Ecos 32 1 inside pages

ECOS 32(1) 2011 Editorial

Partners in crime?

They are meant to be our best friends – the charities that support the array of ecocauses we all believe in. We rely on these bodies to defend our green and pleasant land, and we proudly promote their logos on our car windows. These NGOs, the non government organisations of the environment and conservation sector, are inherently worthy, and in need of our continual support, aren’t they? We put our trust in them to hold government to account, don’t we? Well, times are changing it seems – never before have these bodies come in for such stick throughout an issue of ECOS. In the pages which follow, NGOs stand accused of being shifty about the Big Society agenda, patronising in their treatment of members, and willing to exploit any offer of public lands or forests for their own specific motives. These are not nit-picking complaints, these are fundamental questions about how the NGOs pursue their mission amidst the bigger picture.

Of course NGOs need to survive the harsh economic times, so should we excuse them adopting a more clinical commercial approach? Organisations are feeling the pinch everywhere, as core funding dries up and income streams and investments are on the wane. Jonathan Somper reviews the prospects for future funding in this issue. His outlook is not as downbeat as some might predict. But in a survey conducted by Rachel Kempson, we asked NGOs for views on the jobs market, and how their recruitment plans were faring. Very few were prepared to share their thoughts – perhaps a sign of uncertainty and loss of confidence. The NGOs’ coyness applies to Big Society too – few are challenging the control culture linked to the ethos of Big Society, instead, bodies are poised to grab any funds going. Diane Warburton invites us to realise the pitfalls of Big Society in this edition, and warns against voluntary bodies generating income at the expense of their core values.

Several contributors discuss the U turn on public forest sales, and the aborted plan to sever National Nature Reserves from Natural England. Our authors offer markers for the emerging debate on the future role of the nation’s forests, from the functional role of all that goes with timber supply, to the wildlife and amenity angles, which are ever more complex and important. Indeed, the abrupt rethink on forestry sales

by Government was more than just tactical politics, it symbolised a realisation in society that something bigger and deeper was at stake – a connection with nature and the great outdoors that we feel in our souls, and are prepared to fight for. It was telling that Government picked this up, yet some wildlife bodies did not.

NGOs are the lifeblood of much that we promote and debate in ECOS – the mutual support is close and will go on. But the forces of change affect us all, and the time has come to be a critical friend.

Geoffrey Wain

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ECOS 32(1) 2011

All you need is love?

Mapping out a positive way ahead for conservation beyond the current period of austerity needs more than just Lawton-type reports and corporate resolutions. We need to ask ourselves some searching questions: do we give proper credence to our personal motivations as conservationists? Do we really understand how social institutions work?

Are we hiding behind financial and legal instruments instead of truly engaging with people as individuals and communities? Where’s the heart?

GAVIN SAUNDERS

This article briefly examines some themes which I believe are central to how we plot a path into the future, and it deliberately sets these themes alongside each other, because I strongly believe they’re related. The first is the relationship between conservationists as individuals, and the organisations that employ or involve them. The second theme is the Big Society agenda being proffered by the Coalition Government, and how we respond to it. The third theme is the fitness for purpose of the mechanisms upon which so much of current conservation action depends – the designations and the agri-environment grants. Bringing these themes together – motivations, social institutions and mechanisms – offers evidence in favour of a major re-awakening of the conservation ethic.

This agenda deliberately does not consider ecology at all – it’s about how we do things, rather than about what we are trying to achieve. You could say why worry about the niceties when what really matters is to get out there and do stuff. But I believe the emphasis we rightly place on the importance of action can sometimes mean that we don’t think enough about the how and the why. Landscape-scale conservation is a classic example: it represents a paradigm shift for conservation, the debate about it has been exciting and inspiring, and the projects which are forging ahead using it as a signature are strong and innovative. But perhaps we have been too intoxicated by the idea of what a living landscape full of connected, thriving habitat would look like, to think critically about whether conservation’s modus operandi are actually fit for the job.

Whatever your view of what follows, one thing is clear: the current approach is not working. Biodiversity continues to decline, and conservation is still not a central part of policy and society. You could argue that we’re just not forceful enough, or not well enough resourced. But I suggest that all the noise and all the money in the 2

NEIL BENNETT

It’s a difficult time. The money is drying up, the job specs are being shuffled again, and the public is restive. The world is changing, and conservation needs to judge carefully how its own messages and approaches may also need to change in response. Amidst this turbulent period, should conservation organisations batten down the hatches and weather the storm, or is it time for us all to rush outside and get wet through?

world will do little good if our hearts are not open and our connection to our fellow human beings in society is not strong.

Owning our motivations

In the last issue of ECOS Gabrielle Overgaard-Horup and Cara Roberts presented a clear set of findings from the VINE study into the values and aspirations of nature conservations, vis à vis the organisations they work for. One statement stood out for me: “Organisations (particularly government agencies) seem constrained to refer to nature in scientific and economic terms even to their own staff, who also feel wary of openly admitting the emotional attachments that inspired their initial interest.

This is disappointing as it is precisely this inspiration that conservation hopes to develop in wider society.”

How should we respond to this finding? Feel a warm glow that conservationists have Real Passion in spite of the bureaucratic treadmills they work within? Rue the fact that conservationists are too idealistic in a hard-nosed economically driven world? Or should we actually listen to the message it sends: that the impulse that brings most of us into this business is being stifled by the way we actually go about it. The most precious impulse in the whole world of conservation – the sense of enchantment and joy we gain from the natural world – is being squeezed to one side, rather than being cherished and nurtured and offered unashamedly to our peers.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 It’s not difficult to understand how this situation comes about. To argue a case for anything, you have to present it in other people’s terms, and relate it to the things other people care about. Business and government take little notice of personal feelings, and heart warming stories of personal epiphanies carry little weight when fighting development or forging policy. That’s what we tend to assume, but is it really true? Don’t most of the really significant shifts in public policy start life from moments when public campaigns or debates get under the skin of our human experience, and touch on deep seated senses of truth which we all feel but don’t necessarily articulate? Fighting illness, tackling economic hardship, enabling democratic freedoms, and creating educational advancement all appeal directly to our sense of ourselves, and often do so in very personal, emotional terms. Yet conservation arguments (as advanced by most conservation organisations) seem so often to be couched primarily in terms of the promise of ecosystem services and the risks from threats to biodiversity, relegating the personal stories of human experience of nature to somewhat secondary afterthoughts.

The groundswell of public feeling over the recent Government proposals for disposing of the public forest estate provides a good case in point. Very many people had the gut feeling that the proposals threatened their link with the natural, and their sense of connection with trees and woods. That personal gut reaction was what generated the mass movement in opposition to the proposals – not technical arguments about conservation significance. The Woodland Trust chose to try and steer the debate towards its own priority – ancient woodland. But did arguments about restoring planted ancient woodlands really reflect the public’s instincts?

Getting a fix on the Big Society

I’ve just finished reading Jesse Norman’s book, The Big Society.1 It’s a challenge, trying to wade through the political diatribes against the Fabianism of the modern Labour Party, and the dead hand of the State. Try as he might, Norman, who has been credited as one of the architects of ‘New Conservatism’, can’t hide his old Tory instincts, despite the engaging forays into the philosophy of social interaction. But for all that, the book’s worth reading – many people are becoming dab hands at dismissing the notion of the Big Society, but before doing so we should try to work out the substance behind Mr Cameron’s rhetoric.

There is a huge sense of obfuscation and cynicism in the way much of the environment movement is responding to the Coalition’s overtures on the Big Society.

Apart from natural suspicion of the messenger, given that perhaps a majority of the movement feel their home is naturally on the liberal left, there’s an obvious reason for this caution. Diane Warburton makes the point very forcibly elsewhere in this issue: the horrible conflation of drastic cuts in public spending with overtures about civil society needing to take on the tasks of the state, is at best counterproductive, and at worst evidence of cynical hypocrisy.

If voluntary bodies increasingly take on previously state-run services, there is a risk that they become ever more bound by, and beholden to, the state. This would in fact fly in the face of the very logic of the Big Society as articulated by Norman, as 4

ECOS 32(1) 2011 a ‘conversation’ between independent, free-thinking and equal civil institutions, free to generate their own solutions rather than shackled to a pre-determined set of targets set by a paternalistic state. So if the Big Society notion becomes translated through Whitehall shorthand into a simple contracting-out of services to the voluntary and community sector, that contractual relationship could easily kill any hope of a genuine Big Society outcome.

But however justified the criticisms, we would be profoundly short sighted to simply reject the new politics of localism on the grounds that it’s being undermined by the reality of public spending cuts. The fact that many of the natural vehicles for Big Society are being weakened by the cuts, does not of itself dilute the case of greater civil engagement in delivering public services. But more importantly, to take the principle of Big Society at its word we should not wait to be told what it means. We should stand on our own feet – intellectually, politically and ethically – and define it for ourselves. What does nature conservation have to say about individual capability, social capital, the workings of civic institutions, and the relative roles of society and the state? And what influence should a fresh consideration of those issues have on conservation itself?

Are conservation bodies ‘Big Society in action’?

Funding aside, do the current institutions of nature conservation provide a properly structured set of vehicles for delivering this new localism agenda? Certainly that seems to be how several of them are selling themselves – and indeed, Caroline Spellman herself has said recently that she considers the RPSB to be Big Society in action. But I beg to differ: yes, the RSPB does coordinate ‘citizen science’ initiatives like the annual Garden Birds Survey, but those don’t constitute true engagements with local communities, where people are respected as equal participants in a dialogue about priorities and approaches. The memberships of larger conservation charities tend for the most part to be paying audiences of those organisations, not core participants. Effective though this subscription form of engagement is at demonstrating support, raising core funds and delivering messages to already-interested audiences, it does not of itself empower, involve and mobilise people to become instrumental themselves in effecting change.

It’s true that many people don’t want to be personally instrumental – they would prefer to offer financial support to an organisation they trust, to work for the cause they care about - and that is just fine. But organisations empowered by their supporters in that way do not fit into the localism paradigm in the way it is currently being framed.

When I was an employed staff member at a Wildlife Trust, many years ago, I saw myself as a professional nature conservationist, mandated to pursue my profession in my organisation’s patch. I regret to admit that I regarded many of the Trust’s membership, including many of its (mainly older) active members and volunteers, as slightly quaint throw-backs to the early days of the Trust as a much smaller, volunteer-run body. I regarded ‘us’ staff as much more serious, engaged and effective, making real change on the ground. In some ways I was right – the professional ethos enabled more effective dialogue with land managing and policymaking bodies. But it was also deeply patronising, disregarding the more grounded truth, in many ways, that those members and volunteers represented.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 In the early days of Wildlife Trusts and other conservation charities, change happened because people came together to volunteer their time and effort to a common cause. The work and the approach may often have been flaky and parochial and middle class and limited in reach, but it was real – connected to locality, community and the individual. As Trusts grew, they chose to take on staff to bring skills, dedicated time and professionalism to the task. On paper at least, those originating individuals, or their successors, still run the show, as trustees on councils and committees. But in reality their role – to a greater or lesser extent – is very often manipulated (or ‘steered’, to put it nicely) by paid staff towards what those staff regard as the ‘right’ ends.

The vast bulk of non-active members moreover, don’t even get in on the conversation. From the staff end of the telescope, those members are important as a source of revenue, and as a mandating constituency, but are not necessarily seen as important as sources of ideas and perspectives. The members’ magazines seem to ‘tell’ and ‘explain’ rather than encourage free-thinking debate. The effect is to distance the mandating community from the business of making a difference. This is not to suggest that doing otherwise would be an easy option – once you’ve many thousands of members, how can you organise a dialogue which is meaningful, while still delivering the business of the organisation? But I suggest that it leaves these organisations hard-pressed to truly argue that they represent ready-made models for the Big Society.

Designations and agri-environment – tools fit for the task?

Many of nature conservation’s achievements over the last 30 years have been enabled by site designation and agri-environment schemes. Those tools have served us well in many ways. But I for one feel increasingly conscious that those mechanisms can be counterproductive, if used officiously and without flexibility and real engagement.

And they are still much easier than addressing the real issue – persuading those who control the fate of habitats to buy into the principle of conservation as self-motivated individuals. This too, I suggest, is one of the consequences of the professionalization and corporate evolution of conservation. Though there are lots of highly able and effective advisory staff out there, making great use of these mechanisms, it remains the case that, whether we know if or not, we are hiding behind regulation and grant aid, just as we can sometimes hide behind uniforms and marketing slogans, because it’s easier than true engagement. To quote Jules Pretty: “It is true that natural capital can be improved in the short term with no explicit attention paid to social and human capital. Regulations and economic incentives are commonly used to encourage changes in behaviour. But though these may change behaviour, they do not guarantee a change in attitudes: farmers commonly revert to old practices when the incentives end or the regulations are no longer enforced.

There are quite different outcomes when social relations and human capacity are changed. External agencies can work with individuals to increase their knowledge and skills, their leadership capacity and their motivations to act. If these succeed in leading to the desired improvements in natural resources, then this has a positive feedback on both social and human assets”.2 6

ECOS 32(1) 2011 Idealistic as this may sound to a hard-pressed conservation advisor or SSSI officer battling intransigent landowners, ultimately it’s still true. The only question is, at what point do we actually recognise and act on it? Though it is a great asset, an HLS agreement is not a ‘solution’ in itself, unless the 10 years of that agreement is used as a priceless breathing space in which to build a true commonality of view with a landowner and his or her neighbours, so that conservation gains can be sustained beyond that period on the landowner’s terms, out of his or her own choice.

Freeing the spirit If it is anything, conservation is not a conformist, institutional subject. It is at its best when it is authentic, critical, controversial. The institutionalising process of the last few decades, which has turned amateur zeal into smart marketing, means we spend too much of our time promoting our organisations’ company lines, rather than simply sharing our passions. There is an analogy with the relationship between personal religious revelation and the dogma of established churches. The process of institutionalising a faith can turn a passionate sense of personal truth into a doctrine which stunts the personal. This is not to suggest that nature conservation has religious overtones (though it is informed by a deep spirituality for many), but as a movement it is driven by intensely personal (albeit shared) emotional responses to wild nature. Yet once those motivating instincts coalesce into organisations, they have to be documented, and documents become doctrine.

There is a strong case for suggesting that the conservation movement has lost its way. It has some big and powerful tools at its disposal: the concept of landscapescale working; the argument for climate change adaptation; the logic of ecosystem services. Yet there is a sense somehow that we don’t know quite what to do with those tools, or perhaps lack the heart and passion to know how to wield them. There is something hollow about the mood music. In our souls we know our cause is right, and in our words we trot out arguments which are no less cogent than they have ever been. But in the space between soul and words, there is something missing.

The Lawton report has only underlined that concern for me, rather than igniting a new excitement for the future. It says all the right stuff, but it seems wooden. It’s been summarised as advocating ‘more, bigger, better and joined’. But what about ‘valued’? What about ‘nurturing’, ‘relevant’, ‘accessible’ – even ‘loved’? Lawton does recognise the importance of achieving true societal support, talking about improved collaboration between all levels of society, but the emphasis of the actions it proposes doesn’t seem to reflect this.

So what is the way forward? Re-discover the roots of conservation? Recognise the human basis of our actions – as individuals, families, groups, communities, civil institutions, interests, markets? Accept that sustainable, meaningful outcomes are built through participation, ownership, dialogue, compromise and common consent, not through imposed state rules, abstruse action plans and bribery with EU grants?

For me, the missing ingredient is humanity – the human context and meaning of conservation. There is a lack of heart. What starts as a spark of connection in our 7

ECOS 32(1) 2011

ECOS 32(1) 2011

own hearts as conservationists, somehow gets lost in the translation from individual to professional to organisation to public audience. We need to find that spark again, own it, and set it free. If we don’t, conservationists risk facing another generation of talking amongst themselves.

References

Forest Sales – After the Storm

1. Jesse Norman (2010) The Big Society, University of Buckingham Press 2. Jules Pretty (2002) Agri-Culture, Earthscan

Gavin Saunders is project manager for the Neroche Scheme on the Devon-Somerset border, and a freelance advisor on conservation policy and project development. The views here are his own.

Gavin.saunders@forestry.gsi.gov.uk Mural by Tom Cousins Photo: Michele Covington-Jones

On 27 January 2011, the British Coalition Government launched a consultation on the future of the Public Forest Estate in England. Less than a month later, beset by protest, it changed its mind. What are the implications of this policy vortex for conservation? What are the prospects for England’s forests?

I.D. HODGE & W.M. ADAMS Midwinter was a season of U-turns, if not of government goodwill to nature. On 4 February 2011, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Caroline Spelman, announced the reversal of plans to remove National Nature Reserves from public ownership.1 Less than two weeks later, on 16 February, the Prime Minister was asked by Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, whether he was happy with his ‘flagship’ policy to sell off publicly-owned forests, and he said ‘the short answer to that is no’. Newspaper headlines the next day announced the end of the contentious plans for the £250m sale of forests in England, and the pre-emptive abandonment of the consultation exercise that had been due to run for another nine weeks.2 The forestry clauses were duly removed from the Public Bodies Bill.3 The death knell for the Government’s proposals was the sharpness and scale of the public backlash against them. A YouGov poll4 found that 84% of people agreed the woods and forests should be kept in public ownership for future generations.

By 17 February, some 532,634 people had signed up for a petition launched by the web site 38 Degrees to ‘save our forests – don’t sell them off to the highest bidder’.

Leader and letter writers in all major newspapers were unanimous in their scornful criticism of government policy. Here was a genuinely popular cause: and one that presented the coalition government as genuinely unpopular, particularly with the countryside-walking middle classes. In retrospect, the outcome seems inevitable.

Reasoning The proposal to transfer substantial areas of Forestry Commission land surfaced in November 2010, waking a broadsheet media storm.5 The Environment Secretary claimed that “this is not a fire sale by a cash-strapped state”,6 but that is precisely what the Government was portrayed as attempting. The debate soon focused on England, for the Scottish Government and Welsh Assembly Government soon distanced themselves from the sell-off policy, although attention was soon drawn to the scale of ongoing forest sales in Scotland.7 The scale of the Government’s plans for disposal was clear long before the ‘consultation’ was announced in January: Jim Paice, Minister of State for 8

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Agriculture and Food, said to the House of Lords Select Committee: “part of our policy is clearly established: we wish to proceed with … very substantial disposal of public forest estate, which could go to the extent of all of it”.8 Nor were the reasons in any doubt. Later in the same session, Paice observed “the decision to move towards substantial disposal of the forestry estate is based on a number of issues. First, there has been... a view from some sectors that the Forestry Commission need not be owning all the public forestry estate.

Secondly – and I am not going to avoid the issue here - there is a need for capital receipts. It is potentially a very substantial sum of public investment.

Thirdly, we genuinely feel, and I feel very strongly, that it is nonsense to believe that the huge public benefits can only somehow be under state ownership.”

The politics of disposal January’s Consultation Document set out an even-handed stall: the Secretary of State introduced it by referring to the important role “our treasured woodlands” play in “shaping the character of the natural environment” and suggested the consultation should identify “how best to both protect and improve these public benefits”.9 However, the document assumed from the outset that fundamental change was necessary. It set out the rationale “for a move away from the Government owning and managing significant areas of woodlands in England”. It took for granted that the Forestry Commission would be “a much smaller organisation, and it will no longer be charged with managing a large forest resource”.

The economics of disposal The Government was fighting an uphill battle from the start. Its own Impact Assessment, published with the Consultation documents, made only a partial assessment of the potential costs and benefits of forest sales. Yet it failed to identify a positive economic return to the policy change in any of the four main categories of forest: large commercially valuable forests, small commercially valuable woodlands, multi-purpose forests and woodlands and heritage and community forests and woodlands. The options assessed included lease or sale of commercial forests to private enterprises, lease or sale to community or civil society, open market sale of community woodland and the transfer of large-scale heritage sites to existing and/or new charitable organisations. In every case, the estimated present value of costs exceeded the present value of benefits. Generation of a positive net present value would need a cut in forest management costs, increased exploitation of commercial opportunities and/or greater provision of public goods.

The public argument One purpose of government ‘consultations’ is to keep public comment within manageable bounds. In this case, the media had a field day, gleefully reporting a legion of criticisms of the proposals in a carefully judged tone of public interest and barely suppressed outrage. Much comment related to the protection of public access on Forestry Commission land. In theory, access could be protected through established rights of way, leasehold agreements and constraints 10

The public revolt against proposed forest sales in January in the Forest of Dean.

Photo: Jane Spray

on sales, but how could positive investment in promoting and providing infrastructure be guaranteed? The Government argument was seriously challenged by the widely cited case of Rigg Wood in Cumbria, where following sale by the Forestry Commission, visitors faced a car park closed by a padlocked gate.10 Similar arguments were made about the protection of biodiversity values on Forestry Commission land: could continuity of management be guaranteed, or the grants to pay for it?

But there were many other criticisms. The pattern of timber harvesting undertaken by the Forestry Commission tends to even out the flow of timber, to the benefit of local industries. Such an approach would be unlikely to attract a profit maximising private operator. And while it might be tempting for advocates of the ‘Big Society’ to hope that voluntary organisations could take over the role of the state in managing woodlands of high conservation value, the transfer of assets also transfers liabilities. State and non-governmental sectors are better regarded as complementary rather than substitutes for each other. The management of private wooded land for public benefit is supported by government in a variety of ways, especially through grants provided by the Forestry Commission. NGOs would only consider taking over the management of heritage woodlands if they were guaranteed an income stream to finance the continuing management. They would inevitably be nervous at government plans to cut such payments down over time to encourage increased efficiency.

More subtle arguments were less often aired. The transfer would create a problem of moral hazard. Public agencies, such as the Forestry Commission are under a duty under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act to protect biodiversity values. Private 11

ECOS 32(1) 2011 organisations have no such obligations, implying a much bigger role for a future Forest Agency in monitoring and enforcing the existing and prospective regulations governing forest management and use. There is also an issue of environmental management under uncertainty. We cannot know what environmental threats and challenges will face forest management in the future, although it is a pretty safe bet that they will be novel and often severe. Recent emergence of a variety of tree diseases and pests indicate the pattern. How will private owners and managers respond to the novel conditions? They lack the immediate availability of basic science and research capacity and will look at the options available to them from their own private interests. It is hard, if not impossible, to design contracts that will guarantee actions to be taken in the public interest where those conditions are currently unknown.

After the Storm Although the Government has announced that it is stepping away from both consultation and the sell-off plan, many issues remain unresolved. First, England has government-owned forests, but it is less clear that it has a coherent forest policy.

By default, the consultation carried out under the previous government provides a strategic discussion of the options, but where will the emphasis lie now?11 Forests for carbon storage? The supply of timber? For biodiversity? For recreation? For their contribution to some nebulous English identity, the hearts of oak to match le rosbif of English football? The opposition to the sell-offs certainly suggests how deeply people in the UK value forests and woodlands, but also the variety of reasons they had for doing so. But perhaps it also reflects resistance to change, and lack of trust in government, as much as any settled view about different forms of forest tenure. Given the numerous guises in which government forestry has appeared since 1919 (strategic softwood supply, supporter of private upland afforestation, farm conifer woodlands, broadleaved planting, and forest park), where will the new emphasis lie? The answer to this question is of critical importance for biodiversity, rural communities, dog-walkers, mountain bikers and the sparse shoots of woodusing industry.

ECOS 32(1) 2011 As Andy Wightman pointed out in the Observer, there are different types of public ownership and that local community ownership offers some potential advantages over the large and distant Forestry Commission.13 It is quite possible that the same arrangement of public ownership and management by one particular agency will not represent the optimal solution for all of the forest categories in all locations.

One feature of the anti-sell- offs backlash was that every commentator or protestor had their own idea of what forests meant to them. As Martin Spray points out in this issue of ECOS, in the context of the Forest of Dean14, forests and woodlands have complex histories and are subject to a vast range of uses. In the current jargon, not all areas of woodland provide the same set of ‘services’. There is already a kaleidoscope of different kinds of owners, from corporations through large estates to small landowners and communities and non-governmental organisations. There is every shade of management from intensive tree farming to leaving completely alone, from pheasant rearing to the painstaking re-establishment of coppice rotations. We have a mix of different kinds of forests. It is likely we will need to keep a mix. This very British approach to policy may have arisen by accident, but it may need some care to maintain it. England needs a forest authority which is empowered and resourced to manage its diversity of owners in the public interest.

This brings up the fourth challenge. What will happen to the Forestry Commission as an organization? In particular, what about its science role? Many of those who watched the closure of the Centre of Ecology and Hydrology’s Monk’s Wood base still wait to be convinced of the merits of slimmer and more centralised government science to provide the depth and breadth of environmental monitoring and prediction needed. Without a strong science capacity the Forestry Commission’s achievements in re-modelling the conifer monocultures and delivering biodiversity benefits are unlikely to be maintained. Merger with Natural England is likely to be on the agenda, in response to a mantra of rationalization that will contribute nothing to improved forest management on the ground. And who will oversee the nations’ forests? The Forestry Commission’s Regional Advisory Committees have been disbanded, the Big Society presumably offering a sufficiently broad fig-leaf for centralized decision-making.

Second, who will manage government forests? Sale of forest land is not new or recent, and has not stopped. In this ECOS, Diane Warburton points out how the government is pushing ahead with the top-down creation of ‘charities’ to manage former government assets12, the advance of neoliberalism by stealth, behind the slogan of the ‘Big Society’. Such ‘Quasi-Independent Charitable Trusts’ (QUICTS) are the new QUANGOS, pushing assets and the costs of their maintenance away from government into some limbo where (presumably) the government hopes that private sector management efficiencies can be brought to bear while ‘The Big Society’ label attracts both democratic oversight and cheap labour. Such a solution had been considered for England’s National Nature Reserves, and similar strategies are to be expected with forests, particularly those with high wildlife value and low commercial values.

