A clear car windscreen a threat to our biodiversity

SOMETHING very significant has changed in the Yorkshire countryside. Anyone who drove a car for some distance in summer during the 1960s often had to stop to clean their windscreen because of the number of insects it struck.

Make the same journey now and you won’t encounter the same problem. Not because vehicles have become more streamlined. Because the insects have disappeared.

The way we know this is because of a pretty simple experiment. Researchers drove some vintage cars through the countryside at the same pace as modern cars and found that there was no significant difference in the number of insects they hit.

That loss of such an enormous quantity of life diminishes the environment but may not be regretted by everyone in all situations. Few of us like having our blood extracted by female mosquitoes or being chased by horseflies on a walk across the country.

Losing butterflies and birds is a lot less welcome. It is impossible to remove billions of creatures from the air, the water and the soil without having consequences. The things that eat those creatures also suffer and the removal of the places where they used to live like hedgerows removes homes for other wildlife.

Almost every category of British wildlife declined badly during the 20th century and despite all the best efforts of conservation groups the picture hasn’t been much better since. Britain has the most nature depleted landscape in Europe.

Part of the reason for the wholesale destruction of wildlife has been the industrialisation of some aspects of farming. The pattern of our countryside has changed. It is now rare to see a patchwork of small arable fields separated by hedgerows where interesting plants and animals can be found. There are parts of Yorkshire where you can see one crop being grown in a field that stretches without a break for almost a mile.

When a single plant dominates a large area of landscape it is at severe risk of being attacked by creatures that want to eat it and any infection is likely to spread rapidly and wipe out the crop. The usual way of growing food on such industrial scales is to reach for the chemical sprays.

The loss of all those hedgerows and the impact of the pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and fertilisers on field margins has resulted in many arable farms having less variety of wildlife than the average domestic garden or abandoned brownfield inner city plot.

Each wave of chemicals that has been introduced has arrived with great promises about what a boon they would be only for significant problems to emerge later. DDT use continued in China much longer than in Britain and the consequence is there are large parts of China where the only way to pollinate a fruit tree is by hand because the bees have been wiped out.

When neonicotinoids came on the scene, we were told that they were a brilliantly safe product because the pesticide was inside the seed and spread throughout the plant without ever needing to be sprayed across the countryside. It turned out that these very persistent chemicals washed into hedgerow margins and accumulated in the soil and that they disorientated honeybees so badly that they couldn’t find their way back home and hives gradually died off.

The most commonly used herbicide at the moment is called glyphosate. In June 2020, Byer paid out $10.9bn in compensation to people who had used glyphosate and then developed cancer. Companies don’t pay out billions of dollars when there is no problem to worry about. The product is still widely on sale in Britain under trade names. Check what you buy carefully.

British farmers are now being encouraged to adopt more environmentally sensitive methods of growing food. Which is all very well provided it is also accompanied by measures to ensure that imported food is produced to the same high standards or heavily taxed.

It simply isn’t realistic to ask farmers to produce food responsibly and then allow them to be dominated by the monopoly power of supermarket buyers who insist on identical ‘products’ without blemishes at rock bottom prices. The government needs to step in to provide marketing boards to even out the power.

If we want to continue to use subsidies to encourage more wildlife friendly practices and want to keep food prices down we have to be more realistic about the level of subsidies which will be needed. Such policy issues are, of course, out of our personal control except via the ballot box. There is, however, one thing that many of us can do that is quick, cheap and highly effective. Stop spending money on spraying gardens with harmful chemicals.

A bit of judicious weeding is usually enough to remove any unwanted plants and a simple spray with a fine mist of water is remarkably effective in controlling most insect infestations.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.