Richard Mabey has combed several libraries to come up with a selection that guarantees surprises. There are old favourites. A decent enough selection of Gilbert White, although pretty self-restrained given that Mabey is responsible for a fine biography. Some Darwin too, including his first description of the Galapagos Islands and a lovely exchange between Charles and his botanical mentor John Henslow. Coming up to date, there’s some Annie Dillard and a bit of Bill McKibben.

But to single out familiar items is to miss the great pleasure of this collection, which is the delight of previously unknown pieces. How to organise all this richness? Mabey has chosen to construct seven sections “each One of which,” he tells us, “corresponds to a broad historical movement (for example Romanticism and the Victorian cult of natural history)”. That works well enough.

The amount of commentary, exegesis or explanation is extremely limited. That works well too, but does presuppose some knowledge of the subject in the reader, to be able to sift acute observation from inspired guesswork from received wisdom. I feel sure that Mabey has also adopted the right approach here, giving just enough biographical information to enlighten our view of the more obscure contributors.

Of course, there are omissions; I’d have liked to see some John McPhee, and maybe a bit more of nature in an agricultural context. But these are foolish, personal quibbles. The book is, after all, an anthology, a selection, and I am pleased that Mabey’s selections are not mine, else I would never have discovered such delights as John Clare on “The Will o whisp or Jack a lanthorn” or why St Kevin holds a blackbird’s nest. Enough. I could continue to tantalise you with the delights I have discovered in just a short while. I know where my copy is going to live now: a place where I can devour just enough at one sitting to make the sitting fulfilling as well as emptying.

“Invasives are the single most destructive force worldwide,” Craig MacFarland of the Charles Darwin Foundation in the Galápagos told a meeting at the Royal Society in London last week. Alien species are found almost everywhere but are especially damaging on oceanic islands. On the island of Isabela, the number of goats on Mount Alcedo, one of its volcanic peaks, has increased from about 10 in 1982 to 100000 today. “They’re destroying the cloud forest,” said Fitter, “and that is home to the largest population of giant tortoises in the Galápagos.” Without the forest, the tortoises will die, and without the tortoises the tourist trade and the prosperity of the islands will also wither.

Elsewhere on the islands, it is the trees that are the invaders rather than the victims. Cinchona, the quinine tree, was brought in from the mainland, where it is almost extinct. In the Galápagos it has become something of a weed, displacing local species. And Cuban cedar, imported as a source of timber, remained a rare curiosity for many years. The 1982 El Niño triggered some unknown change, and now the tree is spreading rapidly. “This underlines how little we know about invasiveness,” said Fitter. But he has no doubts about goats. “We’ve got to eradicate them.”

New Zealand leads the field in eradicating alien species. Mick Clout of the Centre of Conservation Biology at the University of Auckland described the country as “one of the most invaded places on Earth”. Almost half of the plants and 94 per cent of the mammals are aliens, and the damage they have done to native species is enormous. New Zealand’s Department of Conservation has been developing eradication techniques, starting on small offshore islands and, as they gain experience, moving to ever larger parcels of land.

Aerial bombardments with poisoned bait have helped to eliminate entire populations of rats and cats, allowing endangered birds and reptiles to recover. The same techniques are now being applied on the mainland, leading to an upsurge in the numbers of native birds such as the kokako, a nectar-eating parrot, and the New Zealand pigeon, or kerera, which is an important disperser of seeds. “Management is possible,” said Clout. “It requires a lot of effort.”

In the Galápagos, biologists are looking to New Zealand for the expertise to eradicate the goats. Trial shooting parties have bagged 2500 goats in five days, said Fitter, but that barely dents the population. Goats can breed four times a year. In New Zealand, marksmen operating from helicopters have been remarkable successful at wiping out entire populations. “The good thing about the goats is that they eat the vegetation, so they can’t hide,” said Fitter. Helicopter gunships may seem extravagant, but are in fact a cheap way of getting rid of the goats, he said.

One invader that was barely discussed was Homo sapiens. Thanks to their unique fauna and flora – and the ecotourists they attract – the Galápagos have the highest per capita earnings of all Ecuador’s provinces. That has engendered a gold rush mentality. Population is increasing by 8 per cent a year, putting tremendous pressure on the 3 per cent of the land that does not have national park status. A new law is being drawn up to restrict immigration, but experts say the government of Ecuador is too weak to implement it. So the goats remain the preferred target (see Map).

Britain risks losing its considerable lead in the plant breeding technology of the future unless it increases its spending, according to plant geneticists. And next week they will be putting pressure on the Centre for Exploitation of Science and Technology to back a plan to more than treble Britain’s efforts to map the genome of wheat.

Mike Gale, head of the Cambridge Laboratory of the John Innes Centre, which has its headquarters in Norwich, says: ‘Britain has the lead in this technology applied to wheat, but we are now under severe pressure.’ Japan and the US are investing heavily in crop genome research.

Gale and his colleagues were the first to develop restriction fragment length polymorphisms for analysing the genomes of cereal crops, and have built on that expertise to construct detailed genetic maps of barley, rye and pearl millet, as well as wheat.

The wheat genome is difficult to map for two reasons. It is huge, many times the size of the human genome, and hexaploid, containing six copies each of seven chromosomes. Each of those 42 chromosomes is equivalent to a third of the whole human genome. Undaunted, Graham Moore at the John Innes Centre began surveying the wheat genome.

Standard mapping procedures depend on homing in on informative coding regions in genes and ‘walking’ along the chromosome, past any uninformative repetitive DNA, to the next gene. Unfortunately, Moore’s group established that coding regions in wheat are few and far between, dispersed among blocks of simple, repeated sequences that make up more than 90 per cent of the genome. The huge repeats in wheat made standard mapping almost impossible, so Moore turned to rice.

Rice has a very small genome, with 12 chromosomes, less than half made up of repeats. Working with the Japanese National Institute of Agricultural Research’s Rice Genome Programme in Tsukuba, Moore looked for genes shared between rice and wheat, and discovered that although wheat and rice diverged some 60 million years ago, the order of the genes in the two species is essentially the same, even though the genes are much farther apart in wheat. Six of wheat’s chromosomes are identical to six of rice’s, while the seventh wheat chromosome is split in two in rice. The remaining four rice chromosomes are duplicates or end bits of the wheat chromosomes. ‘Essentially,’ says Moore, ‘rice is wheat without the repeats.’

