Sod’s law: what can two turf swaps 40 years apart tell us about Britain’s biodiversity crisis? — SkimNews
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- David Nash in 1983 dug up a section of Kensington Gardens and swapped it with Welsh grassland, with the cargo arriving by open-topped truck in 83 hunks of turf.
- Mike Perry carried out the reverse swap four decades later, and the comparison revealed a striking reversal in the fortunes of urban versus rural nature.
- The pair of experiments is being framed as evidence about Britain's wider biodiversity crisis, using matched turf samples to track how the two sites diverged over 40 years.
Why it matters: By matching identical turf across an urban park and a Welsh grassland, the swaps turn a hard-to-measure ecological shift into a directly comparable data point — challenging the assumption that Britain's biodiversity crisis is solely a countryside problem and suggesting urban green spaces may now warrant greater conservation attention.
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