Bill ensures further heritage destruction

In the grand scheme of things, two events this week would have cheered anyone aware of how very precarious our guardianship of the environment is.

However, a third event is another occasion for despair. Sadly, it is necessary to cross the Atlantic to find the positive developments.

The resignation of the head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, must be celebrated. Even by President Donald Trump’s standards, this was a bull-in-the-china-shop appointment. Pruitt epitomises the drill-baby-drill philosophy of exploiting natural resources to destruction.

He brought a zealot’s passion to reversing many of Barack Obama’s environmental protection measures and encouraged Mr Trump to quit the Paris climate pact. Bedevilled by what are described as “ethical missteps”, Mr Pruitt is the subject of at least 13 federal investigations. His departure must be seen as a victory.

America offered conservationists a second reason to cheer when the first farmed salmon, produced entirely on land, went on sale in America, symbolically on July 4.

These fish were not exposed to pesticides, herbicides, or antibiotics and the water used to raise them was recycled and used to grow vegetables in an adjacent market garden.

The Wisconsin project has been described as “the future of environmental-controlled agriculture”.

This advance makes salmon farming in sea cages, almost the only method used on this side of the Atlantic, obsolete. The development suggests that the destructive impact of these facilities can be consigned to history.

That, unfortunately, would require the Government to insist that the sector move to exclusively on-land production bases and close all saltwater facilities.

Anyone familiar with our governments’ feebleness in the face of the food industry knows that the awakening needed to follow the Wisconsin example is unlikely.

The passage of the Heritage Bill, by a vote of 64 to 33, through the Dáil on Wednesday night, is just the latest confirmation that Pruitt’s destructive worldview is shared by far too many of our politicians.

Before being enacted, the bill will go back to the Seanad for one final stage. Laughably called the Heritage Bill, it facilitates further destruction of our heritage, allowing for the burning of heather and gorse in March and for hedge-cutting in August.

Long-sought by the farm lobby, the bill allows hedges to be cut only on the side facing the road. Experience suggests that a spectacular leap of faith is required to believe that limitation will be observed.

That the Wildlife Act already provides for roadside hedge-cutting by an authorised body during the closed season, for reasons of public health or safety, adds to that scepticism.

That the new bill gives unregulated scope for landowners to cut roadside hedges for self-defined road-safety issues deepens that scepticism. The bill’s advocates will scoff, saying it is just a small matter of rural housekeeping. It is much more.

It is another indication that our politicians bend when they should say no to a sector making a huge, disproportionate contribution to the probability that we will face €600m a year in fines because we will not meet our EU emissions obligations.