Monthly Archives: April 2024

Arts, Books, Environment, Nature

Book Review: Hedgelands

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Hedges are humble habitats that are a lively host to much wildlife – a secret safari providing a plethora of environmental benefits

THE humble and often-neglected British hedge, is described by author Christopher Hart as “an incredibly porous and self-sustaining feature of our countryside . . . one of the happiest accidents in human history.” It hums with bees and butterflies, is a rich haven for insects, birds, hedgehogs, shrews, voles, and bats, and also acts as a windbreak, stock fence, flood defence system, and an environmental barrier against soil erosion. The RSPB agrees; its research shows that hedges may be supporting up to four-fifths of our woodland birds, half of our wild mammals, and a third of our butterflies.

Hedges have been a feature of the British landscape since the Stone Age. The original ones were “dead hedges”, made from piles of branches and brushwood collected from cleared areas of woodland.

As the wood rotted, it was swiftly colonised by fungi and insects. Passing birds excreted seeds from trees and shrubs – such as hazel, oak, ash, hawthorn, dog rose, blackthorn, and bramble – which soon started sprouting in among the dead wood. From there, a living hedge was born. (A hedgerow, if you were wondering, is a hedge that includes features such as banks, trees, walls, fences, or gates.)

Our ancestors soon learned the best way to deal with an unruly hedge: by cutting half-way through a rising trunk and then to lay it back into the hedge sideways. In time, this creates a barrier so dense and tough that it can even hold back an amorous bull trying to get into a field of cows.

Yet as Hart rightly points out, these ancient hedges are much more than just a physical barrier. They mitigate flooding and soil erosion and give many animals an invaluable source of shelter from precipitous conditions. A hedge will protect smaller birds and mammals from predators like crows, magpies, sparrowhawks, and foxes – a dense hedge is difficult for predators to access and manoeuvre. This “narrow but incredibly complex ecosystem” is also an abundant source of food for wildlife, providing hips, haws, sloes, and blackberries for them to feast on.

Many of the countryside hedges we see today pre-date the Georgian era, some even being Anglo-Saxon. In a county like Devon, where the land is suited to sheep and cattle and less likely to be ploughed, at least a quarter of the hedges date back to Norman times.

TWO

THERE are strong regional variations in Britain’s hedges. In the Midlands, traditionally cattle country, hedges tend to be mainly hawthorn, which is an excellent barrier to bullocks. The high rainfall in Wales and Ireland is just the thing for blackthorn, which happens to be a handy plant for snagging and restraining sheep.

The Somerset Levels typically have hedges made of osier, a small willow tree, while in Kent and Worcestershire you’ll find hedges of beech, poplar, and elder which tend to grow tall to protect prized orchards from the wind.

By 1820, there were 700,000 kilometres of hedges in England (and many more in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). Today the figure is 400,000 which still sounds impressive, but many of these hedges are so degraded that they have become “little more than a blunt, dwarfish lined of scarred and wind-scoured stumps”, as Hart writes despairingly.

On arable land, hedges are often seen as an obstacle for tractors, while on pastureland, farmers find it easier to put up a barbed wire fence than have a hedge separating livestock. Hart is sympathetic to farmers, who are not “the cartoonish villains of the countryside but, rather, hard-pressed food producers just trying to stay in business”.

But there’s no denying that replacing a bountiful hedge with barbed wire is a disaster for wildlife, which results in “no wild foods, berries, nuts, wild greens, or herbs . . . no shelter or habitat for birds and mammals, [nor] beneficial pollinators and insect predators.”

THREE

MOST of the damage to the country’s hedges was done from the 1960s onwards when, incredibly, government actually offered subsidies for their removal. After 1973, the EU’s damaging Common Agricultural Policy was even more zealous in paying farmers to destroy ancient hedges.

If all this sounds depressing to anyone who cares about the countryside and its wildlife, Hart offers some practical solutions. Many hedges in private gardens are a single variety, like privet or beech; the author suggests that you rewild yours, by weaving honeysuckle and brambles through your hedge, making it far more attractive to insects.

And if you leave a little verge around the bottom of your hedge, all sorts of wildflowers might pop up, from orchids and buttercups to cow parsley and bluebells.

Above all, we are urged to cherish our existing hedges. Instead of spending a fortune on planting millions of new trees, which Hart says are “of low ecological value”, he would like the Government to allocate a fraction of that money to restoring hedgerows.

With better management of hedges, “we might not need to worry so much about insects disappearing, bird numbers falling or our targets for carbon capture. Our lovely native hedgerows would do much of the work for us, if we only look after them.”

Hart has his own 300 yards of “beautiful, unkempt, pullulating hedgerow” at his home in Wiltshire, and he has seen for himself how endangered birds such as redwings and fieldfares will eagerly flock to a hedge which provides nutritious wild berries for them.

