David Bellamy: Caring for the earth
Jun 7 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post
After half a century of campaigning, botanist David Bellamy still believes the answer lies in the soil, discovers Peter Elson
ONCE upon a time, botanist Dr David Bellamy was all over our television screens, like a rash of the invasive fungi he so often enthused about.
He was in that flock of eccentric telly egg-heads (such as Dr Magnus Pike), plucked from their natural academic habitat, hired to round up vast herds of untamed mainstream viewers, previously untempted by a diet of hard science.
But like the formerly prolific house sparrow, Dr Bellamy, aged 75, is also now a relatively rare sighting. Luckily, keen boffin-watchers without binoculars can view him at close-quarters as the Cheshire Show’s special guest, later this month.
Can we blame his scarcity on global warming? Well, yes, indirectly, he says. More shockingly, he believes an appearance on children’s magazine Blue Peter killed his small screen career.
“I stopped a Welsh windfarm on Blue Peter in 1996 and I’ve not been on television since. Also, it was rumoured my stance on having an anti-EU referendum was unpopular with TV bosses,” he mutters.
“If that’s true, it’s a very bad sign for democracy in this country.”
He claims to have “smelt a rat” when the BBC sacked one of its top journalists, Julian Pettifer, for being president of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
“Also Julian Pettifer made a wonderful programme about the effect of farmed salmon on wild salmon and he was publicly sacked,” he alleges.
“From this moment on the BBC became a pusher of global warming. I’m proud to be a global warming heretic, because the theory’s wrong.
“If you wanted to show Al Gore’s anti-global warming film An Inconvenient Truth, by law you have to give the other side now. How many teachers know what to tell the children to balance the 35 mistakes in this film?”
Global warming theory has never been tested and is based on a series of computer models, he says.
“Since 1998 there has been no rise in the average temperature of the world, although we pour 44 giga-tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
“There are now three times more polar bears in the world than 20 years ago when I was working in the Arctic, yet the US Senate has given them special protection.”
But he concurs with the World Wildlife Fund’s new report that a third of all species face extinction.
“We’ve overfished the world and completely screwed up 2% of the world’s soil. The main reason for species extinction is habitat destruction,” he splutters.
Dr Bellamy definitely cares about the animal world. Most people wash their hands after interacting with livestock, but he goes one better.
“I wash my hands before patting any animals to protect them from us,” he chuckles, “nowadays, we do it with water, which is amazing, instead of disinfectant. But we must use press down taps so we don’t waste water.”
Water aside, his great crusade is caring for our soil. He says: “I’ve been campaigning for 52 years for the right use of soil, but we’re still losing soil and cutting down trees.
“At last we’ve got farming turning round and saying that soil structure is important. We must plough, but we do it properly and we must cut back on food miles and have farmers’ markets.
“Big fields for big machinery from the late 1960s onwards didn’t work. It meant all the soil blew away and all the natural history ran away.
“We’ve got far too good at producing food. And to do that we had to use lots of gas-guzzling tractors and chemicals – which we’re still spraying all over the place. Great chunks of Britain are totally devoid of creepy-crawlies (good ones and bad ones).
Of particular interest to Dr Bellamy, is the Show’s new-look Agri-Centre to inform visitors of the food path – From Plough to Plate.
“A supermarket sells food from all over the world pretty cheaply. It’s unbelievable that fish caught around Scandinavia is sent to China for filleting and then back to Europe for sale, because somebody can make quick money.
“This matter of food miles is coming up now because of the bio-diesel fuel nonsense. We’re using large areas of land formerly used to grow grain to grow plants to make into bio-diesel, which forces grain prices up.
“For me the best news is farmers’ markets, although they’ve been through a dodgy stage as people were bringing stuff in from the continent which rather defeated the idea.
“Now as I go round the country, in most places I’m lucky enough to find a farmers’ market and enjoy a local pie.
“At the Cheshire Show I’ll make a point of going into the Cheshire cheese tent especially to find local cheese. That is a bonus which we should all make the most of.
“We’re in a green renaissance, led by farmers who know they should keep their soil in good heart. It was the same attitude as when I was a kid in London trying to feed ourselves during the war.
“These ideas are coming back. Even some of the leading soil scientists are saying that we’ve not factored in soil structure.”
With no worms in our soil (often the case because of pesticide use) there are no soil holes and no soil aeration, leading to waterlogging.
“ If you see a farmer ploughing and there’s no seagulls round the tractor then you know there are no worms. The seagulls aren’t stupid, there’s nothing for them to eat, he says.
“There was common sense among farmers before the EU common agricultural policy, which has stuffed up so much of the soils right across Europe and knocked out the bio-diversity.
“I think the farmers are coming together and while they’re not going to dump modern farming methods, they now keep the soil structure in mind.
“I was born in 1933 and we had the big dust-bowls and the great depression. Then they started contour ploughing and took other conservation measures.”
But the American food machine now uses vast amounts of energy just to keep producing. We’re running out of energy (causing costs to rise) and we have to feed people. Now people in the Third World are suffering from malnutrition.
Luckily, you can regenerate soil. By using US developments like “compost tea-bags”, scientists can take cultures of the undamaged soil and all its fungi and microscopic bacteria, breed them up and the structure comes back.
“These experiments are spilling over into the drier parts of western Australia. There the soil is completely mucked up, where 26 years ago I made a film Wheat Today, What Tomorrow?” says Dr Bellamy.
“Even back then two million hectares of their wheat belt had turned into salt and they couldn’t grow anything. By putting the right trees back in the right place, they can grow crops again. So that’s good news.”
As patron of Britain’s gamekeepers, he’s delighted that they are putting huge chunks uplands back into working order.
In spite of being a decade past retirement age, he would love to get back onto television and do a “David Bellamy good news about nature weekly programme”. Given much of our dire telly fare, surely this is food for thought?
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