Bye bye Aldborough
There was a story at the fag-end of Channel 4 news last night about how Aldborough on the Norfolk coast, famous (so the report said) for artists, composers, and luvvies in general, was in danger of becoming an island due to coastal erosion. This is hardly a surprise: most of East Anglia is reclaimed land which is increasingly indefensible due to sea level rising. What caught my attention was the comments of the owner of a tower near the village, which is now barely 10 metres from the sea. He said something like: "the government spends billions on defending borders here and overseas, so why can't it spend money on defending our borders against the sea?"
This shows a staggering lack of understanding of natural processes, and a blind self-centred parochialism of staggering proportions. I remember hearing a similar sentiment on the radio years ago from some old guy who lived near Easington on the East Yorkshire coast complaining about the lack of sea defences, who said that (I paraphrase) "we defeated the Germans in two world wars, so why can't we can defeat the sea?". This is so typically English, in two ways:
1. A bullheaded 'bulldog spirit' that believes that indomitable patriotic will can defeat any threat to the nation, regardless of its nature. The glorious Dunkirk spirit (although Dunkirk was a defeat, but what the hey).
2. The raising of grand moral and political principle to cover parochial self-interest. It's like when there are boundary disputes between neighbours, where each claims a foot of useless garden as "our property" - these are always dressed up as fights over grand issues, not petty squabbles over nothing. "I'm not doing it just for myself, it's the principle of the thing that counts." Well, matey, if it's the principle of the thing, how come you've never before taken up cudgels on behalf of all other victims of injustice? How come you suddenly decide that there's a principle, nay a human right, at stake once Mr Jones from next door starts planting on the edge of your lawn? Once you've won your battle with him, are you going to offer solidarity and help to others 'fighting' for the same 'principle'? Are you going to become a flying crusader for houseowner's property rights? Let me guess the answer...
It also completely ignores physical reality. I used to live in Hull, and frequently visited the Holderness coast which is a marvellously quiet place. This coast is eroding at the rate of 3 metres a year on average - in undefended places far more - for the simple reason that the whole of Holderness is composed of boulder clay laid down by glaciers in the most recent Ice Ages. In some 16,000 years time, a blink of an eye in geological time, the East Yorkshire coast will be along the chalk escarpment from Bridlington to Hessle, where the Humber bridge starts - everything east of this line will have been eroded away. This will happen - it's a natural process that can't be stopped without inordinately expensive countermeasures which would have incalculable and disastrous consequences. For the residents of Hornsea, Withernsea (truly a town where "every day is like Sunday", as Morrissey sung), Easington and the rest, to complain that they're not being defended is simply pissing in the wind. As it happens, these towns are being defended, but all the defences do is move the erosion to non-defended areas, so slowly but surely they're becoming peninsulas.
So why not put defences all down the Holderness coast? Well, even if it was worth defending - would you spend 100s of millions keeping an awful dump like Withernsea on the map? - there would be serious consequences. John Pethick, in his inaugural lecture at Hull University when he was made a Chair of Coastal Studies (then was head-hunted by Cambridge soon after) which I went to, explained in simple terms that defending Holderness would result in the flooding of Hull and serious damage to the Low Countries. Why? Because the sediment from the erosion (the reason why the sea off the coast is brown) is deposited at the mouth of the Humber, reducing tidal surges (and Hull already has a tidal reach of 10 metres) into the estuary, and over time Holderness sediment is also transported across the sea to the Low Countries helping keep them above water.
But do the people of Holderness care about this? Do they put it above their narrow parochial interest? Do they feck! John Pethick is loathed in the area for stating the simple truth, that Holderness will go into the sea, as it has been doing ever since the glaciers retreated. Any attempt to sensibly manage coastal retreat is greeted with howls of protest. The residents scream and yell for more defences, not caring about the consequences for others. And some, like yer man at Easington, make it into a Churchillian crusade against the 'enemy', the sea.
And it doesn't seem to be any different down in Norfolk and East Anglia, where rising sea levels will steadily reclaim the land that was borrowed from it. Pethick and others have outlined plans for 'managed retreat', in preference to hard defences (walls, rocks) which just don't work (cf. the Mississippi floods a few years ago) - the sea would be allowed to encroach onto land near the coast which would spread its erosive energy over a much larger area than a narrow coastline, and into the bargain create some handy wildlife habitats. Yet even this is being resisted by the narrow-minded locals, going by TV programmes I've seen, who seem to think they can do what King Cnut famously couldn't.
Let's face it. If you go to live in a town on an eroding coastline then you accept that fact - to do otherwise, to move there then scream for protection as if you're an innocent victim of nature's ravages, is just plain 'bad faith', to use the existentialist term. You do have the right to call on society to help relocate you, and IMO it would do the residents of Withernsea, Hornsea, and the rest, a major favour moving them further inland to new houses and new towns (it would improve their inbred gene pool, for a start). You could maybe legitimately call for some degree of compensation from the State and/or insurance companies for your losses. What you can't in any conscience do is complain about unstoppable natural processes.