The significance of this can barely be overstated. Moore and his colleagues say that they can reconstruct the ancestral cereal genome of 60 million years ago, and with it have shown that the genes of all the agriculturally important cereals – not just rice and wheat but sorghum, maize, rye, oats, barley and the rest – can be placed on a single map.

Moore has used landmarks on the rice genome to help wheat researchers like himself to home in on particular genes they are interested in, an approach that can be extended to the other cereals, too. And the shared map implies that genes for important characteristics, such as disease resistance, photoperiodism, drought tolerance, storage proteins and the like, can be plucked direct from one genome and applied in another.

‘The big prizes – and there are going to be some very big prizes – are going to come from transferring genes and knowledge between species,’ says Gale. The work is now going beyond mapping. ‘That is fun,’ Gale adds, ‘but it is only a stepping stone to fusing the biochemistry and the genetics across species.’

The rewards, he says, will be not so much higher yields as more sustainable yields, already being explored in relation to disease resistance. ‘Is rust resistance in wheat the same as rice blast resistance? Can we think of a kind of generic disease resistance?’

The shared genome map cries out for shared research, but the competitive advantage to plant breeders has apparently ruled out cooperation within the European Union. Europe has instead focused on the commercially unimportant thale cress, Arabidopsis, mainly because it has a very simple genome. The Japanese have adopted rice enthusiastically, and says Moore, just back from a new purpose-built rice genome institute in Japan, ‘have ten thousand rice genes sequenced, about half the genome’.

The main effort in the US has been in maize, but that is proving more difficult than barley, which is gaining increasing attention. The Germans, too, have proposed a large programme to map barley. That leaves the British to capitalise on their investment and expertise in their major crop, wheat.

Jerry Miksche, director of the US Department of Agriculture’s Plant Genome Research Program, says that more British effort on wheat would be ‘good logic, in that Great Britain’s research on wheat has made great strides’. The USDA is negotiating a deal between the US and Britain on sharing data, whereby wheat information would be deposited in the National Agricultural Library’s plant genome database in Maryland, and British scientists would receive software tools for interrogating the database.

Gale admits that the work in Britain has been reasonably well supported by the Department of Trade and Industry, the Biotechnology Directorate of the Science and Engineering Research Council, the Agricultural and Food Research Council, and by industry. ‘We have about £300 000 a year,’ he said, ‘which funds five or six posts. That’s terribly small beer compared to what’s going on in the US and Japan.’

The Japanese are spending £3.5 million a year on their rice genome programme, while the German barley proposal is for Pounds sterling 2.5 million. Miksche estimates that American efforts on all small-grain genome research receive about $240 million (about £165 million) a year.

‘An investment of only £1 million a year could accommodate the expertise that is already in place and generate more interest in other labs,’ says Gale. He hopes the new Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, which comes into being on 1 April, will agree.

A quick dip into this book would give the wrong impression. The first
few chapters reprint articles from the magazine Science, and it would be
easy to assume that the rest of this book will also consist of eminent con-servationists
obeying their own advice, managing their intellectual resources and recycling
their ideas. It does not. It is a collection of case studies and personal
accounts that show in detail how, and occasionally why, specific efforts
have or have not succeeded.

Within an overall framework that divides the world and its problems
into four neat sections, it is pleasing to see agriculture receive a good
share of attention. For far too long the plants, animals and ecosystems
on which our immediate survival depends have played second fiddle to the
charismatic megavertebrates and their exotic dwelling places. People have
been happy to save the whales while allowing kales to become extinct.

Three fine chapters demonstrate the value of genetic resources in agriculture,
then go further to show how local farmers have not only the intellectual
capacity but also the practical skills and political will to recapture and
improve on their rich heritage of traditional varieties and growing systems.
That is not surprising, given that it was just such people who invented
and developed agriculture during almost all of its 10 000-year history,
but it comes as a refreshing and hopeful antidote to some of the excesses
of modern agricultural ‘development’.

Other aspects also get a good going over. Ecotourism comes in for some
hard-nosed scrutiny in the context of African primates. It is astounding
that 5000 visitors to the mountain gorillas of Rwanda paid more than $1
million in park entry fees alone, while the $1.4 million collected by Kenya’s
Amboseli National Parks was raised from 270 000 visitors. Sobering, too,
is the thought that despite the local development that ecotourism can bring,
the lion’s share of travellers’ cheques still ends up in private or government
hands, or completely outside the country with foreign airlines.

But there is much more to provoke thought: an analysis of the arguments
for saving the Northern Spotted Owl and its old-growth forests in the Pacific
Northwest of America; a demonstration that an informal forest reserve, managed
by and for the inhabitants of three Peruvian villages, is more effective
than the nearby national park that is the government’s pride and joy; the
productivity gains that arise when researchers work with farmers to realise
their needs rather than those of agronomists; complex and successful systems
of resource management that are not yet recognised as such by either old-school
agriculturalists or mainstream conservationists.

I could go on. Case studies such as these, especially when collected
in a book such as this, are much more valuable than recycled environmental
truisms. If I have one complaint, it is that to save paper, perhaps, the
pages are too densely printed. You will find no space for the marginal notes
that almost every page cries out for.

Jeremy Cherfas is a science writer and editor.

(see Graphic) Whales are safe for another year, but that will not stop Japan and Norway continuing to hunt them, in defiance of the spirit, if not the letter, of the latest decisions of the International Whaling Commission. The 45th annual meeting of the IWC, which ended in Kyoto, Japan, on 14 May, left the moratorium on commercial whaling in place, but postponed discussion of a French proposal for a huge whale sanctuary around Antarctica. Delegates also rejected a demand from Norway and Japan that they implement the system for setting catch quotas in full next year.FIG-mg18740501.jpg

This system, the Revised Management Procedure (RMP), is the IWC’s latest response to its mandate to manage the exploitation of whale stocks. Rather than deny any possibility of commercial whaling, the IWC devised a management procedure that would not endanger whale stocks, unlike previous versions. The core of this RMP is the catch limit algorithm, which sets the quota that can be caught. The IWC accepted the catch limit algorithm last year (‘Whalers win the numbers game”, 91av , 11 July 1992) but wanted to add other safeguards to the RMP before accepting the package.

