Look to the French. When asked how the French managed to have such a good health care system Paul Krugman answered “No one knows”. The French have wildlife bridges and tunnels. My answer is the French are bloody minded enough to say “we are French, and we think this is important, and therefore we will make it so.” They insist their language is important. We have lived with them in Canada now for almost 200 years. They drive at least half the country round the bend, but they have helped to save us from ruin and have enriched us immeasurably. The British love wildlife. Decide it’s important, which I think is your point. I endorse it wholeheartedly.
We lost almost all of our little brown bats (their actual name) in the maritimes due to white nose syndrome (brought from Europe) and the result was an explosion of biting insects, and we have serious ones other than mosquitoes - think horse flies and black flies. They rebuilt Notre Dame in record time because it’s an iconic French landmark and therefore important. Think like the 🇫🇷 French. We are gradually nursing our little brown bats back to health, and as Joni Michell says “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” Loved your book. Read it twice.
I came here to provide that real-life example! No need to posit plague weevils!
For those who won't read the story:
"Frank found that in U.S. counties where bat populations have been decimated by white-nose syndrome, human infant mortality rates rose by about 8 percent. That equates to 1,334 infant deaths between 2006 and 2017 that Frank says are attributable to a loss of bats."
The causal mechanism conjectured is increased use of insecticide:
"... when bats disappear, farmers might use more insecticides on their fields. In counties with outbreaks of white-nose syndrome, farmers used 31 percent more of these toxic chemicals, on average, per the study."
One of the dysfunctions of UK governance is an over reliance of the checkpoint of 'permission to do a project' to deliver broader strategic goals. There are all sorts of ways in which one could imagine preserving a network of habitats for bats. You could explicitly build or maintain them. You could set aside specific parcels of land and monitor them.
It's part of the free lunch mentality of UK gov that instead tries to do this entirely on the back of developers / people doing projects. If you've ever sought any kind of permission to develop a rural building, you'll know how extremely carefully you have to look for bats, even when there is almost no chance that you will find any. The environment agency and other bodies are completely uninterested in most of the country most of the time. But when someone wants to do a project somewhere, they flip into demanding the most minute examination of every inch of it, and the most stringent preservation of anything that's found there.
This is paired with a total lack of interest in enforcement of common or garden environmental crime when it occurs outside of the context of development. If, by contrast, you merely go door to door killing bats wherever you find them, the EA almost certainly will never notice. It's only when you need planning permission that they get interested.
It isn't at all clear that this is an efficacious or proportionate way of achieving the aim of 'bat preservation' — actually there is good reason to think it's not. It certainly makes any kind of development very slow, expensive and annoying, as well as incentivising anyone who can get away with it to just ignore the rules. But it appears to the government to be a 'free' way of achieving these aims, so it's the one we've adopted.
It doesn't have to be 'bats vs growth' but the current way we do this clearly both anti-growth and ineffective
The peabrain told me Global Warming when I encountered this:'
" while recognising that we don’t actually know the downside risk but we know that if we get a sufficiently bad outcome then we won’t be able to get back in the game."
Agree with all of the points in abstract. It's just the particular egregiousness of this one project - it doesn't even protect the bats! The bats aren't actually endangered! (Natural England/environment bureaucracy was just slow to demote them from status.) Natural England's total budget is about £250m, the Bat Conservation Trust's is about £2m - just the size of this money, relative to what is being spent on more deserving environmental causes (with presumably just as important tail risks). Bat Tunnel is the flaws of the whole economic system. £40m for the tunnel alone, but doubled because of Buckinghamshire council's obstructionism, and then an extra (say) £40m because of post-2022 high energy prices increasing the cost of all the concrete and steel. Bats themselves should only be shouldering the first part of the costs, but they instigate the rest.
As someone who did appear in your social media feed quoting a cost per bat figure, I agree that the tunnels for humans were a far bigger cost than the tunnels for bats (as someone else in the thread pointed out, chaotic political management also far, far worse). Bats have got a raw deal.