The Government’s U Turn on sell-offs was sudden, if overdue. Like the original policy, it does not seem to have been the result of any careful thought. Having made a rash and unpopular policy, the Government has made an equally hurried decision to reverse it. The hard question is: what it will put in place? In announcing to the Commons that it “got this one wrong”, the Minister, Caroline Spelman, emphasized the Government’s commitment to “a fresh approach for our forests and woodlands”.

But what will that fresh approach be like? In place of a public consultation, there will be an independent panel to report by autumn 2011 on the future direction of forestry and woodland policy in England and the roles of the Forestry Commission and the Public Forest Estate.15 Out of the glare of the public eye, deals can perhaps be done: the Conservative instinct to sell-off public assets may yet have its day.

Third, what kinds of owners and managers are best suited to different kinds of forests? This is the debate that the foreclosure of the consultation has choked off.

As the 38 Degrees web team wrote on 11 February “good news, but we are not out of the woods yet!”16 The debate about England’s forests cannot be conducted

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 by megaphone, and it remains to be seen how well it can be conducted by proxy in the Secretary of State’s new Panel. Key questions now are: • who are our woods for?

• what should they be like? and • who should manage them for us?

ECOS 32(1) 2011

After the revolt - a sideways look at the Forest

These are not remotely new issues, but they have never been more important.

Voices raised during the public alarm over the proposed forest sell offs raise deeper issues about the meaning of our contemporary forests, as this discussion of the Forest of Dean illustrates.

References

MARTIN SPRAY

1. Robert Mendick ‘Coalition scraps plans for disposal of nature reserves’, Daily Telegraph 9pm GMT 05 February 2011, (www.telegraph.co.uk); 9W.M. Adams and I.D. Hodge (2010) ‘The Crown Jewels and the Big Society’, ECOS 31 (2/4): 28-35.

2. Nigel Morris (2011) ‘Forest farce: Cameron to axe sell-off policy’, Independent 17 February 2011; Nicholas Watt and John Vidal (2011) ‘Forests sell-off abandoned as Cameron orders U-turn’, Guardian 21.18GMT, 16 February, Guardian.co.uk.

3. DEFRA 17 February 2011 ‘The Future of Forestry in England’, http://ww2.defra.gov.uk/news/2011/02/17/ futureforestry/ 4. Damien Carrington (2011) huge majority oppose England Forest sell-off, poll finds’, Guardian 22 January 2011 06.00 GMT 5. Caroline Lucas ‘Fight the government’s forest sell-off’, Tuesday 16 November 1600GMT, Guardian.co.uk; David Clark ‘Our forests are our future’, Tuesday 16 November 1602GMT, Guardian.co.uk).

6. Caroline Spelman (2010) ‘Setting the record straight on the sale of English woodlands’, Guardian 12 November 2010.

7. Simon Johnson ‘£28millon profit selling Scotland’s public forests’, Telegraph 528 GMT 06 February 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk.

8. Answer to the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Union, Agriculture, Fisheries and Environment Sub-Committee on 24th November 2010 9. The Future of the Public Forest Estate in England: a public consultation (http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/ consult/forests/index.htm). Quotes pages 4,7 and 8.

10. Peter Marren ‘Britain’s forests are being sold off - and nature lovers are up in arms’, Independent 3 February 2011.

11. Forestry Commission England (2009) The Long-term Role of the Public Forest estate in England: consultation, The Forestry Commission (http://www.forestry.gov.uk/forestry/infd-7rufme).

12. Diane Warburton (2011) ‘Big Society and the environment - empowerment or takeover?’, in this ECOS. We may wonder why people are not campaigning about the transfer of canals from the British Waterways Board? (http://www.britishwaterways.co.uk/newsroom/all-press-releases/display/id/2999).

13. Andy Wightman (2011) ‘Put forests in the hands of the people and we can transform our countryside’, Observer 16 January 2011, p. 35.

14. Martin Spray (2011) ‘A Sideways look at the Forest’, in this ECOS. 15. DEFRA 17 February 2011 ‘The Future of Forestry in England’, http://ww2.defra.gov.uk/news/2011/02/17/ futureforestry/ (see footnote 3) 16. Email from David Dabbs 11 February, http://38degrees.org.uk/action@38degrees.org.uk.

Ian Hodge and Bill Adams both work in the University of Cambridge, in the Departments of Land Economy and Geography respectively. They are currently interested in the institutional politics of landscape scale conservation in the UK. Contact: idh3@cam.a.uk; wa12@cam.ac.uk

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When I started writing this, early in the UN International Year of Forests, there was still a proposal to transfer more or most of England’s public forest estate out of immediate State control, as part of the Government’s rush to a Big Society, but to do so leaving in place “assured… public access, biodiversity and protection from development”.

This interested me, as the boundary of my garden is also the boundary of the Forest of Dean woodland. It was comforting to know that such safeguards were to stay, but there did seem to be a few uncertainties about the proposal, to say the least.

The proposal generated a national outcry – and this outburst of democracy has led to a governmental back-down. There were a lot of worried people locally, including our former Conservative MP who in a previous sell-off sortie in the eighties declared that the Dean would be sold only over his dead body. All needless, according to a distant neighbour of ours, who said that, as a Heritage Forest, the Dean would be exempt from sale. He was doubtless right, as he’s the present (Conservative) MP, and a Minister. He has striven1 to make it clear that Heritage Forests such as the Dean would not be sold, but leased to charities – or would remain in status quo if none came forward to take them on. To slightly complicate the picture, he suggested that a charity could take on forest land in the form of either a trust or lease. A trust would be subject to the Charity Commission. We were also reassured that ‘Commercially Valuable’ forests weren’t actually to be sold, but leased. A curious scenario, but not so stark a prospect as the originally intended “very substantial disposal” of the estate. Nonetheless the enabling Bill is ringing alarm bells everywhere. Previous Conservative Government advisor Tom Burke says of the situation: “In nearly 40 years of observing government, I have never seen an effort to steal power from Parliament and the public on such a colossal scale”.2 Meanwhile, planning constraints generally are being weakened, and I see some wag has asked why the government thinks timber companies might want to buy the forests. … “To abandon the work they do and become Druids?” No: neither the anger nor the worry was completely abated by such reassurances: in fact, they prompted a few silly (or naive) questions.

The Forest of Dean What is the Forest of Dean? In a curious part of the world, where England marches with Wales, is “one of the oldest and most valuable of our national woodlands”, wrote a former chair of the Forestry Commission introducing the official guide.3 Taking 15

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advantage of the now-abandoned FC (England) & Defra Consultation Document’s words 4, I would say that it is a large multi-purpose potentially commercially valuable heritage forest that is well-used by its community. For England, it is a massive piece of woodland. Its c.120 square kilometres (c.48.5 square miles) of afforested land are almost entirely plantation: a mix of, native and exotic, soft- and hardwoods, but it has long been praised as our foremost oak forest. Recently planted oaks can expect to be in a 150 year rotation. Even softwoods need decades of peace…

Actually, it is a core of statutory forest 5, with large contiguous woodlands and bits and pieces of smaller woods; and of course, it isn’t just trees: patches of grassland, bracken, etc, all constitute ‘forest’, within which there are numerous settlements.

Quite which pieces of woodland were and weren’t included in the proposal is as clear as mud, even to the MP. But there were and are other confusions.

A forest from the past

What is the Forest of Dean for? Although it makes little from its crops, its longstanding remit to be a source of timber continues. Actually, ‘timber’ is a little misleading: some – even some of the picturesque oaks planted in the shadow of Napoleon in the 1800s, for the Navy’s future men-o’-war – is just firewood, and when recently I bought some oak planks locally, they were from France. (One to Boney.) Since 1938, when it became England’s first Forest Park, a second remit is to cater for outdoor recreation. It offers an attractive setting for (r)ambling, cycling, horse-riding, joyriding; a sculpture trail for art-lovers; cover for joyfully wild lovers; and wildlife for nature-lovers. Many visitors come here to ‘recharge’ through ‘contact with nature’.

In its history, the Forest has rung to the calls of royal hunting horns, the clang of hammers and picks on anvils and on stone in iron-mines, coal-mines and quarries, the roar of furnaces, the puffing and huffing of railways. And of course the eager chomp of axes, to feed the furnaces, for building timber and for ships’-beams. It has had one or two lean times. A royal need for funds led to the selling-off of its timber, and minerals, to John Wintour in 1640, after whose entrepreneurial pillaging a Reafforestation Act was needed.6 Britons mined here before the Romans. William the Bastard made it a Royal (hunting) Forest after 1066. The English word ‘forest’, in fact, originally means land subject to severe forest law, as introduced to England by William. Even so, iron mining, quarrying, and coal mining activities grew. The endeavours of metallurgists in the 1800s could have made the Dean a major steel-working centre, but the initiative went to Sheffield. Shallow workings by ‘freeminers’ still yield a little coal, but deep mining is a memory, and opencast mining is scarcely remembered in the reafforested landscape. The intense network of railbeds now makes for easy walking and riding. I guess that most visitors, many incomers, and probably some natives, have little notion of this long history of cropping, extraction, and industry – partly because the trees hide much of the evidence.

All this past is part of the present Forest, but I think few would today welcome the characterisation of the Dean as an industrial and mineral extraction region.

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A public message to the Forest of Dean MP Photo: David Gear

Indeed, proposals for new quarrying, more opencasting, replacement of redundant navy oaks by wanted softwoods, or introducing limited deer and wild (feral) boar hunting, tend to be looked on with horror. Quite right, too! Unless you need a job…

A forest for the future What might the Forest of Dean be for? By raping other people’s forests, just as by having other lands grow much or most of our food, we (I) allow ourselves (myself) to call the place a forest park, sculpture park, or just ‘park’, and to urge that it should be safeguarded for rambling, dog-walking, bird-watching, family picnics, and ‘getting back in touch with nature’. Others would say car rallies, bike scrambling, war-gaming, or pig-sticking. Yet others say settings for luxury hotels, golf-courses, conference centres and the like. If (when) we couldn’t (can’t) get cheap imports, intensive home-growing of timber might be a more acceptable option in this respect - or we could follow the historical route, and clear the forest for cultivation.

It would, of course, be great if it could be steered to become the Wilderness of Dean in the interests of ‘biodiversity’…7 That would not be likely to please either timber-growers or the access lobby! The widespread anger amongst locals – native and incomer – was (I believe) provoked largely by the thought that a sell-off/leasing – in whole or part – might restrict access for recreation, eliminate historic customs of freemining and sheep-running, and degrade the aesthetic amenity. That, and a taken-for-granted claim that the 17

ECOS 32(1) 2011 Forest is ours. Threats to it seem to be felt with something like Welsh hiraeth: grief, longing-through-belonging (I am grateful to RJ Mansfield in his self published Forest story (1964) for this insight on hiraeth).

But just whose is it? Much of the local anger was provoked by the thought that someone else was going to sell our forest and keep the money. It isn’t so straightforward. It is (as I understand it, and I admit bemusement) the property of the nation. Many of us, even republicans, still call it the Royal Forest of Dean and talk of Crown land – though it isn’t: it was, but the Crown granted it to the nation in 1924. I don’t think many locals are aware of that. It was put into the charge of the Ministry/Minister of Agriculture and the care of the young Forestry Commission, and now by hand-me-down is in the charge of Defra.8 Just to complicate things: rather than ‘granted’, some say ‘entrusted’… However, the popular line is that it belongs to us the English Nation, whereas the official line is that it is owned by the Government.

Such confusion is academic, and unlikely to get us anywhere. Anger is negative: is there something more positive in the offing? Certainly, privatising woodland doesn’t have to be (from a conservationist point of view) a negative. Private ownership isn’t confined to what the Telegraph called “supermarket giants and sleazy bankers”, though it isn’t clear who else could afford to take on the larger woods. The Forest of Dean’s annual deficit is about £0.5 million, and for one the Woodland Trust indicated it wouldn’t take part in the selloff / leasing / entrusting.

I remember an article by land economist Prof Denman, arguing that “conservation is a positive act and power, and so to act lies not with planning authorities but with the authority of land ownership – public and private”. But even I find his conclusion – that “he who would respond to nature’s lead to conserve in living leaves the treelife of past ages must plant his tree as much with his heart as with his foot, and with a freedom known only to the franchise of ownership of the land…” – overly poetic.9 Conservation; stewardship; ownership; prudence; usufruct; resource; asset: there are some but only some overlaps.

This land is whose land?

Was the Wintour episode of 1640 an aberration? The 2011 scenario was complicated. It includes leasing, the Minister/Ministry remaining the landlord/lady.

The pretend owner wished to invite “new or existing charitable organisations to take on ownership or management of the heritage forests”. “Opportunities for community and civil society groups to buy or lease” would be created for smaller parcels. “Commercial operators to take on long term leases” the large-scale commercially valuable bits would be found. The trusts would “secure […] public benefits for the long term future”. For smaller woods elsewhere, community or civil society groups could be involved.

That seems a dream. One might also dream that such a scenario ought to be an opportunity for England to slightly reduce its global footprint, by side-lining birders, carvers and other groups, and letting someone make a fist of growing trees. Alas: the time isn’t ripe…

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 Locally, I have heard only an occasional weak voice mention the Dean’s future in terms of a significantly increased home-grown crop of wood. The loudest shouting was about access and amenity; there was some shouting about heritage, and some clear voices were concerned with whatever they mean by ‘biodiversity’. The Forest is commonly seen as ‘resources’, but – surprisingly – one seldom hears of its ‘ecosystem services’. Carbon sequestration as a service is sometimes whispered, but has failed to make the headlines. ‘Biofuel’ has been a little more successful. I guess Foresters haven’t noticed the “paradigm shift, moving away from protecting the natural environment for its own sake towards managing nature for the services it provides”.10 Actually, I can’t say I’d noticed much of a shift towards treating nature for its own sake.

This local quietness of environmentalist voices apparently merely reflects a national quietness in the popular outcry. “It is one of the most extraordinary popular revolts in recent decades, and it’s providing the first real trial of David Cameron’s pledge to lead the ‘greenest government ever’. But Britain’s substantially resourced – and insufferably self-important – environmental pressure groups have played no part in it. Only now [early February] are they scrambling sclerotically to try to avoid being left behind”.11 I hope by the time you are reading this they (we) shall have caught up.

A forest with friends I’m impatient, and very unrealistic. Of course the sell-off proposal is seen foremost as an economic (i.e. political) matter, not an ecological one. We are thinking in terms of resources, facilities, maybe services, and money costs, not biological communities, ecological stability, and environmental costs. In a two hour meeting of locals with our MP, the word ‘environmental’ was used about twice, and ‘ecology’ maybe once.

Little about these aspects has appeared in the torrent of letters in the local papers or on local organisations’ web-sites.12 The campaign against selloff, HOOF (Hands Off Our Forest), was effectively organised. The local papers both supported it, and were (as usual) a platform for letter-writers; their petition was well supported. A leftish flavour predominated in public meetings, a 3,000-turnout rally in snow, and a cramped meeting - the only one – with the MP, called at one day’s notice. The area is perhaps fortunate to have the Opposition leader of the Lords as a denizen, and her speeches have boosted enthusiasm. The Bishop of Gloucester added support, as did the Conservative District Council, which sent a deputation to Westminster. Along roads through the forest, rashes of Not for Sale and Hands Off notices and yellow ribbons quickly appeared. These are perhaps being removed a little prematurely…

As I said, I’m unrealistic. In the aborted consultation we were asked how much we like a mixed-model future for a collection of shed woods, forests and plantations – with no option to say ‘No’. We were not being asked how best to urgently and dramatically increase the tree-cover of our over 90% naked country – let alone how to stop plundering other people’s forests. We were not being asked what the forest estate might be for.

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If you go down in the woods today…

We were not invited to think like a forest. Not surprising, I suppose! I wonder if a Council Of All Beings in the Forest of Dean would be tempted to bid to ‘manage’ the place.13 But if the director of the Adam Smith Institute could say of last year’s report from the New Economics Foundation which once again rehearsed the blunt Green argument that our present economics rationale is wantonly incompatible with environmental stability – that it “exhibited a complete lack of understanding of economics and, indeed, human development”, and that its authors “want us to be poorer and to lead more restricted lives for the sake of their faddish beliefs” … what hope then for All Beings? Only Homo sapiens counts in this game.14 Standing on the sideline, as usual, watching the play, I can’t help thinking that, as US eco-forester Alan Wittbceker put it15: “We are making the forests of the future with our actions today”; yet, “foresters have so long focused on trees that they forget that the forest is a frame that holds many foci (or points of view)”; and that ”forestry is about where medicine was in the 1900s; that is, the patient has a better chance of survival being left to itself.” Maybe Prof. Denman was, in his way, exploring the same territory. Wittbecke presents forestry as ‘poetic activity’.

Poetry is essentially a communication of qualities of things. ‘Quality’ is surely something the notion of Big Society is struggling to deal with, in the face of – but not acknowledging – a rationalistic economics, a politics of short-term fits, and a philosophy which daren’t see that (as it were) a wood is more than trees. On shorttermism in forests, note Herbert Edlin’s nice warning that “with oak trees, […] we are in a world of economics where the users of one century suffer from the habits of the previous two”.16

The tame forest In the Forest of Dean there stand today only a few handfuls of oak of around 300 years. We have greed, commerce, and the Navy to thank for that. Replanting was intended to re-establish oak plantation; but over the past few centuries the Dean’s composition has repeatedly changed. In 1969, a policy change intended a swing to 75% conifers. By 1971, with 58% achieved, policy changed in favour of broadleaves.

In 1990, a 50:50 state was proposed, and the forest still feels about half and half.17 Past policy swings were for strategic, economic reasons. What will determine things in the future? Prioritizing a need for (say) biofuel, or for biodiversity, for houseconstruction timber, or woodpulp, or for the Forest to be scenery for luxury hotels, would see the forest variously garbed.

This relic of ancient West-British woodland, for which many feel hiraeth, is, of course, something of a sham. (Don’t get me wrong: I feel hiraeth, though only an incomer. This is a personal view.) Yes: it is heritage – or part of it: the digging and delving and industrial heritage is largely blanketed out. I suspect few walkers and cyclists read the level tracks as former railbeds, and that few visitors to the main ‘facility’, Beechenhurst, realize it is part of the Speech House Colliery site. We tend to look on old quarries and lesser diggings such as old bell-pits as honorary quirks of nature (but campaign against new ones.) Incomers diluted the social culture (Mea culpa.) – although TV and the Internet do better jobs.

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Wooded since prehistory, “one of the oldest and most valuable of our national woodlands…” I suggest is belied not least by the rarity of old trees and the abundance of rank-and-file evergreen exotics. It is certainly as truly called ‘plantation’ as ‘woodland’. This is an artifact made in large part with ‘natural’ components.

Replacement of oaks by natural regeneration is said to have been faltering by the end of the 15th century. It is still referred to as an oak forest, and certainly there are oaks. Both Quercus petraea and Q. robur are here, of a variety of provenances.18 It is commonly said to have relatively high biodiversity, and certainly it has diversity.

My garden fauna, for instance, includes one dormouse drowned in a bucket, and four reptiles if we count a cast adder skin, and has a background dawn chorus that includes peacocks. But I’ve not felt biodiversity fatigue here. If you have a fair chance of seeing a fleeing deer or a stubborn wild boar in the forest, or at least of finding badger hair on fence wire, if buzzards are almost guaranteed, and if you catch the stories of wild big felids19, you may well go home feeling you’ve had Contact with Nature. I do most nights. And yet….

I prefer to say I have contact with the natural, rather than with ‘nature’. The suggestion that we have thus far protected the Forest of Dean as a sort of refugium where we can meet Nature strikes me as philosophically outmoded or at least overromantic; and the suggestion, sometimes heard, that in this ‘forest’ we can meet The Wild …Well yes: but I would like to know how not to notice the cars, the fences, the sheep, the trees in rows. There is wildness, certainly: look into a clump of moss, or admire the butterflies. But this is a park, not a wilderness. The butterflies and beech-trees, the shadowy cats, the forest (King William’s chase) itself … aren’t we supposed to think of them as services? And who’s the master!? Well: as I write, it’s us the Nation. The nasty Selloff has been seen off, and HMG for the moment 21

ECOS 32(1) 2011 stays as curator. But the Selloff has been foraging here before – several times. It now has a friendly Panel of Experts in tow.

References and notes 1. Mark Harper has been diligent in replying to individual queries, and in presenting Minister Spelman’s reassurances. Recognising the disquiet in the Forest, he welcomes (25 February 2011) the removal of forestry clauses from the Public Bodies Bill.

2. Telegraph 21 January 2011.

3. Herbert Edlin (ed.) (4th. ed. 1974) Forestry Commission Guide. Dean Forest and Wye Valley. London: HMSO. 4. FC (England) & Defra (2011) The future of the public forest estate in England. A public consultation.

5. The Forest’s Verderers define Statutory Forest as “An area within boundaries last delimited in 1833.

Contains not only areas of trees and forest waste, but also private and Council owned land ? [sic] Forestry Commission land comprises about 80 per cent of the area.” Crown Freehold Land is “Parcels of freehold land owned by the Crown within the Statutory Forest. They are [sic] exempt from commoning privileges.

See http://www.deanverderers.org.uk/glossary.html 6. On the Forest’s history see e.g. the FC Guide; HG Nicholls ((1858) 2010) The Forest of Dean: An historical and descriptive account, Milton Keynes: Dodo Press; or Cyril Hart (1966) Royal Forest, OUP. 7. I floated this one in ‘Down in the forest something stirred’, Town & Country Planning December 1987, 332-43, but it sank.

8. There does seem to be confusion about the name and status of the Dean woodlands. The Forest does not have AONB status, though some of us thought this imminent in the 1990s. The parliamentary constituency is a much larger area, 9. D.R. Denman (1974) Land ownership and conservation through trees. Quarterly Journal of Forestry 68(3) 203-10.

10. This shift is well covered in Sharon Beder (2006) The changing face of conservation: Commodification, privatisation and the free market, at http://works.bepress.com/sbeder/24/ .

11. Geoffrey Lean (2011) Green groups lost in the woods. Telegraph 4 February.

12. For example the minimal response to Lost in Transit? at www.transitionforest.org.uk/forum/ .But as one of the organisers said “I don’t see Transition as a conservation movement. Not environmentalist. Not green ” 13. For the Council of all Beings ritual see John Seed, Joanna Macey, Pat Fleming & Arne Naess ((1988) 2007) Thinking like a mountain. New Catalyst Books, Canada.

14. Quoted by BBC news, 25 January 2010. It feels as though we have gone backwards, rather than had a ‘paradigm shift’!

15. Alan Wittbecker Forestry as poetic activity, at http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/ejournal/ecoforestry/ijeacknow. html , acc. Jan. 2010.

16. A merit of private ownership, when property was inherited within a family was that one generation prepared for the next two, or more.

17. The recent forestry history is summarised well by Ian Standing (1990) Learning from the past. Management and silviculture in the Forest of Dean, in P. Gordon (ed.) Silvicultural systems Institute f Chartered Foresters, discussion proceedings.

18. I think both species have been claimed as the ‘proper’ one for the Dean. There is certainly a complexity – e.g. J.E. Cottrell, C.J.A. SamuelA1 & R. SykesA1 (2004) The species and chloroplast DNA haplotype composition of oakwoods in the Forest of Dean planted between 1720 and 1993 Forestry 77 (2) 99-106.

19. Fletcher M (2010) Britain’s hidden leopards – nature’s secret, or ours? ECOS 31(2) 42-48;

Martin Spray takes pleasure in knowing that some of the world is still wild. He is an editor of ECOS. spraypludds@hotmail.com

ECOS 32(1) 2011

Public forests - the wildlife NGOs: brokenbacked but dangerous The strife over Forestry Commission privatisation has shone a spotlight on the wider political role of the major conservation NGOs. Do they resolutely act to defend the public sector, or do they provide a soft introduction for harsh measures of privatization?

DAVE BANGS Jonathan Porritt1 put it best: “Not one of the major environmental NGOs has so much as lifted a finger in support of the [anti-privatization] campaign…. [This] represents a massive failure of collective leadership…. And they’ve made themselves look foolish and irrelevant, as one of the largest grassroots protests this country has seen for a long time grows and grows without them – indeed despite them”.

Neo-liberal wildlifers The principles 2 drafted by a consortium of the largest of our wildlife NGOs in October 2010 just about sum up the reactionary depths to which the NGOs have sunk on the issue of public sector land privatization. I quote: “We have no inprinciple objection to government seeking efficiencies in the management of land through out-sourcing, including to third-sector bodies”. No chance of a reference here to the vastly greater efficiency of the Forestry Commission’s public forest estate relative to private sector forestry - cross-subsidising landscape-scale conservation resources like the New and Dean Forests….

“In most instances, it is likely that civil society bodies can deliver outcomes more costeffectively than the public sector”. In the same way, no doubt, that the old charity hospitals delivered health care vastly more cheaply than our NHS: by casualisation, rationing, volunteers, and poverty wages…. And, by a below-the-belt attack on TUPE 3 (the bare-bones protections staff get upon takeover of their undertakings), which “may act as a barrier to outsourcing and thus accelerate job losses, as well as being unfair to existing staff of third sector bodies”.

This is the language of neo-liberalism from the leaders of a wildlife NGO sector which most of us dupes think is meant to act as a fire-fighting defence against the ravaging of nature by capitalism.

Public is better It seems as if the benefits of public ownership have been forgotten by many in our generation. Let’s review some of them vis a vis the Forestry Commission: 22

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Steady market conditions: It provides a major counter-cyclical function by steady, planned harvesting programmes, irrespective of the fluctuating price of timber, thus enabling the whole infrastructure of sawmills, processors and forestry contractors to stay in place. It is for this reason, no doubt, that the UK Forest Products Association came out trenchantly against privatization.4 It knows that privatization or ’third sectorisation’ of the Commission’s English forests will mean a drop in timber supply and competition for supply – and therefore possible price increases – from Scottish and Welsh sawmills.

