(first published in ECOS, September 2013)

I recently laid out all my copies of ECOS on the floor in my living room, chronologically, as a prompt to writing this piece, but also as a yardstick for the period of my life they cover. As though, unlike TS Eliot, I had measured out my life with ECOS issues instead of coffee spoons.

There was a curious nostalgic waft in the air, not to mention a whiff of stale paper, as I thumbed the early issues. My set only begins in 1990, ten years into the journal’s life, when I was first exposed to ECOS and to BANC when doing the Conservation masters course at UCL. And there, in a late 1990 issue, is an article made up of short pieces written by my cohort of students, including me. In that issue John Barkham, who played a gingering role in the Wildlife Trusts and beyond, coordinated an extended article.  He asked elder statesmen of conservation at the time like Richard Fitter, Tim Sands, Ted Smith and Norman Moore, together with some of the leaders of new thinking like Allison Millward, to offer their outlook for the future, and he had also turned to us young goggle-eyed new recruits for our own breathless statements about the future we stood poised to influence. 

Coming across your former self, nearly a quarter of a century ago, is unnerving. Partly in this case for the uncomfortable earnestness and faux-worldliness with which I (and my fellow students) wrote, and partly for the surprise of seeing that the line I was peddling all those years ago was not so very different from how I feel today. Does that show consistency, or a failure to progress? The nine students who contributed to the piece spoke of the need to make conservation a more mainstream issue, the need to be more populist, to become less reactive and more visionary, to help restore people’s connection to nature, to spread wildlife beyond nature reserves – in fact, prefiguring many of the themes which have dominated the pages of ECOS ever since. But there was also a sense of fearfulness, of almost solemn uncertainty, and impatience for change. 

The writing coincided with the emerging plans to break up the Nature Conservancy Council (in the first of a drearily frequent series of re-organisations which have plagued the statutory sector ever since), which added to the beleaguered mood. And we were in the midst of a generational shift, with the elder statesmen still looking at conservation through the lens of the post-war science-based governmental optimism led by Max Nicholson, and the groundswell of tweedy county trust pioneers in the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves (SPNR), binoculars swinging as they marched between endless committees. The younger set meanwhile betrayed a less certain, more impatient, more wary view, lacking the comforting sense of collective pioneering enjoyed by that previous generation, and perhaps more conscious of the wider society into which conservation needed to move.

Despite the uncertainties on display in that issue, what mattered most was that they were brought together at all. The students on the UCL conservation course who had preceded us in the early 1980s delivered much more than my mouthy but rather trouser-less take on conservation and its prospects. They had realised that the conservation sector needed an independent forum for debate and new thinking. They could see that something was needed to fill the middle part of the spectrum between academic and popular writing on conservation.  And they realised that conservation needed to make better connections into political, economic and social thinking. They set up BANC, which led to the creation of ECOS. That was, I believe, an important act of collective leadership – leadership from the troops as opposed to the generals – and one which gives us, today, a valuable precedent.

From the mid 1980s through into the first decade of the twenty first century, ECOS held a pivotal position in the evolution of thinking on urban conservation, environmental ethics, nature and culture, landscape-scale conservation, environmental education and more. Before the mass availability of the internet and social media, printed journals were a key vehicle for the exchange of views and promulgation of ideas, but by the end of the first decade of the twenty first century a cacophony of other media had begun to dilute and confuse – as well as proliferate – the channels for such debate. 

This is not to say that ECOS has ceased to be influential now – though it is hard for BANC to gauge how wide that influence travels. But it does not enjoy the profile it had in 1990, and certainly if membership is any gauge of influence, it is in danger of losing its voice completely. It may come as a surprise dear reader, but BANC currently has less than 500 members – including individual members and corporate subscriptions from environmental bodies, libraries and academic institutions. Please don’t let that put you off – especially as the readership includes some influential big hitters as well as younger minds – but it might throw into usefully sharp relief the question of how BANC, and ECOS, should develop over the coming years.

