Going Going

The Humber estuary cuts its way into the heart of England.  It is a boundary and dividing line now crossed by the elegant span of the Humber bridge (now, I find, relegated to 5^th longest in the world).  The thin link suspended above the turbid tides of the Humber was, once, the longest and I queued for ages to drive across it the first weekend it was opened.  I hadn’t intended to, but after a day’s birdwatching around the estuary in seemed rude not to make the most of a bridge tick!

I’ve just come back from a meeting with colleagues where we spotting some stories and planning our work over the next year or so.  We covered the amazing range of wildlife that depends on the Humber and the array of challenging development proposals that are coming forward.  The next year or two are going to be busy on the Humber and it’s a story we will follow on this blog.

The Humber is a vast place – starting where two great rivers, the Trent and the Ouse, meet at Trent falls and widening towards the sea to narrow finally past the crooked finger of Spurn point. The character of the estuary changes from the reed-fringed inner estuary with bitterns and marsh harriers (do visit the RSPB’s Blacktoft Sands reserve, pictued) to the wide expansive mudflats, saltmarshes and sand dunes as the Humber blends into the coast of the North Sea.  In winter the estuary is thronged with wildfowl and waders in such numbers that it puts the Humber in the top five of UK estuaries and means that it is of international conservation importance.  One part of the estuary is known as Pyewipe, a local, Lincolnshire, name for lapwings – one of the waders that depends on the Humber in winter.

In common with so many of our big estuaries – the natural world of the Humber sits cheek by jowl with industry and business.  As well as the Humber’s role in trade, the energy industry is looking to expand rapidly.  Already the old energy sources of oil, gas and coal arrive by pipeline and ship around the Humber.  The drive towards a revolution in renewable energy, so necessary if we are to tackle the spectre of climate change, is setting up challenging conflicts with the natural world.  The next year or so will show whether there is the appetite on the Humber to make decisions wisely that can both enable development and ensure that there is at least no net loss to the natural environment – and ideally some net gain.

I’ve taken the title of this post from a poem by the poet Philip Larkin (it’s 25 years since his death).  In Going Going (written in 1972) a grumpy Larkin saw the end of the character of England – a tide of concrete, unstoppable and inevitable.

And when you try to get near the sea

In summer ...

It seems, just now,

To be happening very fast;

Despite all the land left free

For the first time I feel somehow

That it isn’t going to last

I wonder if Larkin would have been a fan of the Birds Directive?  I hope so.  The hopelessness in the face of the loss of our natural heritage in the 1970s was a spur to put in place the means of protecting the best we have (and that includes the Humber) in a way that didn’t fossilise some unattainable romantic notion of the a lost countryside but provided a means of taking wise decisions that put the natural world at the heart of the process. 

And it works – on the Thames port and offshore wind energy proposals are happening, decisions that took full account of the special nature of the Thames.  We want the same approach on the Humber.

But for now the challenge on the Humber is to argue our case proposal by proposal – and there are a lot of them, a peek into the pile of casework faced by our team on the Humber is daunting.  But first things first – the most immediate priority is a proposal for port-related storage (basically a very large car park).  Decision-day is looming at the end of the month and we are still not satisfied that proposed mitigation measures are sufficient to avoid the impact of the development.  We believe that the proposals as they currently stand, risk damaging the Special Protection Area by cutting off the feeding areas in the estuary from vital roosting sites.  We believe that this can be fixed and an agreement reached – but the clock is ticking.

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