I would describe myself as an abundance person but I agree with everything you've written here.
California’s introduction of carbon economics to the management of forests changes everything. Maximize EV Tonnes Avoided CO2 in the forests, and all that habitat shit comes along for free.
Good as rational economics is for the forests, including our people, it is particularly hard on our neighbors and partners in the urbs. Since we are Californians, we know all about the challenges of internalizing the costs (measured in Tonnes Atmospheric CO2). Which is why the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power — perhaps the smartest power organization in the world — is such a critical player in the emergence, from the forests of the Northern Sierra, of the new carbon economy.
Britain is a major player and partner in this program. Carbon-bank forestry is emerging, with Danish partners, in the Scottish Highlands. Further south, the recently announced National Forest in the West (Glouscestershire, Devon, …) is entirely consistent with the carbon economics of forests restoration. Go Brits!
I don't agree - biodiversity is a very different risk from CO2, precisely because there isn't any fungibility. (I had it seriously suggested to me that instead of a woodland, we could rewild a meadow, but bats do not live in meadows!)
Not a proper ecologist, but the model for our program is the forests as they were under the "previous management": here in the Washoe country these would be primarily the ancestors of today's Washoe Tribe of California and Nevada.
Biodiversity is part of the package. Comes along for free.
It may be helpful to think of forests people --- communities of humans working in harmony with the forests of which they are part, often tending the forests to improve its habitat values for themselves and other creatures -- as an indicator population. Kill the people, kill the forests has been the experience.
My claim is that managing the forests to maximize EPV Tonnes Avoided Carbon delivers habitat as an extra. Co-production you know. Including habitat for the descendants of the previous management, and those who walk with them.
Si se puede!
Those crazy Californians. We hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one.
Doesn't change the fact that forests restoration is a carbon fixing activity, and it makes good habitat for people. Tends to drive up wages in the cities and land-rents in the country, unless the peasantry won't work the dirt at dirt wages any more.
Somewhere in there I think I discussed Danish financed forests restoration in the Scottish Highlands, which I thought that was still under the Westminster crown. Maybe it is part of Greenland now. Also a new Labour-funded programme in what I had heard was actiually "England," you know, east of Bristol.
Suppose I am the Forests Banker. I exercise the financial power of the forests carbon on behalf of its owners, to maximize the EV TAC of the owners’ holdings, consistent with the owners’ interests and values.
In my case I would report to my land tribe, the Washoe Tribe of California and Nevada, which holds the carbon, present and future, of the pre-Conquest Washoe region.
But what, o what, does this have to do with me? cries Little England.
The Washoe Forests cover the two major railroad crossings of the Sierra Nevada, complete with these holes in the ground that bats like.
The Washoe People, and those who say “we” with them, understand the bats as our neighbors and partners. Perhaps we tolerate the snow mosquitoes of spring a little better because we love watching them feed our friends the bats so much.
I have a thing about bats.
So when the Washoe direct their Bankers in our investments in the electrification of the Union Pacific’s Donner and Beckwourth passes, it will be interested in the techniques used elsewhere. Even in little old England. Also Scotland, but our tales tell us that the English considered our ancestors, with perscipacity unusual for that lineage, unwashed and scary barbarians. Boo.
I’m just doing my deal as a White Comanche, sneaking in amongst you lot. Industrial Espionage. Just think of me as somebody you accidentally included in your SIgnal chat.
Hadrian built his wall because the population to the North was bat-shit crazy.
There is a serious proposition hidden in there, like a bat tucked in between the rafter and the skip sheeting.
The Anschultz Foundation, a primary owner of the Union Pacific Railroad, funds things like saving bats from train splats in its tunnels. Their land hosts---the Washoe Tribe of California and Nevada--really really likes this kind of work.
If Little England is still the dreary and forlorn place I remember, I guess the bats share in your pain, So therefore do we, fellows in the great family of the Bat Shit Crazy. We might, if we ask the Mighty Anschutz nicely, be able to forage around in his couch for a few Shillings (you are still on the LSD currency perhaps)? Or, better yet, a grant of tradable TACS, which the Washoe control.
