Geographicalwww.geographical.co.uk December 2020 • £4.99MAGAZINE OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY (WITH IBG)

CAN WE PREDICT

CLIMATE MIGRATION?

TIM MARSHALL

ON BELARUS

EARTH PHOTO:

THE SHORTLIST

WHY ENGLAND’S AGE OLD NORTH–SOUTH DIVIDE IS GETTING WORSE

A COUNTRY DIVIDED

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ContentsDecember 2020 • Volume 92 • Issue 12

47SPOTLIGHT ON:

SABAH

Pockets of abundance

in the land around the

Kinabatangan River in the

state of Sabah hint at the

destruction beyond

CLIMBING FOR

CHRISTMASEvery autumn in the

Caucasus Mountains,

men climb to the top

of Nordmann firs to

harvest pine cones

MOVING STORIES

Climate change is forecast to

trigger mass migration, but are

these predictions really accurate?

EARTH PHOTO: SHORTLIST

Shortlisted images from Earth

Photo, the prestigious competition

developed jointly by Forestry

England and the RGS-IBG

18 28

63

WORLDWATCH

6 Mother’s microbes

8 Bushmeat

9 Climatewatch

10 Cartogram: space travel

12 I’m a geographer:

Steven Amstrup

14 Zoos and conservation

15 Geopolitical hotspot:

Belarus

16 WildEast programme

17 Fishing for the future

REGULARS

54 Geo-graphic: energy

inequality

56 Reviews

60 Geo-photographer:

Matthew Maran

72 Where in the world?

73 Crossword

74 In Society; RGS–IBG events

78 Discovering Britain

82 Next month: ylang ylang;

Readers’ corner

DEPARTMENTS

COVER STORY

Find out more about the benefits of joining at www.rgs.org/joinus

December 2020 • 3

36THE NORTH/SOUTH

DIVIDE

England has long suffered

from a North–South

divide that plays out

particularly starkly in

education, transport and

health. Despite numerous

attempts to tackle it, the rift

shows no sign of healing

LOOKING FURTHER

It’s hardly the usual build-up to Christmas. As the UK continues to tackle coronavirus, it’s uncertainty and silence that fills the air rather than joy, laughter and that more 21st century sound of Christmas: the babble of shoppers. But, with several companies offering online delivery, one aspect of the festive period may yet stay the same – the Christmas tree. After all, if we’re going to spend so long at home, why not fill it with the heartening scent of pine. Yet, how many of us really know much about these lifeforms from a forest far away, which come to briefly share our home?

It’s easy enough to find out where your selected tree was grown – it might be Denmark or Norway or even the UK. But this is only the second half of the story. Before growing, someone has to pick the seeds and a huge number of these come from one small region in Georgia. Eighty per cent of Nordmann fir trees sold in Europe are thought to have started life in the Caucasian nation, which exports between 25 and 70 tonnes of Nordmann seeds annually. On page 22, Clément Girardot and Julien Pebrel travel to meet the men who pick these seeds. Unsatisfied at low prices and poor workers’ rights, they may well wish that Christmas tree consumers were willing to look a little further into their trees’ lifecycle.

Looking further also lies at the heart of Chris Fitch’s investigation into the statistics frequently circulated about climate migration (page 28). Vast numbers of people have long been predicted to leave their homes due to the climate crisis, but where do these figures really come from? And how can they be verified? What Chris finds is a situation much more complex than simplistic headlines suggest, revealing that in the face of the challenges to come it’s important to be prepared, both to face the threats and to carefully question them.

Katie Burton

Editor

Welcome

Contributors

‘Very few people know much about their Christmas tree,’ says French freelance journalist Clément Girardot. ‘When you think about Christmas trees, you don’t think that it’s an industry with many similarities to the coffee or chocolate industries, where raw material is extracted in one country and processed in another with a lot of inequalities involved, but this is the case.’

‘The creation of hundreds of millions of refugees has been an anticipated consequence of climate change for decades,’ says writer and author Chris Fitch. ‘But does it do a disservice to people in developing communities to suggest that, at the first sign of environmental change they’ll pack up and leave home? There are many reasons why such a mass movement of people might not unfold on a large scale.’

‘The Thames plays a rich and vibrant part in our past as well as in the 21st century, for me this makes it one of the world’s most fascinating living monuments,’ says Ann Morris. ‘It’s home to me, and millions of others living within reach of its banks, as well as to an extraordinary collection of wildlife from Britain’s rarest bumblebee to some of the largest aggregations of wintering waders and wildfowl in the UK.’

GeographicalDecember 2020 Volume 92 Issue 12

4 • Geographical

Publisher Graeme Gourlay

Editor Katie Burton

Designer Gordon Beckett

Staff writer Jacob Dykes

Subeditor Geordie Torr

Cartographer Ben Hennig

Operations Director Simon Simmons

Sales and Marketing Director Chloe Smith

Editorial Advisory Board

Chris Bonington, Ron Cooke,

Nicholas Crane, Rita Gardner,

Robin Hanbury-Tenison,

Annabel Huxley, Vanessa Lawrence,

Nick Middleton, David Rhind,

Antony Sattin, Nigel Winser

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6 . Geographical

You aren’t quite as human as you might think. Th e multitudes of microbes that live within and on your body – collectively known as the microbiome – outnumber your human cells by ten to one. As you emerged into the world, microbes from your mother’s gut and skin began to colonise your digestive tract – a phenomenon that scientists suspect helps to prime your early immune system. If you were born by caesarean section (CS), however, you may not have been exposed to the full complement of microbes from your mother and your microbiome may have taken a little longer to develop properly.

CS deliveries are on the rise. In 2015, 29.7 million births (21.1 per cent of all births worldwide) occurred by CS – a huge increase from 16 million (12.1 per cent) in 2000. Th e number of CS babies has jumped by more than fi ve per cent annually. Countries where CS occurs in more than 15 per cent of births are more likely to have higher levels of socioeconomic development, women’s education and urbanisation, and a higher density of physicians. Latin American and Caribbean countries top the charts, with highs of 44.3 per cent of births by CS. However, those where CS occurs in fewer than ten per cent of births are more likely to have higher fertility rates, such as in western Africa.

Researchers have pinpointed a few reasons for the rise: fi rst, the proportion of births occurring within medical centres has risen across much of the world. Second, the skills and equipment necessary to perform CS are more widespread. Shift ing cultural attitudes may also contribute. Planning the delivery of a baby through CS can allow families to prepare for the new arrival.

However, access to CS interventions may come at a price. ‘Th e immune system of babies in utero is not developed. Th e development begins the moment the baby sees the outside world,’ explains Willem De Vos, professor of human microbiomics at the University of Helsinki. Some of the fi rst microbes that newborns are exposed to are those from the mother’s digestive tract and vagina. Within hours, maternal gut bacteria begin to colonise the babies’ digestive systems.

WORLDWATCH

Mother’s

mighty

microbes

HEALTH

Scientists are working to mimic

the transfer of immune-boosting

microbes that takes place during

vaginal births to help those born

by caesarean section

Scientists believe that this process is a natural ‘primer’ for an infant’s immune system. ‘Th e gradual development of the microbiome in early life seems to parallel the immune development of infants,’ says De Vos. ‘How exactly this works, we don’t fully know, but the hypothesis is that immune development is induced by these microbes.’

CS babies, on the other hand, may miss out on this process. ‘CS babies don’t have the same temporal development of the microbiome as those born vaginally,’ says De Vos. In early life, many of the bacterial species identifi ed in babies born vaginally are almost absent from the microbiomes of babies delivered by CS.

Some scientists suspect that these stunted microbiomes could be behind an observed increase in immune and developmental disorders worldwide. Th e incidence of infl ammatory bowel disease is on the rise and in UK children under fi ve, incidences of type 1 diabetes are currently rising by fi ve per cent each year. ‘We are increasingly seeing associations between CS incidence and some later-life immune disorders, and that’s why I think it’s important to follow this developing fi eld,’ says De Vos. A recent study that assessed more than 2.5 million CS births in Denmark between 1982 and 2010 showed an increased risk of chronic immune disorders, such

A baby is born by caesarean section

December 2020 . 7

Space travellersA who’s who of travel beyond the Earth

Tim Marshall on... Belarus: minding the gap and the gate

Vital zoosMore than just a fun day out

as inflammatory bowel disease, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and coeliac disease. In the USA, a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology reported that babies born by CS are more susceptible to food allergies in later life.

Because of these emerging links, microbiome scientists are researching ways to ‘normalise’ the microbiomes of CS babies. Some formulations of probiotics already contain microbes that can help, but they fail to restore all of the important species. De Vos, alongside clinicians working with the Human Microbiome Research Program, has a simpler, if slightly unpalatable solution:

‘The most natural and cost-effective way to inoculate the term-infant gut is to expose the infant to maternal intestinal bacteria: in this case, through exposure to the mother’s feces.’

Armed with this simple hypothesis, his team recruited 17 pregnant mothers into a clinical trial. They collected fecal samples from the mothers three weeks before their due date and scanned them for disease-causing pathogens. They then mixed the highly diluted fecal matter into the mothers’ breast milk, before feeding the mix to their newborn babies – a procedure they dubbed a ‘fecal transplant’. When they compared the microbiomes of those born

vaginally to CS babies with and without fecal transplants, they found that CS babies that received fecal transplants had microbiomes resembling those of vaginally born babies. ‘Our study showed that a small fecal transplant from mother to infant allows the bacteria to colonise the infant gut as you would expect from a vaginal delivery,’ says De Vos.

There is still more work to be done: ‘It’s not sufficient to say this should be a routine medical treatment,’ says De Vos. ‘We first have to understand the long-term effects on the immune system.’ Studies are now under way to carry out this long-term monitoring.

WORLDWATCH

DISEASE

8 . Geographical

The hunting and consumption of bushmeat (a catchall phrase for the meat of wild animals) has come under the spotlight due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Researchers have known for a long time that capturing and consuming wild animals, including rats, bats and primates, comes with the potential for transmission of a zoonotic disease among human populations.

For many communities in the tropics and subtropics, however, the practice is a vital addition to the local economy and the local diet, despite the fact that the harvest and trade of wildlife is oft en illegal.

For a group of researchers from the University of Tennessee’s College of Veterinary Medicine and the Department of Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries this raised the question of how aware practitioners are of the risks. Basing their study in northern Uganda,

With growing global awareness of the risks of

hunting and consuming bushmeat, a group of

researchers decided to speak to those who do it

the team interviewed 292 women from the region who cook for their households and 180 self-identifi ed hunters from 21 villages bordering Murchison Falls National Park. Th e goal was to gain insights into bushmeat preferences, opportunities for pathogen transmission and awareness of common wildlife-associated zoonoses (diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans).

Th e interviews revealed that most respondents were aware of the risk of diseases being passed on by wild meat. Both hunters and the women who cook meat considered primates to be the most dangerous animals in this regard. Worryingly, however, this didn’t appear to aff ect behaviour. Hunters reported taking no extra precautions when going about their work.

‘Based on responses to our questions about diseases that wildlife carry, almost all respondents were aware that there is a real and present risk of disease spillover from wildlife to people,’ the authors concluded. ‘Epidemics in recent years may contribute to this

The dangers of bushmeat

December 2020 . 9

Loss and damage

Unless richer nations

compensate poorer ones

for the impacts of climate

change, inequality will

rise, says Marco Magrini

Hurricanes and typhoons do not receive equal treatment. Th e former, born over Atlantic waters and oft en impacting the United States, receive much wider news coverage than the latter, originating in the Pacifi c and battering poorer countries in Southeast Asia. Maybe it should be the other way round, as in the case of typhoon Goni which last November obliterated the Philippines and Vietnam with torrential rains and record-shattering wind gusts of 192mph.

In reality, hurricanes and typhoons are the same weather phenomenon, created by a combination of factors including warm tropical waters (albeit from two diff erent oceans). Th e key diff erence lies in the people aff ected by them, simplistically described as ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’.

Hurricanes and typhoons are now increasing in frequency and intensity, a fact clearly correlated to climate change. Th is highlights the ever-present reality that poor people suff er more from a climate change they contributed little towards. Th e sheer destruction left behind by typhoon Goni will aggravate the livelihoods of millions of human beings whose contribution to the climate crisis is negligible at best.

It was in 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio, that the United Nations agreed on the principle of ‘common but diff erentiated responsibilities’, or CBDR. Since the greenhouse gases emitted by industrial activities linger in the atmosphere for up to a century, the theory was that longtime polluters should pay more – both to mitigate the eff ects of climate change and to help developing countries adapt to its consequences. Th e CBDR principle was applied to the now defunct Kyoto Protocol and has been downplayed, if not forgotten, ever since.

Th e Earth Summit also gave birth to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which holds the yearly summits known as COPs. At COP25, held last year in Madrid, rich countries refused to partially compensate developing nations for the destruction infl icted by a warmer climate, as recommended by a 2013 agreement. Th e staggering Covid-19 bill these countries now have to pay will hardly make them any more munifi cent at COP26, due to be held in Glasgow next year.

Participants at COP26 will also consider a proposed ‘loss and damage’ fund in which rich countries would be compelled to pay in if they miss their emissions reduction targets under the Paris Agreement. Sadly, that landmark treaty was signed by 196 countries only because it contained no real obligations whatsoever. If nothing changes, the planet’s inequalities are set to rise.

CLIMATEWATCH

knowledge, but for hunters, this awareness does not appear to infl uence or motivate any precautionary behaviours during the harvest of wildlife, as virtually no respondents reported taking precautions.’

Th e study also revealed that women trying to avoid primate meat face challenges. In interviews, the women overwhelmingly said that they prefer to avoid purchasing primate meat, but the majority of hunters reported that they usually disguise primate meat as something else.

‘Primates, rodents and bats have long been investigated as important groups in zoonotic spillover events,’ said BreeAnna Dell, a public health expert and one of the study’s authors. ‘Primates are closely related to humans and are believed to share many pathogens with humans, facilitating transmission. Th ese fi ndings raise concerns, as the ability of cooks to know and assess the risks of handling primate meat is subverted through the disguise of these species in the market.’

Th e researchers hope that highlighting where the dangers and confusions lie in bushmeat hunting and consumption will enable safer practices to be developed. ‘Expanding our knowledge of awareness, perceptions and risks enables us to identify opportunities to mitigate infections and injury risk and promote safe handling practices,’ said Dell.

A food market in

Uganda in full swing

10 . Geographical

WORLDWATCH

CARTOGRAM

Man’s exploration of outer space has, for most of human history, been confined to observations from Earth’s surface. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that technological capabilities were advanced enough to breach the boundaries of our

Space travellersplanet. The first rockets to reach space around the middle of the century were quickly followed by the first humans, although only after fruit flies (in 1947) and the famous dog Laika (in 1957).

Ever since Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter space in 1961, more than 500 astronauts have travelled there. In almost 60 years of human space exploration, people from almost 40

countries have made a journey into outer space, as documented in the CSIS Aerospace Security International Astronaut Database.

Although the term ‘astronaut’ is commonly applied to all space travellers, different countries use different monikers. Russian astronauts are also called cosmonauts. In China, the only country apart from the USA and Russia to launch its own crewed

by Benjamin Hennig

December 2020 . 11

spacecraft, the term taikonaut has become more widely used. With commercial space travel slowly becoming established, these terms will undoubtedly further evolve, as the distinction between tourism and professional space travel increases.

During its early years, human space exploration was a highly political endeavour. The race to space was a Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the USA rooted in a demonstration of military power and superiority. That race laid the foundation for the two countries’ dominance of human space exploration ever since. New players have emerged, primarily through the establishment of the European Space Agency and China’s recent advances, but Russia and the USA continue to dominate.

This cartogram shows each country of the world proportional to the number of astronauts who have travelled to space in the history of human spaceflight. It thereby provides an overview of the country of origin of all people who have been to space so far. Apart from Russia and the USA, only Japan, China, Germany (including the former German Democratic Republic) and France have had ten or more people in space – and all are still far behind the two main players.

The picture is similar on the International Space Station (ISS), launched in 1998 and owned and governed by intergovernmental treaties and agreements: of the 240 individuals from 19 countries who have been to the ISS, 151 have hailed from the USA and

48 from Russia. All other nations have sent fewer than ten crew members to the ISS over its 19 years of occupation.

Even if outer space knows no borders, the political lines drawn on Earth have been manifested in space. This cartogram reveals that human occupancy of space appears as a mirror image of the Cold War and that more recent geopolitical changes are starting to shine beyond the limits of our planet. So, too, does it mirror inequalities between the Global North and the Global South, prompting new debates. Privatisation and commodification are making their way into outer space. Some sociologists now point to new forms of colonialism as wealthy elites get access to this commodity, leaving marginalised communities behind.

12 . Geographical

Steven Amstrupis chief scientist for Polar Bears

International (PBI)

I moved into the polar bear world in 1980. I was one of the few people in the US federal government at that time who had any active experience working with bears and so I was asked if I’d like to go to Alaska and get this faltering polar bear research project going, and I said, ‘Yeah, pick me, pick me!’ 

I was in charge of polar bear research in Alaska for 30 years. In the early 1980s, we were still trying to understand polar bears and how to study them. It was the early, formative years of fi guring out how to go out on the sea ice and capture bears in a very remote and hostile environment. In my early years, one of the things I was able to document was that polar bears in Alaska were actually recovering from being excessively harvested in the 1950s and ’60s. I documented thriving populations up until probably the early 1990s, but then I saw a marked change as the sea ice began to retreat.

Most of what I did was launch from the coast and travel over the sea ice in a helicopter searching for bears. When you see a bear, you shoot it with a dart that contains an immobilising agent. Th e bear goes to sleep, you land next to it and then you have an immobilised bear that you can weigh and measure, put your tags on and such. It’s usually pretty predictable. But there were a few hair-raising moments.

Th e experience that was the most exciting was when we were doing a study in the late 1990s into whether or not we could detect polar bear dens under the snow with an infrared device. Th ere was one den where we thought the bear had left and so we started searching to fi nd the best way to get in – we needed to make some measurements. As we were moving around, I fell through the roof of the den. I looked down and within inches of my thigh dangling through the roof was the head of the female polar bear. I can’t repeat what it was that I said, but

you can probably imagine. Interestingly, and to me this is pretty profound, she didn’t just bite me. She looked up at me for a moment with this almost quizzical look. Th at gave me a moment to throw my upper body out of the den. I started rolling down the hill and she came lunging out and started to chase aft er me, but she didn’t go very far. I guess she fi gured that this rolling person wasn’t much of a risk.

I was a dyed-in-the-wool researcher for 30 years on polar bears, and for ten or 15 years before that, working on other species. But by 2010, I realised that while there are still things we could learn about polar bears, we already knew the answer to what we needed to do to save them. So at that point, I thought it was time for me to move out of the total research world and into the world of conservation. 

I dedicated myself to putting together another team and coming up with a paper that was published in Nature in 2010. It showed that if we stayed on our current path, we could probably lose two thirds of the world’s polar bears by the middle of this century, but if we mitigated greenhouse gas rise and halted the rise in the concentration of CO2, then we could make a major diff erence.

We know that we can halt the rise of greenhouse gases. We do have the answers. But what we need is policy leadership. I have to say that I’m not as optimistic about that as I was a few years ago. At the time of the Paris climate accord, I was really feeling pretty good, but as you know, we’ve seen a dramatic decline in leadership here in this country [USA] and not a whole lot of follow through in many other parts of the world. So I’m not as optimistic as I used to be, but I am still very hopeful. At PBI, we view polar bears as messengers to the rest of us, because if we are successful in saving polar bears, it will benefi t the rest of life on Earth, including ourselves.

