chris rose

Summary Of Blogs on Nature, Politics and Culture

Chris Rose October 2024

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Parts 1 and 2 of this blog series argued that real world political decisions show that in Westminster, politicians don’t really believe voters really care much about nature, so it can be treated as politically disposable, optional extra.

Consequently, the UK nature movement’s efforts to change government policies, such as the June 22 Restore Nature Now march, will be subject to heavy discounting, and often ignored.  Changing this requires politicians to encounter signs, signals, events and activities in everyday life, which convince them that nature really is valued as part of popular culture. This is not happening, yet.

Part 3 looks at how nature could be better embedded in popular culture in the UK, in seven sections.  Here’s a précis:

Section 1:  Introduction: A Campaign For Nature In Culture

The nature movement needs to think about and work to build and promote public nature culture, not just increase it’s memberships, funds or build better arguments. Unless prospective politicians experience this, they will not, cannot, change Westminster culture. The UK’s history changing culture of food, health and safety, inclusivity and protection of the built heritage, show it can be done.

The first and critical step is to increase and rebuild Nature Ability (aka Natural History Knowledge, Eco-Literacy).  The ability to recognize and put names to species of native plants and animals is the most basic ABC level.  A GCSE in Natural History is welcome but will not be enough, and studies show formal teaching has less effect on Nature Ability than social connections.

We need a national promotional campaign and programme for nature awareness, ability and understanding.  In 2012 the government spent £125m on adverts promoting the ‘Great British Countryside’ but to tourists, not UK citizens.

The great majority of UK children and adults have become more in favour of nature as a concept but unable to put a name to it, or tell if a place is rich or poor in nature, or if it is real or fake.  As a society it is as if we are increasingly in favour of literacy, while becoming increasingly unable to read.

Most people are probably better able to tell one wine or type of architecture from another, than identify plants or animals, or distinguish ancient woods from planted ones.  Most children cannot identify a Bluebell (their parents have not been tested).

‘Professional’ communicators in the BBC, Greenpeace, Department of Education, The Guardian and local newspapers, and outside the UK, even the UN and science publishers,  have shown themselves unable to tell wild from ornamental flowers, wild bees from honey bees, one common bird from another, or bees from wasps.    As a result, the Honey Bee became “The Wrong Poster Bee” in campaigns against pesticides, which led to a boom in Honey Bee (livestock, not at risk) keeping, which itself threatens endangered wild bees.

UK culture places greater importance on knowing about references to nature in literature, such as Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils, than being able to tell a real Wild Daffodil (the sort he saw), from a ‘fake’, an ornamental variety.  Editors and others would not tolerate such ignorance in covering art, sports or politics.  This nature ignorance undermines attempts to protect nature.

Section 2:   Missing The Garden Opportunity

An incidental demonstration of both the potential of nature ability and its present disconnect from political machinery, occurred in Spring this year, when people in the UK noticed a marked absence of insects, especially bees.

Mainstream NGOs and the media said very little about the UK’s 2024 ‘Silent Spring’ while they were focused on an impending General Election and policy.  A massive reduction in insects, especially bees and butterflies, was observed and discussed on social media by wildlife and nature gardeners (and evident even to visitors at the famous Knepp rewilding project) but it did not feature in either the policy asks of the Restore Nature Now march of 60,000 nature NGO followers  (22 June), or in or around the Election itself (July 4).

By the time organised ecological surveys intersected with the event, the opportunity to connect informed public concern (from people with a lot of very local nature knowledge) and a political opportunity, was lost.  If the nature movement is to make the most of citizen constituencies with real Nature Ability, it needs to become more agile.

Gardening is part of Popular Culture – things people do anyway. It’s a huge opportunity and on the upside, most gardeners (a much bigger group than even the most optimistic estimate of  NGO memberships) say they use their garden to feed, watch or encourage wildlife, 87% wanted to bring more wildlife to their gardens by feeding them or providing shelter, and 37% think wildlife is the best part about owning a garden, ‘rating it ahead of growing their own plants or vegetables’.

Yet the changes people make to their houses and gardens to help nature go unrewarded.  Each year £2.4bn is given to farmers to produce ‘public goods’ such as soil conservation, water management or more birdlife yet nothing goes to gardeners who do the same.  They should get a Council Tax rebate for garden and home nature features, such as Swift boxes, flower-rich lawns, green roofs and living places for insects.

Garden Centres and Supermarkets play a huge role in shaping the choice-architecture of UK gardening.  Yet much of what they sell damages nature.  Large NGOs such should start their own Garden Centres and encourage their members to use them, to leverage change in the sector.

Section 3:  Signalling Nature and Marking Moments

We live in a society estranged from nature.  Perhaps the lowest cost, simplest and quickest way to start to elevate the perception or salience of nature is to improve the visibility of what’s already there.  We put up Blue Plaques for notable people but most important nature goes un-signed, un-signalled.  We should, for instance, use existing Public Footpath signs to alert people to the locations of the many types of nature reserves and protected areas such as SSSIs, and include those on OS maps and apps.  We should also sign land with ecosystem functions  such as the US signing of water catchment creeks and forests (and in our case, peatlands).  And we should have a national system to recognize important moments in nature, such as a national Bluebell Day, week or fortnight.  The UK is the global HQ for Bluebells.

The BBC could bring back it’s historic live Nightingale Song Broadcasts, which from 1924 to the Second World War were hugely popular radio moments of truly popular culture.  Light Music programmes were interrupted to enable the country to share the moment and hear the Nightingales sing live.

Winter Starling murmurations around the Brighton Piers, Knot murmurations on the Wash and gatherings of Red Kites in Wales are examples of other other wildlife “spectaculars” which already exist as cultural touchpoints but deserve more recognition.  Night-time “dark sky” experiences including using radar, as is done in the US and Netherlands to reveal over-head movements of millions of migrating birds, could also provide an “expansion of nature experience” for the whole nation.

Section 4:  Nature Events in Popular Culture

Popular public activities and events which simply could not happen without nature say “nature matters to these people”, and so (unlike protests, marches, advocacy) are non-politically labelled opportunities for politicians and prospective politicians to see that “nature matters to these voters”.  There are already hundreds probably thousands in the UK but many need (careful) promotion and help.  Examples:

The Tenbury Mistletoe Fair in Shropshire is an example of promoting local identity (Tenbury sees itself as the Mistletoe Capital of the UK) and cultural reinvention (December 1^st is declared National Mistletoe Day) around a nature-based business (the annual Holly and Mistletoe Auction).

Volunteer-led Toad Crossings to help Toads across roads as they migrate back to their ancestral breeding ponds is an example of direct action to help wildlife which has become established as part of life and road-culture in hundreds of places around the UK.  At Oxton in Nottinghamshire, Margaret Cooper campaigned for an early spring road closure to protect toads in 1999, won the support of the Council, and her 25 years of running it was recognized with a commemorative plaque from the AA in 2024.

The Suffolk town of Harleston puts up flags to welcome Swifts back each May, as well as Swift nesting boxes and community activities about Swifts.

In the commuter Market Town of Petersfield in Hampshire, PeCAN, a group which mainly formed from Councillors and others who met through Extinction Rebellion, turned their attention to local nature and environmental action which now includes regular Eco-fairs, housing improvements, distribution of thousands of free fruit trees for gardens and native hedging plants, a community cafe and work to reduce pesticide use in the town and increase wildflowers in road verges.

In the ‘Golden Triangle’ villages of Gloucestershire, Dyfra works to bring back the native Wild Daffodils (ref Wordsworth) which made the area famous with Victorian and early C20th visitors who came by rail, and replace ornamental daffodils which threaten to eliminate the wild ones through hybridization.

In a non-place-based example, Buglife and the Kent Wildlife Trust enlist car and van drivers to run a national insect survey ‘Bugs Matter’ by counting the number of insects ‘splatted’ on their number plates.  This provides important nationwide data on the decline, and potentially any recovery, of our insects.  Tens of thousands of drivers have taken part since it was started in 2003 by the RSPB, as the ‘Splatomer’ campaign.

Since 2001 the Fairyland Trust has run magical-days out for families with young children, mixing with the entertainment, food, games, music and activities of traditional Country Fairs, with magical-make nature workshops such as Magic Wands, all to increase the Nature Ability of children (and parents).  Hundreds of thousands of people have attended these ‘Fairy Fairs’, and since 2010, a resurrection of the original nature based autumn Halloween celebrations, in The Real Halloween, which also promotes dressing up without use of any new plastic (shop bought costumes being largely plastic and mostly used only once). It’s aimed at a core audience of the ‘esteem driven’ and ‘aspirational’ mainstream, and the Trust now has a Wildflower Fortunes Caravan engaging young adults with wildflowers at festivals.

Section 5:  Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

As the wildlife gardeners of Twitter showed during the ‘Silent Spring’ of 2024 (Section 2), Natural History is alive and well in the UK, and with new audiences not just established Natural History Societies.   But the Nature Ability of these groups is the exception rather than the rule.

From the Celts and Anglo-Saxons, through 1066, Shakespeare’s time and into the C20th, nature knowledge was far commoner in the past and has left its traces in traditions, speech and practices we no longer consciously associate with ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ such as “touch wood” for luck. Modern psychological and cultural studies show this knowledge was acquired through the learning process known as ‘prediction error’, in which people notice anything new or different, such as the missing insects of 2024, and also how people learn to identify species with the help of relatives of friends with nature knowledge.

In the C19th Natural History became hugely popular in the newly industrialised UK  and seen as important as part of citizenship by local and national politicians.  It was taught in schools and universities but in the C20th its learning methods were seen as inferior by the newer sciences testing hypotheses and Natural History fell from favour.  Max Nicholson saw Natural History Societies as “utterly useless for the new age of conservation” compared to ecological science, when he engineered much of the modern nature NGO and government system from the 1950s-1970s.

In tackling the modern epidemic of nature-blindness with Nature Ability, and embedding nature in popular culture to engage citizens, Natural History has far superior potential to teaching ecology, being socially accessible in time and space, and with a culture allowing emotional engagement rather than professionalised detachment.

Section 6:  Organising Strategy and Ways And Means

This section makes three strategy suggestions, addresses what people need to know in terms of Nature Ability, and makes six suggestions for early political asks intended to prick the interest of politicians and align the nature movement to any campaign effort.

It suggests:

• Organising effort at the National Character Area level, larger than parishes, smaller than counties, and defined by nature and land-related cultural heritage
• Using the Cultural Dynamics Motivational Values system to engage all the main psychological groups in society, not over-focusing on the Pioneers who are already over-represented in the nature movement
• for PR, the NGOs and those they work with should act like a business group, as they would be taken more seriously by politicians. The nature NGOs should increase their soft power capabilities, as farming does. In this last respect, the nature movement should lay claim to being the social and political Stewards of Natural Capital.

To increase Nature ability, the first things people need to know are the basic ABC of species identification, focused on native wildlife where they live (in their National Character Area). Then understanding how they relate to each others, their habitats and landscapes. In literacy terms, perhaps the ABC is species, the sentences are habitats and the paragraphs are landscapes.

The six proposed political asks are:

[1] A government funded campaign to promote Nature Ability, including an above-the-line advertising campaign, and a multi-facetted social marketing campaign and a wide array of instrumental projects.

[2] Council Tax rebates for nature- and ecosystem-boosting features (biodiversity enhancing, flood reduction etc) of homes and gardens, and financial incentives for the same ‘public goods’ contribution made by agricultural land owners by farmers but for owners of other land, such as businesses and Councils. Non-agri Environment Schemes – ELMS 2.0.

[3] Recognition of Ecological Land as a category in statutory Local Plans, and its protection from development.

[4] Signing of National Character Areas and all nature reserves and higher level ELMS schemes and nature relevant features, indicating any sort of public access or visibility, (eg along roads, and Public Footpaths using existing signs) linked to the MAGIC system (eg a more user friendly app), including for example Ancient Trees.

[5] A system of official recognition for nationally and regionally important annual moments (a sorted of nature-centred equivalent to Bank Holidays or the Blue Plaque scheme), including a National Bluebell Day.

[6] Issue all voting age adults with a National Character Area natural identity certificate, citizenship profile or identity card (see p.5), and decide (via a Citizens Assembly?) ways it could be used with some ‘official’ recognition, beyond just inspiring questions in pub quizzes’.

Section 7:    Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

As there is no national promotional campaign for nature and no systematic effort to increase Nature Ability, Natural History Knowledge or Ecoliteracy, no, we are not doing this already.

Although many activities of nature NGOs and government bodies have some effect on signalling nature or increasing Nature Ability, even taken together it is plainly not persuading politicians to take nature sufficiently seriously, or tackle the national deficit in ability to recognize and understand nature.

The section uses the case of a fairly Business as Usual scheme, ‘Back from the Brink’, to make the case that routine NGO activity and government funding will not achieve such objectives because despite some rhetorical garnishing about community and public engagement, it is not what they are designed to deliver.

It concludes by suggesting that the nature movement takes inspiration from the establishment of the The Lottery back in 1994, by then Prime Minister John Major:

‘Experience of working in the Treasury, convinced him that the Treasury would never give ‘more than scraps’ of funding to the arts, and he wanted to ensure ‘a rebirth of cultural and sporting life in Britain’. The Heritage Lottery Fund could now be part of the answer to the nature ability deficit, and a political realisation that nature is important to voters is a pre-requisite to restoring nature in the UK’.

***

Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

*** 

Note:

The first post, ‘Focus On Culture Not Policy To Restore UK Nature’, from August 2024 is at https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/?p=3115 .  The set of seven sections of the second post run in sequence from https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/?p=3381

Links:

1 – Introduction: A Campaign For Nature In Culture

Culture and Nature – Section 1 – A Campaign For Nature In Culture

2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity

Culture and Nature – 2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity

3 – Signalling Nature and Marking Moments

Culture and Nature – 3 – Signalling Nature And Marking Moments

4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture

Culture and Nature – 4 – Nature Events In Popular Culture

5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

Culture and Nature – 5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means

Culture and Nature – 6 – Organising Strategy: Ways and Means

7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

Nature and Culture – 7 – Aren’t We Doing This Already?

PDF download links:

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Summary-Nature-Culture-and-Politics-blogs.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-1-Campaign-for-Nature-in-Culture-Introduction-.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-2-Missing-The-Garden-Opportunity.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-3-Signalling-And-Marking-Moments.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-4-Nature-Events-In-Popular-Culture.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-5-Why-Conservation-Should-Embrace-Natural-History.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-6-Organising-Strategy-and-Ways-and-Means.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-7-Afterword-Arent-we-doing-this-already.pdf

ends

A Campaign For Nature In Culture

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Chris Rose  10 October 2024

This is Part 3 of a series of posts on Politics and Nature (Parts 1 and 2 were published on 27 August 2024 as Focus On Culture Not Policy To Restore UK Nature).  Part 3 is in seven sections.  This is Section 1.

Subsequent sections (follow this post in order)

2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity

3 – Signalling and Marking Moments

4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture

5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means

7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

 Section 1 –  Introduction

The first part of this blog argued that the impact of UK environment NGOs on government policy has long been limited by a Westminster political culture which disbelieves its claims to represent significant public support.  It gave examples of how ‘for decades UK politicians of both main UK Parties have treated the environment and particularly nature, as a politically optional and ultimately disposable ‘priority’’.

It also argued that ‘with nature almost absent from social connections between voters and their political representatives’ government environmental policies ‘are only weakly accountable to public opinion’.

So long as this political conviction remains in place, mobilisations and marches for nature, lobbying on policies, opinion polling, an avalanche of nature-celebrating books, data-rich reports on the State of Nature, and other calls for action are all subject to heavy discounting.  In effect, the pro-nature movement has limited political capital, compared to other calls on the government which are more present in social connections between voters and politicians.

This part looks at how we could make nature less invisible, and more embedded and expressed in everyday social culture, so it reaches politicians ‘bottom-up’.

By ‘culture’ I don’t mean ‘high culture’ as in The Arts and Literature, or ‘alternative’ inter-personal philosophies of living more ‘naturally’ but what most people do day to day, hour to hour, week by week, month by month, at work, rest and play: how we spend our time and money for instance on our homes and gardens and in our spare time, how we mark important moments and places, and how that evidences our connections to nature, and actions people are taking to value, protect and restore it.

Such ‘wrap around’ social evidences are needed to make the policy efforts of our environment groups more effective, and could be more powerful and cheaper, than trying to increase the membership of environmental NGOs, although it might also have that result.  To do this we don’t need a culture-war about nature but we do need a cultural promotional campaign for nature.

What Would Success Look Like?

We will know if it’s worked, when it passes ‘The Weekend Test’.  If, when one politician asks another, “What did you do at the weekend?”, they become as likely to respond with something nature-related that they came across, or did with their friends, family or constituents, as to mention a trip to an opera or a football match, attending a County Show, or getting tickets to Wimbledon. Then we’ll know the UK has a politically mainstream nature culture. (Believe it or not, we once did have something like that).

The Challenge

To embed nature in culture – in things people do and take as normal –  I suggest we will need:

• Increased public nature ability to reverse the trend to nature blindness and enable people to be ‘good at nature’. Starting by being able to recognize, name and understand the native plants and animals where they live: the ABC of nature literacy and ability
• Salience: existing nature and conservation efforts need to be more visible and perceptible: sign-posting and signalling them
• Connecting Opportunities and events involving nature, in mainstream culture; connecting to things people do already, building on historic nature culture and place-based identities, and strengthening pro-nature ‘start ups’ which are themselves potential culture-makers
• Organisation of a movement wide campaign effort
• Political asks which can be pressed on government in the near-term, to give the campaign political traction, and align the nature base and organisations themselves

As the first part acknowledged, creating these social signals would be a long-game, not just a one Parliament project.  In fact to be most compelling, such evidences need to emerge from activities, events and behaviours which do not signal a political ask but are just social facts.

The near but not quite complete disappearance of nature from our culture has been a long and gradual process, involving an industrial revolution, a couple of agricultural revolutions and several technological revolutions.  Now there is a counter revolution which we can make use of.  It’s still in the foothills but it creates hand-holds and stepping stones, some revitalising old nature culture, others creating new initiatives.

From a management point of view, organisations need to recognize that while this would be a political project it’s not one to be left to the few NGO staff working in ‘The Political Unit’.  Many of them are ‘policy experts’ and have a brief to try and achieve policy outcomes but  it’s not about policy.  In the words of former Prime Minister Harold Wilson ‘policies without politics are of no more use than politics without policies’, and  here, the deficit is politics.

But in this case the politics part is about making nature culture, and the people best able to do that may be fundraisers, marketers, communicators and ‘front of house’ staff who understand people, not policies.  ‘Changing culture’ may seem an alien concept to civil society groups more used to thinking about ‘saving Red Squirrels’ or changing farm subsidies but it happens all the time. Take food for instance.

Changing Food Culture

The last few generations have seen a change in British food,  noticed even by some foreign visitors.   In his book Ravenous, on food, health and farming, Henry Dimbleby, the chef and restaurant entrepreneur turned environmental food system advocate and ‘Food Tzar’ under the Conservatives (he resigned in frustration), says of food culture:

Good food cultures don’t just happen: they are made by us … It is sometimes said that Britain ‘lacks a proper food culture’ … but … ours has changed enormously over the centuries … The British were once envied by the hungry French peasantry for our comparatively abundant food, our farmhouse tables laden with suet puddings, savoury pies and joints of beef.  But the Industrial Revolution … created a mass movement of the population away from the countryside.  The resulting shortage of workers meant that food had to be imported from the colonies and beyond.  The rural poor, who had eaten frugally but from the land, were replaced by the new urban poor, who often survived on little more than bread and tea.  As a nation we became severed from the rural cuisine that had been our forte.  It could be argued that we have never fully recovered …’.

Dimbleby highlights the case of Japan as a country which changed its food culture in several steps of ‘deliberate state intervention, as well as historical accident’.

To summarise his account: first, when Japan opened up to foreigners in the late C19th and early C20th its government advisers were struck by the strength of foreigners, and argued the Japanese should drink more milk.  Second, in 1921, the Japanese army, ‘concerned at the state of malnutrition among its recruits’, recommended soldiers eat more protein and fat, and this was promoted to the population in government radio broadcasts and through public cooking demonstrations.  Third, after WWII, defeated starving Japan got US food aid for school meals, and, as Japan got richer in the 1950s, citizens mixed Western and Japanese food styles. Fourth, in the 1990s Japan introduced rules to limit the influence of supermarkets and junk food, and law requires citizens to maintain a healthy weight.

In the UK, it’s the accident, or at least the market bit rather than the government bit which has made most difference to food culture. Dimbleby describes how immigrant Indian, Chinese, Turkish and Thai restauranteurs seized an opportunity to bring ‘foreign food’ to UK streets in recent generations.

At the same time real increases in income and much reduced costs of flying led to mass tourism and adoption of new tastes first experienced abroad (this is me not Dimbleby – see values changes in the run up to Brexit).

So when I was a child in the 1960s, working- and lower-middle class English people drank wine only at rare special occasions and then, we chose from three sorts: red, white or pink. Time spent in Europe on holiday changed tastes, and in the 1980s cheaper imports from Australia were promoted by Supermarkets and newspapers in Wine Clubs, so today most adults in the UK are probably better able to recognize a variety of wines than they are a variety of wild plants and animals.

Stimulated by the cost of obesity, cancer and coronary disease to the NHS which is a perennial concern of UK politicians,  UK governments have tried, albeit much more hesitantly than Japan, to encourage healthier eating.  They have set some limits on salt, fat and sugar and from 2003 ran a ‘Five A Day’ fruit and vegetables public education/ social-marketing campaign (5-a-day was an American idea from 1988).

Precedents For State Interventions In UK Culture

The UK has seen many state-sponsored interventions to change daily cultural practice, just not on nature. Today for instance we speak of ‘health and safety culture’ but Health and Safety, started with a few factory safety laws from 1802 onwards and was turbo-boosted by the Robens Report, under a Labour government in 1972.

The human cost of road traffic accidents led the UK government to run a famous public communications campaign (1971) ‘Clunk Click Every Trip’ on wearing seat belts, and has run campaigns on consumption of drugs and alcohol, including drink driving, and smoking, into the C21st.  The law in the UK has been progressively changed to promote inclusivity and prevent discrimination on grounds of race or sex, in the workplace and public life.  UK governments have intermittently encouraged energy conservation by citizens.  Many of those changes were partly stimulated by civil society campaigns.