It is true that we have crooked roads here, so cars aren't so much the problem for our dear friends and neighbors the bats.
I am just a poor country economist so I know neither which of our species of bat is the target,, nor what the exotic pathogen is involving yellow noses.
Bats gorging on mosquitoes at dusk on , for example, Upper Salmon Lake, flitting in the failing light, is one of our joys.
I have never seen one of our flying squirrels, which is a bat with a fancy coat, but they would be, if questioned appropriately, sceptically in favour of the application of carbon economics to their home forests, which we are trying to learn to share with them.
We ruthlessly appropriate the forests management technology of the ancestors. And update those technologies as appropriate.
Long Live the Forests of the Washoe! Glory to the Washoe! Peace to All who Walk with the Washoe!
Many of us have spent much quality time, often from birth, in old wooden houses with attics that, like belfries, make good bat habitat.
Compleat with rich deposits of bat guano.
Perhaps one of the notorious characteristics of those of us who Holler Holler—-a tendency to speak in an even more outdoor a voice than the normal loud Holler, the less the inefficient listener seems to understand the very simple propositions that are being hollered in his direction—-is the result of brain damage from frequent exposure to bat vectored coronaviri
Bat shit crazy. Explains a lot.
But then again I can’t give blood in the US because of exposure in one of those hellholes Over There to:
There is too much binary thinking with exclusive OR mindsets. "You can do this OR that, but not both". Every time a project is proposed, there is always the argument that the funds should go to something else. That applies if funds are scarce, but it is surprising how often they are not for favored projects. Germany has just proven that by changing the budget rules for military spending. [Cannot Rachel Reeves do something similar?]
Idk too much about HST in the UK (I gather Northern Rail was more important), but the equivalent in California is a vanity project. It would make much more sense to spend the money on increasing the service frequency of the existing trains and track improvements needed to accommodate the increased traffic. It may have made more sense to make quieter, electric commuter aircraft the means to travel to and from cities within their current range. Where I live in California, it is hard to get to a major airport, but we do have a small commercial airport on the edge of town. Maybe have that serve as a feeder to international airports as part of the upgrade? Meanwhile, CA's HST is now being sold as a great opportunity for urban renewal, with glossy images of combined rail station/retail mall/entertainment structures that would, if successful. obsolete the existing mall and still not connect with the other existing passenger rail line, with tracks going from nowhere to nowhere. Who is going to use this pointless service?
"Abundance" should be more carefully thought through. Abundance of what? Does it serve to make life better, or is it about making profits by making shiny things that are at best marginal improvements, or even worse. Is the environmental degradation of increased unrecyclable waste worth the "abundance"? Should we destroy forests and ecosystems to create more farmland? Is infinite growth impossible, and if so, when and how do we call a halt to it?
What a rallying cry! " I want an abundance of abundance". Completely agree. If you ask, "how might we have both", it opens up some very interesting ideas. What level of productivity would it take, what percent of people who aren't in work would have to be, what new technologies might we need?
Stick the bats in a zoo and be done with it! There’s plenty of national parks and woodlands, why is Britain protecting some random stretch of land? There needs to be land for humans and land for not humans, and the land for humans need to be used for human purposes, not cynically blocked out of “environmental“ purposes - that’s why we have parks.
This land is being "used for human purposes" unless British bats have a penchant for rail travel. Raising the cost of a single kilometer (out of hundreds) by ~30% in a one-off expense that will protect a habitat for centuries is maybe the best value idea I've ever heard coming out of an infrastructure study.
Why not just record their genomes and, maybe, keep some frozen embryos?
Bats do all sorts of important stuff like pollenating and controlling insects. They are also very good at controlling viruses, so there's stuff we can learn from them. Bats are even more important because they're just a more visible part of complex system that we know relatively little about. We do know that creating small habitat pockets whether parks or zoo enclosures places them at higher risk of population collapse by limiting migration and gene flow. People argue against regulating business because it is too complex for government comprehension, but the same argument could be made for blindly trying to regulate nature.