I’M A GEOGRAPHER

CV1972

BS in forestry, University of Washington

1975

MS in wildlife management, University

of Idaho

1995

PhD in wildlife management, University

of Alaska Fairbanks

1980-2010

Research wildlife biologist with the US Geological Survey (USGS) at the

Alaska Science Center

2007

Leads a USGS team that produces nine reports that are instrumental

in the decision to declare polar bears a threatened species

2010

Nature report shows that preserving polar bears is all about controlling man-caused temperature rise

2012

Receives the Indianapolis Prize for advancing the

sustainability of a species

PH

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O B

Y ©

KT

MIL

LE

R /

PO

LA

RB

EA

RS

INT

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NA

TIO

NA

L.O

RG

The scimitar-horned

oryx, a recipient of

zoo funding

14 . Geographical

WORLDWATCH

CONSERVATION

Going to the zoo

They might be best known as convenient days out for the kids, but zoos often step in to conservation situations where all else has failed. Take the scimitar-horned oryx, which once roamed central Chad in large numbers. Civil unrest during the 1980s saw the species declared functionally extinct in the wild. Between 2009 and 2013, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) spearheaded efforts to reintroduce captive-bred oryx to Chad; numbers are now growing.

Of course, not everyone agrees with zoos. A stream of bad press, including the revelation in 2016 that 486 animals had died in just four years at South Lakes Safari Zoo in Cumbria, has exacerbated calls for their closure. For some, keeping wild animals in cages cannot be justified. But, according to Andrew Terry, director of conservation and policy at ZSL, the money that zoos bring in is vital. ‘Everything that we do from a science and conservation perspective is founded on the funding and donations that come through the zoos.’

Because of this, the arrival of Covid-19 brought trouble. The pandemic forced zoo closures from mid-March to mid-June, placing an unprecedented strain on finances. With fixed costs of £2.3 million per month, ZSL is forecasting £20 million losses for 2020. Both Whipsnade and London zoos were able to re-open from 15 June at restricted capacity. A public fundraising campaign spearheaded by Sir David

Zoos do a lot more than welcome

excited visitors; closures due

to the pandemic are affecting

conservation work worldwide

Attenborough raised just over £1 million and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced a £100 million rescue package for zoos. But wildlife in remote regions may have already lost out.

‘During lockdowns, foremost was securing the safety of our teams across the world. Then we had to enter bilateral discussions with the 30 or 40 different funding relationships for our conservation projects,’ says Terry.

Lockdowns in countries where ZSL is working on conservation projects have also brought challenges. ‘Many people in fragile regions are losing income. Out of necessity, they could revert to unsustainable harvesting or practices that negatively impact the wildlife we’re trying to conserve,’ says Olivia Couchman, conservation capacity manager for ZSL’s EDGE (Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered) arm. With ZSL funding, EDGE conducts scientific studies into the world’s most endangered animals to help protect them from extinction. In many regions with EDGE projects, such as India and Latin America, large numbers of people have had to move through protected areas when travelling from urban centres back to families in rural settings. ‘With incomes restricted, a forest or area previously protected becomes an essential resource for survival,’ says Couchman.

EDGE’s Chacoan peccary conservation project in the Chaco Forest of Argentina (also known as javelinas, peccaries are pig-like hoofed mammals) works with local communities to slow the incursion of industrial agriculture into critical peccary habitats. ‘Most of our activities have been put on hold,’ says EDGE fellow Micaela Camino, who leads the project. ‘Still, we have found a way to keep on working by creating a radio show instead of workshops.’

ZSL hope that governments, as part of their Covid recoveries, can build more resilience. ‘The tourism model has worked for years, but Covid-19 has highlighted that there is no silver bullet. We need to diversify conservation models,’ says Terry.

December 2020 . 15

BELARUS, THE GAP AND THE GATE

Tim Marshall is a journalist,

broadcaster and author of Prisoners of Geography and

Divided: Why we’re Living in an Age

of Walls

When military strategists in London, Moscow, Warsaw, Washington

and elsewhere look at the political chaos in Belarus they could be forgiven for thinking, ‘Mind the gap’. In this case, the Suwalki Gap. They’ll also have a gate on their minds: the Smolensk Gate.

The gap and the gate are why they care about Belarus, a relatively poor country with a population of about 10.5 million people and the unofficial title of ‘The last dictatorship in Europe’. This year’s disputed election result has concentrated minds beyond its borders due to recent history and the country’s strategic location.

In August, President Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994, was re-elected with a brow-raising 80 per cent of the vote. Russia congratulated him on the result; EU countries rejected it, as did huge numbers of Belarussians. Protests immediately broke out and have been repeatedly smashed off the streets by the riot police. At times, when Lukashenko has looked in trouble, Russia has hinted that it could move in to ‘calm’ the situation, by which it means ensuring someone answerable to Moscow is in charge.

President Putin doesn’t give a fig about Lukashenko and will drop him when it suits, but Russia is determined that Belarus won’t go the way of Ukraine and flip into the Western sphere of influence. If that means moving troops into Belarus, Putin will give the order. The Western powers meanwhile would like the opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, to assume the presidency, but not at the risk of triggering Russian military action. Both sides have their eyes on the gap and the gate.

For the NATO powers, the Suwalki Gap is the more important. It’s a narrow, 40-mile-long land

bridge that connects Poland and Lithuania, and is the only way NATO can reinforce the three lightly armed Baltic NATO states by land. On one side of it lies the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, home to 15,000 Russian troops; on the other lies Belarus. A Russian military presence in Belarus could easily close the gap and cut off the Baltic states. It would also unnerve Poland.

Russia’s presence in Belarus, in the shape of its 1st Guards Army, would mean it had direct access to Poland across a wide front. The army currently sits inside Russia at the Smolensk Gate – a 50-mile-

GEOPOLITICS

wide territory between the Dzwina and Dnieper river systems that for centuries has had armies channelled through it – in both directions. It lies just 300 miles from Moscow. The Guards have more offensive equipment than NATO members Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Baltic states combined, and have conducted simulated invasions of Poland numerous times.

From a Russian perspective, Belarus is part of a buffer zone between it and the west and southwest, the directions from which it has faced several invasions, notably by the French and the Germans. Since the Cold War ended, Moscow has already seen NATO move up from positions 1,000 miles from St Petersburg to within 100 miles of the city. That NATO has no intention of invading is irrelevant in

Moscow’s thinking. After all, times change.

Moscow doesn’t need to move into Belarus, however. Simply ensuring a pro-Russian, or even a neutral but Moscow-leaning Belarus would suffice. That explains why the Western powers have been relatively muted in their response to the crisis. They must be seen to support Tikhanovskaya, but not to the extent that Lukashenko falls, unless it’s Putin who pushes him, having had Russian fears placated.

The EU is imposing sanctions on those it accuses

of electoral fraud. Fine – most of the people targeted are already on a sanctions list and know how to get around such measures, and some of their companies can increase trade with Russia to make up their losses. Besides, sanctions tend to fray; German exports, for example, often get to Russia via Belarus.

Lukashenko holds some of the cards in that he still has the support of the military and, for the reasons above, knows that Western powers are nervous about trying to topple him in case they trigger Putin. Best perhaps for both sides to keep calm, carry on, and – mind the gap.

BELARUS

LITHUANIA

RUSSIALATVIA

POLAND

UKRAINE

RUSSIASUWALKI GAP

SMOLENSK GATE

16 . Geographical

WORLDWATCH

CONSERVATION

The wild, wild EastWildEast, a grassroots community

initiative, is encouraging volunteers

to commit 20 per cent of any land

they own to nature recovery

The UK’s recent State of Nature Report made for dismal reading. It stated that since 1970, 41 per cent of UK species have decreased in abundance; 15 per cent of the UK’s 8,431 species assessed against the IUCN Regional Red List Criteria are classifi ed as ‘threatened with extinction from Great Britain’; butterfl y numbers have dropped by 16 per cent, moths by 25 per cent, insects overall by ten per cent and mammals by 26 per cent.

Th e UK’s natural heritage, however, is deep seated and the number of people volunteering for conservation projects is up 46 per cent since 2000. Some 7.5 million volunteer hours go into biodiversity monitoring annually.

One such volunteer-led project is WildEast, a grassroots community initiative that encourages people from all walks of life to commit 20 per cent of any land they own to nature recovery. ‘Eco-anxiety has gripped most sections of society. People need a positive movement to engage with,’ says WildEast co-founder Hugh Somerleyton. ‘We’ve been inspired by ambitious projects such as in Yellowstone [National Park] and Douglas and Kristine Tompkins’ conservation work in Chile, but we started to dream of a way to get a whole region thinking about living in a nature reserve, rather

than natural experiences being restricted to big parks.’ Th e founders want everyone to participate: gardeners can leave 20 per cent untidied for insects and birds; those working on allotments can pledge 20 per cent to bee-friendly plants and community planting schemes; farmers can dedicate pockets of land to eco-restorative practices. Th e goal is to amass pledges totalling 1,250,000 hectares across the region.

Farmland will be a key target. Coinciding with UK species decline is a continuous growth in agricultural productivity, which has increased by 150 per cent since 1973. In turn, farmland bird numbers have fallen by 54 per cent – the most severe declines in any habitat type. ‘Many farmers feel blamed for nature decline, but actually want to give back,’ says Somerleyton. He, along with the other WildEast co-founders, has experience of managing farms and is entrenched in the East Anglian farming community. ‘We canvassed about 100 farmers and found that most would like to give back. Th ey suggested that we develop an accreditation programme for produce that comes from farmland with a WildEast pledge.’

By allowing farmers and the general public to participate in the same enterprise, WildEast hopes to link the two together with a common cause. Co-founders think this strengthened relationship will improve the premium that farmers get from practising eco-restorative farming, incentivising participation.‘We need a unifi ed campaign. It’s all very well for the more a uent few to buy eco-restorative foods and products, but sustainable nature recovery needs widespread cultural change,’ says Somerleyton. Eventually, a real-time ‘Map of Dreams’ will pinpoint East Anglian regions where WildEast pledges have been made. Local farms, gardens, balconies, roadside borders and schools will start to appear as green dots. A verdant blanket may yet sew itself across the region.

The East Anglian landscape may

soon be better protected

December 2020 . 17

WORLDWATCH

FOOD

As Earth’s population grows, future food systems will need to adapt. Scaling up crop and meat production both come with challenges, including lack of space and declining soil quality. Seafood – a dietary option rich in omega-3, iodine, vitamin D, calcium and zinc – could be a different kettle of fish.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that total fish production will expand from 179 million tonnes in 2018 to 204 million tonnes in 2030. A team of 22 global experts has recently sought to demonstrate that, with reform, the productivity of our seas could sustainably increase beyond even that.

As it stands, seafood provides 3.3 billion people with roughly 20 per cent of their average intake of animal protein. ‘Seafood hasn’t really been an integral part of the future food system narrative though,’ says Stefan Gelcich, associate professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and one of the authors of the new report. ‘We wanted to ask whether the seas have more sustainable potential.’ To do this, the team amassed a huge data set, breaking down the ocean into pixels programmed with economic and ecological factors unique to each region. They used this powerful ‘bioeconomic’ model to estimate the sustainable yield from wild fisheries and mariculture – where fish and shellfish are farmed at sea – under a range of management scenarios.

The model estimates that wild fisheries can sustainably achieve a 16 per cent bump in catch by 2050, while mariculture can generate a two- to four-fold increase in finfish yields. ‘About half of the world’s fisheries have become well managed over the last few decades. The other half have been overfished, with fishermen spending more time chasing fewer fish. The net result is the balancing effect in catch that we’ve seen since the 1990s,’ says another author, Christopher Costello, professor of environmental and resource economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. ‘If done right, there is potential for sustainable growth in every sector of ocean food production.’

The team carved out a blueprint that could see this vision become reality. First, since 80 per cent of

A di�erent kettle of fishFood systems will need to change

as the global population grows.

With reform, could fishing and

aquaculture step up to the challenge?

the seafood we eat still comes from wild fisheries, the authors urge governments to reform poorly managed ‘open access’ zones. ‘In these waters, fishing pressure increases as product prices rise, creating an unsustainable supply curve,’ says Costello. Acknowledging that monitoring fisheries through stock assessments and quotas can be expensive, the team included scenarios where such reforms are first focused on fisheries in which future profits outweigh the associated cost of reforms. Marine protected areas (MPAs) could also come into play. Though not considered by the authors, other researchers have highlighted their potential. A recent study led by Reniel Cabral at the University of California demonstrated that expanding ocean networks of MPAs by five per cent could increase future catch by 20 per cent through ‘spillover’ of fish from MPAs into wild fisheries.

When it comes to mariculture, the authors argue that the industry needs to tighten up lax regulation that has resulted in poor environmental stewardship, disease

and even collapse. ‘There are a lot of horror stories out there about the state of mariculture. Now we’re starting to focus on the role of coupled small-scale fisheries and mariculture, which opens up a whole new avenue for innovation and improvement,’ says Gelcich.

Currently, three quarters of mariculture requires fishmeal and fish oil derived from wild fisheries, further exacerbating demand and contributing to unsustainable practices. Alternative feeds, using microbial ingredients, insects or algae, could decouple mariculture production from wild fisheries. This is already the case for Atlantic salmon, where fish-based feeds have dropped from 90 per cent in the 1990s to 25 per cent today.

With reforms, say the authors, wild fisheries and mariculture could sustainably achieve an 18–44 per cent increase in live catch production per decade. ‘We have enough knowledge now to help governments design sustainable transformations for a more prosperous and sustainable ocean,’ says Costello.

Seagulls swarm as a boat

drags nets through the

waters of the Wadden Sea

Caucasus

Christmas trees

18 . Geographical

Every autumn in the Caucasus Mountains, men

climb to the top of Nordmann firs to harvest

pine cones whose seeds will feed the lucrative

European Christmas tree market. But this activity

generates very limited economic benefits for

Georgia’s Racha province, despite it being richly

endowed with coniferous forests

Words by Clément Girardot

Photographs by Julien Pebrel/MYOP

Climbing for Christmas

A dismantled pine

cone reveals the

seeds within

A Nordmann fir stands tall

in Tlugi forest, Georgia

December 2020 . 19

Caucasus

Christmas trees

20 . Geographical

Georgia exports between 25

and 70 tonnes of Nordmann

seeds annually, with more than

80 per cent going to Denmark

Dressed in a military jacket and

trousers, and sporting a large beige camouflage hat, Lasha

Sopromadze scans the horizon with his binoculars. From

the summit of 2,000-metre-high Mount Satsalike, the

view of the Great Caucasus Range is breathtaking. In the

distance, the snowy peaks mark the border with Russia.

But Lasha isn’t looking for beautiful scenery, or game to be hunted. He’s looking for pine cones. ‘I don’t see anything except in a location that is inaccessible,’ says the athletic 40-something resident of the Georgian village of Tlugi.

In the local region, the pine cone harvest takes place every September and usually lasts for two to three weeks. The men who live in Tlugi and the other communities that surround Mount Satsalike look forward to this time of the year, when they can earn money climbing giant trees. Raised by a local family, Lasha learned from a young age to overcome his fear in order to ascend to the top of the conifers, which can reach heights of 30–50 metres.

‘I spent last week in the forest, camping and climbing Nordmann firs. But now it’s surely over for this year,’

he says, following the day’s unsuccessful scouting. This year, Lasha and his two teammates have harvested just under a tonne of pine cones and earned a total of 2,000 laris (around £500). This isn’t a good year. During a good season they can earn 2,000 laris each – twice the average salary in Georgia.

During the rest of the year, Lasha farms a small patch of land located at an elevation of 1,200 metres above sea level. His house is the final dwelling on the dirt road that leads up from the village centre to the mountain pastures and the huge Nordmann fir forest. The wooded, undulating landscape is reminiscent of the Alpine foothills.

Sixty families currently live in Tlugi, compared to more than 300 during the Soviet period. The entire landlocked region of Racha in western Georgia is affected by this rural–urban exodus, which has seen Racha’s total population halve, dwindling from 60,000 to 30,000 inhabitants since the country gained independence in 1991.

Tlugi is located within the municipality of Ambrolauri and these two toponyms are extremely familiar to Europe’s 15,000 or so Christmas-tree growers. ‘Ambrolauri-Tlugi’ is known for providing the best

December 2020 . 21

In Tlugi forest, pickers test new safety

equipment. For years, foreign companies

have put a strong emphasis on this

equipment, but some pickers find they

are more efficient without it. Being paid

by volume, they favour efficiency

Caucasus

Christmas trees

22 . Geographical

Each Tlugi family has the right to collect

a certain volume of wood for the winter.

A group of men does the work for other

families. Due to the steepness of the slopes,

it’s carried out with the help of bullocks

Nordmann fi r seeds and they can be found in the catalogues of all good seed companies.

According to estimates from the Danish Christmas Tree Association – the most powerful national organisation in Europe – 45 million of the 80 million natural Christmas trees sold each year on the Continent are Nordmann trees, and 80 per cent of them are said to come from Georgia, either from Ambrolauri or the Borjomi region further south. Th e Caucasian nation exports between 25 and 70 tonnes of Nordmann seeds annually, with more than 80 per cent going to Denmark.

‘Th e Nordmann has a graceful silhouette, and long, thick needles that it keeps for three months,’ says Marianne Bols, the head of Fair Trees, a Danish company that works to apply fair trade principles to the entire Christmas tree production chain: from the harvesting of the seeds in Racha to the cultivation of the conifers in central Denmark and their distribution in various European countries.

Th e Caucasian fi r was fi rst scientifi cally identifi ed in 1835 by the Finnish biologist Alexander von

Nordmann. It grows naturally on the eastern edge of the Black Sea: in Georgia, Russia and northern Turkey. But not all Nordmann trees are born equal. ‘Th e seeds from Ambrolauri produce beautiful Christmas trees that grow very compactly, which is not the case with other origins, even in southern Georgia,’ says Karl Moser, a German seed dealer who usually travels to Racha every autumn for the harvest season.

During the Soviet period, the harvesting and export of Nordmann seeds was a state monopoly. Th e quantities collected were much smaller but the activity involved the entire population of Tlugi. ‘Families went with their children to the mountain at this time of the year and many women climbed up the fi r trees,’ recalls 54-year-old Violeta Katsitadze nostalgically as she sits in the living room of her old wooden house. In the entrance hall, drying beans and peppers have been laid out, ready to be canned for the long winter months.

‘Our generation was closely connected with the forest – it was a place where we met each other and relaxed in the evenings. Now this is no longer the case;

December 2020 . 23

Misha lives in Ambrolauri.

He works as a harvester for

two weeks each year

Caucasus

Christmas trees

24 . Geographical

it’s mostly young men who go up there and only during the harvest period to earn money,’ she says.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the collapse of the Communist system led to a deep economic recession in Georgia. Lacking alternative sources of income, many villagers climbed trees in search of the precious seeds, sometimes risking their lives. Several deaths led to a gradual increase in the use of safety equipment.

Ramaz Chelishvili, 43, works for the Danish company Levinsen, Europe’s leading purveyor of Nordmann seeds. Equipped with gloves, a harness and an orange helmet, he climbs with practised ease to the top of a tree and begins to remove the pine cones. Aft er detaching them, he throws them down to the ground, where they bounce and roll in the undergrowth before being picked up by his teammates.

‘It takes us 20 to 30 minutes, maximum one hour, to harvest one fi r tree. On each tree, we collect an average of ten kilograms of pine cones but this can fl uctuate from one season to another,’ says the picker, who lives in Tkibuli, a declining mining town in the neighbouring region of Imereti.

According to an estimate from the Fair Trees company, the total number of seasonal workers varies from 300 to 400. Th ey are paid according to the weight of pine cones harvested. Th e price can vary according to the season and the purchasing company, but a kilogram usually pays between one and 2.5 laris. Only the Fair Trees company off ers a fi xed price of fi ve laris

Lacking alternative sources of

income, many villagers climbed

trees in search of the seeds,

sometimes risking their lives

per kilo. Th e low pay is a recurrent grievance among the pickers, who went so far as to go on strike in 2013. National legislation in Georgia doesn’t regulate wages and provides little protection for workers.

‘During the strike, we managed to negotiate a higher price but the victory was short-lived,’ recalls Lasha with spite. ‘Remuneration fell again in the following years because we didn’t have a strong spirit of solidarity in the village. Th e companies called on people from other regions who were ready to work for less.’