The curious thing is that although ECOS’s influence may have declined – and BANC’s profile and penetration into the conservation sector most certainly has done – there do not seem to be many obvious alternative vehicles for free expression occupying the niche that BANC first carved out. It could be that there are indeed such forums for debate, but people like me are just too out of touch to know what and where they are. Some on-line forums like VINE (Values in Nature and Environment) offer a spirited place for discussion of a wide range of subjects and views, though the circle of participants seems fairly limited, despite the doubtless much wider passive audience. 

The corporate membership magazines don’t provide for critical debate. Nor the popular magazines. Radio programmes like Costing the Earth and Home Planet offer helpful sideways looks at some issues, but they are aimed at a general public audience and are necessarily abbreviated. TV is rather too obsessed by the search for ever more amazing natural images and associated grandiosity – “soulless technically obsessed imperiousness” in Richard Mabey’s lusciously vindictive phrase – to give equal time to critical thought and innovative ideas about human interaction with that natural world.

So, where does a fresh-faced 2013 student of conservation turn for unbiased commentary and inspiration on the conservation scene?  And where is the intellectual leadership to be found in our movement?  The trend-setters and commentators are mostly outside the conservation sector, looking in: Richard Mabey and Robert MacFarlane, Simon Barnes and Jay Griffiths, George Monbiot and John Vidal.  Whether approaching the natural world as inspiration for artful prose, or using their rhetorical capacity to draw campaigning attention to the issues, these writers illuminate and motivate in a way which no conservation NGO can really emulate. These are not simply scientists who happen to be able to write, or writers who know a bit about ecology. They are more than that: they express wholeness somehow, wholeness of human experience in nature. They may sometimes be dismissed (as, for example, in the recent controversial piece by Steven Poole in the Guardian) for taking a comfortable, middle class, nostalgic attitude to nature, and sometimes their words betray a lack of direct experience of trying to ‘do’ conservation on the ground. But nevertheless their impact is great, at least amongst the chattering classes.

And then there are the slightly less high-profile, but still influential bloggers and commentators who hail from careers in conservation and the environment – Mark Avery, Miles King, Tony Juniper, Gordon McGlone – and who, ironically, have gained much of their influence since they left the coalface.

Commentators are always on the outside, ahead of the debate or reflecting on it, and the mainstream of any popular movement tends always to appear flat-footed and behind the curve when challenged by these free-thinking (but generally free of responsibility) individuals. But once they have served their frequent function of seeding ideas, sparking controversy, or causing upset, what happens next?  Who picks up the thread and begins to weave – not from the rhetorical outside, but on the inside? Yes, there are some practitioners well and truly immersed in the business of conservation who make a point of making space to encourage debate – Martin Harper of the RSPB being a good example – but they are few and far between. About the only body which is outside of the major NGOs, but a collective space to which they all subscribe, is Wildlife & Countryside Link, but Link’s role is to enable collaboration between bodies on key campaigning issues, rather than create free space for debate within the sector.

We seem in Britain to lack many examples of people who combine a career in being instrumental and engaged with conservation on the ground, with an ability to really express their knowledge as a catalyst for others to develop their own thinking. And it seems difficult for organisations themselves to act as fearless crucibles for forging new ideas, free of the controlling effect of corporate position statements and marketing messages. Corporate NGOs certainly have their think-tanks, albeit perhaps too dominated by senior managers and too remote from the rank and file foot soldiers of the conservation profession, let alone the apprentices to that profession. And those think-tanks are perhaps sometimes too weighted towards the marketeers’ needs – for profile, impact, members, revenue.

For example, much senior policy brainstorming must have preceded the creation of the State of Nature report by the RSPB, Wildlife Trusts and the partnership of conservation NGOs which joined them in achieving an impressive media impact earlier this year.  But that discussion will have begun in one of those bodies, and spread to encompass a corporate partnership – rather than being intellectually led, or at least joined, by an external, non-aligned debate across the profession.  And the debate amongst practitioners which the report sparked off has had nowhere to go, and little role to play.  It seemed that the report, impressive as it was in some respects, had built a fine set of steps, marched everyone up them with an earnest fanfare, and then left everyone to just fall off the top, for want of anywhere to take the process next.  It raised the stakes, but with a limited gameplan. Had there been a more collective approach to the leadership of that process, the movement as a whole could have been galvanised to harness and feed the public attention. The RSPB, as perhaps the originators of the whole strategy, were of course straight out of the blocks with their ‘Help give nature a home’ campaign. But apart from putting some big smiles on the faces of marketing staff in Sandy, where has the whole process got us?

