London's Thames, once biologically dead, has been coming back to life | Hacker News Reader

London's Thames, once biologically dead, has been coming back to life

npr.org

235 pointspseudolus190 comments

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/data/biodiversity-indicato...

>'The UK is one of the most depleted countries in the world in terms of biodiversity. The Natural History Museum has calculated an index of biodiversity intactness. Using this measure of the health of our natural environment, we rank 189th in the world, and we are bottom of the G7 countries. In the past 10 years, 41% of our bird species have decreased and 15% of our wildlife is threatened with extinction.

>'The dreadful state of our nature is at least in part a result of living in a densely populated country in which nearly three-quarters of our land is used for farming or the built environment. We have simply squeezed nature out of its home.'

>Lord Krebs, zoologist and Member of the House of Lords, in the debate on the Environment Bill, 10 June 2021

It's great that the Thames is improving, and the recent stuff about the wild bees is amazing, but these stories lack the wider context.

There are 196 countries and this study says the UK is ranked 189th?

Have they visited developing countries?

This an absurd statement.

You're honestly surprised that countries that haven't gone through full industrialization have more untouched nature? That countries that mostly depend on tourism from people who want to see unspoiled nature for their economies do better in this score than the UK?

I would expect that more developed countries would have had greater impacts on their biodiversity due to the development itself.

Would you have expected it the other way around?

Developed countries tend to have a far smaller footprint from industrialization per unit of output than developing countries.

When your entire population shits into the main river that does a pretty good job of killing biodiversity even with minimal industrialization.

When your entire population shits into the main river that does a pretty good job of killing biodiversity

I’d expect the opposite.

There is an optimum in the middle. Too much organic matter is harmful, as bacteria decomposing it use the oxygen and emit nitrites.

Fertilizer runoff creates a dead zone at the Mississippi River delta.

> When your entire population shits into the main river that does a pretty good job of killing biodiversity

Yes, but enough about the UK

1) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/17/rivers-i...

Haha… no.

Failed tests is nowhere close to “so much shit nothing can survive”.

Goes to show how out of touch that metric is.

You're literally commenting under a piece that says the Thames was (and largely still is) so shit that nothing could survive.

> Developed countries tend to have a far smaller footprint from industrialization per unit of output than developing countries.

Source? If you're talking about semi-modern countries like India or China specifically it makes sense because they are torn between very poor and very rich areas, both having access to some level of industrial capitalist comforts (eg. people in slums have cell phones and industry-produced clothing).

But, the matter central to this question is that these "developing" countries are in fact the ones producing all the shit we use in the "developed" countries. Production has been outsourced there not only for price of work, but also with the clear conscience that it would reduce pollution in the global north. [0]

> When your entire population shits into the main river that does a pretty good job of killing biodiversity

Yet that's not the only solution. Poop makes for very good compost.

[0] Industry pollution is a well-known problem on a big scale since at least the 19th century, when English/French cities (or at least their popular districts) were filled with acid and lead and other industry byproducts killing the population very fast.

It's a measure of "biodiversity intactness", not human habitability. A country that's been industrialized for hundreds of years will have a lower rating than one that was hunter-gatherer until a century ago.

You (I'll paraphrase): "They did a study and my assumptions have been violated, so I'm going to say it's absurd!"

Obviously it depends on what things they measured. If it's "Number of people named Cumberbatch" the UK would probably be ranked no. 1, so they could've also designed a study to make the UK look bad. But if I can guess, I don't think you read the study and its conclusions.

When a study arrives an absurd conclusion then yes I’m happy to dismiss it.

Well, I guess you can feel free to know what you know, and dismiss anything that goes against your beliefs before even examining their arguments. That's the way to remain smart!

No, honestly it matches what I've seen. Britain is painfully deforested.

Yes, "developing" countries have more litter, but they are also less "developed" -- by which we really mean, the land has not all been converted to farms and cities and industrial buildings and pavement.

Britain is not Mordor, but the shortage of trees and animals is real. Too much of it is an empty green lawn.

Whereas really it should be a temperate rainforest, fuelled by the Gulf Stream. It is a wet, lush, and fertile place. It just needs to regrow.

> Britain is not Mordor, but the shortage of trees and animals is real. Too much of it is an empty green lawn.

Ahem, I believe industrial Britain is meant to be Isengard.

Edit:Format

What?! No. Isengard is somewhere in Central Europe. Britain is the Shire, and Bree. Industrial Britain is the Shire after Frodo gets back, the part the movie skipped (elevating the modern Iraq War veterans experience of “I am the one who changed and don’t belong anymore” over the WWII veterans experience of “even the place I love changed”.)

Isengard is France, with Orthanc being Paris - at the time of writing, the cultural centre of Europe, a shining metropolis full to the brink with earnest intellectuals, and still completely unable to resist turning into the Vichy Regime.

Developing countries tends to have a less damaged wilder environment than the UK and Europe, which are almost 100% man-made at this point: Everything has been planted for humans' benefits and any large wide animal that did not fit in killed off.

We actually want to help developing countries to develop without ending like Europe.

> Have they visited developing countries?