1960s campaigns by the press, architects and the heritage lobby such as the Civic Trust, led to the UK adopting a system of Listed Buildings (it’s origins are older).   That system has not only been arguably more successful than we have with our ‘natural heritage’ but it also gradually educated the public, norming and crystallising expectations.  So estate agents and buyers are aware of the difference between real Georgian and neo-Georgian homes, or real Tudor and Mock Tudor but hardly any would be able distinguish ‘original’ real ancient woods from planted ones.

A National Drive For Public Nature Ability

There’s little that Non-Governmental Organisations like better than asking governments to do things.  Too often it’s an easy but ineffective option but in this case it’s appropriate, and necessary, and an achievable objective (cheap for example, compared to the £2.4bn funds paid yearly to UK farmers and landowners).  An old-school above-the-line educational government public awareness campaign about UK nature, and specifically one designed to facilitate a larger programme of nature-ability, is needed.

Such a campaign should be an early ask from NGOs to government.  It would be a signal of intent that this is an important and overlooked issue, and create a space in which to convene a multi-actor multi-dimensional programme involving civil society, government at all levels, businesses and other actors.   So far as I know nothing like it has ever been done in the UK – except perhaps once.

If you live in the UK you probably missed this government poster

At first glance it could be an advertising campaign to get people to value and visit Britain’s ancient woodlands (woods that have always been woods – what in many countries are called ‘old growth’ forests). Just 2.5% of them remain.

In particular it could be to promote Bluebell woods, for which the UK is famous amongst botanists, as due to its oceanic climate, half of the world population of these beautiful flowers are found in the UK.

Bluebells in Foxley Wood, Norfolk

Carpeting the floor of some woods in April and May, in a blue haze of flowers, Bluebells are one of Britain’s best known, folkloric and loved wild flowers.  It’s not on the scale of Japan’s traditional Hanami or “flower viewing” trips to see blossoming cherry trees but many people make an annual pilgrimage to see the Bluebells in spring.  “Pilgrimage” is the word many of them use.  It’s a cultural, if not formally recognized event.  Consequently if a ‘Bluebell Wood’ comes under threat, it has an added cachet to help mobilise public support in its defence, compared to just ‘a wood’.

In fact, this advert was part of the £125m government funded ‘GREAT” campaign begun in 2012, the year of the London Olympics, to promote tourism.  Hailed as ‘the biggest longest ad for Britain’, it included posters, tv, print and cinema ads in seen in Beijing, Berlin, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Mumbai, New Delhi, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto but not of course, in the UK.

Seeing as a 2019 survey found almost half of UK children couldn’t identify a Bluebell, it’s a shame it wasn’t shown in the UK.

Is That A Bluebell?

Screenshot from Sky News (2019)

Sky News reported:

Half of children cannot identify stinging nettles, 65% wouldn’t know what a blue tit is, 24% do not recognise conkers and 23% do not know what a robin looks like.  Almost all of the children surveyed could not identify a beech leaf or a cabbage white butterfly, while 83% did not know what a bumblebee looks like.

That survey followed numerous others which revealed an epidemic scale state of nature blindness in the UK, affecting not just children but adults, including educators and university students enrolled in ecological courses.

A 2002 study by Cambridge University zoologist Andrew Balmford became famous for finding that children could identify more Poke?mon characters than native British wildlife.  In 2005 Anne Bebbington from the Field Studies Council showed that A-level school students and their teachers, as well as trainee teachers attending courses at Juniper Hall Field Centre, had very little ability to name ‘common’ wild plants. A third of students could only name three species. ‘86% of A-level biology students could only name three or fewer common wild flowers whilst 41% could only name one or less’. Bebbington also found that 29% of the biology teachers could only name three or fewer flowers.

A 2008 National Trust survey found just 53% of children could identify an Oak leaf, Britain’s national tree, and half could not tell a bee from a wasp.  The Trust went on to run a major effort to get children and families to spend more time outdoors in nature, but if adults can’t explain to their children what they are seeing outdoors, how will this be an introduction to nature or equip them to recognize changes in nature?

My 2014 post Why Our Children are not being connected with nature noted that 85% of UK adults agreed “it is vital to introduce young children to nature” but it was evident that this was not happening.

In a 2019 Oxford University project, Andrew Gosler and Steven Tilling quizzed 149 biology undergraduates about birds, trees, mammals, butterflies and wildflowers before they went on a residential field course.  Birds ‘were the best known by the students, while butterflies were the most poorly known group’ but only 56% of the students could name individual bird species rather than generics like ‘duck’, and for butterflies, ‘only 12.8% of students correctly named five British species, and 47% named none’.  Whether students came from rural or urban families only had ‘a small effect’ on their knowledge.

Sarah Wise and I started the Fairyland Trust, which engages families with young children in nature, using activities which embed basic natural history learning through making, in 2001.  It’s deliberately aimed at the mainstream families, engaging adults and children together. 70-90% of the 250,000+ people who have attended its events and activities, have had no previous contact with conservation groups. Over time we’ve learnt and progressively simplified the activities to assume less and less knowledge.  For instance, we discovered that almost nobody knew that butterfly or moth ‘food plants’ are what the caterpillar eats, not the flying adult.

In the early 2000s we were asked to take a Magic Wands Workshop to a Wildlife Trust reserve.  As Magic Wands involves choosing a wand of wood from a British tree, we asked the Education Officers which native trees grew on their site, and were taken aback when they didn’t know, and said they’d have to ask the warden.

At Glastonbury in the ‘Green Kids’ field, we met environmentally-aware parents who were astonished to learn that hedgerows held many different trees and shrubs (which we’d used in a Crowns workshop).  Seeing “hedging plants” sold in garden centres, they had assumed there was one plant to make hedges from.

In 2007, as consultants to Natural England (NE), Sarah and I invented an activity called Ecoteering, designed to enable visitors to recognize key nature features of NE’s National Nature Reserves.  Ecoteering works by using ‘navigation species’ to find your way from one ‘discovery’ feature to the next.  We tried out versions of it on friends and Natural England office staff, and were surprised when one of the latter commented that the navigation species (shown on a photo card) were too difficult to identify, and to distinguish Bracken from Heather would be a role for “a specialist”.

From Navigating Nature in Ecos magazine – opening a ‘discovery box’ on an Ecoteering trail for Natural England

But what does it matter if children, and the adults they become, can’t recognize their own country’s plants or animals?

The Wrong Poster-Bee

In 2010 Friends of the Earth (FoE) asked me to map out possible campaigns they could develop to ‘get back into’ the issue of biodiversity (ie nature).  I suggested quite a few but noticed that whenever I told any non-specialist about the project, they usually said “oh you mean bees”.  It was already a zeitgeist issue, because bee-keepers were reporting ‘collapse’ of their colonies, and a few scientists were fingering agrichemicals as the likely culprits.  The next year (FoE) asked me to outline a bee campaign strategy, and they executed a campaign with some success.

Many more campaigns followed (some such as by Buglife, preceded it). Campaigns to Save the Bees bees from ‘bee killer’ (Neonicotinoid) pesticides became a worldwide phenomenon in the 2010s (see this on some of the history).

Bumble Bees, and hundreds of other types of wild bee, are in decline in many countries.  In some cases they have been reduced from species widespread before agricultural industrialisation to tiny vulnerable populations (such as the Great Yellow Bumblebee, reduced by 80% in the UK).  Three UK Bumble Bee species have become extinct. By 2019 the Large Mason Bee which used to be found in southern England and Wales and the Six-banded Nomad Bee, formerly ‘fairly widespread’, were each confined to single sites.

The success of campaigns in generating public interest led to politicians (including Boris Johnson as London mayor), the media and individuals to promote bee-keeping, especially in urban areas.  This increased bee numbers but of Honey Bees, not of wild bees.  The campaigns to ‘save the bees’ often used images of  Honey Bees which are reared in artificial hives.  Honey Bees were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and are more like livestock than wild animals. They do not need rescuing. In fact like many agricultural animals they compete with wildlife for food.

Above,  for reference, is a Bumble Bee with a Honey Bee

Find a basic UK bee identification chart here. A few truly wild Honey Bees do exist in the UK but are nowadays very rare

‘Saving Chickens’

The US Sierra Club pointed out in 2018 that studies in California, Canada, Ireland and England found that wild bee numbers dropped as farmed bee numbers increased, and wild bees contracted pests and diseases from Honey Bees.

 “Honeybees are not going to go extinct,” said Scott Black, executive director of the US Xerces Society an invertebrate conservation group. “We have more honeybee hives than we’ve ever had and that’s simply because we manage honeybees. Conserving honeybees to save pollinators is like conserving chickens to save the birds.”

In 2018 Greenpeace US drew criticism from a Cambridge bee researcher for featuring only agricultural Honey Bees in its SOS Bees campaign material (no longer online).

In 2019 the Guardian reported:

… growing concern from scientists and experienced beekeepers that the vast numbers of honeybees, combined with a lack of pollinator-friendly spaces, could be jeopardising the health and even survival of some of about 6,000 wild pollinators across the UK.

Kew Gardens’ State of the World’s Plant and Fungi report warned: “Campaigns encouraging people to save bees have resulted in an unsustainable proliferation in urban beekeeping. This approach only saves one species of bee, the honeybee, with no regard for how honeybees interact with other, native species …”

and

Dale Gibson of Bermondsey Street Bees, a commercial beekeeping practice with a focus on sustainability, says they have reduced their hives in London by a third to alleviate the overpopulation crisis. He explains how the dietary requirements of honeybees can make competition for scarce food resource extremely fierce.

“Honeybees are very efficient, almost omnivorous consumers of nectar and pollen; they are voracious,” says Gibson. “There is no off button. They will carry on consuming what’s out there as long as it’s out there. Just to stay alive each beehive will consume 250 kilos of nectar and 50 kilos of pollen. If you have a hive of 70,000 bees, that’s 70,000 times four or five cycles over a single season. You are talking about almost half a million bees that have got to be fed.”

[In contrast even a large a colony of the Buff Tailed Bumble Bee, the commonest species in the UK, will only hold about 400 workers].

The Guardian also noted that:

‘While the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization reports there are more than 90m honeybee hives globally, many rarer native pollinators are in increasingly precarious positions’

So the Honey Bee was the wrong poster bee. Yet like an out of control meme, the Honey Bee continues to be promoted as a proxy for all the wild bees and other insects under real threat from pesticides and destruction of habitat, mostly through industrialisation of farming.

Even now, the UN picks a Honey Bee to represent bees for its World Bee Day , although World Bee Day 2025 information resources created for the Sustainable Development Goals by RELX (formerly science publisher Reed-Elservier),  accidentally uses an image of a wasp colony instead:

Too late, conservation groups were left trying to qualify the story and point out that Honey Bees are not even as important for crops as is often assumed. In 2024 The Wildlife Trusts said  ‘Honeybees are mostly kept in managed hives, and are likely responsible for pollinating between 5-15% of the UK’s insect-pollinated crops. That leaves 85-95% of the UK’s insect-pollinated crops relying on wild pollinators …’..

Tolerating Nature Blindness

The Wrong-Poster-Bee story shows that conservation efforts can be derailed by an inability to distinguish one plant or animal from another, in other words by nature blindness or a lack of nature ability or literacy, or as it used to be called, by a lack of Natural History knowledge.

When the ‘professional’ communicators and educators who relay the ‘messages’ of the nature movement to the whole of society are also unable to tell one creature or plant from another, it undermines campaigns or programmes designed to protect or restore nature.

Mistakes in the UK media regularly provide examples.  Here the EDP, Britain’s largest regional newspapers, provides picture of a Blue Tit to illustrate a story about Bee Eaters.

Not knowing what a Bee-Eater looks like is easily forgiven, as they rarely appear in the UK but the Blue Tit is almost ubiquitous across the country.

With negligible nature ability, people look out of their car windows and make sense of what they see. Understandably, apparently ‘wild’ creatures or plants are likely to be taken as natural.  Many for instance think that Pheasants are wild British birds because they seem to be free-living but Pheasants are not native or wild: they are mass-reared and released livestock.  This misapprehension extends to some producers of ‘educational’ materials and its seems, the BBC, which has awarded it the epithet ‘British’.

Millions of (Ring-Necked) Pheasants are released for shooting each year, with an estimated biomass (weight) equal to twice that of all other breeding birds in Britain.

As the Pheasant is large, obvious and relatively tame, it’s a bird likely to be seen by people driving in the countryside.  Like mass-released Honey Bees, Pheasants are voracious feeders, only not on nectar.  A study from Belgium suggests that wild snakes and lizards have disappeared from areas with large scale Pheasant releases.

David Attenborough’s nature programmes are one of the BBC’s most valuable assets but this doesn’t mean the BBC is nature-literate.  A BBC News voiceover confused Great Crested Grebes with Swans in reporting the results of the biggest UK wildlife photography competition:

Meanwhile, in 2023 the UK Department of Education and The Guardian did not seem to understand the difference between foreign ornamental flowers and native wildflowers.

One reason this matters, as mentioned above, is that many native insects reply on specific native plants as ‘food plants’, while the adult stages may use nectar from many flowers.  Attempts to re-create ‘lost meadows’ (97% of traditional UK hay meadows have been destroyed) or use your garden to help insects will not work if the wrong plants are used.

Proxy Nature

Like most nations, the UK has become progressively ‘greener’ as measured by awareness of environmental ‘issues’ including saving ‘forests’ and ‘nature’, or  willingness to embrace choices such as renewable energy or greener consumer goods.

Yet at the same time the UK has become more nature blind: it is like a society which increasingly celebrates the importance of libraries and literature while simultaneously becoming less able to read.

It’s routinely assumed that because nature is green, and green is good, all that’s green is nature, even chemically sterilised industrial farm landscapes.   Hence the political traction of ‘Green Belt’ and ‘Grey Belt’ discussed in Parts 1 and 2.

‘Nature’, ‘the countryside’ and ‘the outdoors’ have become increasingly synonymous, making it possible to be in favour of them as concepts, and not distinguish between proxies (such as ‘green spaces’) and the real thing.  Launched by then Prime Minister David Cameron, the ‘GREAT’ campaign promoted the ‘great countryside’, and it’s ‘inspiring landscapes’ as one of ten reasons to visit the UK.

The official press release encapsulated the essential ‘greatness’ of Britain’s ‘countryside’ in these words:

‘Countryside: From Constable to Wordsworth, the British countryside has inspired some of the world’s finest artists and poets’. 

True but also indicative of the relative value placed on nature in C21st British culture: important for inspiring formal ‘culture’ as taught in History of Art or Literature courses, but not for itself, or for any direct social connection with nature.

So it’s assumed to be important to know about Constable and Wordsworth but Bluebells or other wildflowers, perhaps not.  Nature-inspired Arts are indeed, their own cultural form but they are only proxies for nature: we can keep the books, poems and paintings more easily than the real nature, just as Attenborough films may outlast their subjects.

The “host” of Ullswater Lake District Daffodils which inspired William Wordsworth’s poem starting “I wandered lonely as a cloud” in 1802, are real Wild Daffodils.  Once common, they are now rare (see ‘Golden Triangle of Wild Daffodils’ in the nature Events in Popular Culture section below).

Today Daffodils are the most commonly planted flowers in Britain but ornamental varieties, not the slighter, delicate wild ones.  Each March hundreds of visitor attractions offer Daffodil Walks, often promoted by reference to Wordsworth but how many visitors realise they are looking at fakes, not the originals?  Even in the Lake District, many roadsides are planted with fake daffs rather than the authentic Wild Daffodils which inspired Wordsworth and his sister.

Here’s Wordsworth’s poem summarised by ChatGPT:

‘The speaker describes a moment of solitude when he comes across a field of golden daffodils dancing by a lake, which brings him joy. The sight of the flowers, compared to stars, becomes a cherished memory that fills him with happiness during his reflective moments, highlighting nature’s uplifting power on the spirit’.

Would we tolerate eradication of the authentic Wordsworth, and its replacement with something which gets the general gist? And if not for the real poem, why for the real plant?

Ask editors from the BBC, The Guardian or the EDP or even web editors at the Department of Education, if they are in favour of banning bee-killing pesticides or creating more wildflower meadows and they’d probably say “yes”, as being in favour of nature in theory, has become a social norm.  Hence all the media coverage, albeit often inaccurate.  But in professional communications culture, getting nature wrong in detail seems less likely to be seen as shameful as a misplaced comma or apostrophe.   This only reflects how the importance of nature ability has dwindled in wider society.

Sunflowers by Banksy?

Thanks to our more embedded social culture of food, architecture, art and sport, editors would not tolerate cakes labelled as bread, a white wine as a Claret, a Tudor house as Georgian, a Van Gogh as a Banksy, or mistaking Wigan Athletic for Manchester City, or US Football labelled as Rugby.  But getting nature wildly wrong is trivial, or perhaps just seen as not being ‘nerdy’.

Conservation and environment groups should take nature-blindness and the de facto tolerance of it seriously, as it speaks volumes about nature’s lack of traction in wider society, including in politics.

Without an intervention to increase basic nature knowledge, they face an uphill task, when every time they want to engage a wider public with a campaign, project or make a case for action, it has to involve trying to explain almost every bird, animal or plant they are talking about, or accepting that audiences nod but really don’t understand.  The net effect of constantly raising concerns about things people do not understand, is of course to create an impression that your concerns are esoteric and marginal.

A Natural History GCSE Won’t Be Enough

The best known current attempt to increase Natural History knowledge through UK formal education is the Natural History GCSE for 16 year olds, developed as a result of a campaign led by Mary Colwell, UK, formerly of the BBC Natural History Unit. (More here).  It has been quite an achievement to steer her proposal through the educational system, not least as many educationalists themselves lack nature knowledge. The earliest that teaching of the new qualification will take place is 2026.

Mark Castle, of the small Field Studies Council which trains people in field skills, has argued for natural history to be available to younger children as well.  The Field Studies Council is calling for a national Skills for Nature Plan.

Any additional teaching of Natural History is to be welcomed as a contribution of overcoming the UK’s deficit in nature ability but despite what many adults might hope, it is far from a silver bullet.

Numerous studies have found that formal school education has a relatively weak effect compared to family influences.  A 2022 Swiss study of nature ability in teachers and primary children reported that ‘contact with living beings’ and ‘support of family members’ were important while ‘their school education was rather insignificant’.  The Oxford studymentioned earlier found that ‘family influences, self-motivation and knowledge of birds, rather than formal education, best predicted students’ overall Natural History Knowledge’.

In 2007 Sarah Pilgrim, David Smith and Jules Pilgrim from Essex University examined  ability to ‘identify local plants and animals, name their uses, and tell stories about them’ in four Lincolnshire villages, four suburban wards of south London, and three maritime towns in East Anglia. They found  ‘respondents with the highest ecoliteracy levels acquired it from parents and relatives, environment-based occupations, and hobbies’.  Those whose knowledge came primarily from TV and schooling were ‘least competent at identifying local plant and animal species’, with book-learning falling in between.

Knowledge of wildlife and in particular plants, is vastly greater in the few societies who still live a pre-industrial lifestyle. For instance ‘by the age of 8’ Zapotec children in Mexico ‘can reliably identify hundreds of wild plants and recall associated culinary and medicinal knowledge’.  We can be fairly sure that they acquired this knowledge from relatives, as would have happened in pre-industrial Britain.

My conclusion is that the adult community, including parents, grandparents and their friends, need to be involved in giving children nature ability, as well as teachers. More than this, ‘children’ should not be the only target in any UK campaign to enhance nature ability.  We have generations of adults who need to be reached, and that requires a multi-channel social marketing approach, in the same way that public health, occupational safety, food and other social and cultural campaigns have worked.

Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

Section 2  – Missing The Garden Opportunity

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“Where Have All The Insects Gone?” – 2024’s Silent Spring

An incidental demonstration of both the potential of nature ability and its present disconnect from political machinery, occurred in Spring this year, when people in the UK noticed a marked absence of insects, especially bees.

Populations of many insects are notoriously volatile and affected by weather at any timescale but by May 2024 it was clear there were far fewer butterflies and Bumble Bees than usual in our own Norfolk garden.  Then we visited the Knepp rewilding project in Sussex and found much the same thing.  We met a fellow Knepp visitor who turned out to be a botanical surveyor from North Wales.  She told us she’d enjoyed hearing the nearby Nightingales but had “expected more abundance”.  I remember saying vague, and to my regret, slightly dismissive things about availability of blossom and insect broods but as we walked on, I had to admit to myself that she was right.   I too was disappointed that the UK’s most famous re-wilding site seemed short on insects (and Swifts).

On May 10 we walked round this orchard at Knepp and saw just one Bumble Bee, despite all the apple blossom.

In Hampshire on 22 May Melanie Oxley of PeCAN (see section on Nature Events) wrote in the Petersfield Climate Action Network blog:

‘A few days ago I led a small group of children armed with insect nets, into a meadow area in the countryside. It was a very warm spring day. In 45 minutes we had caught just two insects, a seven-spot ladybird and a small white butterfly.  Just one pollinator! There was the nature emergency staring us in the face. The children were disappointed and I was heartbroken’.

“Just one pollinator!  There was the nature emergency staring us in the face”.

Back in Norfolk on 25 May as I assembled a demonstration ‘Bug Hotel’ for the ‘Queen’s Garden’ at the Fairy Fair (26 -7 May) at Bradmoor Woods, it was obvious that there were almost no flying insects about.  In previous years on the same dates, we’d been worried about wild bees moving in before we’d have to dismantle and take it away, at the end of the Fair.  We had no such problem in 2024, though the display of wildflowers in pots had few visiting insects to show visiting families.

Also on 25 May, over in Bantry, County Cork in Ireland, Michele Hallahan posted “alarming absence of insects is starkly noticeable this year.  Birds are starving as a result”.

On June 9 Lyn Lambert tweeted from Blashford Lakes in Hampshire:  “insects were worryingly almost missing”, and on June 14 near Newcastle Upon Tyne, John McCarthy wrote: “My walk this afternoon … Bright and warm, slight breeze. But something was missing! INSECTS. There are no bees and hardly any insects … Rachel Carson #SilentSpring”.

On June 22, day of the Restore Nature Now march, @SophieAmandaH tweeted about an absence of larger Hawk Moths in her light trap.

