Fumbling the soil question

“Three years ago,” writes David Cronin in the Guardian, “the European commission proposed a legal framework for soil protection.” Three years later, EU governments are still refusing to approve it. Britain, France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands oppose a plan they claim would be too onerous. Soil “is a matter best left for national administrations,” they argue. Far from being too onerous, counters Cronin, the proposal doesn’t go nearly far enough to protect a resource none of us can live without, merely requiring governments to identify contaminated sites affected by problems such as soil erosion and salinisation and to draw up plans to rehabilitate them. “The soil protection saga,” says Cronin, “is a troubling testament to how the EU's approach to the environment suffers from compartmentalised thinking.” And Britain's reluctance to endorse the plan is yet another example of successive Labour government’s hollow rhetoric on climate change.