Have you? Most places in the world have huge swathes of wilderness. Britain has close to none. It's not so much about how "bad" the human populated places are. It's about how much space is left for the rest of nature.

Britain was the first country to industrialise, it'd be surprising if it wasn't so low.

I recently heard some startling facts about forest cover in the UK. (Forest cover is the amount of forest covering the land.) The UK has only approximately 13% forest cover. In Europe, only Denmark and Netherlands have similarly low coverage.

These facts came from a BBC Radio 4 programme called More or Less [1]

In France, Italy, Spain, and Germany, approximately one third of the land is covered in forests. Finland has an impressive 73% forest cover.

Forest cover has always been small in the UK for the past few hundred years. The Industrial Revolution was not the cause of the small forest cover in the UK.

An estimate from the Forest Commission (a UK government department) is that forest cover in England in the 1100s was only about 15%. After World War I, it dipped to its lowest point - 5%. It's currently about 13% in England (similar in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland).

Why is forest cover so small in the UK? About 5000 years ago, people started cutting down forests to use the land for agricultural use. Even in Roman times, Britain had a reputation for growing lots of produce.

One of the reasons that other European countries have retained greater forest cover is because they have mountain ranges which makes it much harder to convert that land into agricultural use.

[1] More or Less: Behind the Stats: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09x66st (The discussion on forest cover starts approximately at the 24-minute mark.)

---

Edited to add:

The BBC radio programme cites it's source for statistics on forest cover as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Their 2020 Global Forest Resources Assessment is another source of fascinating stats:

- Forests cover nearly 1/3 of land globally

- More than half (54 percent) of the world’s forests are in only five countries: the Russian Federation (20%), Brazil (12%), Canada (9%), the USA (8%) and China (5%)

- Rest of the world makes up the rest (46%)

Link: https://www.fao.org/forest-resources-assessment/2020/en/

Maybe sheep are a factor as well? Just a guess.

In the highlands it seems to be the case. Also lack of predators for wild deer. New trees get eaten and none reaches maturity.

Bring back the wolf, I say.

Farmers, then Vikings, then Weather, Then MORE farming, then the English, then World War 1.

Wild deer are the big issue. There's a small but vocal community pushing for wolf reintroduction, but that has it's own challenges. Scottish land law is extraordinarily complicated and archaic, it remain solely to prevent extinction of a far more damaging animal: the Edinburgh Lawyer.

I'm rarely as concerned about northern forests though. Fir trees count for half, or less, IMO. Without beech, silver birch, oak and yew the forest is fake.

It should be noted that steps are being undertaken to increase forest coverage in the UK. One of the most prominent efforts being the creation of the National Forest which will link up two other existing forests in the Midlands. [0][1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Forest_(England)

[1] https://www.nationalforest.org/

Note that Finnish forests are overwhelmingly young growth forests in forestry use, i.e. tree farms. They may not look as depressing as regular fields, but they are not diverse like natural old growth forests. It's a good thing that we manage our forest cover and grow more trees than we cut down, but it's not like we are a paradise either.

> About 5000 years ago, people started cutting down forests to use the land for agricultural use.

The literal meaning of "England" in norse languages is something like "meadow land".

Not really. It is named after the Angles. See https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/e/Englan...

The fact that English 'meadow' is 'eng' in modern Norwegian is misleading.

Do the Norse call it England then? I think he means they use a different name which means "Meadow Land".

Eng land in modern Norwegian would mean literally meadow country because eng = meadow and land = country. But England derives from Angle land, the land of the Angles.

This might also be true, but to speakers of norse languages (predecessors and old dialects of norwegian/swedish/danish/old english), the literal meaning of the word is still "meadow land" - among other names such as "ice land", "green land", "north land", "small land", and so on.

Yes, places were also named based on the tribes living there ("goth land" or "scot land" for example), but people living in a region were named by that region, like how we say "the icelandic people" today.

"English" people living in "england" is consistent with both perspectives.

(Other place names like Zealand in denmark also have undetermined origins, but regardless of origin the literal meaning has been close to "sea land" for many speakers in the region.)

Here in the South East, the local councils are approving housing all over the countryside to meet the governments housing targets - even though there is brownfield land that would make more sense - but that doesn't get the developers money.

I get the feeling that the Gov doesn't care, and the local authorities have their hands tied or are just overruled when it comes to trying to keep green spaces

I seriously doubt the issue is developer profits, but NIMBYism instead.

The backlash to introducing even modest by-right zoning in the UK last year was immense. The UK's housing regulatory scheme is somehow even worse than California's, it's just that the demand isn't as high and so the crisis isn't as acute.... yet.

Developer profits as in, there is more to made developing on green, than there is developing brown.

There definitely is NIMBYism, but I'd say taht at least half the time there is a valid reason for it - usually the infrastructure is not going to cope with the developments, but then that is always promised to come after, you know, once they run out of money ;)

They’re surely not running out of money.

You just have to drive around the SE for an hour or two to realise it's everywhere - massive developments in some places, virtually whole new towns, and where this is not permitted creeping development of every single tiny postage stamp of land on which planning permission can be gained. It breaks my heart. I remember when there used to be hedgehogs everywhere. These days, it's remarkable. Absolutely tragic. If the woke mob in this country genuinely cared about the environment (as opposed to merely using it as part of their 'nice totalitarianism' agenda e.g. BLM/eco/trans etc.) they would be fiercely anti-immigration. The fact they are not tells you all you need to know about the true agenda.

