Jointly authored with Simon Brenman – for publication in ECOS Winter 2013

On Saturday 2^nd November 2013, the Guardian’s editorial began thus:  “We need to talk about farming. There’s a lot to talk about. There’s the brilliant green of close-cropped grassland and the tidy hedges of tourist brochure England. And there is the environmental impact of so much human intervention on a landscape. There are the golden grain plains of the east and the value of those regular hectares of weed-free, lifeless barley and the hundreds of cattle it will one day feed. And there’s the cost of finding horse in your burger again. And over the grey Cumbrian fells hovers the question: might the barren landscape be more ecologically diverse with more scrub and fewer sheep?”

This exposition, on a subject which doesn’t normally get a lot of attention from the metropolitan media, was sparked by the launch of a very significant consultation by Defra on the implementation of CAP reform in England.  Much attention in this consultation has been on whether the Secretary of State should allocate the maximum 15% of the £2 billion in CAP spending to Pillar 2 rural development, paving the way for agri-environment spending, in turn, to be secured.  There are signs that the full 15% may indeed be earmarked in this way.  However, the so-called ‘greening’ measures which could be attached to the remaining 85% spending on direct payments under Pillar 1, look set to be minimal and unambitious, a huge missed opportunity driven by a governmental focus on bureaucratic efficiency rather than a real interest in public value for public money.

If the Pillar 2 allocation battle is won, schemes like Higher Level Stewardship in the new CAP may end up with a budget allocation similar to what they have had to date, which will be good news as far as it goes.  But the real war, we would suggest, is not going to be won that way.  For all the very great importance those schemes carry, they put wildlife and environment into a conveniently separate box.  For those who regard environmental payments as a mere distraction from the real game of maximising agricultural outputs, it is the neatest way of dealing with the issue – a targeted, voluntary, self-contained set of schemes which bracket conservation into a corner.

Much energy has been spent in campaigning for the agri-environment provisions we have enjoyed hitherto, and in delivering them on the ground, and all that effort deserves fulsome praise.  Schemes like Higher Level Stewardship in England not only deliver a large proportion of the conservation-focused habitat management outside statutory sites, but they provide a bridge between farmers and conservationists.  Bodies like Wildlife Trusts have brokered those schemes for farmers and have provided a positive service to them in the process, countering the impression of farmer-bashing which is the easy caricature to lay at conservation’s door.  Those schemes have, meanwhile, provided a lifeline of economic support, quite apart from their environmental outcomes, for farms operating at the edge of business viability.

But what about the wider landscape?  By playing this game, have conservationists – unwittingly – fallen into the trap of encouraging a divergence between nature and food?

A diverging agenda

For the last half-century nature conservation policy has tended to separate wildlife conservation from food production.  Its focus on special sites and the margins of conventionally farmed land has been a necessary rearguard action to protect the best remaining habitats before they are lost.  But while conservationists acknowledge that most valued habitats need to be ‘farmed’ in some sense, provided the legislation and agri-environment programmes enable that management, they have not seemed too concerned about what happens to the rest of the farmed countryside.  The result is an increasingly stark partition between the majority of farmed land, and the areas ‘reserved’ for different treatment under environmental schemes.

The organic movement promotes farming practices that are sustainable and holistic but it has had to establish a premium market to make these practices affordable. This in turn has created a black and white divergence between those farms prepared to certify themselves as fully organic, and the rest – with the unintended consequence that many sympathetic farmers have been alienated because they don’t quite make the grade.

A huge new opportunity to sell western style meat- and dairy-rich diets to developing global markets and talk of ‘sustainable intensification’, risks exacerbating these divisions further, as the American agri-business lobby seductively tries to suggest that we must farm the good land more intensively, in order to preserve the wild places.

And finally there is a potential risk that the rhetoric of the nature conservation lobby itself, in advocating re-wilding and large-scale habitat restoration (for example in the recent debate over farming in the uplands spurred by George Monbiot’s book Feral), could play into the hands of this separatist agenda, creating an unintended Faustian pact.

