Mapping out a positive way ahead for conservation beyond the current period of austerity needs more than just Lawton-type reports and corporate resolutions.  We need to ask ourselves some searching questions:  do we give proper credence to our personal motivations as conservationists?  Do we really understand how social institutions work?  Are we hiding behind financial and legal instruments instead of truly engaging with people as individuals and communities?  Where’s the heart?

It’s a difficult time.  The money is drying up, the job specs are being shuffled again, and the public is restive.  The world is changing, and conservation needs to judge carefully how its own messages and approaches may also need to change in response.  Amidst this turbulent period, should conservation organisations batten down the hatches and weather the storm, or is it time for us all to rush outside and get wet through?

This article very briefly examines some themes which I believe are central to how we map out a path into the future, and it deliberately sets these themes alongside each other, because I strongly believe they’re related.  The first is the relationship between conservationists as individuals, and the organisations that employ or involve them.  The second theme is the Big Society agenda being proffered by the Coalition Government, and how we respond to it.  The third theme is the fitness for purpose of the mechanisms upon which so much of current conservation action depends – the designations and the agri-environment grants.  Bringing these themes together – motivations, social institutions and mechanisms – offers evidence in favour of a major re-awakening of the conservation ethic.

This agenda deliberately does not consider ecology at all – it’s about how we do things, rather than about what we are trying to achieve.  You could say why worry about the niceties when what really matters is to get out there and do stuff.  But I believe the emphasis we rightly place on the importance of action can sometimes mean that we don’t think enough about the how and the why.  Landscape-scale conservation is a classic example: it represents a paradigm shift for conservation, the debate about it has been exciting and inspiring, and the projects which are forging ahead using it as a signature are strong and innovative.  But we have, I suggest, been too intoxicated by the idea of what a living landscape full of connected, thriving habitat would look like, to think critically about whether conservation’s modus operandi are actually fit for the job.

Whatever your view of what follows, one thing is clear: the current approach is not working.  Biodiversity continues to decline, and conservation is still not a central part of policy and society.  You could argue that we’re just not forceful enough, or not well enough resourced.  But I suggest that all the noise and all the money in the world will do little good if our hearts are not open and our connection to our fellow human beings in society is not strong.

Owning our motivations

In the last issue of ECOS Gabrielle Overgaard-Horup and Cara Roberts presented a clear set of findings from the VINE study into the values and aspirations of nature conservations, vis à vis the organisations they work for.   One statement stood out for me:

“Organisations (particularly government agencies) seem constrained to refer to nature in scientific and economic terms even to their own staff, who also feel wary of openly admitting the emotional attachments that inspired their initial interest.  This is disappointing as it is precisely this inspiration that conservation hopes to develop in wider society.”

How should we respond to this finding?  Feel a warm glow that conservationists have Real Passion in spite of the bureaucratic treadmills they work within?  Rue the fact that conservationists are too idealistic in a hard-nosed economically driven world?  Or should we actually listen to the message it sends:  that the impulse that brings most of us into this business is being stifled by the way we actually go about it.  The most precious impulse in the whole world of conservation – the sense of enchantment and joy we gain from the natural world – is being squeezed to one side, rather than being cherished and nurtured and offered unashamedly to our peers.

It’s not difficult to understand how this situation comes about.  To argue a case for anything, you have to present it in other people’s terms, and relate it to the things other people care about.  Business and government takes little notice of personal feelings, and heart warming stories of personal epiphanies carry little weight when fighting development or forging policy.  That’s what we tend to assume, but is it really true?  Don’t most of the really significant shifts in public policy start life from moments when public campaigns or debates get under the skin of our human experience, and touch on deep seated senses of truth which we all feel but don’t necessarily articulate?  Fighting illness, tackling economic hardship, enabling democratic freedoms, and creating educational advancement all appeal directly to our sense of ourselves, and often do so in very personal, emotional terms.  Yet conservation arguments (as advanced by most conservation organisations) seem so often to be couched primarily in terms of the promise of ecosystem services and the risks from threats to biodiversity, relegating the personal stories of human experience of nature to somewhat secondary afterthoughts.