It is true that, despite the lack of obvious channels, ideas from the outside do sometimes find their way infectiously into the delivery plans of major organisations. The gradual shift of emphasis within the National Trust for example, towards promoting the importance of childhood experience in nature is a case in point, which can probably be traced, at least in part, back to the explorations of that subject in the pages of ECOS.  But this process seems to happen in spite of, rather than because of, any conscious effort to enable that evolution to happen.

Whatever the truth, it is clear that conservation policy is not being set through any explicitly, inclusively democratic debate within the wider movement, but through a fairly closed-doors process of direction-setting, illuminated now and again by bursts of rhetorical fire from the journalists and nature writers outside. But ours is a movement which needs a constant flow of ideas, inspiration, self-critical challenge, and perhaps above all, a means to honour the wellspring of personal passion for nature which brings us into conservation in the first place.  Whatever we do as professional conservationists, we need to constantly refer back to the soul of our movement, which is to be found in our own, individual private soulful thoughts.

ECOS has been a pioneer in melding the fiery passion, the airy joy, the intellectual earthiness and the liquid compassion which suffuse the movement for the conservation of wild nature. It has done that free of the weight of logos and branding, but buffeted by a lack of financial stability and inconsistent governance. Yet to continue to be a catalyst for collective leadership, it has to retain that risky, non-aligned, slightly anarchic freedom.

The current BANC Council members are wrestling with how to re-energise and re-position BANC and ECOS so that we can once again help conservation to enlighten itself and gird itself for the next period in the history of our movement.  As a reader of ECOS right now, you are part of that process. If you want to help further, we would value your support.

Sometimes it feels like the concept of landscape-scale working is more amazing to conservationists than it is to ordinary folk. “Wow, wildlife needn’t just be concentrated on little islands of nature reserves and wildlife sites, but actually could spreadout across the whole landscape, if it was, like, all connected up!” The idea seemslike a revelation to those of us who have lived with maps of coloured-in wildlife site blobs on insipid white backgrounds for so many years.  But most people perhaps see things from the other way round: they are aware of landscape – the vista of fields, trees, houses and roads around them – before they are aware of wildlife habitats, as such.  They may not appreciate how fragmented that landscape is, in ecological terms, for a bee or a dormouse or a nesting bird, but it is a whole with holes, rather than a collection of blobs waiting to be joined up.

Even though the science of landscape ecology has a fairly long history, back at least to MacArthur and Wilson’s work on island biogeography in the mid 1960s, its adoption in the mainstream conservation lexicon only really dates back a decade or so, and it still has the appealing glow of a new idea about it.  Conservationists now revel in the grandiloquent notion of Landscape.  We relish the wide-open vistas the word conjures up.  We talk of landscape in the context of enlarged scale, increased connection, and dynamic flow – as compared to the limited scale, connection and flow which was framed by our restricted reserves and wildlife sites of old.  But there’s more to extending one’s perspective to a landscape scale, than simply the enticing prospect of making things bigger.  Beyond the shrubby boundaries of wildlife sitesthere are a lot of other things happening ‘out there’.  Not just dull green fields, hedges, watercourses, copses, brownfield sites, waiting to be coloured in with bright new habitat; but also parks, streets, gardens, yards, factories, schools, paths, businesses, communities, politics, factions, interests, homes, families and lives.

Others use the word ‘landscape’ in a different way, thereby risking a slight confusion of intent.  Now, we have concurrent, subtly different uses of the word side by side – the aesthetic landscape, as something to describe, characterise and protect, and the ecological landscape, as a space in which natural processes are played out.  Common sense might suggest the two would benefit from coming together, but in practice each has developed its own arsenal of terminology and jealously guarded jargon, and the relationship can be awkward, even when brought together under the roof of a single agency.  In that respect, the European Landscape Convention’s definition of landscape helpfully bridges the divide: “An area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”.