It was Insect Week organised by the Royal Entomological Society from 23-29^th June.  Some people reported lots of insects, many more, very few.  It varied a lot from place to place and across species groups.  From Northern Ireland, meadow-restorer Donna Rainey, @donnarainey4 welcomed an uptick of insects after “a real absence of invertebrates locally for a few weeks”.

One thing that struck me was the number who had put their faith in wildlife gardening and local rewilding, seen it produce results, and were now in need of hope, reassurance and guidance.   “What to do about it seems unanswerable” said one, and another: “I already have an established wildlife garden, usually buzzing with bees and grasshoppers but nothing this year.  I’ve also rewilded other areas.  What can we do now?!”

The following day, Sussex University scientist and naturalist Dave Goulson posted his thoughts in the shape of a video on Youtube, Where have all the insects gone? (58k views).

“Social media in the last few days has been going absolutely berserk aboutinsects having disappeared about the lack of bees in particular in people’s gardens a few a few people disagreeing saying they’ve got plenty but most people saying they’re they’re really worried because they’re they’re not seeing any bees, [and] some say they used to a week or two ago they had bees and they all disappeared … and it seems to be widespread panic that we’re suffering from a very sharp kind of insect apocalypse, so I thought you might be interested in in my take …”

Goulson delivered a “don’t panic” message about the near-term absence of insects related to a “mild really wet winter followed by a really cold and wet spring” affecting both insects and the plants they rely on, followed up with “it’s worse than you think and we should be panicking” about the long-term trends (he guessed 90-95% of insects had been lost over 100 years) and drivers of decline like pesticides and climate change.

The difficulty with this, which long bedevilled climate change communications, is that humans are hardwired to respond to short-term threats, so there is no better time to respond to a gradual long-term change than when it’s acutely manifest in the short- term.   Nature groups need to work out how to do this, or else the shifting-baseline effect will mean the opportune moments to raise the alarm are never seized.

As with climate attribution, where thanks to the work of Friedi Otto and colleagues we now have near real-term attribution of climate change to real weather events, the ‘biodiversity’ community needs to be able to relate things people notice and are concerned about, to probable causes, while the relevant events are ongoing and the critical context (see CAMPCAT) validates the message.

As it was, the highly motivated engagement with the UK’s ‘Silent Spring’, which verged on the cusp of despair, drew a slow and strangely tepid response from established conservation organisations.

I am pretty sure because they’d also noticed but didn’t know what to say.  The UK’s mini ‘Silent Spring’ preceded and followed the June 22 Restore Nature Now march and yet it didn’t seem to feature at that event, although I may have missed it.

Insect week and the ‘missing insects’ were discussed on BBC Radio’s Today Programme on 24 June, and on July 19, Tony Juniper, Chairman of Natural England, wrote a personal Opinion piece in The Guardian Where are all the butterflies this summer? Their absence is telling us something important which reiterated Goulson’s emphasis on the longer term drivers.

Scientists and nature groups have some long-running structured surveys which try to measure the ups and downs of insects in a standardised way, to avoid relying on ‘anecdotal’ reports from Twitter or elsewhere.

In an August article also called Where Have All The Insects Gone?, Manuela Saragosa explored the world of insect-counting for the Financial Times.

She mentioned Britain’s Hoverfly Recording Scheme (Hoverflies are important and endangered pollinators and the UK Hoverflies Facebook Group has nearly 7,000 members) run since at least 1991, and the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, which has been going since 1976 (and has a sister more popular app-based Big Garden Butterfly Count 18 July – 10 August,  with 135,000 counts in 2023), along with the Rothamsted Insect Survey which as been using light and vacuum traps since 1964.

It’s data from such surveys which proves that the UK’s insects have massively declined.   But like most science, such surveys are run and analysed slowly and carefully.  On 29 July Butterfly Conservation, organisers of the Big Garden ‘Count did give a mid-survey update:

‘… very low numbers of butterflies have been spotted so far in their annual Big Butterfly Count. On average participants are seeing just over half the number of butterflies they were spotting this time last year.  The unusually wet and windy spring, coupled with the colder than usual temperatures so far this summer could be contributing to the lack of butterflies. While there is a chance of a later emergence of the insects if there is a prolonged sunny spell, numbers are currently the lowest recorded in the 14-year history of Butterfly Conservation’s Big Butterfly Count’.

[In October I was at a nature reserve with a summer population of Nightjars, birds which feed on night-flying insects.  I was told that scientists studying the birds had found they were badly underweight due to lack of food during the late May – early August breeding season and had probably not reared few if any any young.]

Opportunity Missed

But by August and September many nature oriented Twitter users were reporting slightly larger numbers of bees and butterflies.  It was, now, in communications parlance, a ‘falling’ rather than a ‘rising’ issue.  Engaging a potentially huge audience catalysed by those with the natural history ability, the time, the motivation and the stories – about the nature gardens and places they had lovingly created – was an opportunity missed.

2024’s Big Garden Butterfly Count results were published on 18 September.  They were confirmed as the lowest ever in the Count’s 14 year history.  Butterfly Conservation called it a Butterfly Emergency and Tony Juniper said it was a “warning” of what lay ahead but the findings were no longer so salient.  It was autumn.   The surge of concern driven by the unexpected stillness and silence of flower-filled gardens and hedgerows at the crest of spring and the height of summer was long gone.

People who are active custodians of nature in their gardens on a daily basis, are a growing cultural phenomenon.  They use social media on a short communication cycle.  There will be more opportunities for that to reach out to MPs, government, Councillors and Councils but not at the pace of formalised science, citizen-science or otherwise.

To embed this locally-rooted contemporary nature awareness in political consciousness, will require a more agile way to engage politicians while the public is actively engaged by real events.  In strategy jargon it needs a tighter OODAloop. While the 2024 Silent Spring surge existed, it had nothing to connect it to politics, not even on July 4, General Election Day.

My Twitter ‘nature sentries’ are not typical of the general population: many of them have devoted large amounts of time, effort and money to maximising the suitability of their homes and gardens to support wildlife.  Used to sharing examples of bees and other insects visiting their gardens, and in some cases able to identify a lot of insects and plants including wildflowers,  they are very ‘tuned in’ to nature and likely to notice unusual absences or changes.   But they are just the tip of a gardening culture which is increasingly pro-nature.  They are potential ‘mavens’ and ‘connectors’ who could be used to engage friends, relatives and neighbours – if they engaged at the opportune moment.

Nature’s Changing Place In Gardening Culture

“Norwich is said by fame to be a City in a Wood, or a Wood in a City’ some calls it a Grove in a City, or a City in a Grove; and others say, it is a Garden in a City, or a City in a Garden.” 

 The Records of Norwich 1736   [thanks to Patrick Barkham for tracking down this quote when I couldn’t find it]

‘A nature-literate Britain must become a widely shared political objective. To achieve such political backing, nature ability and quality must become aspirational, for example by being attached to popular past-times like gardening, and being seen as a desirable feature in gardens and homes’.

Why Our Children Are Not Being Connected With Nature, 2014

Gardening is a major part of UK culture because of what we do, not because there are a lot of gardening books, university degrees in it, or gardening museums.  We spend a lot of time and money on, and in our 16 million gardens.  More of us are now including nature in our plans.

According to the UK’s HTA (Horticultural Trades Association), UK households collectively spent around £8 billion on retail garden products in 2023, much of it from about 1400 garden centres and retail nurseries. 91%  believe gardens and green spaces benefit the environment and wildlife and 51% say they use their garden to feed, watch or encourage wildlife.

78% of British adults (about 43m people) have access to a private garden.  62%  use them to grow plants, trees and flowers. 34%  grow some herbs, fruit and vegetables. 84% of British adults believe gardens and green spaces benefit their state of mind, and 79%  their physical health.

The average UK garden is 16m x 16m or 256m², excluding window boxes and balconies, and the combined area of the UK’s domestic gardens is roughly the same as Somerset – with obvious potential to both increase living space for native flora and fauna, and increase nature ability, such as recognizing and understanding wild plants.

For instance the Fairyland Trust has been running ‘Fairy Gardens’ Workshops (children take away coir pots with plug plant of native wildflowers to plant at home) and campaigns about planting wildflowers in gardens, since the early 2000s.

Wildflower plug plants in ‘Fairy Gardens’ at a Fairy Fair, and wildflowers established from a ‘Fairy Garden’ planted into the ground in a garden (Greater Stitchwort, Wild Strawberry and Red Campion).

The Trust worked out that if all 16m gardens grew a square metre of Dandelions at the density found in one garden in Norfolk, that could support 1.7m extra colonies of Bumble Bees. While if all gardens included a four square metre patch of wildflowers, it would add an area equivalent to half of all the remaining natural flower rich meadows in the country.

Birds are already part of garden culture in a way that wildflowers are not just yet.  The BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) says we spend £2-300m on wild bird seed every year.  A 2012 study  found a majority of households feed birds (64% across rural and urban areas in England, and 53% within five British study cities, fed garden birds. That is about 18m households feeding birds in their garden, considerably more people than even the most optimistic estimate of the membership of environment groups.  Another investigation found that over 40 years, such feeding has affected the fortunes of national bird populations, with those using garden feeders going up, compared to those that don’t.

Horticulture Magazine’s website has reported that there ‘has been a conscious move towards organic and eco-friendly products, with 46% of gardeners using organic fertilisers instead of those filled with chemicals’, and  87% wanted to bring more wildlife to their gardens by feeding them or providing shelter.  It also found 37% thought wildlife was the best part about owning a garden, ‘rating it ahead of growing their own plants or vegetables’.  This is a real change from attitudes prevalent in the 1990s when research for early Plantlife campaigns found that even many people who were pro-nature baulked at the idea of wild-flowers in gardens, as ‘wild’ implied a loss of control.

The Wyevale report found that 46% of gardeners were consciously selecting organic fertilisers ‘rather than those which contain potentially harmful chemicals’.  Slug pellets, previously their top selling slug product ‘were not even in the top 3, with an organic alternative now clinching the top spot’.

In 2016 1 in 5 reported they were changing their gardens by reducing the size of lawns in favour of other features.  These trends suggest that it might not be that difficult to encourage people to make further changes to help nature, especially discrete features each with their own logic, such as:

• More ponds, small marshes & wet ditches for frogs, and swales to help water soakaway into the ground rather than overloading drains, and rain gardens
• Wet mud for Swallows and House Martins to make their nests with
• Swift towers and boxes in gardens and on homes
• Green roofs with low nutrient substrates to allow high diversity of wild plants
• Green Walls and rain gardens
• Bramble and nettle patches for butterflies and other insects
• Hedgehog holes through fences to create roaming on ‘Hedgehog Highways’
• Low nutrient unfertilised and chemical free flower beds and mixed length lawns for wildflower and insect diversity
• Leaving areas of fallen leaves and deadstems in place for spiders, overwintering insects and foraging birds and animals

There’s no shortage of examples of nature-improved gardens. Expertise goes back to Miriam Rothschild (whose wildflower garden became a SSSI), and study to Jennifer Owen’s work on a single garden from 1971 – 2001, and almost every environmental NGO has given ‘wildlife gardening’ advice but it’s generally remained socially invisible, a matter of personal choice, carried out in private.

Open Garden Days and community-level networks based around particular actions can make a difference to that but scaling up and sustaining such initiatives requires resources and continuity which have often been lacking.

To take just one of many hundreds of such projects, in 2013 the Warwickshire Wildlife Trust launched a Help For Hedgehogs campaign and in 2015 sought funding for a dedicated Hedgehog Officer, in post for a year, to set up a Hedgehog Improvement Area (HIA) around Elmdon Park in Solihull, involving gardens and open spaces.  The HIA was announced in 2016 and the project engaged 26,000 adults and 12,500 school children but was ended in 2020

 A Hedgehog Highway sign from Hedgehog Street run by the PTES and BHPS

To give such activities sustained social visibility requires some sort of permanent organisational scaffolding, which not only enables it with funding but signals that it has public backing and political legitimacy.  In the 1950s-1970s farmers got grants to destroy nature (eg hedges, wet meadows), while being invited to consider leaving unwanted “corners’ for it.  Later, agri-environment schemes were set up to incentivise nature-friendly farming, but only for farmers and rural landowners.  It’s time this recognition extended to gardeners and urban land.

 Crediting The Value Of Home And Garden Nature

A Lapwing nesting on a green roof in Switzerland

In a 2022 post I  suggested giving local Council Tax payers a rebate in proportion to the nature features they supported by their homes and gardens, in the same way that farmers are now paid for ‘environmental public goods’ on agricultural land:

Reward Everyone Who Helps Nature …  democratize the use of public money for nature (public goods) so it is not restricted by ‘eligibility rules’ based on agricultural holdings … but on outcomes. While the majority of finance would still flow to farmers as so much land in the UK is farmed, there in no natural justice in paying a farmer if s/he produces two Song Thrushes where there was one before, and not a householder with a garden, or other landowner. One way to deliver this would be through Council Tax rebates for nature.

In 2023 Ross Cameron from Sheffield University made a similar call to use council tax or water bill discounts to incentivise greener gardens.

Bumble Bee on an English Green Roof – from www.livingroofs.org

Such payments could also incentivize property owners in developed areas (and not just gardens) to reduce rain run off into overburdened sewers, by diverting it into domestic wetlands and allowing it to recharge groundwater and reduce flood risk.

Running such a scheme would require identification of qualifying features, as has already been done on a coarse scale for agri-environment schemes and is required by the biodiversity net gain planning requirements for new built developments (see 13 CIEEM principles).

These features could and should be related to characteristic local nature, and so could give each home and garden a ‘Nature Score’ and an ‘Ecological Vernacular’ rating, creating new social selling points and become something to be proud of, in the same way that an historic Blue Plaque or Listed Feature, or inclusion of a garden in the Register of Historic Gardens is seen to enhance the value of a property.   They would need to be detailed, recognizing the fine scale of most gardens and the importance of ‘ecological details’, such as food plants for insects (see some moth foodplantsand a Jersey example), birds and animals, or nesting places such as Swift Bricks.

In the past two years Swift Brick advocate Hannah Burn-Taylor has made waves with her one woman Feather Speechcampaign, seeking to convince politicians to mandate Swift Bricks in new homes. It is an extraordinarily modest demand, and so far it’s not succeeded. It shows how little traction nature has in Westminster.

Swift Brick campaigners 20 September 2024

Concern for Swifts was set up to campaign on exactly the same problem of Swifts losing their nest sites, back in 1995, when Burn-Taylor was nine. 15 years before, in his seminal 1980 book The Common Ground, Richard Mabey wrote of Swifts, ‘how good it would be if we also found room for them in our modern buildings, as they do in Amsterdam, where re-roofing is illegal unless access for swifts is retained’.   The UK is still a long way behind.

 

Garden Centres

                                                                                                                                 

Garden Centres and Supermarkets play a huge role in shaping the choice-architecture of UK gardening: they are the default go-to gardening hubs selling everything from seeds and live plants to fish, machinery, plastic grass and garden ‘care’ products, meaning mainly herbicides, fungicides, insecticides and artificial fertilisers.  They are the shop front of a horticultural industry whose prevailing ethos has long been not nature but artifice, with plants as ornaments.

Garden centre plants

Camouflaged by their benign trappings of cafeterias and floral hanging baskets, conventional Garden Centres are the arms suppliers for a domestic war on nature.  Many of the flowers they sell are so artificial that they are useless for nature because they contain no nectar or pollen, or it’s inaccessible, and they are not food plants for native wildlife.

In 2017 Dave Gouslon from Sussex University found some garden centre plants labelled ‘bee-friendly’ actually contained systemic insecticides (ie insecticides inside the plant).  Most Garden Centres also sell ‘lawn improver’.  These can contain a mix of herbicide to kill truly bee friendly flowers like Self-heal or Dandelions, moss killer, and to make grass look bright green, artificial fertiliser which may also be toxic to insects.

Well into the 2000s this ‘normal’ was so ingrained that it was common to see ‘weedkiller’ such as Glyphosate (aka Roundup) advertised in magazines of conservation organisations.  UK readers will remember Therese Coffey, who served as Secretary of State for the Environment in the Conservative administration of Rishi Sunak, and is said to be a keen gardener, and who made a point of endorsing Glyphosate.

Therese Coffey talking to the NFU conference in 2023 – from The Independent

As the Wyevale Garden Centres report highlighted above hints at, there is change at the margins. Whereas in the early 2000s wildflower seeds and wildflower plug plants (small rooted plants that can be easily planted and give much better results than using seed) were only available from a couple of specialists, I found ten online in as many minutes, including established major suppliers, and many more companies sell seed.  There are also dozens of companies offering ecological landscaping and habitat creation services.

Coffey and the conventional garden centres represent the market ‘laggards’.  The ‘wildflower’ customers, along with installers of green roofs and other ‘new green features’, are market innovators followed by the early adopters.  This is the cultural change dynamic tracked for any innovation by CDSM, Cultural Dynamics Strategy and marketing, in their Values Modes model.  The Inner Directed Pioneers experiment and innovate, and if it looks socially successful, they are emulated by the esteem seeking Prospectors.  Once a behaviour spreads enough to be seen as ‘normal’, it’s adopted by the change resistant security-driven Settlers, by ‘norming’, ie changing to stay in line with a new normal. (Social change dynamic #13 &  book here).

This process can be speeded up if large and familiar actors signal that they are adopting the new ways – ripe territory for campaigns seeking a social tipping point.  If the environmental NGOs were now to pressure Garden Centre chains not just to stock and promote nature friendly products like wildflower plug plants grown without pesticides but also stop selling garden chemicals, in line with demands of campaigns such as the Pesticides Collaboration (environment groups and unions) to ban pesticides in urban public places it could catalyse rapid behaviour change.

Of course there would initially be an internal furore in the horticultural industry with many arguing against change, and the most effective way to quickly convince them of the need to change would be the prospect of competition.  Nature groups could set up their own garden centres, and urge their members to use them – groups like RSPB and National Trust have plenty of properties where this could be done, with or without acquiring additional adjacent land, and plenty of corporates and possibly Councils would be interested as potential partners.

All sections

1 – Introduction And Nature Ability

2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity

3 – Signalling and Marking Moments

4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture

5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means

7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

Section 3 – Signalling Nature And Marking Moments

download as pdf

 Just Add Signs

I spent a year in this building, part of UCL in London’s Gower Street, without reading this, high above the pavement but a plaque to Darwin first went up on this site in 1906.  UK nature is rarely as well marked. 

Perhaps the lowest cost, simplest and quickest way to start to elevate the perception of nature is to improve the visibility of what’s already there.  Not just nature itself such as features, plants and creatures but human activities and artifacts which speak of its existence and importance. On a map for example.

Buxton Heath Nature Reserve (Norfolk Wildlife Trust) marked by the blue bird.

In 1997, the blue bird symbol for nature reserves was added to the UK OS Ordnance Survey Leisure Map series.  This small change made nature more visible, and nature conservation more normal and to-be-expected.  Of course it could have also prompted more people to consider or look out for nature reserves while out on a walk.

A visit to Buxton Heath

The UK has far more detailed maps showing signs of nature conservation activity,  at the website MAGIC – www.magic.gov.uk (aka Nature On the Map).  While this is not so user-friendly and is mainly used by professionals and enthusiasts of map-related sports such as geocaching, it is public.

 Buxton Heath area showing the SSSI (statutory Site of Special Scientific Interest), heathland habitat (pink) and Lowland Fen habitat (brown) as well as agri-environment scheme paying public money to landowners/ managers (cross hatching).

Dozens of layers can be selcted on ‘MAGIC’. The pale green dots are SSSIs, the olive ones are National Nature Reserves, the dark green ones are designated Local Nature Reserves

In 2008 Natural England (NE), the government nature agency for England, had the bright idea of using the MAGIC mapping system to show the public where taxpayers money was going to protect or restore nature, through ‘agri-environment’ schemes.  Despite hundreds of millions of pounds going to such schemes (at that time mainly EU funds, since Brexit purely UK), they were, like the nature they could not identify, effectively invisible to the electorate and politicians.

NE’s idea was that people who used ‘the internet’ when visiting the countryside, would be able to look at their phone and see not just their route on a public footpath, road or track but information about nature, including the specific areas where farmers and others were doing good things. I was contracted to write ‘plain English’ explanations of the scheme categories and organise some market testing but before it got much further, government financial austerity ended the project.

The detail on public financial support to farmers originally shown on this system was removed following objections by landowners, part of the national public interest – private interest battle recently chronicled by campaigner Guy Shrubsole in The Lie Of The Land.

Today Ordnance Survey maps and other apps like GoJauntly now show you online maps and suggest walks but not much about nature and I think it the basic NE idea remains a good one. Only it also seemed to me that the most effective way to signpost nature areas would probably be an app plus waymarks added to the physical signposts that (should) already mark every footpath in the country.

A permanent signpost marking a long distance footpath in Wales – from the Ramblers Association.  (In England and Wales most land is private and the only parts the public can rely for legal rights of access are ‘Public Footpaths’).

A condition of receiving public funding for some agri-environment schemes is ‘permissive’ (non-legal) public access.  In 2024 Farmers Weekly reported that ‘new payments for public access to farmland, which have not been available since 2015, are being introduced. Open access will attract a payment of £92/ha, while the creation of permissive footpaths will pay £77 per 100m and bridleways £158 per 100m’ (all annual payments for five years).

An old temporary sign denoting temporary public access on farmland

The temporary nature of such schemes has often been reflected in the temporary nature of the signs which mark them but it also sends a signal about the ephemeral nature of political commitment behind the scheme.  People are very sensitive to reading unintended messages from appearances.

Left: UK bus stop, right, Netherlands

A friend who works on improving bus services in National Parks told me that transport planners know that if the public see purpose-made enamelled metal signs giving timetables for buses or trains, they have far more confidence in relying on the service in place of a car, than if they see a plastic and paper temporary sign attached to street furniture.

Sign on metal, set in stone marking designation of the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in the US Florida Everglades, intended to be a permanent commitment

A brown ‘visitor attraction’ road sign.  Most nature reserves lack such signage.

A Fairyland Trust nature training visit to ‘Roadside Nature Reserves’, two of 111 RNRs, in Norfolk. Tiny relic fragments of roadside verges which somehow escaped agricultural herbicide spraying and over-fertilisation, and are now actively managed for nature.  Despite some of the participants living nearby they were previously unaware of the existence of these RNRs. Just showing people how small and now rare these flower-rich verges are, whereas all verges once looked like these, has a powerful effect (but it depends on first getting them to study ‘normal’ verges)

 Part of Britain’s inadvertently hidden nature heritage – hundreds of County Wildlife Sites and RNRs and SSSIs, on an obscure County Council map, produced by a resource-starved section of the Council.  Point source map of the Norfolk RNRs here.  Neighbouring Suffolk has a better system here.