The groundswell of public feeling over the recent Government proposals for disposing of the public forest estate provides a good case in point.  Very many people had the gut feeling that the proposals threatened their link with the natural, and their sense of connection with trees and woods.  That personal gut reaction was what generated the mass movement in opposition to the proposals – not technical arguments about conservation significance.  The Woodland Trust chose to try and steer the debate towards their own priority – ancient woodland – but did arguments about restoring planted ancient woodlands really reflect the heart of the public’s instincts?

Getting a fix on the Big Society

I’ve just finished reading Jesse Norman’s book, The Big Society.¹  It’s a challenge, trying to wade through the political diatribes against the Fabianism of the modern Labour Party, and the dead hand of the State.  Try as he might, Norman, who has been credited as one of architects of ‘New Conservatism’, can’t hide his old Tory instincts, despite the engaging forays into the philosophy of social interaction.  But for all that, the book’s worth reading – many people are becoming dab hands at dismissing the notion of the Big Society, but before doing so we should try to work out for sure what the substance is behind Mr Cameron’s rhetoric.

There is a huge sense of obfuscation and cynicism in the way much of the environment movement is responding to the Coalition’s overtures on the Big Society.  Apart from natural suspicion of the messenger, given that perhaps a majority of the movement feel their home is naturally on the liberal left, there’s an obvious reason for this caution.  Diane Warburton makes the point very forcibly elsewhere in this issue: the horrible conflation of drastic cuts in public spending with overtures about civil society needing to take on the tasks of the state, is at best counterproductive, and at worst evidence of deeply cynical hypocrisy.

If voluntary bodies increasingly take on previously state-run services, there is a risk that they become ever more bound by, and beholden to, the state.  This would in fact fly in the face of the very logic of the Big Society as articulated by Norman, as a ‘conversation’ between independent, free-thinking and equal civil institutions, free to generate their own solutions rather than shackled to a pre-determined set of targets set by a paternalistic state.  So if the Big Society notion becomes translated through Whitehall shorthand into a simple contracting-out of services to the voluntary and community sector, that contractual relationship could easily kill any hope of a genuine Big Society outcome.

But however justified the criticisms, we would be profoundly short sighted to simply reject the new politics of localism on the grounds that it’s being undermined by the reality of public spending cuts.  The fact that many of the natural vehicles for Big Society are being weakened by the cuts, does not of itself weaken the case of greater civil engagement in delivering public services.  But more importantly than that, to take the principle of Big Society at its word we should not wait to be told what it means.  We should stand on our own feet – intellectually, politically and ethically – and define it for ourselves.  What does nature conservation have to say about individual capability, social capital, the workings of civic institutions, and the relative roles of society and the state?  And what effect should a fresh consideration of those issues have on conservation itself?

Are conservation bodies ‘Big Society in action’?

Funding aside, do the current institutions of nature conservation provide a properly structured set of vehicles for delivering this new localism agenda?  Certainly that seems to be how several of them are selling themselves – and indeed, Caroline Spellman herself has said recently that she considers the RPSB to be Big Society in action.  But I beg to differ: yes, the RSPB does coordinate ‘citizen science’ initiatives like the annual Garden Birds Survey, but those don’t constitute true participative working with local communities, where communities are afforded the respect of being equal participants in a dialogue about priorities and approaches.  The memberships of larger conservation charities tend for the most part to be paying audiences of those organisations, not core participants.  Effective though this subscription form of engagement is at demonstrating support, raising core funds and delivering messages to already-interested audiences, it does not of itself empower, involve and mobilise people to become instrumental themselves in effecting change.  It’s true that many people don’t want to be personally instrumental – they would prefer to offer financial support to an organisation they trust, to work for the cause they care about – and that is just fine.  But organisations empowered by their supporters in that way do not fit into the localism paradigm in the way it is newly being discussed.

