Environmental apathy rules

Aquiet Saturday afternoon at the beginning of summer.

The room bright and sunny, blackbird song, sparrow chatter and wood pigeon croon adrift on the warm air and edging in through the open French windows; a clamour of swifts high and faint overhead, curtains stir in the breeze.

I was a bit under the weather for a few days but now I felt better and it was as if the day was rising to the occasion.

I had been reading the papers and now I was thinking about climate change (climate chaos is a better word for what is going on in the world), which I suppose is enough to make any self-respecting nature writer feel under the weather, although that had not been the reason this time.

I was thinking in particular about how the general election campaign had treated the environment, as if it didn’t exist, not a single profound thought about our relationship with nature or our behaviour towards the planet.

I know, expecting profound thought in an election campaign is more farfetched than expecting Neil McCann to bring home the treble in his first season at Dens Park but I am optimistic chiel, even in the face of crushing odds.

Meanwhile, out in the garden, the sun went behind a cloud, the wind picked up…

I was thinking how Westminster governments consider the post of environment secretary to inhabit the same sub-stratum of political geology as secretary of state for Northern Ireland/Wales/Scotland – which is to say, either an opportunity for a young MP to cut their ministerial baby teeth, or to deposit out of harm’s way a no-hoper who has either seen better days or never will, or the only MP left standing who has the right accent.

In the case of the environment secretary, Conservative governments prefer him/her to own a grouse moor or champion fox hunting, preferably both.

There has not been a good one of any party since Labour’s Michael Meacher (1997-2003) and he has been dead for two years. The Scottish Government does have a good one now in Roseanna Cunningham but her two predecessors were less than persuasive.

I noticed that it had gone ominously dark outside and that the birds had gone silent. Given that nature abhors a vacuum, it now filled this one – with a sudden thunderstorm. Aha, I thought as I closed the French windows in some haste, the President Trump moment has just arrived.

The fact is that without his jawdropper of a speech on the White House lawn extricating the USA from the Paris Accord, the environment would not have made it on to the nation’s front pages at all.

He was so preposterous, so consumed with his Pittsburgh-notParis doctrine (which not even environmentally-savvy Pittsburgh subscribes to), so ignorant of the plight of planet Earth, that he gatecrashed Britain’s election coverage with all the colossal tonnage of his ego.

Meanwhile, there was a flash of lightning and an immediate burst of thunder right overhead that made me spill my coffee. At once, the internet connection vanished. Some metaphors are just too damned close for comfort.

But do you know what I found the most truly terrifying aspect of President Trump’s intervention? It was that when our own politicians got around to sound-biting their responses, the only outrage on display was directed at the Prime Minister, not at the president, because of her own admittedly feeble reaction.

She was “disappointed”, she said. She refused to sign the much more potent letter of protest from several EU countries because Britain makes its own responses and in striking that note she sound worryingly Trumpian.

Collectively, our general election candidates made such a poor fist of the episode and its colossal implications that it was as if the Prime Minister’s “disappointed” was a greater threat to civilisation than climate change itself.

It’s all much too late now for the election is upon us. UK politics has passed over the environment again. It’s expendable, a thing of no consequence. Or to put it another way, there are no votes in it.

We will spend an unknown number of billions of pounds replacing Trident but we will spend next to nothing on the environment. We will divorce ourselves from EU pro-environment legislation in pursuit of Brexit, which itself is just possibly the worst idea Britain has ever had.

Yet the only disaster from which our planet and everything that lives on it and in its oceans will not recover, is when the environment stops working.

Hey look, it got sunny again out there! I opened the French windows again and a blast of animated air danced around the room.

Was it my imagination, or was that air much warmer than it was before?

UK politics has passed over the environment again. It’s of no consequence

Picture: Getty Images. The late Michael Meacher who, for Jim, was the last good UK environment secretary.

Jim Crumley Choice Words