Ecos issue 31 3 4 whole issue

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Winter 2010 issue 31(3/4)

Lawton Report - can we deliver the vision?

Embracing the Big Society - the reality and the risks Nature in Austerity - coping-strategies for the depressed

ECOS A REVIEW OF CONSERVATION ECOS is the journal of the British Association of Nature Conservationists

www.banc.org.uk ecos@easynet.co.uk Managing Editor: Rick Minter 07768 748301 ecos@easynet.co.uk Assistant Editor:

Martin Spray Hillside, Aston Bridge Road, Pludds, Ruardean, Glos. GL17 9TZ 01594-861404 Acknowledgements This issue was edited by Rick Minter and Martin Spray.

Front cover photo: West Weald connectivity view by Richard Howath.

Back cover photo: Devon Dairy Longhorn at the Neroche Project

by Tom Cairns.

The opinions expressed in ECOS are not necessarily those of BANC Council or of the Editors ECOS may not be reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, in whole or in part, in English or other languages, without the prior written consent of the publisher, BANC.

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Chair: Adrian Koster Secretary: Ruth Boogert Treasurer: Derek Bensley

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ECOS is printed by Severnprint using Cocoon Silk 300gsm cover and Cocoon uncoated 100gsm text paper. Both papers have a 100% recycled content and are FSC certified. The electricity used during printing is generated from renewable sources.

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 Editorial

Reasons to be cheerful?

We were due to begin this piece with some examples. We had descriptions of projects ready, to show that however much they met prevailing policies, they could still be axed. But these abandoned projects cannot be named - organisations wanted to keep their heads down rather than illustrate the dilemma of rapidly pruned budgets. While people’s careers and organisations’ futures appear vulnerable, delivering environmental improvement, enhancing wildlife, and helping people embrace nature, won’t always happen to the extent we’d like. The squeeze from the Spending Review is the master for now.

This grim outlook across the public sector has wider effects – consultancy contracts will dip and voluntary bodies’ funds and grants will dry up. Confidence is low across the board. But is this a harsh view of the tough economic times? Peter Shirley, for one, is more upbeat - in our snippets on austerity he notes that well conceived projects often happen, eventually, in any context. He suggests we stay determined, and match our projects to political needs.

We report other encouraging news in this issue from VINE (Values in Nature and the Environment). Its 2010 survey of conservation staff by Cara Roberts and Gabi Ovegaard-Horup found a strong resilience amongst practitioners. Typical is this extract: “…conservationists view nature as an essential component of their personal identities. People were inspired into conservation often because of intangible values such as emotions, spirituality and acknowledgements of intrinsic worth in nature, and often driven by what they feel is a moral obligation to make a difference.” The VINE report is important – it shows there is still a soul to the conservation profession. Passion and belief will count for much as conservation bodies take knocks in the coming restructuring.

It’s been a gloomy twelve months throughout the International Year of Biodiversity, but there are still signs of promise. The forthcoming Natural Environment White Paper may contain some real substance. John Bacon in this issue describes the good vibes from Defra – they seem determined to make a go of the White Paper. Funds may be short, but worthwhile measures may emerge, not least the ideas for new community green spaces. Also promising are the recent proposals from the Lawton Review, Making Space for Nature, which call for more connectivity and enhancement amongst wildlife sites.

Tony Whitbread gives the Lawton report a good hearing, but he urges more ambition.

He notes that many wildlife bodies are already on the case, plotting joined-up sites to make a bigger whole. This work is involving other allies, from utilities to councils and communities. It links nature conservation to other policies, and achieves wider ecosystem benefits. In times of austerity this collective action seems more crucial than ever.

Geoffrey Wain

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The nature of nature conservationists – freeing the spirit or toeing the line?

This article reports on a study which considered how the aspirations and values of nature conservationists themselves match with the organisations that employ them.

GABRIELLE OVERGAARD-HORUP & CARA ROBERTS A passion for nature or just a job?

VINE (Values In Nature and the Environment) is a network for nature conservation practitioners. It explores ideas and inspiration relating to the philosophy, ethics, culture and practice of nature conservation. VINE started in 2006 through a series of informal discussions about why people were inspired to take up jobs in conservation.

This led to expressions of frustration about priorities and policies in the organisations that people worked for as they felt these were often unrelated to their own values.

There was a feeling that personal connections to nature and commitment to conservation were not fully valued or recognised within professional structures.

Consequently, VINE decided to gauge the views of nature conservation practitioners on the practice of nature conservation, exploring issues about working in the field and how these relate to personal beliefs and inspiration. A research proposal was devised to understand more fully the personal values of conservationists and to assess the extent to which these values are recognised and supported by conservation organisations. The authors (two researchers, Gabrielle Horup and Cara Roberts), independently took on this research as part of their own MSc studies. Gabrielle used a mix of qualitative and quantitative research techniques, namely 20 in-depth interviews and an online survey to gather broad opinions. Cara conducted a narrative inquiry involving 20 interviewees to gain an insight into people’s perceptions about nature and their work. This article explores both our findings.

So, what motivates conservationists, and is it something you can ‘bottle’? A central feature of the conservation sector in the UK is that it depends on the enthusiasm and commitment of individuals who give up much of their own time, developing their own knowledge, to share with others and improve the effectiveness of conservation. Are staff members’ personal attachments to nature supported and reflected in the work of conservation organisations? Do respective core values fit when it comes to connection with nature and the motivation to get involved?

Nature conservation – the changing forces To set the context for the research question, it is useful to consider some of the main factors that influence the conservation movement. Both nature conservation and the British countryside are social constructs, with material and social effects. A complex set of circumstances led to the development of a conservation movement and the organisations in existence today. The focus of activities and the roles played 2

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 by these organisations has changed significantly over the years. This involved a move from natural history, to protected sites, through to landscape-scale conservation with an appreciation of people as part of the process. A plethora of conservation organisations are now involved with a wide spectrum of activities.

Conservation organisations are responsible for both pushing the political agenda and instigating change. Factors that influence the activities of the sector range from sustainable development through to sustainable de-growth1, whilst the corporate side of conservation expresses itself through concepts such as ecosystem services. To keep up with changing economics and politics, conservation organisations have become increasingly streamlined and commercial.

“The mainstream manufactures people as a monoculture. It turns us out like cloned rows of apple trees on pesticide-manicured fields. The mainstream trains people by pruning. It forces growth in standardised ways. The song that we sing from within the mainstream is thereby not our own song. It does not issue from the opened gates of the soul. And so our personal branches and cultural roots atrophy away”.2 This quote by Alastair McIntosh captures the essence of some organisations. He evokes the feeling of control they can have, through compartmentalising people in roles and remits, with processes and procedures. Have the new approaches, and a fixation on toeing the corporate line, diluted the passion that led people to work in conservation in the first place? The results from the study explore the implications of this in more detail.