When I worked as an employed member of staff at a Wildlife Trust, many years ago, I saw myself as a professional nature conservationist, mandated to pursue my profession in my organisation’s patch.  I regret to admit that I regarded many of the Trust’s membership, including many of its (mainly older) active members and volunteers, as slightly quaint throw-backs to the early days of the Trust as a much smaller, volunteer-run body.  I regarded ‘us’ staff as much more serious, engaged and effective, making real change on the ground.  In some ways I was right – the professional ethos enabled more effective engagement with land managing and policy-making communities.  But it was also deeply patronising, disregarding the more grounded truth, in many ways, that those members and volunteers represented.

In the early days of Wildlife Trusts and other conservation charities, change happened because people came together to volunteer their time and effort to a common cause.  The work and the approach may often have been flaky and parochial and middle class and limited in reach, but it was real – connected to locality, community and the individual.  As Trusts grew, they chose to take on staff to bring skills, dedicated time and professionalism to the task.  On paper at least, those originating individuals, or their successors, still run the show, as trustees on councils and committees.  But in reality their role – to a greater or lesser extent – is very often manipulated (or ‘steered’, to put it nicely) by paid staff towards what those staff regard as the ‘right’ ends.

The vast bulk of non-active members moreover, don’t even get in on the conversation.  From the staff end of the telescope, those members are important as a source of revenue, and as a mandating constituency, but are not necessarily seen as important as sources of ideas and perspectives.  The members’ magazines seem to ‘tell’ and ‘explain’ rather than encourage free-thinking debate.  The effect is to distance the mandating community from the business of making a difference.  This is not to suggest that doing otherwise would be an easy option – once you’ve many thousands of members, how can you organise a dialogue which is meaningful, while still delivering the business of the organisation?  But I suggest that it leaves these organisations hard-pressed to truly argue that they represent ready-made models for the Big Society.

Designations and agri-environment – tools fit for the task?

Many of nature conservation’s achievements over the last thirty years have been enabled by site designation and agri-environment schemes.  Those tools have served us well in many ways.  But I for one feel increasingly conscious that those mechanisms can be counterproductive, if used officiously and without flexibility and real engagement.  And they are still much easier than addressing the real issue – persuading those who control the fate of habitats to buy into the principle of conservation as self-motivated individuals.  This too, I suggest, is one of the consequences of the professionalization and corporate evolution of conservation.  Though there are lots of highly able, highly effective advisory staff out there, making great use of these mechanisms, it remains the case that, whether we know if or not, we are hiding behind regulation and grant aid, just as we can sometimes hide behind uniforms and marketing slogans, because it’s easier than true engagement.  To quote Jules Pretty:

“It is true that natural capital can be improved in the short term with no explicit attention paid to social and human capital.  Regulations and economic incentives are commonly used to encourage changes in behaviour.  But though these may change behaviour, they do not guarantee a change in attitudes: farmers commonly revert to old practices when the incentives end or the regulations are no longer enforced.  There are quite different outcomes when social relations and human capacity are changed.  External agencies can work with individuals to increase their knowledge and skills, their leadership capacity and their motivations to act.  If these succeed in leading to the desired improvements in natural resources, then this has a positive feedback on both social and human assets.²

Idealistic as this may sound to a hard-pressed conservation advisor or SSSI officer battling intransigent landowners, ultimately it’s still true.  The only question is, at what point do we actually recognise and act on it?  Though it is a great asset, an HLS agreement is not a ‘solution’ in itself, unless the ten years of that agreement is used as a priceless breathing space in which to build a true commonality of view with a landowner and his or her neighbours, so that conservation gains can be sustained beyond that period on the landowner’s terms, out of his or her own choice.

