Hope lies ahead (From Stroud News and Journal)

Hope lies ahead

Is global warming really all doom and gloom for the planet? Stroud District Councillor Ben Francis (Con Berkeley) argues that natural change has compensations that can bring about a brave new world

IT is taken for granted in all circles that the environment is a doom and gloom topic.

The sensibilities of the sensitive are plagued with guilt every time the ignition starts and the spectre of global warming arises.

So what is wrong with the view of the world as developing into ecological disaster? Not much, according to the evidence.

I was distracted recently in the departure lounge of Heathrow by a nugget of hope. The front cover of a magazine had a lead article 'Back to nature - as its population declines, rural Europe is returning to the wild'.

Europe is a changing environment and along with the wailing prophets of doom we can see a new world reverting to an old - a sort of 'environmental postmodernism'.

Within the conundrum of collapse, the global warming and the autocracy of the car, there is an expanding hiatus, a gulf and scenes that remind me of science fiction films.

It seems that we are witnessing a rolling back of the human tide. Europe has a declining population, and a growing reality of 'post-agrarianism' - quite a dramatic shift from the past when almost everybody worked on the land.

The villages are emptying as the young flee to the cities, attracted by the tinselled hope of employment.

This leaves an ageing agrarian community of retirement-age farmers who so dominate the demographic that the delivery of medical care has to be rethought, and adverts placed to attract immigrants into some rural areas.

Wildcats and ospreys are returning to environments where they have not been seen for hundreds of years. Since the late 1990s packs of wolves have been multiplying in Germany as the forest spreads onto what was once farmland.

Europe it seems is renaturalising and moving away from rural areas with the countryside loosing a third of its population. In most communities for as long as anyone can remember, every area of land was fenced off and accounted for - now there are six million hectares of abandoned farmland in Italy.

I do not mean to devalue the activities of farming communities. It is always disheartening to see thriving communities collapse but it is interesting to see the change and possible environmental benefits.

Many people think that world processes are cyclical; I believe that those of us with a strong environmentalist plank in our thinking will see that natural social change (rural-urban migration) is allowing bigger forces to balance the environmental equation.

In addition to re-forestation, (the sprouting of new lungs for the earth?), ultra low birth rates will lead Europe to loose 41 million people by 2030, as the baby boomers start to die out and are not replaced by newborns.

Almost everybody seems to argue seems to agree that we need less people in the world if we are to survive as a species. Similarly, almost everybody seems to agree that the natural world needs to rejuvenate. So, perhaps in the long run maybe this is good news for everybody.