I had one of those What The F - - k (WTF) moments recently. In the midst of reading / writing / planning stuff about the (lack of) merits of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) and what a con / disappointment / travesty / gamble / meaningless hogwash it is, I suddenly thought about Afghanistan and stopped typing as if the keyboard had vanished. Poof!
Explanation: BNG is “an approach to development that leaves biodiversity in a better state than before.” In other words, you can build as much as you like, where you like, and destroy whatever environmental assets you want in the process, as long as you invest in the natural world elsewhere for the net environmental impact to be positive. More here.
Theoretically this should be possible for small-scale, confined developments. A simplistic example: to build one new housing estate requires the destruction of 100 trees and four owls; therefore in the adjacent field you plant 150 new trees and introduce six owls as recompense. Hang on a sec. In the real world, as studied by peer-reviewed academics, it doesn’t really work and nature still loses out. And BNG on the scale of the proposed Ox-Cam arc development across five counties hasn’t been tried anywhere, hence my scepticism / cynicism / negativity / teeth-gnashing.
Get some perspective, woman!
There I was, worrying about planting trees and counting
butterflies, who should attend which zoom call, a colon or a semicolon in the piece
I was writing, and when my next opiate intake was due (please let it be soon!)
while thousands of good, hard-working, blameless human beings were facing the
Devil and his entourage. The word ‘surreal’ crossed my mind but, like every
other word in the English language on this occasion, it was inadequate.
And all because Joe Biden is an a - - - hole, which shouldn’t be a surprise. He’s been on the wrong side of US foreign policy decisions for five decades, not to mention his bromance with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness (the Devil’s entourage gets around doesn’t it). Why would you withdraw from the Afghan project that had, on the whole, worked and when everyone knew that the world would slide (or as actually happened, plummeted) into acute chaos without an adequate western presence there? Blaming Donald Trump doesn’t work; just because ‘The D’ decided one thing doesn’t mean it can’t be reversed. It’s like still blaming Maggie for the shortage of council housing today when several administrations have had, since her tenure, countless opportunities to build new council-owned homes.
Yup. Joe dropped us all in it. Therefore, shouldn’t I be doing something to at least partially right such a heinous wrong?
- Donate hard cash for the refugees? (Would my money help just the Afghans or be diverted to the illegals off the south coast?)
- Lobby my MP to get Boris to keep our troops in Afghanistan? (a: Too late; b: We can’t do anything on our own.)
- Demonstrate? (Where, who with and to achieve what?)
- Write letters to the newspaper? (Did I have anything to say that others haven’t already said?)
- Volunteer as a mercenary? (With a torn rotator cuff?)
And so the doubt / paralysis / bewilderment / sheer horror persists in my mind. And the horror / terror / pain / grief / death / evil will persist in Afghanistan.
There are already too many armchair commentators criticising GB’s role in the withdrawal, claiming that we could have policed Afghanistan without the Americans:
- We didn’t have a strategy for Afghanistan (er yes we did – it was a partnership with the Americans and no one understandably foresaw Joe’s idiocy)
- We should have planned better for the withdrawal (I think we did bloody well given the timescales)
- We shouldn’t have left any deserving escapees behind (no we shouldn’t but given the circumstances it would be hard to know what else we could have done)
- That however many refugees Priti pledged to settle here she should double, treble, quadruple the number (and Universal Credit should be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and funding for the NHS should be doubled, tripled, quadrupled ….)
- We should have got the cats and dogs out sooner without leaving any humans behind (the alpaca Geronimo had a more compelling case).
Then there was the US drone strike that killed suicide bombers, probably saving hundreds of innocent lives, but also killing some civilians including children as ‘collateral damage’. Who has to make those decisions?
What does all this matter as long as Sir Keir can score a political point or two – far more important than putting party politics aside for two minutes to actually try and be statesmanlike and constructive.
The uncomfortable if not humiliating truth is, without the necessary knowledge, experience or contacts, there’s diddly squat I can think of doing that would make a meaningful difference to the lives of those poor people stuck in Afghanistan or just landing in Blighty. A friend of mine suggested taking an Afghan family into my home … really? What has she got against Afghans? I could pray for them, but I’m an atheist. I could continue to fight for the green lungs of England to support good physical and mental health for everyone … that I CAN do, but is it enough?
While the above rant has been (temporarily) cathartic for me, I’m no further forward in my desire to do something tangible re the world’s biggest problem since WWII. It’s even bigger than Covid, because at least you can reason with a virus – keep vaccinating and developing antibodies and it soon gets the message, like the Spanish flu, small pox and polio.
So it’s back to BNG until my subconscious comes up with a Eureka moment.
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