Driving through the south east is going to give you a very distorted perspective. Roads are busy and new development tend to be built around roads. Leave you car and walk a couple of miles and it can be completely different. The South East is also ringed by AONB, National Park and historic parkland that prevent development.

The bit about woke is a no true Scotsman fallacy. And it is ironic how you use the environment to push your own blinkered political agenda.

> AONB, National Park and historic parkland that prevent development

This simply is not the case - there is building throughout these areas, sometimes whole new towns. And I do walk. It's a struggle to get away from traffic noise unless one travels out of the South East.

> The bit about woke is a no true Scotsman fallacy. And it is ironic how you use the environment to push your own blinkered political agenda.

We can all throw slurs around, not sure it gets us anywhere in particular - though I'll note it does seem to be the first resort of the left.

I don’t know why you are complaining about the “woke mob”, this is entirely a Conservative party policy.

People tend to overestimate how much brown field land there actually is. And what does exist is often more suitable for commercial or industrial development anyway. A disused power station site (for example) could be better for a data centre, distribution center or another power station than residential housing.

Also, just because a parcel of land is green does not necessarily mean that it is a valuable ecosystem. Intensively farmed agricultural land can be degraded already. A well designed development will leave the hedgerows, introduce gardens and have wild areas. It can and should be better for wildlife.

People think of Canada as this pristine environment. But Southern Ontario is really bad too. Only 5% forest cover, and some areas as low as 3%. And it has to do with the land being flat, and great for farming. So pretty much everything was cut down. If they just left a narrow strip of a connected forest would have been great for wildlife. But nope.

Is that 13% not for the UK overall? I've read (below) that Scotland's is around 18.5% and England is about 10%.

https://www.gov.scot/publications/scotlands-forestry-strateg...

Also, many outlying islands on Scotland's costs aren't that amenable to forestation, as prevalent high winds can prevent growth of large trees (or re-growth if the land was at one time cleared).

not just in Scotland. The Forest (eh) of Bowland, in the North of England, is continuously swept by strong winds. Other areas like the Goyt Valley seem to struggle in a similar way: they can be prettly lush inbetween hills, but as soon as the landscape opens a bit they become very raw.

I think they probably included those islands when they calculated the forest cover. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t actually

there's also landscapes that shouldn't be forested https://www.theflowcountry.org.uk/flow-facts/flow-fact-1/ - in the past, tax breaks led to attempts to drain and reforest the flow country (an enormous peat bog in the north of scotland). This would have released CO2 when the peat was damaged.

There's plenty of land further south being reforested tho.

In the BBC radio programme they cite the source of their stats as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

As someone living in Canada it was mind boggling to read about the concept of ancient forests in the UK: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_woodland

I’m curious what is mind-boggling about this

Presumably because many provinces in Canada have logged most of the old growth forests in the last century or so.

I would guess it goes the other way, as all the forests in England seem tragically small compared to those in Canada. British Columbia alone has about thirty times the amount of old-growth that all of England does.

Wiki>"Only 3,090 square kilometres (760,000 acres) of ancient semi-natural woodland survive in Britain – less than 20% of the total wooded area. More than eight out of ten ancient woodland sites in England and Wales are less than 200,000 square metres (49 acres) in area, only 617 exceed 1 square kilometre (250 acres) and only 46 are larger than 3 square kilometres (740 acres)."

>"There are about 11.1 million hectares of old growth forest in B.C. Old growth forests make up about 20% of B.C.’s publicly managed forest areas." https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/forestry/managin...

We have such vast amounts of old growth forests and pristine/untouched land that it is not held in the same regard.

I don't think it's that surprising that a large, sparsely populated country has far greater quantity of this type of land than a much smaller, more densely-populated island.

Yes. It's a common misconception that major human impacts on the world started with the industrial revolution. We've been shaping nature globally for hundreds of thousands of years. Another misconception is that prehistoric / native practices were sustainable. As always, the reality is far more complicated.

Prehistoric practices were relatively sustainable because population was extremely low compared to today. It's perfectly fine to cut down some forest to feed your village, it's not a problem as long as global population is less than a hundred million people.

I agree, but I also think that by saying a practice is not sustainable, they mean that if scaled up and run for a long time, it would eventually cause an impact. You can swap out sustainable and scalable and it reads pretty much the same.

So saying "their practices were relatively scalable, since they were at a small scale" sounds wrong, which is why I think you are being downvoted.

Same way "I use gas to drive my truck" isn't sustainable, even if I'm the only one with a truck. The practice isn't sustainable, even if emissions from one person might not have a large impact.

Talking about "scaling up" seems like a very misguided definition of sustainable to me.

Maybe if it was more like "if everyone in similar circumstances lived this kind of lifestyle".

If a forest can safely supply 1000 trees a year, and a certain lifestyle has 300 people depend on that forest and each use two trees per year, then that's sustainable. It doesn't matter that 3000 people per forest wouldn't work. And if a million people all live this way, then they're splitting three thousand forests, so that's fine too.