Freeing the spirit

If it is anything, conservation is not a conformist, institutional subject.  It is at its best when it is outside, critical, controversial.  The institutionalising process of the last few decades, which has turned amateur zeal into smart marketing, means we spend too much of our time promoting our organisations’ company lines, rather than simply sharing our passions.  There is an analogy with the relationship between personal religious revelation and the dogma of established churches.  The process of institutionalising a faith can turn a passionate sense of personal truth into a doctrine which stunts the personal.  This is not to suggest that nature conservation has religious overtones (though it is informed by a deep spirituality for many), but as a movement it is driven by intensely personal (albeit shared) emotional responses to wild nature.  Yet once those motivating instincts coalesce into organisations, they have to be documented, and documents become doctrine.

There is a strong case for suggesting that the conservation movement has lost its way.  It has some big and powerful tools at its disposal:  the concept of landscape-scale working; the argument for climate change adaptation; the logic of ecosystem services.  Yet there is a sense somehow that we don’t know quite what to do with those tools, or perhaps lack the heart and passion to know how to wield them.  There is something hollow about the mood music.  In our souls we know our cause is right, and in our words we trot out arguments which are no less cogent than they have ever been.  But somewhere in the space between soul and words, there is something missing.

The Lawton report has only underlined that concern for me, rather than igniting a new excitement for the future.  It says all the right stuff, but it seems wooden, somehow.  It’s been summarised as advocating ‘more, bigger, better and joined’.  But what about ‘valued’?  What about ‘nurturing’. ‘relevant’, ‘accessible’ – even ‘loved’?  Lawton does recognise the importance of achieving true societal support, talking about improved collaboration between all levels of society, but the emphasis of the actions it proposes doesn’t seem to reflect this.

So what is the way forward?  Re-discover the roots of conservation?  Recognise the human basis of our actions – as individuals, families, groups, communities, civil institutions, interests, markets?  Accept that sustainable, meaningful outcomes are built through participation, ownership, dialogue, compromise and common consent, not through imposed state rules, abstruse action plans and bribery with EU grants?

For me, the missing ingredient is humanity – the human context and meaning of conservation.  There is a lack of heart.  What starts as a spark of connection in our own hearts as conservationists, somehow gets lost in the translation from individual to professional to organisation to public audience.  We need to find that spark again, own it, and set it free.  If we don’t, conservationists risk facing another generation of talking amongst themselves.

References

¹ Jesse Norman (2010) The Big Society, University of Buckingham Press

² Jules Pretty (2002) Agri-Culture, Earthscan

Conservationists are the emissaries for ecology in human society.  Yet the essence of ecology – the understanding that it is the interrelationships between creatures which defines their fate – seems to be too little applied by the conservation profession to itself, and its engagement with society.  Perhaps it’s time to ditch our reductionist tendencies and apply a more ecological world view to our own discipline.  Time to smell the fox…

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move. ¹

Human nature

On the very last page of the revised edition of his book, Future Nature, Bill Adams concludes: “It seems to me that the critical question for conservation is not really about biodiversity, but about ourselves.  It is nature’s capacity to be itself that matters, and conservation is about setting the terms of the engagement between people and nature.”²

Adams argued, both in the first edition of the book in 1996 and in the revised one, seven years later, that the challenge for conservation was to become more human-centred, and to recognise the human experience at the heart of engagement with the natural world.  The book, which was commissioned by BANC, has been influential for many people in the profession, and the call to acknowledge the human dimension of conservation has influenced much discussion in the pages of ECOS and elsewhere.  But the countervailing trend – towards targets and mission statements and long lists and short lists and the remote notion of ‘awareness raising’ – has continued apace, and reinforces the clinical scientific criteria which dictate what matters most in nature conservation policy.

The tendency to dehumanise conservation has something to do with the strange idea that for arguments to carry weight, they must be dispassionate, objective and rigidly scientific, free of any lax notions of subjective human value.  And it is true that in cross examination at a public inquiry, arguing that the bypass should not flatten the ancient woodland because you used to write poetry beneath the bows, or because you lost your virginity against a particular trunk, is probably not a good tactic.  But most people, fortunately, are not barristers or planning inspectors.