Efficient harvesting: It harvests 92% of its softwood increment, as opposed to just 37% in the private sector, and it harvests 60% of home grown timber on only 18% of woodland.

Open access: It dedicated all its freehold forests as statutory access land under the CROW Act. Environmental regeneration: It initiates major programmes of landscape restoration in ex-industrial areas and on our urban fringes. These community forests reconnect some of our poorest communities with nature.

Wildlife protection: It maintains 99.5% of its SSSIs in favourable condition, and has huge commitments to ancient woodland and heathland restoration.

By contrast, the NGO sector is vulnerable to all the market fluctuations in revenue affecting share portfolios, bequests, subscriptions, and corporate sponsorship.

NGOs are inserted far more thoroughly in the normal operations of the capitalist market than the state sector. They lack all the special advantages brought by state ownership’s partial immunity to market irrationalities.

Conflicts of interest And now these broken-backed NGO leaders form the backbone of the Government’s new ‘Independent Panel on Forestry Policy in England’, created by Caroline Spelman when she conceded to the mass campaign for our public forests. Four of the twelve major landowning conservation NGOs (National Trust, Wildlife Trust Partnership, RSPB and Woodland Trust) plus three landowner reps and a forest industry rep, form a majority – a majority united by a conflict of interest with Panel objectivity, as potential beneficiaries of FC disposals.5 I’ll exemplify this: in January I publicly asked the RSPB’s Conservation Director 6 to explain how they were campaigning against public forest privatisation. His answer was astonishing. He made no mention of campaigning, though he did muse that the RSPB was toying with buying some FC woodland near to one of its reserves.

“The RSPB is not a rich organization”, he said, and thus by implication without the resources to participate in this campaign. (But if the RSPB isn’t rich, who is?...)

And “The state has no business growing trees”. Yet it always has had. Oaks and underwood grown in crown forests built the navy’s ships and fired the furnaces which produced their cannons.

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Forest lovers celebrate at the Friston Forest Rally in East Sussex in March.

Photo: Dave Bangs

The Woodland Trust focused all its fire on the need to safeguard ancient woodland and accelerate the programme for its restoration, provoking accusations that its own on-line petition was an attempt to spike the leading role of the 38 Degrees petition.

To my knowledge, not one of the represented organisations objected in principle to the Con-dem privatisation proposals. The Panel has been carefully chosen to represent an array of the softest opposition to aspects of privatization in combination with the more sophisticated advocacy of ‘third sectorisation’. Members have been chosen to block out all passionate opposition. Not a single one of the burgeoning array of forest defence organisations is represented. The new ‘Forest Campaigns Network’ (bringing together all these groups) has no seat; nor does any representative of the FC’s trade unions.

The door remains closed against the real voices in favour of our public forest estate.

If things do not change the Government may well gain by stealth and manoeuvre what it has failed to win by main force.

Wot we want So where do we go from here? We should argue to preserve and expand our state forest sector. There should be no job cuts, no funding cuts and no forest sales.

The army of passionate supporters of our public forests must be integrated in the decision making structures of the Commission at all its levels.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 The terms of reference of the advisory panel give us a platform to ask for what we were cheated of in the consultation for the CROW Act: a statutory right of access to all woodland, private as well as public, as has always been the case in much of Scandinavia, and is now the case in Scotland.

We must stay organised and keep making the case. And we must wage a twopronged campaign, not just to persuade the new advisory panel and MPs, but, just as importantly, to lobby the rich NGOs and stymie the repetition of their recent ghastly mistakes.

References and notes 1. Quotes from Jonathan Porritt’s blog, Saturday, February 5, entitled “Environmental NGOs betray England’s Forests”.

2. “Principles to inform delivery models for public benefit associated with public sector land”, supported by Butterfly Conservation, The Institute of European Environmental Policy, the National Trust, Plantlife, the RSPB, the Wildlife Trusts Partnership, The Wildfowl and Wetland Trust, the Woodland Trust, October 2010.

3. TUPE refers to the ‘Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006’. They implement the European Community Acquired Rights Directive.

4. See the UKFPA letter to the Prime Minister, above their Executive Director D.J. Sulman’s signature, of February 8, headed “The future of the public forest estate in England” and posted on their website.

5. Panel members’ biographies, and the Panel’s terms of reference, are on the Defra website. The Panel is to report to government in the Autumn. Its membership is:

Chair: James Jones, (Anglican Bishop of Liverpool) Shireen Chambers (Institute of Chartered Foresters Exec Director) Dr Mike Clarke (RSPB Chief Exec) Tom Franklin (Ramblers Assoc Chief Exec) Stuart Goodall (Confed of Forest Industries Chief Exec) Stephanie Hilborne OBE (Wildlife Trusts Partnership Chief Exec) Sue Holden (Woodland Trust Chief Exec) Dr Alan Knight OBE (ex-B&Q environmental executive) Dame Fiona Reynolds DBE (National Trust Dir-General) Sir Harry Studholme (private landowner) John Varley (manager to private landowner) William Worsley (private landowner) 6. Question asked to Mark Avery, guest speaker at the Sussex Ornithological Society Annual Conference, January 2011.

Dave Bangs is a land rights activist and life-long nature conservationist. He co-founded both the Brighton and Worthing ‘Keep Our Forests Public’ groups. He has written two books of landscape history and natural history and is now in the middle of a third. dave.bangs@virgin.net

ECOS 32(1) 2011

Big Society and the environment - empowerment or takeover?

The Big Society is seen as offering exciting new opportunities for the voluntary and community sectors, especially at local levels, in providing services for local people.This article questions the positive gloss given to the proposed changes, and examines the potentially dangerous implications for the voluntary and community sectors.

DIANE WARBURTON Many people thought that the Big Society was one of those politicians’ ideas that would just fade away post-election, once the hard work of government had begun.

Any such suspicions were thoroughly dispelled on 14 February this year when David Cameron returned to the idea with a vengeance, saying that “the Big Society was his ‘absolute passion’ and his mission in politics”.1 He said “I think it’s a different way of governing ... As the state got bigger and more powerful, it took away from people more and more things that they should and could be doing for themselves, for their families and their neighbours”.

The mixed messages For those of us who have worked for decades to promote more and better public and community participation in public life, and for people to have more involvement in the decisions that affect them - particularly in relation to environmental, conservation and sustainable development issues – perhaps Big Society should be music to our ears. Yet, many voluntary and community organisations at local and national levels - organisations apparently at the front line of the Big Society - have really struggled with the concept and agonised over what their response should be.

On the one hand, the rhetoric is all about citizens and communities taking control of their lives and improving their local areas. The Big Society website’s Frequently Asked Questions pages 2 talk about “taking power out of the hands of bureaucrats and giving it back to people so they can solve local problems themselves”. Surely that is what we community activists have always wanted? On the other hand, something feels very wrong. Suspicions remain even while the words are beguiling.

Perhaps one place to start to unpick this is to look at the wider context within which the Big Society is being proposed, particularly the economic and political context for how the Big Society will affect conservation and the environment.

Since the Coalition Government came into power in May 2010, there have been some hugely significant changes to the context for voluntary and community activity in the environment and conservation sectors, some of which have been noted by

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Many national voluntary organisations and environmental charities are also facing dramatic cuts in funding. To give just one example: Planning Aid heard in December 2010 that all their government funding had been cut as from the end of March 2011. In the community sector, Volunteering England is restructuring in the face of funding cuts of 50%, and the Community Development Foundation has lost all its central government funding and is now establishing itself as a community enterprise.

This at a time when citizens are being exhorted to volunteer and take action in their local communities. At local levels, spending cuts affecting conservation and environmental organisations are largely still waiting to be seen, but the signs are certainly not good, with many local authorities dropping all but the most essential services and staff.

This is the real political and economic context for the Big Society. It is always hard to get much sympathy for cuts to national public agencies, quangoes and NGOs, but these are not small adjustments to funding and a few mergers. This is wholesale dismantling of the national and local infrastructure supporting conservation and environmental work across the UK. In this new context, where will communities and citizens go if they want to develop assets for community benefit or protect local natural assets or historic features and landscapes and would have previously got free advice from planners and other professionals through Planning Aid? Where do they go if they want to lobby for more powerful regulation of potentially hugely damaging pollution without a strong Environment Agency? Who will listen and who will help? And, as important, who will provide the funding for this work to happen? Even the most committed voluntary activities usually need some funding to achieve their goals, and there are precious few organisations left to provide that funding.

Big Society – on government’s terms So, is the Big Society just a really Bad Idea? Part of the ‘yes - because’ answer is usually that it is just a cover for cuts. However, if the Big Society was designed to be a cover for cuts, it has not worked very well. Everyone knows that cuts are happening.

What the Big Society idea is doing is hiding the details: many organisations remain very tight-lipped about the extent of the cuts they are facing because they don’t want to be perceived as not being able to deliver in future, or as being against the 28

NEIL BENNETT

previous ECOS contributors. As of end of March 2011, the Sustainable Development Commission loses all its government (Defra) funding, after 10 years of some important work within and beyond central government to embed messages and activities needed to achieve sustainable development at local and national levels. At the same time, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution will be abolished, having been established in 1970 to advise government on environmental issues.

And the Commission for Rural Communities, with its emphasis on encouraging rural places to become more sustainable in economic and social as well as environmental terms, has been abolished. Other major environmental agencies such as Natural England and the Environment Agency are already making major reductions in staff to cope with deep funding cuts. Even Defra is facing dramatic cuts in staff.

idea of citizens and communities taking action for the public good, or as simply not wanting to antagonise a key source of potential future funding. As a gagging mechanism, Big Society is working a treat.

Another argument that has emerged against the Big Society idea is that David Cameron didn’t invent it and that it has existed for ages. In this argument, the Big Society is doing something that is a strong part of British culture. This is the ‘having the cake and eating it’ aspect of Big Society: it is something new that the government has invented, but lots of it has been going on already and the government recognise that. Again, not so. Actually what has existed for decades are incredibly vibrant voluntary and community sectors that have achieved remarkable results for individuals, communities and the environment. The Big Society is actually a Big Government takeover of the work we have all been doing for decades and relabelling it as a government idea, but stripping away all the important characteristics of previous activities and leaving some bare bones. The Big Society decides how things will be done and then tells us how great it would be for us to do those things their way. Not our way, which we were doing already. Why are all the existing groups and organisations already providing that support being swept away in the process? Because they are not doing it in the way the government really wants. This is not empowering, this is Big Government ensuring that things are done their way or not at all.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 The latest example is the transfer of Environment Agency navigations to a new waterways charity. The Minister for Inland Waterways, Richard Benyon, announced on 28 February 2011 that “the Government has decided the Environment Agency’s navigations (waterways) should transfer to a new waterways charity, similar to the National Trust”.3 This new charity will also take over the waterways that were previously the responsibilities of British Waterways. Together, these two bodies are responsible for 75% of the waterways in England and Wales. So which philanthropists, campaigners and waterways activists will be setting up this new charity? Actually none. The Government is setting up the new charity. Indeed, apparently “The Government will shortly announce a consultation on setting up the new charity in which [they] will set out proposals for governance, scope and funding arrangements. It is intended that the charity will be set up in April 2012.”

Suddenly, charities are not being set up by a group of committed individuals seeking to do something for the public good, but by government wanting to remove activities from the public sector. It is unlikely that the removal of the waterways from public to private ownership will generate anything like the anger caused by the very similar threat to the public forests, but the principle is the same. Something that belonged to ‘us’, run by public organisations, is being hived off into a new organisation entirely created by government for its own ideological purposes and beyond democratic control and public accountability.

The clues to the real purpose of the Big Society are all there in the rhetoric: “We would like to see the action taking place in these areas replicated across the country.

We want other forward-thinking, entrepreneurial, community-minded people and neighbourhoods in our country to come forward and ask for the same freedoms and the same support”. Note the “We would like to see”, “We want” and the emphasis on having to “ask” for the same freedoms and support. This is community action limited to what is acceptable to government or, presumably, freedom and support will be withheld.

The Big Society is not about all the community and voluntary organisations across the country who have worked for decades for conservation and the environment; this is about a new, thrusting, entrepreneurial approach to voluntary and community action.

It is worth noting that the “One issue worth considering” promoted by the Big Society website is “the establishment of mutual and co-operative organisation among public sector workers”. This is the voluntary and community sector as business enterprises that will take over public services, supported by the Big Society Bank which will not give grants to voluntary and community organisations but will “increase the finance options available for social enterprises, charities and groups”; the aim is to “open up new opportunities for the sector [charities and other civil society groups] to deliver public services”.5 In case the message was still not clear, David Cameron “set out his vision for public service reform” in a speech on 21 February 2011.6 Mr Cameron said opening up public services to private sector providers was an important part of the ‘Big Society’. He said “I would argue that our plans to devolve power from Whitehall, and to modernise public services are more significant aspects of our Big Society agenda than the work we’re doing to boost social action” (my emphasis added).

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Implications for voluntary and community groups As the real Big Society agenda becomes clearer, the unease in the voluntary and community sectors has become greater. The threat to sell-off the forests has already brought some very well-known organisations into direct conflict with the idea that public assets should be sold off to the highest bidder or ‘given’ to charities but without any resources necessarily provided to manage them. Some voluntary organisations are already rejecting any such role. As Martin Spray points out elsewhere in this issue: “the Woodland Trust indicated it would not take part in the selloff / leasing / entrusting” of the forests.

The Big Society is a very Big Idea, and one that not only challenges the concept of public services that has existed in the UK for over 60 years but that also challenges the role of the voluntary and community sectors partly, but not only, within that context. The public funding cuts to the public and voluntary sectors working around environmental and conservation issues have already been touched on, but potentially much worse are the threats to civil society itself.

The legitimacy of civil society as a whole, and the voluntary and community sectors in particular, comes largely from two sources: independence (both from government and from the private sector), and mission and values. These two elements are closely entwined: the priority the voluntary and community sectors accord to mission and values require independence from other pressures.

The Big Society idea challenges both these two defining characteristics of civil society: it insists on government’s definition of priorities and mission, and it changes funding relationships from grant aid (to support organisations’ own priorities) to contracting organisations to deliver services defined by government. Far from government stepping back and allowing the voluntary and community sectors to define activities on the basis of their own mission, Big Society is about government defining what it wants to see done and how organisations should structure themselves to do it i.e. as business enterprises such as co-ops. This is George Orwell’s ‘doublethink’ at its very best.

In the last issue of ECOS, Gavin Saunders suggested that “those in the voluntary sector see themselves as doing quite nicely from the pickings on the public sector”. Some certainly are. Sir Stephen Bubb, Chief Executive of ACEVO - the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations - has argued that there are “Opportunities for our organisations to do more, to deliver better services for our beneficiaries and to do so despite the contraction in state spending”, citing £2bn a year by 2015 for the sector as a result of opportunities from outsourcing public services. For ACEVO, in spite of the inevitable pain from the cuts, “We need to see those opportunities and seize them.” Only a few months later, the divisive implications of this argument are clearly articulated by two influential individuals in community development, who argue that there should be “two clear streams, one regarding strengthening communities and one regarding service provision”, and that the way forward is that “the empowerment element is made the leading edge instead of the poor relation”.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 This is not a new faultline within the voluntary and community sectors, and it is not about anything inherently different between voluntary organisations and community groups (although there are differences). Many environmental and conservation groups have been involved in contracts to deliver services for decades, such as training and ‘getting into work’ schemes for unemployed young people, insulating homes or improving open spaces and derelict land. In many cases, the organisations delivering these services have brought something very special to this work that complements mainstream public services.

But the potentially much greater scale of service provision by voluntary and community sector (VCS) groups under the Big Society could take these faultlines to seismic proportions in a context where grant aid and other traditional forms of funding for voluntary and community activity are disappearing. Some VCS bodies spending some of their time as contractors delivering services which fill gaps or meet particular needs is one thing: the wholesale shift of a large part of the VCS to a government agenda delivered on a business and enterprise model is something else entirely.

In case there is any doubt of the Government’s intentions in this area, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles MP, providing clarification in his speech to the NCVO Annual Conference on 1 March 2011.

He talked about “community rights to buy local assets and run local services”, “voluntary and community groups could hold the key to better value and better services”, and “a strong, thriving voluntary sector is more important now than ever and could be the key to providing high quality, good value services”. Not much room here for the sector to set its own mission for, for example, wildlife conservation and environmental action.

Precious assets The voluntary and community sectors in the UK are assets as precious as forests.

Without the environmental movement in the UK, any environmental and conservation gains in recent years - in whatever field you care to identify from wildlife conservation to pollution control - have been significantly influenced by the work of environmental NGOs and community groups. By no means all environmental and conservation NGOs rely on public funding, but many do, and especially those that are at the very practical interface between the public and nature. The growing emphasis on contractual delivery of services threatens the independence, values and therefore the legitimacy of many of those organisations.

The public, private and voluntary sectors all have roles to play in the conservation of the environment for people and wildlife. The voluntary and community sector are necessary but not sufficient parts of the wider system. The reference cited in Mike Townsend’s fascinating article in the last ECOS makes the point: “The NGO is not an alternative to the state. It is a complement, and one which in no way detracts from the proper role of the state”. This is equally true of the private sector (including, in many cases, the part of the private sector structured as co-operatives, mutuals or community enterprises). Voluntary and community effort is often a partnership 32

ECOS 32(1) 2011 with the state, as all the examples of good practice from joint work with local and national public agencies and governments demonstrate.

But, equally, the VCS should not ape the cultures and methods of the public and private sectors. At its best, which is actually very often, the VCS can champion and develop practical solutions for the environment and conservation that are innovative, values-driven, very specific and close to the grassroots (in every sense). In some ways, the VCS can be seen as part of the powerhouse and dynamism in the UK in terms of creative solutions to complex problems, some of which solutions may then be picked up in mainstream public services and the private sector. Without this very specific set of activities carried out in very specific ways, the future for environmental and conservation work will be immeasurably impoverished. It would be an irony indeed if the Big Idea of the Big Society actually resulted in the destruction of the independent, troublesome, creative, dynamic voluntary and community sectors that have been developing in the UK over the years, and replaced them with a limp puppet responding to whoever pulls the contractual strings.

No one would argue that the VCS is perfect, or that changes may not improve what they do and how they do it. But the changes proposed as part of the Big Society are not the way forward for dynamic, independent, creative and challenging voluntary and community sectors. The shift to funding only through service provision on a business enterprise model risks the entire reputation of the voluntary and community sectors as the public lose trust in organisations no longer perceived as governed primarily by any values other than generating income. Public trust and support are crucial to the survival of strong voluntary and community sectors. The best that can be hoped for at the moment is that enough of the good that is in the voluntary and community sectors can survive by taking advantage of some of the resources on offer, and avoiding the hugely damaging ideological underpinnings of the Big Society idea that could destroy the very characteristics that make the environmental and conservation movement what it can best become.

References 1. Cabinet Office Press Release, 14 February 2011 2. www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/content/big-society-frequently-asked-questions-faqs 3. Defra press release 28 February 2011 4. Big Society website, as footnote 2 5. Big Society Bank. Cabinet Office press release 14 February 2011 6. Number 10 press release 21 February 2011 7. ACEVO press release 11 November 2010 8. Big Society and public services: complementarity or erosion? by Gabriel Chanan and Colin Miller, January 2011. www.pacesempowerment.co.uk 9. CLG Press release 1 March 2011 10. ‘The Big Society’: civic participation and the state in modern Britain by Matthew Hilton, James McKay, Nicholas Crowson and Jean-Francois Mouhot http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-103.html

Diane Warburton is an independent writer and researcher. Her book Community and Sustainable Development. Participation in the Future, was published by Earthscan. diane@sharedpractice.org.uk

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Funding trends – the implication for future nature conservation

ECOS 32(1) 2011

Spending on biodiversity has risen steadily

This article looks at a number of significant strands of funding that have supported nature conservation in the UK over the last decade and considers how funding streams might change in the future.

Spending is recognised as one way of assessing the priority that is given to biodiversity within government. Defra released statistics showing that public sector funding for biodiversity more than doubled between 2000-1 and 2007-8, reaching £525m in 2007-8 (see graph). Since UK GDP only increased by 19% over the same period,4 the implication is that UK government has given more importance to biodiversity in recent years, but was the starting base relatively low? UK biodiversity spending as a proportion of GDP actually increased from 0.02% over the period to 0.04%, around 10% of environmental protection expenditure. This included: spending directly on reserves and conservation measures; related spending on administration and training; relevant research and development; and whether the spending was direct on biodiversity, or through transfer payments to other organisations (in order to remove double counting of financial flows).5

JONATHAN SOMPER

Measures that changed conservation funding for good

Given the current cost saving measures being championed by the coalition government, the furore over the sale of Britain’s public forests and the subsequent government U-turn, there is uncertainty about the future for nature conservation and what direction future funding will take. Our whistle-stop tour of funds in this article includes: lottery funding; Landfill Tax Credits; a succession of government agency schemes; grants by charitable trusts and foundations; individual donations and legacies; and the growing recognition of ecosystem services. Let us begin at the Millennium…

Of the restricted funding pots, probably the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and Landfill Tax Credits have had the most significant impact on conservation organisations’ activities over the last 20 years or so. Bringing in money for land purchase, management and conservation work, HLF had more funds available than previous schemes. Indeed, initially, when it was centrally administered, competition was less and grants were easier to access than the current regional set-up. This five year funding enabled Wildlife Trusts, for example, to make significant improvements to the management of their portfolios of freehold nature reserves. When the Landfill Tax scheme was launched in the early 90s it wasn’t especially regulated and money

What does government spends on environmental protection?

At the beginning of the last decade general UK government environmental protection spending was £4.2bn in 2000/01 up from £3.2bn in 1996/7 and overall spending increased marginally as a proportion of GDP. Public sector environmental protection expenditure as a percentage of GDP was 0.36% in 2001, which was about average for the EU, with other countries equivalent expenditure ranging from 0.19% (Denmark and Finland) to as a high as 0.66% (Portugal).1 About 15% of UK government spending on environmental protection is directed at capital investment and spending on the protection of biodiversity and landscape (i.e. nature conservation) grew from £360m to £510m over the period; representing around a 40% increase. Expenditure on research and development for environmental protection increased 10% to £265m in 2000/1.

Public sector environmental protection expenditure was £5.9bn in 2004, an increase of £0.5bn on the 2003 total of £5.4bn, a rise of almost 10%. This was equivalent to 0.5 per cent of GDP. Year-on-year expenditure on nature conservation in the UK rose 12.5 per cent to £0.7bn (£738m) in 2004, a further increase of 44% from 2001.2 £0.5bn was spent on measures to protect the atmosphere and on climate change prevention, representing 13.1 per cent of total expenditure.3 It is a pity that there are no like-for-like robust figures for the rest of the decade readily available to make further comparisons, as Defra put more emphasis on surveying environmental protection expenditure by individual industry.

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Source: Defra e-digest environmental statistics website http://www.defra.gov.uk/evidence/statistics/environment/supp/spkf20.htm Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 was quickly accessible. With their high gearing ratios against matched funds (1025%), both these funding streams enabled land purchase and land management, and in particular, larger scale projects to be pursued than hitherto. The challenge now is to elicit additional funding for site development including interpretation for the public’s benefit, as this does not generally fit within these schemes’ criteria.

Think bigger… reap greater benefits Large landscape projects like Paxton Pits in Cambridgeshire and the Great Fens project near Peterborough are examples of the direction of future funding. Paxton Pits Nature Reserve is being enlarged from 78 hectares to over 280 hectares with the phased release of quarried land over the next decade, making the site one of the county’s largest nature reserves and securing the important nightingale population at the Pits. The nature reserve attracts around 120,000 visitors a year and a new environmental education centre was opened there in the autumn of 2010, funded by Natural England through Defra’s Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, with match funding from Community and Local Government’s Housing Growth Fund; consequently, visitor numbers are expected to increase. Similarly, the Great Fen project near Peterborough joins the National Nature Reserves at Woodwalton Fen and Holme Fen, to create a 3,700 hectare wetland. The project received significant Heritage Lottery Funding (millions of pounds) for the rewetting of fenland landscapes. Restoring peat lands is a priority in East Anglia, as farmed peat soils continually lose greenhouse gases as emissions to the atmosphere. In one year, Holme Fen releases more than 7,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent carbon footprint of over 9,760 London to New York return flights. Holme Fen has been calculated to gain 700 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year and so could offset 972 similar transatlantic flights. 6 This illustrates the importance of natural assets and their role in delivering ecosystem services, such as climate regulation, that society as a whole benefits from. The provision of ecosystem goods and services seems likely to be a significant driver of funds and policy priorities in coming years.

20 years of agency schemes and machinations Introduced in 1987 Environmentally Sensitive Area (ESA) schemes were landscape oriented rather than biodiversity led and for example, used to revert arable land into grassland. Although the scheme was superseded by Environmental Stewardship, some agreements still run until 2014 and have influenced landscape management for over a quarter of a century. The original Countryside Stewardship Scheme was an agri-environment scheme administered via the former Countryside Commission and successor bodies, and was largely reactionary with land owners requesting assistance. More recently, the Stewardship scheme and especially High Level Stewardship (HLS), intended to disperse Rural Development Programme for England (RDPE) funding from Europe which runs until 2013, and has enabled Natural England to be pro-active and target specific areas. In Gloucestershire, for example, habitat fragmentation has been reduced by linking limestone grassland sites to create a larger network, so that wildlife can move freely, in this way realising significant elements of climate change adaptation. HLS has also been good at delivering environmental benefits, but as more money is ploughed into farming practices and focusing on how the land is farmed, less is available for species recovery work.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 Nevertheless, HLS money has successfully been used to target farmland birds, such as corn bunting, lapwing, grey partridge, turtle dove, and yellow wagtail; perhaps also a reflection of RSPB’s ability to lobby. The scheme initially had targets of attracting 5% of the farm holding into the scheme, but it is actually achieving 12.5% on average in the South West; for the farmer it means that 12.5% of their farmland has a guaranteed income in difficult times – a win-win scenario.