It's not reasonable to worry about infinite population density, because then nothing is sustainable. And prehistoric practices weren't using up fossil fuels; trees grow back if you let them.

Though even the sustainability of gas is more complicated than "it's not". As far as CO2 goes, there is an amount that could be safely released per year. And if we were at that level, oil reserves would last a long time.

I agree with @adrianN (impact correlates to population density) with the obvious caveat that the real question is the ratio between the rate of removal and the rate of replacement. In my initial post when I said prehistoric practices were not sustainable, I should have qualified it -- "not ALL prehistoric practices were sustainable." If you live on an island eating moa, a few thousand of you can drive a species to extinction.

Even with a low population, a society's practices can still be devastating to the environment. There are multiple cases of early Native American cities being abandoned because they got too big relative to their previous size and used up all the resources in the area. This is with populations of 5 and rarely 6 digits.

Perhaps globally, but regionally, you're flatly wrong in at least two ways:

First, on a regional level, civilizations could heavily deforest their surrounding ecosystem to the point of devastating it and themselves with long-term consequences. A couple examples are the Romans, pre-modern Britain and of course, the Maya.

Secondly, the productive practices of pre-modern times were far less efficient in many ways than they are today, meaning not only heavy dependence on forest or at least wood resources, but also a much more impactful destruction of forest land for needs that in many societies today are handled without resotrting to wood.

>the productive practices of pre-modern times were far less efficient in many ways than they are today

Increase in efficiency directly leads to increased consumption:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Yeah, there was great work done on the impact on Mesoamerica from the Mayans.

https://news.utexas.edu/2015/09/03/clues-from-ancient-maya-r...

Supposedly the moors used to be forests, and got the way they are today because of soil depletion in prehistory, as a result of slash-and-burn agriculture.

The other big example is the rapid extinction of all that tasty, tasty megafauna.

The UK is quite far north, just London a southern UK city is about the same latitude as Goose Bay Labrador in Canada.

I'm surprised it isn't more tundra-like in its geography. I know the Gulf Stream helps moderate temperatures but the sunlight level to me seems like northern Canada.

My mental model was always that here in the UK London was roughly level with New York. My mind was blown when someone from the US called us the the Far North and a I realised all of the UK is further north than all of the US.

Yes, the US as quite South compared to Europe.

New York is at 40.7 deg latitude North, which is only slightly North compared to Madrid. Miami is 25.8 deg North, which is more South than the Canaries Islands...

China is also actually mostly to the South of Europe, with Beijing actually slightly South of both Madrid and New York.

Well, except Alaska.

more people live in the city of Seattle than the entire state of Alaska

Yes. Is this topical or trivial?

My mind was blown when I realized NYC and Barcelona are at the same latitude.

> Why is forest cover so small in the UK? About 5000 years ago, people started cutting down forests to use the land for agricultural use.

Iceland used to have 25% of its territory covered in trees... until the vikings came, some time in the 900's. Now, it's nearly entirely devoid of trees.

https://www.geographyrealm.com/icelands-long-road-to-refores...

IIRC this is attributed to the fact that the Vikings came to Iceland from Scandinavia via Scotland, a place with very thick soils capable of regenerating forests.

Superficially Iceland looked forested like Scotland, so they continued their existing animal grazing practices, which along with logging then destroyed the thin topsoil layer of Iceland.

I think it was Jared Diamond who summarized it like that, but in the context of Greenland, where the Viking immigrants suffered and even worse fate, but the patterns are similar.

Iceland certainly does not have many trees outside of settlement areas. But I noticed this island in the middle of a river that was growing a little forest[1]. I thought at the time that it must be all the grazing of the numerous sheep and horses I saw, that kept the forest from returning.

[1]https://njarboe.com/iceland/IcelandTreeIslandSkogafoss.jpg

Nice! But the little island seems to be next to slopes on both sides, well protected from the elements... maybe that helps?!

Counterintuitively, the existence of a forest provides protection from the elements for the trees that make it up. Forests shape their own climate in other wonderous ways - for another example, they tend to make their biome more humid.

Turkey, Greece, and the Eastern Mediterranean generally also used to be forested, until people came with goats.

The impact of sheep is under estimated. On Dartmoor in the UK sheep roam freely and there are very few trees. However, there are pockets of fenced areas that are thickly grown with upland oak and ash that would have presumably been what the whole moor would have had.

I read a book about Wilding recently that challenged the assumption that ancient landscapes were dominated by forests. In a fully unrestricted system, megafauna would be responsible for keeping the number of trees relatively low and certain not like the "closed canopy forest" that we all assume would be the default.

That is how it works now because there are very few large foraging animals in Europe today but to reintroduce them would also need the introduction of their natural predators to keep things in balance and most people are not keen on wild wolves or large cats!

I would be happier with knowing that the UK has "wild cover" rather than forests specifically but I suspect we score even worse on that!

> The UK has only approximately 13% forest cover. In Europe, only Denmark and Netherlands have similarly low coverage. > In France, Italy, Spain, and Germany, approximately one third of the land is covered in forests. Finland has an impressive 73% forest cover.