One of my big problems with the modern abundance agenda is that it is based on an antique model. Trash nature to provide goods and services, as if nature itself had no value and there is no way to provide goods and services without destroying the natural world. To compensate, build some zoos and parks and maybe an embryo bank or genetic database. Make the natural world a luxury good. Why do we even need publicly accessible zoos and parks? Make them luxury goods, too. Liquid nitrogen and cloud storage are government waste. It's high time our politicians stopped wasting our money. That's not exactly abundance.
Nature has no value, except what we make of it. People who aren't from the countryside romanticize it wayy too much. To get anything done, you have to rip it from nature. I can't stand people who think that some arbitrary woodlands or some creature is more important than building houses or developing industries. People over plants!
Of course tho, keep parks if you want to, but leave the rest of the land alone to be developed as people please. They'd probably do a better job of it.
A lot depends on whether you don't mind having to provide your own oxygen, manage your own water recycling, don't care about the outside temperature, are willing to grow your food in greenhouses and so on. Maybe we can turn the earth into a hostile living environment which we can then conquer using space station technology, but it isn't clear that this is an abundant solution.
This may or may not be a sensible view (imo not) but it's staggering how little it engages with the content of the post. If you think "stick bats in zoos" is the correct approach wouldn't it have been more productive to outline why you think the post is wrong?
Look to the French. When asked how the French managed to have such a good health care system Paul Krugman answered “No one knows”. The French have wildlife bridges and tunnels. My answer is the French are bloody minded enough to say “we are French, and we think this is important, and therefore we will make it so.” They insist their language is important. We have lived with them in Canada now for almost 200 years. They drive at least half the country round the bend, but they have helped to save us from ruin and have enriched us immeasurably. The British love wildlife. Decide it’s important, which I think is your point. I endorse it wholeheartedly.
We lost almost all of our little brown bats (their actual name) in the maritimes due to white nose syndrome (brought from Europe) and the result was an explosion of biting insects, and we have serious ones other than mosquitoes - think horse flies and black flies. They rebuilt Notre Dame in record time because it’s an iconic French landmark and therefore important. Think like the 🇫🇷 French. We are gradually nursing our little brown bats back to health, and as Joni Michell says “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” Loved your book. Read it twice.
Well written and, also, bats are valuable: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/collapse-bat-populations-increased-infant-mortality-rate-study-finds
I came here to provide that real-life example! No need to posit plague weevils!
For those who won't read the story:
"Frank found that in U.S. counties where bat populations have been decimated by white-nose syndrome, human infant mortality rates rose by about 8 percent. That equates to 1,334 infant deaths between 2006 and 2017 that Frank says are attributable to a loss of bats."
The causal mechanism conjectured is increased use of insecticide:
"... when bats disappear, farmers might use more insecticides on their fields. In counties with outbreaks of white-nose syndrome, farmers used 31 percent more of these toxic chemicals, on average, per the study."
One of the dysfunctions of UK governance is an over reliance of the checkpoint of 'permission to do a project' to deliver broader strategic goals. There are all sorts of ways in which one could imagine preserving a network of habitats for bats. You could explicitly build or maintain them. You could set aside specific parcels of land and monitor them.
It's part of the free lunch mentality of UK gov that instead tries to do this entirely on the back of developers / people doing projects. If you've ever sought any kind of permission to develop a rural building, you'll know how extremely carefully you have to look for bats, even when there is almost no chance that you will find any. The environment agency and other bodies are completely uninterested in most of the country most of the time. But when someone wants to do a project somewhere, they flip into demanding the most minute examination of every inch of it, and the most stringent preservation of anything that's found there.
This is paired with a total lack of interest in enforcement of common or garden environmental crime when it occurs outside of the context of development. If, by contrast, you merely go door to door killing bats wherever you find them, the EA almost certainly will never notice. It's only when you need planning permission that they get interested.
