I've handed the reins of my blog over to Mark Avery for most of June. Mark's sharing the successes and challenges of saving nature around the world in the run up to the Rio+20 Earth Summit.
I am, unashamedly, an enthusiast for wildlife, for wild places and for the natural world. Although personal relationships, music and sport have all produced moments of ecstasy and sadness in my life, many of the most memorable moments have been with nature.
I’ll never forget moments spent with humpback whales in Australia, a grizzly bear mother and her two cubs in the USA or wildebeest, zebra and antelope herds in Kenya. There are many others, but those three stick in the mind and all involved mammals not birds, all were in beautiful locations where the wildlife added to the experience and all were on other continents. And there’s the rub!
Getting on a plane whose carbon emissions will harm wildlife in order to enjoy wildlife is a moral conundrum that every nature lover with cash to spare faces. And we face it at a smaller scale every time we drive to an RSPB nature reserve or drive down the road to do a bit of bird watching.
One of the ways to square the circle (although I am afraid it will still have lots of curves on it) and reduce your feelings of guilt is to make sure you reduce your overall carbon emissions in as many ways as possible, and another is to make sure your money does some good.
Costa Rica has made the decision to protect and market its natural environment and beauty. Ecotourism is a bigger earner than bananas and coffee combined and comprises 85% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. There are taxes on businesses that pollute water and Costa Rica already produces 89% of its energy from renewable sources and aims to be a carbon neutral country by 2021. Landowners are given incentives to protect the country’s natural resources, particularly its forests (those forests where the golden toad once lived – see essay of 2 June). Costa Rica means Rich Coast in Spanish, and it feel as if the country has seriously committed itself to protecting its natural riches.
Bhutan runs its affairs by different rules from those of most countries, based on its Buddhist religion. Instead of concentrating on increasing a complicated index of economic wealth (GDP) it tries to maximise GDH (Gross Domestic Happiness), and this has been the case for decades. Visitors to Bhutan tell me that the ordinary Bhutanese in the street is quite likely to mention that environmentalism is an important part of how they and their country measures progress.
Both Costa Rica and Bhutan are middle-ranking countries in terms of per capita GDP. Their people aren’t very rich and they are looking for ways to improve their lot, but it is striking that they are both taking a very different route from most other countries and they are deliberately choosing to protect natural wealth as part of their economic strategy.
Costa Rica is 3rd and Bhutan 13th in a ranking of 178 countries by the New Economics Foundation on a ‘Happy Planet’ index which attempts to take people’s happiness and the environmental impact into account. It’s certainly a different and a stimulating way of looking at things and the highest-ranking EU country is Austria (but that is still at a fairly lowly 61st position); the UK is 108th.
I wonder how much of a voice Costa Rica and Bhutan will have at the Rio+20 conference next week. It seems to me that they could teach the rest of the world a thing or two.
Wondering how you can step up? Why not take a minute to consider greener travel next time you plan a visit to an RSPB nature reserve? Many of our sites have cycle routes and can advise on the best way to reach us by bike.
Dr Mark Avery is a former Conservation Director of the RSPB and now is a writer on environmental matters. We’ve asked Mark to write these 20 essays on the run up to the Rio+20 conference. His views are not necessarily those of the RSPB. Mark writes a daily blog about UK nature conservation issues.
Jim - Hi! That sounds a good thing to do and fun too! Good luck!
Update: The New Economic Foundation have published their new Happy Planet Index with Costa Rica top (Bhutan seems to be missing from the list - no up to date data perhaps?) and the UK has got up to 41 so we must all be a lot happier than we were. Take a bow Messrs Cameron and Clegg?
redkite - if you do the sums, or read Prof David Mackay's excellent book with the sums in it, you'll find that we need to make some very dramatic changes to energy use and generation to amke a difference. Some of them are along the lines you suggest. We'll have a biofuels blog in the next few days......
Hi Mark
I'm soon to embark on a sabbatical to visit RSPB reserves in Scotland by low-carbon means only. I'm not visiting all of them in Scotland but hopefully a good few. I want to show that it is possible and I'll be blogging and tweeting my way round. Another aspect is to collect stories of impacts of climate that we are seeing on our reserves and the efforts being taken to help wildlife adapt in the future.
Jim
Hi Mark, I have to say that I do think wildlife tourism is a good thing as long as it is done sensibly and with suitable controls when necessary. The case of Costa Rica you give is a good example as it depends heavily on its ecotourism industry. If all the wildlife tourists gave up going to Costa Rica because of their carbon emissions, I am sure the wildlife of that country would be drastically impacted. The same goes for many other wildlife areas and parks in poorer countries in the world, which often depend on their existence and income from tourists. If one travels on an aeroplane only very few people, if any on many occasions, are travelling for a wildlife holiday. So the actual emissions due to wildlife holiday makers must be minute compared to the emiisions due to all others travelling by air. I therefore think not travelling by air on a wildlife holiday because of the carbon emissions it would cause, is basically "cutting ones hand off to spite ones face".
Having said that global warming is a very serious issue, but I think the way to tackle it is for green power generation methods to be adopted much more widely, eg carbon capture and storage, solar, water turbines, nuclear (although I know many people would not agree with that), home insulation, more fuel efficient cars and aeroplanes and use of bicycles where appropriate . Biofuels should be banned completely and wind farms severely limited and only for as long as needed, because of there servere evironmental damage in other directions. In this way the whole population shoulders the effort to combat global warming and not just one small group of wildlife travellers whose self demise, if it were to occur, would do untold harm to wildlife world wide and especially in the poorer countries.
redkite