YOU probably won’t have heard of Jeremy Purseglove. But arguably he has done more to protect nature than David Attenborough. We have plenty of environmental warriors keen to face down the engineers who would destroy our natural world. But what we also need in the Anthropocene are environmental arbitrators and conciliators to bridge the divide.
Purseglove is one such unsung hero. After a lifetime on the payroll of civil engineering companies, he has written an unapologetic and often moving memoir about interceding for nature. This ranges from plotting a less invasive route for new pylons in Mozambique to mapping patches of rainforest to save in palm oil plantations, and from restoring a corner of the dried-up Aral Sea to designing a road tunnel to save a nature reserve in Surrey, UK.
He calls this activity (and his book) Working with Nature. He might have called it Working with the Enemy, given its call to unite industry and environmentalists.
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Purseglove has seen a lot. A child of the British Empire – his father ran the Singapore Botanic Gardens – he is as at home in Sumatra as Surrey, Kenya as Cambridge. He is also well read, ranging from Vita Sackville-West to George Monbiot, and Rudyard Kipling to Ken Saro-Wiwa. And he writes beautifully, something fans realised 30 years ago with his first book, Taming the Flood, a still-unsurpassed history of incompetent, often hilarious, British river management.
Back then, Purseglove claims he was the UK water industry’s first environmentalist. He helped pioneer flood control systems that stopped pouring concrete to build defences and gave rivers back their natural floodplains instead. Ever since, he has been helping engineers see the virtues of working with rather than against nature – while also urging environmentalists to get off their high horses and engage in the nitty-gritty of building a world fit for more than 7 billion people.
“Environmentalists need to get off their high horses, and engineers must work with, not against, nature”
But he is no utilitarian. He sees himself as a planetary gardener, nurturing a human-friendly landscape. He gets angry about land grabs in Africa intended to grow crops for the West rather than feed local people. But he is nearly as impatient with the environmentalists’ fetishisation of what they think is pristine.
Some celebrate the supposedly Pleistocene landscapes of Africa, filled with megafauna. But Purseglove says the “great glory” of rural African areas lies “not in their wilderness quality… but the touching way that there always seems to be a marriage between humanity and nature”. They are, he says, “spiritual landscapes”.
Spiritual for him, too. He was born in Uganda, and wonders whether the midwife who brought him into the world followed the tradition of burying afterbirths under ancient trees – and if that explains a yearning to return.
While Purseglove wants environmentalists to make common cause with engineers, economist Dieter Helm asks them to grasp capitalism by the horns. Nature is capital to be protected for its economic utility, he says, and without this ultimate resource there would be no economy.
Purseglove chronicles life as an Englishman abroad, while Helm, the son of a German prisoner of war raised on the Essex marshes, concentrates on the UK. Though agnostic on Brexit, his book could be read as a manifesto for taking control of a countryside freed from European Union directives.
His blueprint for rescuing Britain’s green places is short on place-specific detail. Many an armchair environmentalist could have written a wish list for more woodlands, coastal marshes and protected marine areas, or ideas about curbing pollution and soil erosion, or rescue plans for endangered hen harriers, and even reintroducing predators such as wolves and lynx.
“Economic inefficiency is the real villain, such as wrecking land to produce food we don’t need”
Instead, his contribution is to suggest how to make it happen. His key theme is to characterise environmental destruction as the result not of market economics trumping everything, but of its failure. Economic inefficiency is the real villain, he says. We waste money and destroy “natural capital” by paying farmers to wreck the land to produce food we don’t need. We spend millions cleaning up pollution we should never have created. Business as usual isn’t just bad for nature, it is bad for the economy, too.
His proposal is a natural capital authority – perhaps a beefed-up version of the government advisory body he already chairs, the Natural Capital Committee. It would redirect agricultural subsidies to protecting nature and raise more money for clean-up and restoration by taxing polluters and developers.
He isn’t always clear how his environmental economics meets his more rhetorical aspirations, such as delivering a “universal right” to clean air, green spaces and access to the countryside. What if natural capital were best protected by locking it away? What if the green accountants decided cleaning up polluted city air wasn’t cost-effective? Do the agendas of ecology, aesthetics, human rights and economics really fit as snugly as he suggests?
But Helm is surely right to push against the lazy presumption that the very idea of natural capital is “a neo-liberal conspiracy”. And like Purseglove, he insists that “the environment is now irrevocably man-made“. Welcome to the new Garden of Eden.
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