It isn't at all clear that this is an efficacious or proportionate way of achieving the aim of 'bat preservation' — actually there is good reason to think it's not. It certainly makes any kind of development very slow, expensive and annoying, as well as incentivising anyone who can get away with it to just ignore the rules. But it appears to the government to be a 'free' way of achieving these aims, so it's the one we've adopted.
It doesn't have to be 'bats vs growth' but the current way we do this clearly both anti-growth and ineffective
The peabrain told me Global Warming when I encountered this:'
" while recognising that we don’t actually know the downside risk but we know that if we get a sufficiently bad outcome then we won’t be able to get back in the game."
Agree with all of the points in abstract. It's just the particular egregiousness of this one project - it doesn't even protect the bats! The bats aren't actually endangered! (Natural England/environment bureaucracy was just slow to demote them from status.) Natural England's total budget is about £250m, the Bat Conservation Trust's is about £2m - just the size of this money, relative to what is being spent on more deserving environmental causes (with presumably just as important tail risks). Bat Tunnel is the flaws of the whole economic system. £40m for the tunnel alone, but doubled because of Buckinghamshire council's obstructionism, and then an extra (say) £40m because of post-2022 high energy prices increasing the cost of all the concrete and steel. Bats themselves should only be shouldering the first part of the costs, but they instigate the rest.
I gather the point of the tunnel is to keep the moving trains from hitting the bats as they fly around.
But I wouldn't be surprised if, after all the effort, the bats end up roosting in the tunnel, hanging from the ceiling.
...
The use of the word "abundance" reminds me of prosperity gospel stuff so ick.
Fortunately, there is an abundance of Post-It Notes.
As someone who did appear in your social media feed quoting a cost per bat figure, I agree that the tunnels for humans were a far bigger cost than the tunnels for bats (as someone else in the thread pointed out, chaotic political management also far, far worse). Bats have got a raw deal.
I would describe myself as an abundance person but I agree with everything you've written here.
This entire conversation is boring and out-dated.
California’s introduction of carbon economics to the management of forests changes everything. Maximize EV Tonnes Avoided CO2 in the forests, and all that habitat shit comes along for free.
Good as rational economics is for the forests, including our people, it is particularly hard on our neighbors and partners in the urbs. Since we are Californians, we know all about the challenges of internalizing the costs (measured in Tonnes Atmospheric CO2). Which is why the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power — perhaps the smartest power organization in the world — is such a critical player in the emergence, from the forests of the Northern Sierra, of the new carbon economy.
Britain is a major player and partner in this program. Carbon-bank forestry is emerging, with Danish partners, in the Scottish Highlands. Further south, the recently announced National Forest in the West (Glouscestershire, Devon, …) is entirely consistent with the carbon economics of forests restoration. Go Brits!
I don't agree - biodiversity is a very different risk from CO2, precisely because there isn't any fungibility. (I had it seriously suggested to me that instead of a woodland, we could rewild a meadow, but bats do not live in meadows!)
Not a proper ecologist, but the model for our program is the forests as they were under the "previous management": here in the Washoe country these would be primarily the ancestors of today's Washoe Tribe of California and Nevada.
Biodiversity is part of the package. Comes along for free.
It may be helpful to think of forests people --- communities of humans working in harmony with the forests of which they are part, often tending the forests to improve its habitat values for themselves and other creatures -- as an indicator population. Kill the people, kill the forests has been the experience.
My claim is that managing the forests to maximize EPV Tonnes Avoided Carbon delivers habitat as an extra. Co-production you know. Including habitat for the descendants of the previous management, and those who walk with them.
Si se puede!
Those crazy Californians. We hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one.
The maths on this really aren't that hard.
Okay, but what you’re forgetting is that we’re discussing the UK here.
The “previous management” was The Goddamn English and their forestry management strategy was “I don’t loike it and I fink we should cu’ I’ down”.
Doesn't change the fact that forests restoration is a carbon fixing activity, and it makes good habitat for people. Tends to drive up wages in the cities and land-rents in the country, unless the peasantry won't work the dirt at dirt wages any more.
