PAUL ROSE, the new president of Friends of the Lake District, looks at future possibililties and pressures facing the area . . .

IN my lifetime the world’s population has almost tripled. There are more than 7.l billion of us now and we are growing by about 75 million each year.

For the first time in history we have become a true force of nature and with over half of us living in urban areas, we have never affected nature more while at the same time being so far removed from it.

In England there are 407 of us per square kilometre, which means that, depending on how we measure things, England is the sixth most-crowded country in the world – we have to discount small islands, city states and dependencies.

Or, if we include them, we come in at about the thirtieth most-crowded country out of two hundred and forty three. Or we are the most crowded in Europe: this depends on how we interpret Holland’s significant water space.

No matter how we look at the statistics, there’s a heck of a lot of us, we’re growing fast and there is only a finite amount of space.

This means that we are putting unprecedented pressure on our ecosystem services and it pitches us in a sort of mad race against ourselves – we are trying to understand nature while simultaneously pushing the life-giving services of our planet to the limit.

This means that we have to be meticulous in the way we value our ecosystem services. If we were to use TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) to value our Lake District services I wonder what we would charge for the abundant pure drinking water that we send to the cities?

And how much would we invoice for our essential carbon capture services in our peat, woodlands and heathlands?

While we’re at it, we should also think of the priceless, intrinsic value of space, recreation and the sense of the wild places.

And how about putting a price on the miracle of freedom, hope and inspiration that occurs when schoolchildren are allowed to escape the box-ticking exams factory and learn outside of the classroom?

I have all of this in mind when I look at future pressures and opportunities for the Lake District.

Could we become wealthy (and a bit shaken) from shale gas extraction by ‘fracking’? Will we face the nuclear waste disposal issue again and what value could we possibly put on it? My point of view for setting a value is always ‘nature first’.

My point of view on waste disposal is particularly well defined at the moment as we had a tremendous success with the Windermere Debris Dive, with 262 divers and 150 shore- and boat-based volunteers recovering about seven tonnes of waste from Bowness Bay.

We have further raised awareness by school students building beautiful sculptures from the debris and, at Merz Barn, we celebrated by ‘swimming’ in waves of debris. Our waves were made of 72 car tyres, the white surf was rubble sacks and plastic bags.

Traffic cones, hoses, fire extinguishers, pipes and hundreds of bottles floated in the offshore breaking waves and closer to the beach the smaller waves were full of wellies, sandals, goggles, cans, clothing and toothbrushes.

The beach itself was awash with broken glass, batteries, small plastic pieces, plastic bags and all the usual horrible debris that we are used to seeing on the beach.

When we complete the environmental impact assessment we’ll know what damage the heavy metals and other toxins were doing to Windermere.

In the meantime as we reflect on the value of our natural places I wonder, how do we stop people from throwing rubbish in the lake?