Detail from the map of the two tiny Norfolk RNRs visited marked in purple nos. 64 and 104

Nature NGOs could work with the government to get much enhanced and more permanent signage for nature, including SSSIs touched by public access.

Signing Ecosystem Function

From Washington State in the US – a watershed forest creek

Here a system in Pennsylvania in the US, allows property owners to signal their support for and implementation of watershed conservation measures (details).

Many other countries are way ahead of the UK in making nature visible for its ‘Natural Capital’ ecosystem functions, simply by signing them.

Marking Nature Moments in Popular Culture

It’s a well known phenomenon that if you ask someone when they first noticed something, or changed their minds, they often will cite a change they noticed: a moment for instance when “I was walking down the street and I saw …”, or “it was only when I visited X that I realised…”.   This is of course much the same process the ‘prediction error’ learning underpinning Natural History, as opposed to formal hypothesis-testing science (see Section 5).

The 2024 ‘missing bumble bees and butterflies’ Silent Spring was one such ‘moment’ in which something unexpected was noticed, only not in a good way.

More positive ready-made nature-moments that people consciously wait for include the first Cuckoo, Swift or Swallow of Spring, or the flowering of Bluebells.  There are now hundreds of woods promoted as places to go and see the Bluebells but for some reason there is no National Bluebell Week (or possibly fortnight).  There ought to be one.

Where I live in Wells next the Sea, pretty much the whole town notices and talks about it, when the first Pink Footed Geese arrive from the north, usually in September.  These mark the seasons and punctuate our world in a reassuring way – that the clock of authentic nature still functions.  As Richard Mabey wrote:

‘we cannot just casually replace one thing by another.  A plantation will not ‘do’ for an ancient wood.  A dandelion cannot stand in for a primrose.  When the swifts return it is crucial that they are swifts, not starling, and that they are returning’

and ended his book The Common Ground with lines from Ted Hughes poem ‘Swifts’:

‘They’ve made it again,

Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s

Still waking refreshed, our summer’s

Still all to come

            And here they are, here they are again’

The Woodland Trust runs a ‘Nature’s Calendar’ project, guiding and asking people to help record on which dates wild plants come into leaf or produce flowers and fruit.

It’s certain that nature played a central role in making time from way before we had ‘dates’ in the sense of the Gregorian calendar we use today. Ancient Neolithic and later stick-calendars carved into bone, stone, ivory or wood, marked astronomical and ecological events such the timing of breeding wild birds, flowering and fruiting of plants and the migration of fish and whales, and are thought by some to be the origin of ‘magic wands’.

The Fairyland Trust took this as inspiration to invent a signs-of-time ‘Elf Stick’ Workshop:

Elf Stick ‘magical stick of time’ or yearly nature-clock  A black feather marks the arrival time of Swifts (in Norfolk). Contemporary wild plant and animal events on the yearly nature-clock are marked by leaves, flowers or symbols. The silver circlets are full moons, and the gold circlets the solar equinoxes.

Historically the the solar and lunar events were used to time Imbolc (also the Chinese New Year and the Christian Candelmas), and Beltane, Lammas and Halloween, which are ‘cross quarter’ nature based festivals.  These have innumerable folk traditions associated with them, such as how to manage hay meadows (shut out grazing animals at Imbolc/ Candelmas, let the hay grow, and then harvest it and let the animals back in after Lammas Day (in August)).  May is associated with Beltane celebrations of fertility, such as Maypole Dancing, which the Puritans tried to ban, and of course Swifts.

Awareness raising moments can kick start the process of change-making.  The basic audience campaign sequence I use is awareness> alignment> engagement> action (explainer).

In the case of nature it often starts with experiencing a primal sense of awe or wonder.  It might be in the mind of a small child discovering a world of insects on back yard flowers, or during a holiday snorkel across a coral reef, or on a first visit to an ancient forest, or to a Bluebell Wood in May but it’s frequently enhanced by having someone with you to point out “what we’re looking at” or in the case of a Nightingale, “what we are hearing”.  Such moments are often followed by an emotional conviction such as “this is wonderful it must be kept” or in the case of threat or loss, “this is terrible, it must be stopped”.

The BBC’s Lost Nature-Culture Moment 

The BBC prepares to live-broadcast Nightingales, 1924. In the 2010s the BBC said that technical challenges made repeating Outside Broadcasts of Nightingales too difficult. Photo from Science Museum

Mass broadcast media made it possible for millions of people to experience such moments together, from their homes.  The first ever live Outside Broadcast was made on BBC radio, from 10.45 – 11pm on May 19 1924.  It was also the first ever live broadcast of a wild bird.

This famous broadcast came about because musician Beatrice Harrison realised in 1923 that when she played the cello in her garden, she was being accompanied by a Nightingale singing in the adjacent woods.

Harrison told Lord Reith who ran the BBC, and next year the resulting historic live broadcast was listened to by a million people, some as far afield as Italy, Paris, Barcelona and Hungary.  The BBC interrupted a broadcast by the Savoy ‘Orpheans’ dance band to do so.  It was so popular that over 50,000 people wrote letters to Harrison, and in subsequent years, thousands turned up at the Harrison’s house to hear the Nightingales,  where the family fed them beer and tea.

The BBC continued the tradition each year, interrupting live radio concerts of dance music, until 1942 in World War 2.   A popular cultural nature event, if ever there was one, now lost.

By 2000, Nightingale numbers in the UK had plummeted 90% so when one sang on a heath near our house in Norfolk, I walked up the road up to listen, and wanting to share the experience with someone else, I called journalist Mike McCarthy and held up my phone to the bird.  Mike picked up just as he was leaving an Indian resturant on the Chiswick High Road in London.   He later wrote about the moment in The Independent.:

“Live. Real. Not a recording. Singing now. The five pure slow deep notes, then the characteristic jug-jug-jug, then the machine-gun rattle, all delivered fresh and clear on the night air.  For a moment, as the alcohol fumes swirled around my brain, I thought I was hallucinating; but by no means. The bird was singing in a copse … at Salthouse on the north Norfolk coast 140 miles away”. – Mike McCarthy, 2014

In 2014 when there were even fewer Nightingales to be heard,  I started a 38Degrees petition to get the BBC to restart the Reith Nightingale broadcasts, (more at Nightingale Nights).

3,000 people signed the Nightingale petition. I did my own amateur live broadcasts using internet sharing technology and a mobile phone. Andre Farrar from the RSPB and friends attempted to do a streaming broadcast from Kent and sound technician Richard Fair did one from Florndon near Norwich.

In the end, the BBC did broadcast a snatch of live song on a Springwatch programme and aired a string of programmes about musicians and singers performing with Nightingales but it never reinstated the annual live broadcast, citing technical challenges.  According to a friend in PR, the real reason was that they feared it would make them look old-fashioned to critics in government.

I still think it’s an idea which could help efforts to conserve these incredible birds.  Few people are unmoved by hearing the live song of a Nightingale, especially one singing alone on a quiet night.  In the UK where their dwindling numbers are concentrated in the South East, devotees can travel over a hundred miles to stand with others and hear one.  But it’s a nature experience that should be part of everyone’s culture, and a live broadcast could enable the whole nation to join in.

‘Spectaculars’

The RSPB, and the BBC’s Springwatch, Autumnwatch and Winterwatch, and others, have promoted numerous ‘bird spectacles’, such as Starling ‘murmurations’ around roosts.

‘Spectacles’ are great for nature engagement as they are discrete defined moments which are socially ‘portable’, shareable, referrable, recommendable: all qualities which commend themselves to the esteem-seeking Prospectors who are the major psychological group least served by the open-ended, multi-layered, often intellectualised environmental offers shaped by the Pioneers who dominate the hierarchies of cause organisations.

Put it another way, without the pyschographic jargon: spectacles are great as aspirational, mainstream people can enjoy them with confidence, without being made to feel looked down upon by smug ‘experts’.

A spectacle moment which now needs little promotion is watching Starlings around their roost above the sea on the piers at Brighton beach.  It has become a social reference point.  The Brighton Argus reported that the day after it featured in a 2023 Winterwatch broadcast, 5,000 people turned up to see the Starling murmuration.

Photo by Simon Dack, Brighton Argus – the dots in the sea are swimmers watching the Starlings (in 5.C water in February).  The Starlings roost under the Palace Pier and the ruined West Pier.

Watching the Starlings from Brighton Beach.  Photo Redmarkred on Reddit 

This commercial is one of the best videos of the Brighton murmuration.  Google rerturns 18,400 results for ‘starling murmuration video’.  In Brighton ‘catching the murmuration’ has become a social reference point.

Folk/pop singer Ella Clayton named her first LP ‘Murmurations’ after her wistful love song of the same name, including the line “and did you see the starlings murmurations by the pier as the sun set in?”  Youtube Video

Less accessible than Brighton beach Starlings but treated as a bucket-list nature must-see by birdwatchers, are the clouds of Knot, wintering shorebirds who each year come to the Wash on England’s East Coast. They come from Arctic breeding grounds as far away as Canada.

 BBC report incl video

The RSPB posts advice on seeing the ‘spectacular’ when very high tides force over 100,000 of the birds off their regular mudflats and into tight crowds on the RSPB Snettisham reserve.

Other bird ‘spectacular’s include gatherings of Red Kites which are fed at Llanddeusant in the Brecon Beacons and Gigrin Farm in Mid-Wales, and winter gatherings of wild geese and swans at many of the reserves run by the Wetlands and Wildfowl Trust, including Welney and Slimbridge.

The Night

A non-bird moment which can deeply affect us is the first time we get a good look at the stars.  Many people are fascinated by what goes on above their heads (and especially their homes) but which they don’t usually notice.

This was key to the the popularity of long running BBC tv programme The Sky At Night, started in 1957.  The original format was fronted by eccentric astronomer Patrick Moore until 2012, and showed viewers, originally in live broadcasts, the stars that were visible over their heads at the time of broadcast.

A ‘Sky At Night’ episode on BBC1 on 4 September 2013, featuring amateur astronomers in their back gardens, was watched by nearly 1.5 million.  Fearing modernizers at the BBC was about to axe the programme as ‘slow tv’ in the age of online, a petition to save it was signed 40,000. The BBC transferred it to the less watched BBC4, where it’s become a space issues magazine programme and lost the immediacy and home-sky connection of the original format.  [See current BBC astronomy content including a spin off online monthly ‘Sky at Night’ magazine on star gazing].

Of course in most places people in the UK live, light pollution makes it hard to see the real night sky.

With abundant evidence that light pollution is harming human health as well multiple elements of nature, from birds and trees to insects, there is great scope for nature groups to actively collaborate with the ‘Dark Skies’ movement.

CPRE light pollution map for England

Recently discovered – how lights create an ecological trap for insects, who try to keep their back to a bright light at night (such as the moon), and die by exhuasting themselves flying around artificial lights, or get eaten by predators. Also featured on Springwatch.

Norfolk-based nature guide David Atthowe of Reveal Nature uses a uv torch to make nature visible to people at night – from lichens and fish to fungi and moths.  His ‘safaris’ are consumable moments of discovery.  Above – at Ty Canol National Park during the 2024 Welsh national “Dark Skies Week”.

Cutting down light pollution is an easy to understand way to help nature, just by changing lighting.  Householders can do it through the home or garden lighting they chose, and street lighting is something that Councils can control and Councillors can decide.  As can businesses with exterior lighting.  So it’s easily available to NGOs for local, regional or national campaigns (as has been done much more in Europe, eg France, and in North America, than in the UK).

The introduction of LED street lighting has accidentally made the problem worse because most Councils have chosen ultra bright cold white lights which do the most harm.

Warm lights (with a light temperature rating below 2700K) do the least damage.  A case of warm lights good – cold lights bad. (All LEDs use far less energy than old tech bulbs).

Image adapted from https://blog.nitecorestore.com/color-temperatures-in-flashlights.html and Friends of the Lake District Good Lighting Guide

From the Cumbria /Lake District lighting guide.

Most bird migration takes place at night, with the birds feeding by day. In the United States, awareness of the harm done by lighting has also been driven by the huge numbers of migrant birds killed as they crash into windows of tall buildings, lured by lights. Campaigns have led some cities to organise switch-offs to save them, for example in Texas.  The organisation FLAP in Ontario, Canada campaigns to stop some of the one billion birds being killed by flying into lighted windows and reflective surfaces in North America, every year.

 This extraordinary artwork by Patricia Homonlyo is called ‘When worlds collide’. She explains: “The Layout honouring birds collected in [Toronto in] 2022 when FLAP recovered approximately 4,000 birds. This annual event serves to educate the public while providing closure for the volunteers”.

National Migration Moments

If you live right on the UK South Coast, a few times a year you may see clouds of migrant butterflies coming in from the sea having flown from Europe. If you live on the East Coast, you may notice swarms of Ladybirds on coastal vegetation as they do the same in summer, or see Blackbirds and other thrushes, even owls, coming ashore in the late autumn.  The birds then spread across the country.  These mass movements of birds usually only last a day or two.

In late autumn keen birdwatchers will go out into their gardens at night when they know migrant thrushes are passing overhead (they fly low) and listen out for the high pitched ‘seep’ call of Redwings from Scandinavia.  But that’s an unusual activity.  A few even more dedicated UK bird enthusiasts are part of a ‘NocMig’ Nocturnal Migration network, and set up microphones to capture and identify the calls of birds flying over at night ( examples).  In reality very few people are aware of the dramatic waves of migrating birds passing over millions of homes.     [The day after I wrote this the RSPB made listening for Redwings one of it’s six top Things To See in Nature for October but knowing when the birds would be flooding over, would help enormously].

One way to change this would be to use radar, which can detect flying birds and even tell how large they are.   Weather and air traffic radar already detects bird migration but in the UK the data is not made available, and is ‘scrubbed’ from the images used to show rain or aircraft.

In the US, Colorado State University and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology currently produce bird migration forecasts, similar to the weather forecast, using radar networks. They show predicted nocturnal migration 3 hours after local sunset and are updated every 6 hours.  This BirdCast system results from a 20 year collaboration between universities and government agencies.

This BirdCast ‘primer’ shows radar video of waves of birds on their autumn migration in October 2017, as they come in from Canada and head south. Some radar returns show them heading across the sea to the Caribbean, into Mexico towards Central America.

The real time BirdCast map (above) from 26 September 2024 shows 181.7 million birds in flight at 7am Eastern Time.

It would be possible to do the same in the UK, if the right organisations could collaborate. Some Dutch bird scientists do have access to radar – in the video image below, Hans van Gasteren @hvangasteren on twitter, showed a large surge of birds setting off for the UK from the Dutch coast in autumn 2022 (tech from RobinRadar).

Watch the video here – the red and yellow tracks indicate birds of different sizes.  

Conservationists speak of the “extinction of experience” as nature is eroded and we live lives more insulated from nature. We are aware of air traffic above us from the sound of jet engines and contrail pollution but generally the birds migrating high above us remain invisible.  Projects like BirdCast and the UV night walks can offer us some compensating “expansion of experience”.

Birding or birdwatching has transitioned from a weird and unusual past-time to a mainstream activity over the last 100 years so, for example, looking at a BirdCast style online map showing which birds are migrating over your home, would not be a social challenge.  The awareness that could be created neighbour to neighbour or friend to friend – “have you seen what’s happening?” – could then lead into other activities.

* * *

Cuckooflower – a plant in time with it’s bird

In 1994 ,for Flora Brittanica, Richard Mabey collected reports of the Cuckoo calling and the first-flowering dates of the Cuckoo-flower, or Lady’s Smock blooming, from around Britain.  He found ‘the first full blooming of Cuckooflower was a fairly accurate predictor of the first hearing of the bird itself’.

All sections

1 – Introduction And Nature Ability

2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity

3 – Signalling and Marking Moments

4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture

5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means

7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

Section 4 – Nature Events In Popular Culture

download as pdf

There are many initiatives and traditions around the UK which are about nature or rely on it to happen.  These are places and times where people do things which, if encountered by people who become politicians, would say, on the basis that ‘actions speak louder than words’, that “nature is important to voters”.  But there are not enough, and some of those that exist, could do with help and promotion.  Here are a few examples:

Tenbury Wells – UK’s Mistletoe Capital

An example of local identity and cultural reinvention around a nature-based business

Article from Shropshire Star

Every year for the last 160 years the small Worcestershire town of Tenbury Wells has hosted the Holly and Mistletoe auctions (this year 26^th November and 3^rd December).

On 20 October 2005 an unapposed Early Day Motion in the House of Commons congratulated Tenbury Wells Mistletoe Enterprise for ‘the foundation of a national mistletoe day on 1^st December each year’.  It had the support of eight Conservative, five Labour and four Liberal Democrat MPs and ‘wished the Enterprise well’ in continuing to maintain ‘the position of the area as the centre of the mistletoe trade’.

So although it was not a nature conservation proposition as such, it celebrated a cultural activity which would be impossible without nature.  A bit of local Natural Capital, which those 17 MPs engaged with. Tenbury takes that as an endorsement by Parliament.

Tenbury lies close to the borders with Shropshire and Herefordshire.  These counties, the Welsh Marches and the Severn Valley, are the UK centre of of Mistletoe, often growing on old trees in fruit orchards (but also Oak and a wide range of other trees).   Mistletoe was chosen by Herefordshire as its regional flower by public nomination, in the 2002 Plantlife County Flowers project, which has it’s own Wikipedia page

https://mistletoe.org.uk

Mistletoe has its own UK website run by Jonathan Briggs.

Prompted by fears the auctions would end when the livestock market site went up for sale,  Jonathan and four friends invented National Mistletoe Day and an annual ceremony to crown a Mistletoe Queen, to publicise the local Mistletoe culture in 2004/5.

Tenbury Mistletoe Association was set up in 2010 to help run an annual arts festival on the closest Saturday to National Mistletoe Day, the 1^st of December. With disarming frankness, its website states:

 ‘… the Town has been developing its identity as the UK’s Mistletoe Capital. This is unique and provides the Town with a branding that stands out amongst the rest’.

On the Saturday closest to 1^st December, National Mistletoe Day,  Tenbury on Wells holds a Mistletoe Festival and crowns the Queen.

Tenbury Mistletoe Association

Both Holly and Mistletoe have strong magical folklore associations, which is ultimately why we ‘bedeck the halls with boughs of Holly’, and kiss under the Mistletoe, at Midwinter and Christmas.  Mistletoe is a semi-parasite, growing on tree bark and getting its minerals from trees but making its own sugars from green leaves.  The Druids belived it powerful and its seeds are spread by berry-eating birds such as Mistle Thrushes, wiping their beaks on branches.  Richard Mabey writes in Flora Britannica that in Medieval times it seemed:

‘…  entirely magical – a plant without roots or obvious sources of food, that grew way above the earth and stayed green-leafed when other plants were bare.   It seemed the supreme example of spontaneous generation and continuing life.  

It is no wonder that it was credited with extraordinary powers … it was believed capable of breaking the death-like trances of epileptics, of dispelling tumours, divining treasure, keeping witches at bay, and protecting the crop of the trees on which it grew. And with its milk-white berries suggestively held between splayed leaves, it seemed ‘signed’ as a human potion and aphrodisiac too’.

Tenbury Mistletoe Association Facebook

Some local Mistletoe still appears at the Tenbury market alongside more that imported from France.

Plastic Mistletoe is now abundant in Supermarkets and ‘gift’ shops across Britain, appearing in Christmas decoration displays as early as late summer.

 

Mistletoe growing on a Willow tree full of thrushes, near Stroud – photo @Jamiewa50042387  on Twitter

Drummers, dancers and Druids frequent the Fesitival – here along the River Teme – photo Cheeky Monkey on facebook

 

Helping Toads Across Roads

An example of established volunteer-initiated and supported wildlife action

Road-kill is sadly the only way many people become aware of local wildlife such as Toads and Hedgehogs.  Helping a Toad across the road has become a visible community activity for nature, with people using torches and buckest to help them cross and in some cases building tunnels fo Toads, at hundreds of places in the UK.  In 1989 Tom Langton estimated there were 400 human-assisted road crossings in the UK, moving half a million Toads, Frogs or Newts. In 1995 71 Toad Patrols were found to have moved 20-40,000 Toads.

Toads are very committed to using Toad-traditional migrating routes to return to their ancestral ponds to breed each spring.  (They are less dependent on wet conditions than frogs and will over-winter clustered in groups in dry spots such as under a log or stone, they also walk rather than hop). As a result an estimated 20 tonnes of Toads get squashed by UK road traffic every year [a large toad is 80g so that’s 250,000 animals].

Seeing this early spring carnage, at some point someone started helping Toads across roads, and it became a voluntary community activity, accompanied first by home made and then official County Council road signs.

In 1999 Nottingham wildlife Trust member Margaret Cooper successfully campaigned for a Toad season temporary road closure at Oxton – here in 2015. 

 

In 2024 Margaret’s efforts to secure the now annual road closure at Beanford Lane, Oxton were recognized by the driver’s organisation, the AA

Signing roads and helping Toads makes nature visible to many more people but it also focuses close attention on changes in the the state of nature.  As Margaret Cooper she told the BBC this year, when the Oxton road closure started, she estimated 1,000 toads would cross there every month but “Now it’s no more than 100 or two”. A 2016 study using national Toad crossing data found numbers had declined by two thirds since the 1980s.  The reasons are being investigated but may include the direct and indirect effects of loss of habitats, and pesticides, as with Hedgehogs.  Toads live up to a mile from their breeding ponds so numbers migrating are a bellwether for wider conditions affecting nature.

Froglife’s Toad Crossing Network map shows where crossings are manned and where they need more volunteers

Hedgehog Crossings

Ian Mansfield’s London Visits blog reported in September 2024 that Kingston Council had become the first council in the country to install official hedgehog crossing road signs.

‘Over the past four years, Kingston Council has collaborated with the London Hogwatch Team, deploying wildlife cameras that helped confirm that there is a hedgehog hotspot in Old Malden. As a result, four new road signs have been unveiled’.  The cameras also picked up a Pine Marten.