Does any of this matter?  Is the way we farm the wider countryside something conservationists should care about, or can we continue to just fight for the ‘good bits’, and press for these to be expanded and more joined up, at least in some areas? 

We think it does matter.  We think the biggest factor affecting the state of nature in this country is the way we farm the land – all of the land – and the way we farm is currently not working well for society as a whole, not just for wildlife.  The trajectory of the current CAP reform proposals will not change the balance substantially, and so this is a critical moment to be asking some fundamental questions.

The crisis in agriculture

We believe that we have a crisis in agriculture – in the whole system from field to plate.  We challenge the convention that industrial efficiency and a free market should drive farming policy. While conventional measures of agricultural productivity may seem favourable, the current paradigm is bad for biodiversity, and bad for just about everything else – bad at preventing flooding, bad at producing good quality water, bad in inducing a vulnerability to plant disease, bad for livestock health, bad in terms of carbon emissions, often bad in terms of food quality, often bad for the quality of life for many farmers and their families, bad at promoting fair access to food, and bad at improving public health.

Agricultural policy in Britain has been focused on producing more food, more cheaply, but while doing so it has presided over a continuing dissolution of wildlife habitats and species, a massive loss of rural employment (with associated knock on effects on rural society), the break up of family farms, the dilution of mixed patterns of livestock and cropping towards monocultures, increasing problems with nutrient enrichment in our drinking water, a loss of public trust, and twin crises in diet-related public health and growing food poverty.

The effects of the current farming system on wildlife are clear, from the findings of the recent State of Nature report.  Not all the woes of wildlife can be laid at the door of agriculture, but as the major determinant of land use in this country, it is the main factor.

Why has agriculture reached this point?  Why does it no longer serve the common good? 

What we have seen in farming over recent decades is an over-simplification of systems, in the name of production efficiency (an industrial term), which strips out complexity and loses sight of the human scale.  Enlargement of scale, simplification of pattern & genetics, rationalisation of timing, and industrialisation of process, have been pursued allegedly to improve yields, but in truth leading to an ever greater lack of time for farmers and farm workers, a loss of good husbandry skills, a restriction in financial flexibility, and a dearth of social contact.  In addition to simplification and scale, the need to maximise yields has driven huge changes in the timings and types of cultivations, and the extended use of agrochemicals.

This relentless over-simplification weakens the resilience of our agricultural landscapes, which require diversity in order to absorb and contain adverse effects of pests, diseases and climatic stress.  In nature by contrast, large systems are generally diverse and complex. 

In human terms, over-simplified and over-scale systems tend to become undemocratic and inhuman, with few participants feeling any satisfying degree of self-determination.  Working class experience since the beginning of the industrial revolution has borne this out.  As self-determination declines, care and attention to quality tend to decline also.  The loss of vitality which follows is a negative feature even in the most organically barren, tightly controlled factory environment.  In the open, living landscape it is doubly detrimental.

Though it may seem easy to label this as farmer bashing, it is not.  Many farmers are suffering at the hands of this system as much as the land itself, working too hard for too little, suffering depression, losing social contact and a sense of pride, feeding monsters they have no energy to tackle, with no time to challenge or question the pressures being put on them. 

This is a criticism of agricultural policy.  Policy that serves agri-business rather than agri-culture.  Policy that is promoted by lobbyists for the chemical, seed and feed industries, the processors and the supermarkets.  Policy that should be challenged (rather than championed) by the NFU, which has consistently failed to speak for the smaller or more progressive farmer, and is too closely allied to those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo

The crisis with food

Despite the apparent cornucopia of foods in our supermarkets, the quality of average diets in Britain has declined, with more of us eating more processed foods and less fresh food, and losing any sense of what is seasonal, and where food actually comes from.  Meanwhile our appetite for meat is fed by devoting an ever-increasing proportion of our arable land to the growing of feed for livestock – a hugely inefficient use of space, fertility, water and energy.