The now defunct Wildlife Enhancement Scheme (WES) was mainly targeted at SSSIs or non-registered land, like geological sites; HLS is now the main scheme used to support the management of SSSIs. The Environment Agency has been involved in Wetland Vision along with partners with grants available until 2011, as well as other wetland funding; whilst the Forestry Commission offers five grants facilitating stewardship of existing woodlands and one for the creation of new woodlands. The Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund introduced to reduce the effects of aggregate extraction on local communities and the natural environment, has provided sustainable grants, for example, for water parks. There are also multi-objective schemes, (110 multi-objective target areas in all covering around one third of England), such as the one in the Cotswolds addressing arable wildflowers, limestone grassland, and protecting ancient monuments. Finally, funding may come from unlikely sources, for example in Wales, a Bat Roost enhancement was ingeniously funded by the local authority through heritage grants supporting the listed building complex and scheduled ancient monument. In contrast, Natural England’s Countdown 2010 Biodiversity Action Fund although obviously biodiversity focused, was more of a PR tool raising awareness than actually providing new funding.

Is the golden age of conservation funding over?

The voluntary sector had enjoyed year-on-year increases in statutory income totalling £12bn in 2006/7, up 5% on the previous year and statutory income accounted for more than one third of all income the sector received.7 Since statutory funding for third sector organisations is likely to decrease over the next five years given the Government’s dire finances, those dependent on it will be vulnerable and around 40,000 organisations overall are reliant on some form of state funding including many conservation organisations.

Following the Comprehensive Spending Review last autumn, Defra is required to deliver £661m worth of spending cuts by 2014-15. The core Department, which is responsible for just over half of Defra’s £3.1bn budget, faces a cut of 23% to £1.2bn between 2010/11 and 2014/15; whilst its arm’s length bodies like the Environment Agency and Natural England will lose more than one-fifth of their budgets over the next four years. The Environment Agency budget will be reduced to £652m. Natural England’s grant-in-aid over the next four years will be reduced by £44.2m, this is equivalent to a 21.5% cut in Natural England’s overall budget down to £155m and a 30% cut in the budget which the organisation directly manages (the other portion of budget relates to recharges for services provided centrally by Defra such as Shared Services, IT and Estates).8 The Forestry Commission faces a cut of 25% to £33m (and recently announced 400 redundancies); in contrast the National Parks and the Broads Authority face only a 13% reduction to £46.6m. However, the 37

ECOS 32(1) 2011 figures refer to just resource budgets and some capital projects; additional cuts to the remainder of Defra’s capital budget are still being debated.9 The significant reduction in their resourcing and the accompanying loss of scientists from these various agencies, raises the question of how they will be able to administer and deliver some of the EU derived funding streams. Unresolved issues in the marine world are dominated by the Common Fisheries Policy reform (CFP the European Union’s instrument for the management of fishing and aquaculture) and related fisheries activity. In addition, local authorities whose cash flow was affected by the collapse of banking in Iceland in 2010 and reduced revenues as a result of the recession and slow, if not stalled, recovery, will have less funds available for conservation consultancy and contract work. The recent local government settlement in England (for example, affecting budget cuts totalling £507m for 2011-12 in London boroughs) will likely affect non-statutory services, including those for ecology and open space management, with knock-on impacts on local grants for smaller nature conservation charities.

One might conclude that there is actually more money available today than previously - it is more focused and doing more for conservation. However, there are undoubtedly hard times ahead and conservation organisations should prepare for a period of consolidation. In 2013 European funding streams may be rethought in a review of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and there are likely to be greater funding restraints. There are difficult choices to be made: part of the debate might be framed as ‘can we afford those funding streams that do nothing much except enable places to be safe and look aesthetically pleasing, versus those that promote food security and efficient land management with tangible ecosystem service benefits’?

Charitable grants have grown, but from a low base The Charities Aid Foundation (CAF, 2000),10,11 Survey of grants made by independent trusts and foundations, examined the proportion of grants by main subject area and found that environment and animals constituted 3% by volume (65 grants out of 2,055) compared with 36% of grants given to Social Care. (Environment and animals defined as “grants awarded towards the conservation and protection of the environment and animals”). The funding at this time was relatively low as trusts were just beginning to get involved with the sector and some were tied to matched funding criteria. The estimated total value of grants in the main subject areas was £30m for Environment and Animals and £233m given to social care. Whilst independent trusts spent £30m or 3% of their giving on environment causes, a relatively small amount, it is still as much as three times the amount local authorities contributed. The latter spent £10.4m, equivalent to less than 1% of their total spending in the voluntary sector. In contrast, central government provided £2,144m to environmental spending in the voluntary sector.

Comparison of the average size of grants given to the environment and animals indicated that the average mean grant from small trusts was £3,800 and the average mean grant by large trusts was £24,400. In comparison, the overall average of grants 38

ECOS 32(1) 2011 given by small trusts was £4,700 and by large trusts £17,400. These environment grants were targeted at young people, who were the main beneficiaries, enabling them to experience and enjoy nature at first hand. The breakdown of funding was as follows: around two thirds of grants were for project funding (67%); around one quarter were for core funding (24%); and 10% was made available for capital grants.

The Environmental Funders Network report, Where the Green Grants Went, found that the top 300 grant-making foundations directed less than 3% of their grants to the environment and less than 0.3% towards reducing carbon emissions. So although foundations’ combined total environmental giving increased by 68% (almost 10 times the rate of inflation) between 2004/5 and 2006/7 to £53.9m, it was from a relatively low base.12 Environmental issues appeared a low priority issue for these Trusts yet climate change will inevitably impact greatly on their other funded programmes. Trusts that already provide environmental grants - including 50 from the top 300 foundations - 97 UK-based trusts in all, only gave 8% of their grant money to climate change in 2006/7, perhaps an indication that climate change had not yet established an irrefutable case in the public’s consciousness.

The report identifies three categories of environmental problems: • habitat preservation and species conservation; • the impact of human activity e.g. air and river pollution, habitat destruction; • climate change and over consumption of natural resources.

Whilst, the first two environmental problems have been readily addressed so far, the third appears more complex with large-scale ramifications for sectors and geographical areas remote from the initial symptoms. However, charitable trusts and foundations like The Tubney Charitable Trust and the Esmée Fairburn Foundation have supported big-scale, landscape delivery. Landscape-scale delivery was perhaps initially led by National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (ANOBs), but has subsequently been successfully taken up by the Wildlife Trusts over the last five years with their Living Landscapes programme. Partnership working is working increasingly more effectively in the conservation sector and now trusts are offering significant funds with the proviso that those organisations in the same field work together to address the issue; for example, funding was recently made available for shark conservation in Europe by the Pew Charitable Trusts on this basis, a trend that is set to continue.

Individual donations for the environment have been higher than for most other causes A report in 2004 by CAF & NCVO examined the breakdown of the causes that individual donors support with donations. It found that 2.5% of the UK population gave for the environment, compared with 11.1% who gave for animals and 21.6% who donated for children or young-people causes; nearly one quarter of 39

ECOS 32(1) 2011 the population, the highest proportion, supported medical research (24.4%). In terms of the cash given: 16.6% was given to medical research; 14.9% for children or young people; 6.3% for animals; and just 2% for the environment.13 Breaking down the proportion giving to charity by cause in 2007/08 and 2008/09 the report concluded that: the highest, around 20%, gave to medical research, the highest cause in both years; 3% gave to the environment in both years; and 8% gave to animals.14 However, it was reported in UK Giving 2009, by CAF & NCVO, that the average donation to the environment was relatively high at £28. This is a higher average than donations to all other causes, except for art and religious causes respectively, £30 and £33, on average. An overview of charitable giving in the UK, 2009/10, (CAF & NCVO 2011) indicated that the proportion of donors giving to environment causes has remained relatively stable between 2004/05 and 2009/10.15 With other giving evidence, this is indicative of a relatively small core of loyal, welloff, environmental supporters; epitomised by the traditional grass roots supporters of the Wildlife Trusts, before face-to-face supporter recruitment was employed.

However, adjusting for inflation the value of a £10 donation has decreased by 15% between 2000 and 2008, and was worth just £8.46 in real-terms by 2008; both donators and charities need to make allowances for this.16 Since more than one third of donors (37%) use a regular method of giving, charities will need to request that these donors review their giving on an annual basis, so that they can make incremental increases in the amount given to keep pace with inflation. The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) ended 2010 on 3.7% and prices rose by 1% on a month by month basis in December, the biggest rise on record; whilst the Retail Prices Index (the wider measure used in wage negotiations) was 4.8%, and approaching 5%, with transport costs up by 12.9% during 2010 according to the Office for National Statistics. This inflationary trend is continuing during the first quarter of 2011 further reducing the real value of donations.

Around 15% of income for the environment is donated by individuals, not including legacies. UK Giving (CAF & NCVO 2010) highlighted that legacy funding is particularly important to the environment sector. In 2006-7 22% of all legacy income went to the environment sector and only social services received more, 25% (around £0.5m).17 Cash legacy gifts to charities average £3,500 and they are increasing by about 7% per annum, consequently, environmental charities need to realise their legacy potential. 18 The UK Giving Report 2009 (CAF & NCVO) analysed data from the United States and found that while charitable donations may fall in a recession they are restored after the recession is over: “The trend over the past forty years in the US is of long-term growth in charitable giving, with short-term instability during a recession or economic slowdown.” The report concludes that “charitable giving can be resilient in the face of a recession and charities should take heart from this information, whilst also taking the necessary action to mitigate any falls in donation levels they are currently experiencing”.19

Back to the future In summary, conservation funding has increased over the last decade and the present time may be looked back on as a golden age of funding for nature conservation.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 Unfortunately, as we emerge from what has been a worldwide recession and a severe downturn in the UK economy, it is apparent that the next decade will be dominated by a period of retrenchment in the sector. The available funding strands are not likely to be as generous as they have been in the past. This coupled with a review of the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy reform means that the future direction and focus of conservation funding in the UK is uncertain. What is key, however, is that we must embrace the ‘big landscapes’ and find ways of ‘working the land’ better, and link our objectives to social benefits. We need to meet multiple objectives and secure ecosystem goods and services more effectively in the future.

References and notes 1. Environmental Protection Expenditure by the UK general government sector 1996/97 to 2000/1, Office for National Statistics. Harris. R, Mall. H. Eurostat.

2. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_environment/EA-June09.pdf UK Environmental Accounts 2009, Office for National Statistics.

3. Environmental Accounts Autumn 2005, 02 December 2005, Issued by National Statistics

Drummond Gate, London SW1V 2QQ 4. http://www.defra.gov.uk/evidence/statistics/environment/supp/spkf20.htm 5. NB. For the purpose of this measure only biodiversity related grant money and programme expenditure has been included. The above figures do not include any associated operational costs.

6. Changes in wetland adaption and biodiversity; Palaeoecological studies from the Holocene of southern Fenland, Dr Steve Boreham, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. World Wetlands Day Conference 2010, CIWEM, Wetlands, Biodiversity and Climate Change, Linking Policy, Research and Practice, February 2 - 3 Peterborough 7. http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/sites/www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/files/UploadedImages/NCVO/Publications/ Publications_Catalogue/Sector_Research/The_State_and_the_Voluntary_Sector.pdf 8. Natural England grant-in-aid settlement – update 21 December 2010, http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/ about_us/finance/grant-in-aidsettlement.aspx 9. Natural England and Environment Agency budget cuts revealed 20 December 2010 By Alistair Driver http://www.farmersguardian.com/home/business/natural-england-and-environment-agency-budget-cutsrevealed/36223.article 10. A Survey of grants made by independent trusts and foundations, Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), Jeremy Vincent, Cathy Pharoah, West malling, Kent, Dimensions 2000, Volume 3, Patterns of Independent GrantMaking in the UK. 11. Trust sample included all trusts giving away £32m on or more per annum (63 respondents) representing 88% of all large trusts; a one-in-ten random sample of all trusts giving between £30,000 and £2m comprising 154 small trust respondents in all representing 69% of these trusts, but 82% by value (as a percent value of all grant making in sub-sample) granting £39m.

12. Philanthropy failing to combat climate change, 23/11/09, Andrew Holt, http://www.charitytimes.com/ ctphilcc.php

Philanthropic response to climate change ‘inadequate’, says report,Ben Eyre, 26 November 2009, philanthrophyUK. 13. Inside Research, October 2004, issue 21, CAF, NCVO p3 14. The impact of the recession on charitable giving in the UK, CAF, NCVO, November 2009 15. UK Giving 2010, An overview of charitable giving in the UK, 2009/10,

Supplementary charts, Figure 1 Proportion of donors giving to different causes, 2004/05 - 2009/10 (%) CAF/NCVO 2011.

16. What impact does inflation have on charitable giving?, Charities Aid Foundation and National Council for Voluntary Organisations, March 2010 17. UK Giving 2010, An overview of charitable giving in the UK, 2009/10, December 2010

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18. Mathew Little, Third Sector, 15 June 2010, Legacy income still falling, but not as fast as last year, http:// www.thirdsector.co.uk/News/FundraisingBulletin/1009595/Legacy-income-falling-not-fast-last-year/49E3A4 9720167353DCB604F328A87D53/?DCMP=EMC-FundraisingBulletin 19. The impact of the recession on charitable giving in the UK, CAF, NCVO, November 2009

Jonathan Somper is an independent consultant who provides practical marketing support, tailored research, and membership know-how to charities, companies and organisations committed to the environment and a more sustainable future. mail@jonathansomper.plus.com

Drain blocking to aid peatland restoration in Ireland. Part of Rachel Kempson’s experience in volunteering - see following article.

Photo: Cillian Breathnach

Educated and willing‌ but unemployed!

The state of the conservation job market Embarking on a career in the current environmental-conservation job market is not an easy feat. There are things that you can do to influence your chances. However, most of all unguarded determination, being optimistic and undertaking activities that are worthwhile to conservation and help to develop your skills are important in the current situation of intense competition.

RACHEL KEMPSON For the last few years I have been pursuing a career in the environmental conservation field. I have always had an interest in the natural world and employment in this field would provide job satisfaction. After completing my MSc in Conservation last year I have now embarked on the task of seeking employment within the conservation job market. This article is based on personal experience and on a questionnaire sent to a variety of conservation organisations. Comprehensive responses were received from the RSPB, RSK Carter Ecological (part of the RSK Group Plc) and the Countryside Jobs Service. Several other bodies across different sectors were asked for their views, but nothing was received even after reminders. In fairness, due to the current economic situation where bodies are making painful cuts and shedding staff, it is perhaps not a good time to seek such views as resources are already stretched. For example, Natural England announced last year that it planned to cut back nearly a third of its 2,500 jobs.1 Thus 800 full time equivalent posts are to be shed through to 2014.

The Forestry Commission recently announced a programme of 400 redundancies.

There is an entire web site (www.voluntarysectorcuts.org.uk) dedicated to voicing people’s experiences who either volunteer or are involved with charity and community groups and how public funding cuts have affected their organisations. For example, the Goblin Combe Environment Centre in North Somerset has completely restructured its organisation, lost one post and implemented changes of salary and the working hours for other staff. This centre is facing an overall cut of 23%. Another example, The Devon Conservation Forum has been fostered and supported by Devon County Council for the past 40 years, but has now been informed that there is not enough money within the County Council budget to continue supporting it. Therefore, this charity will have to inform Charity Commissioners of its closure and cease taking subscriptions. This is the only impartial charitable organisation seeking to conserve 42

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the environmental qualities in Devon’s cities, towns and countryside. It is sustained by volunteer effort with widespread expertise in land surveying, farming, bee keeping, listed buildings, water engineering, building industry, climatology, town planning, photogrammetry, demography, business management and the like. One part time administration job will cease. The organisation’s newly created website will finish (see the Forum’s Submission to the Royal Commission on ‘Devon’s Demography’).

The voluntarysectorcuts web site is a helpful indication of some of the trends in cuts throughout the entire voluntary sector, beyond environment and conservation disciplines, but what is apparent is how silent many organisations are at present, about their cost-cutting plans and the programmes and the posts they are having to let go. Part of this may be as a result of the rationalisations within organisations which are still being worked out, but part of it seems to be a reluctance to admit the termination of activity and jobs, as organisations try to keep a relationship with their potential funding sources in government, and so don’t wish to cause a fuss.

Being a fairly specialist job market there are a limited number of jobs available and there appears to be an unlimited number of candidates applying for those posts that are advertised.2 The economic climate in general has not helped the situation with many governmental organisations undergoing a recruitment freeze and other organisations having to make cuts and redundancies within their staff. The Countryside Jobs Service (www.countryside-jobs.com), a website that publishes and advertises jobs, advertised approximately 2500 paid positions in 2010 – a reduction from 2007 when it advertised 4867; 2008 with 4349 jobs and 2009 with 3465 jobs.

That is 1400 fewer paid jobs advertised in 2009 compared to 2007. Last year, this organisation saw fewer people already in work subscribing to the organisation’s publications, although there have been more people signing up and the web hits have risen substantially. There have also been more enquiries from people who have been made redundant or who are looking to change careers. Private consultancies have also had to reduce staffing levels and in the case of RSK (see comment above) the staff now consists of a very strong core of people and skills, and as the economy improves RSK will no doubt expand its team and skills set. RSK has also speculated that there has been an increase in the number of applicants from a non-conservation background who view conservation as a way of being paid to do something that they enjoy out of doors. However, these people are in competition with others who have a strong conservation background and unless they have some other skills, for example project management, they may find it difficult to compete.

People who wish to enter the conservation and environmental sector tend to be passionate individuals who are determined to make their mark. In many other sectors there is not such a prolonged process of education, training and gaining of experience followed by a competitive scramble to break into a job. At least in many other sectors where the training and gaining of experience is drawn out there are more comfortable salaries as a consolation, but the conservation world does not offer the same financial rewards. This illustrates just how motivated and determined individuals are within this sector.

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NEIL BENNETT

Limited jobs - unlimited candidates

However, the picture is not quite so bleak everywhere. During 2010, the RSPB advertised 450 positions in comparison to 380 in 2009, and employment in this organisation appears to be increasing. The amount of jobs on offer tends to increase around January-February as many organisations offer seasonal contracts for the field season which generally runs from April until September. However, funding often acts as a constraint on the number of seasonal positions offered. But overall, it seems that the intensity of competition for jobs has increased: I recently applied for a position as an Ecological Trainee at a salary funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund for approximately £12,000. From the feedback I received, there were over 420 applicants, even for a post with that modest salary.

Volunteering A common reason for not succeeding to an interview stage is that the candidate does not have enough experience or enough relevant experience. It is a catch 22 situation in that sense, for one cannot gain experience without successfully securing a role and learning through the job. However, volunteering is a valuable tool for gaining this experience and plays a significant role in the running of many conservation organisations. For example, the RSPB recruits a lot of volunteers and checks the volunteer management system as part of its recruitment process. This organisation offers both residential and day volunteering and clearly sees the benefits and knowledge that volunteers gain about the running and organisation of the RSPB making them useful candidates for employment. Furthermore, many recruits for the large consultancy RSK have worked within the volunteering sector and have gained experience from a number of different places. Ecologists are often people who care very deeply about wildlife and the environment and so many are willing to take on voluntary roles if paid ones are not available. Sarah Harmer, a staff member of RSK highlighted the fact that volunteering plays a vital role in training ecologists and that 45

ECOS 32(1) 2011 despite very demanding careers, nearly all staff at RSK dedicate time to voluntary groups and environmental/wildlife charities. Volunteering also provides a valuable tool for developing useful contacts for future employment opportunities.3 Most conservation organisations offer volunteering opportunities. This can be mutually beneficial in providing experience to people and offering additional resources to the organisation. Opportunities include volunteer warden posts through the National Trust, which include incentives such as linked accommodation, but require a commitment to the position and still involve an application process.

Likewise, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society offers positions such as a volunteer Conservation Guide, but again, these involve an application process.

So, although, there are opportunities such as this around, all involve an interview process and there can be an overwhelming response as applicants look to make a break into the conservation market through such positions.

Academic study Academic qualifications and study allow development of several aspects of conservation, including policy and legislation, basic scientific techniques and monitoring methods, as well as the wider socio-political and economic challenges of conservation. However, this is only part of the requirement for prospective recruits, as practical experience is an intrinsic and vital part of the job. It is important to balance academic knowledge with practical experience. At RSK many applicants going for jobs are generally better-qualified, but not necessarily more experienced.

Therefore, if applicants have a good degree then recruiters would primarily look at their experience to make a decision. This is also reflected in a lot of the job specifications now advertised, particularly for jobs in ecology.

Practical skills One of the present gaps highlighted in ecology is that there is a decline in practical skills and knowledge in areas such as species identification, as discussed in ECOS 30 (3/4). Another aspect is peoples’ engagement with nature. The RSPB has been offered Heritage Lottery Funding to be used to fill some of the skills gaps that the organisation has identified in ecology and people engagement. The project will be run over the next three years and will provide eighteen training placements across the UK to fill skills gaps in species identification and helping people to enjoy nature. These training placements will combine practical experience, mentoring from experienced professionals and formal specialist training courses. As well as learning specialist skills, the placements will cover essential business skills such as creating a CV, project management and formulating budgets. There are a variety of courses offered by the Field Studies Council that allow for training for such skills as identification of grasses or bryophytes, or the identification of bats, although these do come at a financial cost. However, analysing specifications of ecology and conservation jobs, a lot of positions are asking for specific experience with protected species such as bats and great crested newts.

Challenges to aspiring conservationists – a view from experience

ECOS 32(1) 2011 problem specific to jobs in ecology is the fact that they are seasonal and dependent upon short-term funding for individual projects, but not everyone can afford to live like that. Jobs in ecological consultancy tend to be more competitive, with the successful candidates demonstrating that they have often done a great variety of work and are hard working. It is important to have academic knowledge but this needs to be coupled with practical experience and related specific skills.

Currently, I am still seeking work within the conservation job market. I am doing volunteer work to gain more experience and develop a variety of fieldwork skills.

Through volunteering I have learnt a number of new skills including hazel coppicing, rhododendron clearance, and making protective baskets around trees using natural materials. I have even created trout nests! I have also helped with the day-to-day running tasks of the organisation. I am reading around subjects and trying to keep myself up-to-date with conservation issues. These activities and organisations have made me feel valued, worthwhile and determined to carry on my quest to achieve paid employment within the sector. Individuals in my host organisations have offered me strong support, teaching and encouragement to continue working in the environment. The Heritage Lottery Fund appears to be a form of funded support to conservationists wanting to be trained and employed within the market providing many bursary supported positions.

Most organisations wish to employ people who already have experience associated with the job specification. However, how are younger people and new-graduates able to gain this experience when training schemes and internships, plus seasonal contracts are being reduced due to funding constraints? With these internships and placements being reduced, people such as myself are turning to volunteering to make it into the conservation job market. Having entered this route, I am now understanding why this is a valuable thing to do. Organisations can offer to support in various guises, such as to cover travel expenses, offer accommodation, resources, discount on identification keys and field guides, medical expenses if needed, equipment and even clothing. Although this may seem a small token, to someone who is just starting out it is a valuable resource and in the words of Tesco ‘Every little helps!’ The people who work within the conservation job market are often very inspiring individuals and I shall aspire to be one of them! Perhaps staying upbeat, positive and determined is an important attitude to adopt in these pressured times.

References 1. McCarthy, M. and Morris, N. (2010) Rural watchdog posts to be among the first to go in race to cut deficit.

The Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rural-watchdog-posts-to-be-among-firstto-go-in-race-to-cut-deficit-2025977.html 2. Gear, A. (2009) Getting started in conservation – climbing the rungs of the green ladder. ECOS 30 (3/4) 33-40.

3. Boogert, R. (2009) Getting started in conservation – better late than never. ECOS 30 (3/4) 28-32.

Rachel Kempson is a recently graduated student from the University College London MSc Conservation course. She is still continuing to develop her practical skills and knowledge through a number of volunteering opportunities. rachelkempson@gmail.com

One of the major problems for young conservationists trying to break into the market is that although we may be well qualified, we just lack the necessary experience. A 46

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ECOS 32(1) 2011

Biodiversity’s special year – a flagship or a flop?

Are UN labels worth the effort for conservation groups? Do they offer more bland marketing or can they galvanize people’s commitment? This article looks at the mixed picture of how conservation groups harnessed the International Year of Biodiversity, and asks if any of us noticed it.

ANDREW HARBY 2010 was designated the International Year of Biodiversity (IYB), as declared by the United Nations in an effort to raise awareness and generate public pressure for action on environmental issues. Around 450 organisations in Britain, from a range of backgrounds and agendas, joined the IYB-UK partnership in 2010, coordinated by the Natural History Museum. On an international scale, the logo and core message were adopted in 146 countries and has been seen by a million people around the world. What effect, if any, did this have on the actions on conservation organisations? Did it influence and inspire a greater effort and concern for wildlife?

Do more people now understand what biodiversity means?

Promoting and appreciating biodiversity - what happened?

As an example of some of the activities undertaken by organisations for IYB, the Norfolk Biodiversity Partnership, which brings together local authorities, statutory agencies and voluntary groups, organised events bringing together the specialities of its members. These included an event to celebrate the International Day of Biological Diversity, featuring a display called Grains of Truth: Conservation Counts.

Using locally-sourced grains of barley, the display depicted global biodiversity facts and figures in an appealing and accessible way. Many people found the display informative and very moving. The event also featured the work of the Norfolk Biodiversity Information Service and the Partnership’s Non-native Species Initiative.

The latter included the novel and eye-catching use of a “life-size” alien spaceship and live displays of invasive plants and animals, which garnered a large amount of attention and interest in an important topic for biodiversity.