Conservationists are fond of reminding everyone else that ecological processes underpin all of human society, but we’re not so good at acknowledging that wider society itself.  A movement which began life trying to preserve wild places from the ravages of humanity set its focus on those wild places, and chose to see the rest of society as ‘other’.  Though there was every good reason for doing so, this perspective set the tone for how we would relate to the rest of society for decades to come.  It affected our language, our preferences and our comfort zone.  It meant we felt we had to communicatewith the rest of society either with an earnest, objective, scientific rigour, or with a slightly patronizing dumbed-down language of jolly wows and oohs and ahhs about how fab nature is, or with a regulatory officiousness about what is okay and what isn’t okay for the owners of pieces of landscape to do with their own property.

Talk of ‘landscape scale’ could be evidence of the gradual re-emergence of conservation from the shell of self-righteous indignation we’ve hidden in for the last fifty years: a recognition that the things we cherish are connected to everything else, and that the connection can be positive as well as negative.  But if that’s the case, it’s only a start.  Though the efforts to understand the ecology of whole landscapes are highly commendable, there remains something curiously dry, effete and unreal about connectivity maps, permeability quotients and minimum dynamic areas.  They are at one and the same time, both holistic and reductionist.  They look at the whole, but they only seem to see part of it.

Like eyes becoming accustomed to the dark, we might expect gradually to begin to see more detail, more features, more of the true landscape filled in.  In essence we’re trying to grope towards holism – recognising connections, interdependencies between habitats and wider society.  But that holism can’t – by definition – stop with the things we feel comfortable about.  If it means anything it has to grasp that landscapes are interconnected webs in more senses than just the ecological ones. 

Landscapes are products of history, reflections of economies, and accommodators of society, as well as collections of habitats and ecosystem processes.  And they are viewed by 21^st century people through a lens coloured and shaped by a messy legacy of Enlightenment and Romanticism baggage – warring notions from Apollo and Dionysus.

Landscape-scale conservation does not – cannot – mean doing the same things we’ve always tried to do, simply on a larger canvas.  It means engaging with the messy reality of wider society, putting nature in context, making it more relevant and meaningful for different people, and learning to define what is ‘good enough’, rather than always wanting more and always being disappointed.

This is not to suggest that conservation bodies should somehow try and encompass the whole shebang in their work.  They have a niche to fulfil in a wider ecosystem, alongside business advisors, economists, engineers, planners, agronomists, foresters, landscape architects, hydrologists, teachers, community workers, public health practitioners and many others.  But fulfilling one’s niche effectively requires an understanding of the context in which you fit.  Each and every one of those practitioners should understand the wider landscape setting in which they work – the benefits their work can offer to the whole, and the constraints and responsibilities they are bound by.  Conservation, as a progressive, visionary discipline, should be able to set the example for that.

What is also curious about landscape scale conservation thinking in England (in contrast, at least, to Scotland) is that it seems notably anaemic in having any sense of political (small p) context.  In advocating an ecologically more connected landscape, landscape-scale initiatives seem to have little to say about land and our relationship to it.  To achieve a truly sustainable, habitat-rich, climate-proofed landscape would require a wholly different approach by society to its landscape.  It would affect our idea of place, of social justice as played out amongst those who work on, have access to, and benefit from the land.  Are the cherished wildlife-rich future-scapeswe describe in our glossy publications, places made by and for the people?  Or are the people just supposed to obediently appreciate it once we’ve created it?

‘More, bigger, better and joined’, with the exception of the ‘joined’ bit, sounds to me more like a supermarket advertisement than a visionary call for future conservation.  More, bigger areas of habitat, however lovely they might be, which continue to beeconomically irrelevant, legally constrained and socially detached would not – even if they were feasible – be much better, in the full sense, than the fragmented bits we have now. 

Landscape is a process, an experience, a journey – something which happens, rather than something that is.  It is something which can never be pinned down as a defined end-point or manifestation of a vision, but is a constantly shifting, slippery expression of interaction and multiple being, of human perception and expression amongst a living world.

Even if that is only partly true, measuring nature conservation’s success in terms of number of holdings visited, or land into agreement, or area surveyed, won’t cut the mustard for much longer.  Even defining progress in terms of increased populations of key wildlife species is to see only part of a true, desirable future.  What has really changed as a result of our work?  What is functioning better?  Is it economically sustainable?  Who is working better with whom, and is there greater social equity as a result?

