Vandalising nature – with artificial grass

A WEEK seldom passes without new examples of how we, the human race, switch into overdrive in our quest to poison the very world we inhabit.

Globally, we continue to hone our environmental vandalism skills to perfection.

Perhaps human nature is such that, whatever the crisis of the day might be – war, famine, economic instability, terrorism, social injustice or climate change – we see the problems as just too big to sort out.

Or could it be a case of “I can’t do anything about these matters, so I don’t think about them?”

In a sense it’s like looking at the UK national debt. A sum so enormous (over two trillion pounds and rising fast) that it is practically meaningless.

Any aspirations to reduce it, are, in truth, futile. In a parallel with climate change, the national debt is seldom referred to by those responsible for it.

Maybe we are conditioned to do nothing about the big issues of our age?

In fairness, when family and individual priorities are in the “survive until payday” mode and with an increasingly dysfunctional and muddled political class making everything just that much trickier for everyone, fretting about vanishing coral reefs and carbon sinks never leaves the back-burner.

So, who is going to get to grips with our contributions towards climate change?

In January 2018, the Government presented its 25-Year Environmental Plan, “A Green Future”, setting out fashionable and admirable ideas about cleaner air, cleaner water, thriving plants and wildlife, reducing waste and mitigating and adapting to climate change.

A mere 151 pages, this was updated last October with an acknowledgement that progress was a bit slow.

A classic understatement, but a fair admission for a society that has produced over ten billion tonnes of plastic since the 1960s.

There is a view that environmental protection with meaningful legislation infringes upon the rights and liberties of individuals and as such the whole issue becomes prickly and unattractive. This view isn’t confined to any single sector of society or demographic.

An example of this is the massive increase in the sales of artificial grass.

Yes, plastic grass is becoming the ‘thing’ in the UK, contributing to the six billion dollar global demand for the stuff.

The environmental consequences are significant.

Apart from the obvious, such as depriving your patch of its ability to soak up moisture and provide insects and wildlife with a home, the process of installing this trendy eco-brute usually requires the removal of a few tonnes of soil, releasing the carbon stored within it into the atmosphere.

We then need a sand ‘underlay’ for the green carpet that is taken from the seabed around the UK, curtesy of machines that can dredge 2,000 tonnes every hour, destroying everything it their wake.

We could risk the threat of widespread mobocracy perhaps and make plastic ‘lawns’ illegal?

David Briggs Kingston on Soar