Research methodology The study focused on staff working in nature conservation in professional or technical roles. A mix of qualitative and quantitative research techniques were used to capture people’s views. The quantitative element provided a broad understanding of the general perceptions and aspirations of conservation employees, whilst interviews added depth and context.

An online survey was sent to conservationists at a range of organisations. A total of 285 respondents completed the survey, representing around 100 conservation organisations. Around half the respondents worked for a charity or non government organisation (NGO), about a quarter for a government agency and 15% worked for a local authority. A small number worked for consultancies or were self-employed.

The interviews covered a similar spread of organisations. Most interviewees had worked or volunteered for more than one body, and so people’s feedback represented the scope of this experience. As a result, their attitudes and values can be seen as being more representative of the sector as a whole. Quotes from interviews will be used in “italics” to illustrate shared views or particular points.

Key themes The survey started by asking people when they first became interested in nature.

The results revealed that the majority of people became interested during their 3

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 youth, with 4 out of 5 people stating they first became interested in nature under the age of 18. This initial interest was most evident during early childhood.

When did you first become interested in nature?

Sample for this and subsequent graphs = 285 individuals from c.100 organisations across all sectors.

A raft of literature has examined the experiences that influence people to dedicate their lives to the environment. People working in environmental fields across different cultures have reported early memories of interacting with nature in studies into significant life experience.3 For example, E. O. Wilson said that direct experience with nature as a child was one of the greatest influences in the making of a naturalist.4 Our findings support the idea that wildlife is something people are interested in from an early age which can motivate them into considering a career in conservation in later life.

In the interviews many people talked about enjoyable childhood experiences in nature, “I was one of these kids who was never in the house - always up to mischief climbing trees getting covered in glaur [mud]”. Experiences ranged from positive role models “It was my Dad and my Grandad that got me interested when I was young”, through to inspirational moments “We used to have an annual trip to Slimbridge which was pretty special and we also used to go to Westonbirt Arboretum. Those were pretty inspirational trips”.

Nature and identity Our daily experience of the environment and people around us influences our personal identity and what we grow to value.5 The conservationists we spoke to identified nature as a crucial part of who they were. “It is fundamental to my life to the extent that it is what my life is primarily about, if not wholly about”.

People working in the sector have a genuine passion for nature conservation, many feel it is a pre-requisite for the job. This is illustrated by the results from the online 4

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 survey where only 2% stated that they arrived in a conservation career by accident, and the majority who stated that their reason for aspiring to work in conservation is due to a personal relationship with nature. Perhaps this is unsurprising, but all the respondents felt nature shaped their identity and nurtured them emotionally and spiritually. Nature appeared a continual source of wonder and awe, which fed a curiosity and drive for knowledge in creative, emotional and scientific ways.

Career pathways The pathways to a career in conservation are varied, but tend to follow one of two routes. First, there are those who follow a logical progression from studying biological subjects at school and university that leads them to employment at a conservation organisation. Second, there are those who decided on a career change in later life. This can follow a period of self-evaluation through revisiting passions and interests, or witnessing environmental problems. However, most people are required to obtain a relevant environmental qualification, or volunteer for some time, before breaking into the field.

Many people expressed a sense of vocation, and a sense of duty to get involved in conservation “I feel a strong sense of duty and moral obligation to be involved with helping to be part of that green movement towards maintaining biodiversity”.

There was a real sense that people felt they were doing a worthwhile, morally right job: “It does feel like your job has a value and a worth that something like accountancy doesn’t really have”.

There was also a strong desire to be working outside: “I just love being outside in a natural environment watching wildlife. And to have a job where you can do that is just brilliant”. This was backed up by the findings in the online survey where spending time in the field, experiencing landscapes, habitats and species, was highlighted as a key attraction to working in conservation. Conversely, a large proportion of people felt that they do not spend enough time in the field (apart from outdoor specific roles such as wardens).

Inspiring others was a key motivation for many staff, as was the ability to achieve goals and develop their personal knowledge of nature. “Seeing the delight on children’s and grown-up’s faces when I point out something entirely new to them”, “Because I cannot see people without wildlife, and I cannot see wildlife without people”.

Why carry out nature conservation work?

In the interviews conservationists were asked why they thought conservation work was necessary. The question evoked emotional responses, ranging from the altruistic to self interest. This highlights how the relationships between the environment and people are complex and difficult to articulate.

The prevailing theme of ‘what conservation was for’ was defending nature, “to ensure the continuation of habitats, ecosystems, species. And reduce the damage done by [hu]man[s]”. Conservation was seen as a compromise with economic development and the way our society functions, with the main roles seen as 5

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 feeding into scientific understandings of the world and changing perceptions about the importance of nature.

Conservation organisations advocate the need to incorporate both people and wildlife, in equal measures, in their work. Whether staff members share this viewpoint was tested in the online survey. People were asked ‘In regard to nature conservation which of the following should come first?’ Around two-thirds of conservationists felt that both people and the natural environment should take equal priority (68%), almost a third (31%) felt that the natural environment should take priority, while a small minority (1%) put people before the natural environment.

This suggests that conservationists demonstrate understanding, appreciation and support for a key message advocated by conservation organisations.

In regard to nature conservation which of the following should come first?

Job satisfaction Both the online survey and the interviews measured aspects of job satisfaction.

“What we are seeking is not more money, it’s job satisfaction, [a] sense of achievement”. Overwhelmingly staff wanted to be valued for their contribution and making a difference for nature. Most felt privileged that they were able to turn their love of nature into a career. Ways in which people expressed job satisfaction were: • Belief in organisational core aims and aspirations; • Autonomy, to prioritise tasks and influence decisions as well as the ability to object to management decisions; • Support from other staff, a sense of community and common goal; • Working towards achievable goals and recognising successes; • Working for organisations who are willing to speak out for nature; 6

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 • Sharing experiences outdoors and receiving motivational training; • Helping to build scientific knowledge, and alter perceptions about the value of nature.

Job dissatisfaction Conservationists were also asked what makes them most unhappy about their jobs.

A key cause of frustration was distraction from main purposes: “80% plus of my time is spent pretty much doing what I used to do in business. Manipulating spreadsheets, analysing business propositions, writing business propositions and I’m doing that for a lot less money”. The main factors that cause frustrations at work are summarised below: • Reliance on short-term grants and funding; • Administration and paperwork; • Not spending the right amount of time in the field; • Pay and financial reward; • Scale of what people have to deal with; • Organisational restructuring; • Job security; • Targets and reporting; • The way the environment can become a political football when money is tight.