These included minimum standards for data, guidelines for conducting surveys, and effective policing to inspect and verify catches. Japan and Norway asked the IWC to adopt the full RMP next year, opening the way for renewed commercial whaling. The commission refused by 18 votes to 6, with 6 abstentions. This effectively delays for another year the adoption of the RMP. Kazuo Shima, Japan’s commissioner, was worried that ‘the RMP will be postponed indefinitely. It’s a great pity to see the efforts of scientists wasted. I don’t think the IWC is functioning normally.’

Continuation of the moratorium was never seriously in doubt. Agreed in 1982, and in force since 1985, the ban can only be overturned by a three-quarters majority of voters. Despite the emergence of a new pro-whaling block behind Norway and Japan, conservationists were confident that the ban would remain.

The ban has not stopped Japan taking about 300 minke whales a year from Antarctic waters because a loophole allows whaling for scientific purposes. Although each year the scientific committee asks Japan to stop, the IWC can do nothing to halt it. Japan would like to legitimise this catch, and increase it, but the IWC refuses.

Norway, by contrast, has abandoned the pretence of scientific whaling and said that, whatever the IWC’s decision, it would resume commercial whaling this year. The Norwegians say they will take 800 minke whales this year. The first, a 7-metre female, was killed off the Lofoten Islands on 6 May. The US and European Community countries could now mpose sanctions on Norway’s fish exports, and perhaps even boycott the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. But the Norwegians are undeterred. ‘There are hundreds of boycott actions under way in the United States at any given time, and most have a negligible effect,’ said Ingvard Havnen, of the Norwegian foreign ministry.

Earlier in the week, the IWC turned down Japan’s request for an emergency allocation of 50 minke whales for the whalers of its coastal community. Shima expressed ‘anguish and anger’ at the decision, and warned that Japan would re-evaluate its membership of the IWC. But Masamichi Hanabusa of the Japanese foreign ministry played down the threat. ‘We never expressed an intention to withdraw from the IWC,’ he said.

The French first proposed an Antarctic sanctuary at last year’s IWC meeting in Glasgow. There were objections then that they had not followed the correct procedure for tabling a proposal, and discussion of it was abandoned. This year, the French were better prepared, with a suggestion that all whales should be protected south of latitude 40 degrees South. This line runs between Australia and Tasmania and cuts through the tip of New Zealand’s North Island and through Chile and Argentina. It would protect the great whales at their feeding grounds around Antarctica, for 50 years with a review in 2003.

There is a precedent for such a sanctuary. In 1979 the IWC voted to make most of the Indian Ocean a no-go area for whalers. At Kyoto, the proposal for a sanctuary was passed easily by the IWC’s technical committee, which needs only a simple majority. But there were fears that it would not obtain the three-quarters majority needed to be passed by the full commission. Rather than risk defeat, Switzerland, among others, suggested that further discussion should be put off for a year. That delay was accepted by 19 votes to 8, with Japan voting for the delay.

The sanctuary will be discussed at an interim session in Australia before next year’s meeting of the IWC in Mexico. It is not clear whether the sanctuary, if it is ever adopted, would have any impact on Japan’s ‘scientific’ whalers.

Britain has pressed hard for Japan and Norway to wake up to the value of live whales. A paper prepared by the British government says in 1991 whale-watching generated an income of £185 million worldwide. The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society claims that since 1988, the number of people going on whale-watching tours in Japan has doubled every year. ‘In 1992 more than 19 000 people went whale-watching in Japan’, raising about £5 million, it says.

‘Whale-watching may be worth more than whale-catching,’ said Lord Strathclyde, an environment minister. The British paper includes a resolution to give the IWC a key role in monitoring whale-watching, requiring it to prepare guidelines to minimise disturbance of the animals. Before the meeting, Strathclyde said ‘we shall push very hard for its adoption’, and the IWC agreed by consensus to set up a working group on whale-watching.

There were objections, however, from Japan, Norway and Caribbean members, who all questioned the IWC’s authority to regulate whale-watching. Comments by Caribbean delegates in favour of whaling prompted renewed allegations that Japan was buying votes in exchange for development aid.

‘We are not here to vote for Japan,’ said an angry Denis Noel, commissioner for Grenada. ‘I am not in support of Japanese policy but my own. It may happen that our position coincides with the Japanese position.’ Grenada became a member of the IWC a month ago, joining the Dominican Republic, St Lucia, St Kitts and St Vincent.

‘Japan extends economic assistance to all developing countries,’ said a Japanese government official, ‘and those Caribbean countries happen to be among them.

At Blaenavon, in South Wales, where the landscape is bleak and the soil
poor, towering black mountains of waste have been brought to the surface
in the search for coal. British Coal says it has reclaimed these wastes
too, trucking in vast amounts of fine topsoil and bulldozing it around to
bandage the tips. Seeded with grasses and dressed with fertilisers, these
bindings quickly bloom into a lush green skin.

The beauty, however, is only skin deep – and fleeting. After a few years,
mosses and lichens outnumber grasses. Up close, ragged tufts of coarse grass
perch on isolated islands of fertile soil in a sea of sterile earth. British
Coal’s reclamation has obviously failed, and its efforts to reopen a mine
at Blaenavon threaten research that promises successful future rehabilitation
of the site. Like the cleanup itself, the idea that the mining companies
have restored the land is an illusion. ‘Increasingly,’ says Martin Haigh,
a soil scientist at Oxford Polytechnic, ‘the most serious land reclamation
problems in Wales are lands which have already been, quote, reclaimed.’