PS: there's a useful map at the University of Hull which charts coastal erosion in Holderness over time.
This shows a staggering lack of understanding of natural processes, and a blind self-centred parochialism of staggering proportions. I remember hearing a similar sentiment on the radio years ago from some old guy who lived near Easington on the East Yorkshire coast complaining about the lack of sea defences, who said that (I paraphrase) "we defeated the Germans in two world wars, so why can't we can defeat the sea?". This is so typically English, in two ways:
1. A bullheaded 'bulldog spirit' that believes that indomitable patriotic will can defeat any threat to the nation, regardless of its nature. The glorious Dunkirk spirit (although Dunkirk was a defeat, but what the hey).
2. The raising of grand moral and political principle to cover parochial self-interest. It's like when there are boundary disputes between neighbours, where each claims a foot of useless garden as "our property" - these are always dressed up as fights over grand issues, not petty squabbles over nothing. "I'm not doing it just for myself, it's the principle of the thing that counts." Well, matey, if it's the principle of the thing, how come you've never before taken up cudgels on behalf of all other victims of injustice? How come you suddenly decide that there's a principle, nay a human right, at stake once Mr Jones from next door starts planting on the edge of your lawn? Once you've won your battle with him, are you going to offer solidarity and help to others 'fighting' for the same 'principle'? Are you going to become a flying crusader for houseowner's property rights? Let me guess the answer...
It also completely ignores physical reality. I used to live in Hull, and frequently visited the Holderness coast which is a marvellously quiet place. This coast is eroding at the rate of 3 metres a year on average - in undefended places far more - for the simple reason that the whole of Holderness is composed of boulder clay laid down by glaciers in the most recent Ice Ages. In some 16,000 years time, a blink of an eye in geological time, the East Yorkshire coast will be along the chalk escarpment from Bridlington to Hessle, where the Humber bridge starts - everything east of this line will have been eroded away. This will happen - it's a natural process that can't be stopped without inordinately expensive countermeasures which would have incalculable and disastrous consequences. For the residents of Hornsea, Withernsea (truly a town where "every day is like Sunday", as Morrissey sung), Easington and the rest, to complain that they're not being defended is simply pissing in the wind. As it happens, these towns are being defended, but all the defences do is move the erosion to non-defended areas, so slowly but surely they're becoming peninsulas.
So why not put defences all down the Holderness coast? Well, even if it was worth defending - would you spend 100s of millions keeping an awful dump like Withernsea on the map? - there would be serious consequences. John Pethick, in his inaugural lecture at Hull University when he was made a Chair of Coastal Studies (then was head-hunted by Cambridge soon after) which I went to, explained in simple terms that defending Holderness would result in the flooding of Hull and serious damage to the Low Countries. Why? Because the sediment from the erosion (the reason why the sea off the coast is brown) is deposited at the mouth of the Humber, reducing tidal surges (and Hull already has a tidal reach of 10 metres) into the estuary, and over time Holderness sediment is also transported across the sea to the Low Countries helping keep them above water.
But do the people of Holderness care about this? Do they put it above their narrow parochial interest? Do they feck! John Pethick is loathed in the area for stating the simple truth, that Holderness will go into the sea, as it has been doing ever since the glaciers retreated. Any attempt to sensibly manage coastal retreat is greeted with howls of protest. The residents scream and yell for more defences, not caring about the consequences for others. And some, like yer man at Easington, make it into a Churchillian crusade against the 'enemy', the sea.
And it doesn't seem to be any different down in Norfolk and East Anglia, where rising sea levels will steadily reclaim the land that was borrowed from it. Pethick and others have outlined plans for 'managed retreat', in preference to hard defences (walls, rocks) which just don't work (cf. the Mississippi floods a few years ago) - the sea would be allowed to encroach onto land near the coast which would spread its erosive energy over a much larger area than a narrow coastline, and into the bargain create some handy wildlife habitats. Yet even this is being resisted by the narrow-minded locals, going by TV programmes I've seen, who seem to think they can do what King Cnut famously couldn't.
Let's face it. If you go to live in a town on an eroding coastline then you accept that fact - to do otherwise, to move there then scream for protection as if you're an innocent victim of nature's ravages, is just plain 'bad faith', to use the existentialist term. You do have the right to call on society to help relocate you, and IMO it would do the residents of Withernsea, Hornsea, and the rest, a major favour moving them further inland to new houses and new towns (it would improve their inbred gene pool, for a start). You could maybe legitimately call for some degree of compensation from the State and/or insurance companies for your losses. What you can't in any conscience do is complain about unstoppable natural processes.
PS: there's a useful map at the University of Hull which charts coastal erosion in Holderness over time.
1 Comments:
The point about consequences of decisions on unsuspecting parties elsewhere (the Netherlands in this instance) is well observed. It reminds me of the government's shoulder-shrugging response to complaints from the Norwegians about forest die back caused by acid rain. The culprit: British factory chimneys not fitted with filters. As Sting once memorably described it: "Another industrial ugly morning, The factories belch their filth into the sky".
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