Yes, I know it’s Shrove Tuesday – but here at RSPB’s campaign central the pancakes will have to wait.
We’re readying ourselves for the launch of our next campaign – and the Saving Special Places blog is going to be central to the action – I’ll be updating and tweeting live (or very shortly afterwards) from London tomorrow.
The press release is out there so I’m not going to tell you all about the campaign just yet (such a tease) – but it’s big, it’s aimed at the heart of the crisis nature faces both here in the UK and across the world. It will involve how the RSPB will rise to the challenge, it will make the case for Governments across the UK (though we are starting in Westminster ahead of May elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) and it, if you’re up for it, it will involve you too.
As part of the preparations for the launch I was out, last Friday, in the Fens – we want to put across the challenges nature faces and, at the same time, highlight that if we make the right choices we can turn round the long term, chronic loss of our natural riches.
One of the springboards for our new campaign was the failure to do that by 2010 – European Governments signed up to a binding target to stop the decline of biodiversity by last year. We can’t leave it at that – and our new campaign will draw on our experience of what failure means for the natural world and, ultimately, us.
So we were faced with the choice of where to go to illustrate the story – where can the loss and the promise both be shown? There are many answers to that one, but we picked the Fens.
It’s 150 years since our Victorian ancestors drained Whittlesey Mere, near Peterborough. Just imagine if this large lake had survived to modern times – it would be one of our natural treasures – it would probably be a National Park.
But it didn’t.
At the time, the inevitable drying out and shrinkage of the peat was recognised and an iron post was sunk through the peat to the underlying clay with its top level with the ground. And shrink it did. Here’s a picture of the Holme Post as it is now, towering above me – witness to 150 years of environmental change.
The time-scale is one of the challenges we have – the gradual, incremental loss of our natural world means that it slips round the corner of our common memory. Just imagine if Whittlesey Mere had survived and was now threatened with destruction.
We moved on from the Holme Post to our Lakenheath Nature reserve. And here is our site manager, Norman Sills, who is the architect of the restoration of this fantastic place, giving an interview. Fen restored – bitterns boom, cranes dance and the air in spring is filled with hobbies feasting on early dragonflies.
Fen has friends. The Holme Post is at the heart of the Great Fen project, Wicken Fen is the focus of exciting plans for the future and our own reserves (including Lakenheath Fen, the Nene Washes and the Ouse Washes) add to the common effort to restore fragments of the Fens.
Is all we are doing enough? I casually said that Lakenheath was making a huge contribution, and Norman quickly corrected me. ‘No’, he said. ‘Remember the Fens used to cover 1000 square miles, this is really only a small step’.
He’s right – and on the wider canvass the Fens have been converted to rich, productive farmland and so most of it will remain. The future is one where thriving fens are cherished alongside farming – achieving this involves co-operation and vision (a topic we’ll come back to).
The Fens act as a living case study for our new campaign, we could easily have gone to one of our great estuaries, or the uplands, or a lowland heath as spring breathes new life across our countryside.
You can follow me on twitter – I’ll try and do justice to our day in London tomorrow, do let me know what you think.