Water
I feel have written more than sufficient about our pollution for profit water companies and Thames Water in particular, but it beggars belief that even now there is a fresh scandal.
Thames Water and others are banned from paying any more performance-related bonuses (which should never had been paid in the first place) but of course they have come up with a way around it, within the letter of the law but not its spirit. They have awarded their finance chief a signing fee, a golden hello. It cannot be performance related because it was paid before the executive had done anything. The staggering sum of money is one million pounds. This is whilst the company is on the brink of collapse and, one hopes, nationalisation. “The payment was drawn from a £3bn emergency debt package.”
From the article above: The River Action head of campaigns, Amy Fairman, said: “Thames Water is on the brink of financial collapse with a debt pile of £20bn, rivers in their region are drowning in sewage and 571m litres of water are lost every day. Yet there’s still £1m for a finance chief’s signing-on payment when over a quarter of Thames Water customer bills go to servicing debt. Meanwhile, frontline staff are out around the clock holding this failing company together. It’s indefensible. Put Thames Water into special administration and rebuild it to serve its customers, and clean up our rivers, not reward failure.”
Big Pharma
It has been quite the week for scandals or scandals revisited. Actor Michael Sheen’s two-part documentary Buried is an excellent if depressing watch. It concerns the dumping of ‘forever chemicals’, toxic PCBs in Wales and a location in the north of England by Monsanto. Monsanto is best known for the herbicide Roundup which contains glyphosate which is hugely harmful to the environment. Both PCBs and glyphosate are allegedly carcinogenic. Pharmaceutical giant Bayer, which acquired Monsanto has paid out more than $10 billion to settle thousands of claims in America.
Boeing
Another documentary, Freefall: a reckoning for Boeing, exposes the long history of cover-ups and profit before passenger safety at Boeing. Plane manufacture and repairs were outsourced and substandard previously rejected replacement parts (some from boxes actually marked “Scrap”) were used with terrible consequences including several hundred deaths. Whistleblowers were relentlessly hounded and sidelined. Employees state that they would not fly in the planes they were working on even if offered a free holiday.
There is a clear pattern. CEOs are brought in to do nothing but maximise profit with complete disregard for public safety and that is followed by years of denial and obfuscation. Without regulation this is what seems inevitably to happen with unfettered free market capitalism.
Planning
Andrew Burnham has already shown his true environmental colours. These people never fail to disappoint. He proposes handing over planning decision powers to mayors, overruling councils and any local protest. Incredibly, according to the Huffington Post, “They will be allowed to give developers upfront permission, too, so they can build without having to apply.”
Grouse shooting
A letter in The Times yesterday occupied prime position at the top left of the letters page which seems extraordinary given that it is a shameless travesty of the truth. It does betray the Grouse shooting industry’s desperation in the face of regulation and increasing public awareness.
Here is the full text:
Rewilding and fires
Sir, Ben Goldsmith acknowledges that abandoning land without restoring its hydrology or putting effective grazing in place can create a “tinderbox” (“The people blaming rewilding for fires misunderstand what it is”, Times2, Aug 20). That exposes the flaw in claims that rewilding automatically reduces wildfire risk. Rewetting and grazing may help, but only if they actually work. The government should require every rewilding project receiving public money to publish whether the wildfire risk is expected to rise during the transition, by how much and for how long. Projects should also monitor fuel loads and set clear thresholds for when grazing, cutting or controlled winter burning will be used. The public should not be expected to subsidise a project that increases wildfire risk and then pay again for the fire and rescue service to deal with the consequences. Andrew Gilruth CEO, the Moorland Association
There are four species of Grouse in the UK, in the order of the illustrations below, the Ptarmigan, Black Grouse, The Capercaillie (aka Wood Grouse), and at the head of this post the Red Grouse. The illustrations are from Morris (Francis Orpen). A History of British Birds. Six volumes. Groombridge and Sons, 1851-1857. The first three are red-listed, the Capercaillie coming close to extinction. It is the Red Grouse that they like to murder in their hundreds of thousands.
It is of course the case that rewilding would greatly help the prevention and mitigation of wildfires and for that matter flooding. What really sticks in my craw as Andrew Gilruth must be aware is that the industry’s allegedly controlled burning of moors is the cause of causes pollution and other major environmental problems. And they are not even very good at it. I am not suggesting that they are responsible for the majority of wildfires, nevertheless a significant proportion have been linked to their deliberately set fires jumping containment.
In March 2019 a ‘controlled’ burn in Cairngorms National Park escaped into nearby native pine forest and peatland near Abernethy across hundreds of hectares. Firefighters, gamekeepers and helicopters had to fight the blaze for days.
In Spring 2021 fire and rescue services had to deploy units in the Scottish Highlands to combat multiple escaped fires to prevent them from reaching timber plantations and power lines.
In the North York Moors and Peak District fire and rescue services have had to be called out multiple times in the same circumstances.
These are from Animal Wild:
The Countryside Alliance accused Wild Justice of spreading fake news about grouse shooting, which must be the ultimate pot and kettle situation, given their declaration: “It could cause an irreversible decline in protected and endangered species populations, seriously harm our rural economy and have a devastating effect on the environmental benefits that managing moorland for grouse shooting and other countryside pursuits brings to the UK.” The economic benefits as far as ‘ordinary’ local people are concerned are actually tiny, pathetic even, especially if looked at in terms of benefit per square acre. Rather, by maintaining these lifeless landscapes, grouse moors have the opposite effect to that which they claim, not least in pushing up insurance costs for homeowners and businesses because of the increased flood risk brought about by the way the moors are managed.
