I was listening to Nicky Campbell’s BBC Radio 5 Live call-in the other day when a comment from one of the guests stopped me in my typing tracks. The subject was whether the government should ditch the midlands/northern leg of High Speed Rail 2 (HS2) from Birmingham to Manchester, which they now have scrapped.
The rail expert said that he had ‘regrown an ancient woodland’ with acorns from a felled or cleared site during the creation of High Speed 1 (HS1), the line that runs from Kent to London St. Pancras International. There was no confirmation of which woodland the man was talking about.
Nicky Campbell did question this clearly unusual comment about ‘ancientness’, but it wasn’t final and the rail expert had the last word. Let’s look at the facts.
Ancient woodlands are wooded landscapes home to assemblages of particular species relevant to their locale (trees and wildflowers, fungi, invertebrates) that have been on maps since the year 1600. Their soils are rich in fungi and invertebrates, ecosystems that have developed over a very long time.
So is it possible to remove this landscape and put it somewhere else?
HS2 has been trying. They have been moving soil and, apparently, in some cases trees. This method says so much about our relationship with landscapes today – we can just move things around like pieces of Lego, and surely everything will be fine?
In my view, the equivalent of this is wheeling a patient out of a hospital and leaving them in the car park. ‘There you go,’ the doctors might say. ‘Consider yourself replanted.’
It’s like taking the Mona Lisa and chucking it into the sea.
To some ecologists it’s just beyond belief.
What is so problematic about this rail expert’s statement, beyond the obvious? It’s greenwashing from people, intentional or not, who profit from development of ancient woodland, or who think their expertise in one area allows them free reign elsewhere. I’m sure there are housebuilders out there lamenting environmentalists who think they are also experts in constructing properties.
This kind of greenwashing is a green light for bad planning, dodgy development and accelerated destruction of England’s already depleted wild and natural places. I think it’s important to challenge it when it does rear its head. Once an ancient woodland and all its wildlife and heritage is gone, it’s not coming back.
Thanks for reading.
Unlocking Landscapes 