'Disastrous' agricultural policy legally backed, argue hedgehogs,voles and yellowhammers

The GRun is still unhappy about leaving the marvelous protections offered by the EC. I do hope they don't drip on and on as in Kettle. They have to be a bit paranoid and legalistic but they can still raise alarum and despondency.

Wildlife, air quality and fish stocks are all at risk as ministers water down EU regulations

[The new environmental laws] leave[s] gaps, fail on enforcement and oversight, open loopholes for future ministers to quietly backslide from existing standards, and turn what is currently a coherent system of long-term, stable regulation into a patchwork of competing and sometimes contradictory proposals....the new standards on air – along with those on the other three priority areas – will not be set until October 2022....ministers will be required only to set out the steps they intend to take, without accountability as to whether those measures are sufficient...New powers have also been quietly inserted for the government to derogate from high standards at will. 

The existing legislation and EC protection has evidently failed to maintain air quality, of course.Maybe the laws were not enforced enthusiastically? Also:

The EU’s common agricultural policy was often disastrous for wildlife and nature [!]..... and the government was rightly cheered when it proposed paying farmers for providing public goods – clean water, good soil, flood protection.But the new system of environmental land management contracts – to be phased in over seven years – will be voluntary [market-regulated still?]

the fishing quotas each year are still to be set by ministers, with the power to depart from that scientific advice [on sustainability]  and to choose which stocks will be fished sustainably and which will not.

the UK will be quietly swapping an agreed set of outcomes and stringent [!] environmental protections for a set of vague promises, voluntary measures, and deliberately loose and leaky legislation.

So where do we start? This is the old 'progressive' view that a centralised and legally backed regulatory system will have some liberalising benefits -- to offset the neoilib damage and help us ignore it. Ordinary national governments,and certainly their electorates, cannot always be trusted to get this 'balance' right. Existing legislation has not prevented environmental damage, and was even 'disastrous' but at least it had legal backup (but why does that redeem it?) . New legislation is voluntary -- but we can at least campaign and vote against new legislation and (eventually) replace the Government in an election. Who can change the ECJ's mind?

The writer also fashionably rejects human exceptionalism with this

Hedgehogs, yellowhammers and dormice did not figure highly in the EU referendum campaign

Votes for wildlife? A social theorist I am currently reading seriously (?) advocates this.I suspect it relates only to cuddly animals. Won't anyone speak up for the slug?

Thank goodness there is no chance of further environmental pollution in the perfume industry:

Erykah Badu is making vagina-scented incense. A perfumer explained it to us

As someone who already suffers from air polluted by perfumes (male and female) in shops, lifts,on escalators, in swimming pools, bloody everywhere -- where is environmental law when you need it?