The Thick End of the Wedg

THERE is a town near Alicante in Spain called Elche. They make shoes there. The other reason it is famous is that it is the last palm grove left in Europe — there were once about 250 000 trees but now there are just around 10 000.



And they are the real deal — Phoenix palms. They were planted by the Moors as a defensive line against the Catholics about 800 years ago. The palms lining the streets of Cannes and a host of Arabian capitals (and some modern casinos around the world) are from Elche.



Like many Spanish cities, local political power drifts between the socialists and the conservatives, and they have very instructive attitudes to the palm trees. The socialists (at least when I was a correspondent in Spain 20 years ago) tended to want to preserve the trees. If there was one in your garden you couldn’t cut it down, no matter how much you disliked it. The conservatives (in those days the socialists still called them fascists as they were the modern remnant of Gen Franco’s movement) thought the best way to protect the trees was to sell them, which I presume was why so many were dug up.



When I was there the socialists were in power. People used to dig up trees at night and speed them to the nearest port and ship them to clients around the world. The socialists were outraged. People were jailed.



But it was clear then that the conservatives were right. The only way to maintain the grove was to allow people to sell their trees, and so it has proven to be. It encouraged new plantings and fiercer protection of the existing grove. Even today, if you want to line the entrance to your new hotel with the greatest palms of all you would look first to the trees in Elche. A good one could cost $20000.



Commercialising rather than merely preserving endangered species has to be the way forward. I still get irritated when people refer to newspapers as "dead tree" editions. They could not be more wrong. Some 10% of the world’s forests produce timber for the paper industry. If there wasn’t one who would pay for their upkeep? Who would bother planting trees if they could not be sold? If 10% of the world’s forests were suddenly to die it would be regarded as an environmental catastrophe, but that is exactly what so many clever clogs wish upon newspapers.



Of course, the ultimate South African lesson is how we approach the preservation of endangered wildlife. If we commercialised and harvested rhino horns, we would save the species. It may not sit well at polite dinner tables, but it is the absolute truth. Left to the do-gooders, no matter how they spend on tracking and policing, our rhino are toast.