For want of a nail the shoe was lost;
Traditional proverb
for want of a shoe the horse was lost;
and for want of a horse the rider was lost,
being overtaken and slain by the enemy,
all for want of care about a horse-shoe nail.
Can you get repetitive strain injury from non-stop facepalming, or brain damage from banging your head on your desk over and over?
She described the planning blockage as being due to “some snails on the site that are a protected species or something”, adding: “They are microscopic snails that you cannot even see, and they haven’t been able to build there.”
Rachel Reeves clears planning blockage amid ‘good relationship’ with developer
The most senior figures in our government continue spouting ecologically illiterate, ignorant tripe about snails and spiders, what George Monbiot refers to as the ‘cauldron species‘. Punching down on nature, particularly the smaller things, the creepy-crawlier things. Developers do it, the media does it with endless news articles every autumn demonising spiders, the government does it. We’ve been doing this for years, a big part of why the UK is so denuded of nature. And we call ourselves a nation of animal lovers.
At least twenty years ago, I was doing some design work for a developer in Essex who vocally professed his love of nature and the company’s keen interest in working sustainably. Later in that very same meeting he slid over and muttered “if you think some frog is going to stop a development happening, you’ve got another think coming”. True colours shown. I wouldn’t expect any different. Housing developments with no scope for wildlife to move freely, impenetrable concrete-based fences enclosing millions of ecologically desolate islands. Shame about the hedgehog, they’re so cute, why don’t we see them any more? And recently, with Biodiversity Net Gain having been law for over a year, widespread misuse of exemptions by developers and the government consulting on making all sites smaller than 1 hectare exempt from BNG, making 97% of applications in England exempt from BNG. Even a £35 swift brick is now too much effort, but developers have shirked their responsibility to deliver wildlife-friendly features for years.
Around two years ago, I speculated on what BNG might look like in the future. There were various potential pitfalls, but one I didn’t identify was the government rendering BNG impotent before it even had a chance to make an impact. Development is inevitable, we need more homes, sod the microscopic snails.
When Rachel Reeves punched down on small snails recently, it reminded me of my own experience with small snails. In 2017, I did some habitat management work on Duke’s Hollow LNR, a tiny pocket of nature tucked away between Barnes Bridge and the Thames Tradesman’s Rowing Club in Chiswick. I’d done an ecological assessment of the reserve and surrounding area. Duke’s Hollow was a dumping ground for rubble, Japanese knotweed crowded the banks of the river all the way to Chiswick Bridge, and rubbish washed up on the shoreline. But Duke’s Hollow was, is, special – one of only two remaining areas of natural riverbank on the Thames in London, and home to the red-listed Thames two-lipped door snail. We were clearing some of this rubbish one day when Henry, one of the guys I was working with, found snail shells. Then we found more as we looked, and living snails, the first sighting of them in three years. They’re tiny. You wouldn’t know they’re there. And who even notices if they disappear forever from the few places they can still be found?
A few years ago, I commissioned naturalist Andy Musgrove to survey the invertebrates at Deepdale Farm. We needed a baseline for biodiversity, and our invertebrate populations seemed like the best thing to base a bigger picture around. What Andy found was fascinating. 668 species of invertebrate — spiders, woodlice, bees (over 50 species), beetles (175 species), bugs, grasshoppers, flies, moths, butterflies. A hoverfly that mimicked a bumblebee (detected for the first time in Norfolk on the farm). 36 species with some measure of conservation status.
The thing that blew me away was how little I’d always been seeing of invertebrate life, on the farm or anywhere. So many of these creatures were almost invisible. As Andy pored over a sweep net, dozens of miniscule creatures scurried around. I’d only ever been seeing the big inverts and had been ignorant of the microscopic things living in plant stems, beetle banks, hedges and grasses. He painted a picture of a million little soap operas, thefts and murders by parasites and blood bees playing out, all part of the functioning of a healthy ecosystem.
You develop an appreciation of even smaller things when you start to pay attention. Soil organisms. Bacteria, nematodes, mites, springtails, fungi, worms. Making soil, exchanging nutrients, processing dead material, forming symbiotic relationships with plants, regulating water cycles. Millions of organisms in a handful of soil. Soil is a community. It’s an alive thing, living and breathing and feeding.
The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all.
Wendell Berry
Satish Kumar said there is no economy without ecology. Ecology is knowledge of the home; economy is management of the home. We can’t manage a home we don’t understand or value. All the small things are the foundations of our living world.
But our government, like countless others, repeats the same line: that it’s the other way around, that the economy comes first. In this view, all the small things of the natural world are just afterthoughts, obstacles.
It’s backwards, disrespectful, performative macho bullshit, the product of small minds – and it’s why we’re destroying the natural world and, ultimately, ourselves. You can’t manage a home you refuse to understand. Placing the economy before ecology is like planning the household budget while the house is on fire.
Show some respect to all the small things. They vastly outnumber us. Humans make up around 0.01% of all biomass on Earth, less than arthropods, worms, molluscs, fungi, bacteria or viruses.