While food banks proliferate and diet-related obesity spirals, we throw away huge quantities of food.  Tesco has recently reported that it threw away 30,000 tonnes of bagged salad, bread, fruit and other foodstuffs in just the first six months of 2013.  Taking food producers, retailers and consumers together, about one third of all the food we produce in the UK is either not harvested, rejected before sale, or binned once it reaches our homes.  For us to suggest, as a nation, that we should try and crank up the intensity of primary production from the land, with all the consequences of doing so, without first dealing properly with this extraordinary profligacy, is shameful.

Sustainable intensification

Some believe in the concept of sustainable intensification (a land & livestock management model in which agricultural productivity increases whilst use of harmful inputs reduces).  The phrase is being used increasingly as a mantra for a somewhat vague notion of ever-greater outputs without all the disbenefits of the current approach, achieved via unspecified technological fixes.

Others see it as simply an oxymoron, regarding any further increase in the amount of food that is wringed out of our farmed landscape as being anathema to any serious notion of sustainability.

In truth, production can be ‘intensified’ in some situations, in some senses.  There is a case for genuine sustainable intensification in developing countries, where the intensification needed is about intensified skills, knowledge, husbandry, genetic resources, community involvement, labour, storage facilities and complexity.

And in those areas of farmland in the UK which have been simplified into grass or grain factories, ‘intensifying’ those landscapes by ‘complicating’ them with more crops, rotations, mixes and methods, together with workers, volunteers, added-value businesses and messy edges, would be a good thing – as they could become more intensely alive and more sustainable.

Building a solution

Addressing this massive set of issues demands a holistic vision, and an end to narrow perspectives.  It demands the courage not to be put off by the fear that questioning the juggernaut of agri-business is a sign of naivety in the face of a looming crisis of food security.  It demands a dialogue between those who grow things, and those who manage habitats; between conservationists and soil scientists; between environmentalists, food campaigners and public health experts.  It demands the preparedness to stop and listen to the ‘quiet few’ amongst the farming community who already know full well how to integrate nature and food.  Most of all it demands responsible and far-sighted leadership – the kind of leadership that insists that we pay the real and full costs for the necessities in life.

First of all we need to acknowledge that we have a problem, and we have to acknowledge that current problems are not going to be solved by technological advancements alone.  As part of that acceptance process, conservationists have to acknowledge that a continuing separation between mainstream farming and mainstream nature conservation is exacerbating the problem.  To move forward successfully we have to start thinking about agriculture as a means by which we can achieve multiple benefits for society rather than a singularly focussed production process.

In addressing the need for integration in terms of nature and agriculture, we need to acknowledge the web of issues surrounding farming, wildlife and wider society which have to be considered holistically:  the proportion of food being wasted, the proportion of crops used to feed livestock to feed demand for cheap meat, and the balance in public diets between processed and fresh foods.  Conservationists need to recognise – and then help others to recognise – that campaigning for a move towards fresh, unprocessed, seasonal food, with less emphasis on meat and dairy, is a conservation issue, not just a public health one.

Thirdly we need to understand the components of ‘good’ agriculture.  An integrated agricultural land use would conserve soil biology and structure, building and securing organic matter rather than depleting it.  It would encourage farming systems that are complex and diverse, spatially, genetically and temporally (mixed cropping patterns and enterprises, rotations, etc).  It would allow pollinators to benefit from diverse nectar sources, while checking pathogens and pests by limiting the amount of any one host or food plant.  It would encourage producers to embrace diversity in their seed and breed selection, and to share seed locally to fit genotypes to localities.  It would promote a proliferation of people and businesses on the land – a variety of scales and types of business, including specialists and generalists, organic and non-organic, producing both commodities and added value products.  It would create less leaky economic, nutrient and energy cycles, conserving fertility and reducing reliance on fossil fuels, in turn reducing costs and emissions.  It would embrace the good sense offered to us by permaculture and the organic movement, without adopting the all-excluding dogmas of those creeds.