Pay was mentioned by several people in the interviews as an issue, namely that “pay is not commensurate with skills relative to other sectors”. It was highlighted as a factor that has contributed to people leaving an organisation and there was a feeling that increased pay levels would help retain motivated staff particularly within the charities. “People don’t get a very decent wage and they still give everything for the organisation but you know that is the one thing that would make us more effective”.

“Training and development opportunities”, and “promotion prospects”, did not score particularly highly as an issue in this question, suggesting that while the lack of opportunities might be a source of frustration there are more fundamental issues causing problems at work. “Targets and reporting” was rated as an issue and a frequent grumble, particularly for senior and managerial staff.

Differences were found between employee roles in an organisation. For example, ‘not spending the right amount of time in the field’ was the biggest issue for junior 7

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 level staff but not such an issue for senior staff. Whereas, ‘administration paperwork’, is more of a problem for senior staff than it is for junior staff. interviews added context to this finding, by highlighting how administration paperwork expresses itself through the target-driven culture that Britain become bound up in.

and The and has

Factors that cause staff to be unhappy in comparison to their position in the organisation

N.B Respondents were allowed to select multiple answers therefore percentage totals do not add up to 100%

The online survey revealed that a high proportion of NGO, charity and local authority conservationists are young people (aged 25 – 34). This proportion then drops as the respondents get older. In contrast, the age of people employed by government agencies was relatively stable across the different age groups (from 18 to retirement at 65).

Age group of staff in different organisations within the conservation sector Further analysis revealed that the drop in age of people working for NGOs, charities or local authorities over time could be due to limited career progression. One respondent commented that a particular charity lacks the scope for individuals to develop beyond a certain level. “I always got told that the Trust is a nurturing ground for people before they leave. And I am beginning to see it for myself – you can only go so far. I don’t think the Trust necessarily supports the training and development that enables you to progress in your career”.

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N.B Where percentages don’t add up to 100% this is due to rounding

Does size equate to happiness?

The size of an organisation was compared with levels of satisfaction. Overall, 82% of conservationists said they are either very or fairly satisfied with their role. There were some interesting differences by organisation size, with satisfaction being highest among those who work for medium sized organisations (88%), closely followed by those working for small organisations (84%). But satisfaction fell to 75% among those who work for large organisations. So although the majority are still satisfied, a greater proportion of staff at large organisations are less satisfied than those at small and medium organisations.

Levels of staff satisfaction compared with organisational size

A closer look at organisation size in relation to bureaucracy revealed that larger organisations were rated as much more bureaucratic than smaller ones. This is a potentially important issue that can affect the match between the individual and the organisation, and may explain why less people are satisfied in larger organisations.

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Levels of bureaucracy in comparison to organisation size

Funds – a reality check Many respondents mentioned restrictions on funding as a major issue when it came to the work organisations manage to achieve, “it’s not the organisation that holds you back it’s the funds, there’s simply not enough money within our organisation”. “They have got aspirations to do a hell of a lot more than they do, but because of funding restraints they can’t”.

With the current financial crisis, fears about future funding, jobs and how the value of nature conservation was going to be seen against a backdrop of stimulating economic growth, were raised in interviews. Some staff were concerned about their personal futures. One had already been told their job was to go, but they expressed more concern for how resources would be focused and prioritised to help ensure that nature conservation was seen as a society-wide priority.

The Government agencies are going to have to find big savings in their budgets and this will have an effect not only on their own work but on the NGOs through reduced funding. Staff from membership organisations also were concerned they may find more challenges in recruiting members, “Because of other pressures in life, kids, financial, in these difficult times people may have an interest [in nature conservation] but other things take priority”.

Match or mismatch?

In the online survey, respondents were asked about the mission of their organisation. The majority of conservationists (93%) know what their organisation’s mission is, a high number (83%) are interested in their organisation’s mission and around three-quarters (70%) said that their organisation’s mission statement underlines their own values and beliefs. These positive results suggest a high level of interest in organisational missions, which could be interpreted as a match between the individual and the organisation.

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Staff interest in their organisation’s mission

Similar results were reflected in the interviews. Despite frustrations over policies and systems, conservation staff agreed with what they perceived as the organisation’s aspirations “Oh god! They are where I am at myself! Absolutely no problem with that. We are about people’s relationship with the natural world and cultural heritage, and taking that through to the future. I am completely on board with what our Director General says on that”.

Conservation staff generally felt positive about their contribution and enjoyed their work “I feel very positive 99% of the time”, “I love it - I really do, I wouldn’t want to do anything else”. This is also expressed in the survey - when asked to weigh everything up, 82% of conservationists are satisfied with their work.

Talking about value So if nature conservationists generally agree with the mission and aims of their organisation why do many still appear to worry about the direction that policies and discussions about nature conservation are going? In the interviews there was a sense that the way conservationists actually valued nature was not getting across to a wider audience, or even being openly discussed by their organisations.

Core values are the central beliefs that inform individuals’ identities, and in an organisation these values form the philosophical framework as to why and how the work is done. Our studies have shown conservationists view nature as an essential component of their personal identities. People were inspired into conservation 11

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 often because of intangible values such as emotions, spirituality and acknowledgements of intrinsic worth in nature, and often driven by what they feel is a moral obligation to make a difference.

The value of nature highlighted particularly by government agencies has “focused not on the natural heritage per se but on the benefits that we seek to secure for ...people from it”.6 This comment reflects the direction that many strategic and corporate plans have been heading in recent years, with focus on goods and services from nature, such as water filtration and carbon capture, rather than moral, intrinsic, emotional or spiritual values. So while staff agreed with their organisations that conservation was important, the way organisations communicated nature’s value often fails to connect with personal value systems.

A key finding of the study was that conservation staff felt inhibited in how they expressed their feelings about nature. They generally wanted to talk in more passionate and philosophical terms about the value of nature, but were concerned that would be seen as lacking credibility. “So in the end we just talk about nature as in we talk ecosystem services and bringing home to politicians that nature is money, seems to be the only way to do it. It works, it’s maybe a little bit dangerous but you know that’s what is important to people”. This danger comes from the feeling that not everything can or should be valued in economic or scientific terms.