Grouse moors occupy nearly 550,000 acres in England alone, much of it the beneficiary of public subsidy to the tune of £4 million. They are desolate, monocultural killing fields. Hen harriers are being driven to extinction – large numbers (98 since 2018 that we know about) go ‘missing’ or are illegally killed, whilst foxes, mountain hares, weasels and stoats routinely go the same way at the hands of gamekeepers. Covert surveillance by the Hunt Investigation Team found that on the Moscar Estate in 2017 wildlife was targeted on a systematic basis, with estimates of 400 snares in use in addition to other traps. From monitoring just one snare in particular over four weeks, two badgers, a mountain hare, one fox and three lambs were seen to be caught. Just one snare. Large mammal traps were placed right by active badger setts.
Rod Liddle summed it up well in the Sunday Times. He is something of an antidote to Clarkson’s toxicity (ff.) being vehemently against the badger cull too. He reports a Red Kite found hanging from a tree near where he lives, poisoned with carbofuran and bendiocarb and shot. He debunks the myth that local communities benefit: “… the City boys arrive, they are lodged on the estates, they get driven out to the ranges, they fire away and they go home.” In Scotland, he says, it is estimated that gamekeepers kill 250,000 animals in order to allow people to kill 300,000 grouse. “Every way you look at this industry – from the point of view of economics, morality, the environment, biodiversity, land use – it’s existence is an absurdity.” He asks a gamekeeper what proportion of “vermin” he intends to kill and is told that the aim is 100% and describes the moors as “a depopulated and scorched treeless moonscape, the very antithesis of nature.” He adds it is not as old a tradition as one might think – driven grouse shooting has only gone on for around 150 years. Best of all he concedes that such landscapes are indeed unique to Britain – because no other country would put up with it.
In October 2023 a heather-burning fire set by gamekeepers on Moscar Moor created a cloud of smoke which descended, not for the first time, on nearby Sheffield, polluting the air to four times the legal limit, causing some people to have breathing problems and others to have to leave their homes. Local MP Olivia Blake was vocal in her objections, as was Chris Packham: “This is the unspeakable face of driven grouse shooting saying ‘F**k the environment, public health, wildlife and you.’ Underpinned by the criminal persecution of raptors and a cause of poor water quality and flooding this despicable industry needs to end. End of.
This website, Raptor Persecution UK, reveals the Moorland Association’s attempt to challenge DEFRA’s new regulations on peat burning which came into force last year. Mishcon de Reya are heavy-duty lawyers – it must have cost them a fortune. The letter below is typically lawyerish and longwinded. No doubt they charge by the word. As is pointed out on the above website neither Grouse nor shooting are mentioned at all which is way beyond disingenuous. I do not know how it can be that a public document like this can have the names of the three member estates behind it alongside the Moorland Association redacted. What are they afraid of?
As the ever excellent Dr Ruth Tingay says, they are trying to gaslight us.
Mercifully the legal challenged was thrown out in January this year.
British Wildlife magazine
Red Herald Moths adorn the cover of British Wildlife magazine, Volume 37, Number 8, August 2026.
I like Brett Westwood’s story in his ‘Natural reflections’ about thinking he saw a Woodcock carrying away one of her young between her legs when he accidentally came across a Woodcock chick. There have been many such stories but the jury is out. I tend towards the gainsayers’ view that these are more likely to have been distraction displays (tail drooping, dangling legs).
There’s a celebration of limestone pavements and the wildlife which inhabits them whilst ‘Habitat management news’ is focused on invasive, highly problematic plant species such as Himalayan Balsam, Mombretia and Japanese Knotweed and the effects of hedgerow management on bats.
Jonathan Brigss writes about the freshwater jellyfish, Craspedacusta sowerbii, (‘Hidden swarms …’) first discovered in this country by, who else, William Sowerby in 1880. Originally from China it can now be found all over the world. Puzzlingly many isolated colonies are single gendered. This is one of those subjects where we need great deal more data. We saw plenty of Blue Jellyfish on our recent dolphin-watching Teignmouth boat trip incidentally.
Amy-Jane Beer celebrates a dramatic boom in Blackcap numbers this year thought to be in part due to well-stocked garden feeders. Overwintering individuals are evolving longer, narrower beaks as with other songbirds. She has not heard a Song Thrush this year though and she says that Blackbirds are not doing well. Nevertheless there are I think three recent fledglings in the garden here now. They are rather worryingly fearless. I couldn’t be more pleased with the recently purchased Jacobi Jayne® flo™ Classic Green Large Easy-clean Bird Feeder by the way. Unlike so many others it really does come apart easily for cleaning.
Adrian Spalding examines the vexed issue of the concept of ‘nativeness’ in this case of insects in the UK, specifically Lepidoptera. Everything has been non-native at some point, including Homo Sapiens. or Homo so-called Sapiens as Mark Avery puts it in this issue.
Conservation news includes the story that a team of volunteers who removed 200 bags of rubbish over ten days from a section of the River Roding after years of inaction by the Environment Agency are being prosecuted by the Environment Agency for illegal intervention without a permit. Utter madness.
Greenpeace has decided on a second mission to drop boulders inside certain Marine Protected Areas – the government is still dithering on its commitment to ban bottom-trawling in offshore UK MPAs.
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