Haigh is leading an international project to demonstrate how mine spoils
should be reclaimed. Remarkably, most of the work is carried out by untrained
volunteers. More remarkably still, the science behind the work has come
from Bulgaria, where circumstances forced ecologists to devise schemes that
needed neither topsoil nor bulldozers to reclaim mine workings.

How did an Oxford scientist, born, as it happens, in Cwmbran, just south
of Blaenavon, come to be leading a crew of volunteers from Australia, India,
the US and all points between, in an attempt to apply Bulgarian know-how
in Wales?

‘I’ve been studying the soils of Blaenavon for over 20 years,’ said
Haigh as he led the way through teeming rain on a voyage around the tips.
The Blaenavon area saw Wales’ first coal mines in the 18th century and,
more recently, was the site of one of the largest opencast mines at Pwll
Du. That mine, where work stopped in 1948, has officially been reclaimed.
But, as Haigh said, much of the land has shown ‘a surprising capacity to
resist revegetation’.

To find out why, Haigh started monitoring soil erosion from reclaimed
sites and neighbouring natural moorland. He found up to 27 times more erosion
in the reclaimed sites. Then he studied the evolution of erosion gullies
and the ways in which artificially constructed slopes changed. And finally,
he delved into the soil itself, to study its structure and composition.

He discovered that, from the moment the topsoil was trucked in, it began
to die. Haigh found that the soil was being choked. Mine spoil comes up
from great depths and much of it has never been exposed to weathering before.
‘The stones are not like the ones you see in your back garden,’ he said,
picking up a piece of shale. ‘They disintegrate visibly because of rapid
weathering,’ pressing home the point by lightly squeezing the shale. It
crumbled. ‘And the shales break up into clays which wash off and clog the
���Ǿ���.’

A few centimetres beneath the surface, the waste consist of pieces of
shale and grit in a heavy clay matrix that acts like solid rock. Water cannot
percolate through, it runs off the surface, carrying the expensively imported
topsoil with it. The clogging clay particles also mean there is no air beneath
the topsoil, so roots cannot penetrate.

The result is the lunar landscape of reclaimed Blaenavon, but Haigh
is at pains to point out that it is not entirely the fault of the reclaimers.
It is, he says, the result of ‘natural processes working on mine spoils’.
And there are peculiar problems. Tracks left by a single vehicle in bad
conditions can cut through the topsoil and create a furrow that will erode
into a small canyon. Grand engineered drains, designed to divert rainwater,
fall into disrepair and make matters worse. On one hillside, Haigh pointed
out a defunct drain. It had been breached four times, and four gullies sliced
down through the hill to a silty black marsh below.

Haigh argues that the problems of reclaiming marginal land cannot be
solved by better engineering. Although the technique is fine for areas which
will be intensively maintained, on the open moorland, where there is no
provision for future care, this sort of reclamation is a disaster.

‘In Wales, natural processes swamp the ability of life to improve conditions
for life,’ he concludes. But after a couple of decades of study, understanding
why so much reclamation was such a failure was not enough. Haigh wanted
to do something about it. He found the solution in Bulgaria, where the British
Council sent him in 1987. Bulgaria faces very similar problems to South
Wales. Mining in the Pernik basin, south west of Sofia, has created spoils
just like those in Wales, but the reclamation has been completely different.
‘They had bare shale slopes to deal with,’ Haigh recalled, ‘and 20 years
on there are forests of birch and black pine.’

Haigh learned that in Bulgaria reclamation was the province of ecologists,
not engineers. The country simply could not afford to shift mountains of
topsoil around, so the reclamation scientists restored the land with nature
and natural processes rather than with earth-movers.

The Bulgarian approach depends entirely on trees. Workers plant the
slopes with a variety of species. The locust tree, Robinia pseudoacacia,
is a good early colonist, probably because it is a legume capable of creating
its own fertiliser from nitrogen in the atmosphere. Later, its growth rate
declines and birch, ash and pine take over.

The point about the trees is that their roots are strong and penetrating,
they prevent erosion and create a favourable micro-habitat. Bacteria, fungi
and animals such as earthworms, thrive in the root zone. The soil organisms
secrete sticky compounds that help to bind the fine clay particles into
larger crumbs. That stops the clay clogging the shales beneath and improves
the environment for trees and soil organisms alike. The result is a virtuous
circle, with a self-improving soil that supports growing populations of
plants and soil organisms, which in turn further improve the soil. The shale
ends up buried beneath what Haigh describes as ‘deep soils that have great
structure and are full of life’.

SUCCOUR FROM SOFIA

Haigh contacted Svetla Gentcheva, head of the department of ecology
at the Higher Institute of Forest Engineering in Sofia, who had been responsible
for much of the work. ‘I asked her to teach us how to do it, and she did.’

The result is the Welsh project, started in 1990 and funded by Earthwatch,
a charity that charges volunteers for the privilege of spending two weeks
digging holes in heavy clay on a rain-sodden Welsh hillside. Some of their
work has confirmed Haigh’s earlier soil-monitoring results at other sites.
And, under Gentcheva’s guidance, the volunteers started planting trees.

At Bryn Llanmarch Farm, a farmer donated the first test site, a patch
50 metres by 60 metres (see picture above right). On one side, the volunteers
laboured to open craters in the clay. These were filled with leaf-mould,
in which saplings were planted. On the other side of the patch, saplings
were roughly thrust into slits opened up with a spade, and left to their
own devices.

Two years on, another batch of volunteers is scrutinising the trees,
measuring every twig. So far, the properly planted saplings seem to be doing
better, which is a shame, says Haigh, because ‘it’s bloody hard work’. But
even the roughly planted trees are doing quite well, and some that apparently
died last summer have sprung up anew from their roots.

Time will reveal whether some planting practices are more suitable than
others, and future sites will assess the influence of fertilisers, weed-suppressing
mulches, and the like. Haigh also admits that he may need to revise his
selection of trees, which so far has been based on studying which mature
trees grow in the area. Sycamore and ash predominate, with alder as the
early nitrifier, equivalent to the locust trees in Bulgaria.

Despite this, after only two years Haigh is convinced that the method
will work as well in Wales as it already has in Bulgaria. ‘The soil starts
reclaiming itself,’ he says. His task now is to reclaim British Coal’s reclamation
policy.

