Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
There are bigger fauna too. At night, barn owls swoop over the ash heap from their new home in
an abandoned part of the power station. Deer somehow make their way here through the maze of roads
leading to a nearby container port. We stumbled over rabbit holes. “Rabbits love the ash,” says Shaw.
“It is soft on their paws but holds its shape when they burrow into it.”
Coal-fired power plants produce millions of metric tons of ash a year. Half goes for construction and
the remainder is dumped in old lagoons or giant waste mounds. When not encouraging building on the
mounds, planners like to cover them with soil and plant trees in the name of “ecological restoration.”
But Shaw believes the piles should be left as they are. When that happens, they become brief but bril-
liant oases of biodiversity, as at Tilbury. After a few decades, more regular chemistry takes hold in the
emerging soils and the punkish and lawless landscape gives way to middle-aged woodland. But while it
lasts, there is nothing like it. Such places often have no equivalent in more natural settings.
The shoreline of the Thames estuary is dotted with old industrial sites that combine plenty of space
and not too much interference. They provide rich pickings for twenty-first-century wasteland safaris. A
couple of miles from Tilbury, Shaw and I headed past the Lakeside shopping mall, skirted a Procter &
Gamble detergent factory, and pushed on beneath a humming electricity pylon. We spotted the pretty
flowers of stonecrop, dog rose, and buddleia, which was first introduced to England from the Caribbean
three hundred years ago and named after a plant-collecting rector, Adam Buddle.
Our destination was West Thurrock Lagoon, another leftover from a demolished riverside power sta-
tion. In its salt marsh, bare ground, and scrubby meadows have been recorded more rare species than
almost any other site in Britain, including thirty-six species of bees and many rare invertebrates. It is one
of only two known UK sites for the distinguished jumping spider (
Sitticus distinguendus
). Or it was. As
we clambered over the graffiti-covered seawall to get our first look, Shaw gasped. Much of the lagoon
had dried out since his last visit. The place was overgrown with hemlock. This was, he said, almost cer-
tainly bad news for the distinguished jumping spider, whose only other British home is another alkaline
former industrial site on the other side of the estuary that has been earmarked for a theme park.
1
Further downstream, at Canvey Island, a derelict oil terminal by Holehaven Creek has more species
per acre than any British nature reserve. Amid old bikes, broken concrete, burned-out cars, and wind-
blown litter, the thirteen hundred species include the shrill carder bee and four more of the country's
rarest bumblebees, three hundred species of moths, a weevil (
Sitona cinerascens
) not seen in Britain
for seventy-seven years until it was rediscovered here in 2005, the scarce emerald damselfly (also once
thought extinct in Britain), and the last outpost of the Canvey Island ground beetle.
2
“Brownfield sites are as important for biodiversity as ancient woodlands, yet we are encouraging
people to build on them,” says Matt Shardlow of the UK conservation organization Buglife. “It's the
combination of habitats that is so rare. There are very bare areas, basking places, short grasses, sallow
scrub, sand dunes, poor land, rich land, and bits of wetland.” Trail-biking youths and illicit bonfires en-
Many old industrial processes have left behind unique habitats. In what used to be called the Black
Country of the English Midlands, limestone slag heaps left by early blast furnaces now harbor rare
meadow-grasses. In nineteenth-century Britain, the Leblanc process for manufacturing soda from com-
mon salt produced huge steaming piles of blue alkali paste that contained quicklime, calcium sulfate,
and unburned coal. It scorched the earth and smelled of bad eggs. Factories in North West England dom-
inated world soda production and at one stage generated annually hundreds of thousands of tons of this
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