Harleston Town’s Swift Culture

An example of a town deciding to make a nature moment celebration an annual event

Swifts migrate from Africa to the UK arriving at almost exactly the same time each year – where I live they usually appear in the first week of May, which was also the case back in 1923*. [* NNS Transcations 100 Years Ago, Bulletin of the Norfolk And Norwich Naturalists Society, May 2023, No. 161]

Knowing Swifts have been in steep decline and that one reason is traditional nest-holes being blocked up by building owners, a growing number of of people have put up tailor made Swift nest boxes and other nesting cavities, and then watch out for their return with anticipation.  Some places people have gone a step further than this has become part of the local culture, such as Harleston in Suffolk where people started putting out ‘Welcome Back’ flags.

Harleston, Suffolk 2015 – from the Harleston’s Future Facebook page

Swifts mobile made by children in Harleston Church

Harleston 2017 with Swift Boxes

Harleston 2024

Petersfield – Nature In A Commuter Town

An example of a small town with multiple enagement actions for nature

Mention Petersfield in Hampshire to most English people and they probably think of a conservative small London-commuter town but I think it thinks of itself more as a market Town.  And it’s also home to the Petersfield Climate Action Network, a community based NGO set up in 2020, which runs an almost bewildering variety of environmental and nature related projects.  Most of its founders met through involvement with Extinction Rebellion, and over Covid, decided to focus on things practical and near to home.

PeCAN’s activities include supporting ‘No Mow May’ and campaigns to encourage more wildflowers in roadside verges, making the Petersfield area carbon neutral as quickly as possible, schools outreach and an eco-cafe, mapping energy needs and usage and helping develop new sustainable housing, a home retrofit advice service, free thermal imaging of homes in winter, a winter Tree Festival, toy and present swaps, a project supplying subsidised fruit trees and growing advice so as to increase the blossom for insects, a Swift nest box scheme, and advice on wildlife gardening.

PeCAN write about roadside verges:

to make longer verges more diverse in their plant species to the benefit of insects, the mowed cuttings (arisings) must be removed and taken away to compost elsewhere. This requires (a) investment in new (actually old!) machinery that cuts and collects, and (b) a repository composting site. Other local authorities nearby – Basingstoke & Deane, Dorset and Sussex – appear to manage this and are proud of their achievement, so why cannot authorities in Hampshire, one of the wealthiest parts of the country, step up to this relatively straightforward challenge?

In conjunction with the Town Council PeCAN runs a July eco Fair which this year attracted over 1500 people.  Opened by the Town Crier and the Mayor, it included entertainment, photography and children’s writing competitions, and stalls covering travel (with bicycle repairs on offer, bikes for sale and EV owners to chat to), nature, energy and low waste living.

With support from East Hampshire District Council the Tree Council, and Network Rail volunteers (above) last winterPeCAN’s “A Fruit Tree In Every Garden’ project added 1,000 to the 950 it had already distributed, and planting for 2.7km of new hedging.

Over 120 Swift boxes have been put up in PeCAN’s Swift Streets project.  One woman persuaded 28 other householders in her street to take part.  PeCAN works on planning issues and engaging with local and regional decision makers including the District and Town Councils, South Downs National Park but is a truly street by street engagement operation.

One of its blogs reported:  ‘In May one six year old put a chalk notice outside their house about the danger to nature of spraying the road with chemicals. Neighbour after neighbour asked him to do the same outside their houses. Our road was not sprayed. Well done, Chester!’

 

PeCAN encourages people to put up ready-made signs asking their Council not to spray street flowers, or weed the area outside their house by hand so it does not ‘need’ spraying.  – Pesticide-free Petersfield Campaign

None of the PeCAN activities are remarkable in themselves but what is unusual is the density and variety of its mainly volunteer-driven work, and its very localised and public facing engagement.

In a town of 15,000 people and 39,000 including the surrounding “Petersphere” (as defined by local Shine Radio including villages), it directly engages 4 – 10% of the population, which is not bad for an organisation set up only four years ago.

 

The Golden Triangle of Wild Daffodils

 An example of volunteer action to restore nature in danger of losing its cultural authenticity

The Wild Daffodils which inspired Wordsworth are now a rare sight. Community led conservation projects are attempting to return Wild Daffodil populations to their former glory in England’s ‘Golden Triangle’.

Wild Daffodils in Kempley SSSI daffodil meadow in Gloucestershire

‘Golden Triangle’ is the name given to the area around Newent, Dymcock and Ledbury on the borders of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire.

‘in the 1930s, the Great Western Railway began running ‘Daffodil Specials’ from London, for the sake of weekend tourists who came to walk among the ‘golden-tides’ and to buy bunches at farm gates’ – Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica

The ‘Daffodil Line’ railway was closed in 1959 in the Beeching cuts but lives on as a community bus service which is a good way to get to see hosts of Wild Daffodils in the Golden Triangle.  Kempley village holds a Daffodil Festival in March.

https://daffodilline.co.uk

In his magnum opus of wild plant culture, Flora Britannica,  Mabey explains that the native Wild Daffodil ‘is now a rare plant across great stretches of England and Wales, a flower that people make pilgrimages to see in a ‘host’.  Yet in the late sixteenth century John Gerard regarded it as growing ‘almost everywhere’ in England and was ‘so well knowne to all that it needeth no description’’’.

In Germany the Wild Daffodil was the subject of a national ‘Flower of the Year’ awareness campaign for the protection of wildflowers in 1981. In the UK populations of Wild Daffodils now pale into insignificance compared to the tide of ornamental varieties planted (there are 26,000 varieties), including along roadsides. Hybridization with these usually much larger, gaudier, cultivated plants, threatens to wipe out the identity of the delicate ‘miniaturized’ Wild Daffodil. A single UK commercial grower produces 70m ornamental daffodils a year and non-wild daffodils grow in over 80% of UK gardens.

Some of the varieties of Daffodils but not the Wild Daffodil

Wild Daffodils are indicators of ancient woodland and old soils which escaped agricultural ‘improvement’.  The hedgerows, Forest of Dean woods and meadows of the Golden Triangle which hold Wild Daffodils are also famous for numbers of rare orchids, Wild Service Trees, Lily of the Valley and Herb Paris.  (Listen to a Richard Mabey radio programme about Wild Daffodils).

Wild Daffodils in the Forest of Dean – Dyfra

Chris Bligh and others in the community group Dyfra, Dymock Forest Rural Action have been working to protect, publicise and reinstate Wild Daffodils, and weed out threatening hybrids, since 1998.  They write:

Until the 1950s, the wild daffodil grew here in great profusion. The annual harvest brought in seasonal workers to help locals cut huge swathes of daffodils which were then distributed by rail along the Daffodil Line …  to the flower markets in Birmingham, Bristol and London. The wild daffodil no longer grows here so profusely due to its diminishing habitat, caused by the loss of ancient woodlands and orchards and changing agricultural practices, especially during and after the Second World War.

Dyfra volunteers remove hybrid Daffodils from Wild Daffodil populations still growing in Ancient Woodland.  

In the 2010s Dyfra volunteers hand-removed 30,000 cultivated Daffodils which originated from planting in the 1960s, to exploit the Mother’s Day market.

Dyfra’s work has included Wild Daffodil seed collection with assistance of 75 ‘Seed Guardians’ in local parishes, creating a glade of 600 native trees in place of a former Christmas Tree plantation on the Centenary of the Forestry Commission, school arts projects, new Daffodil paths, a ‘Cultural Continuum’ exhibition with local poets and path-makers, Daffodil meadow management, making new habitat corridors to connect local woodland, and collecting acorns of native Sessile Oaks to grow on for new plantings.

Volunteers with Dyfra creating a native tree glade in place of a Christmas Tree plantation, Forest of Dean

Collection of native Sessile Oak acorns by Dyfra

Chris Bligh (right) and team of volunteers spreading native flower and tree seed

Loading acorns [above photos from Dyfra website]

Cultivated Daffodils growing on a bank in the Golden Triangle village of Dymock (see below) – many times the size of the native Wild Daffodils which gave the area its name.

In Dymock village, Dyfra volunteers have worked with a local landowner to remove cultivated Daffodils from a road bank, opposite the pub. Chris Bligh explains:

“We are replacing them with wild ones which have just survived in grassland on the other side of the 1850s vintage estate fence.  The landowner has agreed to to allow a five metre buffer strip around the field under the fence – and plans a Sustainable Farming Incentive grass ley and a three-acre Conservation Orchard with the hope of a new Wild Daffodil field underneath the trees”.

Before work started in Dymock: the small Daffodils on the left side of the fence are the surviving natural Wild Daffodils – the large one on the right side are the cultivated ones.

Preparing the site in Dymock

Dymock  community volunteers clearing a bank from which cultivated daffodils have been removed, so it can be replanted with Wild Daffodils.

Pots to grow on Wild Daffodils from seed (Dyfra says: ‘ unlike  cultivated daffodils, the wild daffodils propagate from seed taking about 4 years to reach the flowering stage; they then flower again for another 2 or 3 years. It is therefore important not to cut the grass until the flowers have seeded and the seeds have matured – usually late June or early July’ .) [Above photos sequence – all Chris Bligh]

 

The Bugs Matter Survey

Example of an activity involving a cultural activity – driving – not fixed to place

Each year from May 1 to 30 September, the Kent Wildlife Trust and Buglife run a ‘Bugs Matter’ survey of insects, involving drivers.  Driving is part of daily life for many people, and taking part can give drivers anywhere, a sense of agency about nature. Using their cars or vans they check on the abundance of flying insects, by inspecting the ‘splats’ on their number plates.

Originally launched by the RSPB in 2003 when 40,000 drvers took part, the RSPB Splatometer project it used paper ‘Splatometers’ on number plates. (See more here).  It provides important data on the decline of insects.

The idea came to Phil Rothwell and other RSPB staff on a trip to see agrcultural areas in former Eastern europe after enlargement of the EU. As they drove East, they felt they were going back in time, as the car windscreen got more and more insects splatted on it.

This ‘folk memory’ resonated strongly with cyclists and drivers who remembered insect abundance from the 1960s.  As that memory fades the project might face ‘shifting baseline’ challenges but it connects to driving culture, and could involve drivers organisations such as the AA, ETA or RAC. It could also help people detect any recovery in insects, if it happens, for example through Rewilding (optimism is of course motivational).

Bugs Matter video

 

Fairyland Trust Events

A conservation group with an audience strategy based on entertainment culture

When we started the Fairyland Trust which uses plant and animal folklore, ‘making’ workshops, multiple learning styles and ‘magical days out’ to engage families with young children in nature, the existing cultural activity we targeted was not an attempt to engage people with ancient magical beliefs but engaging with the modern culture of a ‘family day out’.  We embedded nature learning as a benefit and reward but it was promoted as a day-out, not a green day or environment fair.  The “country fair” format is very old but also still socially recognizable as ‘normal’, hence the “Fairy Fairs”, begun in 2001.

Posters for the Fairy Fair and The Real Halloween in 2024

The motivational insight was that parents are desperate to entertain their 3 – 8 year olds at the weekend, and by 2001 many parents felt that there were only so many bouncy castles, plastic dinosaurs and traction engine rallies they could tolerate.

In the 1990s, we’d seen a growing fashion for Fairy Wings and things magical amongst festival goers, and then Harry Potter books were pubished from 1997 to 2007, so by 2001 witches, wizards and magic were ‘zeitgeist’ content.  Our events were designed to have something for all motivational values groups but especially Prospectors, so there was entertainment, shopping, a magical pub and performers as well as nature workshops.   We knew it was working when one dad said “you’ve invented an organic Disney” (as Disney said “first entertain”).

Graphic on plastic halloween costumes, shared online over a million times

To make the events as sustainable as possible we had started to eliminate plastic before 2010, when we added The Real Halloween (next one 26/7 October), as a more authentic nature-based counterpoint to the prevailing commercial shock and horror sugar fest model, with kids in polyester shop bought costumes.   Parents/ carers are encouraged to assemble their own costumes instead, and we hold a no-new plastic Fancy Dress Show.

Waiting to join the Parade of Animal Lanterns at The Real Halloween

Fairyland Trust workshops are designed for young children, for whom there is no barrier between imagined and real, but in recent years we found that when we took them to festivals, they were also popular with ‘20 somethings’ (Gen Z and Y).

They wanted something enjoyable, social, displayable and ‘different’ to do (such as making and wearing a Wildflower Crown) before going out raving. As a generation, they were already primed to be interested in ‘nature’ but mostly ignorant about it.

Over COVID lockdown our daughters and their friends invented an engagement mechanism designed specifically for their contemporaries, which they tested online.

That started as an “about me” type quiz ‘which wildflower are you?’.

It proved popular so they reasoned that once lockdowns ended, a real-world 3D version might be even more popular at festivals.  The result was the ‘Wild Flower Fortunes Caravan’.

 

The Wildflower Fortunes Caravan at Glastonbury Festival – the visitors are holding cards of their Wildflowers, divined by fortune telling. The moths shown on the two of 40 cards shown are the Flame Brocade Moth (foodplant, buttercup) and the Crimson Speckled Moth (foodplant Forgetmenot).  From the Caravan’s Instagram page.

Festival goers who discovered their ‘spirit wildflowers’ at Boomtown festival (2024). Almost all visitors said they knew almost nothing about wildflowers (including what a wildflower was) before their visit.  Afterwards many wanted to grow wildflowers at home.

***

Apologies to all those also running popular culture events in which nature plays an essential role, which I’ve not mentioned – I’d be interested to hear about them, if you’d like to get in touch. chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

***

All sections

1 – Introduction And Nature Ability

2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity

3 – Signalling and Marking Moments

4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture

5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means

7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

Section 5  – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

download as pdf

Natural History is undergoing something of a revival but over the last century it went from being a mainstay of UK culture to a backwater interest, as the conservation movement mostly sidelined it in favour of ecological science, and the ‘alternative’ environmental revolution largely passed it by.

Important and facsinating though ecological science is (I am a fan), Natural History works in a different way, which makes it more ‘relatable’ and accessible person to person.  It also relates directly to place, landscape and identity, all of which make give it huge potential for building connections between nature and popular culture.

Traces Of Nature Culture

Nobody was measuring public levels of  ‘Natural History Knowledge’ before the late C20th era of opinion polling and environmental anxiety but the nature ability prevailing in times past has left its traces all over popular culture, such as in entertainment, stories, religion, traditions, folk beliefs, decor and businesses.

If you’ve ever “touched wood” or thrown a coin into a fountain or ‘wishing well’ for luck, you’ve engaged with nature beliefs going back not just to Anglo Saxon times but the Bronze Age.  Such traces provide abundant evidence that ability to identify wild plants was once normal because it was essential for treating illness in people and farm animals, and for food.

Nature knowledge was still common knowledge in the C16th, when William Shakespeare conjured up these lines for Oberon, King of the Fairies, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine: There sleeps Titania sometime of the night …’

Shakespeare’s audience were probably aware of what those wildflowers actually looked like, even if they don’t actually all grow and bloom in the same place.  They would be rarely encountered in the everyday lives of most theatre-goers today.  In The Tempest he had the spirit Ariel sleep in the bell of a Cowslip, which is not a Primrose but how many contemporary playrights or movie makers would know the difference?

Cowslips left and Primroses, right

Living Legends

Natural History knowledge used to be vital in marking out our landscape.  Medieval and ‘Dark Age’ equivalents of surveyors and politicians often referred to specific native tree species in marking out the ‘bounds’ of estates and territories that became parishes.  In The Real Middle Earth, Sussex University psychologist and Shaman Brian Bates shows how the Dark Age folklore which inspired J R Tokein’s landcsapes in Lord of the Rings is geographic not imaginary – it’s this country.

Due to various historical accidents described by writers such as Oliver Rackham, the UK still has more ancient trees than anywhere else in Europe.  They are painstakingly plotted by the Ancient Tree Forum, and the subject of the Woodland Trust’s ‘Living Legends’ campaign.  Such old trees, often hundreds and some thousands of years old, are a key ingredient of the ’mysterious’ feel to many UK landscapes, often refered to by visitors from the European mainland but largely un-noticed by modern UK citizens.

1066

Many such trees were sites of cultural importance or landmarks known to ‘Celts’ and Anglo Saxons.  Richard Muir describes how on learning that the Normans had landed in Southern England in 1066, Saxon King Harold gathered the English army at the ‘Hoar Apple Tree’, a ‘landmark tree’ on Caldbec Hill in the Sussex Downs.  (Hoar means a tree made hoary looking by being encrusted with lichen, probably a very old tree).    We still couple “hoary” with “old” but the living coat of muticoloured lichens was almost totally wiped out by industrial air pollution in the C19th and 20^th, leaving book illustrators and graphic designers with a standard image of tree trunks as just ‘brown’.

1930s

Detail from Walter Spradberry’s  ‘Flowers of the Season’ London transport poster (1933) which could almost serve as an identification guide, showing realistic Harebell, Scabious, Tormentil, Ragwort, Chicory, Feverfew and others.

Before chemical herbicides such ‘wayside flowers’ were abundant and often gathered for Village Show competitions, as medicinal herbs, or for decorating churches and homes. So no surprise that they featured in commercial art used to promote taking a bus to the countryside.  In later decades, graphics in advertisements became more abstract and C21st visualisations of ‘meadows’ and even ‘nature’ brand products routinely show astroturf style blank green grass with or without token yellow blob dandelions or, a variety of multicoloured but unreal, or non-native flowers. [Read more].

1950s

Another indicator of the past knowledge and abundance of wild plants is the diversity of their different local (‘folk’) names collected by poet, writer and naturalist Geoffery Grigson for The Englishmans Flora.  Published in 1955 just before intensive chemical farming started to sterilise the countryside, many of the traditional names relate to pre-Christian magical beliefs about the role of plants, as well as their uses in food and medicine.

Take some of the wild flowers said (it varies) to be traditionally placed in the ‘May Garland’ or ‘Fairy Garland’ at the top of a Maypole: Red Campion, Stitchwort, Dandelion, Bluebell, Blackthorn, Elder, Hawthorn, Rowan, Wood Sorrel and Herb Robert.

For Red Campion, Grigson records 63 local names, for Stitchwort 106, Dandelion 53, Bluebell 83, Blackthorn 27, Elder 17, Hawthorn 74, Rowan 38, Wood Sorrel 57 and Herb Robert, a small pink cranesbill now commonly regarded as a garden ‘weed’ but with an enormous list of magical associations, no fewer than 111, including ‘Pucks Needles’.

 Ancient May cycle nature traditions were exported from Europe to America and became a version of  ‘May Day’ in the US. The traditional garland was of local wildflowers.

When Natural History Was Popular Culture

‘Natural History’ became a hugely popular interest in of the C19th, including in the UK.  As a science it went back to the Ancient Greeks but Natural History Societies and ‘Field Clubs’ sprang up all over the newly industrialised societies including the UK.

Natural History was taught in C19th universities, schools, and informally, among the Societies themeslves, with countless expeditions to record and collect specimens, journals in which to record findings, and buildings to display collections.  London’s Natural History Museum opened in 1881.

More than this, having a good general knowledge of nature where you lived was widely respected and fashionably emulated.  Lacking cars and foreign holidays, efforts were usually local and contributed to municipal and regional civic pride.

In 2014 Jennifer Frazer wrote an anguished account of the rise and subsequent decline of Natural History education in a Scientific American blog Natural History is Dying, and We Are All the Losers.   She pointed out that when ‘Natural History flourished’ in the 18th and 19th centuries, not only Linnaeus and Darwin, but the US Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt ‘were avid and avowed naturalists’. It was ‘a time when basic knowledge of local plants and animals was considered part of a good education — and of being a good citizen’ …. [and]

‘ Anna Botsford Comstock published a textbook in 1911 for elementary students and teachers called Handbook of Nature-Study which exploded in popular sales. Between 1890 and 1940 texts such as hers were an essential part of classrooms across America. The aim was to train teachers and facilitate direct contact between children and living organisms in order to create an “essential nature literacy”’.

‘A Masterpiece of Social Mechanics’

Natural History Societies were open, involving and in the cutural mainstream of the time. To support their activities such as exhibitions, museums and libraries, ‘Societies held fundraising events, including popular musical acts, dinners with visiting speakers and even gambling. This of course made Natural History locally visible and socially embedded, and it was promoted as good for health and social standing.

Diarmid Finnegan records that C19th Scotland had at least 70 Natural History Societies and ‘Botany, geology and meteorology … were recommended … as physically and mentally invigorating pastimes’.   David Page, geologist and ‘enthusiast for intellectual culture’ advocated for more field clubs and science associations because ‘natural history , more than other forms of intellectual culture, offered a stimulating distraction from the debilitating effects of routine urban existence’  Page was careful to point out the dangers of narrow scientific professionalism , a condition incompatible with “the duties of brotherly sympathy , honest manliness , and good citizenship , which render life sweet and society enjoyable’’.

In The Naturalist in Britain, David Allen describes the field club model as a ‘masterpiece of social mechanics’ because, says Finnegan:  ‘With low subscription rates , out-of-doors camaraderie and general informality , field clubs had an appeal that transcended social divisions of gender and class even if the impact of an egalitarian ethos was uneven’.

These days perhaps only competitive sport is credited with such benefits.

C20th: Natural History Decline

The main factor which eventually sent the civic natural history into decline was the growing dominance of professionalised science.  Having succeeded in popularising nature education to the point where it was adopted in the formal education system, once there, its advocates saw it progressively eclipsed by more ‘modern’ sciences, which were regarded as a superior form of learning.  Frazer writes of the US:

‘Naturalists … commanded respect at universities, and taught many field classes and courses … dedicated to identifying and understanding the life histories and evolutionary relationships of particular groups of organisms: flowering plants, mosses, lichens, mammals, fungi, insects, invertebrates, birds, insects, fossils, birds, and so on — a host of tangible living things to which people could directly relate …

After World War II, everything changed … The pendulum swung away from outdoor field studies toward indoors laboratory research on fundamental processes. Scientists who studied underlying processes of biology — evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, etc., — got bigger grants and better publications than those who studied the organisms themselves. Funding and grants for natural history evaporated’.

How Conservation Let Natural History Slip

The foundations of most of UK conservation – government and NGOs – were laid in post-war Britain.  A desire to see it taken seriously inadvertently contributed to a decline in Natural History.

The first UK National Nature Reserve, at Beinn Eighe, purchased in 1951.

