catholic Church really teaches on this subject.

Yet some, at the time, thought rather differently, and that the result was to promote vice rather than virtue.

Luther thinking differently

All sorts of trouble followed after that.

In 1567, Pope Pius V cancelled all grants of indulgences involving any fees or other financial transactions, but indulgences continued to be a matter exercising the minds of the Church:

After the Council of Trent, Clement VIII established a commission of Cardinals to deal with indulgences according to the mind of the Council. It continued its work during the pontificate of Paul V and published various bulls and decrees on the matter. But only Clement IX established a true Congregation of Indulgences (and Relics) with a Brief of 6 July 1669. In a motu proprio on 28 January 1904, Pius X joined the Congregation of Indulgences with that of Rites, but with the restructuring of the Roman Curia in 1908 all matters regarding indulgences was assigned to the Holy Office. In a motu proprio on 25 March 1915, Benedict XV transferred the Holy Office's Section for Indulgences to the Apostolic Penitentiary, but maintained the Holy Office's responsibility for matters regarding the doctrine of indulgences.

By the bull Indulgentiarum doctrina of 1 January 1967, Pope Paul VI, responding to suggestions made at the Second Vatican Council, substantially revised the practical application of the traditional doctrine.

Environmental protection is the new virtue and we are in the process of erecting a new Church and complicated ecclesiatical mechanisms to protect it. But, in our society, someone owns everything, including the environment, and so our mechanisms must, once again, have a monetary aspect.

It was long ago decided that someone owned the land. 'Naturally' someone must own the water the air and everything else around us.

As George Monbiot tells us, our last government, at a cost of £100,000, 'commissioned a research company to produce a total annual price for England's ecosystems. After taking the money, the company reported – with a certain understatement – that this exercise was "theoretically challenging to complete, and considered by some not to be a theoretically sound endeavour". Some of the services provided by England's ecosystems, it pointed out, "may in fact be infinite in value".

'This rare flash of common sense did nothing to discourage the current government from seeking first to put a price on nature, then to create a market in its disposal. The UK now has a natural capital committee, an Ecosystem Markets Task Force and an inspiring new lexicon. We don't call it nature any more: now the proper term is "natural capital". Natural processes have become "ecosystem services", as they exist only to serve us. Hills, forests and river catchments are now "green infrastructure", while biodiversity and habitats are "asset classes" within an "ecosystem market". All of them will be assigned a price, all of them will become exchangeable.

'But it doesn't end there. Once a resource has been commodified, speculators and traders step in. The Ecosystem Markets Task Force now talks of "harnessing City financial expertise to assess the ways that these blended revenue streams and securitisations enhance the ROI [return on investment] of an environmental bond".'

Hurry on down

Subterranean waste disposal, they point out, is a cornerstone of the nation's economy, relied on by the pharmaceutical, agricultural and chemical industries. It's also critical to a future less dependent on foreign oil: Hydraulic fracturing, "clean coal" technologies, nuclear fuel production and carbon storage (the keystone of the strategy to address climate change) all count on pushing waste into rock formations below the earth's surface.

Midsummer

Yesterday, walking on National Trust land above the West Dorset coast, I could find on hindreds of gorse bushes only a single flower. usually at this time of year they are a mass of vivid yellow.

As it was not

In past centuries, when man's efforts had only small effects on the natural environment and the workings of natural processes, poeple were immensely concerned to discober whether untoward natural phenomena were some kind of retribution for their misdeeds and much livestock was sacrificed in the effort to find out. Nowadays, when our natural environment is fundamentally shaped by our activities, past and present, for some it seems worries melt away if it can be thought that unwelcome or unprecedented changes in the natural world are not 'anthropogenic', and many keyboard strokes are expended in the effort to prove it.