As the Levinsen pickers fi nish up for the day, other employees pick up the bags of pine cones and gather them in a glade, where they will be stored temporarily. Next to the stacks, Levinsen’s manager, Ulrik Nyvold, is sitting on a quad bike – a car accident left his legs paralysed. ‘We supervise the harvest, which is carried out by the Georgian company Jadvari, with which we have been working for many years,’ he explains. ‘Th ey take care of recruiting the pickers, organise all the logistics and then clean the seeds in their Tbilisi factory before exporting them by truck.’

A small tablet is fi xed to the bike, which Nyvold uses to geolocate the diff erent forest sectors being harvested. Each area is associated with a specifi c ten- or 20-year

licence, auctioned off by the Georgian authorities. In total, 24 licences cover the 5,000-hectare Tlugi forest.

With fi ve licences, the Levinsen-Jadvari alliance is the main player, but Nyvold is far from satisfi ed with the system. ‘We paid a lot for these licences,’ he says. ‘I would have hoped that the environmental police would have monitored the activities in the forest more carefully so that no-one would come and harvest in our areas!’

He’s referring to the so-called ‘pirate harvest’, known to take place in Tlugi and the other Nordmann fi r forests around western Georgia. Seeds are illegally collected, oft en by lower-paid workers climbing without safety equipment, and end up feeding a parallel market in Europe.

A picker scales a tree to

collect pine cones from

the topmost branches

December 2020 . 25

A picker takes a break.

Due to the poor harvest,

he spent the day testing

new safety equipment

‘Th ere are two types of market,’ Nyvold continues, ‘one for seeds for which there is no independent control to guarantee provenance, but which still bears the Ambrolauri label, and one for seeds with documents proving their traceability and quality. Th is is our case and it involves expensive certifi cation procedures. We sell our seeds from Georgia at £115–120 per kilo; the others are traded at £55 or £65 per kilo.’

Th is lack of control from the Ministry of the Environment is also a major concern for the municipality of Ambrolauri, which levies a tax of 60 tetri (100 tetri = 1 lari) on each kilo of pine cones collected by the companies, based on the quantity declared by each licensee.

Bags of pine cones are left

at the base of the trees

Caucasus

Christmas trees

26 . Geographical

‘If someone declares five tonnes here and exports seven tonnes, there is no mechanism to uncover fraud. We are asking the government to tighten controls because we think we can double our revenues from this tax. This will allow us to invest more in local infrastructure,’ says Zviad Mkheidze, mayor of the city of Ambrolauri, as he sits at his desk, behind which hangs the municipal coat of arms: a bunch of grapes topped by three mountains and a Christian cross.

Crossed by the Rioni River, Ambrolauri is a sleepy settlement whose only curiosity is a huge bottle erected in the middle of its main roundabout. On its giant label is marked ‘Khvanchkara’, the appellation of a locally

produced semi-sweet red wine, famous across all of the former Soviet republics. In addition to winemaking, which is the main economic activity of the valley, local officials are hoping that tourism and organic agriculture will help to develop and repopulate the surrounding villages. ‘More jobs would also be created if the drying and processing of seeds were carried out locally and if nurseries were created,’ says the mayor.

This prompts a bigger question. What if Georgia produced its own Nordmann fir trees instead of just exporting the seeds? The overall turnover of the Christmas tree sector in Europe is estimated at £1.4 billion. Capturing even a tiny fraction of this lucrative market would have great economic benefits. In 2011, the Georgian government commissioned the auditing firm PwC to carry out a feasibility study on creating a local Christmas tree industry. The report concluded that it would be a significant challenge, as the country lacked the capital and advanced horticultural know-how to compete with European firms.

‘We believe, however, that there are opportunities to develop the domestic market and sell Christmas trees to neighbouring countries such as Russia, Armenia or Azerbaijan,’ says Karlo Amirgulashvili, head of the department dedicated to biodiversity and forests at the Ministry of the Environment. ‘But of course, this is a free and open market for entrepreneurs – state bodies can only raise awareness among private stakeholders.’

New initiatives are also emerging from civil-society organisations. In 2016, Giorgi Janitsa, a 31-year-old horticulturist, founded the NGO Green Life in Tbilisi, with the support of the Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church. ‘Our aim is to popularise the Christmas tree in Georgia, because many people don’t know it actually comes from our country!’ he says.

The project is based near the centre of Tbilisi, just behind the huge Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, built between 1995 and 2004, symbolising the reawakening of Orthodox faith after seven decades of Soviet atheism. The church opened a professional horticultural college in the premises of the Holy Trinity. Students take care of the green spaces surrounding the cathedral and participate in Green Life activities. They tend the Nordmann fir seedlings that are lined up in their hundreds in front of the school building.

‘These small fir trees are about two years old. We sell them in pots during December,’ says Janitsa. ‘The aim isn’t to compete with Denmark but first of all to participate in the fight against deforestation in Georgia, which is a serious issue. This is why we are asking customers to replant these seedlings in their garden or in a forest.’

On the other side of the school, metre-high Nordmann firs grow in larger pots. These are unsold trees from a previous year, collected by the school. Paradoxically, like the majority of Christmas trees sold in Georgia they’ve been imported from Denmark. They cost between 120 and 200 laris, a huge amount for consumers living in urban centres and an unaffordable luxury for households in rural and mountainous areas. While living in the homeland of Europe’s most popular Christmas tree, most Georgians put up a plastic tree made in China in their living room when the festivities begin. Maybe one day, that will change.

‘Remuneration fell again in

the following years because

we didn’t have a strong spirit

of solidarity in the village’

Lamara spent years working as

a picker. She talks with nostalgia

of a time when the whole family

participated and when a good

working season could buy an

apartment in Tbilisi

pete@endeavournzis.co.nz facebook.com/endeavournzis Endeavournzis

www.endeavournzitineraryspecialists.co.nz

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28 . Geographical

DOSSIERClimate Migration

MOVING STORIES

December 2020 . 29

Climate change is

forecast to trigger

the mass migration

of millions of people

over the coming

decades, but are

these predictions

really accurate?

Chris Fitch

investigates

The year is 2050. Floods, cyclones and storm surges have made many existing coastal regions uninhabitable. Th e combined forces of severe drought, soil erosion, desertifi cation and even saltwater intrusions have caused multiple harvest failures, especially in poorer, developing nations. Food and water shortages threaten billions. Many low-lying islands face the possibility of complete elimination. Consequently, 150 million or more desperate and impoverished ‘environmental refugees’ have been driven from their homes. 

It’s not hard to imagine this dire scenario – now so familiar from apocalyptic news reports and disaster movies – given the media narratives commonly deployed on this topic. ‘Climate change “will create world’s biggest refugee crisis”’, ‘UK warned of “climate change fl ood of refugees”’, and ‘Climate change will stir “unimaginable” refugee crisis, says military’, are just a few examples of headlines that have appeared in British newspapers in recent years. A New York Times

feature this summer was titled: ‘Th e Great Climate Migration Has Begun.’

Th e chemistry of the Earth’s atmosphere is undoubtedly changing. Last year saw 33.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide enter the atmosphere thanks to human activity, a stubbornly large quantity that’s unlikely to drop signifi cantly in 2020, despite the wide-ranging shutdowns caused by the pandemic. In May this year, the pioneering Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded a record high of 417.1 ppm (parts per million) of atmospheric CO2, far above the supposedly ‘safe’ level of 350 ppm and increasing at a steady two to three ppm annually.

Average atmospheric temperatures are rising and ice sheets are destabilising accordingly. Without a change in direction – even with an unlikely reduction in emissions to comply with the demands of the 2015 Paris Agreement – there are anticipated to be a great many radical changes to the global climate and the average sea level in the coming decades. An estimated one billion people live on land that is less than ten metres above current high tide levels (for 230 million individuals, it’s less than one metre) making them especially vulnerable to sea-level rise, extreme weather and other potential consequences of global climate change. 

Is the eventual mass movement of millions of so-called ‘climate refugees’ therefore an unavoidable consequence of climate change? Is the international community prepared for such a scenario? If not, what action could be taken now to prevent a full-blown humanitarian crisis? 

It’s far from clear how many refugees

will be mobilised by climate change.

Here, refugees from the Syrian conflict –

a war that some claim was exacerbated

by climate change – rest in a camp

located outside the city of Aleppo

K8P0V4L

DOSSIER

Climate Migration

30 . Geographical

STRAIGHT TO THE SOURCE

Th e pessimistic scenario described at the beginning of this feature was outlined in depth nearly three decades ago in a report published in 1993 in the journalBioScience with the evocative title Environmental Refugees in a Globally Warmed World. Th e author, Norman Myers, then a professor at the University of Oxford, wasn’t the fi rst to apply the ‘refugee’ term to the topic, but he was the fi rst to forecast that such large numbers of people would be aff ected. 

‘It requires a leap of the imagination to envisage 150 million destitutes abandoning their homelands, many of them crossing international borders,’ wrote Myers, who passed away in October last year. ‘In a greenhouse-aff ected world of the future, they are likely to become a prominent feature of our one-Earth landscape due to the burgeoning phenomenon of environmental displacement.’ 

Myers’ fi gures certainly caught people’s attention. His prediction has been referenced in multiple infl uential documents, including those produced by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and in the UK government’s 2006 report: Th e Economics of Climate Change: Th e Stern Review. If you’ve ever seen a statistic such as this, predicting some hundreds of millions of environmental or climate refugees, chances are it can be traced either directly or indirectly back to Myers. It may therefore seem surprising that his estimates were fairly rough.

‘When Norman Myers’ studies fi rst came out, he was making these projections on the back of an envelope in many cases,’ says Robert McLeman from Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. ‘Th at’s maybe

‘I’ll be the � rst to admit

I thought, “It’s a little

bit on the high side”’

exaggerating a little, but it was rough estimates of how many people live in such and such locations; how many people already move; if it moves in this trajectory, what would be the increase; and so on. He ballparked hundreds of millions of people – 200 million by mid-century was his most oft en cited fi gure. Of course, now it’s 2020, mid-century isn’t all that far off .

‘I’ll be the fi rst to admit that when I fi rst read those numbers, I thought, “It’s a little bit on the high side – sounds a little bit alarmist’,’’ continues McLeman. ‘But as time passes, I’m starting to agree with him, in the sense that we will be extremely lucky if it’s only tens of millions of people who have to move because of climate change and the increased frequency of extreme weather events. It’s not a hypothetical, this is an actual.’

Myers liked to emphasise the ‘heroic extrapolations’ his forecasts were undertaking; his 1993 paper included the caveat: ‘Even if the overall total were too high by one third, or 50 million people, this refugee problem would still be of altogether unprecedented scale.’ Nevertheless, they remain some of the highest

Flooding is the natural disaster that causes

the greatest displacement of people. Here,

people wade along a flooded street in

Dhaka, Bangladesh, in July 2020

December 2020 . 31

profile and frequently referenced predictions for what will happen to vulnerable people as climate change continues to become more extreme. Subsequent reports have gone even further, boldly forecasting up to one billion migrants being created due to climate change, a figure quoted by the UN’s International Organisation for Migration, and even an incredible two billion by 2100, according to a study by researchers at New York’s Cornell University. Just this summer, the inaugural Ecological Threat Register, a report by the Institute for Economics and Peace, predicted the displacement of 1.2 billion people by 2050, primarily due to environmental disasters, and claimed that, since 2008, there have already been 288 million displacements caused by natural disasters.

UNDERSTANDING NUMBERS

‘I mean, what do you do with those big numbers anyway?’ asks Helen Adams, a lecturer in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation at King’s College London. Among other things, she highlights the

complexity behind the forecasts produced by migration models, including those exploring environmental changes. ‘Models are useful to understand dynamics, not to project the future,’ she says.

As she points out, models that try to produce accurate numbers of prospective climate refugees lean on a theory widely embraced in economics which holds that people gravitate towards more populous locations, such as big cities. ‘It makes sense and it does hold true, but it’s by no means a prediction of the future,’ says Adams.

‘This urge to get these estimates sometimes bothers me a bit,’ says Ingrid Boas, an associate professor in the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. ‘There’s so much of a push to search for numbers and to search for direct connections between climate change and migration. Sometimes I wonder if that’s not beside the point, because it’s often quite complex and nuanced in reality. It reduces the complexity.’

Another complication to the simplistic climate-refugee narrative emerges from some of the definitions used to describe the people affected. First, there’s no legal definition of a ‘climate refugee’, or an ‘environmental refugee’, or even a ‘climate migrant’, no matter how frequently the terms are used in the media (and, indeed, almost unavoidably, in this article). As is true of virtually all overlapping and interconnected flows of human migration globally, untangling different motives is much more complicated than the reductionist label ‘climate refugee’ suggests (Myers himself argued that distinguishing environmental and economic refugees was of little importance). ‘They might be moving a little bit for economic reasons, a little bit for family reasons and a little bit for, say, environmental reasons,’ says McLeman. ‘How do you define that?’

And it isn’t just about motivation. Human migration can manifest itself in a huge variety of ways that aren’t just A to B. ‘You could just be commuting more,’ suggests Adams, ‘or you could be spending more time away on short-term contracts, or there might be different patterns of seasonal migration, or short-term displacement due to flooding, or seasonal migration in the hot seasons to cooler areas. That’s the crazy thing about climate migration – we keep separating it, but we can’t actually separate it.’

Despite the assertions of numerous reports and press coverage, it’s extremely difficult to put a figure on how many people might be forced to move due to the impact of climate change. Even if it was possible to get a perfectly accurate model, it’s almost impossible to isolate the motivations or the corresponding actions of entire populations. Perhaps the authors of the 2007 IPCC report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability described it best when they wrote: ‘Estimates of the number of people who may become environmental migrants are, at best, guesswork.’

LAST RESORT

Putting aside the difficulties of establishing who exactly is and isn’t a climate refugee, there’s often an unspoken assumption within such forecasts that millions of people in the world would be content to pack up their belongings and hit the road as soon as life gets

As a low-lying island,

Tuvalu in the South

Pacific is highly

vulnerable to

rising sea levels

32 . Geographical

DOSSIER

Climate Migration

tough; an assumption that the detrimental impact of climate change will be the trigger that provides the excuse – and perhaps the mechanism – to opt for a new life elsewhere. This, too, is a perspective with a nuanced and complex reality.

‘You don’t want to romanticise poverty and you don’t want to minimise the structural constraints on the poor in rural settings – but most people don’t really want to leave,’ says Adams. ‘There are all sorts of emotional and behavioural reasons why people want to stay where they are.’

Carol Farbotko is a research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia. She conducts cultural fieldwork in the South Pacific, primarily in Tuvalu, a low-lying island nation highly vulnerable to rising sea levels, to understand the psychology of people who face these looming threats. ‘The strong feeling that you get from the people in Tuvalu is this real sense of, “We don’t want to go anywhere’,’’ she says. ‘They know the risks and their response is: “We need to figure out a way to stay where we are. Because this is our home, this is where our ancestors are, this is where we want to be long term”. There’s no sense of, “Oh, my goodness, if only we had somewhere to migrate to we’d be fine”. That just doesn’t exist on the ground in these places.’

For many vulnerable people, adaptation is the desired path, which may involve reclaiming land, constructing defensive barriers or safeguarding vital resources such as freshwater. Farbotko references an ongoing construction project in Kiribati, another vulnerable island nation, that aims to build a ‘resilient urban development’ capable of protecting 35,000 people from rising sea levels at least until the year 2200. ‘People are very aware of climate change, very aware of the future risks, very hopeful that the international community will get their act together on emissions,’ she insists. ‘But also increasingly hopeful that there will be on-the-ground adaptation that fortifies the islands to enable them to live there as long as possible. These governments see any sort of relocation or migration internationally as the last resort.’

TRACKING MOVEMENTS

Nevertheless, the long-term impacts of climate change are likely to be severe and, as such, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that numerous people will move as a consequence. As robust as the determination of many people to stay and adapt will be, some form of migration will be a necessary response for millions.

‘It’s not a hypothetical phenomenon – it already happens,’ says McLeman. ‘Right now, people are displaced on a regular basis across the world because of weather-related events, the most common ones being floods and extreme storm events, followed by droughts, wildfires and other heat-related events.’ He quotes the latest figures from the Switzerland-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, which revealed that last year saw 23.9 million people become globally displaced due to weather-related disasters – three times the number displaced by conflict or violence.

However, this amount of weather-related displacement doesn’t necessarily mean that millions of people are making the extreme leap into refugee

‘We tend to think of climate change as what happens to

other people in other countries – typically poor, low-income

countries, troubled countries, politically unstable ones,’

says Professor Robert McLeman from the Department of

Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier

University in Ontario, Canada. ‘But if you look at the Internal

Displacement Monitoring Centre statistics, a lot of them are

in places like the USA.’

For example, you can find Iñupiat communities in Kivalina,

an Indigenous village in Alaska, who are having to prepare

to move elsewhere due to forecasts showing the likely

inundation of their homes by rising sea levels, a far slower

moving form of environmental change that nevertheless

forces relocation. Similarly, in the UK, the residents

of Fairbourne, in Gwynedd, north Wales, have less than 35

years to vacate their village before the council abandons

it to the encroaching waves. Happisburgh and many other

Norfolk villages have long experienced the sinking feeling

of seeing the coastline tiptoe ever closer to their back doors,

with many properties now lost to the sea.

‘The advantage that European countries and Americans

have is that we have the wealth to build adaptive capacity,’

continues McLeman. ‘We can build sea walls, we can divert

rivers, we can organise resettlement of people in small

villages in Wales if they can no longer do so. Whereas in a

place like Bangladesh, or a small island state in the Pacific,

the resources just don’t exist to do that.’

DEVELOPED NATIONS

December 2020 . 33

camps or fleeing to other countries. Instead, climate-related migration typically manifests itself in the form of internal movement within countries: ‘An awful lot of very regional moves and very local moves’, as Adams describes it. 

A high-profile report published in 2018 by the World Bank called Groundswell, attempted to produce forecasts specifically for this internal movement. The headline figure stated that, by 2050, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America could together see as many as 143 million people internally displaced due to the effects of climate change. This was the upper estimate of a worst-case scenario, with the opposite end of the range – the lower estimate corresponding to a more climate-friendly scenario – forecasting 31 million internal migrants.

But these numbers are also complicated. For example, in Bangladesh, a country recently hit by heavy rains and floods in the aftermath of ‘super cyclone’ Amphan, half of the land area is less than ten metres above sea level. The Groundswell report projected that the country will contribute around a third of South Asia’s internal migrants by 2050 under the worst-case scenario – more than 13 million people.

Ingrid Boas from Wageningen University describes the results from fieldwork she conducted with threatened communities in Bangladesh. ‘A lot of people who are affected and are losing their houses are constantly moving a bit more inland, then five metres again, five metres again,’ she explains. ‘Those people are

the most affected and they don’t have a lot of resources to move away. But they do move, in very small steps. How is that captured by the modelling?’

FINDING REFUGE

Yet internal migrants don’t always stop at borders. Groundswell notes that its own modelling ‘identifies numerous migration hotspots in areas close to national borders’. In some vulnerable locations, there may be nowhere else to go. It’s in those places that people might start looking beyond their own countries.

In March 2017, a family from Tuvalu – taking up that ‘last resort’ strategy described by Farbotko – discovered that the application they had filed for refugee status in neighbouring New Zealand had been denied. Despite the evidence presented – that climate change made their lives in Tuvalu unsustainable due to a ‘lack of clean water and proper sanitation’ – it was decided that such a scenario didn’t meet the definition for refugee status, as laid out in the 1951 Refugee Convention.

‘One of the challenges that you face is that no country grants asylum on the basis of environmental displacement,’ explains McLeman. ‘You cannot use the UN Refugee Convention to make a claim for asylum on the basis of climate or environmental displacement because the convention only looks at people displaced for political reasons: persecution, violence and so on.’ The 1951 convention defines refugees as those in fear of being ‘persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’. Perhaps to be expected for a document that was drafted in the aftermath of the Second World War, there is no mention of the environment or a changing climate.

