There are many reasons to fear the deregulating bulldozer that is the Truss cabinet – amongst them, as was revealed last week, is the way their policies are looking like what RSPB England dubbed an “attack on nature.”

The ornithological charity was objecting to the UK government’s new plans for “Investment Zones”, where eased planning restrictions would “drive growth and unlock housing development”. It warned that “where you live, the wildlife and places you love, from the shires to the cities” could be “all under threat from bulldozers, from concrete.”

The zones are just one of a slew of policies that suggest a loosening of nature protections in England, from dispensing with farming subsidies for nature recovery to the rapid ditching of EU laws. But will these policies also impact us, here, in Scotland? What do they mean for the health of our wildlife, and our own health too?

We know, at least that HM Treasury has announced it would begin work in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland “to agree” investment zones – and that those bulldozers could be coming here too.

The environment, however, is a devolved issue. Hence we might like to think that our nature is protected from the onslaught of the Truss regime. The question is if there are holes through which protections could slip?

Among the policies that UK environmental groups are worried about is the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill which has set a sunset deadline of the end of 2023 on EU Law, a great deal of which relates to the environment. This leaves DEFRA faced with a short timetable in which to replace or lose crucial laws, covering the likes of food safety, water quality and chemicals.

As each law needs to be replaced, restated or revoked, this would mean DEFRA processing at a rate of around a law a day. A key worry, in Scotland, some say, regards Habitat Regulations. Most of these are devolved, but some few, for example those around energy developments, are reserved to the UK.

But the Scottish Government are not taking this without a fight. Last week the Scottish minister for environment and land reform Mairi McAllan and minister for green skills, circular economy and biodiversity, Lorna Slater, issued a letter to the UK Government complaining about how “little clarity” there had been over the measures and their implications in Scotland.

“We strongly urge you to reconsider,” they wrote, “both the anti-nature measures set out in the mini-budget and the proposed Retained EU Law Bill. Should you proceed regardless of our concerns and those of the public and civil society across the UK, then as a minimum we seek a guarantee that none of these measures will apply in Scotland without specific consent from the Scottish government.”

Nevertheless even if we have our own nature protections in Scotland, there is reason to be concerned at our next-door neighbour taking such a cavalier approach. We might also want to be concerned about it on grounds of human health. Food Standards Scotland has said that the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill risks removing restrictions on the use of treatments for meat, such as chlorine washes on chicken and minimum hygiene standards. Even if high legal standards continued to apply in Scotland, it has said, the Internal Market Act means there would be no means of preventing such goods being sold here.

Often the two go hand-in-hand. Attacks on human nature often come with threats to human health too.

The UK government published a DEFRA blog last week, in which it observed, “a strong environment and a strong economy go hand-in-hand.” But do they? Even can they? That remains one of the big questions of our crisis-addled times. Is it even possible to pursue growth without damaging the natural world that supports us?

The issue was analysed in the UK Government’s Dasgupta review into the Economics of Biodiversity, published only last year, which argued that instead of focusing on growth, governments should focus on wealth, and include nature as an aspect of that wealth. It was also there in an article last week by Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England, attacking UK government policy, and including the striking line, “even bankers need to eat, drink and inhale clean air”. Juniper argued that economic growth and nature could be compatible, but that “growth that results in the destruction of nature will, in the end, cease.”

I have my doubts whether growth can indeed be compatible with sustaining nature – and I’m sure it’s not possible without fastidious regulation. Truss’s government feels like a throwback to a time in which growth was the answer to everything, and technological ingenuity the trick that could get us out of any fix. It’s wishful thinking – and a denial of material realities of the natural world.