Excelsior Lowlanders

Modern Avatars of a Dark Age

For folks in the Northern Hemisphere it has been a pretty torrid winter.  We are thinking not just of the extreme cold in Canada and the United States, but of the floods in the United Kingdom.  However, it seems that the flooding in that country was immediately caused not by heavy precipitation, but substantially by the government's application of a foreign Greenist religion.

Consider James Delingpole's indictment:

Britain's Floods Were Engineered by Green Government Policy

James Delingpole

February 23, 2013

TheBlaze

Was the flooding which has devastated parts of Britain the deliberate creation of government agencies and environmental groups which put the needs of wildlife before human beings?

The evidence is now in and despite weeks of official denials it's a definite "Yes."

Thanks to Richard North we now know which organisations are responsible for the millions of pounds worth of damage the floods have caused, especially in the worst hit area, the Somerset Levels.  These include: the European Union (EU); Europe's largest wildlife charity the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB); the World Wildlife Fund (WWF); the Environment Agency (EA); the environmental quango Natural England; the last Labour government, especially its (subsequently disgraced) "floods" minister Elliott Morley; and the Met Office, whose inaccurate forecasts predicting a dry winter helped turn what could have been a minor inconvenience into a major disaster.

Christopher Booker reports:

"The “smoking guns” begin with a policy decision announced in 2005 by Labour’s “floods minister” Elliot Morley, later to be jailed for fraudulently claiming more than £30,000 on his MP’s expenses. Under the heading “Saving wetland habitats: more money for key sites”, Morley directed that, to comply with the EU’s habitats directive and a part-EU-funded study involving the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the WWF and the Environment Agency, flooding in Somerset should be artificially promoted, because “wildlife will benefit from increased water levels”. The 13 local drainage boards, responsible for keeping the Levels properly managed, were all to be co-opted into implementing this policy."

In a similarly damning piece in the Spectator, Melissa Kite provides further anecdotal evidence that as far as Britain's governing agencies are concerned, wildlife - voles, beetles, trout, and golden plover - now take precedence over people and property.

"Travelling around the worst of the flooded areas last week, I met family after family who said their local rivers had been left to clog with debris — and always because of some critter or other. Somerset farmer David Gillard, for example, repeatedly begged the Environment Agency to dredge the River Parrett, which runs near his sheep farm just outside Burrowbridge. And last summer they did come and give it a go. But while they were at it they found a vole, so of course they packed up and left. The farm is now flooded.

"And what are we to make of this letter from the Environment Agency to Robin Haigh, a landowner in Chertsey, which he received after his house had been surrounded by flood waters? ‘Dear resident, I am writing to let you know about a new initiative to improve the river habitat for wildlife in your area. The Environment Agency are working in partnership with the Wild Trout Trust and local landowners on a project that will breathe new life into the Abbey River which our records show passes close to your property. The project will bring considerable benefit to wildlife in the area encouraging more fish, birds and other water-dependent species to use the river as its ecological value grows…’

"The letter was sent on 28 January, after major flooding. Last week, as the flood waters rose dangerously again and the area was in a state of full emergency, EA staff came out to visit. They met Mr Haigh’s wife, Mary, who told them, ‘Well, I expect you won’t be going ahead with that trout project now, will you?’ Au contraire, the EA people told her. The project was very much going ahead. They will be moving a sluice and creating a riffle."

Yet in much of the mainstream media, most especially the BBC, the official narrative continues to be that the floods were the unavoidable result of the "wettest winter since records began" , that rainfall is becoming more intense because of climate change, and that the government should be spending more money both on flood defences and the bloated Environment Agency.

All these excuses are a red herring. Yes, of course, in part floods are a natural phenomenon. (Visit my birthplace Worcester and you'll see a gauge showing all the years through history when floods reached shocking highs: the worst was 1672).  Yes, it has been particularly wet this winter. Yes, of course we should be ensuring that our flood defences are adequate to the task.

But they are distractions from the root cause of the problem. It's a root cause which, if there weren't so much hard evidence for it, you might easily dismiss as a right-wing conspiracy theory. That was certainly the response from the green-liberal-left when I wrote my book which exposed the scandal, Watermelons.

What I argued in the book is that the world's environmental charities and political institutions (such as the UN, the EU, the Department of Energy and Climate Change, the Environment Agency, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and so on) have been taken over by green ideologues who believe, as an article of faith, that mankind is a cancer on the planet and that wildlife should come first. This eco-fascist hardcore, I argued, exert an influence out of all proportion to their real numbers.

You want to tell me that this is far-fetched? Fine. Well just run through that Richard North piece again, would you? And then explain to why – contrary to all documentary and anecdotal evidence – Britain's flooding policy isn't now in thrall to green EU directives such as Natura 2000, the Habitats Directive, the Water Framework Directive, now integrated into British law with the Conservation (Natural Habitats &c.) Regulations 1994, and enthusiastically adopted and policed by useful idiots at the Environment Agency.

Then when you've done that, maybe you can tell me why the victims of the flooding shouldn't sue the government responsible for it for millions of pounds in compensation.

Now, consistent with a Year 12 history examination, let's do a little "comparing and contrasting".  Let's compare and contrast the authorities beavering around the UK making sure that waterways and their resident species have priority over human beings, on the one hand, with the inhabitants of the 11th century in the Lowlands, on the other. 

Let imagination take your mind back to that swampy, water infested Lowland mass being ruined by thousands of unnatural, anthropogenic windmills sequentially pumping water into and along ditches--night and day, even--eventually over sea-walls (which the locals called dikes).  Think of the rotting, muddy landmass exposed, the death and dying of the natural habitat, the sea creatures, the welks, the snail darters.  Then contemplate the rich agricultural land subsequently reclaimed, supporting a densely populated wonderland, whose inhabitants tilled (still to this day) one of the most productive food producing areas in the world. 

Let the examinants compare and contrast the religions, education, sophistication, and wisdom of the respective civilisations--that of the Lowland inhabitants in the eleventh century versus the EU-Environmental quangos and the UK government in the twenty-first century--and determine which is the more intelligent, advanced, perspicuous, enlightened, and humanitarian.  The eleventh century Lowland peasant or the UK government officials of the twenty-first? 

The Lowlanders, of course.  More smart, more sophisticated, more enlightened, better educated (in the true sense of that word) and a better man-friend and man-steward of the natural world.  Which of these two, then, represents the Dark Ages?