Rolled up with the self-enforced discipline of being dispassionate, is the Victorian naturalist’s desire to collect, sort, classify and define nature.  But the mixture of these two tendencies, I suggest, is only serving to maintain the aloofness which still pervades the conservation profession, despite Adams’ appeals. As ECOS approaches its 30^th year, I hope what follows can offer a few primers to the coming debate on redefining nature conservation.

The ecology of conservation

Ecology – the science of conservation – is the study of interactions. It recognises that organisms are products of their environments, and that they thrive when they are able to mingle within that environment.  Conservation lectures the rest of society about the truths of ecology.  But do we live by its principles ourselves?

Conservation has always been about fighting battles.  Those who fight against an enemy – be it through a physical struggle against an invader or through a battle of ideas and world views – by necessity think of themselves as a band of brothers, parking their wagons in a circle to resist assault.  And the language of battle has served conservation well, insofar as it has forged a sense of team spirit and reassuring togetherness in a sea of troubles.  Stephanie Hilbourne made much of the language of the battlefield in her article in ECOS 29(2), in which her message was laced with words like defending, attacking, leadership, vision, hope.

If you grow up with a fondness for wildlife and an antagonism towards human defilement of the natural world, it is natural enough to develop a world view which sees those who champion nature as being separate from, and pitched against, those who don’t.  There is comfort in feeling it is ‘us’ against ‘them’.  I remember myself, as a young teenager, rationalising the deep affection I felt for threatened whales and wildflowers, by earnestly hoping that mankind would someday literally die out, so that Nature could re-inherit the earth.  But just as human beings as a whole are mistaken when they regard themselves as separate from the rest of nature, so do conservationists go wrong by building up this sense of the separate.

Nature in boxes

Conservationists tend to separate themselves psychologically, by building intellectual walls around their subject, and drawing battle lines against the unenlightened.  They also partition their subject into pieces, by taking a reductionist approach to nature – sites, species, targets, disciplines.

Faced with the vast, sprawling panorama of nature, and the complex, labyrinthine mess of human engagement with it, it is easier to split things into bite-sized chunks.  Easier to reduce the problems to a series of categories, and the landscape to a series of sites, than to stretch one’s thinking across the whole, ragged reality, where there are more grey areas than black or white ones.

We separate ‘good’ habitat from the rest.  We build laws which prosecute people for ploughing one field of flowers, while allowing another to be lost because it happens to have a few fewer species in it.  We catalogue pieces of otherwise continuous landscapes under headings of international, national, county and local importance.  We sort species in endless lists, which separate those that matter from those that remain anonymous.  And we argue and wring our hands about the needs of one butterfly against the needs of another, rather than simply giving them the space to find their own equilibrium.

In recent years, the reductionism of site-based and species-based conservation has begun to be replaced by a more expansive, ecosystem-recognising approach.  Yet the mental constructs used by conservationists – betrayed in their language – tend still to be about distancing and dividing.

The aloofness of awareness-raising

This tendency to dig mental moats around ourselves is all too obvious in the world of environmental education and interpretation – not all of it by any means, but far too much of it.  When we set out to ‘raise awareness’ we assume that we know, and others don’t – and that the cure is to enlighten people and correct the error of their ways.  Where people start from as individuals, and what their personal take is on nature, is not really acknowledged – they just need their awareness to be raised, so that they will then magically start hanging up bird feeders and supporting their local conservation charity.

It has always struck me as odd that in most nature conservation strategies and action plans, the simple human aspect of nature is so often just tacked onto the end.  After grandiose and detailed treatises about data needs, ecosystem services, habitat management, agri-environment and ecological research, come throw-away references to ‘raising awareness’, and recognising ‘cultural/aesthetic’ considerations – the latter often without even the offer of a verb to describe what the action might need to be.  It is almost as though recognising the human scale of interaction with nature is too subjective – too uncomfortably close to what actually motivates human beings to care about nature – to risk giving it credence.