The Norfolk Biodiversity Partnership also demonstrated a greater collaborative outlook fostered through IYB. A further event organised by the Castle Museum in Norwich collaborated with the Biodiversity Partnership, the University of East Anglia, the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, the Non-native Species Initiative and the Biodiversity Information Service. Entitled “Biodiversity and Extinction in Norfolk and Beyond”, the day attracted around 100 students from Norfolk schools and featured a live debate as well as a series of interactive workshops. Topics such as ecological networks, invasive alien species and biological recording were covered. Through the IYB, this helped the Partnership to engage with students of this age for the 48

first time. Because of the positive feedback received, the Partnership plans to run a similar event in 2011.

Other organisations also ran activities to commemorate the IYB, including Froglife, who ran a family event called ‘Under the Surface’, also as part of National Science and Engineering week. Interacting with school groups, a giant pond installation was created in an art gallery and made open to the public. As part of the process, school visits included a talk about the biodiversity value of ponds, information about the creatures that lived there, and discussions about biodiversity loss and how people could help.

A number of organisations point towards increased awareness and understanding as a result of the activities. Some also suggested seeing a significant improvement in their ability to develop new links with a range of other bodies and signatories from academic to retail and industrial interests, and thus improve funding prospects.

Sam Taylor of Froglife commented: “I think IYB was helpful in raising the profile of biodiversity nationally, and I think HLF and other funders were really keen to give to more projects that included biodiversity in order to do their bit, so it probably helped us to get some more funding.”

Improving public understanding of biodiversity Perhaps the most important area of improvement appears to be an increase in engagement with the public and improved dissemination of the biodiversity message to new audiences. This was perhaps always the most likely area of impact for the campaign, rather than through more physical actions, though this is obviously still an area with huge potential to improve biodiversity gains. Whether this will be maintained beyond 2010 or how responsible IYB is for this is open to debate.

Though IYB seemingly increased the public profile of biodiversity as a phrase and concept, whether it improved true understanding of biodiversity issues amongst laymen is questionable. Several organisations have expressed a belief in an improved understanding of biodiversity through increased media presence, but is such a thing truly quantifiable and to what extent are positives being sought for the sake of the reputation of the organisations involved and the status of the IYB? A response from 49

ECOS 32(1) 2011 Victoria Picknell, Press Officer from ZSL, elaborated on this: “I think it’s a complicated term that will always be misunderstood. I am not convinced that we managed to explain biodiversity to the masses, but instead just preached to the converted.” Victoria also pointed to the more pressing personal issues of 2010, such as unemployment, cuts in public services and the like, which may have lessened the impact of the message.

However, as part of Froglife’s ‘Under the Surface’ event, 52 young people completed questionnaires, of which 27 were able to give correct explanations of biodiversity.

Other organisations that responded positively about the role of IYB include Flora and Fauna Internaitonal (FFI) who pointed towards an increase in web-based activities in response to the campaign. These included the creation of several webpages highlighting the year and showcasing a different animal, plant or habitat every month that FFI are involved with, giving website readers a sampling of the planet’s biodiversity. FFI also boosted the social network profile of the campaign through frequent mentions on their Twitter and Facebook pages, increasing the time spent on each one of their IYB pages, thus raising awareness of the campaign further. FFI also suggested that the aims and targets of IYB helped to address the overly climate change-centric view of much environmental coverage in the media: “Over the past few years, climate change has been so dominant in terms of media coverage, and of course it is a huge challenge. However, biodiversity had been ignored and I felt the IYB was a great opportunity to really shout about what we’re doing to the planet’s wildlife and why it matters for everyone.”

Looking to the future Responses about 2010’s International Year of Biodiversity were largely positive, though as these were from listed partners this probably not surprising. The low rate of response may also suggest a degree of apathy towards the IYB, although it would be ungenerous to read too much in to this. On a less official footing, some saw it as nothing more than a PR exercise that did very little to actually directly benefit conservation issues and halt biodiversity loss. Many organisations took up the IYB kitemark but the lack of articles or reviews of the scheme in the months since the end of 2010 would indicate that the scheme has had limited impact in one of it’s aims to raise awareness sufficiently to influence global leaders. Indeed, the view of the IYB as a kitemarking exercise is strengthened by the campaign’s official Facebook page, a large proportion of which is given over to showing the logo displayed in various locations around the world.

ECOS 32(1) 2011 On a more challenging note, one focus group moderator that ECOS spoke to had held 10 focus groups during 2010 which were all about biodiversity. None of the participants, who numbered over 150, had heard of the IYB and none of them used or referred to the term in their own comments and dialogue at any stage. The same moderator remarked that IYB may have encouraged conservation groups to persist with a clumsy term, which is used inconsistently by conservation groups, and may be an unhelpful label to use for the conservation sector if it has no resonance with the public.

To continue the theme, the UN has designated 2011 the International Year of Forests. Like the IYB, the project is a platform to raise awareness on sustainable management and conservation issues affecting all kinds of forests. So far, this campaign seems a great deal less noticeable without the level of presence achieved by the IYB. During the recent woodland sell-off debate in the UK, a perfect issue for the campaign to get it’s teeth in to, the media visibility of the campaign was low. Hopefully the scheme will begin to show some actual benefits for the world’s forests by acting as a spur to stronger management and improved legislation.

Andrew Harby is a Senior Project Officer with the London Wildlife Trust and works to introduce urban teenagers to the natural environment. The views expressed here are his own. a_harby@hotmail.com Learning about invasive alien species at a 2010 Norfolk Biodiversity Partnership event to celebrate the International Year of Biodiversity.

Photo: Norfolk Biodiversity Partnership

With a lack of policy or criteria associated with the International Year of Biodiversity, or 2011’s International Year of Forests, to be found on the UN website, these campaigns seem lightweight and without any real drive or specific objectives.

The ‘International Year of’ promotions seem destined to always disappoint environmentalists while giving the impression of progress to the laymen. Without any apparent formalised evaluation of IYB, it may not be overly cynical to suggest that this impression of action being taken was an aim of the scheme. There can be positives to be gained for the future however, as long as IYB is seen as a springboard for further, more all-encompassing campaigns than a culmination of the effort to bring biodiversity to the mainstream media.

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Food for thought: the real costs of intensive farming Intensive industrial agriculture is at a crossroads. Trends in intensification and super-scale livestock units seem in conflict with the needs of healthier lifestyles. This article

discusses the trends and issues and the alternatives.

RUTH BOOGERT Cows belong in fields, or so said Compassion In World Farming (CIWF) in response to recent planning applications from Nocton Dairies Limited in Lincolnshire for a facility which would house over 8,000 cows in what would have been the largest dairy farm in the UK. The animals in this mega-dairy would have little or no access to the outdoors and would be fed on grain-based diets rather than grazing pasture. The application was recently withdrawn following local and national protests, however similar schemes are in the pipeline. A super-dairy housing 1,000 animals is in planning stages for Leighton in Powys and approval for a facility housing in excess of 20,000 pigs and piglets in Foston, Derbyshire has been sought by Midland Pig Producers. These proposals arguably herald the next stage in the intensification and industrialisation of UK farming and if these are allowed, it is more likely that others will follow. We are at a crossroads, and decisions at this stage, which either endorse or reject these farming models, could have significant implications for the future of farming.

However, the UK food production system is already heavily industrialised: according to CIWF over 90% of UK pigs (over 8 million animals) are kept indoors and an estimated 10% of the UK dairy herd (up to 200 000 animals) are kept in zerograzing systems where they are housed for most or all of their lactation (which lasts for around 10 months) and are only allowed out to pasture during their dry period (around two months) if at all. This intensification is important because food production, and in particular intensive livestock operations, can have a significant impact on the local and global environment. Food production is estimated to contribute between 19%1 and 31%2 of the UK’s consumption related greenhouse gas emissions, and the problems don’t end there. A recent UK government report3 listed the problems associated with food production as including “soil loss due to erosion, loss of soil fertility, salination and other forms of degradation; rates of water extraction...over-fishing...and...heavy reliance on fossil fuel-derived energy for synthesis of nitrogen fertilisers and pesticides.” Despite this, worldwide population growth and changes in diet mean that food demands are set to increase, and in particular demand for meat is expected to double by 2050. This leads some to argue that intensive factory farming is the only answer, but this could not be further from the truth. Any so-called efficiencies in such systems can only be achieved by ignoring or externalising the damage done to local and global environment, as well as human health and animal welfare.

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There are over 30 million hens in the UK laying flock. Over 15 million are kept in cages. Around 800 million chickens are reared for slaughter each year in the UK, with over 600 million of these reared intensively in barren overcrowded conditions.

Photo: ADAS

The effects of intensive livestock farming on land use Livestock production accounts for a large proportion of total food production based emissions: UK meat and dairy consumption is responsible for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of around 60 million tonnes CO2 equivalent, equivalent to 38% of food’s impact1 and this figure could well be an underestimate because it does not take in to account land use change in other parts of the world to which UK meat consumption may be indirectly contributing. Cattle ranching is the main reason behind deforestation in the Amazon4 and after pastures, large areas of land are converted to grow crops such as soya which are used primarily as animal feed.

Globally 94% of global soya production is fed to cattle, pigs and poultry, and 40% of cereals is used for livestock consumption. The effect of this land use change should also be included in the calculation of the consuming country’s GHG emissions. As 53

ECOS 32(1) 2011 well as increased emissions, widespread conversion of land to monoculture crops or cattle ranches can reduce biodiversity.

The effects of intensive livestock farming on water use As well as their large carbon footprint, animal products also have a high water footprint. A water footprint attempts to describe the amount of water used to produce a given product, much like a carbon footprint.6 The concept is considerably less well developed than its carbon cousin and suffers from wide variability in calculation methods and therefore results, rendering individual values potentially unreliable. However, it can provide a valuable starting point for examining the degree to which water use is sustainable by examining the origins of water inputs.

For example, in some systems crops are rain fed and this water would not have been put to some other use were those crops not present. However, some systems in water stressed regions can rely on artificial irrigation which reduces aquifer levels and uses water which may be required for cooking and drinking. The need to irrigate large areas of crop destined for animal feed can result in a relatively high water footprint for animal products, and the location of the crop or livestock operation can determine whether water use is sustainable.

As well as water use, waterways are often under threat from pollution. The livestock sector is the leading contributor to nitrogen pollution in the USA5 which is believed to damage ecosystems by reducing oxygen levels in waterways. The Mississippi drainage basin in the USA contains almost all of the US feed and livestock production5 and in 2001 more than 20,000 km2 of the coastal waters had such low oxygen levels that shrimp and demersal fish could not survive. In Asia pig and poultry operations concentrated in coastal areas of China, Vietnam and Thailand are a major source of nutrient pollution in the South China Sea.4 The preceding sections have shown how current methods of livestock production are using increasing amounts of land and water, and producing increasing amounts of pollution in the form of greenhouse gas emissions and excess nitrogen. Can other, more sustainable sources of animal protein help to feed a growing population?

Fish: the (environmentally) healthy alternative?

Does replacing red meat with fish reduce our demands on the planet? Industrialisation and intensification are a problem for marine food production as much as for livestock and consumers rightly sought alternatives to wild caught fish in response to overfishing and marine habitat destruction. Farmed fish is often marketed as the eco alternative, so much so that aquaculture is now the fastest growing food production sector in the world7 but the industrial scale of some operations means that, like their land-based counterparts, so-called efficiencies are actually costing the earth.

The effects of intensive fish farming: pollution Farmed fish operations can produce high levels of pollution due to the high stocking densities in some sea cages. Jeffrey Masson eloquently describes the incredible journeys undertaken by Pacific salmon during their lifetimes, and the 54

ECOS 32(1) 2011 stark contrast to the life of an equivalent farmed fish: a typical sea cage measures 12 – 20 m2 and can house between 5,000 and 7,000 salmon for between one and two years.8 These high densities increase risk of disease and parasites, so high levels of antibiotics and other drugs must be added to the cages. Dyes can also be added to colour the fish flesh. Open sea cages are open to the sea and these chemicals along with faecal matter can build up on the seabed below the cage if currents are insufficient to clear it although in either case, high levels of these chemicals are entering the marine ecosystem.8

The effects of intensive fishfarming: resource depletion Systems continue to deplete wild marine resources by feeding wild caught fish to farmed fish(and farmed livestock for that matter) in the form of fishmeal and fish oil, which is favoured by farmers because it promotes growth and flavour.

According to a study published in 2009, the average ratio is 0.63 (ie 1lb total species group biomass increase requires 0.63lb feed) which has reduced over time and reflects increased efficiency in conversion from fishmeal input to farmed fish output as a result of pressure to reduce.10 However, it indicates that fish farming is still a major consumer of wild caught fish (over 33 million tonnes of fish were farmed in 2008, according to FAO statistics9) and also hides substantial variability in the feed conversion ratios between different species, production systems and countries. Farmed Atlantic salmon for example have a feed conversion ratio of 5.0.10 Furthermore predators such as seals will try to bite at fish confined in sea cages, causing fish farmers to shoot thousands of dead seals a year. Other predators are killed by getting caught in the nets and drowning.

The effects of intensive fish farming: risks to wild fish populations Escapes from fish farms are also a cause for concern as they can carry disease and parasites in to wild fish populations, outcompete them for scarce food resources and also reduce the wild population’s genetic diversity by mating with wild fish. In Maine, USA it is estimated that 180,000 fish escape from salmon farms annually, around 100 times the number of wild Atlantic salmon found around New England.8 Figures from the Scottish government show that in the five years 2005-2009 over 1.5 million fish were reported escaped from fish farms.11 So there are costs associated with current aquaculture methods, which may in some ways be all the more dangerous than those associated with land-based factory farming, because they are less visible and therefore less widely acknowledged, and because of the extremely rapid rise in the level of worldwide production. Factory farming must be stopped both on land and in the water.

An agricultural neo-Luddite revolution Simon Fairlie’s recent collection of essays on the role of livestock in a sustainable agricultural system examines how the land use requirements of various farming regimes, from vegan through to mixed arable-pastoral and from organic to intensive, chemical-based systems.12 His conclusion is that animals have a valuable role to play in a balanced, sustainable farming system, but this is not a vindication of business as usual because he explicitly rejects meat and dairy in its intensive factory-farming 55

ECOS 32(1) 2011 form. His vision of “default livestock farming” promotes production of meat, dairy and other animal products where they are a co-product of a mixed farming system.

Animals should be kept to the extent that they make use of marginal and otherwise unproductive land, or consume “waste” products from other parts of the system (such as feeding swill to pigs – now illegal in the UK after the Foot and Mouth outbreak in 2001), and in this case their production is from an environmental point of view, benign or even, he argues, beneficial. However, intensive farming systems intended to meet soaring demand are not part of such a system. They compete with other products for land area by requiring large grain inputs rather than taking up outputs and by-products from other processes, and it is at this point that they can start to have a destabilising effect. A return to organic, mixed farming systems is needed and this will mean farming driven by resource availability rather than consumer demand.

Reducing farming intensity is crucial, and that means changing diets; eating more seasonally, locally produced food and also consuming less meat. It will be possible to feed the predicted human population in 2050 humanely and sustainably if the major meat consuming nations reduce their consumption.2 Even in the UK, evidence shows that we can produce sufficient food for ourselves under an organic regime, if we fit our diet to the produce available.

ECOS 32(1) 2011 Label

Background

What it means

‘Organic’

Six separate bodies in the UK can certify food as organic, to at least an EU minimum standard.

Some bodies impose greater requirements.

No synthetic fertilisers Avoid pesticides All animals are free range Restricted antibiotic use No growth hormones No GM.

Local Low air miles Sourced from small producers Minimal packaging

‘Conservation Grade’

UK-based scheme under which farmers must set aside 10% of their land to create habitats for wildlife

Preserves natural habitat Fewer pesticides UK production

Organic Pesticide free Minimal packaging

Marine Stewardship Council

The is one of the leading certification schemes promoting sustainable fisheries.

Sustainably managed fisheries Attempts to re-establish endangered species Best practice in catching fish

Sustainable practices used after the fish are caught Farmed fish excluded Fish never taken from depleted stocks Fair access to certification for small-scale fishermen

Freedom Food

RSPCA certification for eggs, dairy, meat, poultry and salmon products.

Welfare standards may be above minimum No battery cages for hens

Free range/ access to outdoors High environmental standards on farms No mutilations (tail docking or beak trimming) Animals fed natural diets Organic

Red Tractor

Use of this logo is granted by the Assured Food Standards, an umbrella group representing the National Farmers Union, the Meat and Livestock Commission, Dairy UK and the British Retail Consortium. A British flag in the logo denotes products produced, processed and packed in the UK.

Food produced to a minimum UK/European standard

Not intensively reared Outdoor access for animals No mutilations No GM No growth promoters Locally grown ingredients Organic

Lifestyle choices

Eating less meat: This simple act confers multiple benefits to individuals through better health; to society through lower public health costs; to animals through higher welfare standards; and to the planet by reducing or removing all the examples of environmental degradation discussed here. As a benchmark, even Simon Fairlie and his defence of the carnivore, reports that he eats meat twice a week. Try Meat-free Mondays13 or New York Times food writer Mark Bittman’s VB6 philosophy (vegan before 6pm – eat a vegan diet all day and then anything you like for dinner) to get started.14 Many meat-based recipes and dishes are easily adapted, and there are countless dedicated vegetarian and vegan recipes, recipe books and websites available for further inspiration.

Nutritionally sound diets: A common concern is that a diet without meat/fish protein cannot be nutritionally complete, and whilst it is certainly true in poorer societies where there are serious problems of malnutrition, that meals which are largely grain or tuber based can be nutritionally boosted by the addition of a small quantity of meat, this is absolutely not the case in the UK or any of the other rich nations currently experiencing the public health epidemic euphemistically referred to as “over-nutrition”. When a nutritionally adequate range of plant-based foods is available, high levels of fat and calorie-rich animal products can actually be disadvantageous.

Know your labels: Food producers know that there is a lot of mileage in convincing consumers that they have some animal- or environmental-welfare credentials, but the array of labelling schemes and the lack of regulation mean that some expressions mean more than others. See the table below for some examples: 56

What it doesn’t mean

Table information adapted from Decoding the Label.15 Now is the time to stand up to the threat of a factory farm invasion, and abstaining is not an option because we all make a choice about the sort of food system we want (at least) three times a day. Eating is a political and moral act and it’s time to vote with your fork!

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References and notes 1. Garnett, T. (2008) Cooking up a storm. Food, greenhouse gas emissions and our changing climate.Food Climate Research Network, Centre for Environmental Strategy, University of Surrey. Available from http:// www.fcrn.org.uk/fcrnPublications/index.php?id=6 2. Audsley, E., Brander, M., Chatterton, J., Murphy-Bokern, D., Webster, C., and Williams, A. (2009). How low can we go? An assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from the UK food Systemand the scope to reduce them by 2050.WWF-UK. Available from http://www.wwf.org.uk/research_centre/research_centre_results. cfm?uNewsID=3678 3. Foresight. (2011) The Future of Food and Farming. Final project report. London: The Government Office for Science. Available from http://www.bis.gov.uk/foresight/our-work/projects/current-projects/global-foodand-farming-futures/reports-and-publications 4. Gura, S. (2010) Industrial Livestock Production and Biodiversity in The Meat Crisis. Developing More Sustainable Production and Consumption. Edited by J. D’Silva and John Webster. Earthscan.

5. Steinfeld, H., Gerber, P., Wassenaar, T, Castel, V., Rosales, M. and de Haan, C. (2006) Livestock’s long shadow: Environmental issues and options. Food and Agriculture Organisation, Rome. Available from http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm 6. A number of resources on the subject of water footprints are available from www.waterfootprint.org 7. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2010. FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome. Available from http://www.fao.org/docrep/013/ i1820e/i1820e00.htm 8. Masson, J.M.(2009). The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food. WW Norton.

9. Fishery and Aquaculture Statistics 2008. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome.

Available from http://www.fao.org/fishery/statistics/global-aquaculture-production/en 10. Naylor et al (2009) Feeding aquaculture in an era of finite resources. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. vol. 106 no. 36 pp 15103-15110.

11. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/marine/Fish-Shellfish/18692/escapeStatistics 12. Fairlie, S. (2010) Meat, A Benign Extravagance. Permanent Publications.

13. http://www.meatfreemondays.co.uk/ 14. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/vegan-before-dinnertime/ 15. Thomas, P. (2010) Stuffed - positive action to prevent a global food crisis. Alastair Sawday Ltd.

Ruth Boogert is a research student at Queen Mary, University of London. The views expressed here are her own. r.boogert@qmul.ac.uk

ECOS 32(1) 2011

Deer management and biodiversity in England: the efficacy and ethics of culling This article examines the issues associated with controlling deer numbers in order to protect biodiversity.1 It concludes that culling is in danger of becoming increasingly indiscriminate and that a different perspective derived from ethology and philosophy demands a new approach. The impact of deer on other species is largely true for a narrow range of habitats upon which relatively few species depend, species whose habitat should nonetheless be safeguarded.

SIMON LEADBEATER The relationship of deer to the extinction of other species is an issue of growing importance; biodiversity losses continue unabated and deer populations continue to increase. There is a consensus between government and conservation nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) that biodiversity can only be sustained by managing deer numbers, and indeed some evidence that co-ordinated deer management can improve the condition of woodlands classified as SSSIs.2 In response to increasing deer numbers government policy has recently moved to encourage more culling. But what of the deer themselves? Public interest in deer welfare was briefly ignited in October 2010 following media coverage of the Emperor of Exmoor and so-called ‘trophy hunting,’ but little concern is expressed for the 350,000 deer shot in the UK each year.

This article is written from the perspective of a woodland owner who sees at first hand the environmental damage caused by two deer species, fallow and muntjac.

The consistent advice provided by different agencies is that deer culling is the prerequisite to good woodland management. However, research suggests that culling is ineffective in several respects and advocates generally exclude the inherent welfare dimension to killing deer.

Extinction abroad and closer to home Richard Leakey coined the phrase ‘the sixth extinction’3 and habitat deterioration and species loss seems to be confirmed consistently. Evolution Lost stated that across the world mammal, bird, reptile, fish and amphibian populations had declined by 30 per cent in the last 40 years.4 2010 was the UN’s International Year of Biodiversity; many governments signed the Convention on Biological Biodiversity 58

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and the European Community aimed to halt biodiversity losses by 2010. Regrettably research suggests the Community is not succeeding and species loss in the UK may be continuing at between 5 and 30 species every year.5 One of the most wildlife rich habitats is woodland, and it is here that habitat degradation has caused 40 per cent of the UK’s species extinctions since 1800.6 Since 1990 broadleaved woodland has increased by 5 per cent, but this has coincided with a 34 per cent decrease in wild flowers and a calamitous 74 per cent reduction in woodland butterfly populations.7 More woodland yet apparently less biodiversity can in part be explained by the fact that ancient woodland - woodland with a continuous history since 1600 comprises less than half of the UK’s woodland cover of 12 per cent,8 and new woodland does not have the flora richness of ancient woods. Another factor is, perhaps, the increasing presence of deer.

The impact of deer on biodiversity Oliver Rackham makes the case against deer; “the biggest... threat to woodland is browsing animals... [they] subtract much of the woodland ground vegetation, replacing it with browsing-adapted plants, especially grasses. They render coppicing impracticable. They convert a woodland ecosystem into trees plus grass with no long term future for the trees”.9 He goes further; “deer are a really serious problem… [they] affect ground vegetation, small mammals, birds and invertebrates…Nearly all the efforts are anti-conservation; they subtract features from woodland without adding features.” Rackham provides evidence for his views, including studies attributing Oxlip declines to excessive deer browsing.10 He is not alone; Putman concludes “there is no doubt that… deer in sufficiently high density can inflict considerable damage of real economic consequence”.11 The consensus appears to be that excessive deer numbers inhibit woodland regeneration and damage the shrub understory and flora habitat necessary for many woodland species. However, some alternative perspectives can be found.

The Woodland Trust has questioned the links between browsing and ground flora species richness and asserted that declines in bird numbers do not correlate with deer data.12 Greenwald’s research even suggests “the counterintuitive possibility that [deer] reductions could adversely impact some populations of common amphibians, reptiles and invertebrates”.13 More fundamentally Hambler has questioned the efficacy of some traditional woodland practices, such as coppicing, and has argued that these favour a limited number of charismatic light loving species (e.g. butterflies) and ignore the over 25,000 ‘decomposers’ which prefer high succession woodland. The optimum habitat is for half the woodland to be dead or dying, providing the necessary volume of deadwood required by most woodland species. Deer do not make dead trees anymore dead than they already are, and by far the greatest threats to this environment are woodland management practices – whether ancient or modern. Wood merchants will recommend removing dead standing trees as they ‘infect’ live trees destined for timber14 and the modern thirst for woodburning stoves and ‘green’ energy may be encouraging a revival of coppicing, but also removes the key ingredient necessary for most woodland species – dead wood.15 In this sense people not deer are the greatest threat to woodland biodiversity.

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This hedge was planted in 2005 and nearly completely destroyed by fallow and muntjacs. Re-planting took place in late 2010 with much more robust guards and a fence may prove necessary.

Photo: Simon Leadbeater

Increasing deer species and population growth It is widely believed that there are more deer in the UK than at any time in the last one thousand years;16 there are estimated to be between 1.5 and 2 million deer.17 Red and roe deer are acknowledged as the only native deer, with fallow deer probably being introduced by the Normans. There are then some more recent arrivals, the most recent introduction of which is muntjac, reputedly an escapee from the Duke of Bedford’s estate in Woburn, Bedfordshire, in the early part of the last century though Putman argues there were additional deliberate releases.18 The Muntjac seems to have a real palate for our native wildflowers, and is consequently seen as a particularly damaging alien species. The reasons deer numbers are increasing may be several-fold, including more woodland areas being planted and especially the green corridors between woodlands, a previous run of milder winters and a greater variety of winter crops.