This is pretty well explained by population density, though which is cause and effect is debatable. (OK UK and Germany are ballpark similar)

NL: 421 UK: 272 DK: 135 FR: 118 IT: 200 ES: 92 DE: 232 FI: 16

UK population density is very uneven; e.g. SE vs Scottish highlands.

On the plus side, we have about 13.2% wooded cover now - up from 12% in 1998 in the UK.

There's a great book that covers this a bit, it's a fun and interesting read, very accessible. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Tree_Story/Q4_TDwAAQBAJ...

> In Europe, only Denmark and Netherlands have similarly low coverage.

You forgot Iceland, at about 2%.

One major lumber sink before the industrial revolution (especially then!) was iron production. The "How did they make it" series posted on HN earlier has wonderful detail on that topic [1]. Apparently the supply chain even in Roman times required a staggering amount of trees to the point parts of the UK ran out.

> The ecological impact of pre-modern iron production was also significant. We know, for instance, that Elba was almost totally deforested during the Roman period to fuel the bloomeries smelting the ore and Pliny notes in his Natural History that smelting (not always of iron) had substantially reduced forest-stocks in parts of Gaul and Campagnia. Roman iron production in the eastern High Weald of England may have deforested something like 500km2 over the course of three centuries and there is reason to believe that Roman-period iron production in this area stopped because of scarcity of fuel, rather than ore. Iron-working was hardly the only factor in the steady deforestation of Europe, but it was a major factor.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-they-...

This is one of the reasons I am fiercely anti-immigration to the UK: there simply is not enough space left to accomodate more people here without a. smashing the remain biodiversity to pieces b. drastic impacts on the current human population's quality of life, as we are herded into pod cities to preserve the sad excuse for nature that's left or c. outright genocide, which sadly doesn't look that far away to me these days. Anyone that's pro-immigation needs to tell us which it will be. Personally I'm already planning to leave this country for good due to the overcrowding. I - like I suspect the majority of people in the country - never voted for mass migration, and indeed, there's clearly a globalist agenda that seeks to prevent the electorate being given a vote on this at all costs (see how completely insane they went over Brexit...). It's simply not a civilised way to live and not something I have any intention whatsoever of inflicting on my offspring.

You've stated your preexisting conclusions with great drama, but you have not related them back to the topic at hand convincingly.

Indeed.

Insofar as the presence of humanity is the enemy of biodiversity, the problem is suburban sprawl and excessive rural development, and the answer is urban density. Immigration is only a facet of that larger paradigm.

> the answer is urban density

i.e. live in the pod?

hah. I mean, I would have loved to try pod-living in my late teens or early twenties, sounds better than roommates.

They say that if everyone lived like a New Yorker, you could fit the world population in Texas. I imagine that if everyone in the UK lived like a Londoner, you could fit the non-London population in a London 2?

But before you come back and say "yeah well not everyone wants to be an urban hipster" and this turns into an "urban elite" conversation, have you ever thought about the flip side of that, a sense of "rural elite"? Land is limited. Space is limited. There's something odd about people with all the property in the world saying "this is all mine, keep everyone else out, there's not enough to go around, mine." And they don't have as much space as the average citizen, they have THE MOST SPACE.

Like, if this isn't a race or nationalism thing, would [parent] be cool with a mass exodus of Londoners who suddenly developed a taste for, I dunno, fox hunting or whatever? If not, why?

At any rate: living in the country and worrying about immigrants is ridiculous. They come to the cities to look for work, everyone knows that. Regarding biodiversity, I wouldn't support any kind of program that forced people to move to pods in the city, but we should certainly work on making cities more appealing so that people will make more sustainable choices.

>we should certainly work on making cities more appealing so that people will make more sustainable choices.

I think there's definitely a percentage of humans who are just hard-wired not to live in cities. I for one can't stand urban living, I'd be a depressed alcoholic within months of moving to a place like London I think. Don't get me wrong I'm not one of those "I hate cities and everyone who lives in them" sorts, I visit cities fairly often and appreciate their qualities but after a while I literally start tasting the air and feel gross for it. There's nothing that could make dense living in a concrete environment appealing to me long-term, and I think there's a bit of a presumptious attitude in some parts of this discussion* that we can just coerce, gaslight, or "nudge" people until they're mentally ground down enough to grudgingly live in a city. Personally I'd emmigrate long before we reached this point - I've had enough "nudges" for a lifetime over the last two years!

Remote working has been a real blessing for me, and hopefully things like Starlink will be even better for people who fall into the "knowledge workers who instinctively dislike urban life" category. I also recognise that this is an enormous privilege though, most of society isn't in a position to take advantage of these things and there's all sorts of issues caused by people moving to less well-off areas and driving up house prices and other services out of the reach of people who've lived their lives there. I'm not sure what the solution is really, but I definitely think there's shades of grey.

* not your post by any means, I think you make good points

Urban density can also mean multi-polar moderate urban density. With many smaller more dense villages scattered around a less heavily used countryside.

That also avoids us all taxing the same few nearby hiking trails like I see in some urban areas.

You're not convinced that bringing more people into a country whose ecosystem is already severly impacted by man will necessarily make things worse? ok then...