The recent public inquiry to consider British Coal’s application for
a new opencast mine at Pwll Du did not consider the proper restoration of
the land once the miners have gone again. The new mine would have destroyed
some of Haigh’s long-term monitoring sites, and although British Coal eventually
agreed to try to preserve these sites, and also offered some new research
sites, it later said it was not interested in the research. After mining
had ended, the operators would, however, reclaim the land they reclaimed
45 years ago.

‘Our reclamation techniques are completely different now,’ said a spokesman
for British Coal Opencast. ‘We have had a research programme for the past
12 years to solve the technical problems of land reclamation, and we can
claim that the problems have been more or less solved.’ Drainage, for example,
is improved by new machinery that rips the subsoil to prevent the formation
of a ‘pan’ of impermeable, compacted earth. Haig counters: ‘The pan will
reform, and they know that. The ripping machine is no answer. In fact it’ll
just make the problem worse.’

He recalls trying to persuade one engineer working for British Coal
at least to consider a change of practice. ‘He told me we weren’t doing
reclamation because we weren’t using bulldozers,’ Haigh said. ‘Then he put
the phone down.’

In a sense, British Coal’s attitude is understandable; they want to
open a new mine at Pwll Du, so they can hardly admit to problems with reclamation.

Haigh concedes that some of British Coal’s research work, for example
using sewage sludge to encourage planted trees, is heading in the right
direction. ‘They’ve got some very good young researchers, but as far as
I can tell they don’t listen to them,’ he says.

‘We are at the forefront of a change in philosophy,’ Haigh insists.
Reclamation in Britain – particularly within British Coal – has always been
technocentric. His goal is to make reclamation more ecocentric. ‘You want
to restore the land. Do you use machinery and technology to push it into
shape? Or do you use more gentle, ecological methods to coax it into a position
where it can look after itself?’

THE BURDEN OF PROOF

‘The big expense now is the burden of scientific proof,’ says Haigh.
That is where the project’s sponsors, the BOC Foundation and Earthwatch,
have been so useful. The foundation enjoys an annual income of up to 0.5
per cent of the annual profits of BOC Group, the big industrial outfit,
and is dedicated to supporting practical efforts to clean up pollution.
It is giving £20 000 a year for two years, which will allow Haigh’s
team to determine which tree species are best at penetrating the impermeable
spoil layers to create a living soil, and also to find a way of managing
these plantations that brings the quickest rewards.

Even if British Coal eventually approves of his techniques, Haigh may
face a tough time convincing local farmers. Most of the reclaimed land ends
up as common, grazed by sheep but not worth anybody looking after in the
long term. Sheep are the enemy of young trees, so if Haigh is to adopt an
ecological approach he will have to keep the farmers off. ‘I’ll deal with
that when I have to,’ he says.

‘Reclaimed’ land is that which has been subjected to reclamation treatment.
It is not necessarily land which is going to stay reclaimed. A significant
fraction of Europe’s ‘reclaimed land’ is suffering progressive degradation,’
says Haig. Bulgaria could hold the key to sustainable reclamation, but what
disappoints Haigh most is that the experience of his Bulgarian colleagues
seems to count for nothing.

Jeremy Cherfas is a reporter who specialises in biological resources.
In South Wales, efforts to reclaim the black mountains of waste from coal
mines have failed. A Bulgarian technique promises to do better

Tough decisions were studiously avoided at last week’s annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission. Iceland walked out, it is true, but had decided to do so last year. And Norway decided to resume commercial whaling. But those decisions were essentially outside the IWC. Within, the French proposal to set aside Antarctic waters as a whale sanctuary was put off to another day. Requests from Japan for a continued kill of minke whales in Antarctica for ‘scientific research’ were granted with no more than a gentle rebuke.

It was not until the last day that delegates to the Glasgow meeting really bit the blubber on a resolution that split the ranks of whalers and non-whalers alike. The resolution accepted the scientific engine that will calculate catch quotas, but added numerous features that need to be in place before the engine is used, as part of the Revised Management System (RMS).

Japan and Britain found themselves united in abstaining over the resolution: Japan because it did not like those additional features, Britain because there was no mention of reducing the cruelty involved in whaling. The only country to vote against it was Norway, because it doesn’t like the quota-setting calculations. The resolution was, however, adopted by 16 votes to 1, with 11 abstentions.

At the heart of the conflict that has divided countries that say they will accept whaling provided it is properly regulated, from those that want to whale, is a simple question: how many whales can one kill?

That question has exercised the brains of the IWC’s scientific committee for more than five years. But at last they have a set of rules on which they agree. These rules, now endorsed by the IWC, form the catch limit algorithm at the heart of the Revised Management Procedure (RMP).

The job of the RMP is to provide a rational basis for exploiting whales. Its forerunner, the New Management Procedure (NMP), was essentially a simple model of a population. Left alone, under pristine conditions, animals are born and die, and the total population depends on the ‘carrying capacity’ of the environment. Removing some animals will free resources for those remaining. These will flourish, creating a surplus that can be exploited.

Maximising yield

Simplistically, the population can be reduced by hunting to a level at which it produces the maximum sustainable yield (MSY), the greatest harvest that can be taken year after year. Take more than this each year and you eat into the natural capital, depriving yourself of future yield. Take less, and you are unnecessarily forgoing some yield that you could take.

The scientists who devised the NMP decided that the MSY would be provided by a whale population reduced to 60 per cent of its pristine abundance. One safety feature to preserve numbers was to set the maximum catch quota at 90 per cent of the MSY. A second was to insist that if a population fell below 54 per cent of its natural abundance, it would be completely protected.

In a perfect world, the NMP would have worked. Given accurate information about such things as the rate of reproduction, age at first reproduction, rate of natural mortality, population age structure and the like, the NMP could have managed whaling adequately. The problem was that the biological data were almost impossible to come by at an acceptably accurate level. Whales are difficult and expensive to study, and commercial whaling does not provide statistically sound data.