The reality of culling and its variance from best practice The Forestry Commission’s ‘deer management principles’ – and the view taken by the Deer Initiative – is that up to 25 per cent of deer should be culled each year and the focus should be on mature females.19 A well-organised culling programme should enable the maintenance of a healthy herd, keeping deer numbers to manageable levels and producing a sustainable source of venison. The Deer Initiative was set-up in 1995 and recommends the establishment of Deer Management Groups to coordinate the culling of deer over wider ranges. Best practice is perhaps epitomised by the approach taken by a well-known local deer expert (and BANC member), Peter Donnelly, who featured in the national press following the death of the Emperor of Exmoor, which Donnelly considered ‘unsporting’ because the stag was 61

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taken before the rut. Donnelly’s view is that deer must be harvested (sic) in what amounts to a sort of free range farming as stalkers know the deer on Exmoor well and are able to target individuals before they ‘go back’. 20 A previous contributor to ECOS, David Blake, makes similar points and argues that culling has advantages over natural predation in so much as the stalker can cull evenly across age groups instead of ‘slaying the young and stupid,’ which habitually happens when ungulates are naturally predated.21 But does deer culling work? The evidence suggests not. First, deer numbers are rising; officers from Natural England and the Deer Initiative estimate that the deer population will double in 10 years.22 The Deer Initiative may be a logical approach, but the reality is that co-ordinating a range of disparate elements is hard to achieve.23 Additionally, in the author’s experience stalkers simply wish to shoot deer, and in the small privately owned woodlands which form the habitat of many of Britain’s deer it is not a question of shooting older deer or does rather than bucks – it is about shooting what comes in sight, safely and hopefully cleanly.

One Oxford academic, who sits on the Wytham Woods management committee, advised that deer management in the woods constitutes fencing an area targeted for re-generation and then shooting all the deer within the fence. He said this occurred in many woods. When mentioned to a scientist based at the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust he commented “this sounds pretty sound to me.” Is this a description of indiscriminate slaughter or a pragmatic approach to culling the remaining few deer foolish enough to remain within a fenced enclosure?

Research conducted for this article included contacting The British Deer Society (BDS), The Forestry Commission (FC), The British Association for Shooting & Conservation (BASC) and individual stalkers. Data on deer management in England is limited in part because unlike Scotland there is no statutory duty to report culling data. However, while the data are partial, clearly mature females are not the only focus of stalkers. The latest BASC survey suggests as many as 173,000 deer are culled in England each year. This does not specify age or gender, but the FC reported that in the season ending March 2010 of the 11,000 deer culled on FC land 5,000 were adult females, 4,000 males and 2,000 (gender unspecified) juveniles.24 British Deer Society data also suggest a 51:49 split between genders.25 Data from stalking carried out on the author’s land confirmed more males than females were culled.

The published diary of a professional stalker, Colin Elford, confirmed that while older females will be targeted instead of younger deer, essentially he shot what came in range.26 What this data collectively evidences is that the ‘harvesting’ approach adopted by stalkers such as Donnelly is not the pattern predominating in England.

Moreover, in order to increase the number of deer culled the Government has legislated to lengthen hunting seasons and even gone so far as to allow dependent fawns to be culled when deprived of their mother _ further indicating that the key concern is cull numbers, not best practice.

In summary, in response to the increasing deer population evidence from both hunting organisations and other sources, coupled with the trajectory of government 62

There are numerous locations of captive deer in Britain including here in Richmond Park, London. The park is closed when culling operations occur and local people are unlikely to oppose piloting immuno-contraception techniques from America.

Photo: Simon Leadbeater

thinking, is to cull increasingly indiscriminately – basically to kill as many animals as possible – in contrast to the ‘principles’ promoted by the FC and Deer Initiative which espouse maintaining balanced populations. That this approach continues to fail in appreciably reducing deer numbers should be no surprise. As Putman observes, the natural response of population decreases is an “increase in productivity”, through reproduction, immigration and increased survival. “If population levels are lowered artificially, the density-dependent brake is released: reproduction increases, mortality declines”.28 He also stresses that culling animals of the wrong age or gender can be counter-productive, because if the normal social structure and organisation is disrupted, damage to trees increases as deer display abnormal behaviour.

Whether deer suffer and if so how much and how many The degree of suffering might be supposed to hinge on how cleanly deer are shot, but there is dissent on this very point. Following submissions to the Burns enquiry on hunting with dogs, veterinarians took issue with Sir Patrick Bateson’s and Elizabeth Bradshaw’s view that “the welfare costs associated with hunting Red Deer [with hounds] were higher than those associated with stalking”.29 This included a discussion on whether shot deer do not feel pain in the way humans have avoided experiencing in some circumstances. Depending upon how and where a deer is shot clearly impacts on when it loses consciousness. The British Deer Society has tried to establish how often deer are wounded or killed cleanly. From an on-going survey, and what the Society admits is a small sample of just over a 100 hunters, it 63

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appears that 88 per cent of deer are killed with one bullet, which echoes Urquhart and McKendrick’s earlier research.30 The BDS estimate 2 per cent of deer shot are ‘hit but lost’.31 From these findings and assuming nearly 175,000 of deer culled each year in England perhaps 3,500 are wounded and not recovered. This is data from responsible stalkers and not poachers or incompetent hunters, so it is reasonable to assume a higher number of deer are wounded of which a proportion will die.

Assumptions about suffering can be made. Some wounded deer may recover, but that they must suffer in some measure is incontestable. There are then 12 per cent which required additional bullets for dispatch – suggesting at the least a greater likelihood of suffering, though both bullets may be fired in quick succession. The fortunate 88 per cent majority will probably die quite quickly, though the BDS research assumes rather than demonstrates or records this.32

Discussion This discussion leads to several initial conclusions: • Controlling deer numbers is important for particular types of woodland habitat which favour a small number of charismatic species, but not for the vast majority of species which favour high succession woodland environments characterised by significant volumes of dead wood.

• Trophy hunting selects the ‘best’ males and general culling predominantly involves shooting essentially what is available – certainly young deer and does with their fawns.

• Experts agree culling is not reducing deer numbers. Some, such as Putman, would argue that culling actually encourages deer to increase their numbers by, inter alia, breeding more productively if deer densities decrease.

• Some readers will consider stalking involves a degree of suffering, particularly to wounded deer and those not killed quickly.

These arguments do not lead to a specious conclusion that deer need not be managed at all. Deer are increasing in numbers and they are adversely impacting on a valuable woodland habitat and in so doing could be said to contribute to the extinction of other species. Commentators, such as Professor Priscilla Cohn, a philosopher and Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and founder of Pity not Cruelty in the United States, argue that deer are no less valuable than other species and as such their hunting cannot be justified to benefit biodiversity. So, there is the argument that deer should not be valued any less than the species they are adversely impacting,33 but human intervention either reduces deer numbers or through non-intervention that of other species. Both consequences are lethal to individuals and in the latter case potentially irreversibly fatal to a whole species.

Allowing deer numbers to burgeon unchecked and increasingly damage shared habitats is not the answer. If culling is not then proving effective in controlling deer numbers is there an alternative?

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A remote trail camera snaps a muntjac deer on a Gloucestershire farm. The farmer was not aware of muntjac being present on his land before this photograph.

Controlling deer populations through non-lethal means The Government alludes to non-lethal methods of deer control by stating that they may make a “valuable addition to lethal methods, but [are] unlikely to replace them”.34 This is not the position of Dr Jay Kirkpatrick35 who argues that a technique called immuno-contraception can “achieve zero population growth relatively fast but it takes some time to actually reduce the population, but it can – and has been – done”.36 In one trial 88 per cent of females did not become pregnant in the first year.37 Other research cited by Kirkpatrick38 indicated a 60 per cent total population reduction in White-Tailed Deer.39 This coupled with more traditional techniques of providing mineral licks and sugar blocks have the effect of ‘holding deer’ in given areas and reducing their propensity to strip bark.40 There are numerous captive deer populations in England such as those in Richmond Park, London. The park is closed for culling operations and the local community is not likely to oppose piloting immuno-contraception techniques from America. Kirkpatrick’s views are not, however, shared by all experts; Jonathan Reynolds of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust does not believe ‘that immune-contraception is just around the corner and only needs a bit of money to make it a workable technique.’41

If all animals are equal, are deer less equal than others?

There appears not to be a consensus concerning the merits of immunocontraception, but perhaps different values are at play here as much as scientific evidence. In the UK discussions about conservation and deer management centre 65

ECOS 32(1) 2011 on the need to maintain balanced deer populations and the research undertaken for this article has identified some concern for animal welfare. However, within this discussion no commentator, to the author’s knowledge, has suggested “that we extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognise should be extended to all members of our own species”.42 Darwin suggested that the difference in minds between people and animals was one of degree not kind43 and Bentham argued that the capacity for suffering was the vital characteristic that gives a being the right to equal consideration.44 These ideas have been expanded by the philosopher Peter Singer and others. More recently Bekoff and Pierce, a scientist and philosopher respectively, have gone further suggesting that “new information that’s accumulating daily is blasting away perceived boundaries between humans and animals”45 and argue that animals have the capacity for moral lives. This intervention makes an already complex area much more so.

If deer are viewed as ‘game’ or relatively anonymous herd animals, or even as pests, then most readers would probably still advocate management methods which minimise suffering. If, however, the view is taken that animals in general and deer in particular are different from ‘us’ in degree not kind46 the corollary is that suffering should not be minimised but avoided. Immuno-contraception techniques may well need perfecting, but there is evidence that they work in some circumstances and certainly their use could be explored more vigorously than at present.

Animals are pampered, bred and hunted, tested upon, eaten or extirpated, all subject to whether people like, dislike or fear them, upon their utility or whether they compete, how we categorise them as wild-living, livestock or pet. Accepting there are differences and exceptions to these general rules “we tend to practice an animal apartheid system,”47 in which some species are treated more favourably than others depending upon the values we ascribe to them. Wild-living deer are certainly treated as less equal than our pampered pets, though by no means as the least equal of animals. Should we not instead treat them assuming a shared capacity for suffering and sentience?

Avoiding unintended consequences Some commentators promote the happy convergence of hunting and its economic and environmental benefits. This is one argument put forward by ECOS author David Blake who suggests hunting is somehow part of people’s ‘evolutionary biology.’48 The combination of ethology and philosophy provides a different if for some rather inconvenient perspective. It is not enough, however, to only argue that hunting should stop and that deer numbers could be reduced by limiting their effectiveness to breed – individual deer would then grow old and become infirm and die a lingering death. This is arguably less humane than continuing to cull and as a potential nightmare of unintended consequences has to be avoided.

Conclusion With increasing deer numbers it is likely that government agencies and NGOs will call for greater and more co-ordinated culling. Although the Government has abandoned plans to sell off FC forests the countryside is not likely to remain static 66

ECOS 32(1) 2011 in the years ahead – ownership may become more diffuse and organised culling based on the best ‘deer management principles’ increasingly challenging. If, as evidence suggests, this will mean increasingly indiscriminate culling and possibly more suffering, how can this be reconciled with the view that people share more in common with deer than not. With deer numbers predicted to increase it is time to draw on the experience of non-lethal forms of population control carried out in other parts of the world. This will have the added benefit of avoiding the suffering entailed in stalking deer however much organisations like the Deer Society try to minimise it.

Most woodland species require high succession woodland cover which deer affect rather less. Although this perspective conflicts with the widely received view held by most conservationists about what woodland management is all about, the fact remains that high deer densities adversely impact on understory shrubs and light loving plants upon which many other woodland species depend. This only reinforces the need for an effective population control mechanism to replace ineffective culling.

Insufficient eclectic thought is being given to the issue of species’ overabundance; ethology and the insights offered by philosophers such as Singer compel we look at the problem afresh.

References 1. By which is generally meant an abundance and variety of life. Hambler & Speight provide a more detailed definition of biodiversity which includes species richness, abundance and habitat diversity. Hambler, C. and Speight, M. R. (1995) Biodiversity conservation in Britain: science replacing tradition, British Wildlife 2. Natural England (2008) State of the Natural Environment 3. Leakey, R. & Lewin, R. (1995). The Sixth Extinction 4. Zoological Society of London (2010) Evolution Lost 5. Hambler, C. (2010) Conserving Species. Hertford Magazine p.64 6. Hambler, C., Henderson, P.A., Speight, M.R. (2010) Extinction Rates, extinction-prone habitats, and indicator groups in Britain and at larger scales. Biological Conservation p.5 7. Plantlife 2010 Issue 18 p. 21 8. Watts, K. (2006). British forest landscapes: The legacy of woodland fragmentation. Quarterly Journal of Forestry 100 (4), 273 -279.

9. Rackham, O. (2006) Woodlands p. 269.

10 Rackham op.cit. pp. 537-539 11. Putman, R. (1989) The Natural History of Deer p. 165 12. Smithers, R. (2007) Living with Deer: an alternative view of deer management. Conference paper at the Deer Initiative Deer, Habitats and Impacts Conference March 2007.

13. Greenwald, K R, Petit, L J, Waite, T A (2008). Indirect Effects of a Keystone Herbivore Elevate Local Animal Diversity. Journal of Wildlife Management 72(6): 1318-1321.

14. Recommended to the author in November 2010 15. Hambler et al op.cit.1995 16. Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology,(February 2009) Postnote, Number 325 17. Watson, P. (January 2009) Note on Deer Numbers 18. Putman op.cit.

19. Forestry Commission (July 1999). Managing Deer in the Countryside p.8 & 10, Watson op.cit.

20. Donnelly, P. (1/12/10) Email correspondence

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 21. Blake, D (2007) Deer in Britain: the challenges for nature conservation. ECOS 28 (2) 41-49.

22. Goldberg, E and Watson, P. (2011). Landscape scale deer management to address biodiversity impacts in England. Quarterly Journal of Forestry Vol. 105 No. 1 p. 32 23. Postnote op.cit.

24. Forestry Commission (2010) Correspondence 25. Rose, H. (2008) Shooting Accuracy and Deer Recovery Project, British Deer Society Deer 26 Elford, C. (2010) A Year in the Woods, The Diary of a Forest Ranger 27. HM Government, Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – Defra – and The Forestry Commission, England (February 2010). The sustainable management of wild deer populations in England: A review of 2005-08 and summary of action to March 2011.

28. Putman op.cit. p.171 29. Bateson. P. & Bradshaw, E. Animal Welfare 2001: 10 113-117 30. Urquhart, K.A. & McKendrick, I.J., (2006) ‘Prevalence of ‘head shooting’ and the characteristics of the wounds in culled wild Scottish red deer,’ Veterinary Record 2006;159:75-79 doi:10.1136/vr.159.3.75 31. Deer op.cit. p. 19 32. Deer op.cit.

33. Cohn, Prof. P., Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University. Email correspondence dated 2/12/10 34. Defra & FC 2010 op.cit. p.23 35. Dr Kirkpatrick is the Director of the Science and Conservation Centre at Billings, Mont. USA 36. Kirkpatrick, J. (January 2007) ‘Response to Pennsylvania Game Commission’ – www.pzpinfo.org/home.html 37. Gionfriddo J P, Eisemann J D, Sullivan K J, Healey R S, Lowell, A Miller, Fagerstone, K A Engeman R M, Christi, AY (April 2009). Field test of a single-injection gonadotrophin-releasing hormone immunocontraceptive vaccine in female white-tailed deer. Wildlife Research 38. For a list of scientific papers many of them by Kirkpatrick follow the link http://www.pzpinfo.org/ bibliography.html 39. Naugle, R., Rutberg, A. T., Underwood, H. P, Turner, J.W., Liu, IKM, (2002) ‘Field testing of immunocontraception on white-tailed deer (odocoileus virginianus) on Fire Island National Seashore,’ New York, USA, (Suppl. 60): 143-153.

40. Putman op.cit. p. 174 41. Reynolds, J. email to the author of 2/3/11 42. Singer, P. ‘all animals are equal’ in Regan, T. & Singer, P (eds) (1989) Animal Rights and Human Obligations, New Jersey, p 148.

43. Darwin, C., (1871)The Descent of Man 44. Quoted by Singer, op.cit.

45. Bekoff, M. & Pierce, J. (2009) Wild Justice; The Moral Lives of Animals, 2009 p. x.

46. Bekoff et al op.cit. p. xi. Darwin only stated ‘minds’ differed in degree not kind.

47. Llewellin, Rt. Revd. Richard, (1998) Export of Live Animals, Anglican Society for the Welfare of Animals.

Bishop Richard had experience of living in South Africa and was writing specifically in connection with the export of live animals.

48. Blake, op.cit.

Acknowledgement: The author acknowledges the assistance provided by Dr Jonathan Reynolds of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust who commented on an earlier version of this paper. The views expressed are, however, the author’s alone.

Dr Simon Leadbeater is a woodland owner and writer on environmental issues.

Simon.leadbeater@btinternet.com

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Wild rights – campaigning for the Tay beavers A Facebook campaign to celebrate wild nature taking its course is gathering pace…

LOUISE RAMSAY On 26 November 2010 Scottish Natural Heritage announced that it intended to trap and remove the beavers living free in the Tay river system. The news was disappointing, but came as no great surprise. It had been known that beavers were living in the catchment since May 2001 when a group of people, including wildlife conservationists, saw a beaver swimming in the Earn while out canoeing. Over the years it has become apparent that beavers were breeding successfully and that this was becoming widely known.

Gathering support via the web The Facebook campaign ‘Save the Free Beavers of the Tay’ was started by me shortly after the SNH announcement. I began it because I had seen our son, Adam Ramsay, have great success with a Facebook campaign a year ago and felt it was a good starting point to disseminate information and provoke discussion. An early outcome, as membership was growing, was the support of the local newspaper, the Blairgowrie Advertiser, which is now selling T shirts with a ‘Hands off our Beavers’ slogan. Since then we have had considerable coverage in the press. My husband Paul and I have administered the group and added information to it in ways that have kept the discussions lively, but otherwise we have largely left it to its own devises.

We held our first meeting in Blairgowrie in January. It was well attended, and the people who came decided that they would like to form themselves into a group called Scottish Wild Beaver Group. This group is soon to apply for charitable status.

Again, so far Paul and I have been at the helm, chairing and taking the minutes, but tasks are now being divided between more people. About half a dozen local people have got seriously involved and given up a lot of time to the beavers, working on aspects as diverse as bank observation, Twitter, press releases, the website, www.scottishwildbeavergroup.org, and the education of children. Meetings are now monthly and are lively. The beavers are known to be popular in the Aberfeldy and Invergowrie areas as well as around Blairgowrie.

There has been some local opposition, particularly from one floodplain farmer who has understandable concerns about beaver impacts on floodbanks. Broader opposition to beavers has come from some landowners and from the Tweed foundation, whose fisheries biologist thinks that beavers will have a negative impact on salmon migration in Scotland. The Tweed Foundation’s anxieties (misplaced in our view and that of many salmon and beaver specialists) have spilled over into the 69

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Coming into view In November 2006, the manager of a put-and-take fishery at Sandyknowes near Bridge of Earn complained that a beaver was in his artificial loch. Looking through a night sight, he claimed to have seen two. Visiting the fishery, I noticed that the beavers had built a lodge, which suggested that we were dealing with a mated pair. The manager, Eoin Christie, had reported the presence of the ‘beaver’ to The Courier and to SNH. SNH was not amused and reported the sighting to the police. In December 2006 we heard that there were signs of beaver around Glamis in Angus.

The following spring the then Scottish Executive contacted the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland to remove the beaver at Sandyknowes. They caught the male, and the other moved on.1 We were aware of a somewhat piecemeal attempt to trap wild beavers over a few years, but the trappers did not seem to be very successful.

There was news of a beaver in Tentsmuir Forest in Fife in 20082 and there were reports of activity in the Tay near Balnagard. Occasionally reports appeared in newspapers:3 a passer-by saw a beaver early one morning in Invergowrie in July 2010. There was, however, little awareness of the extent to which beavers were spreading through the area. We learned later that many people knew of beavers, but had kept quiet. Then, on 6 August 2010, The Scotsman published an article by Keith Ringland, accompanied by a fine photograph, which claimed that there might be up to 100 beavers in the Tay. We waited to see what would happen. It was clear that such public knowledge of the presence of beavers in Tayside would be a source of embarrassment to the Scottish Government and SNH. The Scottish Wildlife Trust and Royal Zoological Society of Scotland’s trial reintroduction, which is monitored

by SNH, was underway in Argyll.4 Its publicity campaign and fund raising literature had been full of how the Knapdale beavers were the first to be back in Scotland for these four hundred years and their kits were the first to be born in the wild since then. Paul Ramsay had filmed a beaver kit in the Dean Water in Angus in July 2009 and posted it on You Tube at the time. We hoped that SNH and SWT would see what wonderful news it was that the beaver, ‘the missing link in our ecosystem’ was back and that they would find a way to extend their study and commission some research into the Tay beavers to complement the work in Knapdale. It would be a great opportunity to study beaver activity in a salmon river along with intensive arable farming and private woodland.

From the grass roots to the Great and the Good Once we knew that SNH intended to eradicate the beavers in the Tay, we launched a campaign to protect them. Facebook was our starting point. We have urged our supporters to write to the Minister for the Environment, Roseanna Cunningham, and members of our campaign have met her. We have had coverage in The Guardian, The Independent, The Courier, The Perthshire Advertiser, The Blairgowrie Advertiser, The Strathearn Herald, and countless websites and blogs. Questions have been asked in the Scottish Parliament.5 70

As I write there are 865 names on our Facebook Group and, on and off Facebook, the campaign has a number of well known names including Sir John Lister Kaye, Professor Christopher Smout, Roy Dennis, Derek Gow, Prof. Aubrey Manning, Dr. Philip Ashmole, Prof. Bryony Coles, Robin Harper, and Louise Batchelor the journalist, and Dougie Maclean the Folksinger.

A couple of dozen follow the forum carefully and write regularly, some from the USA. Heidi Perryman from John Muir’s home town of Martinez, California, who led the campaign to save the Martinez beavers 6 has been a wonderful support. We have not so far had any formal support from mainstream conservation bodies although three former officials of SNH and two former employees of WWF are supporting our campaign. A long list of bodies including the SWT and RSPB were represented in the National Species Reintroduction Forum, which was consulted at the time that SNH made the decision, in August 2010, to trap and if necessary cull the beavers. None of the representatives objected.

NEIL BENNETT

official view of the Scottish Rural Business and Property Association, although we know informally that many landowners and fishermen are interested in and tolerant of the presence of beavers. Some are even enthusiastic.

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From this forum, and in other ways, we have become convinced that the Scottish Government is ignoring its obligation to protect the beavers under European law.

We are puzzled that the Scottish Executive’s rejection of SNH’s application for a license for a trial in 2005 recognised the protected status of the beaver in the wild in stating: “The release of European beaver in Scotland would grant the species full legal protection under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981”, but that the post 2007 Scottish Government has reverted to a different opinion.

Official muddled thinking?

It is hard to understand why the position of the Scottish Government should differ from the opinion expressed in Natural England’s paper ‘The feasibility and acceptability of reintroducing the European beaver to England’7. “The UK would … be obliged to protect the species, once it became established in the wild”.8 The fact that the free beavers’ escape was not a licensed release does not equate to their claim that they are unlicensed. It is as though beavers had wandered over the border from say France into Germany, at a time when Germany had none, and had been arrested for having no licence.

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The campaign gathered speed when we learned of the trapping of the first beaver.

We were told he was caught in the Ericht. A supporter named him Eric and he became the symbol of our fight. Eric is known to be in the custody of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland. The newly formed Scottish Wild Beaver Group adopted Erica, who turned out to be female on behalf of the Alyth Beaver Scouts.

us. The likelihood of picking up this worm from a beaver of the Tay seems really extraordinarily small. It is much more likely that an infected rat from continental Europe, landing at a British seaport, would be eaten by a fox that, in its turn, became infected.

SNH has complained that the beavers of the Tay are of the wrong provenance.

They argue, quite reasonably, that we must follow IUCN guidelines that say reintroductions should be of the type most like the one that was there before, but mistakenly treat the guidelines as dogma. As the guidelines state: “These guidelines are intended to act as a guide for procedures useful to re-introduction programmes and do not represent an inflexible code of conduct.”

In February Paul Ramsay heard that two beavers had been shot East of Meigle in the last few months (not by SNH) and another was caught in a snare, allegedly not intended for a beaver. This has caused much regret in the group and renewed anger that the beavers are not protected here. We believe it is important that provisions are made for the translocation of beavers whose presence has become a significant problem for land managers, as is the case in Bavaria. We are glad that SNH is to stop its trapping programme before Easter, but with a small but growing population, it is imperative that the Scottish Government recognizes the beavers’ protected status.

The Scottish Government and SNH put out press releases from time to time that try to make it sound as if it is beyond belief that anyone would question its logic.

We find it beyond belief that they don’t welcome and celebrate the return of this wonderful old native with its gift of making free habitats.

In the case of beavers there are three good reasons to question the validity of being too precise about matching beaver types: • There is very little evidence in the archaeological record to go on.

• All three of the western beaver populations are based on a tiny remnant and are inbred • There are only tiny genetic differences between beavers across the whole of Eurasia, even between the Eastern and Western ESUs Derek Gow, the naturalist who quarantined the Knapdale beavers says the choice of Norwegian is inaccurate in any case: “the Scottish samples were nearest in type to German samples. It was the English samples which were nearest to Scandinavian.”(pers. comm.). Duncan Halley, the most up to date authority9 on the subject says in his paper in Mammal Review: “Each (of the three populations of western beavers) is genetically depauperate, apparently as a result of genetic drift at low population levels.” He therefore proposes three options – the first two are ways to follow the IUCN guidelines closely and introduce beaver from just one, or a mixture of two or all three of the western populations – but a third is to “make an informed exception to the IUCN guidelines and reintroduce animals of mixed eastern and western … provenance.” The beavers of known origin in Tayside are Bavarian and descend from a reintroduction themselves from a mixture of Eastern and Western. The stock was intentionally mixed to create a strong hybrid.