> a country whose ecosystem is already severly impacted by man

There is very little land on earth that doesn't meet this standard; even areas with very low population density.

I'm not convinced that concern about biological diversity is an honest justification for anti-immigration beliefs.

Angry man against immigration: threatens to emigrate.

You would do better directing you ire against the British upper classes, who just removed the tax on internal flights, and block any attempt to provide alternatives to driving -- to give two examples that come to mind.

> Angry man against immigration: threatens to emigrate.

Bit of a weak and snarky straw man, friend. I'm absolutely not against immigration - what I am against is immigration to the UK, and any other already overcrowded place for that matter, when it necessarily results in destruction of the environment else destruction of quality of life for the population. Pod life will be miserable (intentionally miserable?) when it comes.

I agree with you on the ruling classes - who are ethnically distinct from and apparently contemptuous of the indigenous population, dating back to Norman times.

> what I am against is immigration to the UK, and any other already overcrowded place for that matter

Ah, so you'd like emigrate...off the Earth? /s

That seems an ideal solution long term.

Short term I think we have to find a way to allow more sustainable small multi-polar village life happen so we don’t all crowd into the same dozen or so mega-cities on the planet

Those mega cities are a lot better for the environment than villages or suburbs.

I guess people made similar wisecracks about people moving to the US (for similar reasons of liberty, QOL etc.) back in the day.

Yet you emigrated (at some point) to the Netherlands, which is even more crowded than the UK.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28977602

> Yet you emigrated (at some point) to the Netherlands,

unless born there

> which is even more crowded than the UK

at least for now (0.37% growth vs. 0.48).

Temporarily, for work, somewhat forced due to wanting to make enough money to be able to afford to buy a house in the (overpriced due to overpopulation) UK housing market, and I lived in a (relative) pod, used public transport etc. etc. But well down Sherlock for your bloodhound-like skills.

It'sprobably better that people emigrate to the UK with its relevatively impoverished forest cover and relieve pressure on countries with better preserved ecology.

Or are you against people moving from the countryside to London too?

Nothing about that comment was "angry". Building more railways and slowing immigration are not mutually exclusive.

Where do you plan to immigrate to that you won't perpetuate the exact same problem you see as your main reason for leaving?

Really? The overcrowded countries are the exception, not the norm. It's proven that people need space and nature.

A lot of the world is low density, but high population. Subsistence farmers on small plots of land (often degraded with little nature). A dwelling every few hundred yards. It looks natural but probably isn't.

Virtually anywhere else the world that isn’t a major metro center.

We are not even close to running out of space. In my eyes, the bigger problem is all those pretty fields with the livestock walking about in them. They should all be covered in forest.

I highly doubt immigration is affecting our population that much. Plus, as recent news has shown, UK is nothing without our migrant workers.

> the bigger problem is all those pretty fields with the livestock walking about in them. They should all be covered in forest.

If the UK replaces all its farmland with forest then they have to import all their food, right? That's not great for the environment, or the UK. A balanced approach seems reasonable.

According to the ONS, the total fertility rate in the UK has been below the replacement rate of 2.1 since before 1980. Immigration is what has been sustaining (and growing) the population.

I think the current impact on the environment demonstrates that we need to (slowly) reduce our population - UK included.

However, according to the statistics, we can maintain a certain level of immigration while also reducing our population - and in fact need to do so to avoid an age pyramid that is so far inverted such that it causes great economic problems.

So while I agree with you that immigration ought to be restricted such that we don't continue population growth, we don't actually need to reduce it by much to make that the case.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

To me the issue is really consumer culture. If you have a densely populated area where households own multiple large cars, pave over gardens to park them, drive them on ancient narrow lanes etc, that seems to me a big cause of nature destruction. And extending houses to have space for all sorts of possessions that are of doubtful value, or could be shared with others. There surely are far more densely populated areas than SE England in poorer countries that just don't have financial means to destroy nature to the same extent. There's a council estate a couple miles from where I live that has some reputation of being "troubled", "unsafe" etc, but to walk around it is quite pleasant, it has far less traffic, far more trees and bushes in gardens, due to being poor. Frankly a lot more birds singing there. To me the answer is if we all try to live rather more simply in terms of consumption.

You talk about smashing biodiversity. But farmland is often degraded already. A residential development can retain hedgerows, and include plots of land managed for wildlife. It absolutely can and should improve biodiversity. Also, the idea that Britain has been concreted over is a myth. Urban land barely gets into double digits in most of Britain. We have lots of golf courses though.

Yeah the industrial revolution kicked the environment hard in the nuts.

This even predates the industrial revolution.

Part of the reason why English joinery was so advanced is that they cut down all the trees everywhere. Consequently, they were left with tiny trees which grew quickly and had to make up for that with advanced joinery.

As for the Thames, that was terrible even as far back as Shakespeare (presumably even further back than that).

In a global context, English laws and customs also form the basis of land and resources policy for the entire Australian continent as well as most of North America, the Indian sub-continent and non-trivial portions of the African continent.

When I read the title of the post, I knew right away that the top comment would be a comment about how bad things are. Top 3 comments, currently.

It's almost like anything optimistic is a threat that needs to be immediately dealt with.