Science has been the basis for understanding the natural world and justifying the need for conservation since the 1940s.7 Policy makers tend to consider quantitative science valuations of nature as the ‘expert’ view raising them above less tangible feelings of value that people engaged with nature on an intimate basis perceive.8 Natural England describes itself as “an evidence-based organisation”9 and staff, from all sectors, agreed that scientific credibility was essential to discussions of why nature mattered. Across the board however, conservationists felt that instrumental values of nature were discussed and promoted as the central value of nature while the intrinsic and less tangible values were largely ignored, “it’s talked about in far too limited a horizon - I think wildlife and the natural environment have many, many, others values to society and to individual people other than pure scientific value, which is really the way in which it is argued. I think it is fundamentally important to people’s wellbeing”. A physical science based understanding of nature provides only limited ways of knowing nature, whilst intrinsic, cultural, spiritual and emotional valuations are the ones that actually inspire people’s interest.

Ways forward?

The ‘Space for Nature’ Lawton review published in September 2010 (reviewed by Tony Whitbread elsewhere in this edition) emphasises that “there are strong moral arguments for recognising the intrinsic values of other species and for passing on the natural riches we have inherited to future generations”.10 In terms of ecosystem services the report raises concerns about efforts to increasingly measure nature in monetary terms, even though the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment framework provides recognition of the aesthetic, enjoyment and other subjective values people 12

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 derive from nature.11 Crucially the report points to the need for a change in attitudes towards the value of nature, saying that efforts to conserve and expand natural habitats cannot succeed “without society accepting it to be necessary, desirable, and achievable”.12 NGOs also stress the need to move people’s perceptions and emotions towards conserving nature as they feel that if society does “not value the natural world, then there will be no political drive or practical means to conserve it”.13 The membership organisations have acknowledged in recent reviews that more intrinsic, personal and emotional values have often been missing from policies and practices in their own organisations, and are beginning to take steps to address this.

Getting emotional…

We have found that nature conservationists’ relationships with nature are complex and central to their identities. They have described a sense of ‘calling’ that has drawn them to want to protect nature for moral and deeply personal reasons.

Interests sparked, often in childhood, and then deepened by educational opportunity and growing understanding of the world – these are key motivators for becoming involved in conservation.

How conservationists, and the nature conservation organisations, see values in nature is also complex and multi-layered. Nature conservationists and the organisations they work for have similar aspirations and staff feel privileged to be able to make a difference towards those aims. However, staff don’t always feel their core values are given space to influence how they carry out their work. Currently scientific and economic paradigms appear to hold sway in politics and organisational policies over moral and intrinsic arguments. 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 the initial interest. This is disappointing as it is precisely this inspiration that conservation hopes to develop in wider society.14 Our research has demonstrated that the field of nature conservation is staffed by individuals who show commitment and understand and care about the mission of the organisations that they work for. Some ideological differences exist in how nature’s value is expressed, but job satisfaction is generally good, although there are marked differences between types of organisation. For most, the passion for nature is enough to sustain the commitment to conservation. However, negative experiences, often sector-wide, such as bureaucracy and short-termism combined with funding constraints can place strains on the relationship between individuals and the organisation. There are also issues around pay levels and personal development that cause frustration. The relationship would be strengthened if the organisations created the conditions to allow individuals to realise their aspirations whilst meeting the aims of the organisation, thereby paving the way for a fulfilling conservation career. Conservation staff need to be able to express original ideas, show creativity and have some level of autonomy in their roles. Importantly, organisations need to acknowledge ‘love of nature’ as a key motivator in their own staff management and communications – as well as in how they communicate nature conservation to the wider world.

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 Relationships with nature play a key role in the practice of conservation and are something that needs to be promoted in wider society. Passion is a powerful thing and nature conservationists’ enthusiasm should be harnessed to encourage others.

If staff who conserve nature cannot talk about ‘loving’ nature then who can?

Nature will never be valued sufficiently to maintain its integrity if our culture continues to assume that only scientific and economic measurements of value are valid.15 Conservationists, and the organisations they work for, have an instrumental role to play in influencing wider society’s understanding of the value of nature but they have to begin by reminding themselves why it is worthwhile. “It has to be about inspiring other people, sharing your thoughts, keeping the thing going.

There is a lot of talk about whether it is of any benefit preaching to the converted, but I believe you have to keep preaching to the converted otherwise they trickle off, you have to tell yourself often: Yes it is important”.

References 1.

Martínez-Alier et al (2010) Sustainable de-growth: Mapping the context, criticisms and future prospects of an emergent paradigm. Ecological Economics. 69, 1741–1747.

2. McIntosh, A. (2001) Soil and Soul. People versus Corporate Power. London: Aurum Press. (p.1) 3. For example see: Palmer J A, Bajd B, Hart P, Ho R K, Ofwono-Orecho J K, Peries M, et al. (1998). An Overview of Significant Influences and Formative Experiences on the Development of Adults' Environmental Awareness in Nine Countries. Environmental Education Research, 4 (4) 445-464.; 4. Wilson, E. O. (1995) Naturalist. London: Allen Press. (pp.11-12) 5. Clayton, S, & Opotow, S (2003) Identity and the natural environment: the psychological significance of nature. London: MIT Press.

6. Scottish Natural Heritage (2008) Corporate Strategy 2008-2013. Inverness: Scottish Natural Heritage. (p.5) 7. Alexander, M. (2008) Management planning for nature conservation.

8. Johnston, E, & Soulsby, C (2006) The role of science in environmental policy: an examination of the local context. Land Use Policy , 23: 161–169. (p.167) 9. Natural England (2010) Research evidence. Retrieved September 26, 2010, from Natural England: http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/ourwork/research/bodyofevidence.aspx 10. Lawton J, Brotherton P, Brown V, Elphick C, Fitter A, Forshaw J, et al. (2010) Making space for nature: a review of England's wildlife sites and ecological networks. London: Defra. (p.v) 11. Millenium Ecosystem Assement. (2005) Ecosystems and human wellbeing: Biodiversity synthesis.

Washington DC: World Resources Institute.

12. Lawton, et.al. (as above) (p.x) 13 & 14. RSPB. (2007) A voice for conservation: the RSPB's plans for 2007-2012. Sandy: The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

15. Rolston H I (1994) Conserving natural value. New York: Columbia University Press. (p.30)

Cara Roberts is completing her MSc in Outdoor Environmental & Sustainability Education at the University of Edinburgh, and following ten years as a countryside ranger now works as an environmental educator. cararoberts@rocketmail.com Gabrielle Overgaard-Horup has completed an MSc in Environmental Management at Birkbeck College, University of London and recently took on the role of Conservation Officer at Gwent Wildlife Trust. gabrielle_horup@yahoo.co.uk More information on VINE can be found at www.vineproject.org.uk

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Don’t badger the Badger Proposals to trap and shoot badgers will be ineffective and risk alienating those in the farming community who adopt the measures.

