(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.