This article reminded me of the news of the amount of coacine in the river Thames and how it made eels "hyperactive":

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/eels-in-thames-left-h...

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/cocaine-in-the-river-...

I know this is bad for nature and all I want to support the eels, but I just can't stop myself giggling every time I see it

Let's get them a trading licence!

>Scientists using a monitoring station near the Houses of Parliament found there was a constant low level of cocaine entering the river, The Sunday Times reported.

That explains a great deal of things!

I've always wanted to get into the bottled water scam. Nestle and Coca Cola are making billions in that space.

I couldn't think of an edge before, but now I think I might have something that sets my water apart from all the others.

Thames Water.

You think that's bad, you should read about the Brixton Crack Squirrels: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/oct/08/drugsandalcohol.p...

However much life has returned, it's nothing compared to before the Industrial Revolution. The wonderful book The Once and Future World by JB MacKinnon changed my understanding of how much more wildlife there was, everywhere. The Thames, for example, had walruses. Captain's logs of ships before steam wrote of being stopped in the middle of the ocean because the sea was so dense with fish.

Today, visitors to Maine feel lucky and pleased if they see a whale. Ships used to see whales as far as the eye could see all day long.

I recorded a couple video essays of the book for a bit more:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLAvBiols2Y

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4NZdciDozI

This person claims they saw a seal off London bridge recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29198398

It’s not uncommon to see seals in the Thames, even in central London. I’ve seen one. ZSL have a map of sightings: https://sites.zsl.org/inthethames/#Public%20sightings

There are seals and sharks in the Thames nowadays. The sharks live in the salty estuary, though.

This article is completely London-centric. The Thames runs 50 miles east of London, and most of that reach is non-tidal (e.g. there are no seals or avocets in Oxford).

That non-tidal reach is pretty polluted - there are small fish (I've seen fishers pull out perch the size of a hand), but unfit to eat, because of the low water quality.

[Edit] There are herons, mallards, and lots of greylag and canada geese on the non-tidal Thames. I've occasionally seen water-voles; but never an otter. I guess the fish must be OK for herons to eat.

Gordon Ramsay of all people noted that the Thames is now teeming with eels because they compete very well in polluted water, while potential competitor species just can't survive and reproduce in those conditions like they can. He was trying to encourage consumption of eels as a protein source as a result.

So apparently, some species can be fit to eat but it's highly dependent on their biology.

I grew up near Oxford and I put the fact I don't get ill very often down to a childhood swimming in the Thames/Isis! You definitely wouldn't want to eat anything from the river there but it's mostly coarse fish anyway - they wouldn't be great to eat even if the water was perfect.

One positive thing in an otherwise fairly depressing picture is that the reds kites seem to be doing really well, I always thought they were carrion eaters but I was fishing once and saw one dive and pull a fish clean out of the water! There were very few when I was a kid but they were re-introduced from Wales and there's loads back in Oxford now.

There are also shags. Shags are relatives of the cormorant, fish-eaters, and fantastic underwater swimmers; they padddle around on the surface for a yard or two, then dive, then surface 30 metres away, often holding a fish.

The common cormorant (or shag) lays eggs inside a paper bag [1].

[1] The reason, you will see no doubt, is to keep the lightning out [2].

[2] But what these unobservant birds have failed to notice is that herds of wandering bears may come with buns and steal the bags to hold the crumbs.

> One positive thing in an otherwise fairly depressing picture is that the reds kites seem to be doing really well

A little too well maybe. Around the Chiltern Hills they are now a very common sight. I saw one many years ago and was amazed, but last time I went there were dozens or them hovering right over the towns! Apparently they have become brave and will swoop down on people, like seagulls but possibly even more alarming.

I drank an unfortunate amount of the Thames on the Devises-Westminster race a decade or so ago. Somehow didn't get ill, but I think that was luck.

I have personally in the past few years seen evidence of sea trout in the the upper Thames: to get there of course they need to go through London which they didn't do for a long time. Before the Victorian era and the pollution from mass industrialisation there were even migratory Salmon in the river, and enormous trout living in the weirpools.

I saw an otter up river on my way to work in 2019. I was not expecting that!

Mammals will probably get somewhat of an easier ride through the Thames since at least they're not getting their oxygen through the water.

It does indicate there's a food source there for them, and that requires stuff that does get oxygen from the water.

I wonder how much pollution tolerance and even preferences play a role here. The Thames has been heavily polluted for hundreds of years, at this point.

I guess that's what you'd expect from a river running through a forest:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/07/london...

The full report from the Zoological Society of London contained in the embedded link:

https://www.zsl.org/sites/default/files/ZSL_TheStateoftheTha...

Didn't London only get a modern sewerage drainage system after a drought lowered the flow of the Thames and made it so that Parliament could smell all the garbage, sewerage, and dead bodies in the river at a time when they still believed that smells were the cause of disease/

Well, yes, but that was centuries ago (the 1860s). Surely it's effect should have been obvious before now.

Yeah Thames is recovering, but I wonder how many rivers in Asia have been turned into dead sewers in her place.

I recently move to London. Whenever I post pictures of the river everyone points out how murky it looks. I was quite surprised to read that it's cleaner than how it looks.