In 1949 the UK Government ‘Nature Conservancy’ was set up by Max Nicholson, a lifelong hyper-active polymath with a visionary talent for identifying needs for political or social machinery and then fixing them.  Nicholson played critical roles in founding or operationalising WWF, the BTO, IIED the RSPB, as well as initiating the UK’s urban nature parks movement and the strategic data journal ENDS.  Aiming to convince politicians and the media of the importance of nature conservation, he strong-armed the BBC into funding the start up of the Council for Nature’s ‘intelligence unit’, to promote environmental coverage.  That led to CoEnCo which led to the current UK NGO umbrella group Wildlife and Countryside Link.

A fan of expertise being “on top, not on tap”, of data, and of scientific rigour, as well as being an accomplished naturalist, Nicholson was also a WW2 and post-war Civil Servant familiar with the machinery of power, in which he played numerous senior roles.  Seeing the political authority accorded to Science in post war Britain, Nicholson made sure the original Nature Conservancy had the status of a ‘Scientific Service’, in effect a Research Council.

“we made a policy decision to write off the Natural History Societies, which we considered utterly useless for this new age of conservation” – Max Nicholson

A pragmatist, in 1980 Nicholson told Charlie Pye-Smith and Phillip Lowe, “the important task was to vindicate the role of ecology as a science through serious quantitative and experimental research, and thus make possible the creation of a science-based conservation movement  which in turn could lead to a broader professional environmental programme”.

Nicholson’s vision was largely realised.  There is now a large UK ‘environmental management’ policy community, with professional organisations.  He also anticipated that for political reasons, the fledgling Conservancy would need a ‘strong voluntary support movement’, so he channeled funds into building up “a complete network of County Naturalists Trusts” [now The Wildlife Trusts].  Again he succeeded but as he also said, “we made a policy decision to write off the Natural History Societies, which we considered utterly useless for this new age of conservation”.

At the time it was probably the best option but just as nobody foresaw that the voluntary conservation groups would find themselves fighting to mitigate wholesale change, from road building to intensive farming, blanket forestry and pollution – and despite their best efforts and significant growth in memberships and nature reserve estates, failing overall,  nor did they anticipate the arrival of attention-driven politics, or the national withering of nature knowledge or its consequences.

In the C20th today’s major nature and environment groups made it their task to find ways to persuade naturalists to join conservation efforts, and alert the wider public to the need for environmental action (in which they succeeded, at a conceptual level).  It was not to introduce the wider public to natural history, as that didn’t seem to be necessary.  And nor, with the partial exception of the RSPB and birds, have they ever done so at scale.

C21st: Calls For Natural History Revival

‘Ernest Rutherford famously said “all science is either physics or stamp collecting”. No science has perhaps been a bigger victim of this attitude than natural history’ – Jennifer Frazer

In recent decades some scientists, especially those with ‘field skills’ (ie mainly, natural history knowledge) have become increasingly concerned that their own community is becoming estranged from nature, as an unintended consequence of its attempts to be increasingly ‘rigorous’, and more like technological sciences promising to lead to commercial applications and economic growth.  From the 1970s, computing power and modelling enabled mathematicians to create and test hypotheses at the cutting edge of ecological research, so long as they had data. They had little need to tell one species from another, even if they met them while out for a walk.

In 2007, American scientists and field naturalists Stephen Trombulak and Thomas Fleischner from Arizona pointed out that a 1994 survey  found ‘a surprising number’ of the American Society of Naturalists had themselves equated an interest in natural history with being an ‘unsuccessful biologist’. They issued a call for a ‘renaissance in natural history’, started a journal, and set up an institute to promote it.   In 2014 Joshua Tewksbury and 17 other scientists, published Natural History’s Place in Science and Society, in the journal BioScience. They detailed a significant decline in natural history practice and called for its ‘revitalisation’.

China’s Natural History Revival Movement

The most coherent and comprehensive cultural and social rationale I’ve come across for a revival of natural history is not from the UK, or indeed Europe or North America but from China.  At least so far as I can judge from this 2023 article in Nature’s  ‘Humanities & Social Science Comunications’, by Siyu Fu and Kristian Nielsen at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Huajie Liu of Peking Universty – find some of his (English Language) work at ResearchGate.Net)

Their account centres on the work of Liu Huajie at Peking University, whose thinking seems very relevant to many of the issues facing the nature movement in the UK.

Siyu and Nielsen write that Liu is ‘widely considered the main protagonist and public spokesperson of the NHRM’ or Natural History Revival Movement in China.

Liu wrote a book Living As A Naturalist (only available in Chinese) in 2016.  ‘Living As A Naturalist’ is a philosophy and a call for a movement, or a movement in practice, depending how you view it.  Siyu and Nielsen write:  ‘the call for naturalism as a way of life applies to individual citizens and communities’. ‘Living As A Naturalist’ also attracted a following of Chinese-speakers living overseas, through viewers of Phoenix TV.

The authors begin Liu’s story in the 1990s, when he ‘became known as a staunch critic of pseudoscience’ as opposed to ‘science proper’.  But after wining an award to study it, ‘Liu had modified or even reversed his original standpoint’ and:

 ‘around 2000, Liu Huajie began publishing academic and news articles, all of which called for a revival of natural history amidst a virtual flood of books in Chinese about nature and experiencing nature’.

In 2007 the Chinese Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)  adopted the concept of building an ‘Ecological Civilisation’ or the EC, which became part of the Constitution in 2012. The rationale included avoiding ‘progress traps’ caused by environmental degradation.

Siyu Fu and Kristian Nielsen say the NHRM ‘entails an alternative vision of EC with associations around nature as an important political force’, and with less emphasis on achieving it through science and technology.

They add ‘Liu Huajie defends natural history as a legitimate and relevant mode of knowledge production’ … and  ‘in contrast to how people in China usually understand science, the natural history approach emphasises inductive learning and emotional engagement with its subject matter, rather than hypothetical deduction and detachment’.

The paper describes how a large number of bird-watching clubs and local and national nature organisations have become established in China and their science or citizen science has influenced local conservation policies.  Liu uses BOWU [Beauty, Observation, Understanding, Wonder] as an acronym to present or memorise the aims of the kind of natural history education that he advocates.  In my opinion, that’s also good advice for the nature movement in the UK.  More about Liu’s approach from the paper in Nature:

To really see nature, one will have to get to know it, which is why, according to Liu, naming natural entities is important.

Liu compares knowing the names of plants and animals to knowing the names of famous actors. To appreciate cultural products such as Hollywood movies, we want to know the names of the actors in the movies. Similarly, to appreciate nature, we need to know the names of plants and animals in nature.

Education in this case means practice and learning-by-doing, not formal training by following a well-defined curriculum. Liu cites the nineteenth century Swiss-born naturalist Louis Agassiz to make his point: ‘Study nature, not books’.

Learning how to practice natural history in the modern age, Liu suggests supervised training. Natural history training is different from professional training or on-the-job training. There are no specific aims or learning goals involved in the kind of natural history envisaged by Liu other than inciting curiosity about nature and love of nature. 

I’d recommend anyone interested in organising action to improve nature ability in the UK to read Siyu Fu and Kristian Nielsen’s paper  Reviving natural history, building ecological civilisation: the philosophy and social significance of the Natural History Revival Movement in contemporary China.

Natural History’s Particular Political Potential

In my view we need both Ecology-the-science and Natural History but there are political reasons why Natural History is now particularly important for conservation.

First, because it is socially accessible to the great majority of the public who are never going to become professional ecologists, and second, because it has a distinct psychology that is far more intuitive than the hypothesis-testing of formalised science.

In a short 2022 article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, The psychology of natural history,  New Zealand researchers Kevin Burns and Jason Low lay out how Natural History has a distinct methodology called ‘prediction error learning’.

This means learning from seeing something unexpected, suprising or remarkable, which is then assessed against prior knowledge, as opposed to the powerful but different process of setting an a priori hypothesis and then testing it, which became the bedrock of ‘scientific methods in the C20th (the ‘hypotheticodeductive research paradigm’).

Because prediction-error learning is enabled by having a baseline knowledge of what’s ‘normal’ in nature and how it works, people with nature ability (naturalists and others observing nature ‘in the field’) are at the frontline for nature conservation. They are most able to notice anything new, including disappearance or non-appearance of something familiar, or the appearance of something unfamiliar, such as the nature-gardeners who noticed the 2024 ‘Silent Spring’.

	Natural History	Ecological/ env science
Learning method	Prediction error	Hypothesis testing
Entry Requirements	None	Academic qualifications
Primary communications Channel	Track 1, System 1 intuitive	Track 2, System 2 Professional analytical
Social open-ness	High	Low
Cultural availability potential	High	Low
Current UK comm’s framing	A hobby/ pastime	A science/ discipline/ profession
Capacity to analyse invisible risks and processes (eg climate)	Low	High

(My interpretation)

People who still directly depend on a particular feature of nature or plant or animal for their livelihood can of course also be in this position.  For example the 1980s ‘Waldsterben’ or ‘forest-decline’ became a huge social and political issue, starting in Germany (see ch. 5 in The Dirty Man of Europe).  The first people to notice something was wrong (perhaps in the 1970s) were locals who went into old-growth forests to collect trimmings from felled Silver Fir or Tannen Baum, the traditional Christmas tree, to make decorative wreaths.  Rather than shiny green foliage, they found it was going sickly yellow or brown.

1981 – ‘Acid Rain’ and ‘Forest Decline’ became a big political issue and scientific controversy in Germany (which still rumbles on, as effects of climate change worsen)

The change was gradual but as these collectors only visited once a year, they noticed before professional foresters did (I asked a German scientist activist what the very first symptoms of forest decline had been, and he sardonically replied “an attack of blindness in foresters”).  Presumably the Christmas décor-makers found an alternative supply of foliage once it became unattractive.  It was only when scientists proposed that air pollution might be to blame for the increasingly obvious decline of forests that it became a big public issue but it was prediction-error learning that first alerted the scientists.

Similarly, from the 1950s to the 1970s, conservation managers, naturalists and field biologists had reported puzzling cases of reproductive problems in wildlife.  These remained unexplained, and largely set aside by scientists who were investigated different hypotheses until the 1980s when US scientist Theo Colborn realised that a common factor was concentration of (endocrine-disrupting)  industrial chemicals in freshwater food chains.

Another case, metioned by Joshua Tewksbury’s group, is the disastrous result of ignoring North American native people’s traditional knowledge of the controlled use of fire in forest management.

Beyond just noticing, getting to know a wild plant, animal or natural place enables people to form an emotional bond with them, so such folk are most likely to want to ‘do something’ about loss or damage.   Consequently, from a social-political point of view, conservation has a profound need for more Natural History ability across society.

Natural History is also democratically participative in that it’s socially porous and accessible in a way that most sciences are generally not.  You can be a naturalist, and learn, teach or share a lot about Natural History, without having to be a scientist, pass exams or know a lot of ‘scientific methods’.  Building on this could help strengthen nature’s place in UK culture.

Naturalists are society’s sentries for nature, those who can sound the ‘alarm call’, as well as, alongside scientists, often being those with most understanding of what nature needs to function and survive.   With different organisation they could also be nature’s rapid reaction force at the local level.

All sections

1 – Introduction And Nature Ability

2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity

3 – Signalling and Marking Moments

4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture

5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means

7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

Section 6 – Organising Strategy: Ways and Means

download as pdf

If anyone buys the idea that we need a national effort on nature and culture, an important question is how could it be done?

The earlier sections make some suggestions about projects, audiences and activities but not about overall organisation and strategy.  Below are three strategy suggestions: about scale and geography of organisation, about audience enagagement, and about PR for the nature movement, and a couple of of thoughts about what people need to know, and candidate political asks actionable in the short term.

Scale and Geography – Use National Character Areas

In a country with a highly centralised system of political power, there is an ever present gravitational pull on any social campaign not focused on business, to direct lobbying, advocacy and effort at the political centre of Westminster and Whitehall.  But then delivery of government policy is often filtered down to less powerful bodies such as Counties and Districts (with the important exception of Unitaries with directly elected Mayors), and most UK politicains have local Constitutuencies.

That, and the allure of a highly centralised and dominant national press and news media (which many countries do not have), and social media with its beguilingly low transaction costs, often leads to English campaigns which try to use ‘grass roots’ indications of support (eg petitions and clicks) for policy asks directed at the National Government in London, with not much in between.

My contention in Part 1 was that this has not proved very effective but it certainly won’t work very well in terms of demonstrating and developing the cultural significance of nature.  For one thing it does not reflect lived experience, unless you are part of the Westminster-Whitehall policy community.  For another, both nature and popular culture are themselves much more granular and dispersed, locally and regionally and across the four UK Nations.

A Devon Parish Map from Common Ground – sourced from the community, so hard to overlook by local politicians

In terms of organisation and logistics, NGOs are then faced with a problem.  The very obvious very local level, embraced for instance in a case-by-case way by Common Ground with its Parish Maps, is the Parish (or Town Council). But the NALC, the National Assoctaion of Local Councils (an excellent body which has done some sterling work on nature) represents 10,000 Town and Parish Councils, which is too many for most projects to deal with.

The County and District tiers are important but socially little loved. They suffer from the baleful effects of too-frequent re-organisation by national government, and a public perception that they do little more than arrange for the bins to be emptied, and, if they are considered at all beyond that, impose Council Tax, fail to handle planning, social services or transport effectively, and seem powerless in the face of National Government.

This is very unfair but Local Government is a largely forgotten force in UK life, until something goes wrong.  It’s even ignored in many University politics courses.  None of that makes adminsitrative Counties and Districts a natural choice for social campaign architecture.  (This little experiment in trying to localise a national campaign to Norfolk Constituency levels might be of interest).

Amazingly, England and perhaps Scotland and Wales, do have an essentially nature-based system of regions which in my view, are at the natural scale, and follow the right natural contours, for working on nature and culture.  In England they are called National Character Areas.

Interactive map of National Character Areas (the colours)

England has 159 National Character Areas (NCAs) but hardly anyone living in them has the slightest idea they exist.  Not even Estate Agents and tourism organisations, for whom they are a ready-researched marketing opportunity. (There are also 48 NLCAs or National Character Landscape Areas in Wales, and there is a system of Landscape Character Types in Scotland).

Government agency Natural England says NCAs aim ‘to help guide land management and other activities to strengthen character and resilience, responding to pressures such as climate change’ but they could be a lot more interesting than that.  The NCAs, which are a national system but really should be called Local or Natural Character Areas, are defined by local regional geology, nature and land use.

It means they reflect the distinctive landscape on a human scale and are described in (relatively) everyday terms the public can understand, without any maths, convoluted science or jargon.  Most of them could be traversed by someone on a bicycle in a day, or in some cases, on foot. (England is a small and varied place).  They depict the characteristic nature, explain why the ‘verancular’ or local building styles vary from one place to another, the industry, farming, habitat and its history, and provide a nature-based expression of locality and identity.

Here for instance is the start of the description for the Bedfordshire Greensand Ridge, set in the South Midlands, the sort of area often wrongly referred to as “unremarkable”.

The description includes:

‘… A patchwork of semi-natural habitats including mire habitats, lowland heathland and lowland mixed deciduous woodland species, including coppiced hazel which is important for dormice at Maulden Wood.

… Adders are particularly associated with heathland areas of the Ridge … The Ridge is dissected by the rivers Ouzel and Ivel, which have carved distinct valleys … Springs arising from the Ridge support important wetland habitats, including acid mire and wet woodland.

… Visible heritage of iron-age banks and ditches at Kings Wood and Glebe Meadows, Houghton Conquest Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and iron-age hill fort remains at Sandy. Remnant ridge and furrow at Hockliffe and Potsgrove.

… Historic parklands and estates associated with grand country houses such as Woburn … Estate villages, houses and farmsteads use local building materials including clay brick and tile, locally quarried brown ironstone, thatch and render…

Major communications infrastructure includes the Sandy Heath transmitter.’

The NCA definitions are not just about nature but nature is important to people as part of place and identity, however much or little natural history knowledge they have. As Craig Bennett of The Wildlife Trusts pointed out in 2021: ‘Polling shows that good quality natural places are the most important thing to foster pride in people’s communities – more than pubs or even the local football team’.  (That survey gave people 16 possible reasons to be pround of their local area and ‘our local parks and green spaces’ came top at 36%).

It would make driving around, travelling across or living in England more interesting if there were signs to announce when you are entering one of these areas but I’ve never seen one, although when I travel from my home in North Norfolk to see my daughters in Bristol I cross at least seven of them.

From a nature campaign organising perspective they are an unused gift.  Socially, they connect with people’s lived experience, where they grew up or went to live, and what it is like, in a way that larger regions, or administrative Counties, do not.

‘Place’ is important to people in the UK, as elsewhere, and as the Victorians recognized, natural history provides threads in that fabric.   It’s the sort of rooted background identity which ought to be covered in School Curricula and perhaps captured in a form of ‘Passport’, or ‘Identity Card’ for every resident, as some of the coordinates of ‘home’.  Maybe even something which runs with a home as a property.  At the very least, our NCAs deserve a mention on road signs.

Audiences – Engage Across Values Groups

To make just one over-arching suggestion about audiences, if the UK nature movement is to reach and see its ideas more adopted beyond its base, or less kindly, outside its ghetto, they will need to resonate with motivational values, the underlying deep and largely unconscious convictions of the population.

Many environmental NGOs are perceived to be, and most campaign groups definitely are ‘change organisations’. This in itself is enough to mean they tend to be very strongly dominated by Pioneers, just one of the three roughly equal main values groups dividing the population.  (See How change campaigns get populated by the Usual Suspects).  Which of course applies in politics.

This does not matter if your aims and objectives can be achieved from within, or resourced by a focus on, one values group but it does matter if you want your cause or projects to be perceived as representing or involving the mainstream, or ‘normal’ or ‘average’ people.

As Mark Avery observed, in the UK cancer and health charities raise vastly more money than nature and environment groups.  Their most high profile fundraising activities are often mass sponsored Fun Runs or Park Runs, and their participants and supporters are skewed to the mainstream esteem-seeking Prospector group. Support for environment and nature charities however is strongly skewed to Pioneers (charity motivational values maps here).

Motivational values difference: left my favourite type of charity is environment, right favourite is health.  Warm colours indicate stronger agreement (UK population). This is why health charities have a bigger social and cultural presence in the UK than purely environmental ones, and why adapting environment or nature to be ‘about health’, can involve a wider audience. More ‘nature’ data here

Compared to Pioneers, Prospectors like to do fun and socially visible things, preferably ‘looking good’ as a group of friends. Pioneers not only overindex on nature and global issues but love debating ideas and issues.  This is perhaps why events like the RNN Restore Nature Now march are stronger on talks, information and ideas than looking good or having fun, than the average Prospector would like.  Yet Prospectors are most often swing voters, are disproportionately represented among those in full time employment, and politicians are sensitive to them as ‘aspirational’ voters.

So in terms of audience strategy, it would make sense for a campaign to increase nature ability, and to send participatory signals, to first and foremost try to engage Prospectors.  A lot of Pioneers will probably be attracted to nature events and activities anyway, so long as they are ‘interesting’ enough, and Settlers will join in once the behaviour seems normal.  (For more see this summary and the book What Makes People Tick).

Here is a ‘values planner’ giving a ‘straw person’ idea of the sorts of activities which different motivational groups might be attracted to. Essentially you can most easily engage Pioneers with interesting ideas, Prospectors with (the right sorts of) activities, and Settlers via groups they are already in, and familiar activities.

These values planner activities were adapted to climate change some years ago but could be easily be revised to fit nature.

Pioneers can be attracted to innovative activities but Prospectors want to see them proved successful, and Settlers want them to have become normal before joining in, so rather than inventing completely novel ways to engage with nature, it’s more effective to attach, reveal or insert nature into existing cultural practice.

To take the case of gardening culture, for Settlers gardening might be about survival (grow your own), retaining the familiar (including regular visiting birds or other wildlife), exerting control or rules of your own, and being ‘normal’, so if normal changes, the Settlers change in line with it.  For Prospectors a garden could be an opportunity to display symbols of success (which could include wildlife if there is a clear way to be seen to ‘do the right thing’ and ‘win’), have fun, and do things with friends.  For Pioneers a garden could be many things depending their interests, including a realm of the imagination, an opportunity to experiment, and to make a difference.

The natural social dynamic of behavioural change is that Pioneers innovate and experiment, and if that appears socially successful, Prospectors will emulate it.  Then if enough people pick up that new behaviour, it appear as normal, so Settlers join in.    The current UK trend of increasing gardening for, or with nature, is part way through this change dynamic.

Interventions need to be designed to match these needs and dynamics otherwise they will not spread, or may even cause a build up of resistance and ‘culture wars’.  (The problems faced by initiatives like No Mow May and changing verge management, are a case in point: Pioneers will start them, Settlers may be incensed by Councils “not doing their [traditional, normal] job”, and Prospectors probably are not sure what to think but avoid the controversy).

Knowing about nature in general meets different needs, or gives different benefits and rewards, for different people according to their motivational values.

• For Settlers, recognizing and knowing the names and ways of plants or animals could help make them feel they belong part of a familiar community, even with friends.
• For Prospectors being able to put names to nature, explain them to others or to discover the rare and unsual could be an opportunity to hone and demonstrate their abilities.
• For Pioneers, being able to read and interpret the intricacy and multiple layers of nature, including mysteries, could give them additional self-agency and opportunities to use it to ‘make a difference’.

For all of them, being able to name and understand nature changes the experience of being in-nature from one of just being in a green or blue space, to something more rewarding.   It changes the experience of being in a ‘Nature Reserve’ or at a ‘nature event’ from one of potential boredom or alienation, feeling inadequate or that they do not belong, to one of welcome, fascination, appreciation and belonging.  As John Muir said, “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

For professionals of any chalk, being fluent in nature enables them to be confident about engaging with it as a policy matter, or in professional practice as in education or health, and with members of the public, practitioners like land managers or farmers, and voters or environmental NGOs.

PR: Act Like A Business

The UK nature movement does not need more PR to make politicians or the rest of the population aware that it exists but it does need politicians to take it more seriously. One way it could do that without requiring any clever or expensive new tricks, is to act more like a business in its government relations.

Nature protection as practiced by the environment groups on the June 2024 Restore Nature Now march, is not obviously a business in the conventional sense but it could be taken more seriously by Westminster politicians if it better played to its strengths in terms of employment and economic importance.