As long as that was true, scientists who used the NMP to set quotas could fudge the issue by using estimates that in the 1960s gave larger quotas than were wise. Later, as conservationists gained the upper hand, quotas grew ever smaller. In 1982, conservationists eventually forced through a moratorium on commercial whaling that began in 1985/6. During the halt, the scientists would come up with a revised management procedure that made good the deficiencies of the NMP.

There were objections to this approach from the whalers. Johann Sigurjonsson, chief scientist in the Icelandic delegation, was indignant during his country’s valedictory after walking out of the IWC. ‘Iceland manages cod, all the time revising the management procedure, but we don’t stop catching cod while we are revising. So, why do we need to stop catching whales while you are revising management procedures?’

Ideally, a management procedure would not put an existing population at risk of extinction, it would offer a high quota, and the quota would not swing wildly from year to year. But you can’t have everything. The most risk-free strategy is to take no whales. That is stable, but offers no yield. Deciding the relative importance that should be given to yield, stability and risk, the scientists argued, was a job not for them but for the Commission.

For four years, the IWC failed to set priorities for the RMP. Finally, in 1989, it attempted to give scientists the guidance they sought. Minimising the risk of taking whales from a depleted stock was given top priority. Next in importance was to maximise the stability of the quota from year to year. And finally, the procedure should offer the highest total yield over the long run.

With that guidance, it became pos-sible to test rival management strat-egies. Australian population biologist William de la Mare had proposed a high-stakes computer game: put up a set of management rules, and apply them to a stock of whales in a computer. The winner gets to manage whales in the real world.

Each set of rules had different strengths and weaknesses. One set was risky, allowing a catch from populations that were not reproducing very quickly. Another was inefficient, in that it was both risky and offered a poor total yield. The winner was the most balanced. It allowed catches even from depleted stocks, but at a level that barely affected their recovery.

The catch limit algorithm adopted, called the core C procedure, was devised by Justin Cooke, a British population biologist based in Germany, who represents the World Conservation Union (IUCN) at the IWC. Rather than relying on estimates of the biological parameters, such as breeding rate, that proved the un-doing of the NMP, Cooke’s algorithm needs only an estimate of the number of animals in an area and, if available, the number of animals taken in past seasons. Those data go into an assessment process in which the biologically important parameters are allowed to vary between reasonable limits.

So, at first, there might be a great deal of uncertainty about a stock’s level of depletion; it might be at 30 per cent of its pristine level, or at 60 per cent. Also, the reproduction rate might be anywhere between zero and 5 per cent. Estimates of abundance will not only vary, they may also be systematically biased.

To arrive at a catch limit, the algorithm is run thousands of times. Each time it picks at random a subset of the estimated parameters within their set limits, and each time it calculates a separate value for the catch limit. The result is a distribution of possible catch limits which reflects the uncertainty in the data (See Graphs). The actual catch limit is set by the ’42nd percentile rule’: 42 per cent of the calculated catch limits are below the chosen limit and 58 per cent above it. This limit was chosen to satisfy the Commission’s requested balance of risk and reward.FIG-mg18293001.GIF

In later years, so the theory goes, more data are available. More surveys might have been carried out, and there will be catches from recent hunts. These allow the asses-ment procedure to improve its initial vague ideas about stock size, level of depletion, and other factors. As a result, the distribution of possible catch limits narrows, and the actual catch limit tends to increase.

The beauty of the core C algorithm is that it is conservative and robust. The scientific committee tested it to the limit under a wide variety of assumptions, and it generally gave the desired combination of safety, stability, and yield. Systematic bias, different historic catch patterns, different underlying population models, and unpredictable catastrophes all barely perturbed the outcome. The algorithm does not even need frequent surveys to be carried out, although there may well be an incentive for whalers to provide survey data because additional information will almost always increase the catch limit (See Graphs). Also, as a safety measure, if there has been no survey for five years, a rule is triggered that decreases the catch limit by 20 per cent a year.

The core C procedure works, at least on computer populations. It satisfies the criteria set by the IWC, offering a quota on stocks above 54 per cent of their original abundance (a number chosen so that the RMP appears at least as safe as the NMP), while allowing stocks to recover quickly.

It has been set to work on the two stocks of whales most likely to be hunted: the minkes of the northeast Atlantic, wanted by Norway, and those of the Antarctic, wanted by Japan. The results are still stuck in the computer, because the scientists did not want to calculate quotas – potentially legitimising the claims of Norway and Japan – before the IWC had adopted the algorithm.

In the northeast Atlantic, according to one scientist who really understands the Cooke algorithm, the quota would be ‘in the hundreds’. And in the Southern Ocean, where the minke population is estimated at 760 000, and where a total of about 100 000 have been taken since the 1970s, the algorithm would allow whalers to take another 100 000 whales over several decades.

Patience rewarded?

Several countries, notably Britain and New Zealand, take exception to any commercial whaling. Others have no intention of whaling themselves, but seem willing to let other countries do so, provided there are strict controls in place. The catch limit algorithm is just part of those controls, which is why it has been wrapped up within what has become the RMS. This, proposed by Australia and others, ties the quota-counting engine to additional components such as minimum standards for data, guidelines for conducting useful surveys, and an effective inspection scheme to verify and police catches. A year’s delay was built into the RMS. The 16 nations supporting it want time to consider the additional components. If they vote for the system at next year’s IWC meeting in Tokyo, commercial whaling could again become a reality.

In past years, the whalers have exploited loopholes in the IWC convention to remain afloat. Their patience might now be rewarded. The science that both sides have always turned to will be saying: ‘Yes, you can kill X minkes in the northeast Atlantic this year, with acceptable risk to the population’. The question then will be whether the Norwegians stick to the limit? And how will those who still want a whaling ban justify a position that, at base, owes everything to emotion and nothing to science?

Jeremy Cherfas is a freelance reporter who specialises on biological resources.

Although conservationists had been expecting Iceland’s departure, Norway’s
announcement came as a shock. Cassandra Phillips, cetacean officer of the
World Wide Fund for Nature International, said it was ‘a clear breach of
the IWC procedures’.