Somewhere in there I think I discussed Danish financed forests restoration in the Scottish Highlands, which I thought that was still under the Westminster crown. Maybe it is part of Greenland now. Also a new Labour-funded programme in what I had heard was actiually "England," you know, east of Bristol.
This is about a specific local population of 300 endangered bats.
Generalized carbon policy isn't going to help them avoid getting splatted on the train cars.
True nuff.
Suppose I am the Forests Banker. I exercise the financial power of the forests carbon on behalf of its owners, to maximize the EV TAC of the owners’ holdings, consistent with the owners’ interests and values.
In my case I would report to my land tribe, the Washoe Tribe of California and Nevada, which holds the carbon, present and future, of the pre-Conquest Washoe region.
But what, o what, does this have to do with me? cries Little England.
The Washoe Forests cover the two major railroad crossings of the Sierra Nevada, complete with these holes in the ground that bats like.
The Washoe People, and those who say “we” with them, understand the bats as our neighbors and partners. Perhaps we tolerate the snow mosquitoes of spring a little better because we love watching them feed our friends the bats so much.
I have a thing about bats.
So when the Washoe direct their Bankers in our investments in the electrification of the Union Pacific’s Donner and Beckwourth passes, it will be interested in the techniques used elsewhere. Even in little old England. Also Scotland, but our tales tell us that the English considered our ancestors, with perscipacity unusual for that lineage, unwashed and scary barbarians. Boo.
I’m just doing my deal as a White Comanche, sneaking in amongst you lot. Industrial Espionage. Just think of me as somebody you accidentally included in your SIgnal chat.
Hadrian built his wall because the population to the North was bat-shit crazy.
There is a serious proposition hidden in there, like a bat tucked in between the rafter and the skip sheeting.
The Anschultz Foundation, a primary owner of the Union Pacific Railroad, funds things like saving bats from train splats in its tunnels. Their land hosts---the Washoe Tribe of California and Nevada--really really likes this kind of work.
If Little England is still the dreary and forlorn place I remember, I guess the bats share in your pain, So therefore do we, fellows in the great family of the Bat Shit Crazy. We might, if we ask the Mighty Anschutz nicely, be able to forage around in his couch for a few Shillings (you are still on the LSD currency perhaps)? Or, better yet, a grant of tradable TACS, which the Washoe control.
Well, talley-ho! Good luck with your bats.
It is true that we have crooked roads here, so cars aren't so much the problem for our dear friends and neighbors the bats.
I am just a poor country economist so I know neither which of our species of bat is the target,, nor what the exotic pathogen is involving yellow noses.
Bats gorging on mosquitoes at dusk on , for example, Upper Salmon Lake, flitting in the failing light, is one of our joys.
I have never seen one of our flying squirrels, which is a bat with a fancy coat, but they would be, if questioned appropriately, sceptically in favour of the application of carbon economics to their home forests, which we are trying to learn to share with them.
We ruthlessly appropriate the forests management technology of the ancestors. And update those technologies as appropriate.
Long Live the Forests of the Washoe! Glory to the Washoe! Peace to All who Walk with the Washoe!
And then there is the bat-shit crazy hypothesis.
Many of us have spent much quality time, often from birth, in old wooden houses with attics that, like belfries, make good bat habitat.
Compleat with rich deposits of bat guano.
Perhaps one of the notorious characteristics of those of us who Holler Holler—-a tendency to speak in an even more outdoor a voice than the normal loud Holler, the less the inefficient listener seems to understand the very simple propositions that are being hollered in his direction—-is the result of brain damage from frequent exposure to bat vectored coronaviri
Bat shit crazy. Explains a lot.
But then again I can’t give blood in the US because of exposure in one of those hellholes Over There to:
Bovine Encephalitis. Mad Cow Disease.
Moo to you too.