With our system of geographic constituencies, even ‘national politics’ has a localist psychological reflex: nearly all MPs strive to be seen to support ‘local businesses’ and in particular ‘small businesses’.  Speaking up for businesses has a very different feel to speaking up for think tanks, pressure groups or policy advocates who are in effect, in competition with the advisers to political parties.  How could this be arranged for nature?

Maybe it needs a Confederation of Nature Industries?   The idea of a National Conference (touted by the RNN groups), is a good one, especially if it looked like a Business Conference, and included businesses from the sectors who also directly benefit from and in some cases contribute to conservation of British nature.  And especially if there was clearly signalled participation from every Constituency in the country.

Tourism, agriculture (especially Regenerative and Organic Farming), woodland owners, Health and Educational Professionals, Estate Agents (nature adds value), Remote Sensing and Renewable Energy companies, carbon sequestration investors, green roof providers, wildflower growers, and so on, not just policy experts and scientists, could all be involved.

And of course any rally or festival could feature the tools of the trade – from tractors and trailers to boats to conservation grazing animals – to give it tangible and visual presence.  Just as traditional farm and County Shows provide a soft-power platform for farming PR.

Royal Welsh Show – from www.dailypost.co.uk

One or more such big actualizing events each year could transform the way conservation gets communicated, and create multiple opportunities for people to meet, including politicians and their constituents.  A march is not an ideal place to have a chat.

(Yes there is the Bird Fair which raises money for Birdlife International and attracted 13,000 birdwatchers in 2024, although a better model is perhaps Groundswell, which has brought together practitioners of Regenerative farming, Rewilding and Restorative farming).

At present, when the majority of pro-nature mobilisation comes in the shape of attempts at policy literalism – ie to articulate or support policy-ask  demands – news and social media coverage tends to reduce to a shrill ‘tall but thin’ debate between environmentalists on one side and their opponents on the other, directly or indirectly appealing for political backing.   That can reduce to ‘nature versus the economy’ or  ‘nature versus jobs’, so it’s time to have jobs onside.

PR – Communicating Through Jobs

‘Nature protection’ as an industry is relatively new, and in cultural-political terms it comes a poor second to long-established relevant industries such as farming and fishing.

The entrenched political power of the farming and lobby compared to the nature movement, is because in the public and political mind, farming has managed to equate ‘the land’ and ‘countryside’ with ‘farming’ and land ownership.  It is not down rural/urban differences: if anything rural dwellers are a bit more pro-nature than urban ones, or to numbers of votes.

According to Statistia, there were 22,000 people employed as professionals in UK conservation, and 47,000 in ‘the environment’  in 2019.  In comparison,  about 10,000 fishers worked on 5,541 registered fishing vessels in 2022.  Not so many, yet in conventional politics, upsetting fishermen and fisherwomen is probably regarded as a more serious problem than upsetting conservation and environment workers.  Why? Because of culture, or in this case, cultural legacy.

As one UK Minister who had tried to put forward fisheries conservation measures explained, you can have as many facts and scientists on your side as you like but once TV news interviews a craggy blue-eyed fisherman in a yellow Souwester staring into a gale on a dockside and saying his family’s livelihood is at stake, “you are ****-ed”.

Fishers are less numerous but more ‘represented’ in the public and political mind.  This political effect is ultimately why our fisheries are in such a dire way, and our marine environment is even less protected than nature on land.

A still from the BBC series ‘A Fisherman’s Apprentice’ in which biologist Monty Halls joined fishermen at work.   ‘The Billy Rowney crew describe the dangers of life at sea, particularly in bad weather’.

As measured by GDP, farming is a bigger economic activity than the nature conservation business in the UK, and farming covers 71% of the land area (50% as ‘enclosed farms’), whereas only 2.9% is effectively protected for nature.

On-farm UK jobs, that’s farmers, plus spouses, business partners, and workers, were officially put at 292,000 in 2023, with 209,000 farm ‘holdings’ or ‘farms’ of some sort, most under 100Ha (including ‘hobby farms’ devoted to nature). About half the farmers are part time.

Yet just 19% of the farms cover 75% of the farmland.  It’s this last group of ‘agribusiness’ farmers who hold most sway for example in the NFU (National Farmers Union, with 46,000 members), and thus with the government. In Englandjust 7,600 farmers have more than 100Ha of cereals, and only 9,000 dairy farmers have herds of more than 150 dairy cows, in total less than 20,000.  Such capital and chemical intensive farming has been largely responsible for agricultural pesticide, fertiliser and slurry and air pollution, and soil damage.

Despite its name, the NFU is not a Trade Union: it supported abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board which had regulated pay of farm workers, and has been described as an ‘English Agribusiness Lobby Group’.  It has organised and lobbied to have farmers appointed to National Parks boards, to lift bans on neonicotinoid pesticides, and against establishment of zones to control nitrate pollution of water.

Yet by the same media alchemy as the Souwestered fisherman, no matter how big the farm business, ‘the farmer’ only has to appear along with a family member holding a lamb or a box of vegetables in an advert or on TV, to become a “family farmer”.

In contrast, the 67,000 conservation and environment professionals are fighting the battle for public support, from a position of almost complete invisibility.

They are unlikely to live and work on a ‘family nature reserve’, or in a ‘family wood’, or on a ‘family river’.  Their families are at home, elsewhere.  They rarely have a telegenic farmhouse kitchen Aga to meet journalists beside, or heart-warming story of ‘the family business’ for MPs to repeat.  (Theses are deficits and absences which the NGOs – the landowning ones especially – could fix.  It’s one reason why farmer-led Rewilding projects have had a relatively good media reception).

NFU branded Boris Johnson feeds an unlucky lamb.  Photo Yorkshire Post, 2021

Nor are the nature professionals represented by a well-organised business lobby.   Politics is about people, and causes, interests and issues are represented by people with stories. Nature can’t tell its own stories to politicians.  The NFU does a very good job in making sure politicians meet their people and not their accountants.  The nature groups need to look at how they can do the same.

BBC Countryfile presenters with some old-school farm props.  Perhaps the pond dipping net represents natural history.  Picture from The Guardian.

Farming also looks more politically weighty if you present it as it ‘Farming and Food’. Include everyone involved in the food chain, including transport, packaging and processing, wholesaling, retailing and catering as well as farming and fishing, and the UK ‘Food and Farming Industry’ comprises 4.2m people and 6.5% (£148bn) of gross national ‘value added’.   Actually growing a carrot or sheep or catching a fish is the work of just 10% of those 4.2m. Ninety percent of them work in the chain, including catering, retail and manufacturing.

But when it comes to media representation, it suits both ‘halves’ to up put a farmer or fisher out front.  In the 1980s, farming rep’s spoke of the countryside as their ‘factory floor’ but they learnt that ‘Factory Farming’ invokes awkward thoughts.  The industry knows an individual farmer or fisher, looking as hands-on and small-scale as possible, enjoys far more public sympathy and cultural authority than a food chain executive.

PR – The Natural Stewards Of Natural Capital?

If the nature organsiations did decide to have a festival or trade fair, they could include a section for accountants and economists, as accounting for the value of natural assets, or Natural Capital created by nature, is now becoming a big business, and attracting its own sector of analysts and business consultants.  The £148bn ‘value added’ by agriculture mentioned above is from old school financial accounting of wages, dividends and sales of products and services etc..  It doesn’t account for the loss of assets created by nature, such as damage to soils, loss of peatlands storing carbon, or any increase in such assets, such as if expanded tree growth mopped up more pollution, both now and in the future.

In recent years the government has started to try and count the value of nature and (but not only) ‘ecosystem function’ in alternative national economic accounts, rather than just GDP measured in £ financial transactions.  The government Office for National Statsitics (ONS) explains:

Natural wealth includes things like the productivity of soils and access to clean water. Any natural resource or process that supports human life, society and the economy forms an important part of our natural capital… [it] is an important part of a wider move to better understand inclusive wealth, as discussed in The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review

Natural capital monetary estimates should be interpreted as a partial or minimum value of the services provided by the natural environment, as a number of services, such as flood protection from natural resources, are not currently measured …

As Natural England put it:

The value of the environment and natural capital is routinely understated. For example, the Office for National Statistics estimate that England’s woods and forests deliver a value of services estimated at £2.3 billion annually. Of this figure, only a small proportion – 10% – is in timber values. The rest of the value derives from other more ‘hidden’ benefits to society, such as human recreation and air pollution removal, which improve health, and carbon sequestration which can help combat climate change

Looked at this way, the ONS says ‘in 2021, the total asset value of ecosystem services in the UK was just over £1.5 trillion’.  ONS adds: ‘In 2021, cultural services made up the majority of the asset value (61%), followed by provisioning (32%) and regulating (7%) services’.  [Conventional agricultural output comes under ‘biomass’ which comes under ‘provisioning’].

“Cultural services” means ‘the non-material benefits we obtain from ecosystems through recreation, tourism, and their associated health benefits’.  

The ONS states that on these accounts for England in 2020, ‘the total annual value for the ecosystem services we are currently able to measure was £35.7 billion’, and,  ‘over half (57%) of the annual value in England in 2020 was derived from cultural services, predominantly recreation and tourism (£12.4 billion) and health benefits (£5.5 billion) associated with this’.

As the diagram below shows the value of tourism and recreation, plus health benefits from outdoor recreation, outweigh agricuture and water abstraction combined, and that’s before you include the positive effect of nature on the value of homes, its role in removing pollution, or natural greenery cooling cities.

The 2021 ‘Tourism and outdoor leisure accounts, natural capital’ accounts ‘main points’ state:

• ‘Nature contributed an estimated £12 billion to tourism and outdoor leisure within the UK in 2019.
• The number of outdoor-related activities participated in across the UK rose from 1.2 billion to 1.5 billion between 2011 and 2016.
• Outdoor-related activities in urban settings accounted for over 60% of all nature-based spending in 2019 within Great Britain.
• Between 2011 and 2019, 8% of all estimated tourism and outdoor leisure spending in Great Britain was driven primarily by nature’

In 2020 agricultural biomass (ie crops and livestock) made up £5.4bn of ‘Provisioning’ services in England.   So from this perspective, although this accounting system is still in development and counted as ‘experimental’, nature looks rather more important than if you judged the nature movement of the 28 main NGOs on its £0.5bn financial turnover estimated by Mark Avery in his book Reflections.

In Natural Capital accounts, agriculture contributes £5.4bn in England against (see above) £12.4bn from recreation and tourism.

In 2022 Alice Fitch and others published an analysis in the journal PLOS One putting ‘the natural capital contribution to tourism’ in the UK at £22.5 billion, or 0.9% of UK GDP’.  That includes a wide range of ‘Tourism and Outdoor Leisure’ activities which use the natural environment from sea-angling and visiting a beach to birdwatching.

The 67,000 conservation and environment professionals are not just concerned with nature and environment on farmland, and nor are the nature and environmental NGOs but they have a good case to make that they are de facto,  the principal and longest-standing social advocates of protecting and increasing our Natural Capital.

They should also have a key role in explaining nature to economists.

Consider this from with Partha Dasgupta, author of the government review in biodiversity and Natural Capital, speaking to the Leslie Hook of the Financial Times in 2021:

PD: “Depreciation is not accounted for in GDP.  The ‘g’ in GDP. Stands for ‘gross’ not ‘net’. No one would know from national statistics that natural capital is being degraded even as GDP is growing.  That’s a serious shortcoming of GDP, for ecosystems can be degraded very easily and violently; you can wipe out a whole ecosystem by trashing it”…

Leslie Hook: “… [your] review says .. nature is a blind spot in economics … what would you like changed?:

PD: “change really needs to come internally from the teaching profession.  It’s not a giant intellectual step to introduce nature into economics.  Economic reasoning involves capital assets which are used to produce goods and services we like and enjoy and care about … To rebuild economics, we would need to add natural capital to the binary classification we economists use, namely produced capital, such as roads, buidings machines, and equipment, and human capital, such as health and education” …

… “The hard work lies in modelling ecosystems … but received economics does not include natural capital because economists  are unfamiliar with ecology.  Many of the most prominent economists today have a math background, and most have no knowledge of ecology.  And yet mathematical models of ecosystems bear a strong resemblance to models of economic systems, so it should be relatively easy for economics courses to include natural capital”.

I hope that any such course includes a bit of Natural History and not just mathematical ecology but the most important question is who and what represents Natural Capital socially, culturally and politically.

In The Lie Of The Land, Guy Shrubsole describes how landowners and farmers pulled the trick of describing themselves as ‘stewards’ rather than ‘owners’ to imply that they were on the same side as the public interest.

But as he says, to ‘steward’ means looking after something you do not own, and that is what the nature movement has been for Natural Capital, since long before the term was invented.  The environmental NGOs have resisted pollution and loss of biodiversity, whereas farming has overall been the main driver of loss.

The nature groups and their allies should now act like businesses and take the opportunity to occupy that space.  Otherwise they may find that the agribusiness and landowning lobby pulls the same ‘stewardship’ trick for Natural Capital, as it did in claiming privilege to ‘speak for the countryside’.

What People Need To Know

At its most fundamental, nature ability, Natural History Knowledge or nature literacy starts with being able to recognize and name plants and animals: the ABC, the alphabet of nature.  Which species?   The local ones, of the area where live, and in England, their wider National (Natural) Character Area.

After that comes knowing something about the ways of creatures and plants, how they interact, and their homes, the habitats they live in.  Once know those are understood, people can start to ‘read’ whole landscapes.   So perhaps if you make an imperfect analogy with literacy, the ABC is species, the sentences are habitats and the paragraphs are landscapes.

With training in environmental problems and conservation needs in mind, the next level of useful knowledge would be about things like how and why a diversity of wildflowers needs low nutrient not high nutrient soil, the relationship between insects and food plants, what fertilisers and pesticides are, how to make garden nature features, how to introduce children to nature, how hay meadows, heathlands and wetlands come about, how rivers and floodplains work, how flood control works (beavers), how carbon fixing works, how we know whether species are vanishing or not, shifting baselines, and reading the landscape and recognizing old and new woods and grasslands  – uncommon knowledge.

Who Could Be Involved

Obvious organisations which might contribute include the Field Studies Council and others focused on Natural History and particular sectors such as the BTO for birds and the BSBI for plants, and Natural History Societies.

All the nature conservation organisations are candidates, from the National Trust down to the smallest newer or most specialist groups but to get new and additional results in terms of nature literacy will require going beyond formal educational methods, and involving bodies from outside the existing ‘nature movement’, which are in touch with and just as important, in tune with, the wider public, from media and business to hospitality, Local Government, sports and entertainment.

Half A Dozen Political Asks

The introduction argues that some early political asks would be useful to align project partners and help provoke political interest in the idea of a national drive for Nature Ability. To achieve any scale would require some things to be resourced by the government or bodies like HLF.

Some suggestions:

1. A government funded campaign to promote Nature Ability, including an above-the-line advertising campaign, and a multi-facetted social marketing campaign and a wide array of instrumental projects.

2. Council Tax rebates for nature- and ecosystem-boosting features (biodiversity ehancing, flood reduction etc) of homes and gardens, and financial incentives for the same ‘public goods’ contribution made by agricultural land owners by farmers but for owners of other land, such as businesses and Councils. Non-agri Environment Schemes – ELMS 2.0.

3. Recognition of Ecological Land as a category in statutory Local Plans, and its protection from development.

4. Signing of National Character Areas and all nature reserves and higher level ELMS schemes and nature relevant features, indicating any sort of public access or visibility, (eg along roads, and Public Footpaths using existing signs) linked to the MAGIC system (eg a more user friendly app), including for example Ancient Trees.

5. A system of official recognition for nationally and regionally important annual moments (a sorted of nature-centred equivalent to Bank Holidays or the Blue Plaque scheme), including a National Bluebell Day.

6. Issue all voting age adults with a National Character Area natural identity certificate, citizenship profile or identity card (see p.5), and decide (via a Citizens Assembly?) ways it could be used with some ‘official’ recognition, beyond just inspiring questions in pub quizzes.

 

All sections

1 – Introduction And Nature Ability

2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity

3 – Signalling and Marking Moments

4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture

5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means

7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

Section 7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

download as pdf

There is no national promotional campaign for nature and no systematic effort to increase Nature Ability, Natural History Knowledge or Ecoliteracy, call it what you will, so no, so we are not doing this already.

It’s true that it’s not a new idea to set out to embed nature ‘in culture’ and even just in the UK, there are many more existing moments or activities established in popular culture, which have nature content, than I have mentioned.  Most of those were never started with any intention to roll back a problem of national nature blindness because in the past, it wasn’t seen to be a problem but now they could be built on to help do that.

But isn’t it also true that almost all the communications or outreach activities of organisations in the ‘nature movement’, however you define that, may have some effect in signalling nature and the work done to try and protect or restore it?  Yes that is true but even taken together it is self evidently not tackling the problem of a lack of public nature ability, or sufficiently convincing politicians in government that nature is a real political imperative.

The main reason that existing activity is not doing the job, is that it hasn’t been designed to do so.

The Participation Principle

Ultimately the point of this proposal to invest time and effort to embed nature in culture is to show people who are or may become our elected politicians, that nature is an integral part of social life.  As behaviours shape opinions and behaviours are tangible and visible, we need the valuing of and engaging with nature to be expressed through events and activities.  Both which and how many people are involved, is  important.

For good reasons, most voluntary sector nature conservation effort is either aimed at delivery in terms of species survival and natural ecosystem quality and quantity, and the area of habitats protected or restored, or fundraising, including recruitment and retention of supporters or members.

The logic of nature delivery investment is to achieve the maximum gain for every pound or hour spent, and that generally applies to government nature agencies too.  The logic of fundraising and membership investment is to gain and retain as much support as possible for each pound or hour spent.  But the objective of investing time and effort, and money in a drive for public nature literacy, and to create or promote popular culture nature events, is to maximise participation.

Efficient Businsess As Usual leads to Different Outcomes

So, ‘Business As Usual’ for efficient habitat delivery, and efficient fundraising/ membership recruitment sets priorities which are different from maximising nature ability and sending signals that nature is popular and important to the public.

For example, imagine what happens if one woman takes the time and trouble to grow 100 hectares of wildflowers on her land.  A good thing but it sends a different signal from 100 women growing one hectare each, and a different one again from if the 100 hectares were made up by 10,000 women growing 1 square metre each. (1 Ha = 10,000 square metres).

For targeting agri-environment grants or a NGO buying land, a single 100Ha wildflower meadow makes sense but politically the single landowner is one vote, the 100 are 100 votes and the 10,000 votes is larger than the majorities of many Westminster MPs. It’s participation in activities that is important from the politics-signal point of view.

NGO fundraisers also often pursue a strategy of efficiency, targeting people most likely and able to give the largest donations, which is usually existing long-standing and richer supporters.  This is one reason why nearly all NGOs gave up street collections even before the decline of cash but that also had the effect of making themselves and their cause less salient in the world outside their mailing or emailing lists.  That involved a loss of quality too: the human contact disappeared into direct mail and online giving.

Fundraisers in NGOs often have bigger communications budgets than the communications or campaigns departments, as the organisation relies upon them to keep it going.  Inadvertently, this efficiency also focuses the organisation’s communications and relationships on maintaining and recruiting to it’s funding base. It’s normal for most of what pleople outside a NGO know and think about it, to be down to its marketing and fundraising comms, not it’s a change adovcacy or delivery.

But if you accept the logic of this paper, which is that to make the nature movement more effective politically, nature needs to be more expressed in public culture, targeting the base is not what’s most needed.

The Curse Of The ‘New Project’

Business as Usual nature-related projects are often given aims or objectives about ‘public engagement’ and even ‘sustained’ support but subsidiary to the main tasks of land management for species, habitats and ecosystem function. At the same time, funders may require projects to be ‘new’ activities.  This combination tends to significantly reduce the chances of the projects leading to sustained outcomes of public engagement in terms of nature ability, or nature embedded in popular community culture.

Providing that its current owners are open to growth, investing in a project which already has social ‘roots’ in the shape of people who are commited to and understand it, is probably more likely to yield sustainable results in terms of embedding and expressing nature in social culture, than investing in a completely ‘new build’.  Each new build is like a prototype, a seed, or at best a seedling.  There will be a high failure rate. Existing rooted activities have already gone through a sort of natural selection process and developed some sort of resilience.

So in terms of priorities, I would suggest taking the time and trouble to locate existing projects or activities which are already all or most of the way to making nature part of the culture, or where it already is, and wherever possible building on them, however modest they might be.

Back From The Brink

Many Business as Usual nature projects start, stop and relatively quickly, leaving little trace.  One with quite a good account which is still avilable online, is ‘Back From The Brink’ a £7m scheme which ran for only four years from 2017 to 2021.  This is a short time in which to expect a project to develop much in the way of social roots, especially if they weren’t designed with that in mind.

Nineteen Back from the Brink projects were adminsitered by Natural England with money from HLF (Heritage Lorry Fund), and run by seven nature charities incliuding RSPB and Plantlife.    In 2015 NE announced that Back From The Brink would aim to ‘save 20 species from extinction and help another 118 species that are under threat move to a more certain future’.

With a mix of familiar subjects like ancient trees as well as obscure rare plants like Cornish Moss, and the Narrow Headed Ant’s only remaining colony, the scheme’s aim was ‘for threatened species to be restored to a steady state’.  But as well as improving the immediate prospects for rare bats, butterflies, crickets, birds and flowers, Back From The Brink wanted to ensure that ‘landowners and communities’ were ‘working to actively sustain them’.

The post-programme summary states that Back from the Brink involved 59,000 people, including over 10,000 who ‘learnt new skill’s and nearly 4,000 who volunteered their time, while people had ‘185 million opportunities to hear about Back from the Brink’ (eg media mentions).

It aimed to deliver a legacy in these terms:

for threatened species to be restored to a steady state, with landowners and communities working to actively sustain them            

The result was described like this

A legacy of success:  the prospects for targeted populations of our threatened species have been improved from hundreds of practical actions carried out to support them, with more people knowing about and acting for them, and more effective collaborative working by conservation bodies on species recovery as a result.

Which doesn’t say anything about ‘communities working to actively sustain them’.

Back From The Brink map

The interactive map above takes you to two layers of details on each project.   I looked at ten of them and none of the ‘community’ or ‘legacy’ parts mentioned a specific community or group continuing the work, or taking on responsibility as ‘stewards’ for the projects.