Opening the 44th annual meeting of the IWC, John Gummer, Britain’s agriculture
minister, departed from his prepared speech to fire a shot across Norway’s
bows. ‘No country can make a unilateral decision about an international
matter and expect to be taken seriously on other international matters,’
he said later, a clear reference to the global environmental concerns of
Gro Harlem Brundtland, Norway’s prime minister.

Gummer’s intervention gave some hope to conservationists, but he went
on to pour cold water on a French proposal for a sanctuary in Antarctic
waters. France has suggested that no whaling should be permitted south of
40 degrees South. This boundary effectively protects all the remaining great
whales around Antarctica.

Rather than offering to support the sanctuary, Gummer merely described
it as ‘interesting, inventive and challenging’. He said that the proposal
‘still needs a great deal of work done on it’, and offered to put Britain’s
considerable experience of Antarctic science at the disposal of those who
would have to do the work.

France’s proposal is one of the main items on the IWC agenda, and is
especially important because the other main item could lead to a resumption
of commercial whaling. For more than five years, the commission has been
struggling to devise a Revised Management Procedure (RMP) that will replace
the discredited New Management Procedure. The first part of the RMP, a system
of rules for setting catch quotas, has been unanimously agreed by the scientific
committee of the IWC. Preliminary indications are that the RMP would allow
a quota to be taken from some stocks of whales.

The French Antarctic Sanctuary would shelter most of the world’s remaining
whales even if the RMP says a quota could be justified on scientific grounds.
The scientists are not saying what the RMP would offer as a quota. ‘The
numbers are in the computer,’ one of them said, ‘so we can produce them
if we’re asked to.’

One reason for this reticence is to avoid playing into the hands of
Norway, which said that if the IWC refuses to sanction a commercial kill
of minkes in the northeast Atlantic, it would set its own quota ‘in accordance
with proposals made by the IWC scientific committee’.

The details of the RMP, especially the implementation and policing of
the agreed quota-setting rules, will occupy the IWC for the rest of the
week, along with the proposed Antarctic sanctuary. Whalers want a resumption
of commercial whaling, even if that means giving up the most lucrative areas
in the Antarctic. And conservationists must either accept the unwelcome
outcome of the improved scientific management of whales they have been campaigning
for, or find other reasons to oppose quotas for whaling.

This was the focus of an international meeting in London last month
entitled ‘The Gene Traders’, convened by two non-governmental organisations,
the Intermediate Technology Development Group and the New Economics Foundation.
Agricultural activists from around the world gathered to report on some
signal successes in the fight against genetic erosion.

Genetic erosion eats away at the foundations of the world’s food supply.
It occurs when a few modern varieties displace the myriad varieties that
once patchworked farmers’ fields. High-yielding rice, for example, has conquered
Asia. In some places, such as the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam, a
single variety may account for as much as 60 per cent of all rice production.
In doing so, it sweeps aside hundreds of locally adapted varieties.

Open to disease

That might be acceptable, if the high-yielding variety always produced
high yields. It does not. These varieties fulfil their potential only as
part of a package that includes irrigation, pesticides, herbicides, and
top-grade land. If any factor is missing, the modern variety generally performs
more poorly than those it displaced.

Worse, monocultures of genetically uniform plants are extremely susceptible
to disease epidemics. ‘The Irish potato famine, Southern corn blight in
the United States, there are plenty of examples from history,’ warned Michel
Pimbert, head of the biodiversity programme at Worldwide Fund for Nature
International in Switzerland. ‘Sixty-two per cent of Bangladeshi rice varieties
share a single maternal parent,’ he added ominously, which means they could
all be susceptible to a single disease.

Much can go wrong with modern varieties, but it can take a season or
two for trouble to emerge. In the interim, there is a chance that the old
varieties will have gone extinct, leaving farmers worse off than they were
before.

To prove that traditional ways can be best, Third World farmers are
working with scientists. They are improving crops and techniques themselves,
rather than relying on imported ‘improvements’. And they are enhancing their
nutritional status.

Paradoxically, nutrition is often poorest where the land is richest.
In Kenya, the government insists that much fertile land is used to grow
tea, a cash crop, said Monica Opole. ‘But at the end of the day the poor
woman has to ensure that she has enough food and adequate household nutrition.
That means creeping under the tea bushes looking for something to eat,’
she said.

Opole manages the Indigenous Food Plants Project of KENGO, the Kenya
Energy and Environment Organisation. Her aim is to help small farmers, almost
all of them women, feed themselves better, with the primary focus on indigenous
vegetables. One of these – Gynandropsis gynandra, or dek in the language
of the Luo people – has three times the vitamin A, five times the vitamin
C and three times the protein of an introduced vegetable such as cabbage.

Dek grows wild along the roadsides in much of the country, although
it is semi-domesticated in western Kenya. ‘People there grow it in small
kitchen gardens, along with more than 20 other crops.’ The wide range of
crops provides nutrition. The huge genetic diversity helps plants withstand
pests and enables them to tolerate climatic fluctuations, which farmers
have always understood.

In Sudan, for example, modern agricultural development is concentrated
in the east, on the good land alongside the Nile. Traditional farmers in
western Sudan have been left alone to face population pressures and market
forces. ‘Everything they do is to cope with risk,’ said Yagoub Abdalla
Mohamed, head of the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University
of Khartoum. ‘It is the calamity factor that maintains diversity.’

Farmers use diversity to forestall calamity. Abdalla Mohamed has watched
them plant three crops in one hole; sorghum towers above sesame, while water
melons creep along the ground. ‘It is a common technique around the world
and makes the best use of scarce resources,’ he said. There is diversity
within each crop, too. Sorghum, for example, may be an early variety or
a late, with red, white or black seeds. Each has different properties and
thrives under different conditions. If the rains fail or disease strikes,
one of them will survive. Sesame, too, has varieties that mature quickly
or slowly. ‘They plant different varieties because if they were all ripe
together there would be a labour shortage in the fields,’ Abdalla Mohamed
explained. His main goal now is to educate people, not farmers but relief
workers and politicians.