IAN ROTHERHAM To cull or not to cull?

Bovine TB and the expanding population of badgers have been ongoing issues for farmers, land managers and conservationists for many years. Furthermore, in some parts of Britain, especially in the South West, dairy farmers are very worried. I understand their concerns and I sympathise with their plea to do something to ease their problem. However, there is a real danger of taking action but without scientific or management justification. This is an even more acute difficulty for an industry that in recent years has struggled to win the hearts and minds of its community. Trapping (chasing) and shooting badgers will be a waste of time and money for the public purse and a spectacular PR own goal for farming.

NEIL BENNETT

Yet the constant re-opening of the ‘to cull or not to cull’ debate is understandable but at the same time is damaging for both conservation and for farming. I believe the issues are at two levels: first, that of the scientific evidence, and second, one of an emotional reaction to the deliberate removal of what is arguably Britain’s most evocative and iconic conservation emblem.

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The control culture Badgers first gained a degree of genuine protection in the 1970s, through the work of one of my local MPs Peter Hardy, representing Rother Valley. By this time the badger was virtually extinct across lowland South Yorkshire and hung on by its claws in remote upland crags and even disused mine adits along the sandstone and gritstone edges. Nationally it was a symbol of campaigns such as National Nature Week and other initiatives intended to raise public awareness and sympathy for wildlife on the brink of extinction. In my own region, the issues were especially problematic. The deep-rooted enthusiasms in some parts of the farming community to ‘control’ badgers, and by rather nasty groups within the mining community to both dig and bait badgers, took many years to counter. Now, decades on, the animal is back and doing well. We go to great lengths to work with developers and with landowners to protect and nurture this beast whilst avoiding undue disruption to their activities.

Some farmers are desperate to solve this most intractable problem and will grasp at any straw; but trapping and shooting is not the answer. The scientific evidence is that disturbance to established badger colonies and their territories causes massive movement across the countryside and hence spread of any disease. This kind of break-up of distribution patterns is the last thing you want to do to a population based on long-term and robustly defended territorial units unless you wish to cause a further spread of infection. No, the aim must be to minimise disruption and to keep long distance dispersal to a minimum. Any solution, if it is to be workable, must operate within such a framework.

A return to bandit country?

However, the situation gets worse, much worse. The act of legalised control muddies the waters with regard to illegal digging and baiting. It blurs the boundaries between what is legal and what is illegal, and importantly it removes any ethical or moral high ground between authorities and diggers. How could necessary ‘control’ of badgers be so illegal if the authorities themselves are now doing it? The result will be a carte blanche for resurgence in the activities of diggers and baiters justified by governmental blessing of a trapping and shooting programme. This will create a weakness in the conservation armour that many will be keen to exploit and I know because I have talked to these people. In Sheffield in the 1980s, we had vanloads of diggers travelling from as far afield as Tyneside to dig badgers in the city’s woods. I have known of local people disrupted in the early hours of the morning by groups of swarthy men, armed with pickaxes and guns, digging up their back garden in pursuit of a badger to extract and then to bait for money. We do not want a return to the legitimacy of such barbarism, or any excuse to make such activities spuriously acceptable.

This idea of trapping and shooting badgers will not solve the long-term issues but will cost a lot of money and make the situation worse. All the evidence seems to show that it does not work and in the medium term will make the situation much worse. Even more alarming for farmers is that the public will link farming with this ‘control’. This will be incredibly bad PR for the industry. The action would make 16

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 farmers out, yet again, to be the ‘bad boys’ of the countryside and reduce public sympathy in terms of the support and grant aid that the industry needs. The public will not understand farmers’ arguments but will just be witnesses to the killing.

Perhaps a desperate farmer will ask whether pubic support or understanding is necessary. In a democracy I would argue that yes it is. However, there are direct effects too, and how many people will wish to go on farm-based holidays, or be tourists in farming areas associated with the slaughter? I wonder if the economists have taken this negative impact on diversified farm incomes into account.

Real and lasting measures…

The answer is a combination of improved hygiene and farm livestock management and programmes of vaccination to control the spread of disease; funded from the public purse as necessary steps to support the farmers. We need the public to be better informed about the problems that face the farming industry. They must understand how important this sector is in terms of future sustainability and food security. Above all, we cannot afford to allow farming, however desperate the situation seems, to make such a colossal and expensive misjudgement on all our behalves.

Ian Rotherham is Professor of Environmental Geography and Reader in Tourism and Environmental Change at Sheffield Hallam University. i.d.rotherham@shu.ac.uk Photo: Dave Pressland

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Thinking big – a better deal for connecting nature The Lawton Report, Making Space for Nature, offers a more bold and creative approach to wildlife conservation. Conservation groups must press for its endorsement in the coming White Paper.

TONY WHITBREAD Nature conservation has traditionally focused on conserving the most important parts of our natural environment. Find the best areas, protect them and then look after them through some form of conservation management – this has generally appeared to be our conservation strategy. However, even right from the start this has not really been the case. Different generations may have had different words, but these special places have often been seen as reservoirs, or hot-spots, or centres of colonisation, or core areas. The picture is not one of isolated living museums; it is more one of important parts within a much wider ecological network.

Gains but net losses The environment of tomorrow can only evolve out of what remains today, so there must be no question of any new approach sweeping away the hard-won levels of protection for our most important nature conservation assets. Special areas (Nature Reserves, Sites of Special Scientific Interest, and Local Wildlife Sites etc) are important in their own right. But they become far more effective if they are part of a much wider system of functional ecosystems.

In 2008 the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee concluded that the UK had failed to halt the loss of biodiversity and that we were not going to meet our 2010 Biodiversity Objectives. The EU has now set a new target “to halt the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystem services by 2020.”

Another firm commitment but what are the chances of success if we just try to do more of the same? Indeed time and again we hear firm political commitments to nature conservation, whether it is the Wildlife and Countryside Act, the Convention on Biological Diversity, commitments to deliver Biodiversity Action Plans, or warm words in local authorities’ Local Development Frameworks. We may think we are getting somewhere but in practice the gains are at best small. Loss of biodiversity continues, at global and local scales, unfortunately confirming that we are indeed in the middle of the sixth global mass extinction event.

Economics – friend or foe?

Evidence from studies such as The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) and now the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA) are confirming what ecologists have known for 18

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 decades – nature provides the services on which we depend for all aspects of human well-being (The TEEB material will be reviewed in the next ECOS by John Bowers). Ecosystem services are provided by a healthy, functioning environment but at present many of these are unknown and unvalued. This is already having direct economic consequences. TEEB, for instance, has estimated that the economic loss through damage to ecosystem services from the degradation of forests alone is far greater than the economic losses experienced during the worst of the recent recession. As ecosystems degrade further, these losses will increase.

