When Going Green Goes Wrong

I’d say I have strong green credentials: I’ve worked on global commons and social accountability for over a decade, I ran an international tree planting charity, and I’ve been an environmental writer since the term ‘environment’ was coined, just about. But I do have a big problem with the world of ‘green’ – let’s call it policy hypocrisy.

The nasty truth is that a lot of the simplistic, one-size-fits-all, ‘you can save the planet’ policies offered by governments just don’t work. And that failure can leave even the keenest green activist feeling like a fraud and a contributor to planetary despoliation, so what it does to the novice ‘green’ I can’t imagine.

Reduce land fill, increase composting

Take, for example, composting. The UK government has funded a number of schemes to get more people to make compost at home. This is a great idea: it produces compost that gardeners can use to grow their own vegetables: reducing food miles and food packaging and increasing self-sufficiency, and reduces the rubbish that goes to land-fill. What could possibly go wrong?

I’m a keen gardener, and I have an allotment where I make compost with the gleeful happiness that comes only from getting something for nothing, so I was first in line when my local council handed out massively subsidised compost bins. I bought two.

But what I bought wasn’t a compost bin, it was a gigantic pair of rat feeders. I started dumping my potato peels, carrot ends and teabags in the first bin, and within three weeks found myself confronted with a large and rather aggressive rat, sitting in the middle of my compost and hissing. Well, I’m not a coward, so I took to banging on the side of the bin with a bit of wood before lifting the lid, and telling everybody that Ms Rat and I could co-exist happily. But I couldn’t help noticing that the rat consumption was reducing the waste almost as fast as I provided it. My compost bin was getting rid of rubbish all right, but not in the intended way. And the rat was tunnelling under my fences in all directions, which suggested that Ms Rat had a family that visited regularly.

And then our local paper published an article saying that a woman had died of Weil’s Disease, a form of leptospirosis. Oh boy! Weil’s disease is an extremely rare variant of leptospirosis which is transmitted to humans by contact with the urine of rats, cattle, foxes, rodents and other wild animals. And this poor woman had found a rat caught in one of her bird feeders, tried to free it, got bitten for her pains and later died.

So what are the risks? Very low. Leptospirosis is rare in itself and doesn’t kill, and Weil’s Disease is an incredibly unlikely development of leptospirosis – but still, my next door neighbour has two children under twelve and next door but one has three children under seven. Did I have the right to expose them to this risk? What about my two dogs – were they at risk from a rat bite? And the elderly couple who live at the back of me and kept their back door open all summer – would they find their kitchen invaded by a potentially disease-carrying rat?

I spoke to my local council, who told me that as long as the bin was well away from my house I wasn’t at risk. But it wasn’t my risk I was concerned about, it was all the people around me who might be exposed to harm by my behaviour! Putting the bin at the end of my garden just meant the rats were closer to other people than to me – it might be green, but it was hardly friendly or ethical.

Government green policies misfire

So I stopped making compost at home and took the bins to the allotment, where rats are just as common, but small children aren’t. I take my household green waste to the allotment too, but very few people are lucky enough to be allotment holders so what do others do – give up composting or live with the rats?

And why won’t my local council admit that this problem exists? Because they get a big government grant to hand out the bins, and then they can tick a box on a form that says they’ve met a ‘green’ target. There are no national or local figures on the outcome of this composting experiment, only on the ‘uptake’, so there’s only anecdotal evidence about how well, or badly, such schemes actually work.

So I did some checking, and half the people I knew who had started home composting had stopped because of rats, neighbour complaints or plagues of flies. Box ticked yes, target met no. Government declaration: ‘positive’, actual experience: ‘negative’. And next time there’s some crackpot suggestion about how ‘we the public’ can save the planet, all those who’ve had one failed attempt won’t try again. And nobody in government will talk about it …

Rat photograph courtesy of WhisyMac at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence

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