Section:GDN 1J PaGe:4 Edition Date:190815 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 14/8/2019 18:29 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian Thursday 15 Aug ust 2019
4 Opinion
A
s Dutch elm disease spread across
Britain in the 1970s, the country fell
into mourning. When the sentinel
trees that framed our horizons were
felled, their loss was a constant
topic of sad and angry conversation.
Today, just a few years into the
equally devastating ash dieback
epidemic, and as the fi rst great trees are toppled, most
of us appear to have forgotten all about it. I’ve travelled
around much of Britain this summer, and seen the
disease almost everywhere. A survey published this
spring found infected trees across roughly three-
quarters of England and Wales: the spread has been as
rapid and devastating as ecologists predicted. But in this
age of hypernormalisation, only a few people still seem
to care. Ash to ashes: our memories wither as quickly
as the trees.
And almost nothing has been learned. Our disease
prevention rules, whose scope is restricted by the
European Union and the World Trade Organi zation,
and whose enforcement is restricted by the British
government’s austerity, do little to prevent similar
plagues affl icting our remaining trees. Several deadly
pathogens are marching across Europe. While it is hard
to prevent some of these plagues from spreading across
land, there is a simple measure that would stop most of
them from spreading across water: a ban on the import
Stuart Jeff ries
writes about
cultureof all live plants except those grown from tissue cultures,
in sterile conditions.
But bans are more or less banned. Nothing must be
allowed to obstruct free trade. Instead, the world’s
governments rely on hand wringing. Take, for example,
a lethal plague called Xylella fastidiosa , which is ravaging
olive groves in Italy and threatens a remarkable variety
of trees and shrubs, including oak, sycamore, plane and
cherry. The system for preventing its spread depends
on inspections of random consignments of known host
plants, and a passport scheme to ensure they aren’t
imported from infected areas. This system is likely to
be useless. The EU keeps a list of plants that can carry
Xylella. It has been updated 12 times in four years , as new
carriers emerge. Visual inspections won’t reveal plants
that carry the disease without symptoms. Random
sampling won’t protect us from a plague that can be
introduced by a single plant.
Nor do we know whether Xylella is the most urgent
risk to our remaining trees. Many plant pathogens evolve
at extraordinary speed, jump unexpectedly from one
host to another, suddenly hybridise with each other,
and behave in radically diff erent ways in diff erent
environments. A system that regulates only known risks
is bound to fail.
Even in economic terms, the live plant trade is
senseless. Ash dieback alone, according to a paper in
Current Biology , will cost this country around £15bn. But
the UK’s import and export of all live plants amounts to
£300m a year – 2% of the costs of this disease. The paper
estimates that another 47 major tree pests and diseases
now threaten to arrive in Britain, and these are just the
known plagues. In ecological terms, this legislative
failure is a total disaster. For the sake of deregulatory
machismo, we face the prospect of tree species
everywhere eventually meeting their deadly pathogens.
Where logging and climate breakdown have so far failed
to eliminate the world’s forests, imported diseases
threaten to complete the job.
What will come next? Will our beech trees succumb
to Phytophthora kernoviae , a disease that appears to
have been imported to Cornwall on infected shrubs from
New Zealand? Will Sitka spruce , on which commercial
forestry in this country relies to an extraordinary
extent , be hammered by the larger eight-toothed spruce
bark beetle , found for the fi rst time this year in a Kent
woodland? Will it be hit by another marvellously named
plague, Neonectria fuckeliana? Or by something else
entirely? As the trade in live plants reaches almost every
corner of the Earth, nothing and nowhere is safe.J
ust as we need a precautionary approach,
every lid is being ripped off , every barrier
smashed, facilitating trade in everything,
including pathogens. In response to a
parliamentary question about Xylella, the
environment minister, Thérèse Coff ey,
claimed that Brexit creates an opportunity
to introduce “stricter biosecurity
measures”. It does, but will it be used? Given that,
for the monomaniacs who now run this country, the
main purpose of leaving the EU is to escape its public
protections, the chances of Brexit leading to stricter
regulation of plant imports seem remote. Never mind
that this trade makes neither ecological nor economic
sense. Our government, like many others, favours a
global trade regime that places the free movement of
goods above all other values (while imposing ever tighter
restrictions on the free movement of people).
There’s nothing good about ash dieback, but there is
one useful thing that could be done: wherever possible,
leave the dead trees to stand. There is more life in a dead
tree than in a living tree: around 2,000 animal species
in the UK rely on dead or dying wood for their survival.
But (except in politics) there’s a dearth of dead wood in
this country. Many species, such as the lesser spotted
woodpecker , the pied fl ycatcher and the stag beetle, are
severely restricted by the shortage of decay, caused by
our tidy-minded forestry.
And there’s another reason to let the dead giants
stand: as memorials to the repeated failures of
government. Let us remember our losses, and learn
from them.P
icture the scene. You and your kids
are sporting in the fountains in the
square behind London’s King’s Cross
station. Your phone beeps. A news
alert tells you that the owner of this
(pseudo-)public space, Argent, is using
facial recognition software in security
cameras. You look up from your phone
and see a camera pointed right at you. Not only do you
worry that your boss might thereby acquire data to
undermine your claim to be “working from home”, but
you are furious at this violation of your privacy.
What do you do? Unless you happen to work for
Big Brother Watch or Liberty , both of which campaign
against the use of biometric technology , and so might
cut you some slack in the event that your facial data
from chillaxing, fountain-style, proves you’ve been
bunking off , the best thing to do is to hack your face ,
and possibly your children’s faces, too.
One hack against facial recognition technology
is to wear what is eff ectively a hi -tech witch’s hat.
Devised by Project KOVR, this hood is part of an anti-
surveillance coat that can block electromagnetic
signals. Your data and face will remain private while
you’re inside it. If you really want to protect your
privacy while looking like a member of a Ku Klux Klan
chapter from another galaxy, this is the way to go.
More promising is Hyperface, a project being
developed by Berlin-based artist and technologist
Adam Harvey to overwhelm and confuse facial
recognition software by printing patterns on to clothing
that a computer can interpret as a face.
Harvey earlier developed an open-source project
called CV Dazzle that encouraged humans to
camoufl age themselves with makeup and crazy hair
to create an unreadable “anti-face”. If your kids are set
on going to the face-painting booth after the fountains,
maybe suggest to the makeup artist they go nuts with
the paint – and restyle their hair while they’re about it.
If none of these hacks works for you, take solace
from the current hopelessness of facial recognition
technology. University of Essex researchers found that
the Metropolitan police’s tr ials had an 81% error rate.
If you’re a person of colour you may not feel reassured ,
though, by research that suggests the darker your skin
tone, the more likely you are to be misidentifi ed.
To thwart such miscarriages of justice, privacy
violations and algorithmically facilitated racism,
my favourite hack is to wear a 3D printed mask of
someone else’s face. A 3D printed prosthetic image
of artist Leo S elvaggio, the creator of the project
URME Surveillance , is on sale for $200. If successful,
this mask may make S elvaggio the most wanted –
though ultimately wrongly accused – man on Earth.
Theoretically, you could print a mask of anyone , but
one tip: unless you want to be chased through the
fountains by mobs of angry Guardian readers, perhaps
it’s best to avoid a Boris Johnson mask.Stuart
Jeff ries
Free trade in
plants is lethal
for our forests.
We mu s t b a n it
How a hi-tech
witch’s hat can
help you keep
your data safe
A dying ash at Pound Farm Woodland, near Ipswich
PHOTOGRAPH: BETHANY CLARKE/GETTYGeorge
Monbiot
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