In brief, nature is continuing to be degraded but we rely entirely on a healthy, functioning nature for our economy, sense of well-being and ultimately for our very existence. Whilst past approaches to nature conservation have had some success, the failure of the current system to reverse the long-term trend of biodiversity loss indicates that we need a paradigm shift in the policies and approach we adopt for our natural world.

Pressure for change Before the general election the Wildlife Trusts lobbied the main political parties to create a major new driver for the natural world to achieve a Living Landscape. One result of this, in September 2009, was the formation of a review group to look at England’s ecological network by Hilary Benn, the then Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. ‘Making Space for Nature: a review of England’s Wildlife Sites and Ecological Network’, was therefore set up and chaired by Professor Sir John Lawton, a highly respected ecologist from York University. Even as the Lawton review was underway we turned our efforts towards gaining cross party commitment for a White Paper, with the support of other Non Government Organisations. The General Election and subsequent change of government in May 2010 could otherwise have put paid to this, but the new Secretary of State, Caroline Spelman, was totally committed to the White Paper.

The completed Lawton Report1 was submitted to the Secretary of State on 16 September 2010. The Lawton review asked the basic question “do England’s wildlife sites comprise a coherent and resilient ecological network?” In essence it asks whether our current approach can deliver an ecological network where “biodiversity is enhanced and the diversity, functioning and resilience of ecosystems re-established in a network of spaces for nature that can sustain these levels into the future, even given continuing environmental change and human pressure.” An ecological network should restore species and habitats to levels better than in 2000, restore the ecological and physical processes that underpin ecosystems, enhancing the capacity to provide ecosystem services, and provide accessible, wildlife rich, natural environments for people to enjoy and experience.

Our environment faces huge challenges, from demographic change, economic growth, new technologies, societal preferences, and changes in policy and regulation, for example. All these will have huge consequences on the environment.

Establishing a coherent and resilient ecological network will help wildlife to cope with these changes. It will also improve the ability of our environment to provide the range and quality of ecosystem services upon which we all depend.

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The Lawton agenda The review essentially concluded that our current scatter of wildlife sites does not comprise a coherent and resilient ecological network. Perhaps this is not a surprise, but it is significant that a government commissioned report, drawing on a wide range of evidence and expert opinion came to this conclusion.

The Lawton review then sets out 24 recommendations for what needs to be done in order to make the coherent, resilient ecological network that we need. Together these recommendations provide a key check-list for what we should be expecting from the new Natural Environment White Paper.

First, the review recommends that ecological networks should be identified and protected. Looking after what we have is the basic starting point. Importantly, however, this includes areas for ecological restoration, and thus not solely focusing on the areas that are currently of high quality.

A key theme is the delivery of landscape-scale ecological restoration. This, it proposes, should be done through the establishment of Ecological Restoration Zones (ERZs) - “large, discrete areas within which significant enhancements of ecological networks are achieved, by enhancing existing wildlife sites, improving ecological connections and restoring ecological processes”. It also promotes making space for nature along river catchments through the expansion of wetlands and the restoration of natural processes. Coastal management should also take full account of the natural dynamics of the coast, thereby allowing habitats to move and evolve.

The proposals were summarised in four words – “more, bigger, better and joined.”

The review suggests that the process should start with the development of 12 Ecological Restoration Zones around the country. The Wildlife Trusts view is that this would be far too minimal; indeed to limit ambitions to just 12 ERZs would be to ignore a large amount of work that has already taken place. As a comparison the biodiversity partnerships in the South East of England have got together to develop a map of large scale Biodiversity Opportunity Areas (BOAs). This process has involved a large number of partners, extensive consultation and is now accepted as the basis of the South East Biodiversity Strategy. It did feed into the South East Plan (before it was abolished by the new government) and should now feed into the more local strategies that replace it. So a lot of work has been done.

In Sussex alone we have identified some 75 BOAs.

Ideas into action – large or small?

Sometimes it is helpful to think of a real area in order to put some ‘meat on the bones’ of some of these general strategies so I’ll talk briefly about one such location in Sussex. The Sussex Wildlife Trust has a West Weald Living Landscape project in a large area on the Surrey-Sussex border, to the south east of Haslemere.

This is an agglomeration of Biodiversity Opportunity Areas that can broadly be described as a forest matrix, containing within it some of the most important ancient woods for nature conservation in Europe. We know the nature of the 20

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Palfrey Copse and its connectivity in the West Weald Photo: Richard Howarth

ecosystems there, and partnerships of key organisations have been established and landowners are involved. This has all led to a good understanding of the ecological processes at work and the various ecosystem services delivered. Work is underway here already, although better support would see far more achieved. The point, however, is that this could provide a model for future ERZs. In practice, Ecological Restoration Zones should surely be on a scale similar to that of the West Weald Landscape project. If so then ERZs must ultimately be identified in every part of the UK and therefore there should be a large number of them, all interlinked to form what truly is a coherent ecological network. Just 12 such projects scattered around the country will be far too few to have much positive effect on a failing country-wide ecological network.

The Lawton Report does not claim to offer accurate estimates of the cost of its recommendations but it does touch on how they might be implemented. Current financial mechanisms (such as Environmental Stewardship and tax incentives) need to be improved, and new ones brought in. Economic approaches are needed that favour conservation management by stimulating new markets and payment for ecosystem services, to ensure that the values of a wide range of ecosystem services are taken into account in decisions that affect the management and use of the natural world.

Nature paying its way?

Payment for ecosystem services is a growing theme. It was addressed in the Lawton review and options and examples are currently being researched by Defra. The UK 21

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 National Ecosystem Assessment aims to describe the state and value of the UK’s ecosystem services. If this value is properly understood, then the need for healthy, functioning ecosystems should also be recognised. The natural environment should then start to have due primacy in policy, legal and economic decision making.

There are, however, dangers in ascribing an economic value to the natural world; there are more fundamental, over-riding ethical considerations that justify nature conservation at a higher level than its utilitarian value. Some scientists described an economic valuation of ecosystem services as a “poor approximation of infinity” – how can you put a price on something that you can’t do without. Furthermore I would argue that our economy is not the over-riding system we imagine it to be.