‘The convention is quite specific as to who is a refugee; that’s quite clearly defined,’ agrees Shabia Mantoo, a global spokesperson for international protection, statelessness and internal displacement for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. However, she argues that anyone forcibly displaced for environmental reasons should be eligible for the same protection as a political refugee. ‘If you do flee across borders, and you’ve been forced to flee your home because of climate-related factors, you should still be protected and assisted by international law,’ she says.

UNHCR is already involved in many situations involving people impacted more by environmental than political factors. In recent years, it has been on the ground in Mozambique and neighbouring countries hit by Cyclone Idai, in Yemen in response to flooding events, and in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon after severe storms. ‘UNHCR are a big player when it comes to climate migrants because they’re always there after climate disasters when they shouldn’t be,’ observes Adams. ‘UNHCR should not be there when there has been a flood – that’s not their mandate. But they’ve unofficially already expanded their mandate to take that into account.’ The agency’s annual Global Trends report for 2019 specifically mentioned, for the first time, the impact of ‘climate change and natural disasters’ as factors that can ‘force people to flee within their country or across international borders’. 

Mantoo emphasises that a changing climate is a growing threat to people displaced for whatever reason,

Coastal erosion in

Happisburgh, Norfolk,

has already rendered some

homes uninhabitable

34 . Geographical

DOSSIER

Climate Migration

especially those now living in precarious situations. ‘We’re seeing that the consequences of climate change are having a huge impact on people who are already displaced,’ she explains, pointing out that many people the organisation helps are now experiencing secondary displacement. ‘When you look at the fact that 85 per cent of refugees are being hosted in developing countries, many of them are highly climate vulnerable or on the frontlines of climate change. It’s compounding humanitarian needs, it’s exacerbating vulnerabilities, and in some situations, also forcing people to move again.’ 

It begs the question of whether the Refugee Convention needs to be updated to grant ‘environmental refugees’ official legal status. However, that isn’t a universally popular idea. ‘There is a lot of discussion and debate about whether

we should have a treaty or agreement to assist people who are displaced for climate-related reasons,’ says McLeman. ‘But you get pushback from a bunch of different directions.’ He explains that both refugee-hosting countries, such as Kenya and Turkey, and countries politically resistant to high immigration, such as the UK, the USA and Australia, resist the idea that anyone affected by climate change should be defined as a refugee.

In addition, even non-governmental actors working in this arena can be wary. ‘The NGOs and multilaterals who work with refugees often say: “Look, we’ve already got more than 20 million refugees around the world. We can’t look after this group of people who have been displaced by conflict and now you want to expand the definition to include more people? Let’s not go there.’’’

Of the many narratives swirling around the now

decade-long Syrian civil war, one theory referenced by

everyone from Barack Obama to Prince Charles relates

directly to climate change. It proposes that the conflict

stemmed in a significant way from an exceptional and

pervasive drought in the Fertile Crescent that struck

in the winter of 2006–07, a natural event made two-

to-three times more severe by the influence of climate

change. ‘The severity of that recent drought is well

outside of what has occurred naturally over the past

900 years in the eastern Mediterranean region, strongly

supporting the contention that human influence on

the climate system is likely to blame,’ says Colin Kelley,

an associate research scientist at the International

Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia

University. Resulting in widespread crop failures, it led

to the mass migration of an estimated one-and-a-half

million people from rural areas to the overcrowded

cities. This population of politically and economically

restless migrants then formed the heart of the uprisings

against the Assad regime in early 2011.

An opposing view disputes this hypothesis. Jan

Selby, a professor at the University of Sheffield, insists

that the extremity of the drought can be attributed to

structural problems, including the degradation of water

resources, not climate change. He argues that there is

no clear evidence of this large-scale migration and that

generally there’s little to support the theory that climate

change played a major role in triggering the uprising.

‘There’s a repeated history of Western policymakers,

media, NGOs and public intellectuals exaggerating the

impacts of climate change on conflict,’ says Selby. ‘I’m

deeply concerned at how climate-migration and

climate-conflict narratives are already being taken up by

the far right. Eco-fascism is on the rise and the myth of

climate migration is absolutely central to this. It’s in this

sense, in my view, that climate migration and conflict

narratives are most worrying.’

SYRIA

Did climate change

contribute to the

Syrian conflict?

December 2020 . 35

Following the failed Tuvalu applications, James Shaw, New Zealand’s minister for climate change, fl oated the idea of the country creating a special humanitarian ‘visa’ to ease passage for people from their island neighbours whose livelihoods have been lost due to climate change. It wasn’t the fi rst time such an idea has been put forward – for example, it has gained some traction in Germany, inspired by the so-called Nansen passports given to stateless people aft er the First World War – but it was perhaps the closest it had yet come to becoming a reality. 

‘I don’t really see a reason why we couldn’t have a visa for climate refugees, if climate change is a clear factor,’ says Boas. ‘My main worry is that while this may be a solution for some – and may indeed be needed for some, for instance with areas that are really becoming uninhabitable – many others need a diff erent type of support. Th is visa might be a solution for some people, but not for a lot of people.’ Th e New Zealand government has since rowed back on Shaw’s comments, saying that it’s now focusing on adaptation and has no plans to create any such visa. 

MOVING PAST SCAREMONGERING

International co-ordination on migration does appear to have taken a step forward in recent years. Th e Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, an agreement fi nalised in 2018, is the fi rst comprehensive UN document to specifi cally cover international migration. It lists ‘the adverse eff ects of climate change and environmental degradation’ as being among the reasons why people might wish to migrate. ‘Th e compact has explicit suggestions on how to go forward on managing people displaced for climate-related reasons,’ says McLeman. ‘But, it’s a voluntary document.’

Not only are the practices outlined in the document entirely voluntary, but, in keeping with their hardline political rhetoric, a number of countries that have grown increasingly hostile to migration – among them the USA, Hungary and Poland – chose not to sign up to it at all. Th ere’s clearly a long way to go before it becomes a global standard. ‘In theory, the mechanisms exist, but in practice, nobody wants to implement them,’ says McLeman. 

Nevertheless, perhaps a combination of the multilateral agreements already in existence might allow help to fl ow to those who most need it in the face of climate change. ‘Th e fact is, you’ve got climate change in the Paris Agreement and migration in the Sustainable Development Goals – I think you’re starting to see migration in all these climate- and environmentally related multilateral agreements,’ says Adams. ‘I think the compact goes with those. You’re creating this consensus that we need a migrant-driven approach. But, it remains to be seen what countries actually do.’ 

McLeman emphasises the extent to which many of the popular narratives about climate refugees – all those hysterical newspaper headlines – are now overwhelmingly about security; about placating the fears that many people who live in wealthy countries have about waves of foreigners banging on their borders, regardless of whether or not those fears are based on reality. Th ese narratives manifest themselves

‘There is no evidence

that climate change is

the main factor’

through, for example, European policies designed to strengthen Mediterranean ports in response to the refugee crisis of 2015, as well as in the ongoing debate around the fortifi cation of the border between the USA and Mexico. 

‘Th e evidence on climate change as a factor in migration to Europe and North America is incredibly weak,’ insists Jan Selby, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Sheffi eld. ‘Not only is there no evidence that climate change is the main factor – I don’t think there’s trustworthy evidence that it’s a factor at all. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that climate-migration narratives are basically rooted not in evidence, but in racism.’ All those headlines should perhaps be taken, at best, with a pinch of salt, at worse as a form of scaremongering. 

Th e legacy of Myers lives long in the memory. Th e prospect of hundreds of millions of refugees might grab attention, but the reality is far more complex than these fi gures suggest. No-one seriously disputes that the impact of climate change will be severe, but the mobility of people who do use migration as a way to adapt will likely be very diff erent from the simplistic, security-focused narratives that make it into the headlines.

‘Basically, most of the people who are going to be aff ected by climate change won’t be able to move at all,’ says Adams. ‘But it doesn’t matter how many times you or scientists or researchers say: “Look, most people won’t move, the people who do move will move within their own country, the people who do move outside the country will move to the country next door.” Th ere’s still this fear that millions of people are going to move.’

Poland’s prime minister,

Mateusz Morawiecki, from

the far-right Law and Justice

party, has highlighted anti-

immigrant policies

UK

North/South

London: economic

powerhouse or

economic drain?

36 . Geographical

THENORTHSOUTHDIVIDE

Antony Gormley’s steel

sculpture the Angel

of the North stands

tall in Gateshead

December 2020 . 37

The concept of a North–South divide, a line that dissects England, rendering the two halves economically, socially and culturally different, permeates English history. It also leaks into the very idea of Englishness. Some trace it as far back as 1066, when William the Conqueror rampaged north in ‘a mad fury’ (his own words) to control the unwieldy parts of his new kingdom. Ever since then, the story goes, North has suffered more than South, a phenomenon that has inevitably led to a raft of stereotypes. ‘The Northerner has “grit”, he is grim, “dour”, plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy…’ wrote George Orwell in �e Road to Wigan Pier, that classic tale of moving from a fairly prosperous London to an unfamiliar and downtrodden North.

Today, the notion of a North–South divide is still vastly important. Politicians promise to tackle it, academics grapple with it, authors capitalise on it, people complain about it. But how bad is it really?

In some respects, very bad. When it comes to health, education and transport in particular, the North has reason to complain. Since 2010, life expectancy has increased in London relative to other parts of the country. In contrast, it has improved least in the North East and has actually fallen in the most deprived parts of that region. According to the Office for National Statistics, between 2016 and 2018, Richmond-upon-Thames had the highest male healthy life expectancy at birth in the UK, at 71.9 years. This was 18.6 years longer than males in Blackpool, where it was only 53.3 years. In general, life expectancy at birth was highest in the four most southerly regions of England for both males and females. Much of this inequality was caused by higher mortality from heart and respiratory disease, and lung cancer in more deprived areas.

People also have a higher chance of dying prematurely (defined as death before the age of 75) in the North than the South. ‘Examining data on all deaths in England from 1965 to 2015, we found a 20 per cent higher risk of dying aged under 75 in the North,’ explains Tim Doran, a professor of health policy at the University of York. ‘Between 1965 and 1995, this gap narrowed, with health in the North slowly catching up with health in the South, but this convergence stopped in the late 1990s.’ Over the

England has long suffered

from a North–South divide.

Despite numerous attempts

to tackle it, the rift shows

no sign of healing

by Katie Burton

UK

North/South

38 . Geographical

Poor Londoners have better

prospects when it comes to

education and health than poor

people in other regions

Durham as seen from the

top of Durham Tower, part

of the city’s cathedral

entire 50-year study period, mortality rates in the North were always at least 15 per cent higher than in the South – equivalent to an average of 38,000 excess deaths in the North every year. 

This divide partly comes about simply because there are more poor areas in the North than in the South. But that’s not the full picture. Even after adjusting mortality rates for deprivation, a substantial divide remains, suggesting more deep-seated structural issues. ‘If you go back over the past 50–60 years in terms of premature deaths in the North, it’s over and above what you would expect,’ says Doran. ‘There seems to be an additional risk factor of being in the northwest and the northeast of England.’

Education is also a particular bugbear and once again, more than just poverty is at play. Children receiving free school meals in London are at least twice as likely to go to university as children receiving free school meals elsewhere in the country, with the exception of the North West and the West Midlands. ‘There are deeply ingrained structural issues,’ says Olivia Blake, the Labour MP for Sheffield Hallam. ‘We really don’t get enough money for education. We get less per head than a lot of the other major cities and it’s hundreds of pounds disparity. That really comes out in our GCSE results. So we still have quite a lot of difficulty getting a good amount of kids to get Cs at GCSE.’ The 2015–16 report by the government’s chief inspector for education was particularly stark

in this regard, noting that while secondary schools had improved overall, ‘the gap between the North and Midlands and the rest of the country has not narrowed, in fact, it has widened slightly.’ It went on to state that ‘this year, there are 13 local authority areas where every secondary school inspected is either good or outstanding, and all in London or the South East.’

And then there’s transport, considered so bad in the North that it’s almost a joke. ‘We’ve had, I think, six ministers for transport come up to the North and promise new train carriages since 2010,’ says Doug Martin, course leader at the Carnegie School of Education, Leeds Beckett University. ‘We’ve got some secondhand carriages from the South starting to appear, which is good. But we’ve been literally using converted bus carriages for about 30 years between cities and towns in the North. Their lifespan must be ten years,’ he adds, referring to the much-maligned ‘Pacer’ trains: maximum speed 75mph.

December 2020 . 39

What makes these divisions particularly stark is their extremity. Most countries have divisions, with the region around the capital city often more wealthy than other areas, but the UK’s seem particularly entrenched. Thinktank IPPR North’s State of the North 2019 report stated that ‘the UK is more regionally divided than any comparable advanced economy’. Researchers found that rates of mortality vary more within the UK than in the majority of developed nations, with places such as Blackpool, Manchester and Hull having mortality rates that are worse than those in parts of Turkey, Slovakia and Romania. As �e Economist put it in a July 2020 article: ‘Other countries have poor bits. Britain has a poor half.’ The article went on to state that the North is as poor as the US state of Alabama or the former East Germany.

CAPITAL APPRECIATION

Of course, many of these statistics raise one question in particular. Is there a North–South divide, or merely a London versus the rest of the country divide? London certainly sticks out for the sheer level of investment and infrastructure spending it attracts. Half of all foreign direct investment projects go to London and southeast England. This means that even though some areas of London have similar or worse levels of poverty than the North, by some metrics it still performs better. In fact, what London reveals is that poverty isn’t necessarily what defines the North–South divide.

Some areas of London are extremely poor. According to a 2020 report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, inequality is far higher within London than in any other part of the UK, with London overrepresented at both the bottom and the top of income distribution nationally. Measured after housing costs, 28 per cent of Londoners live in poverty, compared with 22 per cent across the UK as a whole.

Despite this, poor Londoners have better prospects when it comes to education and health than poor people in other regions. ‘Just the fact that we tend to concentrate power in and around the capital means that the further away from the capital you are, the worse the social circumstances tend to be,’ says Doran. ‘And health follows that pattern. What we’re seeing now is less a separation between North and South, and more between the capital and everywhere else.’

London certainly stands out infrastructurally speaking. Transport infrastructure spending for London in 2014 stood at around £2,500 per head, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research. The corresponding figure for the northeast of England was just £5 per head.

And in education things look better, too, setting London apart even from its wealthy southern neighbours. ‘London, although it’s much poorer than the rest of the south of England, is doing slightly better than the south of England at Key Stage 4,’ says Martin. ‘That’s partly because of a school-improvement programme called London Challenge, which was set up by Tony Blair. There has also been other research into why London may be doing better. One suggestion that’s very explosive is that the indigenous UK population don’t care much about education, whereas the migrant population in London see it as an opportunity. But

WHERE IS THE BORDER?

The dividing line between the North and the South is

an arbitrary one, but that certainly hasn’t stopped people

trying to identify it. (YouGov once had a go, based on the

number of people who call their evening meal ‘dinner’

[southern], or ‘tea’ [northern].) While some regions are

placed firmly in one camp or the other (Scousers know they

are Northerners, Londoners know they are Southerners),

plenty of others lie somewhere in the middle and the

Midlands gets tossed about from map to map.

In 2017, Danny Dorling, then professor of human

geography at the University of Sheffield, set out to draw a

line based on a range of factors, including life expectancy,

poverty, education and skills, employment and wealth.

The resulting line runs diagonally across England, weaving

through towns and villages and cutting through counties. It

rests above Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire

and Lincolnshire, and runs below West and Mid-

Worcestershire, Loughborough, Scunthorpe, Cleethorpes

and Great Grimsby.

Other attempts to draw similar lines have been more

controversial. Mark Tewdwr-Jones, a professor at Newcastle

University, caused some consternation in 2018 when he

appeared on Radio 4 and divided the UK based on London’s

sphere of influence, which, according to him, led to Leeds

and York being defined as in the South.

The division that seems to be most commonly used

in academic papers is the so-called ‘Severn-Wash’ line.

Broadly similar to Danny Dorling’s line, although it respects

county borders, it divides the population of England

roughly in two, running diagonally from the Severn Estuary

to the Wash – the rectangular bay located in the northwest

corner of East Anglia.

SOUTH WEST

LONDON

SOUTH EAST

EAST OF ENGLAND

EAST MIDLANDS

WEST MIDLANDS

YORKSHIRE

AND HUMBER

NORTH

WEST

NORTH

EAST

Map of England

divided by

Government Office

Regions, with those

above the Severn-

Wash line in pink (the

North) and those

below in blue

(the South)

SEVERN ESTUA

RY

TH

E W

ASH

UK

North/South

40 . Geographical

‘In Spain, there’s a much greater

degree of regional autonomy,

where the regions have greater

power to raise and spend taxes’

Andy Burnham has served

as Mayor of Greater

Manchester since 2017

there’s no clear evidence as to why London’s doing better with similar levels of poverty to the North.’

MIND THE GAP

The question of how to narrow the North–South divide (or the North–London divide, depending on which statistics you look at) has long plagued politicians. Schemes have come and gone, at a rate of almost one a year, but none have made a lasting impact. Specific efforts between 1997 and 2010 to reduce differences in life expectancy did begin to close the gap between the wealthiest and most deprived regions. However, this trend has now reversed.

The current government has pledged its own efforts. Boris Johnson has promised to ‘level up’ the economy, living standards and life chances across the country. The government has announced a review of the rules for deciding which public investments go ahead, with the intention of increasing the share going to areas outside of London and the southeast of England. Then there’s the Northern Powerhouse, the proposal launched by then-Chancellor George Osborne to boost growth in the north of England.

Many Northerners, however, remain unconvinced by these efforts. ‘In the North, we all laugh at the Northern Powerhouse. It’s just an absolute joke,’ says Martin. ‘Promises of improvements and investment. People in the North just laugh about it.’

For some, until we tackle the wide-ranging impacts of austerity – the era that saw local funding slashed dramatically, with the cuts arguably disproportionately hitting the North – it will remain impossible to lift up the poorest areas. ‘What local governments have been able to invest in has been really, really reduced,’ says Blake. ‘So all of the stuff that we used to do around business innovation has been stripped back. Really, until we fix that kind of underlying investment in public services, it’s going to be very difficult for local leaders to invest and shape areas so that some of the inequalities can be tackled.’

But it comes down to more than just funding. A report published by the UK2070 Commission, run by a former head of the civil service, Bob Kersall, called for a long-term plan that, as well as a £10 billion-a-year fund, would see the development of an ‘MIT of the North’. It argued that Britain has an unstated policy in which spending on science, culture and administration is concentrated in the South.

The report also called for substantial devolution of power to the North and this more than anything, is the cause that unites Northerners. ‘We’ve always been fairly centralised,’ says Doran. ‘But now, more than 90 per cent of our public spending is controlled in Westminster.’ The State of the North 2019 report also blamed centralisation of power and lack of devolution for making the country more regionally divided than comparable nations, pointing out that 95p in every £1 paid in tax is taken by Whitehall, compared with 69p in Germany.

‘No other country has that degree of centralised control,’ adds Doran. ‘If you look at Spain, there’s a much greater degree of regional autonomy, where the regions have greater power to raise and spend taxes. Even the local authorities in England and Wales are beholden to Westminster, so they can only spend what

Westminster gives them and their tax-raising powers through local taxes are actually quite strained.’

To a certain extent, a new era of devolution is already underway. There are now directly elected mayors in Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region, Tees Valley, Sheffield City Region and the North of Tyne. Some – Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham springs to mind – are making quite a name for themselves. But, according to Jake Berry, Conservative MP for Rossendale and Darwen and former minister for the Northern Powerhouse, it’s still not enough. ‘We live in a far too over-centralised country and although some steps have been made to devolve power to regions and nations within our United Kingdom, that is all at the whim of Whitehall,’ he says. ‘I believe, and I think lots of people across the north of England believe, that actually, if you really are going to close this North–South divide, you have to look at transferring power, money and influence, which will then, in turn, help to generate the wealth to close the gap.’

