Not cute and furry, but insects need love too!
The Thames Estuary is one of the UK’s biggest development sites at the moment with thousands of new homes planned for this stretch of marshland, but actually it is already a home to millions of creatures, albeit ones you can barely see. There are in fact 7,500 different species of insects calling this part of the UK home, including scores of rare insects. And this amazing biodiversity has, for a change, been helped by mankind’s propensity for dumping waste products. Marshes, covered with industrial waste such as ash have burst out with grassland and scrub supporting an astonishing number of species.
However, as these areas are brownfield, not greenfield, sites, there is little protection through planning laws for them and outline planning permission has already been granted for building on some of them. The wetlands on the fringe of the proposed building sites have received greater publicity and therefore protection, but it has been left down to a relatively small charity, Buglife, to bring the marshes into the public eye. Matt Shardlow, the Conservation Director of Buglife is unimpressed by this discrimination against invertebrates: “Lack of information is being used to downplay their significance.” Buglife is seeking a judicial review in the case of the planning permission granted on one of the sites and is hoping to survey all the rest of the proposed sites before permission is granted.
