DO CORMORANTS COME FIRST?

Charles Clover on Saddam's

environmental crimes and the danger to the dugong

WE ARE all environmentalists now. Yet, as someone who earns his living by writing about the environment and the natural world, I have to admit to grave reserva- tions about the hysterical fuss over Saddam Hussein's oily act of environmental terror- ism, exemplified by the Mail on Sunday last weekend. Below a front page picture of a lone cormorant swimming in a sea of oil, the headline bawled 'Obscenity'. The strap line read: 'Poisoned by Saddam's depravity.'

The writer of the editorial which took over the front page, perhaps Mr Stewart Steven, the editor of the Mail on Sunday himself, appeared to have made a disturb- ing new discovery about Saddam. 'Saddam Hussein is a tyrant. That was clear. Sad- dam Hussein is a killer, that too was recognised . . . But not until today did we begin to glimpse the absolute depravity of this man with whom we have gone to war. This is obscenity,' cried the unnamed leader writer.

Steady on. Is Mr Steven really suggest- ing that what Saddam is doing to the cormorants of the Persian Gulf is more absolutely depraved than the chemical weapons he dropped on the Kurds? Or what his army did to the people of Kuwait? Or what he has done to captured Tornado pilots, or come to that to his own air force chiefs? I believe that is exactly what Mr Steven is saying: that Saddam's absolute depravity is only truly revealed by his onslaught upon the defenceless Socotra cormorant and the dugong, and not the fate be has dished out to thousands of people. This implies an absolutism about `Brilliant, Sergei, you got away with a whole sackful of 100 rouble notes'. the natural world and nonchalance about the human race that is truly chilling — but also very modern.

As one American marine said: 'People out here have got more on their minds than oil and birds. It seems crazy that some people out there seem more worried about a cormorant than what happens to us.' Cormorants are clearly what some people do seem to be more worried about.

One could say that the oil spill would have received less coverage if there had been usable pictures of the bombings or a land war in progress. But there is more to it than that. Mr Steven is not the only example of the new phenomenon which has emerged of prizing nature above man. The Germans, who for political reasons were unwilling to commit their forces to the Gulf, conquered their public revulsion for sending support into the war zone only after Saddam launched the largest oil slick ever upon the little-known ecology of the region. Countries which are intense- ly insular about their own sphere of politic- al influence allow themselves a heady dose of imperialism when it comes to the en- vironment.

We have to thank Saddam for the new and frightening concept of environmental war. But if its implications for the planet were not enough, what it reveals about human nature is almost equally horrible. It reminds us what we already knew from the case of the elephant and the rhino, that the death of one animal in a far-off land elicits more absolute outrage than the death of humans in those countries, at least in television and Mail on Sunday terms.

In the weeks leading up to the war the environmental effects of a Gulf conflict were used unashamedly as blackmail by Saddam through the West's peace protes- ter's. Before the fighting started it was said that he had mined 200-300 oilwells and would burn them out of spite sending plumes into the air that would change the climate. When he did use oil as a weapon, against the sea not the air, was his sole thought the Saudi desalination plants, on which so much of the war effort must depend? Or was the striking against some- thing the West held dear and he did not, to test allies who, he believes, do not have the stomach for war?

If he did, Saddam has almost certainly miscalculated. For the effect of modern environmental feeling is more likely to be to reinforce public determination that he must be removed at any cost. But in the process the allies, too, have fallen into the habit of exploiting this `ecological catas- trophe' — as Mr Heseltine called it in the first we have heard from him on the subject of the environment in the two months since he returned to Marsham Street. Ecological disaster has become an atrocity to frighten the children and reassure us that the cause is right, the equivalent of the bayoneted babies and raped nuns which the Daily Mail used to fulminate about in the first world war. However, cynics may even doubt General `Stormin' Norman Schwarz- kopf's assertion that the oil spills came about exclusively through Iraqi action.

Beneath the hyperbole important ques- tions about this oil spill remain un- answered. Are we sure it is really the largest spill of all time? Will it really be the disaster that is predicted? There is the perplexing example of the spillage at the Nowruz field in Iran in 1983, as a result of Iraqi bombing. That spillage of four mil- lion barrels, described as the size of Bel- gium, also went untreated as a result of the war. Yet after considerable but relatively light damage to seabirds and fisheries it drifted out to sea where it mysteriously broke up.

What will the true ecological damage of this spillage be? Over to the hyperbole- mongers again. One bird organisation told me that it would wipe out the 'already endangered' Socotra cormorant. But the Socotra cormorant is not on the en- dangered list. Or take Mr Steven's news- paper which tells us that it will kill red- shanks, curlews and oystercatchers. Not according to my bird book. I'd be more worried abut the pelican, flamingo, red- billed tropic bird and the Gulf's own species of terns, gulls and waders. I recall that be- fore the war started the members of CND and the Green Party who led the anti Gulf war peace alliance called a press conference about the dangers of oil spills, at which they were unable to name a single species that would be affected, or describe the location of a single coral outcrop or fishery.

The best assessment is that the most lasting damage caused by the oil — that will be with us when Saddam is long dead — will be to destroy habitats such as coral and sea-grass beds, not to wipe out species, with the exception perhaps of the unfor- tunate dugong, or sea cow, an endangered herbivorous mammal given to eating and doing little else. And with the loss of the dugong who can deny that something magical would have gone?

The profoundly depressing theme of Bill McKibben's beautifully written book The End of Nature, is that man has the capabil- ity now to undermine the very processes of climate and genetics. We now give almost religious reverence to the remaining aspects of the natural world. The Judaeo- Christian tradition of animals provided for man's use is being overturned. 'The com- fort we need is inhuman,' is McKibben's bleak conclusion.

So is it more evil to wipe out the dugong than a squadron of Tornados, as Mr Steven seemed to be suggesting? That is a false comparison because clearly each is an evil of a different kind that cannot be measured against the other. The ecology of any region would be menaced, as well as human life, by a man such as Saddam. Autocracies and dictatorships have as poor a record on the environment as they do on human rights. A reverence for liberty and the natural world go together, and we are now fighting for both of them. Some Tornado ground crew may even now be decorating their bombs with the message: `This one's from the dugong.'

Charles Clover is the environment editor of the Daily Telegraph.