Christopher Hart has written an eye-opening and inspiring book which will leave the reader with a deep appreciation of these wonderful habitats – and perhaps a desire to create their very own hedge. As he says: “You don’t need to go to the Serengeti to see amazing animals. You just need a good thick hedge.”

– Hedgelands by Christopher Hart is published by Chelsea Green, 208pp

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Britain, History, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Politics, Saudi Arabia, Society, United States

Middle East history. It needs to be understood.

MIDDLE EAST

Ancient indifferences are reshaping the Middle East and forging unlikely new alliances

GEOPOLITICAL statements come no more obscure than one given earlier this week by an Israeli news site.

A member of the Saudi Arabian royal family had reportedly told the broadcaster Kan that, in his view, Iran had started the Gaza war by instructing its proxy group Hamas to attack Israel on October 7.

Tehran’s attention, according to this nameless royal, was to thwart the imminent normalisation of diplomatic relations between Israel and the Saudis.

This is so important because it symbolises the extraordinary transformation under way in the politics of the Middle East. For a Saudi royal to express such a view – that a Muslim country instigated the conflict for the purpose of spreading discord – would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. But that’s not the only way in which the winds of change are resettling alliances in this volatile region.

Five days ago, the ayatollahs of Iran inflicted their first direct attack on Israel since they came to power in 1979.

For some 45 years, the Islamic Republic has plotted the destruction of what its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei calls “the evil Zionist regime”. But it has left the actual attacks to its proxies, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

This fresh assault did almost no damage, thanks to the defensive coalition that shot down almost all of the weapons directed at Israel.

The US and UK played a role in this. But they were joined by two other countries for whom defending the Jewish state would have been fanciful until recently: Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

For most of the time Israel has existed, Saudi, as one of the leading Muslim nations and home to the holy city of Mecca, has been its implacable foe. But now it is on the verge not just of tolerating Israel but becoming an ally.

Similarly, back in 1967, Jordan actually invaded Israel – a disastrous move which lost it the territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Yet now Jordan, too, has stood alongside Israel to protect it from Iranian bombs. This newfound cooperative spirit continues apace: it has emerged that both the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates had passed helpful intelligence to America to use in Israel’s defence, with Jordan further agreeing to let the US and “other countries’ warplanes” use its airspace, as well as sending up its own jets. The rise of Iran – and its chilling proximity to a nuclear weapon – has driven old foes closer.

Iran now dominates a vast region from its borders with Iraq, through Syria and Lebanon, to the Mediterranean. Through its Yemeni proxies, the Houthis, and its own navy, it is causing chaos and major disruption in the key Red Sea trade route.

And it has turned the Palestinian cause into a strategic vehicle for its own ambitions through two other proxies, Hamas (Gaza) and Hezbollah (Lebanon). This chaotic and meddlesome statecraft has appalled other Muslim countries.

The story of the Middle East used to be “Israel versus everyone else”. However, that is no longer true. To understand how all this has come about, you need to go back to the very roots of Islam – and the schism within it. In 610AD, Mohammed unveiled a new faith. By the time he died in 632AD, he and Islam were all-powerful in Arabia, and within a century it had subjugated an empire stretching from Central Asia to Spain.

But as history teaches us, Islam was split over who should succeed the Prophet. One faction argued the leadership should be passed through his bloodline. They became known as Shias, from shi’atu Ali, Arabic for “partisans of Ali”, who was Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law.

The others, the Sunnis (followers of the sunna, or “way” in Arabic) said leadership should be determined on merit.

Ali was elected as “caliph” (spiritual leader) in 656AD but within five years was assassinated, enshrining an enduring split.

Fast forward to 2024, and about 85 per cent of the world’s 1.6billion Muslims are Sunni, while 15 per cent are Shia.

Two countries now vie for the leadership of Islam, Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. Since the mullahs seized power in Tehran 45 years ago, the divisions and mutual hatreds have only grown.

As a minority within Islam, the Shiites have historically been treated as subordinate in Sunni-dominated countries. But there has been a significant growth of the Shiite population in Gulf nations. This has increased anxiety among Sunni rulers over the growing power of Shia Iran.

In Gulf states such as the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and especially Saudi Arabia, the Shia threat – in other words the threat from Iran – is seen as existential.

Egypt, too, which has had a peace treaty with Israel since 1979, is also an arch enemy of the mullahs. In Israel’s 2006 Lebanon war with Hezbollah, Sunni countries were, behind the scenes, willing Israel to triumph, just as it is said now that Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia want Israel to destroy Hamas in Gaza.

The rapprochement of some Sunni countries was embodied in the 2020 Abraham Accords which normalised relations between the UAE, Bahrain, and Israel, and later Morocco and Sudan.

There is logic, then, to the deepening alliances between Sunni states and Israel. The Arab nations understand that while Israel has no ambitions to dominate its neighbours, Iran seeks to control all of the Middle East.