Unlike many issues in today’s partisan politics, this push seems as though it could cross party lines. ‘I think that actually, there’s a real excitement around devolution and I think that we should continue to have those conversations, particularly within the Labour party,’ says Blake. ‘I think that there’s a real need.’

December 2020 . 41

Are these Manchester

schoolchildren

disadvantaged simply

because of where

they grew up?

NOT SO GRIM UP NORTH

There is, of course, another side to Northern life and the desire to point out unfair regional differences can sometimes mask it. The stereotype of ‘it’s grim up north’ is surely a lazy one. Perhaps what best defines the North is a sense of pride and a determination to endure. Adversity, after all, can build community.

‘The northern area doesn’t really exist in any government-acknowledged way,’ says Berry. ‘But people who live in the North know what it is to be a Northerner, and that’s really strong. I would say it’s as strong as people who are Scottish feel a Scot, or people in Wales feel Welsh. Place is really important to people.’

This sense of pride in place not only fosters a sense of community but contributes to a thriving cultural scene. Contrary to the common attitude that people wanting to work in the creative industries necessarily flock to London, for some this is far from the truth. Fiction author Ben Myers, who was born in Durham in 1976, has experienced both sides of the country, having spent nine years living in London. Now back in his home county, he doesn’t see the capital as a particularly friendly place for creatives.

‘My experience as a writer is that it’s much easier and more enjoyable to exist as a creative, artist or writer in the north of England. I think the narrative is that the North is hard done by and we’re deprived and we don’t get help. And I’ve possibly said as much in pieces in the past, but there is support up here. There are networks and grants, and there is funding. And it’s just much easier to live here. I can exist on half the outgoings that I had when I lived in London. So if your rent or your mortgage is half, that means, theoretically, you only have to do half as much work, which means it frees up a lot of time to create.’

When it comes to income (but not wealth), this is partly backed up by the statistics. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, if measured before housing costs, median household income in London is around 14 per cent higher than the UK average; measured after, it’s only one per cent higher. London’s house prices make it far from desirable for much of the population.

DEVOLVE, EVOLVE

Today, the North is bracing itself for the effects of Covid-19. Already it is clear that the region is suffering from higher case numbers. Hospitalisation rates of people with coronavirus for the week ending 4 October were 7.3 per 100,000 in the North West, and only 1.7 per 100,000 in London. Longer term, the pandemic will likely hit Northern economies harder as well, partly because it has a higher proportion of jobs in hospitality and leisure. But, if anything, these difficulties are likely to exacerbate calls for more autonomy, even if that autonomy won’t be given easily. At the time of writing, Andy Burnham was battling the government over its proposed local lockdown and Covid-19 support package. Local mayors can undoubtedly be a headache for central government, but Northerners believe that the right to be headache is a right they should have.

‘Whatever the government’s view is, and I guess the government’s probably going a bit cold on devolution, given the current fights with these mayors – it’s going to happen,’ says Berry, who recently set up a new grouping of northern Tory MPs designed to put pressure on the government to fulfil its promises of levelling up. ‘Like we found with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, it’s a one-way street. You can’t go backwards. I think, out of this Covid crisis, there will be a cross-party alliance to say, let’s rethink Britain. I think this is the time to do it.’

WILDLIFE

Thames

42 . Geographical

Winding lazily for 95 miles from

the west of London, through the heart of the city and out

past skyscrapers, factories and docks, then on through

the mud fl ats that fringe Kent and Essex until it reaches

the cold North Sea, the tidal Th ames Estuary is one of the

greatest on Earth.

Th is is the world of mists and mudfl ats out beyond the

Th ames Barrier and the Royal Docks that once inspired

and haunted writers such as Charles Dickens and Joseph

Conrad. Yet, despite the estuary’s signifi cance, the 20th

century has seen the slow disappearance of 97 per cent of

its wetland habitat. As London expanded between 1932

and 1984, marshland was drained, either for industrial

development or to create farmland on which to grow

arable crops to feed the growing city. As a result, much of

the wildlife that once called these places home was pushed

back and began to disappear.

Change has come again in recent years. Many of

the huge industrial sites have declined and the scarred

remains handed over to the management of conservation

groups such as the RSPB, with the hope that the land can

be returned to nature. Th e RSPB completed its fi rst land

acquisition on the estuary’s Essex bank in 2000, when 479

hectares of land at Rainham Marshes, previously used as

a fi ring range, were bought from the Ministry of Defence.

The Thames Estuary has long been home to heavy

industry, rubbish dumps and drained marshes, but

restoration projects are inviting wildlife back in

By Ann Morris

Turning the tide on the Thames

In 2006, 31 hectares of land were acquired at Vange Marsh

and since then, a further 730 hectares have come under

RSPB management.

Th e challenge has been to fi nd the funding necessary to

restore this land to its full potential. ‘Th e Th ames Estuary

is an amazing place for wildlife,’ says Alan Johnson,

RSPB area manager for Kent and Essex. ‘Despite the

disappearance of wetland over the past century, it still

hosts the second-largest aggregation of wintering wildfowl

and waders in Britain. Th e UK is a very biodiverse

place, but what puts us on the map is our breeding

sea bird colonies and wintering wildfowl populations,

so the Th ames is important. A lot of the estuary is

waiting to be switched back on for wildlife, but we need

willing partners, more government support and more

connectivity between habitats.’

A number of the Essex reserves are already offi cially

recognised as important. Rainham Marshes and Canvey

Wick are both designated Sites of Special Scientifi c

Interest. Canvey Wick has been described as a ‘little

brownfi eld rainforest’, home to 30 invertebrates found on

the IUCN Red List, including three species previously

thought to have been extinct in the UK.

Now, a small amount of fi nancial help has become

available through the Th ames Vision 2035 plan, initiated

by the Port of London Authority (PLA) and launched in

2015. Th e PLA is a self-funding trust that governs the

tidal Th ames. It has a number of statutory responsibilities

relating to river-traffi c control, security and navigational

safety, but according to its chief executive, Robin

Mortimer, it also has a duty ‘to hand the tidal Th ames on

in a better condition to succeeding generations’.

Brent geese feed on the

mud flats of the Thames

Estuary near Southend-

on-Sea in Essex

December 2020 . 43

WILDLIFE

Thames

44 . Geographical

It was only in the 1960s,

when the sewage system

was improved, that

the Thames started

to breathe again

In the estuary, nature

has continued to thrive,

despite the industrial and

urban development

Th ames Vision 2035 was developed over an 18-month

period and included consultation with 74 stakeholders,

from local councils to major freight companies, rowing

clubs, conservation groups and boatyards, as well as

members of the public. Th e aim was to provide a framework

for the estuary’s development. Stakeholders were asked to

address three questions: what do they value about the tidal

Th ames; what are their top three priorities for the river’s

future; and what do they want the PLA to do?

Th e fi nal document, Th e Vision for the Tidal Th ames,

included six goals: more trade and jobs in London’s

ports; more freight, taking goods off roads and onto the

river; increased passenger transport; increased sport and

recreation; more ways for people to enjoy the Th ames; and

improvements to the environment. It’s this last goal that

could help to restore the landscape.

Th e environmental package under Th ames Vision 2035

embraces a wide number of diff erent projects, including the

£4.2 billion, 25-kilometre Th ames Tideway Tunnel, which

is due for completion in 2023. Another major programme

is the PLA’s ongoing fi ght against litter in the river, the

Cleaner Th ames Campaign, led by former RGS-IBG vice

president Paul Rose. Currently, up to 300 tonnes of rubbish

are removed from the Th ames every year.

Th ames Vision 2035 is also looking at ways to restore

some of the natural wildlife habitats along the banks of the

estuary. ‘Sixty years ago, there were no fi sh in the Th ames

Estuary,’ says Tanya Ferry, head of environment for the

PLA. In 1957, the Natural History Museum declared

the Th ames ‘biologically dead’. Wartime bombings had

destroyed the network of sewers that had previously

helped to keep the river clean. Post-war Britain didn’t have

the resources to fi x the problem. It was only in the 1960s,

when the sewage system was improved, that the Th ames

started to breathe again. Today, despite ongoing concerns

about pollution, an estimated 125 species can be found in

the water, including seals and seahorses. Now, attention is

being turned to wildlife along the banks.

‘We want to create a diff erent and better riverscape,’ says

Ferry. ‘Part of the Th ames Vision 2035 plan is to restore

and connect natural habitats on the edge of the estuaries,

through planning greener edges – re-establishing plant

and animal species along the riverbanks. As well as the

major projects, small gains – such as a bit of gravel for a

tern – can make a big diff erence.’

Some of the fi rst projects to benefi t from funding and

see results are RSPB reserves on the Essex banks of the

estuary. Four South Essex sites and one North Kent site

have received funding totalling more than £150,000.

Th e two main projects are at Bowers Marsh, a grassland,

marshland and wetland reserve that needed restoration

RU

TH

GIL

LIE

S

December 2020 . 45

A lapwing

stretches

its wings

The shrill carder

bee is a species

of bumblebee

with a wide

distribution

across Europe

A pyramidal

orchid at

Canvey Wick

and faces a constant battle with predators, and Canvey Wick,

which needed targeted habitat restoration.

‘We knew these patches of land had real potential but

we were hampered by a lack of the necessary fi nancial

resources,’ says Izzy Donovan, senior sites manager for the

South Essex reserves. Th e RSPB wanted to improve water

levels and nesting grounds to encourage wintering birds and

to protect them from predators such as foxes, which have

made a permanent home in Pitsea landfi ll site – one of the

largest landfi lls in the UK, situated adjacent to Bowers

Marsh. Although fi nancially modest compared to the

billions being spent elsewhere, as far as the RSPB is

concerned, the funding represented a small pot of gold.

‘Th is is an important partnership. We need commerce to

work with us, to appreciate the value brought by improving

these reserves and bringing them back to their full potential,’

says Donovan.

Th e funding enabled the RSPB to build a 3.6-kilometre

barrier fence to reduce predation; restore ditch networks

to support water voles, a priority conservation species

in Europe; and restore 175 hectares of wet grassland for

ground-nesting waders and wildfowl such as lapwing and

redshank, which have signifi cantly declined.

Th e work took place at the end of 2019 and wildlife has

rushed back: redshanks, avocets and lapwings have been

building nests and chicks have been hatching and fl edging.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ says Izzy. ‘I certainly didn’t expect it to

change that quickly. But because of the lack of predation and

the other work carried out, there are more waders nesting

in the grassland area than I’ve ever seen before. Industry

is ingrained in the Th ames, but wildlife can live alongside

it. People are waking up to their environment; people care

about the world they live in.’

Other river-bank projects due to receive funding include

land on the north bank at West Th urrock, where the salt

marsh is eroding, and a project on the eight islands that lie

in the river between Chiswick and Richmond, where black

poplars, a now-rare species that used to form woodlands on

fl oodplains, are due to be planted.

Meanwhile, the slow transformation of the South Essex

reserves is being followed with great interest by Ian White,

who has been an RSPB volunteer in the region for 11 years

and has lived on Canvey Island for 22. ‘Th is part of Essex

was and is riddled with rubbish dumps. But here on the

estuary, it’s a success story in terms of the transformation

of brownfi eld sites,’ he says. ‘Canvey Wick was at one time

destined to be a caravan park, then an oil refi nery, but it’s

ended up as a reserve. Now you can count the orchids in

their thousands.’

Th e key now is to continue the good work. ‘Th e

enthusiasm of those working for environmental and

conservation organisations looking to improve and restore

the banks of the Th ames Estuary makes me optimistic that

all that’s needed is a concerted eff ort and more funding,’ says

Professor Tim Stott of Liverpool John Moores University.

However, he also off ers a reminder that things can change,

particularly when water rises and fl ooding increases. ‘In

the 2013–14 fl ood season, the Th ames Barrier was closed

41 times for fl oods and nine times for high tides – fi gures

that I fi nd slightly alarming. Th e barrier was designed to last

until 2060–70, but I wonder if it will. I’m concerned that in

the coming decade, there will be increasing tension between

protecting London from fl ooding versus improving and

restoring the environment.’

RSPB

RU

TH

GIL

LIE

SR

SP

B

TUNNEL VISION

The Thames Tideway Tunnel, which

is due for completion in 2023, is

a super sewer the width of three

London buses that will pipe London’s

waste to Beckton Sewage Treatment

Works. The tunnel project came

about because of a 1991 EU Directive

that requires the UK to protect the

environment from waste-water

discharges. In 2012, the Court

of Justice of the European

Union found that the UK was in

breach of the directive, meaning

that the UK was, and still is, at risk of

fines if the problem isn’t addressed.

The tunnel faced objections from

councils concerned at the eff ect

of the 24 building sites involved in

its construction, and more broadly

from those concerned at the cost

and those who want to see greener

solutions to the pollution problem.

Nevertheless, in September 2014,

planning authorities approved

plans for the tunnel, having decided

that reworking the plan would

create unacceptable delays to the

resolution of the pollution problem.

EXPLORE TODAY’S GLOBAL

CHALLENGES. CREATE

SUSTAINABLE FUTURES.

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From climate change to sustainable development, from hazard and disaster management

to identities and social justice, our degree programmes enable you to develop your

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and Sustainability

Visit www.bathspa.ac.uk/open to find out more at our Autumn Open Days on 10 and 31 October, and 21 November 2020.

@bathspageog

SPOTLIGHT ON...

Sabah, Malaysia

The land around the Kinabatangan River in

the state of Sabah is home to a remarkable

number of charismatic species, but this very

abundance hints at the destruction beyond

by Mark Rowe

The best

known of all

Bornean

species,

orangutans

are under

serious threat

December 2020 • 47

The last

pocket of

abundance

SPOTLIGHT ON...

SABAH, MALAYSIA

Just as the light begins to fade, an orangutan appears, gathering leaves, twigs and small branches together; making a bed for the night. Once the sylvan hammock is constructed, it sits back, contemplates its work and unhurriedly rearranges everything, just so. It then settles into its creation, so that all that remains visible are two feet, an elbow sticking out and a scalp. It’s as though it has eased into a bath tub.

The Kinabatangan River flows for 560 kilometres through eastern Sabah – the Malaysian state that occupies the northern part of the island of Borneo – to the Sulu Sea. Its catchment covers 23 per cent of the entire land mass of Sabah and it flows across one of the last forested alluvial floodplains in Asia. This is an area of enormous importance for wildlife, one of just two places on Earth where ten primate species can be found together, including the orangutan, proboscis monkey and Bornean gibbon, along with 250 bird species, 20 reptile, 50 mammal and more than 1,000 plant species. In short, the Kinabatangan is astonishingly

Geographic location: Part of the island of

Borneo, between the South China Sea and the

Sulu Sea, 1,500km east of peninsular Malaysia

Latitude/Longitude: 5°9’N 116°E

Land area: 72,500 square kilometres

Habitat types: Mountainous regions, beaches,

tropical rainforest

Population: 3.9 million (2018), including 33

indigenous groups speaking more than 50

languages. The Kadazan-Dusun form the largest

ethnic group, representing 30 per cent of the

population. Chinese make up the largest non-

indigenous group.

Key species: Orangutan, sun bear, pygmy

elephant, proboscis monkey, Sumatran rhino

(functionally extinct), slow loris, oriental pied

hornbill and banteng

48 . Geographical

abundant. Troops of proboscis monkeys gather in the late afternoon, the alpha male sporting fur patterned in such a way that it looks as though it’s wearing a pair of patchwork pyjamas; macaque monkeys, entirely unbothered by humans, chew berries at the water’s edge; rhinoceros hornbills swoop from one side of the river to the other; yellow-ringed cat snakes doze.

At night, baby crocodiles snap at frogs, which furiously hop for their lives along the river bank. Mouse deer wander and wide-eyed tarsirs cling motionless to tree trunks. In the morning, sun bears emerge, standing on rear legs and methodically pulling at branches in the mangrove swamps.

The verdant backdrop to all of this activity – the emergent trees rising like periscopes above a thick, knotted mass of nipa palms, lianas and mangroves – feels as though it stretches away for hundreds of miles in each direction. But it doesn’t. Eastern Sabah has been so affected by the rampaging palm oil industry that this remnant rainforest now covers little more than a mile-wide strip on either side of the river. Within such a diminished range, it isn’t so surprising that wildlife is abundant – it has nowhere else to go. ‘It’s pretty bad. We’ve come to a point where palm oil has been catastrophic for wildlife and rainforest,’ says Michelle Desilets, executive director of the Orangutan Land Trust.

‘Oil palm plantations are responsible for a significant

By 2003, some

87 per cent of all

cultivated land

in Sabah was

under oil palm

INDONESIA

MALAYSIA

BORNEO

SABAH

BRUNEI

SOUTH CHINA

SEAKINABATANGAN

SABAH

MA L A Y S I A

December 2020 . 49

TIMELINE

c. 25,000 years BC

First evidence of

human settlement

in Sabah

1881–1942

Sabah (then North

Borneo) ruled by

the North Borneo

Chartered Company

1946

Becomes British

crown colony

1950s

Logging begins on

an industrial scale

1960s

Cash crops such as

tobacco, cocoa and

rubber develop

1963

Becomes part of

new independent

federation of

Malaysia; first

government

conservation body

established

1980s

Large-scale palm oil

plantations appear

percentage of deforestation – about half – in the state,’ adds Marc Ancrenaz, scientific director of the conservation NGO Hutan. ‘But it doesn’t explain all the issues. Poaching and human–wildlife conflicts are all factors.’ Habitat degradation and fragmentation also occur due to mining and quarrying, which account for 30 per cent of Sabah’s gross domestic product.

Sabah’s modern-day troubles began with the onset of logging during the 1950s. In a pattern seen in rainforests around the world, once the loggers had taken out what they needed, cash crop industries such as cocoa, tobacco, rubber and coffee moved into the cleared land. Large tracts were re-designated for permanent conversion to agriculture. ‘The native forests have been impacted by selective logging, fire and conversion to plantations at unprecedented scales since industrial-scale extractive industries began in the early 1970s,’ says Ancrenaz.

Incredibly, since these industries really took off, there has been no island-wide documentation of the forest clearances or logging. While this creates an information gap for conservation planning, satellite images gathered by NGOs have revealed that plantation industries have been the principal driver of deforestation. Over-harvesting, poor logging practices, short logging cycles and the absence of rehabilitation following harvesting resulted in an initial massive

The Bornean sun bear, known for its pale

horseshoe-shaped chest pattern, is the world’s

second-rarest bear, after the giant panda. It’s

also the smallest and most arboreal. The sun

bear population has declined by 30 per cent

since 1990 due to habitat destruction and

poaching; sun bears are targeted by hunters

for their gall bladders, which are popular in

Chinese medicine, and for the pet trade. As

well as dispersing seeds, sun bears dig for

invertebrates, which enriches the soil. Their

predilection for shredding tree bark also creates

nesting holes for hornbills and flying squirrels.

BORNEAN SUN BEAR

Conservationists broadly agree that, if the world

requires an edible oil to make everything from pizzas to

toothpaste to margarine, then palm oil is the least bad

option. As Michelle Desilets, executive director of the

Orangutan Land Trust, points out, to obtain the same

amount of oil from soybeans or coconuts you would

need between four and ten times more land, which

would just shift the problem to other parts of the world.

Another factor in favour of oil palms is that, unlike

many crops, or cattle ranching, they can thrive on poor

soil for cycles of up to 25 years before being replaced

on the same land with new oil palms – it’s not a case

of land becoming useless after just a handful of years.

This natural advantage provides the rationale behind

the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. To qualify

as ‘responsible’, oil palms must meet several criteria,

including a requirement that they generally be grown

on existing plantations and not on purpose-cleared

rainforest. Other mitigation measures include planting

legumes around the oil palms and using dead fronds of

old palms as soil coverings, a step that helps slow run-

off and erosion from heavy rains and returns nutrients

to the soil as they rot down.