It is essentially a sub-system that relies totally on the whole system which is the environment itself. It is odd to value the over-riding system (the environment) according to the values of a sub-system (the economy). Thus whilst economists may ask us to justify the environment in terms of its economic worth we should rather be asking the economists to justify the economy in terms of its environmental worth. Furthermore, such ecosystem services are essential, non-tradable and required by everyone, so should largely fall above economic value.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to express the essential worth of the environment in a world so heavily biased towards economic value. As Pavan Sukhdev, leader of the TEEB initiative, has said, putting a monetary value on something does not mean you are creating a market for it. Furthermore, when economic evaluations of nature are carried out TEEB shows that economic benefits of environmental protection are often between 10 and 100 times greater than the costs.

The value of nature therefore needs to be embedded into decision-making at all levels. The current link of damage to ecosystem services and biodiversity loss on the one hand with economic growth on the other is in practice a market failure of greater severity even than that which has led to climate change. Indeed the need to disconnect economic growth from negative environmental impact is perhaps the greatest challenge of our time. Re-internalising the costs to nature and the benefits from nature into policy and practice will help set the basis for an economic structure that is symbiotic with nature rather than parasitic upon it.

The work of the UK NEA could provide a framework in this respect, categorising ecosystem services into a hierarchical structure: • First are the Primary Ecological Functions fundamentally supporting all subsequent ecosystem services. These include all supporting services and the major regulating services.

• Second are the Final Ecosystem Services including the remaining regulating services and all cultural and provisioning services. These underpin the goods we receive.

• Third are the Goods themselves which have a financial or non-financial value to humans.

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 In order to avoid double counting, ‘value’ is attributed at one stage – usually from the ‘goods’ received at the end of the hierarchy (and even then some goods are valued while others are not). In practice goods are often seen as competitive, with any area of land providing one or another good. Even worse a ‘good’ may be seen as competitive with its underpinning ecosystem services and even with the primary ecological functions that support all services. Intensive food production is an example of the bias in the way we currently evaluate services. In this case food is the only good that is evaluated. All other goods provided by that area of land are either degraded, unvalued, assumed to be free or assumed to be infinite. Food is an essential provisioning service but if produced at the cost of all other goods then it is a very inefficient use of land, and if it is provided at the cost of the ecosystem services and ecological functions on which it depends then it is ultimately self-destructive.

Furthermore, with our valuing system so biased towards a small number of goods, biodiversity can be relegated to a small, special interest in a sub-group behind one of the goods (a sub-set of recreation perhaps). In practice, however, biodiversity: • forms the basic building blocks of the ecosystems that underpin ecological functions; • is an indicator of ecological health; • is valued by people; and • provides genes and species for crops and other products.

Building up credit A key principle from an ecosystem approach should be the delivery of multiple ecosystem services from an area of land; any forces acting on that area should be supportive of rather than counter-productive to ecosystem service delivery. A consequence for the forthcoming White paper could be that all activities should be ecosystem and biodiversity ‘proofed’. If an activity negatively impacts on biodiversity or ecosystem services then it should pay a realistic cost to reflect that impact, but if it has a positive effect then it should receive some form of ecosystem or biodiversity credit.

When ecosystems are seen as not only essential but also providing an economic benefit, then this might put a rather different complexion on the apparent ‘costs’ of implementing Lawton’s 24 recommendations. Instead of being seen as costs perhaps it should be seen as paying for the benefits we are (or should be) receiving from healthy ecosystems. If we don’t pay for them, we may not get them. That will have much larger economic consequences.

I suggest there are two main themes that come out of the Lawton review and the UK National Ecosystem Assessment: • First: Major landscape-scale ecological restoration – Ecological Restoration Zones, river catchment restoration, re-instatement of natural processes and a 23

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 large ‘ecological network’ philosophy. England has failed to meet its 2010 biodiversity objectives so we need to scale-up the future action.

• Second: Recognising the value of functional ecosystems because of the ecosystem services they deliver and so developing financial mechanisms to pay for them. We can no longer ignore the value of what nature provides for us.

Both these elements must be fully addressed in the forthcoming Natural Environment White Paper. If successful this should create a paradigm shift in our attitude towards the natural world, returning primacy to environmental quality rather than economic growth. We must aim high.

Reference 1.

Lawton J, Brotherton P, Brown V, Elphick C, Fitter A, Forshaw J, et al. (2010) Making space for nature: a review of England's wildlife sites and ecological networks. London: Defra.

Tony Whitbread is Chief Executive of Sussex Wildlife Trust. tonywhitbread@sussexwt.org.uk

The Mens woodland in West Weald. A 160 hectare ancient woodland being helped to revert to a natural state as a core part of the West Weald Landscape Project.

Photo: Richard Howarth

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Conservation and Big Society opportunity or threat?

The principles and the practice of the Big Society ideals are well known to many in the conservation sector. This article discusses how conservation bodies should interpret the notion of Big Society and harness it to best effect.

MIKE TOWNSEND Out with big government, in with the Big Society. Founded on the belief that government alone cannot solve complex social and environmental problems, the Big Society demands a decentralising of power, greater accountability within public services and increased opportunities for civic participation. This coincides with a programme of cuts to public spending which are likely to see some major casualties within those departments supporting nature conservation. How should nature conservationists, particularly within the voluntary sector, respond to this challenge?

The Big Society and green thinking Many green narratives of a sustainable society are also developed around ideas of decentralised self organised and self reliant communities, with a movement of political power from an authoritarian state.1 Not surprisingly the Big Society is framed in the language of moral absolutes, responsibilities and obligations, but much of the essence is very similar to more liberal green approaches.

David Cameron cites amongst others, Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel Prize winner for economics as providing evidence of the Big Society at work. Ostrom and her colleagues have studied the exploitation and provision of common pool resources; shared use of forest resources, management of fisheries, provision of communal irrigation systems and the like. What they showed was that where top down solutions from outside were ineffective, self-organised, cooperative action where communities communicated and took action to monitor transgressors, led to success.2 Ostrom’s thesis is intuitively appealing, but also supported by empirical observation. What Ostrom found through years of evidence gathering is that schemes imposed by the state or from the centre have low success compared to those from within the community.

The changing nature of voluntary organisations Part of the narrative of the Big Society is the assumption that civic participation has declined, pushed out by an overweening and controlling state and a dependency culture where personal responsibility and community action has been strangled.

Actually there is little evidence of a decline in civic participation, but the nature of participation has changed. Whilst membership of voluntary organisations has 25

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 grown, including in the nature conservation sector, face-to-face member participation has increasingly been displaced by a more distant, financial relationship between NGOs and their supporters.3 This has been fuelled in part by the growth of ‘expert’ organisations, able to engage in what are seen as complex policy discussions on climate change, agriculture policy, EU Directives and so on.

Civic action has been entrusted to NGOs by a relatively affluent population who have assigned representation, in return for providing financial support.

