Yet again George Monbiot has applied his pitchfork to the tender parts of the government’s environmental policy. Yet again it is all to do with flooding. Here is the large part of his article in the Guardian of 17 February — he says it all so much more succinctly than I could.
How we ended up paying farmers to flood our homes
This government let the farming lobby rip up the rulebook on soil protection — and now we are suffering the consequences.
It has the force of a parable. Along the road from High Ham to Burrowbridge, which skirts Lake Paterson (formerly known as the Somerset Levels), you can see field after field of harvested maize. In some places the crop lines run straight down the hill and into the water. When it rains, the water and soil flash off into the lake. Seldom are cause and effect so visible.
That’s what I saw on Tuesday. On Friday, I travelled to the source of the Thames. Within 300 metres of the stone that marked it were ploughed fields, overhanging the catchment, left bare through the winter and compacted by heavy machinery. Muddy water sluiced down the roads. A few score miles downstream it will reappear in people’s living rooms. You can see the same thing happening across the Thames watershed: 184 miles of idiocy, perfectly calibrated to cause disaster.

Mud (aka. silt) pours straight off this field near the source of the Thames.
Photograph: George Monbiot
Two realities, perennially denied or ignored by members of this government, now seep under their doors. In September the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, assured us that climate change “is something we can adapt to over time and we are very good as a race at adapting”. If two months of severe weather almost sends the country into meltdown, who knows what four degrees of global warming will do?
The second issue, once it trickles into national consciousness, is just as politically potent: the government’s bonfire of regulations.
Almost as soon as it took office, this government appointed a task force to investigate farming rules. Its chairman was the former director general of the National Farmers’ Union. Who could have guessed that he would recommend “an entirely new approach to and culture of regulation … Government must trust industry”? The task force’s demands, embraced by Paterson, now look as stupid as Gordon Brown’s speech to an audience of bankers in 2004: “In budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers.”
Six weeks before the floods arrived, a scientific journal called Soil Use and Management published a paper warning that disaster was brewing. Surface water run-off in south-west England, where the Somerset Levels are situated, was reaching a critical point. Thanks to a wholesale change in the way the land is cultivated, at 38% of the sites the researchers investigated, the water — instead of percolating into the ground — is now pouring off the fields.
Farmers have been ploughing land that was previously untilled … leaving the soil bare during the rainy season. Worst of all is the shift towards growing maize, whose cultivated area in this country has risen from 1,400 hectares to 160,000 since 1970.
In three quarters of the maize fields in the south-west, the soil structure has broken down to the extent that they now contribute to flooding. In many of these fields, soil, fertilisers and pesticides are sloshing away with the water. And nothing of substance, the paper warned, is being done to stop it …
Maize is being grown in Britain not to feed people, but to feed livestock and, increasingly, the biofuel business. This false solution to climate change will make the impacts of climate change much worse, by reducing the land’s capacity to hold water.
The previous government also saw it coming. In 2005 it published a devastating catalogue of the impacts of these changes in land use. As well as the loss of fertility from the land and the poisoning of watercourses, it warned, “increased run-off and sediment deposition can also increase flood hazard in rivers”. Maize … is a particular problem because the soil stays bare before and after the crop is harvested, without the stubble or weeds required to bind it. “Wherever possible,” it urged, “avoid growing forage maize on high and very high erosion risk areas.”
The Labour government turned this advice into conditions attached to farm subsidies. Ground cover crops should be sown under the maize and the land should be ploughed, then resown with winter cover plants within 10 days of harvesting, to prevent water from sheeting off. So why isn’t this happening in Somerset?
Because the current government dropped the conditions. Sorry, not just dropped them. It issued … a specific exemption for maize cultivation from all soil conservation measures … The crop which causes most floods and does most damage to soils is the only one which is completely unregulated.

When soil enters a river we call it silt. A few hundred metres from where the soil is running down the hills, a banner over the River Parrett shouts: “Stop the flooding, dredge the rivers.” Angry locals assail ministers and officials with this demand. While in almost all circumstances, dredging causes more problems than it solves, and though, as even Owen Paterson admits, “increased dredging of rivers on the Somerset Levels would not have prevented the recent widespread flooding”, there’s an argument here for a small amount of dredging at strategic points.
But to do it while the soil is washing off the fields is like trying to empty the bath while the taps are running.
So why did government policy change? I’ve tried asking the environment department: they’re as much use as a paper sandbag. But I’ve found a clue. The farm regulation task force demanded a specific change: all soil protection rules attached to farm subsidies should become voluntary. They should be downgraded from a legal condition to an “advisory feature”. Even if farmers do nothing to protect their soil, they should still be eligible for public money.
You might have entertained the naive belief that in handing out billions to wealthy landowners we would get something in return. Something other than endless whining from the National Farmers’ Union. But so successfully has policy been captured in this country that Defra … now means Doing Everything Farmers’ Representatives Ask. We pay £3.6bn a year for the privilege of having our wildlife exterminated, our hills grazed bare, our rivers polluted and our sitting rooms flooded.
Yes, it’s a parable all right, a parable of human folly, of the kind that used to end with 300 cubits of gopher wood and a journey to the mountains of Ararat. Antediluvian? You bet it is.
A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com/2014/02/17/muddying-the-waters/
From www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/17/farmers-uk-flood-maize-soil-protection
Now tell me, please, why there is no need to reform agricultural practices?