Celebrate wild nature

References and notes 1. The sighting of two beavers and the fact of a substantial lodge suggested a mating pair. However, RZSS claimed that there was only one.

2. The Tentsmuir beaver was caught eventually and taken to a wildlife reserve in the south of England, whence it escaped into the Thames.

3. www.thecourier.co.uk/Living/Outdoors/article/1810/wildlife-enthusiast-spots-beaver-in-invergowrie.html 4. At a reputed cost of £2m.

5. S3W-39473 - Liam McArthur (Orkney) (LD) (Date Lodged Tuesday, February 08, 2011): To ask the Scottish Executive whether the beaver captured in the River Ericht is alive and, if so, where it is kept.

6. http://www.martinezbeavers.com 7. The feasibility and acceptability of reintroducing the European beaver to England’ Natural England Report.

8. NECR002 2009.

9. Halley J D Mammal Review 2010.

Louise Ramsay is a self-employed business woman, farmer’s wife, mother, grandmother and life-long environmentalist. Paul Ramsay is a conservationist-landowner, farmer and writer with a passion for rewilding. Paul and Louise have beavers on their land in two large enclosures. They acquired beavers, as members of the Scottish Beaver Network (an informal group of like-minded people), that was set up to support SNH’s plan to restore beavers to Scotland. Paul Ramsay is writing a book about beavers. louise@bamff.co.uk

SNH have produced a third argument against the Tayside beavers – it is something of a scare tactic in our view. They claim the beavers may have a parasite, Echinococcus multilocularis, a tapeworm that has been spreading through Europe, Japan and North America (the Mid-West) for a number of years. It is not present in the UK (except in the case of one quarantined beaver that died of it). One stage of its life is spent in rodents and then, if the rodent dies and is eaten by a fox, the cysts are ingested by that animal for the next stage of its life. It seems that E. multilocularis has not reached Norway yet, so SNH are using this as another stratagem for convincing the world that the Norwegian variant of Castor fiber is the only one for 72

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Big Birds in the UK: the reintroduction of iconic species There has been over three decades of success with reintroduction of large birds, some with fierce reputations among farmers and game keepers, and some demanding of habitat restoration and undisturbed nesting grounds. Are there lessons here for mammalian reintroduction programmes?

PETER TAYLOR The reintroduction of bird species formerly eradicated from Britain contrasts markedly with the mammalian equivalents. Whereas it took almost 20 years from the first factfinding trip of Britain’s conservationists to see a beaver reintroduction site in Brittany in 1991 before masses of red tape and consultations brought this harmless mammal to a remote site in Scotland, big bird enthusiasts began reintroducing sea eagles to Scotland in 1975 and red kites to England in 1989. Programmes of releases continue, with sea eagles now on the Scottish east coast and potentially in East Anglia, golden eagles already breeding again in Ireland, and the red kite programme on its ninth release project in the north-west of England, following the first project in the Home Counties. Great bustards and cranes are currently subject to captive breeding and release programmes in Wiltshire and Somerset. Apart from the cranes and bustards, the avian success story involves large predators that could engender opposition from farming and game bodies unless handled with full involvement of these interests, yet these programmes have had striking success. Are there lessons here for future mammal projects?

The sea eagle This magnificent eagle, also called the white-tailed sea eagle, is a close relative of the American bald eagle, and despite being a predator and scavenger mainly of fish and wildfowl, had an undeserved reputation as a lamb-killer. It was systematically eradicated in Britain and Ireland where it was confined to coastal wilderness areas, probably numbering about 100 pairs in Britain and 50 in Ireland at end of the 18th century – by 1916, the last pair on Skye had been exterminated.

The reintroduction programme began in 1975 – with Roy Dennis being a key champion of the project. Over a 10 year period, 82 birds were released, first in the Hebrides, and in 1985 the first chicks were reared. In the 1990s the programme was extended to Wester Ross, and by 2010, there were 50 breeding pairs raising 46 young with a 10% increase over the previous year. Young birds disperse and one is currently wintering in Hampshire!

The RSPB has begun a 5-year project in eastern Scotland, with more young birds being brought over from Norway.

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The Crane School – young cranes being nurtured as part of The Great Crane Project at Slimbridge, using dummy equipment to ensure they remain naïve of human presence.

Photo: WWT

In recent years a project to begin releases in East Anglia has developed, initially along the Norfolk coast near Brancaster. In 2010 the proposals were halted, officially due to shortage of funds, but perhaps partly due to difficulties amongst the partnership of bodies, which included landowner interests. Overall, the sea eagle programme has been a resounding success. The sea eagles released on the Isle of Mull in Scotland have proved a major draw for the island, and visitor spend associated with the sea eagles is between £1.4m-1.6m a year.

The project illustrates the nature of a necessary long term commitment and continued releases over a decade to reach the critical threshold for a slow-breeding top predator.

The golden eagle Scotland has a relatively stable population of golden eagles – and a significant proportion of the European population of this holarctic species. It would appear another iconic candidate for re-introduction to England, but no attempts have been made. A single pair has attempted breeding several times in the Lake District with a few years of successes and many failures. It may be the case that prey species and carrion are not abundant enough in the English fells. In contrast, golden eagles were returned to Ireland by taking young birds from Scotland to Glenveigh in Donegal in 2001. By 75

ECOS 32(1) 2011 2007, there were eight territories and two chicks. This programme was supported by the EU Life fund and many Irish charities and agencies. The Glenveigh National Park has a healthy population of Irish hare and the eagles also feed on fox and badger cubs.

The red kite Although this species had a recovering population of Welsh birds that had hovered on the brink of extinction and were nursed back by diligent nest-protection under the auspices of the RSPB, the birds had yet to colonise their former haunts in England or Scotland. Reintroductions began in 1989 in the Chilterns, bringing chicks from Spain and Sweden and by 2002 there were 140 pairs in the hills of the Home Counties.

Another eight release sites from Devon to Northumberland have seen the English population rise to over 300 pairs, with 200 pairs now breeding in Wales. Scottish releases centred in Inverness and Galloway have been very successful, with the Scottish population at 160 pairs raising nearly 300 young birds in 2010 – a rise of about 10% on the previous year. In 2011, a release programme began in Northern Ireland.

The osprey Ospreys had been similarly eradicated by Victorian obsessives but recolonised Scotland from Scandinavia in the early 1950s. A diligent programme of nest protection (from egg thieves) by the RSPB saw the Scottish population steadily rise to over 200 pairs by 2010. As this raptor is migratory, young birds began long stays on Welsh estuaries, in the Lake District and Rutland and Kielder reservoirs and this prompted the erection of artificial nest sites leading to the first rearing of English and Welsh chicks.

The great bustard This large game bird – perhaps the heaviest flying bird, died out on the central plains of England toward the end of the 19th century, and a brief attempt at reintroduction failed. A 10 year programme began in 2003, spearheaded by the Great Bustard Group, consisting of the RSPB, Natural England and Bath University. In cooperation with the Russian Academy of Sciences, eggs taken from nests endangered by farming in the Trans Volga steppe region of Saratov are first hatched and the chicks transferred to rearing facilities at the Salisbury Plain reintroduction site. The object was to release about 100 birds and to have a breeding population by 2015 – and the first British-born chicks arrived in 2010. The target is 20 breeding pairs by 2030.

The project has just been award £2.2m of EU Life funding over three years.

Prospects for this programme are better than might be expected as the source population have adapted to cropland in their home range and seem to prefer it to remnants of the original grassy steppe vegetation. The main threat will be high predation pressure on vulnerable chicks from Britain’s high density of foxes. The species is very shy and it remains to be seen whether it could extend further than the relatively unpopulated land used for military training.

The crane Another ancient denizen of Britain, well-featured in folklore and in many place names across England, has received the helping hand of restoration. It had already 76

ECOS 32(1) 2011 begun a slow process of natural colonisation in the fens of East Anglia over the last two decades, but the population remained at about 6 breeding pairs, with about 40 over-wintering adults. The Great Crane Project was set up to establish another population in England, with the Somerset Levels the chosen site. This project is a joint initiative of the RSPB, the WWT and the Pensthorpe Conservation Trust together with interest and funding from the Viridor landfill credits scheme.

Eggs were taken to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge and hatched with the chicks then reared by people in weird baggy costumes (looking like they are about to deal with a nuclear emergency!) holding dummy crane beaks to deliver food – this to ensure the fledged birds did not habituate to humans. The first young birds were released in the autumn of 2010 at a site on the Levels. The source population of 350 pairs is in the 130,000ha Schorfheide-Chorin biosphere reserve in eastern Germany.

The goshawk and eagle owl I bracket these two raptors together as they are classic examples of inadvertent, surreptitious, quasi-legal and accidental re-introductions. The goshawk suffered extermination at the hands of Victorian game-keepers, as it is a powerful predator of reared game birds such as pheasant. The eagle owl existed only in the postglacial fossil record and if it did survive into medieval times, as we now know the lynx did, as with that animal, it did not influence national folklore.

The goshawk began breeding in central England sometime after the war and doubtless as a result of falconry escapes. Some of these may have been deliberate, but inadvertent losses of hunting birds are common and this hawk is a favourite of the dedicated falconer. There are now over 400 pairs in England. Scotland and Wales and all of various origins with a mix of sub-species from North America, Scandinavia and Central Europe.

The eagle owl has been observed in Britain on numerous occasions since the mid 1800s, but all birds have been assumed escapees, as it is a popular animal in zoos, wildlife parks and private collections. It breeds well in captivity and is readily sold on to devotees who may not have appropriate training or facilities. The RSPB has data showing that in the 10 years to 2007, 123 birds were recorded as escapees, with 73 not recovered; there were 440 voluntarily registered in captivity and over 3000 sold on (a certificate of origin is required by law, but there are no other requirements of ownership). That is not to say that some of the sightings may have been of birds crossing from Scandinavia – another owl species, the long-eared, may be able to make this crossing during winter dispersal, as this forest-dweller is regularly encountered on the headlands of the NE coast.

Whatever their origins, at some time during the last decade, several pairs of eagle owls established a breeding population in a remote upland area of Northumberland.

This was not welcome news to the RSPB who were concerned for their small breeding population of English hen harriers – a ground nesting raptor, as eagle owls are known to prey upon other raptors up to the size of buzzard. A pair of owls 77

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 I did once have the pleasure of watching an escaped bird that haunted the local churchyard and rooftops of Glastonbury High Street. It was a magnificent sight and much loved by the more switched-on members of the community. However, others were concerned for their small pet dogs and cats – not that there was any evidence the owl was a danger and it must have found adequate rats and mice.

It was eventually trapped and sent back to prison. Early in 2011 the exploits of an eagle owl were reported in The Forester (Forest of Dean) newspaper. This concerned a tame eagle owl that apparently brought presents of mice and sundry small furry animals to a quarry workers’ tea hut near Coleford. It was seen to be shot and thought to have died, after which local people left flowers at its favourite perch. It was later found alive and is now recuperating at the nearby International Centre for Birds of Prey at Newent.

Issues and lessons This rather successful history of re-instating large birds, including predators that engender some opposition, is an object lesson for mammalian projects. Firstly, the projects encompass not only exterminated species, but also those re-colonising of their own accord but deemed in need of a helping hand. If we consider the history of mammals, then this would include not just wolves, bears, lynx, moose, beaver, boar and reconstituted wild cattle, but also extending a hand to pine marten, polecat, and wildcat as well as the less problematic water vole.

Andrea Gear explains the causes of some of the eagle owls present in Britain: Falconry is fashionable, which isn’t necessarily a problem. Indeed there are some falconers who contribute greatly to conservation through captive breeding of vulnerable species and rescue and rehabilitation of wild injured birds, or specimens confiscated by customs. Unfortunately however, no license is required to keep a bird of prey despite the level of expertise required. As a result many people have bought a bird of prey as a novelty to keep in an aviary in their back garden.

On realising the commitment required many self-proclaimed ‘falconers’ give them up, either to a rescue centre or by releasing them into the wild. The Eurasian Eagle Owl has suffered particularly in this respect as it may live up to 60 years in captivity, requires a lot of space and costs a fortune to feed. Of those that are released only a minority survive, due to the fact that they have no hunting experience, or the negligent owner didn’t remove the jessies, which tangle up in trees. Those that are recaptured or live in rescue centres may be traumatised, and with talons powerful enough to crush a fox’s skull, not the sort of animal you would keep as a pet. Until the breeding and trade of birds of prey is better regulated there will always be a surplus of unwanted birds.

Photo: David Gear

that established themselves in the Forest of Bowland were recently seen to take a hen harrier on its nest. There were initial questions of capturing and returning the birds to captivity, despite the outside chance they were indeed colonisers from Scandinavia. However, a government sponsored consultation process came to a view that they should be monitored and action taken only if they became a serious problem for other conservation priorities, and this view was endorsed by RSPB late in 2010.

This species has been imported and kept in captivity in Britain for over a hundred years and birds have come from many parts of its range in Eurasia and even North Africa. Sub-species vary in size, from small pale desert races to larger dark-plumaged Siberian forms. It is a bird of wild forests, deserts and crags and highly susceptible to disturbance.

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The example of goshawk is of note from a provenance point of view: the population is made up of genetically diverse races, some quite distinct in appearance – North American birds are large and pale grey, where their European cousins are smaller and browner. From a genetic point of view, the larger the gene-pool, the more resilient and adaptable the population is likely to be. In the case of the legal introduction of red kites, again, birds were of mixed origin and it is seldom noted that the Welsh population, having been isolated from its European cousins, had begun to evolve a distinctive whiter head. Much is made of genetic sub-specific status in mammals – for example, the Amur leopard pedigree is jealously guarded in zoological collections to maintain the sub-species, despite that population being on the verge of extinction compared to the relative success of other more adaptable leopard populations. Likewise, much has been made about the origin of the Tayside beavers (with SNH branding it the ‘wrong’ subspecies - see Derek Gow’s article in ECOS 31 (3/4)), and of the genetic purity of wild boar, remnant Scottish wildcat and the Exmoor wild horse.

The issue of aliens has arisen with the eagle owl – despite the presence here of its tiny family member – the little owl, never native and introduced by the Victorians.

There is an argument for pragmatism. The natural environment of Britain is far from original, even in its wildest examples in the glens of Scotland. Who is to say what constitutes the best genetic mix for an adaptable and successful repopulation, especially as the climate is changing (natural and otherwise)?

The success of the early ‘suck it and see’ programmes is also an argument against ‘red tape’ and the inevitable high cost of official project infrastructure, particularly the 79

ECOS 32(1) 2011 propensity for high-tech monitoring with GPS-satellite, and radio aerials in addition to the obligatory wing-tags and leg-rings. These species are symbols of the wild, but I cannot help feel something is lost when birds are encumbered with radio aerials and wing tags. I understand that these are a feature only of the beginning of a programme and a valuable research tool with regard to dispersal. But it can be overdone and despite Ospreys becoming well-established, they continue to be tracked.

In Wales, kites have become a branding emblem and tourist draw, but not as remote dwellers of the fells, rather with many hundreds congregating at public kite-watching facilities, where they are fed offal and religiously watched for their ring colours and origins. The RSPB has osprey and eagle nests wired with video links to the watchers’ hides which are a key visitor attraction. In Galloway they estimate over £20m has been brought to the local economy from kite-watching since 2004.

Conservationists have long argued for the economic benefits of rewilding to be considered in strategies that involve future lynx, beaver and possibly wolf, but without care, wildlife conservation organisations can morph into tour operators and merchandisers with visitor centres, increased car-based tourism and interpretation facilities that are far removed from a wild experience and contact with real nature.

When I saw my first red kite gliding over the M4 near High Wycombe, it brought little excitement – not like my first encounter as a boy on the high moors above Llandovery, in the days when the red kite was a genuine symbol of wildness. I am excited by eagle owls in a remote corner of Northumberland and the mystery of their origins – legal or otherwise, less so by the fledgling cranes just down the road, with their numbered wing tags and radio antennae – not because I do not welcome them back, but because I had been awaiting the first really wild unaided arrivals from Norfolk.

In my part of Somerset conservation priorities have focussed upon habitat recreation – rewilding the hydrologically challenged Levels with artificial reedbeds aimed squarely at one species – the BAP priority bittern, and yet this has brought six great white egrets to overwinter, cattle egrets have bred, and last year, little bitterns arrived to breed unexpectedly – having bred only once before in Britain. The habitat has increased diversity in the heron and egret family and who knows what might be next? But overall, the feeling remains that the helping hand removes an element of chance and mystery.

And my ever present eye on conservation’s corporate interest notes the large funds to be had for giving nature that helping hand. It is just a cautionary note – to make the research and monitoring phase as short as necessary and the watcher facilities as small and unobtrusive as possible, lest the object of iconic true wildness be lost.

Details of many of these programmes can be found at www.rspb.org.uk and for the bustard project: damon.bridge@rspb.org.uk ; see also the www.thegreatcraneproject.org.uk Peter Taylor is currently compiling a book on rewildling and reintroductions for BANC and the Wildland Network, bringing together much of ECOS’s coverage on these topics in recent years.

For details see the BANC web site from May. ethos_uk@onetel.com

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From understanding to action - the consequences of how we label nature A recent popular science book on the history of taxonomy (Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science by Carol Kaesuk Yoon) portrays modern evolutionary biology as the enemy of natural history.

CLARE O’REILLY Trusting our umwelts?

In Naming Nature, the author expresses a sentiment that conservationists will share and applaud: that there is an urgent need to engage more people with nature. However, she lays the responsibility for any lack of engagement squarely at the door of science.

What could have been a lively account of the history of naming nature is re-packaged as a call to reject scientific taxonomy. The narrative is well-crafted and entertaining but the message potentially damaging for biodiversity conservation. Taxonomy is the science of grouping and naming organism. Scientific naming or nomenclature has to follow which ever taxonomy is used and does not exist independently. Conversely, common or vernacular names are independent of scientific taxonomies.

Yoon, the author, maintains that: • Scientism means we leave grouping and naming nature to scientists; “we don’t remember that there is any valid way, other than science, to determine what a living thing is or is not.”

• Science is not necessarily the best or only way to order nature as “there is so much more to ordering life than science.”

• We have the innate ability to order nature ourselves – our ‘umwelt’ (what ethologists describe as how organisms perceive the world around them) – as demonstrated by studies of brain-damaged patients who have lost this ability.

• Science battles against our umwelts because science is objective and our umwelts are subjective.

• Taxonomy by the 1950s “was entirely the territory, the sole property, of the professional taxonomists”. Today it is only done by scientists in genetics laboratories and excludes amateurs - in contrast to the 19th century hey day of natural history.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 Therefore, she concludes, science is undermining our engagement with nature because ordinary people’s umwelts are ignored and they cannot take part in grouping and naming plants and animals. Or as Yoon with rhetorical flourish puts it, scientists have killed fish, common sense tells us there are fish, so we should demand them back.

This is a reference to the hotly contested late 1970s and 1980s debate between groups of taxonomists, known as cladists (favouring grouping by common ancestry), pheneticists (grouping by physical similarities, often visual i.e. morphological but also chemical, anatomical, ecological etc; ‘phenetic = ‘appearance’ in Greek), and traditionalists (who tried to balance both methods). All three methods use morphological, molecular, chemical, cytological (e.g. chromosome number) and other characters. It is not a case of DNA taxonomy against the rest.

Phenetic similarity and recency of common ancestry (or branching order) do not always coincide, i.e. similar-looking organisms are not necessarily closely related.

This happens because lineages evolve at different rates. ‘Fish’ as a natural group does not exist, where a natural group means a group whose members are closer cousins to one another than they are to non-members of the group. The natural group to which humans and cows belong includes lungfish but not sharks or tuna.

This isn’t to say that humans are descended from lungfish; we share a common ancestor. Yoon argues that common sense recognises ‘fish’, including lungfish, sharks and other aquatic vertebrates because they all look like fish.

The traditionalists are championed by Yoon, their umwelts explaining their resistance to the more objective numerical and cladistic (now called phylogenetic) methods.

However, there is no account of the reasons provided by these biologists themselves for their resistance; so no first-hand evidence is provided supporting Yoon’s umwelt theory. It does look rather like Yoon imposed her umwelt concept on historical events to satisfy her present-day ontological pre-judgement.

Folk taxonomies and common names – the pros and cons This book’s solution for engaging people with nature is getting fish back by re-claiming our folk taxonomies and common names and, presumably, therefore also either rejecting scientific taxonomies and nomenclature or relegating these to the ‘experts only’ side-lines. There are several problems with this argument, as discussed below.

As fascinating, and as culturally valuable folk taxonomies are, is Yoon seriously saying that Rondelet’s 1555 classification of fish into “flat and compressed fishes”; “those that dwell among the rocks”; “little fishes”; and “fishes that are almost round” is preferable to having no ‘fish’ because lungfish are not fish? People use groupings that they can relate to in their time and place, but these still need to be based on sound theories of knowledge or will lead us wildly astray. They both reflect and direct our thinking. Scientific taxonomy underpins all biodiversity conservation effort because scientific names go with taxonomies and provide the order we need to then describe what we have got, where it is and what threats it faces. Ordering is a prerequisite to protecting.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 We may have a sense of innate order in nature but this is to suit our purposes. Most folk taxonomies are about the use of plants or animals by humans. Modern phylogenetic groups are liberating as they value nature on its own terms. Our common sense grouping of lungfish with fish is nostalgia for a more anthropomorphic-centred view of life.

Folk taxonomies and common names co-exist with scientific groupings. Lungfish are both ‘fish’ in the popular sense, ‘not-fish’ in the scientific taxonomic sense, and may well become something else if future research displaces our present understanding. In the meantime, there is no need for one system to replace the other as this books advocates and it is essential that scientific ordering is recognised, used and valued by the general public.

Many of my students comment to me that they are fascinated by counter-intuitive relationships such as lungfish and mammals sharing a common ancestor and these facts engage them to want to learn more about nature, not less! As Dennett (1995) put it “how can increased understanding [of organism relationships] diminish their value in our eyes?”

Yoon stresses at the start of her book that as a PhD biologist she could be expected to be biased in favour of science; and implies therefore that her views contra scientific taxonomy are more credible. This is naïve because her own conception of science – as an objective, exclusive laboratory club – still influences her arguments heavily, creating a false dichotomy between science and natural history.

Scientists are part of the process of doing science, so it cannot be free of some level of subjectivity. Phylogenetics involves subjective decisions, such as scoring peaks by eye in DNA sequence data. Taxonomies are not objective pigeon holes but developing hypotheses. Conversely, naturalists aim at objectivity in their meticulous empirical observations and would not recognise Yoon’s vague sensual view of doing natural history. Her description of the meditative moth man identifying specimens as if by black magic betrays her outsider’s perspective – a taxonomist would know how much systematic thinking and scientific rigour was going on as he examines 83

ECOS 32(1) 2011 a specimen. It may appear subjective and mystical but it is most definitely not. Her account of Darwin’s barnacle work leaves the impression that she believes species are too variable to recognise so groups are always arbitrary, when the basic skill of a taxonomist and scientist like Darwin is to distinguish informative diagnostic characters from the rest.

Science and society – going deeper to see the relationships Science is not as objective, nor natural history as subjective, as this book portrays.

A polarised distinction, of course, supports the author’s central umwelt-v-science thesis, and again it looks like this bias has dictated the presentation of the story.

The late 19th century naturalists heyday and twentieth century decline is also misleading. As Farber (2000)1 stresses, a fashion for fern cabinets and museum visits did not equate to serious amateur taxonomy or any concern for nature and its protection.

If you look at the actual numbers, for example using Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) membership as a proxy for serious naturalist participation, people actually identifying plants and writing floras, this hey day myth is revealed: BSBI (originally the Botanical Society of London then the Botanical Exchange Club) was founded in 1836 and had less than 100 members (mostly male, schoolmasters, GPs and vicars2) throughout the 19th century; by the 1990s, it had over 3000 members from a range of social backgrounds. More botanical recording goes on now than ever before. The heyday of opportunities for everyone to engage with nature is the 21st century. Keeble-Martin’s flora sold over one million copies in the late 1960s; by the 2000s public participation projects like the Woodland Trust’s Phenology Project and the Open University’s OPAL Project were engaging thousands of new nature lovers, particularly by using website fora. Any scientist in our few remaining universities doing taxonomic research would weep to have access to the £12m funding that OPAL enjoys! There has always been, and still is, taxonomy going on outside of labs and professionals have long worked in successful partnership with amateurs.3 There is still a role for amateurs doing detailed morphological, anatomical and ecological work. Whether people choose to take up these opportunities to do taxonomy is another issue. The decline since the 1950s has been of specialist expert taxonomists (both amateur and professional) not in public participation in natural history.

Public participation projects, while great for many reasons, are unlikely to produce dedicated experts.4 By contrast a taxonomy training apprenticeship like the Natural Talent scheme run by BTCV and partners in Scotland will hopefully produce some future experts – but much depends on whether those involved are able to devote the time required. 39% of amateur naturalist society members are over 65 and 70% are male (as found by a recent Natural History Museum survey) probably because it takes so much time (and obsession) to do natural history seriously. Perhaps younger people are not so bothered about knowing the names of things, but names are still a fundamental reference point to describe features of an organism’s biology, ecology, and cultural associations. Names are the basic starting point for knowledge. So those who only appreciate nature in an aesthetic sense, and who do not want to know more, are not naturalists in the sense I am writing about here.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 The author’s status as a scientist, and the New Scientist’s award of ‘best book of the year’ means that readers are likely to rely on the book’s arguments as authoritative and, even, as one journalist reviewer announced, “revolutionary”. This is worrying because although the author dismisses creationism, paradoxically, her book provides an argument for creationists to claim that evolutionary biology is damaging biodiversity conservation – a point raised by several other reviewers.5 This book is a missed opportunity to produce an accessible account of the history of taxonomy. The umwelt story is interesting but unhelpfully polarises science and society. Above all, this book is misleading about scientific taxonomy at a time when it needs more public recognition, not less, if plants and animals are to be conserved worldwide.

