Ecological: Eco Worriers and Nimbys
Everyone wants to save the world, just not in their backyard
By Neil McCormick | telegraph.co.uk | 11 Feb 2010
Neil McCormick Photo: PHILIP HOLLIS
Following the frankly pathetic spectacle of rampant self-interest and short-term thinking that masqueraded as the Copenhagen climate treaty talks, a round robin email popped up in my inbox. The subject line was: "If not us, who?" My immediate reaction was, well, not me, anyway. Really, I was feeling quite bad enough about the future without having the whole thing thrown back in my lap.
The thrust of the message could be summed up as "The politicians have let us down. Now it's up to ordinary citizens to take matters into our own hands". I am sure everyone who received the email had a similar response: we're all doomed. Because if there is one lesson we can take away from Copenhagen, it is that everyone wants to save the world, they just don't want to have to start in their own backyard.
When I first heard the expression "Nimby", I thought it was an onomatopoeic noun for an over-sensitive whinger. Which probably isn't that far from the truth. I pictured nervous, fretful aesthetes developing a rash at the mention of the word "windmill", which apparently has near satanic connotations to those of a Nimby disposition.
Then someone explained to me it was an acronym for Not In My Back Yard, which pretty much covers everyone with a backyard. If the future of mankind comes down to a confrontation between Eco Worriers and Nimbys, we might as well hand the keys back now, and make an orderly queue for the door marked Extinction.
You wouldn't have thought there was much to get Nimby-ish about in our little slice of north London, a mix of Victorian and Edwardian streets bumping up against concrete tower blocks and council estates laid out with all the touchy-feely aesthetic of high-security prisons. Right across the road, however, is a large, green open space. No one is allowed to use it though. It's an old covered reservoir, surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire. Kids sometimes scale the battlements for a game of football, till they are chased off by the water company. Someone turns up every now and then to mow it. And that's about it.
Then my Dearly Beloved got involved with Mayor Boris Johnson's Capital Growth initiative and suggested this might be a suitable site. Other water company properties have apparently been dragooned into participating in this heroic effort to provide London with a modicum of food security by growing carrots on every spare inch of green.
The idea sparked excitement in the neighbourhood, where the waiting time for an allotment is directly related to the mortality rate among senior gardeners (one in, one out). There was talk of an orchard and vineyard, an environmentally keen local retailer insisted he would sell any produce grown and neighbours revealed a hitherto unsuspected passion for beekeeping.
A website was set up to co-ordinate the project. And then the objections started, as we always knew they must. Someone wasn't sure about children "running wild" (as if a green space could provide any competition with cyberspace). Someone else proposed a key system because we wouldn't want just "anybody" using it (am I wrong to suspect they really mean "anybody from the council estate"?).
There was some discussion of the aesthetic unsightliness of vegetable patches, so couldn't we just have a lovely meadow, and some benches to sit on and admire the view of our own houses? As for the bees, did we really want to encourage insect colonies so close to living facilities? And then a counter proposal started to gain unexpected traction: maybe we could turn it into tennis courts? At which point I wanted to fire back, Not In My Back Yard!
It's like the Copenhagen summit adapted for an amateur theatre production, with everyone fighting their own little patch according to very different ideologies. One minute we're talking about food security and the next we're discussing sports facilities. And that is the reason the human race is doomed. Let them eat tennis balls, I say.
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