At last! MPs are beginning to get the message about HS2. According to yesterday’s Observer:

HS2 billions should be diverted to rebuild south-west railways, say MPs
Call to invest in transport infrastructure after sea wall collapse undermines Dawlish railway track

I’m coming to like the idea of beavers. And no, I don’t mean those, I mean the animated furry kind. Oh maybe not that either … the animals what build dams in rivers, m’lud.
I used not to think much of these animals, but research seems to be showing that they really do have a beneficial effect on water management, otherwise known as flood control.
And beavers are back on the agenda (well, maybe) because a large part of southern England is under water thanks to a record breaking deluge over the last 2-3 months. December and January rainfall has been the heaviest in England and Wales since records began 240 years ago — and it looks as if February is about to join them.
According to New Scientist the rains have been exacerbated by the weather in Indonesia and the tropical west Pacific — no I don’t get that either but then I’m not a meteorologist. But regardless, we’ve had several oceans of rain recently and consequently there is much flooding in southern England.
There is an argument going on about whether rivers were dredged sufficiently, and whether if they were it would have made any difference. On the one side we appear to have the UK government who say rivers must be dredged more and they’ll pay — mainly because they’re trying to appease agribusiness. On the other hand every hydrologist being quoted is saying dredging would, at best, have made no difference and would likely have made things worse.

I think I might just trust the hydrologists rather than the politicians.
Joining in with the hydrologists is environmentalist and thinker George Monbiot. His piece in the Guardian at the end of January mocks the politicians’ unseemly positions but also makes many salient environmental points which the politicians appear to have missed (or ignored).
Quoting from an Environment Agency report, Monbiot says:

“Dredging of river channels does not prevent flooding during extreme river flows … The concept of dredging to prevent extreme flooding is equivalent to trying to squeeze the volume of water held by a floodplain within the volume of water held in the river channel. Since the floodplain volume is usually many times larger than the channel volume, the concept becomes a major engineering project and a major environmental change.”

He then says:

Is that not bleeding obvious? A river’s capacity is tiny by comparison to the catchment from which it draws its water. You can increase the flow of a river by dredging, but that is likely to cause faster and more dangerous floods downstream when the water hits the nearest urban bridge … If you cut it off from its floodplain by turning it into a deep trench, you might raise its capacity from, say, 2% of the water moving through the catchment to 4%. You will have solved nothing while creating a host of new problems.
Among these problems, the Environment Agency points out, are:
1. Massive expense. Once you have started dredging, “it must be repeated after every extreme flood, as the river silts up again”.
2. More dangerous rivers: “Removing river bank vegetation such as trees and shrubs decreases bank stability and increases erosion and siltation.”
3. The destabilisation of bridges, weirs, culverts and river walls, whose foundations are undermined by deepening the channel: “If the river channels are dredged and structures are not realigned, ‘Pinch Points’ at structures would occur. This would increase the risk of flooding at the structure.” That means more expense and more danger.
4. Destruction of the natural world: “Removing gravel from river beds by dredging leads to the loss of spawning grounds for fish, and can cause loss of some species. Removing river bank soils disturbs the habitat of river bank fauna such as otters and water voles.”

Yep, that’s right: dredging is a tool for improving navigation not land drainage. If you want to prevent flooding you need to do things like:

• More trees and bogs in the uplands — reconnecting rivers with their floodplains in places where it is safe to flood …
• Making those floodplains rougher by planting trees and other deep vegetation to help hold back the water — lowering the banks and de-canalising the upper reaches, allowing rivers once more to create meanders and braids and oxbow lakes. These trap the load they carry and sap much of their destructive energy.

So how should all this be done?
Well one answer appears to be beavers!

Yes, beavers. The pesky furry critters what fell trees and build dams.
We used to have beavers in this country but they were hunted to extinction here several hundred years ago — they lasted until Tudor times in Scotland but disappeared from England long before that.
Why beavers? Well to quote from a Wild Wood Trust document:

Beaver are considered to be a ‘key-stone’ species because they have the ability to create and maintain wetlands by building dams and digging ditches. They also create coppice, selectively felled areas of woodland. In doing this they provide essential habitat for many other species of plant and animal. Wetland areas and coppice must currently be maintained artificially, at significant cost to the public. Beaver damming activity has also been observed to filter pollutants out of the water, leaving streams cleaner.
Wetlands are … fragile ecosystems, but they can also act as a flood defence and could protect homes across the country. After heavy rainfall, wetland areas and flood plains act as a sponge, holding excess water and releasing it slowly, preventing sudden rises in water level and flash floods …
Beavers have been reintroduced across Europe, and have not caused any serious ecological problems. Reintroductions have been extremely successful as long as the population density is low enough that the beavers do not come into conflict with human activity.

There’s a fuller report, by Natural England and People’s Trust for Endangered Species, on reintroducing beavers to England here.
Sure, beavers likely aren’t going to do a lot of good actually on the Somerset Levels. But they will help if they are present on the uplands which drain into the Levels. One of the keys seems to be the need to manage water flow much higher up the valleys than the actual areas currently being flooded.
But of course that’s counter-intuitive both to the affected residents and to politicians. And of course neither trusts the experts who they employ. If you’re not going to listen to experts — insisting instead on a DIY fuck-up — then don’t waste money employing them.
So the bottom line is we need to reintroduce beavers.
What a great idea!
Meanwhile I’ll leave you with George Monbiot’s final salvo:

Cameron’s dredge pledge is like the badger cull. It is useless. It is counter-productive. But it keeps the farmers happy and allows the government to be seen to be doing something: something decisive and muscular and visible. And that, in these dismal times, appears to be all that counts.