References and notes 1. Farber P.L. (2000) Finding Order in Nature. The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E.O. Wilson. John Hopkins Introductory Studies in the History of Science. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

2. Allen D.E. (1986) The Botanists. A History of the Botanical Society of the British Isles through 150 Years. St Pauls Bibliographies, London.

3. This was highlighted as a particular reason for the success of British natural history and taxonomy in the twentieth century by Allen D.E. (1976) The Naturalist in Britain. A Social History. Penguin Books, London.

4. For the natural history society survey see http://www.opalexplorenature.org/sites/default/files/7/file/ Can%20the%20female%20of%20the%20species%20save%20nature%20groups.pdf 5. A staggering 44% of Americans deny evolution (Gallup survey figures for 2008 cited in Dawkins (2009) The Greatest Show on Earth. Black Swan Transworld Publishers, London). A review by a leading American taxonomist also makes this point – see http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/55880/ • Yoon, K.Y (2009) Naming Nature.The Clash Between Instinct and Science, W.W. Norton

Clare O’Reilly is a professional ecologist rather than taxonomist but was originally trained as a historian and has a Masters degree in plant taxonomy and evolution. She regularly teaches basic plant taxonomy and evolutionary biology to volunteer nature lovers and is researching a Botanical Society of the British Isles Handbook on Viola as a hobby. She has enjoyed much support from professional taxonomists. clare@ptyxis.com

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Book Reviews

ECOS 32(1) 2011 dangers involved. They “snap viciously at any object that enters their mouth.

It helps if this is not a finger. We learnt, after the odd minor mishap, to use small pliers”. What wonderful understatement. Here is a man who faced tigers, lions, snakes, spiders, charging elephants and angry bees.

He has eaten a plate of giant turtle penises thinking they were asparagus, recommends peeing through a plastic tube to avoid mosquito attack, and thinks killer crabs are all in a days work.

The book is full of wonderfully selfeffacing stories of hardship and drama.

The man-eaters of the title are the tigers of the Sunderbans, and Freeman finds huge pug marks in the swamp so fresh he can watch as they fill with muddy water. He turns his back on a cow for a second, looks back, and the cow has gone, lifted bodily away by the tiger.

Exciting, but I will re-read this book for the tortoises and blackbirds, the cranes and marmots, and the dry humour and genuine passion that emerges from a life full of adventure.

MANGROVES AND MAN-EATERS and Other Wildlife Encounters Dan Freeman Whittles 2011, 224 pages Pbk, £18.99, ISBN 978-184995-009-1 There is a charming old fashioned modesty to the adventures in Dan Freeman’s book about filming wildlife.

He describes facing death in almost every chapter, yet seems to shrug off danger, makes a joke, and carries on. It is a refreshing contrast to some of the adrenaline fuelled wildlife programmes around today.

Freeman produced a classic BBC film about piranhas, and describes the 86

Mark Fletcher

THE SPECIES SEEKERS Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth Richard Conniff WW Norton, 2011, 464 pages Hbk, £19.99, ISBN 978-0-393-06854-2 This book chronicles the exploits, tragic and triumphant, of those intrepid souls who, from the 18th Century on, scoured the world for ‘new’ species. This was one of the consequences of colonisation, and indeed a way of demonstrating the supposed superiority of the colonialists, even though they were ‘discovering’

mimicry’) spent 12 years exploring the Amazon and brought back 8,000 ‘new’ species.

Some collecting was done by military officers during their campaigns. One French officer used to glue cork inside his helmet. Immediately before a battle against the Spanish he spotted a beetle, jumped down from his horse to secure it, and pinned it to the cork to await identification later.

animals and plants already well known to the people in the lands concerned.

The privations and dangers they faced, and frequently succumbed to, are almost unimaginable.

Their troubles did not end when they embarked for home in Europe or America, which is where they all started from.

Specimen collections and notebooks were sometimes lost in shipwrecks.

We learn that the Frenchman Jules Verreaux spent 13 years in Africa, only to become the sole survivor when the ship with all his finds foundered within site of the French coast. He wasn’t put off by this - he later undertook a fresh expedition to the Pacific. A similar fate befell Sir Stamford Raffles, of Singapore and London Zoo fame. For those whose collections and notebooks did make it back the rewards, scientific and financial, could be substantial. Henry Bates (whose name lives on in ‘Batesian

Species seeking was a dimension of imperialism, and Conniff discusses this early in the book. He also describes the competitive nature of the naturalist (a trait still displayed today) and looks at the problem of crediting discoveries to the right person. Should it be the explorer risking life and limb to acquire the specimen, the indigenous but usually anonymous person who guided him to it (explorers were nearly always men) or the taxonomist back home who named it?

The class-ridden society of the time favoured the stay-at-home scientist because the explorers themselves were often considered to be mere labourers in the field. There were of course those, like Darwin, who were famous as both collectors and scientists. The book describes an incident on his journeys when he realised that the Christmas dinner he had just consumed consisted of a species of bird he was searching for! He was reduced to retrieving the remains from the kitchen waste.

To be able to name species at all required a system of some sort, and that was provided by Carl Linneaus in 1735 with the publication of his Systema Naturae.

Conniff tells us much about Linneaus: he seemed to be a flamboyant and 87

ECOS 32(1) 2011 charismatic teacher, and a great selfpublicist. His students’ collecting trips often ended with colourful and noisy parades through Upsalla back to the University. Even so he had his critics: the French biologist Buffon said that Linneaus was attempting to “impose an artificial order on the disorderly natural world” – a discussion still going on today. As for ‘splitters and lumpers’ it is pointed out that the ‘lumpers’ are busy ‘undiscovering species’!

ECOS 32(1) 2011 This is a minor criticism of a book full of adventure, information and unexpected insights. It contains a collective noun new to me – a ‘curiosity’ of naturalists.

For anyone with an ounce of that curiosity about the natural world, or about its famous and not-so-famous personalities, from Linneaus to Walter Rothschild, or Darwin to Audobon, it will be a wonderful addition to their library.

Peter Shirley

Be that as it may, Conniff graphically describes the mania for collecting and displaying exotic specimens, dead or alive, in the cities of Europe and America. This was big business – showmen, museums (usually privately owned) and the nobility competed to have the biggest and best collections.

People voluntarily subjected themselves to electric shocks from eels, taxidermists died early from the effects of working with mercury and arsenic, and Thomas Jefferson laid out Mastodon bones in the White House. By the late 1800s there were about 150 natural history museums in Germany, and 250 in the USA. Some of the book deals, perhaps in too much detail, with one of the outcomes of the collecting, displaying and classifying mania: the development of ideas about the natural world, especially the theory of evolution. There is much about Darwin and others, the events in their lives and the relationships between them. Likewise there is a somewhat tedious discussion of the controversies surrounding the exploits and ethnic origins of the explorer Paul Du Chaillu.

These things have been chronicled many times before and a reference to them would have been more appropriate here.

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SACRED NATURAL SITES Conserving nature and culture Edited by Bas Vershuuren et al Earthscan 2010, 310 pages Pbk, £29.99 ISBN 978-1-84971-167-8 The significance of sacred natural sites for the conservation of biodiversity was barely recognised until the late 1990s; by then many had already been modified, reduced, fragmented or destroyed. In 1998 UNESCO organised a series of workshops which inspired IUCN and WWF, working with indigenous groups and networks, to start exploring ways to integrate sacred natural sites into their conservation work, recognising the urgent need to protect the remaining sites, and to raise awareness and understanding of their value amongst conservation managers and agencies. IUCN set up the Specialist Group on the Cultural and Spiritual Values of Protected Areas, which led to the development of guidelines and the publication of this significant, scholarly and fascinating book, with its urgent appeal for conservation action.

Sacred natural sites are defined as “areas of land or water having special spiritual significance to peoples and

communities’ – are places which “fulfil humankind’s need to understand, and connect in meaningful ways, to the environment … and to nature”. The book does not address built sacred places, such as temples. Sacred natural sites represent ancient and profound cultural values; many have been protected for hundreds, even thousands of years with low levels of disturbance.

As well as being high in biodiversity, they provide ecosystem services and resources such as water and medicinal plants. They have spiritual, cultural, economic and educational value as the location for events, ceremonies, pilgrimages and tourism.

Building on two decades of work, the authors explore “humanity’s deepest response to the biosphere – the sacred values of nature as exemplified by sacred natural sites” through a multidisciplinary socio-ecological approach. Importantly, the book includes many different worldviews, aiming to stay true to the traditional knowledge holders and custodians of these sites, giving voice to “perspectives that reflect custodian interpretations and realities that manifest in these special places”.

Many sacred natural sites are now small, fragmented and modified, but may be the only remaining natural or semi-natural places in a cultural landscape, the last places where natural regeneration occurs and certain species survive. Many examples underline the rapid, accelerating loss of sites across the world. For example in Xishuangbanna, China, the number of holy hills recorded in 1984 was 400; this had declined to 250 in 2005, and only 10-15% of these remained in a pristine state; 21 tree and shrub species were lost in a 30 year period. In south India, 59% of the area

of sacred groves was lost in one decade, the1990s, while many remaining sites may have been reduced to below an ecologically viable size.

The one UK case study describes a sacred natural site that has several levels of protection: Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, off the Northumberland coast, includes a National Nature Reserve and marine Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention. As well as attracting birdwatchers to see the wintering wildfowl, the island has been a place of pilgrimage since AD635, venerated as the ‘cradle’ of Christianity in northern England and southern Scotland, and associated with several ‘nature saints’. The most notable, Saint Cuthbert, is regarded by some as ‘England’s first nature conservationist’, according to the author of this chapter, ecologist and sociologist Robert Wild, one of the book’s editors and Chair of the IUCN’s Specialist Group on the Cultural and Spiritual Values of Protected Areas.

The resident community of Lindisfarne of just 150 people swells with over half a million visitors (and their vehicles) a year. The number of pilgrimages is rising annually, with increasing interest in Celtic Christianity; retreats on ‘God and Nature’ and ‘Faith and Feathers’ bring together spiritual and conservation interests. The visitors bring economic benefits but also challenges that threaten to compromise the integrity of the island and destroy that which people come seeking.

The experience, evidence and wisdom in this book is distilled into ten conclusions, offered by the editors as a framework for conservation action. As well as documenting the biodiversity value and complex cultural dimensions of sacred natural sites, and the losses, 89

ECOS 32(1) 2011 threats and pressures they face, the contributors make recommendations to decision makers at local, national and international levels for conserving sacred sites and supporting the communities that are their custodians.

Tess Darwin

WEEDS. How vagabond plants gatecrashed civilisation and changed the way we think about nature RICHARD MABEY Profile Books, 2010, xii+324 pp Hbk, £15.99, 978 1 84668 076 2 Although there is much reworking and expansion of material from previous books, with Weeds, Mabey brings us another entertaining and educating read. He weaves botanical, ecological, historical and biographical strands into a fine review of the lives of plants. Its subject matter is both broader and narrower than the title: narrower, because it deals almost only with weeds in Britain; broader, I think, because Mabey is reluctant not to use the interesting material he has to hand even when it doesn’t tell us much about weeds – indeed, sometimes we seem to have wandered.

One should not open the book expecting detailed insights into the biology of weediness, or the economics of infestation, or the significance of weeds to the fates of nations – or, for that matter, their influence on philosophies of nature. What one does find is snippets and glimpses, and the sorts of appetisers and signposts to further insight that Richard is so good at providing. The message (at least, the one I find) is that plants – even noxious ones - are interesting.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 Weeds have been our company a long while. They thrive with us; we change conditions – often knowingly – to their liking. In return, they “sabotage human plans” by their insistence and bad manners. But they also have beneficial effects, pointed up in the later chapters.

While they may hide the doings of some (human) ne’er-do-wells, they also support kids’ play, feed a diversity of wildlife, and hide much of the ugliness we insist on living amongst. Weed communities and the other life that comes with them, often provide the next-(second) best thing to wildness.

Mabey looks for example at the case of derelict swathes of Detroit.

Weeds, of course, by definition are our fault. Like shadows, many follow us around the globe. The commonest city weeds, says Mabey, in Europe, Australia and North America are the same bunch of species. Some of these are Europeans, but the world’s most troublesome weeds are tropical grasses.

These, Mabey does not detail. Chapters are flavoured by such toughs as giant hogweed, ground elder, and plantain; and by such less than thuggish and hardly rumbustious examples as selfheal, adonis, and pansy. All are worthy as well as worrying – to various degrees.

Mostly, we can enjoy pansy; but isn’t ground-elder also beautiful in flower? – and it tastes good, too. Hogweed and knotweed are well known problems – both brought to beatify our gardens.

Again, I would have liked the book to say a little about the global context.

On the issue of invasion by aliens, Mabey seems reasonably sure that the dangers tend to be exaggerated – at least so far as plants leaping the garden wall are concerned, but this part of the story didn’t seem to convince. Nonetheless, a

stimulating book: lucid, but let down a little by poor proofreading.

Martin Spray

WILDLIFE OF A GARDEN A Thirty-Year Study Jennifer Owen Royal Horticultural Society, 2010, 261 pages Hbk, £30, ISBN 9781907057120 Anyone involved in nature conservation in towns and cities knows of the importance of gardens for wildlife, and the impact of gardening (especially the introduction of exotic plants) on the urban environment. This book is the most authoritative and detailed study of what is really going on in a suburban garden that we have. It completes a wonderful trilogy by Jenny following her earlier ‘Garden Life’ published in 1983 by Chatto and Windus and ‘The Ecology Of a Garden: the first 15 years’, published in 1991 by Cambridge University Press.

Where the first book was mainly descriptive, Wildlife of a Garden is more technical, full of lists, tables and charts. It is however very readable, and enlivened by plenty of good colour photographs.

In his Foreword Chris Packham puts his finger on the value of the book: “Continuous, accurate, standardised data – scientific gold”. Jenny Owen herself says that there is “Nothing special about the Leicester study garden” modestly forgetting to mention that the garden is special because it is tended by a most extraordinary gardener.

The book takes the reader through the ecological, topographical and geographical context of the garden, detailed reviews of the various groups of

insects and other wildlife found there, the trapping and sampling methods used (for example a malaise trap was run for 7 months a year for every one of the 30 years) the garden’s habitats and the changes and trends apparent from the data. The abundance, diversity and seasonal differences are logged, as well as longer term variation (mainly declines it must be said) in these over the 30 years. The most diverse groups were ichneumon wasps with 533 species recorded in just 3 years (1972 – 1974) and beetles, with 422 species found.

There is an interesting discussion about the value of native and non-native species.

The plant used by the most moth species is Buddleja, with 19 different caterpillars feeding on it; the next most used had only nine. One criticism is that most of the book (145 pages) is devoted to insects and other invertebrates. Mammals, birds and amphibians only have 10 pages between them. This is partly, no doubt, because of the dominance of invertebrate data, but considerable space is devoted to their life-cycles which is mainly absent from the vertebrate accounts. Another issue, nothing to do with the content, is that the book is printed on glossy paper, making for difficult reading in some lights.

This book is a worthy successor and perfect companion to Jenny’s earlier works. Together with other invaluable books on garden wildlife, such as Michael Chinery’s The Natural History of the Garden (Collins 1977), Chris Baines’s How To Make a Wildlife Garden (Elm Tree Books 1985) and many others since, they provide a wealth of thoughtprovoking information about a subject which some still treat with disdain.

Peter Shirley 91

ECOS 32(1) 2011 OUTSIDE Chris McCully Two Ravens Press, 2011, 210 pages Pbk, £10.99, ISBN 978-1906120573 Chris McCully is a writer, poet and angler.

He uses fishing as his muse, another kind of hook with which to approach the art of looking. Fishing obliges one to be still, practice observation and patience. The wildlife, like thoughts, comes to you.

Few British schoolboys of my generation did not at sometime take up fishing.

In my case it was both brief and very rewarding; not in fishes caught but in the introduction fishing gave me to the outdoors. It was sitting still beside gravel pits and a shallow river which was my introduction to natural history outside of the cover of a book. Later, I went off in other directions but those experiences remained as did the lessons.

I have found much, seen much, simply by lying down or sitting quietly in wild places.

Outside is a beguiling title. Relocated to the Netherlands in 2007, McCully found himself facing uncertainty about his role in life; not a crisis, more a serious question for someone who is used to forming responses, finding expression for those thoughts. This was the genesis of Outside – walking beside canals and looking at what he saw for some reflection of himself as an observer: “What was I for? Where did I fit in?”

The outcome of this knotty question was unplanned and yet grew into a group of writings “around 1000–1200” words about fishing, published in an angling journal (obviously, a rather literate one). These short essays gave the resultant book its form, a diary in some sense, of thoughts speculations 92

ECOS 32(1) 2011 and connections between someone with a gift for language and the activity in the natural world which is their focus.

The first books on natural history I read 50 years ago were written by men of the ‘outdoor type’. They fished and shot. McCully however, does not ever slip into the cliches of such writing.

Playing a pike he is encouraged by two workmen from a nearby house who come to watch. They are there fixing double glazing. This engaging mixture of the delicate and blunt in McCully came as relief to this reader.

Recommending such books to professional or would be professional conservationists I have in mind a troubling disconnect between environmental science and practice as witnessed first hand. In today’s aggressive reassertion of market forces, even on ‘ownership’ of state woodlands and NNR’s, it may be that useful defences for conservation are being raised up by writers like McCully: anglers, mountaineers, long distance cyclists and walkers. These should not be overlooked. Outside is well produced, finely written and illustrated in black and white by McCully’s own photographs.

Barry Larking

THE DANCE OF AIR AND SEA How oceans, weather, and life link together Arnold H. Taylor Oxford University Press, 2011, xiiii+288 pages Hbk, £16.99, ISBN 978-0-19-956559-7 As I write this in March 2011, a few days ago events vindicated the blunt message of sharp words of American

philosopher Will Durant: “Civilization exists by geological consent subject to change without notice”. But the abrupt geological event is only one of the puppeteers. The Dance of Air and Sea reminds us that a triumvirate of forces spin a civilization’s fate.

The Dance is a distinctly English and mildly old-fashioned book, with a few diagrams and no photos, with flowing text without boxes, but with asides and anecdotes at every opportunity.

The author, marine biologist and mathematician, and follower of the line that civilizations are helping the world get warmer, elucidates the large-scale couplings of ocean conditions and currents – especially the Gulf Stream – and those of the atmosphere, and their influence via weather on biological species and communities. He ponders such questions as what ecological shifts might accompany future changes in circulation in the oceans. And he highlights the importance of long-term ecological research projects and long data-sets: the Gloucestershire roadside verge data that Arthur Willis started collecting at Bibury 40 years ago have sadly few parallels.

Reading the book gives an impression of the intricacy of the dance, and the subtleness of many of the effects on species and communities, both aquatic and terrestrial. Taylor predicts, for example, an increase in kidney stones.

It also makes one wonder at how little attention we – whether uninterested person in the street, conservationist, or ecologist – tend to give to marine ecology: yet as Taylor points out, for instance, marine diatoms provide one fifth of Earth’s primary (i.e. photosynthetic) productivity.

Taylor brings many characters into his somewhat wandering dance. Ocean conveyor belts, El Nino and La Nina, climatic seesaws, and the Little Ice Age are there, of course, as are Windermere char, coccolithophores, and lemmings.

There are perhaps too many, and the thread is sometimes obscure. But there is much of interest here; and once more our view of the world is shown to be too simple. As has been pointed out, the story of the warming effects of the Gulf Stream is the climatological equivalent of an urban myth.

Martin Spray

GREENLAND A play by Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne National Theatre (25 January 2 April 2011) I love plays. The joy, immediacy and ease of being educated, informed and entertained, without the effort of reading. Like buses, three plays tackling climate change rolled into London earlier this year. Eager to explore the big issues of our age, the National Theatre commissioned ‘Greenland’.

Four playwrights collaborated to tackle different themes and spent six months interviewing scientists, politicians, philosophers and businessmen, attempting to comprehend our changing relationship with the planet.

Connected but separate narratives included a fieldworker who had spent years counting guillemots and observing spring coming earlier. A teenager discovering activism was suspended in a shopping trolley whizzing above the stage, and superfluous plastic packaging was dumped onto the stage.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 Sitting on the front row I felt the full force of the weather and was snowed on by hundreds of pieces of paper tumbling earthwards.

Another strand was a scientist whose new model challenged today’s mantra of limiting global warming to less than two degrees above pre-industrial levels, instead predicting a catastrophic four degree rise by the end of the century.

One character made the point that if smoke creeps towards you, do you ignore your instincts to act if everyone else is ignoring the approaching fire?

Being made aware of this effect makes you more likely to question following the masses who do nothing.

Lyndsey Marshal was outstanding playing Ed Millband’s assistant negotiating in Copenhagen. The social politics of all the delegates at the meeting was fascinating. My impression post Copenhagen was that many people blamed China, but the reality was more complex. I did learn that Obama had been concerned about the weather closing in and anxious to leave, prematurely announced to the press that a deal had been done. The smaller developing countries were not impressed and rebelled.

The reviews for ‘Greenland’ were mixed at best. Some critics thought it disjointed, but to me the different story lines flowed easily. I believe they got the balance right between presenting information and keeping people interested in the story. Relationships were formed, characters were funny and well observed. Everyone was impressed by the polar bear’s appearance. Probably animatronics, possibly a person inside, life-like certainly.

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ECOS 32(1) 2011 Was the play just preaching to the converted? While I have to declare an interest in conservation, I do think it largely succeeded in engaging a nonspecialist intelligent theatre going crowd. The feedback gained from the ‘Talkaoke’ discussion with audience members afterwards, showed the production had encouraged debate and made people think. It’s hard to say though whether it would have appealed to the average man in the street, if such a person exists. I do think however, there is general confusion in the populace between weather and climate, having overheard people questioning global warming’s existence with the last two winters being so cold.

There are of course, deeper discussions going on within some scientific and environmental circles, on the flux of the climate, such as the debate between Peter Taylor and Alastair McIntosh on the BANC web site.

The written word is wonderful, but in order to make environmental issues relevant and reach as many people as possible, we need to use a whole array of measures, from TV documentaries and social media, to plays.

Jocelyn Murgatroyd

THE WORLD OF WOLVES New Perspectives on Ecology, Behaviour and Management Edited by Marco Musiani, Luigi Boitani, and Paul C Paquet.

University of Calgary Press, 2010, 398 pages, £23.50 Pbk, ISBN 978-1-55238-269-1 This is a serious, heavyweight book that presents a wealth of data and information from recent studies about

exponential, or other such functions) or ought one to compare the linear model to a second order polynomial?”.

For non-specialists who persevere, and of course also for the scientists the book is mainly aimed at, there are sections lesssteeped in such technical details. Insightful chapters are focused on topics such as the ecosystem effects of recolonising wolf populations in Banff and Yellowstone National Parks in North America, studies of a snowmobile wolf hunt in northern Canada and an analysis of differing husbandry techniques to reduce wolf predation on livestock in Alberta.

wolves across much of their range in the northern hemisphere. Topics include advances in the genetic studies of wolf populations, the dynamics of wolfmoose interactions on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, the effects of inbreeding depression in the recolonising Scandinavian wolf population, and studies of the ecology and management of wolf populations in eastern Europe.

This is not a popular book for a general audience. It is squarely aimed at the specialist, and indeed some of the chapters are dense and almost inaccessible to a lay person. To get the most out of this title, readers will need to be comfortable with understanding questions such as “More generally, is it appropriate to compare the parsimony of a linear model (e.g., y=a0 + a1X) with any of the non-linear models that possess the same number of parameters as a linear expression (e.g., hyperbolic, inverse,

The results of some of the research presented in the book are revealing, not least those from Isle Royale, where the authors conclude that nearly 50 years of predator-prey interactions are inadequate to predict future wolfmoose dynamics on the island. This is based on the fact that the first two decades of studies recorded markedly different behaviour dynamics than the subsequent two decades. This unpredictability could almost be taken as symbolic for the future of the wolf itself, particularly in regions such as Scandinavia where the long-term viability of the small and geneticallyisolated population is tenuous. Given the ambitious scope of the title of the book, one surprising omission is any coverage of wolves in Russia, where a significant proportion of the world’s wolf population lives.

In conclusion, the book provides an up to date account of recent wolf research, but is more suited for experts and scientists than wilderness advocates and non-specialists.

Alan Watson Featherstone 95

ECOS 32(1) 2011

ECOS annual student article competition Call for 2011 entries Students - Here’s your chance to say something about the conservation of nature...

Two prize winners and two runners up will be announced each year, and the winning articles published in ECOS. Winners and runners up articles will be promoted on the BANC web site, and prizes will be on offer. All submitted articles will be included on a register of essays on the ECOS-BANC web site. A website archive will be maintained which will hold all entries that pass the judges’ standard.

Who can enter If you are an HND, undergraduate or postgraduate (other than PhD) student at any UK academic institution, or if you completed a course within the past year, you are eligible.

What you can submit Your submission should be an essay or an article, rather than a technical or scientific paper. It should be in clear English, written for an informed readership, in a style compatible with examples in recent issues of ECOS. It might be based on a dissertation, project write-ups, or some other assignment, but must be tailored for ECOS readers, who are mainly conseravtion practitioners from a wide range of ages, backgrounds and environmental disciplines. It should be a maximum of 1,200 words long, with figures, tables and illustrations as extra where appropriate.

Subject matter Topics can include: wildlife issues ; application of ecology; education; nature conservation practice; land management and landscape planning issues; environmentalism attitudes and perceptions; environmentalism; environmental philosophy. Subject matter needs to relate to a UK context in some way.

Categories We are looking for fresh thinking and crisp writing in the following categories: An academic style and a journalistic style.

More details, including how to submit articles by the end July deadline, and the full judging criteria are at www.banc.org.uk/wordpress/ecos/ecos-annualstudent-article-competition/

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