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 - I share your frustration. And, I think, Ministers do as well. There is a reference in the white paper to a review of advice and incentives for farmers and land managers. They want to "create a more integrated, streamlined and efficient approach that is clearer to farmers and land managers and yields better environmental results". While these are just words for now - this has to be right.
Thanks both - the sad fact is that there is political consensus on the need for action but there has to date been too little invested in improving the situation. We need to regroup and think about what will force governments to act.
See that RSPB are at Cereals 2011 saying what will encourage farmers to step up for nature.Although no longer a farmer think it is simple really,the present schemes are to ordinary farmers so complicated do this or that and a thousand other options that either no one will go to that trouble or if they do some things they do such simple things that have hardly any impact.What they need is simple stuff like grow a Hectare of wild bird mixture leave overwinter and claim x number of £s + we will give you the advice of how to do this.
Unless someone takes the initiative and stop complaining about farmland birds getting fewer and fewer then they will go the way of Marks favourite comment of Martha.
Find it frustrating that with all the brains in the country people do not seem to see that if these schemes were working then numbers would not be dropping and are farmers clambering to improve things,of course not,much to complicated.Perhaps you are in a fortunate position to have influence but nobody takes any notice of ordinary farmer,even the three options to improve things at RSPB stand gives options not relevant.
Like your blogs Martin but such a lot to do not even being tackled at present.
I think this is the greatest challenge in conservation facing us - teaching our kids to care about nature. But you're right there are so few wild places left that they don't know nature, other than parks and bright green fields of wheat. As a father of 2 teenagers I struggle to get them interested, although heartening I guess is that they acknowledge nature should be protected, but is that enough for the next generation?
Spending a lot of time at a local nature reserve makes you realize how few young people visit and if it's just left to us oldies then what we have left is on a short life span!
Could not agree more, Martin. In my respones to the call by DEFRA for comments during the preparation of the White Paper I suggested that companies should be encouraged to assign their employees one day a year to work on a nature reserve and so make contact with nature that way.
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