Declaring an aim to create sustained community action may reflect over-specifying and inflating aims so the scheme could be announced as ‘ambitious’, especially when it was primarily a ‘shot-in-the-arm’ habitat and species ‘rescue’ operation. More first-aid than a public health programme.  In fact it was not large, compared to HLF’s own land, nature and biodiversity programme, and miniscule compared to government support to ‘farming and environment’ payments (which of course have almost no affect on public nature ability or popular culture as they are generally in the oprofessional farmer-contractor world).

The overall aim for ‘community’ was also bit hyperbolic: to ‘inspire a nation to discover, value and act for threatened species  – aim of 1.3 million people so engaged’.

To set such an engagement aim for a £7m programme of 19 localised and mainly rather specialist projects where much of the effort was necessarily detailed habitat, survey and estate management work needed to directly benefit the wildlife, was over-ambitious but perhaps not intended to be taken seriously.  £7m is not much if you are buying and managing land but it’s a lot if you were primarily doing communications work and community engagement.  £7m could be spent so as to ‘inspire the nation’ but not like this.

‘Engaged’ can mean many things and ‘community’ is often sprayed around in priject specs and promotion like a rhetorical garnish.  In this case community engagement was essentially a side effect in the projects I looked at, not a detectable objective.  These were not bad projects – they were great conservation projects.  They did involve people and in all cases they probably raised nature ability, and in a few cases by a lot, judging by descriptions of numbers and training in Natural History.

But they were conventional Business as Usual projects,  more run by NGOs, more professional than volunteer organised, more parchuted in than embedded in society and unlikely to last as something that people would get involved with on an ongoing basis, becoming part of popular culture.

Some of the projects involved activities and events with artists, poets or musicians but these are injecting ‘Culture’ into nature projects rather than the nature projects becoming part of community culture.

Pick Up The Threads?

It could make sense for NE and HLF to go back to these projects, and pick up the threads of  the ‘collaborative NGO working’ and the glancing through-to-deep engagement with many people no doubt had with them, in a new tranche of projects. These could explore connection to local communities, and see if the nature could become central to events, business or social activities which are or become an ongoing part of community culture. Then communities might be ‘actively working to sustain them’. But as this was a project launched under a Conservative Government the new Labour Government would probably not want to do that.

The Green Recovery Challenge Fund

What several groups running Back To The Brink projects did mention under ‘legacy’, was continuing NGO posts and project work by seeking funding from the the Green Recovery Challenge Fund (GRCF), the next temporary pot of money to hove into view.

GRCF was a small £80m part of government COVID largesse and was also distributed by HLF, in 2021 and 2022.  It initially aimed to create 3,000 jobs in England to ‘restore nature and tackle climate change’, the latter through ‘nature solutions’.

The subsequent evaluation recorded that over three years, 1.7m trees got planted, conservation activities took place on 1,500 square km of land, 25,000 ‘enagement events’ were held involving 400,000 people, and 1,500 jobs were supported.

It involved 159 projects and linked to NE’s Access to Nature programme.  Activities included nature walks, training in identifying species, citizen science, wildlife watching, habitat restoration, school curricula related or forest school type (ie outdoors) activities, gardening, mindfulness, and social media engagement.

An example which involved local distinctiveness was working to restore abundance of the rare but once common flower Sulphur Clover in verges of the Norfolk ‘Claylands’, an often overlooked area.  A great project but it ended in 2023.

Although this funding was put together in a hurry, and ended after three years, it is probably closer in scale and management to the sort of programme that would be needed to make a dent in the problem of the national deficit in nature ability, and developing and running projects to embed nature in social culture.  As well as money, the HLF and its partners have a lot of relevant experience and skills, particularly with social activities and culture.  Such a scheme would have a greater chance of success if it was preceded or accompanied by a national promotional campaign for nature ability.

Conclusion

To UK practitioners struggling to do what they can to make a difference to the nature crisis within the system as it stands, my arguments may seem annoyingly unrealistic but that is partly as their movement has become used to subsisting on a dwindling supply of scraps.

I’d suggest taking inspiration from the establishment of the The Lottery back in 1994, by then Prime Minister John Major. Experience of working in the Treasury, convinced him that the Treasury would never give ‘more than scraps’ of funding to the arts, and he wanted to ensure ‘a rebirth of cultural and sporting life in Britain’.

The Heritage Lottery Fund could now be part of the answer to the nature ability deficit, and a political realisation that nature is important to voters is a pre-requisite to restoring nature in the UK.

All sections

1 – Introduction And Nature Ability

2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity

3 – Signalling and Marking Moments

4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture

5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means

7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk   

Chris Rose, August 27, 2024 –   https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/?p=3115  download this post as a pdf, here

In July 2024 the UK got a new Labour Government.  As part of it’s preparations for fighting the election, the Labour Party cut its ‘Green Prosperity Plan’ to invest £28bn a year in a green transition, by 80%.   We also got a spring and early summer almost without insects, much to the alarm of a small section of the population who follow these things closely but with no discernible political reaction.  At midsummer, London saw the largest ever mobilisation of nature groups, in the 60,000 strong ‘Restore Nature Now’ march. It was ignored by the BBC.  The day after the election, David Attenborough got a standing ovation when he visited the tennis at Wimbledon.  What’s this say about the prospects for nature under Keir Starmer’s Labour?

For decades UK politicians of both main UK Parties have treated the environment and particularly nature, as a politically optional and ultimately disposable ‘priority’.  I’ve reached the conclusion that until nature is less invisible, and more embedded and expressed in everyday social culture, this will remain a limiting factor because Westminster politicians not-so secretly believe the UK population doesn’t really care that much.  To change that, Britain’s nature groups need to focus on culture more than policy.

In this post I look at the political situation for nature and the environment under Keir Starmer’s Government, and at  Westminster political culture.  A subsequent post will look at what could be done to widen and deepen connection to nature as part the culture of UK society.

Introduction

On the morning of 5 July, the day after along with most of the country, campaigners for nature and environmental protection heaved a sigh of relief.  The unpopular Conservative government was gone in a landslide General Election victory for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, which secured 412 seats, a huge majority of 172.

Environmentalists had endured 14 years of broken promises, false starts and regulatory failure on issues from climate change to food and farming, to water pollution and nature protection, punctuated by periodic attempts to consolidate right-wing support by denigrating and reversing pro-nature, pro-climate policies, with ruling politcians even attacking their own nature agency, Natural England.

It’s a bizarre feature of this sad story that UK public opinion was in favour of stronger environmental action throughout, and Conservative voters were if anything, more in favour than Labour voters.  Why this had so little effect on government nature policies has to do with the lowly and untethered place of nature in UK political culture, and that in turn, reflects a social culture, informing political predicates and convictions, which has a very limited connection to real nature.

For generations, Britain’s environment movement has succeeded in protecting thousands of individual nature sites, produced swathes of reports and analyses of issues and now, has taken to cross sector mobilisation in marches.  But with it’s influence largely confined within its own base, that not been enough to stop politicians treating environment as a marginal, optional concern.

Consequently with nature almost absent from social connections between voters and their political representatives, government environmental policies and the outcomes they seek to achieve, are only weakly accountable to public opinion.   Culture, as they say, trumps both process and strategy.  For most of our politicians, nature in UK culture is socially invisible, and thus politically disposable.

This blog explores why in my view, UK campaigners and advocates need to look beyond policies to social culture, meaning popular culture, what people do and value doing.  Without that, nature can’t be really restored in the UK, rather that just celebrated as a nice-to-have concept.  Keir Starmer is said to be a ‘committed environmentalist’ but he is also boxed in by many constraints which we have to be realistic about. All the more reason to make a start on the long game of changing the social invisibility of nature now. It does not involve inventing a wheel: many ingredients for doing so, already exist.

A Nature and Politics Strategy Framework

Here’s a crude strategy framework to show how I at least, see the issues discussed in this paper.  It’s specific to the UK and particular England, where almost all key nature related policies are directly or indirectly controlled from Westminster.  The content and implementation of nature policies is determined by Westminster Parliament, Government and Whitehall Departments and below them, agencies they control.  Behind those policies lie the ideas politicians have about how important nature really is, part of Westminster culture.  Those are somewhat tenuously derived from wider social culture.  NGOs can try to affect all three.

The default focus of UK NGO political efforts has been on Westminster and Whitehall.  Political culture, particularly among MPs, is quite impervious to external influence.  Political and Parliamentary tradecraft is conservative ‘with a small c’.

There is abundant evidence, a lot of it collected by the environmental NGOs themselves,  that the default approach has been an historic failure and UK nature is one of the most depleted in the world.

My conclusion is that this is doomed to continue so long as the political culture in Westminster remains cynically disbelieving about the importance of nature to voters, and the only realistic way to change this, is bottom up social evidence of nature being culturally important to voters, and not just to representatives of the ‘NGO lobby’.

Part 1: The Place of Nature Under Keir Starmer

Wimbledon 2024:  A Good Omen?

David Attenborough receives a standing ovation at Wimbledon, 5 July 2024

On the day after the General Election, Sir David Attenborough received a standing ovation as he took take his place in the ‘Royal Box’ at the Wimbledon tennis tournament.  The 74 seats in the Royal Box are invitation-only from the Lawn Tennis Association and stuffed with top rank celebrities, the rich, powerful and famous.   Outside the Royal Box another 14,000 mainly rich and influential people make up the rest of Centre Court, and it was these people who rose to give Attenborough his standing ovation. Millions more (not me) avidly follow Wimbledon on tv or online.

When It Hits the Fan is an interesting BBC podcast presented by corporate communications gurus Simon Lewis (ex Buckingham Palace) and David Yelland (ex Sun newspaper).  I recommend it.  In the July 2nd episode “Why PR loves Wimbledon”,  Yelland described passes into Wimbledon as the “golden tickets” of UK PR, and the Royal Box as “probably the best bit of PR in maybe the entire world … part of the soft power of this country”.  In this country Wimbledon is a cultural fixture , an occasion for the UK to feel reassured and good about itself.

So was Attenborough’s Wimbledon endorsement, seen on TV and online by millions, a good omen for nature under Starmer?  It was a cultural moment but they were celebrating the David Attenborough, not nature.  It was best summed up by a commentator for Australian Broadcaster @9NewsAUS who said “for much of his 98 years, Sir David Attenborough brought the world’s wildlife into our homes”.  The Daily Express described him as ‘revered’ and ‘iconic’.

All true although as has been discussed many times, for most of his career Attenborough brought us living-room nature-tainment without revealing the reality of environmental destruction that was eliminating the very nature shown in his programmes.  Within the BBC it was known as ‘the bubble’: nature escapism, a treasured part of domestic tv culture.

To be fair to Attenborough, it’s also true that his 2017 series Blue Planet II, made well after he had become a global tv phenomenon,  broke that mould by showing the impacts of plastic and did a lot of heavy lifting to enable plastic campaigns.  And, that in recent decades he departed from his insistence that he was ‘just a film-maker’ and became an overt conservation advocate.

Chris Packham: ‘Restore Nature Now’

A better bellwether of Wimbledon’s commitment to restoring nature would have been to invite Chris Packhamto the Royal Box.  (Or possibly the charismatic Feargal Sharkey, musician and fly-fisherman turned clean rivers activist – of whom more below).

Not world-famous but well known in the UK, Packham (age 63) is a zoologist who built a following through fronting popular TV programmes from The Really Wild Show in 1986, to BBC’s Springwatch (since 2009).  Packham is spikier than the emollient Attenborough, and has become increasingly activist.

Like Greta Thunberg, Chris Packham has Aspergers and “says it like he sees it”.  In 2015 he called out major UK conservation groups for their weakness on Fox hunting, Badger culling and the perscution of Hen Harriers.  His home has been attacked by arsonists and he has been villified by pro-hunting groups.  Perhaps down to him, the popular Springwatch series has changed from just promoting UK natural history to actively calling for conservation action.

Packham can also take credit for gradually unifying the UK’s diverse collection of environmental NGOs in public and demure demonstrations.  In 2018 he organised a Manifesto for Wildlife and delivered it to Downing Street with a march of 10,000 people, ‘The Peoples Walk For Wildlife’.

Chris Packham’s Walk for Wildlife, 2018 (photo www.dailypost.co.uk)

The 2018 March was something of a watershed in that it was supported by the main conservation NGOs as well as animal welfare groups, who then backed a second Packham walk slated for November 2022.  That was postponed three times due to rail strikes, and finally cancelled in 2023 after Packham attended another family-friendly four-day event, The Big One (April 2023) led by Extinction Rebellion, with a consortium of groups including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace but without the main conservation NGOs.  XR said 60,000 people took part.

This year Chris Packham got together 350 organisations including businesses, for Restore Nature Now (RNN) another march from Hyde Park to Westminster, on 22 June.  It was billed as the country’s ‘biggest ever march for nature’ and had been planned months before the moment when, on May 22, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak surprised almost everyone by calling a General Election for July 4.  The police estimated 60,000 took part.  Some of the organisers said more. The most A-list participant was actress Emma Thompson.

Emma Thomspon, Chris Packham and pro-nature group leaders front the Restore Nature Now march, 2024. Image from www.restorenaturenow.com

Sky News, ITV News, Al Jazeera  and other broadcasters covered RNN and it was covered in the press but the BBC did not turn up, prompting a spate of angry and disappointed complaints on Twitter (X) and in other social media.

“BBC news didn’t even cover the restore nature demo of 60,000 … why?” – @BellaDonnelly; “Shameful absence of BBC News …” – @NatureNerdTech;  “Shhh! @BBCNews thinks 60,000 or more protesting in central London to #RestoreNatureNow never happened … But it’s OK … @BBCNews features an ugly dog, and a boxer wanting his son to be an accountant” – @artgelling; “where is your coverage of this pivotal pre-election event?” – @dmokell  

More complaints poiting out covergae of Taylor Swift, previous BBC failures and accusing the BBC [fairly] of having a “biodiversity news blind spot”.

Not News

Internal BBC politics probably played a part but for those of the organisers who understood news, being ignored by the BBC could not have come as a surprise. You didn’t have to be David Yelland and Simon Lewis to see the basic problem.  Standing in Parliament Square at the end of the march, as people around us complained about those media present focusing on Emma Thomspon and asking her if she supported Just Stop Oil throwing ‘orange paint’ onto Stonehenge (that happened three days earlier and was condemned by Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer), a campaigner friend said simply: “if they wanted news they should have provided some: there wasn’t any”.

Organisationally, to go from 10,000 to 60,000 was an achievement but it wasn’t news.  Plus news is about an interesting or surprising twist on something people already understand, so the media focused on the most famous person involved and asked her about something controversial because if nothing controversial or consequential is happening, such as some form of disruption, then someone well-known saying something controversial, is second best.   News journalists look for the conflict in events.   If Thompson struggled to move the conversation on, perhaps it was because after the slogan ‘restore nature now’, chanted on the march, there was no single stand-out demand or consequence but a five point rather general and predictable set of ‘aims’, directed at politicians in general, too long to get into a soundbite:

Any one of those points could have been sharpened and directed at particular politicians or other groups, so as to demand a response but none were, nor in the context of an imminent election, did they directly relate to voting.

Beyond demonstrating numbers, it wasn’t clear to me at least, what was at stake, or where the political jeopardy was for any politician in not doing any more than sympathetically acknowledging the concerns of the well-tempered marchers. Is this how environment groups should try to influence the Starmer administration?

The Numbers Game Trap

Depending on what the organisers were hoping to signal, perhaps the most unfortunate fact was that if you are holding a ‘mass protest’ in London, the media idea of “biggest ever” is a lot bigger than 60,000 or even 100,000.

The 2003 Stop the (Iraq) War protest on the same London route, was put at a million strong by the BBC.  The 2019 Second Referendum march against Brexit, also in the same spot,  was reported by Sky News as a million. I was at both and you could see the police starting to lose control as marchers spilt out from the organised routes and flooded through side roads and parks towards Parliament.

From Sky News

That loss of control registers politically: the sense of being physically overwhelmed by manifest public opinion is visceral.  If such a march happens at the weekend, by Monday morning, advisers, officials and Ministers across Whitehall and Westminster will be in “do we need to recalibrate?” mode. If a march passes off unremarkably, it won’t be noticed. If it fails to match the organisers public expectations, that will be noted down for future discounting of your claims.  A case of, to quote Josef Stalin, “how many divisions does the Pope have?”.

It’s all the more awkward because the UK green NGOs still like to claim that between them they have 8 million members, and imply that politicians should therefore listen to them.  In one sense that is probably true but if it’s in fact 8 million direct debits and includes ‘family members’, that’s not 8 million voters. Mark Avery, a colleague of Chris Packham at Wild Justice, has argued that in reality the combined membership of the NGOs may represent just 500,000 ‘committed’ individuals.

Avery, who spent years working for the RSPB, wrote in his Reflections “if government really believed that the wildlife conservation movement had 8 million supporters it might well take a lot more notice of what it said”.

https://www.youtube.com/live/vqjSaJ9z9WA  Feargal Sharkey addresses the Restore Nature Now marchers.

As the march ended, former Undertones singer and fly-fisherman turned rivers campaigner Feargal Sharkey delivered a firebrand “we’ll be back” speech with cadences of J F Kennedy:

“I need you to make a promise today. If, under a new government, (these problems are) not resolved …. if the needs be, promise me you will be back here again, two times more, three times more, and if need be we will be back here one hundred times and bring a million people”.

As Sharkey implied, if you do embark on a numbers game, you had better show signs of winning by upping the turnout.  A million is a lot more people who need to be persuaded to take a day off from fishing, family weekends or pleasant trips of nature reserves or National Trust tea rooms, to join a political march in London.  It’s may be impossible without pinning a march to an impending cliff-edge political decision, as applied in the case of the Iraq War and Brexit.   But in truth the environment groups could get a long way without needing any qualitative change in strategy.  Just more effort and organising might raise the turnout say, tenfold, to 600,000.  The NGOs have the money and mandate to do that, if they have the will.

Turning out 600k in 2025 would at least pass the Avery Threshold but there are other issues than time and cost which I’d suggest are more significant, and underly the very reasons the environment movement struggles to gain real political traction on nature. These do require a qualitative change, with a focus on culture beyond Westminster, indeed beyond what’s obviously political. {See part 3}.

In August Sharkey announced a ‘March for Clean water’ in London on 26 October, supported by Surfers Against sewage and others.

The Business As Usual Trap

After the election, The Independent reported that some of the organisers of Restore Nature Now had re-addressed its five demands to Prime Minister Keir Starmer.  The Independent noted that ‘groups plan a “mass lobby” of Parliament ‘which aims for thousands of people to travel to Westminster to talk to their MPs’, and ‘the first UK Nature Conference’’.

It also reported: ‘A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesperson as saying:

“Nature underpins everything. That is why this government is absolutely committed to restoring and protecting nature. We will ensure the Environmental Improvement Plan is fit for purpose and focused on delivering our Environment Act targets, improve access to nature and protect our landscapes and wildlife.”’

This is the Business As Usual trap: trying to address the problem of inadequate policy or implementation by arguing about policy, and responding to an invitation to discuss plans,policies and process with government, rather than changing politics and culture which create the preconditions for government attitudes to nature.

https://www.standard.co.uk

Living in the UK as I do,  I didn’t watch the Biden-Trump debate on CNN but in the middle of the night I woke up, switched on the radio and heard reports of “panic among US Democrats”.  Sure enough, the first news clip was audible confirmation that Biden was not just old but infirm.  He sounded unfit for office: stumbling, raspy and confused.  My immediate conclusion was the same as American commentators who promptly announced “game over”.

But it was the second clip which really hit me, and might, just might enable Democrats to turn this ‘car crash’ debate back to their advantage: Trump and Biden were arguing about who was the stronger golf player, in a way that said they really thought this was important.

Rake Wars

Hearing Biden (81) and Trump (78) bickering over golf, I was immediately transported back to a small Norfolk village we lived in for a couple of years.

Just down the road, two old men occuppied adjacent Council houses with traditional cottage-style front gardens, divided by a privet hedge.  These men had been at odds with one another since World War II (one had been a conscientious objector), and shortly before our arrival, neighbours had been forced to intervene, when they began fighting one another over the hedge, using rakes.  It seemed funny at the time but then they weren’t using it as a proxy judgement for taking on leadership of the Parish Council, let alone the most powerful nation on earth.

A Way Back For The Democrats

So long as Biden’s capacity due to age was an unresolved issue, it remained a fatal test.  Barring extraordinary developments between now and the election it looks to me like he failed that test.

If the debate had ended at that point, that would be the out-take.  Firm Democrats would despair, committed Republicans would rejoice.   US political analysts seem to agree that to win, the views of undecided voters, Independents and ‘double-haters’, ‘double-despairers’ or ‘double dislikers’ may also be critical but the main damage would have been to Biden.  Trump did himself no new favours but he probably didn’t drive away many more potential voters than those he had already alienated.

But it didn’t end there.  It ended after the hypothetical golf-match, which made neither of the protagonists look suitable or serious as Presidents.

The we-think-politics-is-golf framing could change the significance of the debate.  As numerous commentators have already noted, golf is a game primarily associated with retirees, and often richer, whiter males. Golf in the US was in decline pre Covid and its TV audiences still are. It was and probably is a past-time of an increasingly old demographic. During Covid it got a boost as a ‘safe-place’ escape from the realities of the pandemic.  It’s a big game still in America but far from the national sport.  The proxy golf-off spat will have reminded a lot of potential swing voters of why they didn’t like the Trump-Biden choice.

Is this goodbye to golf as a political metaphor?

My guess is that the debate leaves most Americans with the conclusion that Joe Biden, cruel a judgement as it is, has proved himself “too old”.  If Biden were now to step back, relinquish his candidacy and help his Party find a younger, sharper more vigorous Candidate, younger of course than Trump, then for the potential swing voters, there could be a new more palatable choice, and rob Trump of the “age card”.

A political communications task would be to define why, while Biden is “too old”,  Trump is “too ….”.  Preferably in a single word.  Dishonest?  Unreliable?  Insane? Uncontrolled?  Which one most resonates most effectively with potential swing voters (leaving aside those committed to RFK) is something that can be researched.

When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with the humble is wisdom

Proverbs, 11.2

Age it is said, brings wisdom but it also brings age: none of us get any younger and the age thing is not going to go away for Candidate Biden, it will just get worse.

It looks to me at least that the most useful thing Joe Biden could do to help his Party, his country, and others, is to swallow his pride and lend his wisdom and backing to a new candidate.  He can’t ‘take Trump down with him’ right now but he can still help bring him down, and make space for someone else.