Rene Salazar, Seeds Programme Coordinator for the Southeast Asia Regional
Institute for Community Education, stressed the ‘structural constraints’
that promote genetic uniformity. In his own country, the Philippines, the
government gives loans ‘only to farmers who will buy the whole high yield
variety package’. And his country is not alone in this practice. The Philippines
government also recently increased the amount of credit available to purchase
pesticides despite the conclusion of the International Rice Research Institute,
based in Manila, that pesticide use can be cut by 80 per cent with no noticeable
effect on yield.

In 1986, Salazar, along with scientists from the University of the Philippines
at Los Banos, established a programme called MASIPAG, which has collected
more than 200 older varieties from around the country. The scientists worked
with farmers to screen the samples for their ability to resist disease and
yield well without expensive chemical inputs. After just three years, MASIPAG
had come up with traditional varieties that are more than a match for high
yield varieties. On a level field, without chemical fertilisers and pesticides,
the traditional varieties yielded 3.98 tonnes per hectare while the high
yield varieties gave 3.87 tonnes per hectare.

Despite these successes, Salazar is not optimistic. Eighty per cent
of small farmers in the Philippines are landless tenants. They have no impetus
to preserve the land, and their landlords seek short-term rewards. ‘Preserving
diversity means preserving farmers,’ Salazar insisted, ‘which means land
reform.’ Unfortunately, the far left also calls for land reform, and ‘simple
military minds usually miss the difference’. The result is considerable
oppression; in Indonesia, for example, farmers have been forced to uproot
their own fields, for the crime of having planted varieties that the government
has not approved.

‘Governments are too often the problem,’ echoed Rodger Mpande, a consultant
agronomist for ZERO, a network of environmental experts in Zimbabwe. That
country, when it was Southern Rhodesia, developed SR-52 – the world’s second
hybrid maize – and today’s government has a continuing obsession with maize
even though, as the present drought sadly demonstrates, its success is critically
dependent on rainfall (This Week, 21 March). But maize is the province of
the big mechanised farmers, the 4000 whites who own 60 per cent of the land.
It is on the rest, the marginal lands, that the people depend for food,
and their preferred crops are sorghum and millet.

Mpande asked farmers how they save seeds of their favoured varieties.
‘They hang them up over the kitchen fires, and the woodsmoke preserves them.’
They also keep three or four plants of sorghum or millet in their gardens.
‘That gives enough seed to plant a field, not like maize where you need
kilograms of seed.’ And within each community, some individuals are known
as seed bankers, who preserve seeds and swap them with other seed collectors
from further afield.

The problem for Zimbabwe’s small farmers is that the government continues
to push hybrid seeds in an inappropriate package. ‘We know (the local system)
works much better, but the government refuses to listen without empirical
data,’ complained Mpande. ENDA-Zimbabwe, a development organisation, is
working with local farmers to conduct trials of traditional practices alongside
hybrids, rather like MASIPAG in the Philippines. ‘It will take three or
four years,’ said Mpande ‘but that will knock some sense into government.’

Melaku Worede, director of the Plant Genetic Resources Centre of Ethiopia,
has already knocked some sense into his government by pioneering a new kind
of cooperation between gene banks and farmers (‘The West pays up for Third
World seeds’, 91av, 11 May 1991). Several areas around the country
had seen their genetic reservoirs drained by introduced high-yielding varieties,
which then failed to perform under poor conditions. The Ethiopian gene bank
had collected samples before the coming of modern agriculture, and was in
a position to give the people back their genetic heritage. Worede and his
colleagues created conservation areas for different landraces – varieties
developed by farmers.

In those areas, farmers were asked to grow the original landraces alongside
modern introduced varieties. Worede agreed to pay them the difference between
their yield and the best yield around. It wasn’t much, but it helped to
compensate those farmers whose crops were disappointing. On average the
landraces were ‘more productive and more reliable’ than the introduced varieties.

The next step was to enlist the farmers’ help in selecting elite strains
from the landraces. ‘Farmers like to grow tall sorghum,’ Worede said, because
the stalks provide animal feed, and are used as a building material and
a fuel. ‘Each woman selects her own sorghum heads to save for seed,’ he
continued, ‘but we introduced them to the idea of a measuring stick.’ The
result was strains that performed better than the original landraces and
the improved varieties. Now farmers outside the conservation areas are adopting
similar techniques.

Worede spent years seeking support for his scheme. ‘People ridiculed
the idea of the gene bank doing anything with farmers.’ Eventually the Unitarian
Church in Canada gave him a chance. Now the Canadian government gene bank
is cooperating with Canadian growers, and a few other enlightened gene bank
directors are trying to emulate Worede’s programme.

These successes give some hope, but the question remains of why they
are not more widespread. Perception is part of the problem, for people as
much as for governments. Opole spoke for all at the London meeting: ‘People
say traditional crops are backward, they’re anti-development.’ But even
that may be changing. ‘Three years ago, there was not one restaurant in
Nairobi where you could get good African food,’ Opole said. ‘Now I can count
at least five; it is becoming fashionable.’

Indeed in the North, fashion may be the only force in favour of genetic
diversity. A taste for older varieties of potatoes, tomatoes and apples
is beginning to emerge, ‘because those older varieties have some taste’,
said Alan Gear, chief executive of the Henry Doubleday Research Association
near Coventry. The HDRA, which promotes organic growing, maintains its own
seed library, but according to Gear suffers because people think genetic
erosion is solely a problem of the South.

‘I appreciate the problems in the South,’ said Gear, ‘but if anything,
it’s worse here. Indonesia is planning laws against certain varieties? We
in the EC have already got them. You can’t sell seed of any vegetable variety
that isn’t on the National List. As a result we’ve lost hundreds of useful
varieties. Traditional farmers are struggling to maintain diversity? We
hardly have any traditional farmers left.’

North and South, the value of diversity in agriculture is that it reduces
risk; for the vast majority of farmers around the world that is far more
important than maximising productivity. Whether the Earth Summit will come
up with anything concrete to preserve crop biodiversity is still open. ‘I
doubt it,’ said Rodger Mpande. ‘We’ll just have to carry on as we are now.’

Jeremy Cherfas is a biologist and freelance journalist.