What’s indisputable is that if you don’t understand this split and history, you can’t understand the Middle East at all.

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Britain, Iran, Israel, Middle East, United Nations, United States

Iran’s nuclear threat will be a concern for Netanyahu

IRAN-ISRAEL

ISRAEL’S Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may feel he faces an impossible dilemma following the successful neutralisation of Iran’s missile and drone onslaught.

President Biden has counselled him to “take the win” and refrain from escalating hostilities. But the hawks in Mr Biden’s war Cabinet and the Israeli public want their PM to press home the advantage and take the battle to Tehran. After all, they say, the mullahs have never been closer to developing a nuclear bomb.

While there is no doubt Iran’s nuclear ambitions pose a grave threat to Israel and the West, as David Ben-Gurion (Israel’s prime minister from 1955 to 1963) once said, the Jewish state cannot afford long wars.

Ben-Gurion was right then, and he’s probably right today. Even with its allies’ help, defending itself against last weekend’s single Iranian attack is estimated to have cost Israel no less than $1billion. The last thing Tel-Aviv needs is a long and protracted internecine conflict with the theocrats of Persia.

But nor can Jerusalem do nothing. It does look evident that Israel will mount surgical strikes against Iran’s missile launch sites and the factories that produces its ordnance. Even if Iran does develop a bomb, without a delivery system it will be unable to use it against its enemies.

The world itself should be in no doubt as to the danger an Iranian bomb would present – and just how terrifying close the regime is to building one.

In a desolate mountainous region 140 miles south of Tehran is a one-square-mile site protected by anti-aircraft batteries, and a detachment of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard: the Natanz nuclear facility.

Over the years, Natanz has been subjected to a remorseless campaign of sabotage in a bid to prevent it creating the wherewithal for a nuclear warhead.

In 2009, it was hit by a sophisticated cyber-attack using a computer virus called Stuxnet. This is believed to have been created by Israel along with American cooperation.

For months, Iranian scientists scratched their heads in puzzlement as its centrifuges, vital tools in the uranium enrichment process, failed at an unprecedented rate. Israelis also organised the targeted assassinations of key scientists involved in the nuclear programme and destroyed elements of the Natanz facility using bomb-carrying drones.

Now, however, there are signs that great strides have been made in improving security at Natanz, to the point where it has become virtually impregnable.

A recent analysis of satellite images of the site concluded that the Iranians are building an underground facility at Natanz at a dept of between 260ft and 328ft.

As the US’ most advanced bunker-busting bomb, the GBU-57, is designed to plough through just 200ft of earth before detonating, this is bad news for the Israelis and their allies.

Meanwhile, in the five years since President Trump unilaterally withdrew America from a nuclear accord that strictly limited Iran’s enrichment of uranium to 3.67 per cent purity (enough to fuel civilian power stations) and by keeping its stockpile to some 300kg (660lb), it has made good progress towards developing weapons-grade uranium.

Last year, inspectors discovered that it had produced uranium particles that were 83.7 per cent pure, just short of the 90 per cent weapons threshold.

And Natanz and its various sister sites are not the Iranians’ only nuclear option. Just as Britain and Russia developed “civil” nuclear energy, which produces plutonium as a by-product of the electricity-generating process, to give themselves a source of the necessary nuclear warhead material, so Iran has acquired a plutonium-powered plant of its own.

At the port of Bushehr on the Persian Gulf, there is an atomic energy plant controlled by Russian engineers.

Conventional wisdom has it that the plant will not bring Iran any closer to building a nuclear bomb, because Moscow supplies the enriched uranium for the reactor and – under a “peaceful use” clause in the deal – repatriates to Russia spent fuel rods that could be reprocessed and enriched into weapons-grade plutonium.

Yet much has changed in the world of geopolitics since that deal was struck. Russia has turned itself into a pariah following its unprovoked, brutal, and bloody war against Ukraine.

It was also striking quite how pro-Iran Putin’s UN ambassador was at the Security Council meeting immediately following the attacks on Israel. Who’s to say, then, Russia would object to Iran purloining enough plutonium to produce a range of nuclear warheads?

Certainly, using the plutonium produced at Bushehr would be a quicker route to making a bomb than waiting for Natanz to come up with sufficient enriched uranium.

Given that Tehran could, theoretically, have a bomb within a matter of months, the need for Israel to take out Iran’s ability to make delivery systems could not be more urgent. The destruction of manufacturing facilities for rockets, guidance systems, and detonator plants at centres such as Parchin, would mean Iran would not have a deployable nuke even if it had sufficient highly enriched uranium. Precision strikes would also spare civilian Iranians the calamity engulfing Gaza.

Such a move would also send a powerful signal to Iran’s increasingly restive population. A decisive Israeli military strike now could destabilise the Ayatollah’s regime and remove the fear of his Revolutionary Guards enforcers.

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