There is too much binary thinking with exclusive OR mindsets. "You can do this OR that, but not both". Every time a project is proposed, there is always the argument that the funds should go to something else. That applies if funds are scarce, but it is surprising how often they are not for favored projects. Germany has just proven that by changing the budget rules for military spending. [Cannot Rachel Reeves do something similar?]
Idk too much about HST in the UK (I gather Northern Rail was more important), but the equivalent in California is a vanity project. It would make much more sense to spend the money on increasing the service frequency of the existing trains and track improvements needed to accommodate the increased traffic. It may have made more sense to make quieter, electric commuter aircraft the means to travel to and from cities within their current range. Where I live in California, it is hard to get to a major airport, but we do have a small commercial airport on the edge of town. Maybe have that serve as a feeder to international airports as part of the upgrade? Meanwhile, CA's HST is now being sold as a great opportunity for urban renewal, with glossy images of combined rail station/retail mall/entertainment structures that would, if successful. obsolete the existing mall and still not connect with the other existing passenger rail line, with tracks going from nowhere to nowhere. Who is going to use this pointless service?
"Abundance" should be more carefully thought through. Abundance of what? Does it serve to make life better, or is it about making profits by making shiny things that are at best marginal improvements, or even worse. Is the environmental degradation of increased unrecyclable waste worth the "abundance"? Should we destroy forests and ecosystems to create more farmland? Is infinite growth impossible, and if so, when and how do we call a halt to it?
What a rallying cry! " I want an abundance of abundance". Completely agree. If you ask, "how might we have both", it opens up some very interesting ideas. What level of productivity would it take, what percent of people who aren't in work would have to be, what new technologies might we need?
Stick the bats in a zoo and be done with it! There’s plenty of national parks and woodlands, why is Britain protecting some random stretch of land? There needs to be land for humans and land for not humans, and the land for humans need to be used for human purposes, not cynically blocked out of “environmental“ purposes - that’s why we have parks.
This land is being "used for human purposes" unless British bats have a penchant for rail travel. Raising the cost of a single kilometer (out of hundreds) by ~30% in a one-off expense that will protect a habitat for centuries is maybe the best value idea I've ever heard coming out of an infrastructure study.
Why not just record their genomes and, maybe, keep some frozen embryos?
Bats do all sorts of important stuff like pollenating and controlling insects. They are also very good at controlling viruses, so there's stuff we can learn from them. Bats are even more important because they're just a more visible part of complex system that we know relatively little about. We do know that creating small habitat pockets whether parks or zoo enclosures places them at higher risk of population collapse by limiting migration and gene flow. People argue against regulating business because it is too complex for government comprehension, but the same argument could be made for blindly trying to regulate nature.
One of my big problems with the modern abundance agenda is that it is based on an antique model. Trash nature to provide goods and services, as if nature itself had no value and there is no way to provide goods and services without destroying the natural world. To compensate, build some zoos and parks and maybe an embryo bank or genetic database. Make the natural world a luxury good. Why do we even need publicly accessible zoos and parks? Make them luxury goods, too. Liquid nitrogen and cloud storage are government waste. It's high time our politicians stopped wasting our money. That's not exactly abundance.
Nature has no value, except what we make of it. People who aren't from the countryside romanticize it wayy too much. To get anything done, you have to rip it from nature. I can't stand people who think that some arbitrary woodlands or some creature is more important than building houses or developing industries. People over plants!
Of course tho, keep parks if you want to, but leave the rest of the land alone to be developed as people please. They'd probably do a better job of it.
You're the kind of idiot who thinks trees are just an elaborate storage medium for shelving with no other role.
A lot depends on whether you don't mind having to provide your own oxygen, manage your own water recycling, don't care about the outside temperature, are willing to grow your food in greenhouses and so on. Maybe we can turn the earth into a hostile living environment which we can then conquer using space station technology, but it isn't clear that this is an abundant solution.
This may or may not be a sensible view (imo not) but it's staggering how little it engages with the content of the post. If you think "stick bats in zoos" is the correct approach wouldn't it have been more productive to outline why you think the post is wrong?
Thoughts on Mao and sparrows?