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Sunday November 7, 2004
The Observer (London)
Deep below the grassy banks of the River Don, canaries would warn of impending catastrophe. Now that the mineshafts are empty and the birds have gone it can seem the entire kingdom of nature is alerting us to imminent catastrophe. Amid this corner of South Yorkshire, slag heaps and scraps of woodland struggle for space with sprawling rubbish tips alongside the brackish ebb of one of the most polluted waterways in Britain.
A few miles down the Don, close to the centre of England, marks the point where Britain's green dream died. Here, opposite the village of Conisborough, lies the world's first environmental theme park. The Earth Centre was meant to inspire us to a cleaner lifestyle. Almost £60m of public money was lavished on the idea that the British public would embrace sustainable development, a way of living that would guarantee future generations do not inherit a broken planet. Eventually, however, the ideology behind Britain's first landmark millennium attraction became unsustainable. The truth is we never really cared.
Maybe the Earth Centre was ahead of its time, too esoteric for a society used to the here-and-now. Yet those whose life is devoted to researching the fate of our polluted, populous planet felt its message arrived, if anything, too late. During the five years since the centre wooed us with its imperative for change, the planet's health has steadily deteriorated. Man has embarked on the greatest extinction of species since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago; the great forests are dying; the deepest oceans are haemorrhaging life at a rate almost unimaginable a decade ago; while the highest peaks have shed their shawl of snow for the first time since the last Ice Age. And every day man-made poisons leach into the ground, our water and bodies. No one knows where we are heading. All that seems certain is that the face of our island, disfigured beyond recognition in a few centuries, will change at a rate faster than history can predict.
The portents are ominous. Less than two per cent of the UK remains cloaked in ancient forests - 15 times less land than that coated beneath concrete. We have become one of the least-wild countries in Europe, but few seem to mind. Perhaps the concept of climate change and evaporating ice shelves will always remain too abstract for most Britons to comprehend. By contrast, the Dutch and Germans travelled hundreds of miles in their droves to the Earth Centre, until the attraction closed down. Unlike many who live close by, they never doubted ministers who once hailed the project every bit as significant as the Millennium Dome.
Brutalised by the complexities of balancing economic competitiveness and the needs of nature, South Yorkshire remains among the most polluted patches of Britain. Long after the Industrial Revolution, two-thirds of all cancer-causing chemicals spewed into our skies are being belched from factories found in the most deprived 10 per cent of communities.
It has fallen to Eton-educated Jonathon Porritt to persuade us of the virtues of a sustainable lifestyle. Porritt is the man picked by Tony Blair to succeed where the Earth Centre failed, finished off, ironically, by the rainfall last August, Yorkshire's wettest on record. From his Gloucestershire headquarters, the chairman of the government's Sustainable Development Commission is phlegmatic about the task. 'It is not an easy message to get across, but essential. We need to live in a less damaging way, but raising awareness can be a slow, painful process.'
Tony Upton spends most Sunday mornings scrubbing his Peugeot 406. It is more out of pride than necessity: the gleaming metallic-green paintwork parked on the driveway of Doncaster's Stonecross Gardens - four miles from the Earth Centre - could only belong to a new vehicle. It is almost the same model as the old family car, last seen by the nation bobbing down the ripped-out heart of the Cornish village of Boscastle. Viewers missed the 59-year-old yanking his son from the family car moments before it was dragged face-down towards the Atlantic. They similarly missed the hours of ferocious rain that engorged Cornwall's rivers to an impossible fatness. Until then Upton thought he had seen flooding. After all, the River Don, like most these days, is more prone to bursting its banks. The millions who gawped at the images of 'Dinky' cars tossed downstream through a quaint English tourist town knew something terrible had gone wrong.
Yet the government's advisers shared only a muted sense of awe: they had been waiting for something like Boscastle for some time. Mention climate change to John Schellnhuber and his features, browned from a never-ending global tour witnessing the latest twist of nature, crease with anxiety. He is research director of the Tyndall Centre, where Britain's most eminent scientists chart the latest erratic meteorological episode. 'This is only the start; we need to raise the reality that we are heading into danger. Things could get grim for us all,' says the 54-year-old physicist.
Precisely a month after Boscastle, the Earth Centre, which had been preaching the threat of climate change to its underwhelmed public, closed down. Just when the nation demanded an explanation to the extraordinary events of 16 August, its message had been vanquished. Less than 48 hours after the Doncaster centre bolted its doors, Tony Blair received a final briefing from his chief scientific advisers. For a prime minister dogged by the need to find weapons of mass destruction, one had landed on his doorstep. The following day he announced a new industrial revolution, founded on sustainability. But Blair was not telling the whole story. If he had done so, Chancellor Gordon Brown's prudent book-keeping for a new economy might have been destined for a recyclable paper bin before he even began. Calculations by Schellnhuber suggest climate change could 'bankrupt Britain'.
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