The countryside’s biodiversity is being devastated as the no butterfly effect shows - Andy Brown

Most of us would like our children and grandchildren to have the opportunity to see butterflies and swallows. Each decade sees fewer of them.

This year the most reliable large-scale count of butterflies showed the lowest numbers since the survey began 14 years ago and a drop of 50 per cent on what was found last year.

Locally it may have been significantly worse. My own personal observations are that over the summer it has been astonishingly rare to see any butterflies, ladybirds or wasps.

Most of this season’s decline is down to the weather. A one year variation as a result of weather would normally not represent much of a problem. Butterflies lay a lot of eggs and numbers can soon bounce back when times are good.

There are, however, some serious problems with a smug assumption that what is happening is entirely natural variation and we just have to wait for things to get better.

The decline in our wildlife has been going on for decades with each generation growing up assuming that the depleted environment in which they live is the norm. I grew up in the 50s and 60s when there were a lot more insects around. On any drive in summer hundreds would hit the windscreen.

Yet even then there had already been a significant decline. Early reports from British naturalists record nights when there was a snowstorm of moths as the norm. Rivers produced annual eruptions of huge numbers of flying insects. The variety and quantity of butterflies that were routinely spotted in the nineteenth century were dramatically higher than anything people saw in the twentieth and the decline has continued into the twenty-first.

The countryside that I now look back on as being rich in its diversity had already been devastated by the use of DDT. Despite the banning of such damaging pesticides the amount of wildlife in this country continued to decline because of intensification of agriculture and the loss of habitat.

The loss of insects has, of course, a direct impact on the lives of other creatures. There are fewer swallows and swifts because there is a lot less for them to eat.

Describing a problem is always a lot easier than finding a solution. Our land is under competing pressures for use. We do need to grow more of our own food locally as the world becomes a more insecure place. There is a need to build homes and to help businesses that need to expand. So, nature isn’t always at the top of the list of priorities when decisions are being made.

The most practical response to this problem is to make sure that land is suitable for multiple uses rather than restricted to being used for one sole purpose. Growing food doesn’t need to happen via mile long fields of one crop that is routinely sprayed with powerful chemicals. It is possible to produce food and retain hedges, ponds and field boundaries and to rotate crops or grow more organically.

Installing solar panels needn’t involve taking away good quality agricultural land. There are plenty of warehouse roofs, schools and offices that can make good use of solar power on site. It is also perfectly possible to raise up solar panels a little and enable sheep to graze beneath them. There is a big difference for wildlife between a solar site where the land around the panels is regularly sprayed to keep down vegetation and one where animals can graze down that vegetation and insects thrive.

Homes are already being built in ways that ensure that biodiversity is higher after the construction work is finished than it was before the project started. It would be even better if the focus was on re-using brownfield sites so that there was no need to use up more agricultural land in the first place and our neglected communities were revived.

Where we are planting trees to promote wildlife it is perfectly possible to do so in ways that also enable food to be produced. Fruit and nut trees are good for nature. Animals grazing beneath lightly wooded environments increase biodiversity.

Rewilding can be something of a fake objective in a heavily managed landscape whereas consciously planning to get as much variety of life into an environment that is still producing food will achieve increased diversity more rapidly and help feed us. Eating less but better quality meat is good for the environment and good for health.

We are often told about the power of the butterfly effect where one insect flaps its wings and a whole weather system changes. The no butterfly effect is much more evident and has much greater consequences. We need to use our land intelligently if we are to avoid further losses and even more damage to our wildlife.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.