PALM OIL: HERE TO STAY

50 . Geographical

reduction of primary forest cover in Sabah between 1975 and 1995, estimated at 2.8 million hectares. Were that not enough, since the 1980s, Sabah has been held in the firm grip of the palm oil industry and is now Malaysia’s largest palm-oil-producing state, accounting for a quarter of the nation’s 2019 production volume. By 2003, some 87 per cent of all cultivated land in Sabah was already under oil palm. Those pressures continue and while the economy is dominated by the export of palm oil, petroleum and cocoa, other sectors, including timber milling, agriculture, tourism and manufacturing, are ‘growing vastly’, according to the Sabah state government.

Oil palms and the palm oil they yield are much demonised, and often rightly so. Yet Sabah offers a typical example of the complexity of the issue. Oil palm cultivation is said to have played a significant role in poverty alleviation among smallholders and the rest of the rural population, with rates of poverty dropping from 68 per cent to 12 per cent between 1970 and the turn of the century. Since then, overall poverty in the state has further reduced to just 2.9 per cent in 2016.

Conservationists believe that a strategic long-term shift from oil palm is necessary, not only to boost biodiversity but to avoid an economic over-reliance, with all of the associated pitfalls. Alternative ways of

SPOTLIGHT ON...

SABAH, MALAYSIA

Rati quos in et, veleni

nia sum untio berro

eiur siminction nihicte

The only places on Earth you will find the Bornean

pygmy elephant are the forested areas in the south,

centre and east of Sabah, and parts of Indonesian

Borneo. Typically standing around 2.6 metres tall, they

are distinctly smaller than their mainland cousins. DNA

evidence suggests they were isolated from mainland

elephants around 15,000 years ago.

The last recorded count of pygmy elephants living

in the wild took place in 2010 and placed the number

at 2,040, a figure that’s now believed to be below

1,500. Human population growth and the expansion of

agriculture are the prime reasons for the decline – over

the past 40 years, Sabah has lost 60 per cent of its

elephant habitat to cultivation. The elephants are often

caught in illegal snares designed to catch small game.

In the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary, it’s

estimated that 20 per cent of elephants have suffered

injury from such snares.

‘Most of the former elephant habitat (flat lowlands,

floodplains and river valleys) is now oil palm plantation

and the herds are confined largely to marginal habitat

of low forested hills,’ says John Payne, executive director

of the Borneo Rhino Alliance (BORA). ‘The species is

breeding well but there is better habitat for them on

private lands than in protected areas, so they come out

and have conflict – although much less than you might

imagine – with people.’ One solution, he suggests, is to

improve habitat for elephants inside protected areas

by development of grasslands on degraded sites such

as old logging roads and burned areas.

BORNEO PYGMY ELEPHANT

The Borneo pygmy

elephant is only

found in Sabah and

parts of Indonesian

Borneo

December 2020 . 51

living need to be considered, says John Payne, executive director of the Borneo Rhino Alliance. ‘It may turn out to be necessary for many people outside urban areas to revert to old-style, small-scale farming of multiple crops. Sabah is less than 30 per cent self-suffi cient in rice because almost everyone currently fi nds it easier and cheaper to buy the government-subsidised rice imported from other countries.’

Such long-term thinking appears likely to stay on the ‘to-do’ list for a while yet. ‘It’s been easier to get a claim for a forest area and convert it – it’s cheap and

there are usually no overlapping claims,’ says Desilets. ‘When rainforest gets cleared, you wipe out 80 per cent of mammal species in the area.’ Species found in plantations tend to be generalist, non-forest species (including invasives) and pests, while specialists and those of highest conservation concern are generally absent. ‘Th ose that do survive are facing depleted resources and elephants and orangutans wander between the fragmented areas and become pests in the eyes of farmers,’ she adds.

Orangutan conservationists became acutely aware of the environmental impacts of the conversion of forests to oil palm several years ago when large numbers of the primates were suddenly reported in distressed situations. Th e designation of protected areas doesn’t always make a diff erence as most orangutans live outside such areas. By 2025, the orangutan population across Borneo is forecast to decline by up to 86 per cent from its 1973 population. Other species are arguably under even greater threat. Proboscis monkeys, while easily spotted, are regarded as being in steep decline, with their range now limited to the Kinabatangan fl oodplain and around Dewurst Bay. Th e banteng – a larger, wild version of domesticated cattle – is considered to be even more endangered (see box on page 52).

‘Th e oil palm industry is here to stay,’ says Desilets, ‘and it’s likely going to grow, so we need to make sure it doesn’t aff ect biodiversity. Calling for a boycott of all palm oil in places such as the EU, Australia or the USA would have a negligible impact on the production of it, as the greatest take-up is from countries such as India

A troop of proboscis

monkeys uses a makeshift

bridge to cross a river

There has been no island-

wide documentation

of forest clearances or

logging on Borneo

SPOTLIGHT ON...

SABAH, MALAYSIA

and China, which have less insistence on sustainability.’ She is, however, optimistic because she sees NGOs, ‘progressive companies’ and some government agencies coming together and pushing for sustainable or responsible palm oil.

Th e majority of protected areas in Sabah are owned by the state government. In 2019, the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Environment kickstarted eff orts to create a more robust state-wide wildlife policy in order to address the increasing threats facing wildlife. Th e previous year, the Sabah state government launched its Sabah Forest Policy, which aims to maintain at least 50 per cent of the state’s landmass under forest reserves and tree cover, and for 30 per cent of Sabah to be designated as totally protected areas by 2025. In 2015, Sabah launched a ten-year jurisdictional plan to deliver 100 per cent RSPO-certifi ed (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) oil by 2025. At the national level, last year, the Malaysian Minister of Primary Industries announced that the country was halting oil palm plantation expansion to ensure that Malaysia’s forest cover remains above 50 per cent, a moratorium that extended to Sabah.

While this is undoubtedly good news, it remains wise to be cautious, given shift ing political developments. ‘While there is a foundational policy framework in place in Sabah that supports biodiversity conservation, sustainable development and economic growth, the current political scenario is quite dynamic and may lead to erosion or non-implementation of such policies or even changes in priorities,’ says a spokeswoman for WWF Malaysia.

Yet, such moves are welcomed by Desilets and other campaigners, who hope they represent a meaningful shift towards long-term management, rather than fi refi ghting in the form of centres such as the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, which is Sabah’s best-known visitor attraction and, until recently, a draw for tens of thousands of visitors every year. ‘With all the will in the world, picking up orangutans and putting them in rescue centres is not a sustainable option in the long term,’ says Desilets. ‘It’s not going to happen overnight, but things are going in the right direction.’

NGOs still have a signifi cant role to play. Work by Hutan has included documenting how orangutans can adapt and survive in man-made landscapes and erecting orangutan bridges to help the primates traverse rivers where bankside deforestation makes it impossible. Hutan is also actively acquiring privately owned land to create forested corridors for wildlife.

Ultimately, however, meaningful laws need to be put in place to achieve change and meet such goals, says Payne. ‘Large land owners, mainly oil palm estates, need to be compelled by government policy to allocate small percentages of the land to restoration of habitat for some species. A few of these land owners are embracing the idea on a voluntary basis, but most aren’t. Th is will need to be done on a pre-planned, landscape scale, so the plant species planted are benefi cial and in the appropriate sites.’ In order to allow a wild population of orangutans to recover on the mixed oil palm–forest landscape, he adds, ‘their food supply has to be boosted

signifi cantly in order to raise carrying capacity of the species in the oil palm monoculture areas.’

Conservationists require paradoxical tactics, says Payne, whereby both urgency and patience are required. ‘We need to keep raising the bar slowly over the next few decades,’ he says, ‘and get things like restoring and managing wildlife habitat to become the new norm. We also have to wait patiently for the old guys to retire and die, and the younger managers, owners and shareholders to grow to accept this new norm.’

Rati quos in et, veleni

nia sum untio berro

eiur siminction nihicte

The most endangered species in Sabah is one that few

people have heard of. Now that the Sumatran rhino has

become functionally extinct in the state, the dubious title

belongs to the Bornean banteng, a species of wild bovid

endemic to the island. Land use changes over the past

100 years have driven a decline of the banteng, as a huge

human population increase and a shift from swidden (slash-

and-burn) farming to permanent crops has altered their

habitat. They are also subject to widespread poaching. The

few remaining herds have, over time, been isolated into

separate, highly inbred groups. They are already extinct in

neighbouring Brunei and Sarawak.

Banteng are an important part of the Sabah ecosystem:

their grazing controls tree growth, allowing plants to push

through; their dung fertilises the soil, thereby supporting

insects and animals further up the food chain such as birds.

‘They are on the path to extinction,’ says John Payne of

BORA. ‘The inbreeding issue and slowly declining small

herds can be addressed only by a combination of pastures

developed wherever herds still exist to boost habitat

carrying capacity and herd sizes, and by conservation.’

Payne believes a captive-breeding programme, similar

to that which brought the European bison back from the

brink, could reverse the animal’s fortunes, mix genomes and

boost numbers. ‘Unfortunately, there is a bizarre sentiment

nowadays against captive breeding of any endangered large

mammal species, including in the big conservation NGOs,

which are influenced by social media keyboard warriors,

so governments are now afraid to stick their neck out and

support captive breeding,’ says Payne. ‘It’s sad that fashions

in thinking are now contributing to their decline.’

BORNEAN BANTENG

The Bornean banteng,

little-known but

very endangered

52 . Geographical

The great energydivideDesign: Geoff Dahl

IN 2012, THE TOP

10%of earners received...

THE

22

1 BILLION

GLOBAL INCOME � WEALTH INEQUALITY

INEQUALITY OF ENERGY

CONSUMPTION

41%42%

47%54%

55%55%

21%

37%

22%of total wealth is

owned by just 1% of

the global population.

70%of total wealth is owned by just

10% of the global population.

Less than

2%of total wealth

is owned by the

bottom 50%

of the global

population.

The top 10% of global

consumers consume

~39%of total final energy.

In terms of vehicle

fuel, currently

The lowest

10% consume

~2%almost 20 times less.

WealthWealth (the value

of all the assets

owned by a

person) is even

more concentrated

than income.

IncomeIncome inequality has

increased in nearly all

world regions in recent

decades, although at

diff erent speeds.

of national

income

richest men

have more

wealth than

all the women

in Africa.

people still don’t have

access to electricity.

Inequality in income and

wealth are only one measure

of global inequality. It’s well

established that a minimum

level of energy consumption

is required to enable decent

well-being; however, many

people fall short.

187xmore energy is

used by the top

10% of consumers

relative to the

bottom 10%.

Roughly

Sources: World Inequality Report 2018;Oswald, Y., Owen, A. & Steinberger, J.K. Large inequality in international and intranational energy footprints between income groups and across consumption categories. Nat Energy 5, 231–239 (2020)

GEO-GRAPHIC

54 . Geographical

52%of the emissions added to

the atmosphere between

1990 and 2015.

15%of emissions added to the atmosphere

between 1990 and 2015 – more than

all the citizens of the EU and more

than twice that of the poorest

half of humanity.

7%of the emissions added to the

atmosphere between 1990

and 2015.

The richest

10%of the world’s

population (630

million people)

accounted for

The richest

1%of the world’s

population were

responsible for

The poorest

50%of humanity (3.1 billion

people) produced only

INEQUALITYOF EMISSIONS

HOW TO LOWER EMISSIONS WITHOUT INCREASING

INEQUALITY?

Inequality in the amount

of energy consumed

means that some people

and nations produce far

fewer CO2 emissions than

others and are therefore

less responsible for global

warming and climate change.

Some studies have suggested that if we increase the living standards of the poor by raising energy consumption, we will hamstring eff orts to meet climate goals. But other researchers have demonstrated that by lowering the consumption of the very top consumers (through taxes and bans) we can both lower emissions and tackle poverty.

In a 2017 study, a global team of researchers demonstrated that the potential for climate change mitigation through the reduction of emissions of one billion high emitters is far greater than the threat of granting the poorest 2.7 billion the basic level of emissions that comes with decent living standards.

In the study, decent living standards for all meant granting every person an allowance of one ton of CO2

per year in emissions (an amount roughly consistent with the UN Millennium Development Goals and an amount that 2.7 billion people currently fall below). According to the authors, this allowance could be put in place while also achieving a 30% cut in global emissions by 2030, as long as a corresponding cap on emissions for the top 1.3 billion highest emitters is implemented. The cap (set at 9.6 tons of CO2) would still be vastly higher than the amount required for basic necessities.

More than a third of the emissions

of the richest one per cent –

people with a net annual income

above US$109,000 – were linked

to citizens in the USA, with the next

biggest contributions from citizens

of the Middle East and China.

100% OF GLOBAL EMISSIONS

100%OF GLOBAL EMISSIONS

100% OF GLOBAL EMISSIONS

52% OF GLOBAL EMISSIONS

15%OF EMISSIONS

7%OF EMISSIONS

Chakravarty, S. et al. Sharing global CO2emission reductions among one billion high emitters. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA

106, 1–5 (2009)

December 2020 . 55

GEOGRAPHICAL

REVIEWSBOOK OF

THE MONTH

MAGDALENA

River of Dreams

by Wade Davis

• Penguin RandomHouse

Here is a towering revelation of the magnificent, tragic country of Colombia. One of the most biologically rich and most diverse states in the world and yet, throughout its turbulent history, it has been ravaged by savage conflict and rapacious commercial abuse, culminating in La

Violencia, the period of violence that lasted for ten years from 1948 to 1958. During that time, 200,000 people died horribly, two per cent of the population, only to be followed by 50 years of guerrilla kidnappings and drug wars that devastated the nation.

It would be easy to give up on somewhere that has suffered so dreadfully, both socially and environmentally. Yet Davis manages this complex story brilliantly, mixing his knowledge of environmental complexity with a historian’s grasp of the big picture. The perceptions of some of the great naturalists, including Alexander von Humboldt, are introduced to parallel some of the most horrendous examples of man’s inhumanity to man, especially the intense cruelty perpetrated on the indigenous people during the rubber boom. Throughout, Davis’s deep understanding and affection for the people and the environment sweep the reader along.

At one point, he quotes Humboldt: ‘Nature is one great republic of freedom. Everything is interconnected.’ The great central river of Colombia, the Magdalena of the title, is successfully used as the thread to tie this epic story together. Once the lifeblood of the nation, today it’s desperately polluted with human and industrial waste, and dark with the silt from deforestation. It looks beyond hope of salvation, but, as with the country itself, extraordinary resilience is revealed.

Here, Gabriel García Marquez, Colombia’s greatest writer, is quoted as saying that the river has been transformed from paradise to wasteland, but ‘forests can be grown back and animals be reclaimed, even from the abyss of extinction’.

Magdalena is littered with astonishing stories, often recorded first-hand by those who experienced them, of reconciliation and forgiveness. These tales are cleverly woven together so as to contrast the depths of human failings and cruelty with the richness of the natural world. Some of the descriptions of the torture

and other atrocities suffered by the inhabitants of this diverse nation are the stuff of nightmares. Yet Davis manages to switch between horror and grace with a flowing narrative that echoes the flow of the river.

Magdalena is also full of detailed information on so many subjects of which I, myself, am woefully ignorant. Davis’s eclectic range of interests, each scrupulously researched, range from lyrical descriptions of the immensely varied wildlife, plant life and insect life to music, myth and troubled history. For example, we learn that the great liberator of South America from Spanish rule, Simón Bolívar, did much of his campaigning and fighting up and down the Magdalena. A contemporary of Napoleon, he liberated for all time lands far greater than Bonaparte’s continental empire, which endured for but a decade while Bolívar’s legacy continues, for better or worse.

Humboldt became a close friend and advisor of Bolívar’s when they spent time together in Paris in 1804. As a result, he was, as Davis writes, ‘perhaps the only major revolutionary hero whose political ideology was fundamentally informed by natural history. He did not distinguish between the destiny of nations and the fate of nature’. If only some of the world’s most powerful leaders today would adopt the same approach!

Davis asserts that the relationship between Humboldt and Bolívar is key to the story of Colombia. Bolivar himself asked, before embarking on his great liberating campaign, how could a continent ‘so abundantly endowed… be kept so desperately oppressed and passive?’ In victory, he

declared before Congress: ‘Nature is the infallible teacher of men.’

Could politicians and scientists not come together in the same way today to deal with the current looming apocalypse? Instead of the senseless violation of nature, inspired by greed, might we not take a cue from Bolívar and make environmental protection a symbol of national pride rather than a political issue? It manifestly hasn’t worked in South America so far, but the heroic optimism that shines through this book and the people we meet in its pages give a glimmer of hope that, as we face the very real possibility of the extinction of life as we know it, we might come to our senses. ROBIN HANBURY-TENISON

The great central river of

Colombia is successfully

used as the thread to tie

this epic story together

56 • Geographical

December 2020 • 57

SIGNS OF LIFE

To the Ends of the

Earth with

a Doctor

by Stephen Fabes

• Pursuit Books

It’s a hazard of this job: reading

about adventurers so determined, so awe-inspiring, that one’s own at-home workouts start to feel truly pathetic. This has never been truer than on reading Signs of Life by Stephen Fabes, a man who chose to cycle not one continent, not two, but all of them (minus Antarctica, which even he decided was a stretch).

In this account of his six-year adventure, Fabes sweeps through countries as if they were counties, displaying a pretty astonishing appetite

for discomfort, heat, wind, cold, bugs and curious onlookers. If his lack of preparation seems a little too extreme to be believable, his general air of relaxed determination feels genuine. Here’s someone who, without any history of extreme fitness, really did come up with a mad plan and one day decided to carry it out, trusting that the task itself would build the required athleticism. Often humorous in the light of this madness, Fabes recounts his remarkable adventure without any sense of ego.

Many of the most poignant parts of the book come as a result of Fabes’s pre-adventure (and post-adventure) career as a medical doctor. As the trip wears on and Fabes begins to crave a deeper sense of connection to the places and people he meets, he visits health centres and programmes in different countries, discovering that

while resources may differ, disease really is a human leveller. If there is an overarching theme to Signs of Life, it’s this similarity among peoples. All children, it turns out, will run after a bike and possibly throw things at it; all border guards will act aggressive before handing over food (at least for a white Englishman on a bike they will).

So, too, do Fabes’s personal struggles stand-out, particularly as he nears the end of his quest. After all, how do you replicate the adrenaline rush of camping wild in Mongolia or crossing a desert known for hiding warring tribes? This is something Fabes struggles with as he nears home and perhaps still struggles with today. And, while the context isn’t exactly relatable given its extremity, this external search for meaning certainly is.KATIE BURTON

THE FRAYED

ATLANTIC EDGE

A Historian’s Journey

From Shetland to

the Channel

by David Gange

• William Collins

When David Gange returned to his fourth-floor office after a year of kayaking around the Atlantic coast of Britain, he noticed a heightened awareness of the characteristics of the urban society to which he’d returned. He prickled at attempts towards a managerial ethos where standardisation is ‘assumed to be a universal good and any independence or eccentricity must

be fought for’. He felt intensely the ‘contrast between my urban life and the power of locality I’d witnessed in communities I’d travelled through’.

Over the course of the year, Gange’s trip took him through sun and storms, past whales and seabirds, and among communities and histories as diverse as the coves he toured. Along the way, he met and heard stories about individuals from Shetland and Orkney, the Western Isles, Ireland, Wales and Cornwall. These many encounters led him to suspect that interpretations of traditional narratives can get landlocked, or ‘London-locked’. Our nation has become defined by its cities.

Gange believes that ‘recovering the

voices of the small-scale fisherman, the coastal crofter and the leaders of threatened communities are among the best methods we have of building histories that aren’t triumphalist propaganda for the events that created the problems of our present’. In defiance of an ill-fitting urban culture, he finds coastal places in which ‘inspirational individuals proved capable of rousing communities in celebration of locality and littleness’.

The thrilling and thoughtful book that results from Gange’s windswept, nerve-wracking adventure sets out to demonstrate how crucial Atlantic geographies still are. And it succeeds. ELIZABETH WAINWRIGHT

Stephen Fabes’s bike

rests on the ice

REVIEWS

58 • Geographical

WRITER’SREADS

Stephen Fabes is a medical doctor

who uses human stories to explore

the landscape of health and disease. In

2016, he arrived home, having cycled

the length of six continents.

