Children: An untapped resource

by Steven Goss

As a nation, we in Britain might have

just woken up in time to the huge environmental damage we have wrought on our countryside during the past fifty years or so. Although recent

events in Newbury and at Selar Farm in

Wales might suggest otherwise, environmental issues now receive much more attention and figure high on the list

of public concerns in general. This is no doubt partly due to organisations like ours, but whilst it is encouraging that children are learning about recycling and the destruction of tropical rainforests, are they really growing up with an understanding of the countryside and should Butterfly Conservation aim itself more at children? Naturally, it is adults that provide B.C. with much of its income through subscriptions and legacies etc. but I think there is considerable untapped potential to enlist more junior members. The R.S.P.B. currently has around 139,000 junior members. That's a lot of subscription money, but more importantly it's a lot of young people growing up with an interest in birds.

I firmly believe that if we can capture the interest of children, they will retain that interest, to a greater or lesser degree , for the rest of their lives. So many of today's children seem to be growing up on a diet of television and computer games, whereas in the past they might have spent leisure time playing in the garden and country lanes where butterflies "' would have become a familiar sight. If they caught one, w,y chances are that their mother or 1 ;:f;1/ father could tell them what it was. Today, I think most children would struggle to name even one species. So what can we do about it ? On a local basis, information packs for schools combined with a short talk with slides sounds like a good idea. Nationally, perhaps competitions and features in children's magazines combined with the chance to join B.C. could work. Unfortunately, I think there is little doubt that recruiting new members of all ages is made somewhat harder because they have to join nationally and not locally.