I have been thinking about where the environmental leaders of tomorrow will come from.
I had a lovely morning on Saturday celebrating the role that one such leader - Adrian Darby - has played as Chairman and President of Plantlife over the last 18 years. He's made a huge contribution to nature conservation over the years (including time spent as Treasurer and Chair of the RSPB Council).
I'll always have a soft spot for Adrian - not just because he was on the interview panel when I landed my job as Conservation Director of Plantlife in 1999. He was a great mentor to me and others at Plantlife. He loves his plants (especially arable flowers) and always brings intelligence and humour to any debate.
But perhaps his greatest achievement has been highlighting the need to protect wildflower meadows.
Appropriately, therefore, we were at the Lugg Meadows in Herefordshire - where 18 hectares were dedicated to Adrian. These flood meadows are the largest known surviving example of Lammas Meadow – areas of common land that date back to medieval times.
Just 5% of the original meadows remain - a fact that is heart-breaking whle walking through the meadows in the summer, when they are at their best - oozing colour and full of life.
I was with the kids and I was reminded of something that Chris Rose had said the day before at a conference: we are losing contact with nature partly because of our lifestyle which shelters us from the wild. But this is compounded by a diminishing resource. There is simply less wildlife-rich habitat for you to bump into. Young people these days (did I really say that?) will have to be pretty smart to find their way to the patches of flower-rich grassland which remain. So, how can they grow to love it if they never have contact with it?
This is why I have always been keen on advocating the right for every child to have contact with the natural world as part of their formal education. Others, such as Tony Juniper, have advocated introducing natural history GSCE.
This is also why I am disappointed that successive governments, whilst agreeing with the principle, have not done enough to encourage out of classroom learning.
Unfortunately, the Natural Environment White Paper, while saying all the right words, fails to provide the guarantees that I think are necessary. This was a missed opportunity. The RSPB and others will continue to provide high quality field teaching opportunities, but many schools simply cannot afford taking kids on school trips. We had calculated that just £27m was needed to subsidise all children eligible for free-school meals to be given an annual opportunity to have contact with nature.
I know, there is no money, but surely it is worth looking again as this is such as tiny sum of money to invest in finding tomorrow's environmental leaders.
Sooty - some answers to your hen harrier question.
The first thing to say is that it’s an interesting idea. But English hh breeding population is at its lowest ebb for years – 5 active nests – so it is all rather a rather hypothetical conversation. If a significantly greater number of harriers were allowed to breed on grouse moors, then of course we should consider ways of managing the interface with grouse shooting.
Another, practical approach exists, with evidential support for its effectiveness – diversionary feeding of hh nests. It is a mainstay of the Langholm Moor Demonstration Project. The key question is why other moor managers are so apparently opposed to using it? Arguments of practicality and cost do not stack up compared to the implications of running/policing a brood management scheme.
We have what we call a ‘cascade approach’ to conflict mitigation where less intrusive techniques are first tested. We think that this remains robust. A translocation scheme should be regarded as a last resort, as it is in law.
The last thing to say that, even if consented, it cannot offer a long-term solution because it would need to continue in perpetuity despite the fact that there will be only a limited availability of suitable recipient sites for translocated birds.
Hope that helps.