River Town

by Peter Hessler (2001)

Hessler’s sensitive account of his time as a Peace

Corps volunteer teaching on the banks of the Yangtze

River is all the more revealing when he shares his

students’ hopes, fears and pointed silences.

Dispatches from Pluto

by Richard Grant (2015)

With his yoga-practising liberal girlfriend in tow,

Grant moves to deepest Mississippi, a state that

tops league tables for all the wrong reasons. And yet

despite signs of social dysfunction, he develops an

unexpected and requited love for his new home.

In Trouble Again

by Redmond O’Hanlon (1988)

Some may consign this to the ‘doofus does’ school of

travel writing, but when a bumbling naturalist heads

into remote Venezuelan Amazonia, the resulting

misadventure is far too funny, passionate and heart

thumping to write off.

Coasting: A Private Voyage

by Jonathan Raban (1987)

An elegant travelogue of a man and his 32-foot

ketch, sailing 4,000 miles around the British coast.

Raban’s interests – the swirling sea and the national

psyche – combine beautifully with entertaining

cameos from Paul Theroux and Philip Larkin.

Lands of Lost Borders

by Kate Harris (2018)

Kate cycles the Silk Road with childhood friend

Mel. There’s an intellectual voyage here, too – an

open-minded meditation on borders.

Indonesia etc

by Elizabeth Pisani (2014)

Like all the most adept wandering writers, Elizabeth

will nose around, undaunted, chatting with anyone

willing. This attitude, along with an eye for the

absurd, makes this a particularly enjoyable survey of

some of the little-known lands of Indonesia.

Interstate

by Julian Sayarer (2016)

On an impromptu hitchhike across the USA,

heading west like many before him, Julian looks to

people to understand a nation.

Alan Partridge: Nomad

by Neil Gibbons et al. (2016)

A send-up of all the worst adventurer tropes, Alan

follows in his father’s footsteps, an ‘odyssey’ from

Norwich to a nuclear reactor in Kent.

IRREPLACEABLE

The Fight to Save Our Wild Places

by Julian Hoffman

• Hamish Hamilton

Nature and place aren’t mutually exclusive ideas.

‘Both are critically necessary to the flourishing

of human and wild communities,’ writes Julian

Hoffman, author of the superb Irreplaceable, which

was shortlisted for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for writing on

global conservation.

According to an Italian study, during starling

murmurations, each bird’s orientation and velocity has

been found to calibrate to the seven birds closest to it.

Imperceptible calculations and adjustments ripple out to

create a graceful, swarming whole. Each small role is essential

for collective beauty. This is mirrored in Irreplaceable, in

which we hear about the small roles, the minor voices and

places that are essential for the collective countering of

creeping loss – of habitats, of species, of the relationships

between people and place.

In 2017, a National Trust study called ‘Places that make

us’ found that personally significant places spark a greater

emotional resonance than valued objects. In a material

culture, and with increasing uniformity in both urban

and rural settings, this finding is striking. Hoffman was

determined to explore place and ‘explore loss in a way that

wasn’t simply elegiac but defiant’. He travels to places known

to be significant to people and communities – on the Hoo

Peninsula in Kent; in woodland north of Sheffield; in India;

in Indonesia; on urban allotments and open prairies; among

landscapes of lynx and nightingales and coral. In each

place, he listens to stories of conservation – from grassroots

groups, professional ecologists and academics. The love and

knowledge he finds is tangible, as is the call to arms in the

face of the destruction of nature.

Irreplaceable is a love letter to habitats and species,

and an account of the ties between humans and wildlife.

Understanding these ties lessens the hopelessness that can

come when considering the state of nature. Hoffman shines a

light on what we still have to lose – and how we might combine

the best of people and place to make sure we don’t.

ELIZABETH WAINWRIGHT

A magical murmuration

of starlings

December 2020 • 59

A pigeon takes a rest on

the Empire State Building

ANTARCTIC ATLAS

New Maps and Graphics That Tell

the Story of a Continent

by Peter Fretwell

• Particular Books

As a geospatial scientist at the British Antarctic Survey for the past 18 years, Peter Fretwell is well qualified to write about and produce maps of Antarctica. In fact, he has spent the past five years doing just that, making more than 70 new maps of the continent for this book – although they represent just a fraction of the 2,000 or so he has produced over the course of his career.

The maps on offer here are designed to be engaging, providing an original thematic representation of the continent’s history, people, fauna and ocean systems, as well as its geography, geology, its sheer scale and its future.

From simple geographic maps that depict the continent’s shape, regions and temperature; graphic representations of its size in comparison to other countries; and much more complex portrayals of ice volume, ice flow, rock formation and the depth and location of ice cores extracted for scientific purposes, the book provides a picture of a troubled but beautiful continent in constant motion.

Travelling back in time, there are maps that reflect Antarctica’s formation, as various other bits of land break away to forge their own paths, as well as maps that fast-forward to a time in which the ice has melted and coastlines around the world have been inundated. Particular favourites include the map dotted with the faces of different penguin species and the maps that focus on the geopolitical concerns of nations interested in exploiting the Antarctic’s riches or laying claim to its territory.

This is a full guide to the continent that has for so long fascinated humanity, with more than enough detail to make it appropriate for a serious geographer, but also enough graphics and clarity to entertain anyone looking for an excuse to bone up on all things snow and ice. KATIE BURTON

VESPER FLIGHTS

by Helen Macdonald

• Jonathan Cape

To many birds, the Empire State Building is a curious construction. Some interpret it as a cliff: peregrine falcons use the behemoth as a convenient perch during high-flying hunts. Migrating birds such as yellow-backed warblers and black-crowned night herons have to rise a little higher to clear it annually. Others are more unlucky: hundreds of songbirds die each year by clattering into it.

For a select group of birdwatchers, the building offers an excellent perch from which to watch annual migrations. And, for Helen Macdonald, scenes such as these are a lens through which to explore the interface between humans and nature. Her latest book, Vesper Flights, dives right to the core of a fractious but often elevating relationship. Do these passionate birdwatchers best define humanity’s relationship with nature? Or, is it better represented by the answering machines of the city’s pest controllers, inundated with requests to remove songbirds from high-rise balconies?

In Vesper Flights, Macdonald exercises the same eye that saw H is for Hawk become a classic of nature writing. In the latter, she set about fulfilling a childhood dream of training her own goshawk, this intimate connection becoming caught up in the deep grief she felt after the death of her father. In the former, nature is once again tied up with human emotions. She sees the natural world as a limitless source of intrigue – a compendium of insight that shapes her perceptions of humanity and society. Her own fear of oncoming migraines becomes a metaphor for climate change denial; starling murmurations reflect the voyages of refugees; and the supernal warp of light from a solar eclipse becomes a tool to unify society through transcendence. To Macdonald, the natural world can be a levelling influence at a time when we need it most.

The horror of WWF’s Living Planet Report, which pointed to a 68 per cent decline in global vertebrate species populations between 1970 and 2016, struck a deep chord, felt across generations. Although conservation programmes across the world are becoming more data-driven and objective, our willingness to let nature truly thrive will be drawn from a more primal appreciation of its wonder. Macdonald’s work opens eyes to this side of the debate. JACOB DYKES

60 . Geographical

GEO PHOTOGRAPHER

MATTHEW MARAN

It’s all too easy to overlook the beauty that exists on our doorsteps. When nature documentaries highlight the stunning deltas of southern Africa or the coral reefs of the Pacific, an English allotment can feel drab. But, as nature photographer Matthew Maran discovered, looking closer to home can bring extraordinary results.

‘As a wildlife photographer, you often think you have to go far away,’ says Matthew. ‘But in two out of the last three Wildlife Photographer of the Year competitions, I’ve had images of foxes placed, close to home, ten minutes walk from my house.’

This year, Matthew’s image of a fox grasping an alarmingly large rat saw him scoop a highly commended award in the prestigious annual competition, but it was really chance that led him to focus on these wily night-prowlers of London streets. ‘I always knew that I wanted to focus on one animal, but I didn’t think, “Oh, I’m definitely going to do foxes”. It was

just a chance encounter. On Boxing Day 2016, I walked with my partner up the street, close to Turnpike Lane Station, and there were two foxes just fighting in the middle of a green, up on their haunches. I started going back over and over and over, and then about a year later, I got access to the allotment where they live. That was when I really started to get more deeply involved and learn about the family structure.’

As with any wildlife photography, getting the best shots of this family involved a certain amount of patience. ‘Something that I say when giving advice to young photographers is to find a location that you can go back to over and over again. There’s no secret to it. I’ve got images in my head; sometimes they come off, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you rely on a bit of spontaneity, like that picture of the fox with the rat. I could never plan for such a picture. But I was in the right place at the right time and that was just by going there. When you get a situation like that, you have to just make sure that you react

They live among usquickly, that your settings are all in the right place. There’s a bit of hope involved as well, especially with explosive action and behaviour, that the fox is going to be in the frame the way you want. Other shots that I’ve got have been more constructed and I use a remote trigger and two flashes.’

Sometimes, however, no amount of equipment can make nature play ball. ‘I’ve been trying to get pictures of foxes coming back to the den with food in their mouth to feed their young. I’ve completely failed. But if the vixen does have cubs in the same place this year, then I will have all that experience of failure and hopefully I can get it.’

For Matthew, it’s this constant interaction with one place, and one group of animals, that allows him to tell a meaningful story and reveal the diversity of wild creatures that, from a fleeting glance (the most we usually get), look so similar. By gaining the trust of the animals he has also become

more acquainted with the constant danger that underpins their lives. ‘I’m particularly attached to one vixen, the first one I saw fighting. She’s still around to this day, which is extraordinary because the average lifespan of a fox in the city is only 18 months. Most of them get hit by cars or perhaps starve. Mange is still a big killer; they could eat poison, rodenticide. So it’s a tough life for urban foxes. I saw one with a cut off plastic bottle over its head.’

‘You don’t have to be hard hitting as a photographer,’ Matthew continues. ‘And you shouldn’t be pressured to be hard hitting but, at the same time, if you’re photographing the natural world, as a photographer you do have a responsibility. With my fox work, I’m trying to educate people about foxes, to show that they’re just living among us and trying to make a living, just like us. If I can change a few hearts and minds with my work, then I feel that, as a photographer, that’s a success.’

FOX MEETS FOX

MM: Six months in the making, I dreamt of catching this photograph. After many failed attempts throughout the winter, a little bit of luck, lighter spring evenings and my persistence paid off

FOX DRINKING FROM A WATER TROUGH

MM: Foxes choose their homes wisely and an allotment with a year-round supply of water is the reason they can often be found living there. I used a twin flash set up and remote triggers to capture this fox drinking at night

December 2020 . 61

INSPIRATION

MM: Sebastião Salgado, Don McCullin and a French photographer called Vincent Munier. He was a regular winner in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year. His photography is exquisitely beautiful: lots of stuff in the Arctic, lots of stuff in snow. It’s just instantly recognisable.

PURPOSE

MM: Without question, photography is powerful, but not on its own. If you’re trying to support a conservation campaign, then it’s a team effort. That would mean that your images are put together as a story or alongside good science and well-written text. It’s basically a tool for communication.

ADVICE

MM: Make life easy for yourself. Particularly now, in the time of the pandemic, you almost have to start in your own back garden or balcony. Go to your local park and photograph one tree over the course of the year and I guarantee, by the end of it, you’ll have 10–20 really nice pictures of that tree.

THE RAT GAME

MM: This rare behaviour was one of the most exhilarating experiences over the past four years and possibly of my photographic career. When a fox exploded from the bushes with a rat in its mouth, I couldn’t believe my luck. A tug-of-war game commenced, with each fox wanting a piece of the rat. My goal was to stay cool within all of the commotion and keep the subject focused and in the frame

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GEOPHOTO

GALLERY

December 2020 . 63

Earth PhotoEarth Photo is a

competition and

exhibition developed

jointly by Forestry

England and the Royal

Geographical

Society (with IBG).

Here, shortlisted

photographs across

five categories –

People, Place,

Nature, Changing

Forests and A Climate

of Change – help us to

better understand the

world around us

Işık Kaya

Second Nature (2020)

Işik Kaya focuses on human

impacts on the landscape. By

framing subjects exclusively

at night, she tries to uncover

the uncanny atmospheres

and qualities caused by

urbanisation. This image,

from the series Second

Nature, was taken in southern

California, where camouflaged

communication and

surveillance infrastructure has

started to fill the city. The first

antenna was transformed into

an artificial pine tree in 1992

by a company called Larson

Camouflage, which has also

worked with Disney.

GEOPHOTO

GALLERY

64 . Geographical

Sophie Bartlett

Flora Sample (2019)

Sophie Bartlett is an emerging environmental artist who focuses

primarily on the impact of pollution, especially that which is a

product of mass tourism. She is currently on an artistic residency

in Cusco, Peru. Flora Sample is from a series of photographs

that explore the most resilient aspects of nature. Here, lamp light

allows flowers to grow far from sunlight, 150 feet underground in a

developed cave system.

December 2020 . 65

Roberto Bueno

Life, A Thin Line 2 (2019)

Roberto Bueno’s love of nature began at a young age and was shaped by regular

forays into Las Sierras de Béjar y Francia biosphere reserve near his home in

Salamanca province in western Spain. His images reflect nature’s constant destruction

at humanity’s hands and he hopes that they will help others to become aware of

that degradation. In Life, A Thin Line 2, a raised road divides green, fresh water from a

reservoir of toxic ochre-coloured mining waste water.

Jonk

Coffee Shop, Abkhazia (2019)

Jonk is a self-taught freelance photographer whose work focuses on humans and their

relationship with nature. His images are taken to raise awareness of the ecological crisis

that faces humanity. Fascinated by abandoned places that have been reclaimed by

nature, in 2018 he published Naturalia: A Chronicle of Contemporary Ruins. Far from

being pessimistic, and at a time when human domination of nature has never been so

extreme, his images are designed to awaken our ecological consciousness. Nature is

stronger, so whatever happens to humans, nature will always be there, he says.

66 . Geographical

GEOPHOTO

GALLERY

December 2020 . 67

Yanrong Guo

Untitled (2019)

This image was taken in the Daliang

Mountains, in the south of China’s

Sichuan province. Rising above the left

bank of the Jinsha (Upper Yangtze)

River, the range’s name means ‘Great

Cool Mountains’. The surrounding

region is famed for its visually stunning

lakes and mountains. It’s also home

to the largest population of the

Austroasiatic Yi or Nuosuo people,

the seventh largest of the 55 ethnic

minority groups officially recognised by

the People’s Republic of China. Close

to nine million Yi are found across

China, Vietnam and Thailand, often in

mountainous regions.

68 . Geographical

GEOPHOTO

GALLERY

Dong Min

Back from Fishing (2020)

A fisherman carries his net across a mudflat in Xiapu in the north-eastern part of China’s Fujian

province. The oldest county in eastern Fujian, Xiapu’s long coastline, shallow sea, sandy beaches

and beautiful mudflats are increasingly popular with nature photographers.

Jacopo Pasotti

A Resilient Innovation (2018)

Jacopo Pasotti presents innovative

climate-smart agricultural solutions

to the problem of decreasing land

productivity, telling stories of resilient

farmers coping with environmental

change. An estimated 40 per cent

of agricultural land in Bangladesh

will be lost by 2080 due to sea-level

rise. Floating vegetable gardens in

which crops are grown in soilless

platforms constructed from locally

available materials have been

proposed as one way to deal with

the problem. Aquatic plants and

straw are woven together to create

a platform on which crops are

planted. Leafy vegetables, okra,

gourds, aubergines, pumpkins

and onions thrive on the floating

gardens. Each raft lasts for around

three months before being hauled

ashore, broken down and used to

fertilise land-based crops. Farmers

are now teaching the method to

others in the region.

December 2020 . 69

Li Ming

Gathering Stones in the Sand (2020)

Li Ming’s photographic subjects range from landscapes and people

to wildlife and environmental change. He began to experiment

with aerial photography in April 2018 and has since won numerous

national and international awards, including twice winning the Top

Ten Chinese Photographers in the World competition, in 2018 and

2019. In this image, taken during the drought season in northern

Bangladesh, people excavate the bank of a river in order to collect

rocks for use in construction.

70 . Geographical

GEOPHOTO

GALLERY

Javier Clemente Martinez

Potosí Mines (Since 1545) (2020)

The mines of Potosí, in present-day Bolivia, have

been producing silver since the 16th century.

Dug into 4,800-metre-high Cerro Rico de Potosí,

they were first worked by indigenous and African

slaves, and the silver they produced contributed

to the wealth of the Spanish Empire and the rest

of Europe during the colonisation of the Americas.

The city of Potosí still lives in the shadow of Cerro

Rico (‘Rich Mountain’) and the exploitation of the

many miles of mine shafts continues to form

the basis of the local economy. Two centuries

after declaring independence from Spain, Bolivia

has failed to put in place measures to protect

the almost 15,000 workers, including children,

who continue to work in the mines. Although

women have long worked alongside men,

they are considered to bring bad luck, leading

to differences in remuneration and a lack of

knowledge about mining work. As a result, many

have chosen to leave the shafts and engage

instead in open-pit mining.

Tamara Stubbs

Crabeater Seals Napping (2019)

© Atlantic Productions

Tamara Stubbs is a photographer, aerial cinematographer and documentary

sound recordist. She recently travelled with expeditions to all of the world’s

oceans, including visits to both 80° north and south of the Equator. Crabeater

seals rely on the now-dwindling Antarctic sea ice to feed, rest and escape

predators. This pair sleeps unaware of the changes that will shape their future.

The Earth Photo 2020 exhibition is

now open online. Visit www.rgs.org/

geography/earth-photo-2020/ to see all

of the selected images and videos. Overall

winners will be announced in December

P020

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CAN WE PREDICT CLIMATE MIGRATION?

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EARTH PHOTO: THE SHORTLIST

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72 . Geographical

1It has an estimated 3,000 castles:

one for every 100 square miles

2 The unicorn is the official animal

3 It contains more than 600 square miles of freshwater lakes

4 Its land area is around double that of Bhutan

5Its coastline is about 11,000 miles long

Find the answer online at geog.gr/where-world

or in next month’s issue!

Where in the world?

Identify this country usingthe following clues:

November answer:

Stepantsminda, Georgia

QUIZ

Xxxx 2000 . 999

1 2 3 4 5 6 71 8

1 1 1 1 1 11

9 10 1 111

1 1 1 1 1 1 11

12 13 1 14

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 11

15 16 1 17 18

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 11 1

19 20 1 21 22 23

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 11

24 1 25 26

1 1 1 1 1 1 11

27 1 28 29 301

1 1 1 1 1 11

31 321

NOVEMBER CROSSWORD SOLUTION

ACROSS

1 Tiramisu 5 Stupor 9 Achilles 10 Tuareg 12 Coal 13 Restful

17 Inaccurate 19 Wet 21 Guy 22 Charioteer 24 Ranches 25 Mail

28 Hamlet 30 Carthage 31 Red Sea 32 Viennese

DOWN

1 Tsar 2 Ruhr 3 Mallorca 4 Shell 6 Thurso 7 Par 8 Regulators

11 Crater 14 Fawkes 15 King Arthur 16 Banyan 18 Rehash

20 Coniston 23 Cheese 25 Miami 26 Fare 27 Nene 29 Mud

Download your entry at:

geog.gr/cross_word or simply fill

in and cut out the grid above. Send

your entry to the editorial address

on page four, marked ‘December

crossword’. Entries close 21

December. The first correctly

completed crossword selected

at random wins a copy of the

Philip’s Essential World Atlas,

a comprehensive hardback

atlas worth £25. For details,

visit www.octopusbooks.co.uk

WIN

CROSSWORD

ACROSS

1 It’s lace designed in central Spanish region (7)

5 Despite these imperfections, flees to the West? (7)

9 It’s not a rebuilt Euston, for example (7)

10 Some provincial French wine (3)

11 Decay initiates Reign of Terror (3)

12 Charged President with misconduct:

‘Revolutionary Che paid me’ (9)

14 and 23 down Signals price crash in Australian

town (5,7)

15 Penal amendment here in the Himalayas? (5)

17 Unexpectedly, Stevie and Ann are natives of

an Italian city (9)

19 New sidesmen, including Oscar, in state capital (3,6)

21 Company has merged – complete confusion! (5)

24 Unusual heron on European river (5)

25 Last of squadron, flyer, including group leader,

and another crew member (9)

27 Unwell, I get 50/50 (3)

28 Oddly smarmy America uncle (3)

29 Close working relationship, as in oil, perhaps (7)

31 Seeing changes to section header in early book (7)

32 I leave premises remodelled for Joséphine,

maybe (7)

DOWN

1 and 2 In a space as wild as this large landlocked

salt lake (7,3)

3 Back in Alcatraz, I bill it as ‘party island’! (5)

4 Dine out unusually beside hotel cooker in

Netherlands city (9)

5 Leader of druids keen to become Welsh saint (5)

6 Facts ain’t mutable? Great! (9)

7 Territorial Army leaves Costa Rica in disarray

for Mediterranean island (7)

8 Comfy seats fixed on English river! (7)

13 Type of music initially played on piano? (3)

16 Big cats, strangely noiseless (9)

18 Roughly shaven, 27, in country music centre (9)

19 Aff ectionate term for an Australian river (7)

20 German cake taken without permission, and

left inside (7)

22 Pass one in Parliament to start active climate

talks? (3)

23 See 14 across

25 French city with minimal guests in the centre (5)

26 Take a firm hold of good file (5)

30 Perceive scene regularly (3)

December 2020 . 73

72 • Geographical74 • Geographical

This Christmas, why not give the gift of inspiration and encouragement to the geography enthusiast in your life? With gift membership of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), you can unlock a wealth of geographical knowledge and understanding for your loved one.