Fourthly we need to recognise and encourage ‘good’ when we see it.  This means creating an environment where good practice and innovation are noticed and rewarded.  We need to notice those quiet, committed farmers who are unusual only in that they do not accept the status quo, and have the personal and professional ingredients to farm at a human yet effective scale, caring for the land and also yielding a good, but sustainable harvest.

Conservationists need to expand their consciousness of what is really good for biodiversity.  We need to look for the actual and potential diversity in swards where more forbs and weedy species are encouraged, in arable fields where cropping patterns and crop choices complement the needs of pollinators, beneficial insects and birds, and in soils where home-grown organic matter is seen as a precious resource, with the effervescence of soil biodiversity it carries.  None of this should or need be at the expense of semi-natural habitat, but is an inescapable partner to it.

This argument draws attention to a cultural blind spot which has affected some parts of British conservation for decades – the lack of acknowledgement of the soil as a conservation issue. Yes, nature conservationists bemoan soil that gets washed off the fields into the rivers, for the effects it has downstream.  And yes, we recognise that the degradation and erosion of soil is a bad thing.  But we’ve tended perhaps to see soil conservation as the concern only of those whose business is growing things.  Actually, the abundance and trophic complexity of biodiversity in the soil is a massive iceberg beneath the surface, with direct links between above and below-ground wildlife.  We tend to concern ourselves only with the biodiversity we can see.

The conventional farming lobby’s response to this type of argument is to dismiss it for failing to offer a way for society to produce the food it needs, and meet the growing global demand for food.  And it is true that an integrated, genuinely sustainable farming system will not produce ever more food.  We can only rebalance our approach to agriculture if we address the question of what we want from our countryside, what we eat, how much we need, and how we avoid wasting or destroying what the land gives us.  But we must not succumb to the panic-inducing cry that future food security demands that we abuse the land even more.

Wild Things and Artificial Things

I have some misgivings about Project Wild Thing in some (rather effete) respects, but it is powerful, is delivering its message in a novel way, and we need more of its kind.  There has been some complaining from some quarters about the allegedly disrespectful treatment of a frog in the ad for the film, which is shown being licked by a child.  The allegation is that this treatment does not offer an appropriate role model to other children – the adults making the film should offer a more respectful example.

An adult should indeed model respect for nature in the process of introducing children to it.  But respect grows slowly in children.  They are not held back by such cerebral concepts at first – they have an instinctive love, but only stubby fingers to express it.  Respect is a product of practice – holding, feeling, hurting, regretting, learning, hurting again, learning again, working foolishly and working well, and then finally understanding what it was we unconsciously loved in the first place.

Meanwhile, the RSPB offer a little film on their website which describes the making of their current TV advert for their ‘Giving Nature a Home’ campaign – http://www.rspb.org.uk/film/69697956.aspx.  I find this little documentary almost unspeakably depressing.  Yes, I know all the arguments about reach and the power of TV, and the need to have control in the props you use when doing high-quality ad-style filming.  But there is something almost malign about this for me.  The falseness, the crowd of marketeers, the cool metropolitan attitude, the suave corporate assurance of RSPB execs, the (unintended) cynicism towards the public, the notion that ‘the only’ way to reach the masses out there is through television.  Some will, I’m sure, applaud the RSPB for taking a grown up attitude to marketing their message in the same way as the rest of the Powerful do, but I think it stinks of a Faustian bargain.  A talking head in the film says “we want the public to fall in love with hedgehogs, ladybirds and the RSPB”.  Well, forgive me for saying so, but those three things are NOT on a level, and the mistake of the big NGOs is to fall into the smug belief that they are.  I hope people are inspired by the ad – of course I do – but I hope they respond by going out in their garden and connecting with the bugs and birds there – NOT by joining the RSPB.

(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

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