Fernando de Noronha to Antigua - Day 13 1800UTC
Vega
Hugh and Annie
Tue 18 Apr 2023 18:07
10:29.4N 52:43.2W COG 300T SOG 5.5kts+ Wind E/ENE F3/4 Steady progress. The sea and wind are both down so everything is smoother. Vega time is now UTC-3 which is also local time (Surinam). When we return from our travels we have the house to settle back into and I have a project in mind to build a pond that will increase the wildlife value of the garden and also complement Annie’s wish to create our own little haven of tranquility in the middle of Bristol. At the same time my son Oliver is now the owner of two acres of grassland in the Brecon Beacons. I plan to spend time helping him manage the land to promote its biodiversity. From childhood and through my working life I have had an interest in and professional involvement with the countryside and environmental policy and governance. I have worked with industry, local and central government, wildlife organisations, consultancies and so forth within and outside the UK and know, or at least knew, how the system operates and what the outcomes are. I worked in the construction industry, specifically on projects to acquire and develop land for quarrying and so I know how destructive supplying the raw materials for our industrial society can be. But I also know the value of supplying those raw materials, the value of the land we quarried in economic and environmental terms and the value of the habitats created from former quarries, industrial sites and so forth. I can put my hand on my heart and tell you that one of the best things you can do for wildlife in the UK is to take land out of agriculture, quarry it and allow nature to re-establish some of our finest habitats. The UK has one of the most degraded natural environments in the developed world - fact. A walk through our agricultural landscape can be eerily quiet save for the sound of agricultural machinery. No hum of insects, no birdsong - the decline of our wildlife has been catastrophic. Part of the reason for sailing around the world was to see what was happening to the oceans and in other countries from an environmental perspective. 50 or more years ago marine life such as whales, dolphins, sharks, fish and so on were an integral part of accounts of sailing voyages. No longer. Most of the oceans we have sailed in are, in our experience, silent, just like the British countryside. I have commented previously on the scale of commercial fishing we have come across. Just recently Henry on Ceres came across a Chinese fishing boat putting out a drift net. There were four AIS beacons on the net, each 8 miles apart. That means 24 miles of net indiscriminately trapping anything that swims into it. It would take us five hours to sail the length of this net! Whilst he was watching this on his plotter Henry saw a “cargo” vessel come up to the fishing vessel. This will have been a factory ship taking on board the catch from this and other fishing boats in this particular fleet. We have seen these Chinese fleets in every ocean we have sailed and Chinese fishing boats, both legally or impounded for illegal fishing, in many ports. Industrial scale fishing has destroyed coastal fishing stocks in many of the countries we have visited but effective protection can safeguard or allow the re-establishment of marine ecosystems. It isn’t just the Chinese of course but the fact is the Chinese and others are hoovering the life out of all the worlds oceans. There is a UK connection here as well. The UK government proclaims the introduction of “world leading” environmental legislation. It may be right but does not also proclaim the fact that most of this legislation is discretionary, at the whim of government ministers. Furthermore it does nothing to reverse the fact that we have such a degraded natural environment. We have protected marine reserves all around the British coast but the government does very little to prevent illegal fishing within them. It takes Greenpeace to start dropping boulders within these protected areas to prevent trawlers from dragging their nets through them. The government immediately takes legal action against Greenpeace to stop the boulders from being dropped whilst doing nothing to prevent the illegal fishing. This government has introduced the largest protected marine reserve in the world around the British Indian Ocean Territories and yet we have seen with our own eyes that it is open season for Indian fishing boats there. Protection from fishing seems to be an effective way of re-establishing marine ecosystems. Designating protected areas and then doing little or nothing to enforce them - politics or pragmatism? Certainly hypocrisy and typical of current UK governance. The UK has “world leading” CO reduction targets in place but no policy to achieve them (policy is considered market intervention and anathema to this government as I have been told by ministers in my working life). We are still granting licences for North Sea oil exploration and production despite the fact that we cannot burn all the existing reserves there and around the world if we are to prevent global warming by more than 1.5 degrees. This government is in league with vested interests while hiding behind a smokescreen of “world leading” environmental legislation. Just as predicted as a consequence of Brexit, mandatory European standards are being replaced by discretionary British ones. Based upon knowledge and now experience I am going to become more active in highlighting and challenging environmental governance in the UK. However, there are political fundamentals that have to be addressed before anything meaningful can change. The fact that our parliamentary voting system can ensure a government with an 80 seat majority while being voted for by a minority (only 40%, usually only a third) of the electorate is a scandal that the British people are breathtakingly complacent about. And yet draconian laws are being enacted to remove our freedom to protest. I cannot sit back and become part of this complacency. Editing and printing our blogs into book format for posterity will take up time. I know this because I spent a good proportion of lockdown formatting the first leg of our circumnavigation from Bristol to the Canary Islands. I have subsequently not been able to find a trace of my efforts on any of my devices or hard drives. I have in the back of my mind the feeling I may have saved it onto a memory card that is now in the attic…….. Then I want to take up watercolour painting, get to grips with my guitar and tin whistles. I still hanker after a motorbike and then of course there is sailing and more time with the grandchildren. It’s going to be an active few years. |