Nature will never be spent if we act to save our countryside

An integrated world view sees the value in the natural world beyond its aesthetic beauty – it also has an economic value as a carbon store
Nick Herbert
guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 July 2009 14.39 BST

Since the fens of East Anglia were drained in the 17th century, 99% of traditional fen wetland has been lost. Meandering rivers and streams, wet grassland and reed beds, together with the rich diversity of wildlife, were replaced with intensively farmed agricultural land.
This week I visited the Great Fen project, an extraordinarily ambitious plan to restore 9,000 acres of wetland near Huntingdon. Walking through the nature reserve which will lie at its heart, we saw dragonflies and water deer (a threatened species in their native China), and sniffed water mint. It's hard not to be captivated by the project. Yet its very scale draws us into a debate about how land should be managed in future.
When Britain increasingly imports food from other countries, often produced to lower environmental or animal welfare standards, shouldn't we be growing more at home? There are good answers to these questions on the fens. Growing high-value vegetables needs peat, but the habitat is under threat. And by storing water and carbon, the Great Fen will benefit surrounding farmland and society alike.
But the wider question of how we reconcile the need to produce more food while avoiding a return to an intensive and potentially environmentally damaging agriculture is real. So, too, are the challenges of adapting to climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the over-exploitation of natural resources.
Many are beginning to argue that conventional policy levers – with regulation at their heart – won't be enough to address the scale of these problems, especially with pressures on public spending. David Cameron has called for a system of conservation credits to secure greater investment in new habitats for wildlife, effectively putting a value on the natural world.
It's a bold idea. As Graham Wynne of the RSPB says: "Putting a monetary value on the carbon stored in natural ecosystems may well be part of their salvation … but it's much more difficult to put an economic value on the skylark's song." Perhaps – but we already know the price. The RSPB's own Hope Farm in Cambridgeshire, which I also visited last week, shows how simple changes in farming practice through initiatives like leaving small spaces in fields of wheat can see the lark ascend again. And these changes have been funded with public money paid to farmers.
Can we do better with the money that's being spent? Despite being governed by a single department, Defra, policy for the natural world is still fragmented. There's a plan for the water industry here and another for farming there. What's needed is a holistic approach. Instead of the public paying a fortune for the removal of nitrates from water, why not save public money and let the water companies pay farmers to use less fertiliser in the first place? Instead of shoring up defences to prevent floods, why not use natural wetlands to act as water sponges?
The need to adapt to climate change will make us think beyond the aesthetic value of habitats like woodlands to their additional value as carbon stores. The natural environment can't be a peripheral consideration in the low-carbon economy.
Poet Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote that "nature is never spent". But it can be. Food is running out, water is scarce, and species are being lost. In the UK alone, nearly half of priority habitats are clearly in decline including chalk rivers, fens, wood-pasture and coastal sand dunes. Almost one-third of priority species are also clearly declining, including the red squirrel, turtle dove and juniper.
We need to find new, integrated solutions – which is why today I'm launching a new initiative entitled Future Countryside, to debate these issues. If you value the lark ascending, please join in.
• Nick Herbert is the shadow environment secretary and Conservative MP for Arundel and the South Downs