I always hear disbelief whenever I say it's cleaner than what people actually think, especially from Londoners.

It's generally murky because the tide kicks up a lot of silt, giving it it's brown colour. You'd need a hell of a lot more sewage for that to be the reason it's brown.

Yeah, the Thames Estuary consists of extensive mudflats and saltmarshes. Well worth visiting if nothing else just to see the effects of the tide.

Go for a swim! :)

Modern day Londoners' grandparents have all heard about the offal and excrement floating in the Thames while toddlers sitting on the knees of their grandparents, who heard about the same sitting on the knees of their grandparents. Hard to break a chain like that even with scientific evidence.

Reminds me of the Rhine in the Netherlands. The worst polluting industry was outsourced to other countries when stricter environmentalist legislation came in.

An often overlooked function of a river is drinking water...

> biologically dead

How can we balance microbial biodiversity against macroscopic zoological biodiversity? Certainly the Thames has been thriving with a diversity of microbial life. Are there measures of biodiversity that are less zoologically-centric and more information theoretic, say by measuring the information content of the collective genomes in an ecosystem, including bacteria and viruses?

I saw a Seal off London Bridge last week. It was something of a personal ambition fulfilled.

Cool. I've only been to London once, but I distinctly remember being disturbed by how dead everything was. I'm not sure how accurate the stat, but I recall Table Mountain having more floral species than the entire UK.

Yes, but Table Mountain has ridiculous floral diversity. There are widely considered to be six floral kingdoms [0]: the northern hemisphere, the tropics, Africa and southern Asia, South America, Australia, the Antarctic, and the tip of South Africa. My (probably incorrect) understanding is that each of these is similar to the others in floral diversity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytochorion

Fair enough :) Growing up there you never consider it like that.

The sad thing is that is comming back to a different life.

Life always finds a way..

I wonder if the native wildlife is also complaining about the "myriad of biodiversity" on the river ;)

That’s all the untreated pop they’re flushing into the waterways

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.sky.com/story/amp/beyond-a...

If it’s not the cocaine making the eels hyperactive it’s the Irn Bru I guess.

That would apply more to any eels in the River Clyde in Glasgow.

I didn’t know a peppy London area soft drink, sorry :(

Vodka with Red Bull and champagne in Marylebone.

Pimms in the Summer

I live in Kingston Upon Thames, a 2 minute walk away from the river. Can I swim in it?

Yes

Life... uh... life finds a way

I wonder how the future water levels will impact have impact..

Wait what? There is positive news about the environment.

Recent legislation allows waste treatment companies to pour raw sewage into british waterways - so I guess the seals/eels/salmon etc won't be sticking around for long...

Hopefully the Tideway project will remove the need for that in London https://www.tideway.london/

Shame though for the rest of the country that might not necessarily be able to bankroll such a project.

where else in the country has victorian sewers built for a population density of 6825 per square kilometre vs 18457 people per square kilometre today?

My comment was more in reference to the fact that it is now legal for UK companies to dump raw sewage into the water. It means that the practice will likely proliferate to other less well funded regions.

In the event of emergencies where the other option is for it to flood the streets with sewage.

Billions are being spent to make sure that doesn't happen.

Waste companies have always done this. It happens when shared rainwater/sewage drains become overwhelmed in heavy rain and overflow into rivers.

The legislation isn't allowing something to happen that didn't happen before. There was a vote to ban it outright, which didn't pass. A watered-down (oh yeah) law was passed which allows the practice to continue but requires the water companies to work to prevent it.

You've got it back to front. The Labour Party introduced a completely impractical amendment which would have been impossible to pass into law, so that when the Conservatives voted it down they could use it to convince members of the public that the government want rivers filled with sewage. Classic opposition playbook.

What was the amendment? I would like to read about it.

"Only 22 Conservatives rebelled against the Government by voting for an opposition amendment to the Environment Bill, which would have forced a legal duty upon water companies not to pump sewage into waters.

...

'Initial assessments suggest that total elimination of discharges from storm overflows would cost anywhere between £150 billion and £650 billion.

This process could involve the complete separation of sewerage systems, leading to potentially significant disruption for homes, businesses and infrastructure across the country.'"

https://www.maldonandburnhamstandard.co.uk/news/19688229.joh...

thames has outsourced that to the yangztse

Biologically dead? A foolhardy assertion for anyone to make. Nature is nothing if not robust! I have no doubt that at the minimum microbial life has been flourishing throughout, with many other beings likely hiding from view.

That sounds like valuable research you've done - were you able to do it all from your armchair or did you have to go and take samples?

I'd say the burden of proof is on those who claimed it is biologically dead. I'd find it hard to believe no microbial life was in the Thames.

You find life in the most harsh environments, geysers, volcano vents, miles deep in mines.

But in reality the statement "biologically dead" is a hyperbole from the media meaning fish and animals weren't present, not microbes or biological life in general.

GP was making a tongue-in-cheek statement against that hyperbole I believe.

I'll see my way out...

Sure, but I replied sarcastically because OPs remark was akin to 'my house wasn't "consumed by an inferno", part of the back wall is still standing!' and therefore somewhat missing the point....

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