Presumably, some time in the eighteenth century, in a pit somewhere, the dumbest man in Cwm Rhondda seriously said something like “why does the foreman care so much about bloody canaries? Why are we having to cut a shift short and lose pay just for the sake of his pet?”. And this became a joke repeated down the mines until the invention of the Davy Lamp.
But here we are today, and people still seem not to understand that when development is stalled by protected habitats for bats, newts and snails, it’s not really the snails we’re protecting.
There are three kinds of species that are mentioned in the various habitat protection legislation. Some things are protected simply because they’re endangered themselves[1]. Some are “keystone species”, which are protected because they’re known to occupy an important place in the system and if they go, a lot of cascading damage will ensure.
But there are also a bunch of little critters (often invertebrates like the fabled newts and salamanders) which need to be monitored as part of the job of assessing the health of a particular habitat. And, of course, if you monitor something at regular intervals, and take action when it appears to be endangered, then that looks a lot like protection for the actual thing; just like it looked to Dewi Twp in 1788 like the foreman was looking after his canary.
Water regulation is a bit of a wicked problem in this regard, because the nature of groundwater is that when you draw some of it out in one place, the effects might show up somewhere else. In the particular site in Horsham which our Chancellor was talking about, developments have been stalled for a while in a big area, because in the course of monitoring a couple of protected sites (including one of the three habitats of the whirlpool snails), Natural England noticed that things were drying out at a faster rate than expected.
This is, actually a big problem. The whole of south east England has inadequate reservoirs (due to the kind of problems I wrote about in The Problem Factory), and consequently makes too much use of the underground aquifer. It’s been known for ages that this was unsustainable.
When you start seeing the predicted problems actually happening, unfortunately that really is a “down tools lads” moment for housing development, until you can do a bunch of expensive survey work and find out exactly what’s happening to the aquifer. Quite apart from anything, you don’t necessarily want to be building tens of thousands of houses in a location where it turns out that supplying them with water is going to be vastly more expensive than you had planned for.
I think there’s a real risk of the phenomenon “IBGYBG” happening here. In the run-up to the financial crisis of the 2000s, a lot of bad deals went out the door because the people selling them figured that “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone”; the consequences would only become apparent after all the parties involved in structuring the deals had moved on in their careers or retired.
The nature of early warning systems is that if they’re functioning, they stop activity when it isn’t causing any harm. And so at the point where the red light flashes, it looks like bureaucracy gone mad has prevented the development of 20,000 family homes in order to protect some funny snails. The trouble is, that in fifty years’ time, when the aquifer is depleted, the houses are worthless because of subsidence, the river is a kill-zone and everything has to be put right at much greater cost, all the people who wanted to get the red tape out of the way and be builders rather than blockers will not be picking up the phone. In fact, they’ll most likely be nonplussed at the idea that anyone might point the finger for this completely unpredictable environmental act of God anywhere near them.
The purpose of this blog is “things that stick in your mind”, and the thing that’s stuck fastest in my mind is what an old friend said to me when we met up for a pint this summer. “Looking around at this world, all I can really say is that I’m glad I’m old enough and have enough money to just watch all of this happen and then die”.
[1] The specific snails in the case I linked to are also actually extremely rare themselves, poor things, but it’s clear from reading the position statement that Natural England is worried about a lot of things happening in the habitat zones affecting a lot more things than the snails.
one thing I should have said but forgot to - there was a very good comment on Bluesky to the effect that it's really bad and screwed up that the planning system for housing and infrastructure becomes the place where important problems like this get fought out. I;'d really like to see the paper this is referring to if anyone can find it. https://bsky.app/profile/msingerhobbs.bsky.social/post/3m2oe3kf7mc2z
I was just reading about John Scott Haldane, who started the canary-in-the-coal-mine thing, and he figured out a lot of lifesaving information about how the gases in the mines worked via some pretty brutal self-experimentation, as well as some involving his young son (who grew up to be the scientist JBS Haldane). Then he popularized the canary test.
It all goes to your point--when we know of a non-human indicator, why ignore it until it affects humans, by which time it may be too late?