Yet it is not a defeat, nor even a mere tactic, to couch nature conservation ends in human societal terms – to talk about the personal, social, educational and community relevance of nature.  It is not just an excuse – a ruse – to put nature into human terms.  It is a recognition of the golden thread running through human nature and wild nature.

A landscape-scale approach in our heads

Landscape-scale thinking, on the face of it, should counter these reductionist and divisive tendencies.  This new expansive, proactive approach has come to dominate the forward agenda for conservation: I have immersed myself in it on many occasions, and gladly so.  But I’ve always felt there was something not quite right about the way we talk about it.  While the language is expansive, it is less clear whether conservationists are prepared to be as expansive themselves, in recognising the wider landscape in which their own interests are embedded.

I remember sitting in a session during the South West Nature Map process, where conservationists and naturalists from across a particular county were huddled over a map, drawing lines to define Strategic Nature Areas.  These were intended to be zones of opportunity for habitat consolidation and expansion, based on general rules for how large they should be, what habitats they should encompass, and what geology and soil patterns they should reflect.  Yet it struck me that although the scale was amplified, the mentality was business as usual.  Most participants seemed to see the exercise as simply an opportunity to plan for more habitat, without recognising the accompanying obligation to acknowledge other elements of the landscapes concerned – patterns of human population, landscape character, agricultural land uses, and the historical landscape.

As we imagine shimmering hillsides of chalk grassland alive with bubbling skylarks high in a blue firmament above the heat haze, and rolling carpets of woodland canopy full of dancing red squirrels, vaulting over a sea of bluebells, it seems that people are being tacked on to the image last.  Of course, implicitly we imagine ourselves amongst that landscape, as vaguely disembodied conservationists appreciating our works.  But the re-wilded landscapes being designed in metaphorical smoke-filled rooms of conservation thinking seem to be peopled only with identikit figures with smiling faces, like in an architect’s sketch of a new shopping precinct.

Landscape-scale conservation recognises that species and habitats do not exist in isolation, and that healthy populations need to be set in a matrix which allows them to interact and exchange genetic information in order to thrive.  Diversity and vitality decline when patches of habitat, however rich they may be individually, are separated as islands in a sea of inhospitable land.  Once connected, or in close enough proximity to allow exchange, those patches are more likely to feed one another, but they will also mutate over time, losing some features and gaining others.

The equivalent to this thinking in the human landscape is that people and groups in society do not thrive if they are isolated from one another.  They lose the opportunity to exchange ideas, see different perspectives, and enrich each other’s thinking, and are likely to become narrow-minded and find it more difficult to communicate.  And, by the same token, given the chance to interact, some will be changed by the experience.

Amongst the current literature about landscape-scale conservation, it seems to me that there is a divergence between a more liberated understanding of ecosystems, and a continuing silo mentality in how conservationists wish to use their new insight.  The talk is of landscape-scale approaches ‘allowing us to take the fight to new levels’, ‘making people see the importance of biodiversity’.  It is still a didactic language of separation, of them and us.

That feeling of something missing was reinforced for me when I visited the much-vaunted Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands.  The grandiose plain of developing wilderness was accessible to humanity only at its edge, through a very ordinary set of paths and interpretation panels and viewing hides, relegating people to spectators on the dramatic tableau of herds of feral beasts, from behind a fence.  There was no scope for people to engage with that landscape, to be human amongst it – it was devoid of culture, and spoke only of the culture of titanic struggles between subtly different ecological ideas on how to let nature be natural.

Apply the landscape approach to the minds of conservationists, and we are forced to see that conservation lives amongst a sea of human concerns, perspectives and interests.  And in practice, if you mix ecologists and conservationists with artists, outdoor educators, farmers, historians, fishermen, poets, foresters, health workers and psychologists, what you get from the melee has the chance of enriching everyone.  And the result is something to which most people, whatever their background and technical knowledge, can respond.

