There were powerful arguments made by George Monbiot in his recent article on Natural Capital and in his lecture for SPERI at Sheffield University yesterday evening where he further developed the theme. It's easy to be persuaded by something one's believed in for many years but it helps to have it articulated by a gifted communicator.
He gave some telling examples of the absurdity of trying to put a price on natural beauty and of the disaster that will follow from bringing market values into decision making on all the intrinsic values that make life worthwhile. The talk was entitled The Pricing of Everything
Inevitably in Sheffield the recently arisen example of Smithy Wood came up. Any visiting speaker will look round for local examples and this is a good one to illustrate the point. The very idea of destroying ancient woodland to create a motorway service station is about as crass a piece of philistinism as you could find.
No surprise then that this issue has been taken up by those* in the the city who have a track record for publicity seeking and empire building. I wonder how much of the irony rubbed off onto them as they listened to the lecture or whether they even made the connection with their own use of CAP farm grants to turn what should be wild and wholly natural land into farmland? They certainly know the price of everything. Some think they know the value of nothing.
Let's hope then that the Smithy Wood campaigning is successful and proves to have no ulterior motivation. It's possible of course but the track record is hard to ignore.
*Sheffield Wildlife Trust has been campaigning against the Smithy Wood development - at least they've arranged to have their pictures taken with banners in the local media. And their Chief Exec has a letter in last week's Telegraph. I wonder how many of them have walked in Smithy Wood before this came up. I also wonder if they have hopes of an appeal to raise the funds to purchase the woods and turn them into a mountain biking trail?
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