Perhaps we don’t yet fully appreciate how deep the water is, now that we’ve dived into the concept of holistic, interconnected landscapes.

The State of Nature report and its associated media coverage were a tribute to a lot of hard work from a lot of people.  It’s a fine publication, powerfully delivered and expertly promoted.  It’s probably the single most powerful and focused attempt by the conservation sector to raise the alarm on the assault afflicting our wildlife. 

But for me, it was not only the catalogue of ‘horrendous facts’ it contained that made it an uncomfortable thing to read and experience.  I think it was also uncomfortable for what it said about the state of conservationists themselves.  The abiding sense which came over to me was one of collective, impotent despair – a sense of conservationists thumping the stack of evidence and saying “Look! We’ve been telling you this was happening for years!  Here’s the evidence, clear as day!  Why won’t you DO something!”

Certainly there’s plenty to feel despairing about, ecologically, politically, financially.  But given how bad everything is, it surely shows we’re getting it wrong in the way we try and make gains for nature, and encourage more effective actions from society – something has to change in us (as conservationists) as well as amongst everyone else ‘out there’.

I personally took issue with the overall negative tone of the report – however accurate and justified its facts, I simply don’t believe that throwing bad news at people really changes behaviour – not when there isn’t an easy, obvious scapegoat to blame.  In some walks of life, bad news does shock us into action.  Shocking news from the recent NHS reports about the state of care in our hospitals will have a big effect on health care management, because there is a clear(ish) line of responsibility, and despite the political mud slinging it is clear who needs to take action.  But the state of the natural world is such a complex picture, with so many interacting strands of cause and effect, that simply saying what’s wrong does not spark change by itself.  If anything, it causes people to just stop listening to the messenger.

When using shocking facts to make a point, sometimes black and white data, calmly delivered, can do the trick.  Other times, it needs something more raw and impassioned to make a difference.  One of the most resonant moments from the State of Nature launch was the speech by Iolo Williams in Cardiff (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnJQjtvngqA).  Why did his speech get noticed?  Because it was impassioned.  And we lack many instances when passion really shows.  Not the breathless enthusiastic ‘passion’ of TV presenters watching webcams, but angry, articulate, politically edgy passion that rages.  Iolo very effectively harnessed not just his rage, but the rhetorical power that flows from an appeal to conscience – a sense of loss, of despair, of shame, of regret.

When someone has the balls to say what they think in the way that Iolo did, it seems wrong to criticise him, but I think what he went on to say betrayed two common mistakes which beset many of us in conservation.  Where his speech came unstuck for me, was in when he chose to focus his bile on the “grey, fat salaried spineless bureaucrats” who, he claimed, had sold nature down the river.  I’m not saying he’s wrong – sadly he’s probably right.  But isolating blame like that is too easy, too convenient.  Grey bureaucrats are a manifestation of wider society, and none of us can claim to be free of responsibility in the web of cause and effect which underlies the state of nature.

The second failing of Iolo’s speech was that he made a fine rhetorical bang in talking about what is wrong, but offered a relative whimper in describing what the solutions should be.  He rightly criticised cosy self-serving bureaucracy, and “endless committees, meetings, action plans, empty words”, and he rightly called for more effective action that translates into tangible change in the countryside.  But what, exactly?  And the State of Nature report itself has virtually nothing to say about solutions, at all.

I believe that delivering the bad news about the state of nature in a way which makes a difference, demands the addition of three ingredients, alongside that basic indigestible cocktail of facts.  The first is passion – to summon up the blood, and show the anger we feel.  The second is honesty – to stiffen the sinews and tell it how it is, by pointing to the uncomfortable truth that the solution to nature’s woes lies not just with the faceless bureaucrat, but also with the face in the mirror – our own face, for we are all contributors to this sorry state.  And the third is hope – the prospect of a way forward, the knowledge that there are actions available to all of us, from the smallest personal act to the farthest reaching political strategies. 

 If that is so, how do we explain to people that their own life choices affect nature, in a way which will find willing ears?  How do we point the finger at all parts of the spectrum of human causes of wildlife degradation, in a way which is constructive rather than just condemning?  And how do we present solutions as clearly as we currently present the problems? 

(First published on BANC blog, September 2013