This week, Nimby Watch is… everywhere. Or at least, it’s in ‘nature, parks and green spaces’ across the country.
Right then, where are we going this time? Well, for once, it’s not so much about where we’re going as where the Nimbys are headed.
That sounds ominous. It is! A coalition called Vote For Nature is organising a ‘National Day of Action’ this Saturday April 18. They say they have ‘150+ communities taking action’ with ‘700+ local groups in the UK’.
A National Day of Action, you say? But I thought Nimbyism was all about inaction. Well, it’s a day of action to oppose anyone building anything, of course. Their argument is fairly clear on that front. Their call to action opens with: ‘Across the country, nature, parks and green spaces are being opened up to developers. And it’s all so unnecessary.’
It’s unnecessary to build? Are they suggesting that millennials and Gen Z should go feral and live in the forests? Because…looking at the headlines lately, I can sort of see the appeal. No, no, they’re insisting that the Government’s housing targets are actually easy to hit without building on the green belt.
‘The Government’s housing target can be met twice over without touching any green spaces, by building on brownfield sites, renovating empty and dilapidated homes and repurposing office space no longer needed because of home working.’
Well…that all sounds pretty reasonable. Well, if it’s that easy, why hasn’t the Government met its housing targets once in the last several decades? Office blocks tend to be large buildings with huge floorplates – meaning that most of the homes would be windowless, which is against UK building regs (and would make for horrible homes). The campaigners are against ‘deregulation’ which would allow that.
Also, Nimby Watch is full of examples of what happens whenever someone actually tries to build on brownfield sites. If it’s a former industrial site, the cost of decontaminating it is prohibitive, meaning developers can’t build affordable housing on the site, meaning campaigners get it rejected. If it’s a pub, people campaign to ‘save’ it. If the building has any kind of historical link, people try to get it listed to stop building. We’ve failed to build enough homes for decades. Brownfield isn’t working.
You make some good points there. But the coalition is called ‘Vote for Nature’ and I don’t really want to be against nature. Yes, it’s a good name, isn’t it? The coalition argues that the UK is ‘already considered to be one of the most nature depleted countries on the planet’, and so its day of action will involve human chains linking arms across threatened green belt land, tractor rallies ‘showing support for farming land’ and action ‘from village greens to city parks’.
You seem to be quoting a Nimby group heavily. You usually only do that to make a point. So…where’s your gotcha here? I have several! The first is that farmland, village greens and city parks have nothing to do with nature. They are all manmade spaces just as surely as a building is. Farming is often about covering large swathes of land with a monoculture (though we have rules about hedges and boundaries, etc) – which is necessary to grow enough crops, but has little to do with biodiversity and nothing to do with nature.
In reality, ‘nature’ is a conveniently ambiguous term that means different things to different people. For many people, it’s just ‘what do I like to look at out of my window’ or ‘where can I walk my dog’. It serves as a nice catch-all for a bunch of often contradictory goals, and helps make a bunch of competing interests look like a coalition.
But the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. That sounds serious. It does, doesn’t it? But ‘nature-depleted’ doesn’t have a formal definition. It’s a term taken from the Natural History Museum’s Biodiversity Intactness Index, and it’s largely unknown outside the UK. The term is vague, and doesn’t particularly mean much: replacing low quality farmland with a new housing development that included a new park with wetland and wildflower areas would increase biodiversity, not reduce it. But… should that count?
The UK has been occupied by humans for millennia. We don’t really know what it would look like in a state of nature – other than some mix of woodland, scrub, wetland and even some temperate rainforest. But parks and rolling fields would have nothing to do with it.
Okay, fine, most of the countryside isn’t natural. But why shouldn’t we worry about more building if we worry about this stuff? Well: only about 2% of the UK is covered by buildings. The same percentage of England is covered by golf courses. More than two-thirds of UK land is used for farming. None of that is ‘natural’. So… why the relentless focus on building and development?
The honest answer is the obvious one: this isn’t a coalition for nature. It’s a coalition of Nimbys, strategically rebranding itself. It should be treated as such.
Below is a speech incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham could give – one that would unite the country around a shared vision of prosperity. Prosperity for All My fellow citizens, Today, as I stand before you as your Prime Minister, I want to cut through the political noise and give you the unvarnished truth about […]
In Gordium, the capital of Phrygia, stood an oxcart, its yoke connected to the pole by a knot of cornel bark so intricate that no one could find where it began or ended. An oracle promised that whoever undid it would rule all Asia. For generations, clever men picked at it, theorised, and organised what […]
For a nation of Nimbys, Britain – or at least London – is remarkably fond of its skyscrapers. We love them so much we give them cutesy diminutives like ‘The Gherkin’, ‘The Cheesegrater’ and the ‘Walkie Talkie’. We boast about vistas from which you can see them, marketing properties for their ‘stunning view of The […]
