Tim Almond

I was reading today how a motorway in Leicestershire is going to have to be delayed because of some newts:-

Work on a new road could cost £1.7m more than expected after it was found to run through the home of a rare newt, a council has said.

Do you know just how rare they are? I put “great crested newt” into Google news. There are also development projects in Lancashire, Cheshire, West Midlands, and County Durham being held up or incurring extra costs because of a great crested newt. There’s a house in Hampshire where they think they might have them.

So, of all the land in the UK being developed (which is a tiny proportion of the total amount of land, especially in places like County Durham), we have recently found them in 7 different counties in an area of tens of thousands of square miles. I’d hardly call that rare.

However much we might want to keep all these colonies and retain bio-diversity, it costs. At the Leicestershier site, it’s reckoned there are maybe 10 of them. That’s £170k per newt. If you had to spend your own money, you could choose between the following:-

Newt

DB9

Not much competition, really.

Tags: Politics, making gaia cry //