Owning the personal

There has been a good deal of introspection in the pages of ECOS in recent issues.  Some might see it as self-indulgent, and sometimes it is.  But what comes across is a sense of searching -–sometimes awkward, sometimes brazen, but always looking for something.

Why do we pursue the ideals and practical actions of conservation?  For ourselves, that’s why.  We may project our idea of what matters onto other people, often with justification, but our basic motivation is essential personal.

Nature offers us a map of our own psyche.  Ted Hughes knew that:

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near

Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow, 

A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

What is intense here?  The fox?  The observer?  The metaphor?  Or the flow between the three?  Human nature feeds off wild nature, and sees in its rhythm the impetus for creating art.  Out of the darkness comes the fox.  Out of the darkness comes the verse.  Yet the poet and the fox are as distant and disinterested as asteroids in cold space.

In the recently published collection of his last writings, Notes From Walnut Tree Farm³, Roger Deakin had the courage to ponder his own motivations, alongside his beautiful pen pictures of nature around him:

The day a policeman came to the door and told me my father had died might actually have been the moment that made me into a conservationist. I had lost such a big part of my life that I needed to compensate by holding on tightly to everything else. This may be the source of my passion for conservation. Does this matter? Is it too personal a base? Too emotional a base? Not philosophical enough? Is it even the wrong reason?

Here we see the fragility of the masterly Deakin: a writer whose work was marked by a self-assured knowing-ness about the natural world, shaken into self-doubt by the notion that his motivations towards nature might have such a very human origin.

Deakin’s ruminations about the loss of his father chimes deeply for me.  I recognised, recently and belatedly, that having lost my own father at an early age, and with a mother who gave me a natural empathy for plants and soil, I effectively imprinted on the nature around me to find the male role model I unconsciously lacked.  I talked to nature, and the communication which came back was that of a father figure, giving advice, telling me off, reflecting my conscience.  My relationship with nature is not reverential, but one of a son, variously at war with, in awe of, resenting, and just enjoying the company of, his father.

That is an intensely personal thing – but I express it not out of a self-indulgent desire to examine my navel in print,  but because I don’t think I’m unusual.  Most people have personal motivations for a love of nature – linked to parental encouragement, childhood memories of the outdoors, the solace of nature as an escape from personal difficulties in adolescence, a turning to nature out of thin-skinned reaction against humanity.  None of those motivations are illegitimate, yet equally, none of them would sit too well alongside the fight-the-good-fight or jolly-hockeysticks or turgid utilitarian language used by conservation bodies to engage with the public.

Nature enables us to understand ourselves.  It gives us space to be ourselves.  Watch a group of children, set loose in a wood, free of adult tendencies to rationalise or explain or interpret.  They just occupy the space.  Their personalities expand to fill the niches and nooks and crannies, to root about in the leaf mould, hang in space from a branch, charge through the undergrowth.  The woodland gives them context, incentive, boundaries, mystery, magic.

And if we experience that magic consciously enough to carry that feeling through to adulthood, then we want that wood to be there once more, for our children, and for our own reference and renewal.

And so…

Conservationists are afraid of being sidelined by the climate change agenda in the environmental hit parade (although as ECOS has been hinting, maybe too many of us look uncritically at the science and the implications of climate change).  If that happens, it will be because conservation has failed to be human enough.  Not human in a cuddly, webcam-on-a-nest Kate Humble type of way, but human in just recognising the simple, individual, consciousness-to-consciousness place of nature in the human condition.

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Such poetic musings may seem a long way from hard-nosed battles over American tycoons turning wild Scottish dunes into gold courses, or testosterone-fuelled drives for vast barrages across dynamic sea channels.  But beneath the veneer of policy and cash, all people feel the sun on their faces, hear the wind in the trees, and smell the sharp hot stink of fox.

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

References

1.         All stanzas from ‘The Thought Fox’ by Ted Hughes

2.         W M Adams (2003) Future Nature, Earthscan Publications for BANC

3.         Roger Deakin (2008) Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, Hamish Hamilton