In these uncertain times, geography helps us to address the world’s most pressing issues, from climate change and global pandemics, to racial inequalities and sustainable development. And with a gift membership of the Society, you get to give a year’s worth of access to expert opinions, cutting edge research fi ndings, and countless sources of inspiration. Members can attend our renowned Monday night lectures – which are live

IN SOCIETY RGS-IBG MEMBERSHIP

Give the gift of membership

Ordinary Membership is

the perfect present for

geography enthusiasts

of any age.

This includes:

print and

digital editions of

Geographical

access to Monday

night lectures

third party discounts

Young Geographer

membership is designed

for those aged 14 to 24.

This includes:

digital edition of

Geographical

access to Monday

night lectures and

all our educational

resources

third party discounts

WHICH GIFT MEMBERSHIP IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

streamed so you can watch from wherever you are. Th ey can also browse our library of event recordings, featuring hundreds of geographical talks, lectures, and panel discussions. In addition, members receive a discount on our public events as well as on books and kit bought from Cotswold Outdoors and Stanfords.

And from January, Ordinary Members will receive the digital edition of Geographical, our monthly magazine full of geographical news and stunning photography, as well as the print edition. Th e digital edition includes access to the entire Geographical archive, going back to the 1930s, and ensures you’re able to read the current issue on the day it is published.

Young Geographers receive the digital edition of Geographical. Th ey can also access all of the Society’s educational resources – including podcasts, animations and case studies to support the geography curriculum – as well as the full range of our online journals.

By giving the gift of membership, you are directly supporting our wide range of charitable activities that support geography and geographers. Our broad range of infl uence, from geography in schools and universities, to its application in the workplace and in policymaking, would simply not be possible without our members.

You can fi nd full details of gift membership on our website, at www.rgs.org/gi� . If you have any questions about gift membership, or Society membership in general, please contact us at membership@rgs.org.

From everyone here at the Society, we wish you a very merry Christmas!

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March 2018 • 73December 2020 • 75

IN SOCIETY

RGS-IBG EVENTS

ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY (WITH IBG)SELECTION OF EVENTS FOR DECEMBER

Wednesday 2 December, 6.30pm-

7.30pm

Where the Animals Go – James

Cheshire

(Lecture, online)

Where the Animals Go is the first book

to off er a comprehensive, data-driven

portrait of how creatures such as ants,

otters, owls, turtles, and sharks navigate

the world. Based on pioneering

research by scientists at the forefront of

the animal-tracking revolution, James

Cheshire and Oliver Uberti’s stunning,

four-colour charts and maps tell

fascinating stories of animal behaviour.

Venue: Online

Tickets: £5, free for RGS-IBG members.

geog.gr/rgs-JamesCheshire

Monday 7 December, 6.30pm

Behind the line: Two weeks in North

Korea

(Lecture, online)

Join us for this Monday night lecture

to hear how Sir Michael Palin and his

team overcame the di� iculties to make

a documentary series in one of the

least visited countries in the world.

Venue: Online

Tickets: Free, RGS-IBG members only.

geog.gr/rgs-NorthKorea

Thursday 3 December, 7.00pm-

8.00pm

The Living Mountain: Book club

(Lecture and panel discussion,

online)

Join us for a panel discussion as we

delve into this masterpiece of nature

writing in which Nan Shepherd

describes her journeys into the

Cairngorm mountains of Scotland.

Venue: Online

Tickets: £6, RGS-IBG members £4.

geog.gr/rgs-LivingMountain

Monday 14 December, 2.30pm-

3.30pm

Be Inspired: Unarticulated

narratives of women on David

Livingstone’s Expeditions

(Lecture, online)

In this lecture Dr Kate Simpson

explores the Society’s digital library

to identify the African women in the

expeditions of David Livingstone,

to present alternate narratives of

exploration through which these

women can be restored.

Venue: Online

Tickets: Free.

geog.gr/rgs-Livingstone

Tuesday 15 December, 7.30pm-

9.00pm

Ten slides to tell a story

(Lecture, online)

Get to know some of the East of

England Committee members

and what they get up to in their spare

time at this fun virtual get-together,

featuring short presentations from

Clare Brown, Michael Hand, Christopher

Jones and Jane Murphy.

Venue: Online

Tickets: Free

geog.gr/rgs-EastofEngland

Monday 14 December, 6:30pm-

7:30pm

Searching for giant bananas in the

Ethiopian Highlands

(Lecture, online)

Ethiopia, a historical recipient of

targeted food aid, is exceptionally

botanically rich. Dr James Borrell will

discuss recent research eff orts to map

the diversity and distribution of enset, a

giant banana relative providing staple

food for 20 million people.

Venue: Online

Tickets: £5, free for RGS-IBG members.

geog.gr/rgs-bananas

The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) is the

home of geography. Founded in 1830, we are the UK’s

learned society for geography and professional body for

geographers. Our core purpose is to advance geographical

science. We achieve this in many ways, through our

charitable work in education, research and fieldwork, and

more widely as a membership organisation.

The Society welcomes anyone fascinated by the

world’s people, places and environments. Membership is

open to all and tailored to you. Whether you’re a Fellow,

Young Geographer or Ordinary Member, we make your

adventures in geography richer and more meaningful.

Geographical is the Society’s magazine,

and available with all types of

membership – but there are so many

other benefits. Our Fellows and members

gain access to topical events and

activities, where you can meet others

who share a passion for geography.

So whether you’re a geography professional or student,

or simply have a thirst for geographical knowledge,

membership of the Society will satisfy your curiosity.

For more on what membership has to o� er you,

visit our website at: www.rgs.org/join-us

RGS-IBG CORPORATE SUPPORTERS

RGS-IBG ARCHIVE

IMAGE

Communication

with the natives,

from Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage by

John Ross

(London, 1835)

Artist: thought to

be John RossBy Peter R Martin

76 . Geographical

Despite the way it’s often imagined, the history of exploration in the Arctic regions has regularly been one of failure. Rarely were the goals of a given expedition attained, whether they were to locate the fabled Northwest Passage, to rescue comrades lost in the ice or to reach the coveted

North Pole. When returning from these voyages, travellers were mindful of the fact that in order to maintain their reputation as respectable explorers, the narratives surrounding their – at times disastrous – expeditions had to be carefully curated.

Accounts of expeditions were therefore presented in exciting ways to appeal to broad public audiences. Explorers partnered with influential publishers, and often novelists, to produce spectacular descriptions of their ‘voyages of discovery’. These books proved to be immensely popular and allowed readers

to travel with explorers as they traversed the fabulous, other-worldly landscapes being described.

Two aspects of these narratives proved to be particularly appealing to readers. The first was descriptions of the explorers’ encounters with the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic. These were typically filled with exoticised (and often racist) language and presented Arctic peoples as exciting curiosities with peculiar cultures and customs. The second was the use of lavish illustrations to accompany the narrative. Paintings, drawings, engravings and woodcuts were variously used to present Arctic environments as a combination of threatening, enticing and awe-inspiring landscapes.

This illustration uses both of these strategies. Appearing in John Ross’s account, entitled Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage, the image depicts the

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December 2020 • 77

moment on 9 January 1830 when the crew of the Victory came into contact with the Netsilingmiut community of Boothia Peninsula (in the Kitikmeot region in modern-day Nunavut). Th e illustration shows the explorers dropping their weapons and approaching the group of huddled Inuit, raising their arms to signal that they mean no harm.

Like many previous attempts, Ross’s voyage in search of the Northwest Passage didn’t result in the discovery of the fabled route. Although his nephew, James Clark Ross, did reach the magnetic North Pole for the fi rst time, that particular achievement was only of interest to those with a keen interest in science. Th e ultimate outcome of this expedition was therefore one of failure, yet one would be forgiven for forgetting this fact when reading Ross’s account and studying the associated illustrations.

The Royal Geographical Society Picture

Library is an unrivalled resource,

containing more than half a million

images of peoples and landscapes from

all over the world. The collection holds photographs

and works of art from the 1830s onwards and

includes images of exploration, indigenous peoples

and remote locations. For further information on

image licensing and limited-edition prints, or to

search our online collection of more than 7,000

images, visit www.rgs.org/images. Rolex kindly

supports public access to the Society’s collection of

photographs, books, documents and maps.

EXPLORE – DISCOVERING BRITAIN

WITTENHAM CLUMPS

Most winter sports fans seeking a challenge probably wouldn’t think of an Oxfordshire village. Yet Little

Wittenham, near Didcot, has not one but two seasonal slopes. Round Hill and Castle Hill are a pair of peaks that literally stand out from surrounding fl at fi elds. Circular and almost symmetrical, their nicknames include the ‘Berkshire Bubs’ and ‘Mother Dunch’s Buttocks’ (the former aft er old county boundaries, the latter a previous Lady of the Manor). Th e hills are commonly known though as Wittenham Clumps. When snow settles, their banks make an enjoyable course for sledging: ‘Th ere’s a side of Round Hill that off ers a good long run. It’s quite steep, not for the faint-hearted.’

So says Dr Helen Rawling, a cultural geographer and curator who devised this trail. Rawling grew up in nearby Abingdon. ‘I couldn’t quite see them from home but the Clumps were near enough for frequent trips. Somewhere us kids and the dog could run around and explore.’ Th ese days she visits with her children. Besides providing family-friendly fresh air, Rawling suggests that these much-loved local landmarks also satisfy a psychological pleasure. ‘Th ere’s that sense of challenge and reward – seeing a hill in the distance, getting to the top and enjoying the views.’

Th e trail begins with a gentle ascent towards Round Hill. In spring and summer, the surrounding meadow is dappled with wildfl owers such as buttercups and cowslips. On a late autumn morning, grasses swoosh underfoot and birds swoop overhead. Th e muddy vein of a chalk path leads the way. Looking at it closely, white speckled with black, reveals the lifeblood of the hills. Wittenham Clumps are made of chalk and greensand clay. Th eir unique shape was created around 40 to 60 million years ago when two tectonic plates collided to form the Berkshire Downs.

For this month’s

Discovering Britain

trail Rory Walsh

walks up on the

Berkshire Downs

Erosion over the millennia broke up this chain of hills, leaving the Clumps as distinctive outliers.

Only select fl ora and fauna thrive on permeable chalk soils. Th e most obvious examples stand proud on the horizon. At the summit of both Clumps are clusters of beech trees. Dating from the 1740s, they are the oldest beeches planted in England. Th e group on Round Hill is sometimes named the Cuckoo Pen. Legends claim that trapping a cuckoo among the branches will ensure an endless summer. Smooth

and grey, the trees resemble giant knights in armour.

From the top of Round Hill, a quilt of fi elds and villages unfurls below. Th e Th ames Valley’s seasonal patchwork includes greens, golds, yellows and browns. Th e red roof of Dorchester Abbey and the blue-grey River Th ames remain visible all year round. Th is is no longer true of a more controversial landmark, Didcot Power Station. Its six huge cooling towers and 200-metre chimney once dominated the views from Wittenham Clumps. Demolition began in 2014 with the chimney fi nally felled in February 2020. ‘Th e power station was impossible to miss,’ says Rawling, ‘but I do kind of miss it. A frame of reference from my childhood has gone.’

A thread of lost landscapes runs throughout the trail. Aft er descending between the Clumps into Little Wittenham Wood, the stitches become more apparent with the ascent onto the other Clump, Castle Hill. Reaching the

‘Grey hollowed hills

crowned by old

trees, Pan-ish places

down by the river,

wonderful to think on’

78 . Geographical

View of Castle Hill and Round

Hill, Wittenham Clumps

TRAIL

Rural • South East England • 1 ¼ mileswww.discoveringbritain.org

top means crossing a large trough-like ditch. In places the earth is piled with distinctive mounds and hummocks. These are the remaining ramparts of an Iron Age hillfort dated to around 600 BC. Wittenham Clumps are also called the Sinodun Hills, from the Gaelic Seno-Dunum (‘Old Fort’). In an otherwise flat part of Oxfordshire, they offered the local Catuvellauni and Atrebati tribes an obvious defensive stronghold.

Before my visit, Rawling suggested that the Clumps make an ideal Boxing Day walk. Castle Hill looks especially evocative in winter. ‘A morning with a bit of frost is magical,’ Rawling says. ‘You get a real sense of all the different people who lived here.’ Though Round Hill is taller, 390 feet high compared to 350 feet, Castle Hill has the longer human history. Archaeologists have found traces of a Bronze Age settlement, occupied around 1,000 BC, and a later Roman villa. Artefacts discovered on the hillsides include

pottery, weapons, and even animal bones from Iron Age rubbish pits.

The views from Castle Hill offer tantalising glimpses of this ancient past. Another tree-topped mound can clearly be seen to the right. This is Brightwell Barrow, a Bronze Age burial chamber sometimes described as the ‘third Clump’. It’s also possible to spot the Ridgeway, Britain’s oldest road. Spanning 87 miles, from Avebury in Wiltshire to Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire, the Ridgeway is now designated as a National Trail. Before then, countless travellers, farmers and soldiers – including Saxons, Vikings and Romans – had trod the track’s course for around 5,000 years.

Unsurprisingly, the Clumps’ historic and visual allure has inspired many artists and writers. Landscape painter Paul Nash first saw them as a teenager while visiting his uncle. He returned to portray the Clumps many times. Aged 13, Nash described them in a

letter: ‘Grey hollowed hills crowned by old, old trees, Pan-ish places down by the river, wonderful to think on, full of strange enchantment.’ For Nash, this corner of Oxfordshire was ‘a beautiful legendary country haunted by old gods long forgotten’. Looking around Castle Hill, it’s tempting to imagine the marks in the earth as the signatures of previous generations written on the land.

Among them was a local Victorian maltster, Joseph Tubb. Pressured into the job by his family, Tubb longed instead to be a wood carver. In summer 1844 or 1845, he took a ladder and tent up Castle Hill. Tubb spent two weeks cutting a poem into a tree. The poem, carved from memory, refers to several historic sites visible from Wittenham Clumps to ‘Point out each object and instructive tell / The various changes that the land befell’. The ‘Poem Tree’ became itself a much-loved landmark. In 1994, a sarsen stone was placed beside it to mark the 150th anniversary of Tubb’s visit. By then the carving was almost unreadable, so the stone included a plaque transcribing the words.

Today the stone still stands but the tree lies in the ground, crumbling into mulch. The beech was over 300 hundred years when Tubb inscribed it. The same erosive weather that shaped the Clumps rotted the tree’s insides, until in 2012 it collapsed. The Earth Trust, the environmental charity that looks after the Clumps, has deliberately left the tree to return to nature. This copse corpse now provides insects and other wildlife with food and shelter. The tree will eventually disappear into the hill itself, becoming part of the landscape it once described. Meanwhile Tubb’s poem, the abstract now set in stone, survives to haunt the hills like one of Nash’s ‘old gods’.

Rawling is right that Wittenham Clumps are an ideal place to visit in winter. Winter is a season to look back at events just gone and ahead at events to come. Similarly, the Clumps offer insights into our past and a place to think about our future.

HEDLEY THORNE

December 2020 . 79

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GeographicalDirectory

GEOGRAPHICAL

The perfume isles

82 . Geographical

The ylang-ylang plant

As a Fellow of the RGS-IBG, I have

enjoyed Geographical and its diverse

articles for many years. However, I

was not impressed by the concluding

paragraph of the November

Worldwatch article entitled ‘BIG

Computing’.

The author raises a valid point

concerning the CO2 emissions

resulting from large scale computing,

but the concluding paragraph is

simplistic in the extreme. I have

worked in the E&P Industry for

over 35 years, I am a Fellow of the

Geological Society, and a member

of the EAGE and SPE (Society of

Petroleum Engineers). I do not

dispute that Amazon and Microsoft

are forming business partnerships

with the oil & gas majors, now

rebranding themselves as energy

companies as they diversify into

renewables. These new style

arrangements are termed sustainable

energy agreements and represent a

new form of innovative deal, in which

renewable energy is supplied to the

European data centres in return for

their facilities.

Europe is leading the global energy

transition, and the re-branded energy

majors are investing heavily, their

intellectual and physical assets

being employed in the flagship

North Sea CCS and hydrogen

projects in the surrounding waters.

Among others: the Oil & Gas Climate

Initiative sponsoring Net Zero

Teeside, managed by BP; Shell’s

long contribution to the ACORN

CCS/hydrogen project to the east of

Aberdeen; and Equinor’s commitment

to the North of England H21 project,

and the Northern Lights project

offshore Norway, importing CO2 for

storage from around Europe.

All these projects require BIG

computing. Ultimately, the provision

of computing resources is irrelevant

of the nature of the project. What

is relevant, is the emphasis on

renewable energy.

Susan Fellows

READERS’CORNER

Driving along the winding, potholed roads of the island of Anjouan, in the Comoros archipelago, you can smell the nation’s most iconic crop long before you see it,’ writes journalist Tommy Trenchard in next month’s Geographical. ‘The scent – a heady, floral, spicy cocktail somewhat reminiscent of jasmine – is most powerful at dawn, when it

spills out of the plantations that dot the landscape and flows down over the steep volcanic hillsides towards the Indian Ocean below.’

The crop in question is the ylang-ylang flower, and this little-known string of islands set in the warm waters between Mozambique and Madagascar has been its heartland ever since it was first introduced by French colonialists in the late 19th century.

Despite being one of the poorest and least developed nations on earth, in recent decades the Comoros has dominated the world supply, producing as many as eight out of every ten litres of ylang-ylang essential oil reaching the perfumeries and cosmetics companies of France. The oil is used in everything from soaps to incense, but it is as an ingredient in fine perfume that Comorian ylang-ylang is best known. Since 1921, it has even been a key component of the most famous scent of all time – Chanel No. 5. And with the country’s other main exports being vanilla and cloves, the archipelago has long been known to sailors, settlers, traders and other visitors as ‘the perfume isles’.

Yet in recent years, market forces far beyond the control of local farmers, combined with environmental challenges and further compounded by the global Covid-19 pandemic, have left the ylang-ylang industry reeling, and have served as a reminder that this fragrant flower can be not only a blessing for the thousands of Comorian farmers, flower pickers and oil distillers who rely on it, but also a curse.

Next month, Tommy meets those who make a living in the world of ylang-ylang and examines the market forces which govern their lives.

NEXT MONTH

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