If the Big Society results in increasing emphasis on replacing state intervention with delivery by civil society, with NGOs as a vehicle, this could change the function of NGOs and their relationship with supporters. Currently NGOs provide a mix of critical lobbying, proactive policy proposals, and complementary action on the ground. If the role becomes formalised into one where they provide what were hitherto government responsibilities, the relationship with supporters becomes more ambiguous. The focus of action switches from that of promoting the interests of the beneficiaries and representing supporters, to securing funding for the delivery of services. Instead of vigorously promoting the interests of nature conservation and holding government to account, the preoccupation could become that of contract delivery.

More particularly it runs the risk of breaking the trust between NGOs and supporters and blurring the focus on beneficiaries. If NGOs are not longer seen as an independent voice – ‘our experts’ – trusted to represent our concerns, then to whom do people turn?

The Woodland Trust demonstrates the power of community and volunteer action.

Photo: WTPL/Niall Benvie.

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 Furthermore many nature conservation NGOs, particularly the larger ones, are not constructed around a business model of local representation. And, local community concerns may not always fit within the boundaries of corporate priorities and charitable purposes; communities are often less single issue focussed than organisations, overlaying social and wider environmental concerns on those of nature conservation.

Nature conservation on the cheap?

There is a danger then, that while funding and support are withdrawn from the centre, they don’t re-emerge at a local level; that the institutional structures which currently support nature conservation either disappear or prove not fit for purpose for the Big Society approach. As a consequence, such meaningful action as there is could falter.

The Big Society reflects many of the values to which green activists also aspire. But its arrival at a time of austerity in the public sector prompts cynics to view it as little more than a crude attempt to cut government costs; shifting the proper responsibilities of state to the individual or community. But I think it would be unworthy – and possibly unwise – to dismiss it so lightly.

The Big Society challenges the role both the public and voluntary sectors should play. How should the voluntary sector work with supporters and communities to provide opportunities for genuine and direct participation? Can it act as facilitators of local community action, eschewing the need for deterministic outcomes? How does it balance the role as provider of public services with that of holding government to account and representing the interests of beneficiaries?

For a society disenfranchised, or at least distanced, from the natural environment, the Big Society offers, at the very least, a starting point in a discussion about how we restore decision making to people. Where we lament the lack of connectedness between people and care for the natural world, we now have licence to address it.

If we reject the challenge of the Big Society, what we are left with is simply government cuts.

References 1.

2.

3.

Dobson, A. (2000), Green political thought, 3rd ed., London Routledge.

Ostrom, E., Gardener, R., and Walker, J. with Arun Agrawal et al. (1994) Rules, Games and common-pool resources, University of Michigan Press '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-paper103.html

Mike Townsend is an advisor with the Woodland Trust. The views expressed in this article are those of the author. miketownsend@woodlandtrust.org.uk

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The Crown Jewels and the Big Society - What future for National Nature Reserves?

As Britain embarks on another round of debate about the privatisation of our natural assets, it is important to reflect on the meaning of ownership and the implications for the control and management of land.

WILLIAM M ADAMS & IAN D HODGE In 1914, the zoologist E. Ray Lankester wrote a letter to the Journal Nature urging its readers to support the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves (SNPR) in its efforts to “preserve from destruction in this country as much and as many as possible of the invaluable surviving haunts of nature”.1 Thanks to the work of Arthur Tansley, the SPNR duly produced a list of those haunts in 1915 in the hope that the Board of Agriculture would not plough them up as part of the war effort. These sites, ‘Rothschild’s Reserves’,2 became the basis for lists of areas of conservation importance in debates about government involvement in conservation during the 1940s, and for the county schedules of (Sites of Special Scientific Interest SSSIs) compiled by the Nature Conservancy after the war. They were at the heart of the Nature Conservancy’s controversial ‘unpublished appendix’ to its annual report in 19553, and of Ratcliffe’s Nature Conservation Review 4. Above all, after 1949, Tansley’s list for the SPNR became the new Nature Conservancy’s shopping list for National Nature Reserves (NNRs).

The first National Nature Reserve was Beinn Eighe, declared in 1951. Through the 1950s, the number of NNRs grew rapidly, some purchased by government, some leased and some held under ‘nature reserve agreements’. They survived the years of fiscal austerity under the Labour government after the World War Two, and the implacable hostility of the Treasury in the 1950s.5 They persisted through absorption of the Nature Conservancy into the Natural Environment Research Council in 1965, its renewed independence (shorn of most of its science) as the Nature Conservancy Council in 1973, and its dismemberment into national bodies for England, Wales and Scotland in 1992. They survived the successive re-branding, mergers and takeovers characteristic of corporate style governance of public bodies under Conservative and Labour administrations, as English Nature, Natural England. Until now, that is: in August 2010, the new Con-Lib government proposed selling off part of the national conservation land estate, NNRs in England. 6

Green Cuts In May 2010, David Cameron announced during a visit to the Department of Energy and Climate Change that he wanted the new Conservative-Liberal 28

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 Democrat administration to be the 'greenest government ever'.7 Perhaps, but its first Budget focused on rapid reduction of the deficit in public accounts, and a shift to fiscal austerity that matched (or even exceeded) the budget of 1981,8 introduced under the first conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, the arch proponent of neoliberalism. Through the summer, news of cuts to government departments, QUANGOs (quasi-autonomous government bodies), and public services dribbled out, with the loss of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and the Sustainable Development Commission among the most significant environmental institutions slashed in a bizarre reversal of green credentials. By the autumn, the RSPB noted that the UK was entering ‘a period of deep and prolonged green austerity’.9 The October 2010 Spending Review spelled out the deep cuts faced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). These reached 30% (£700m by 2014-15), compared to an average of 19% across government.10 Through the summer, Natural England managers applied themselves to the prospect of significant reductions in staff numbers (The Guardian reported 5-8000 out of 30,00011), and began to plan for the sale of NNRs. By September, the sale of NNRs had hit the national press, followed in October by plans for the sale of the Forestry Commission estate: one newspaper commented that the government seemed intent on ‘asset-stripping our national heritage’.12

The Crown Jewels The idea of selling off government conservation land is not unprecedented: in this respect, Conservative governments have form. Under Margaret Thatcher, in 1988, the then Conservative government considered the privatisation of National Nature Reserves, requesting that the Nature Conservancy Council (the UK government conservation body at that time) review their holdings with a view to shedding reserves which no longer met the criteria for which they were designated, or that could be more appropriately managed by others.13 In 1988, the Observer’s Environment Correspondent accused the Environment Secretary of asking officials to ‘privatise some of the crown jewels’ of Britain’s national treasures.14 In 2010, the Guardian chose the same imagery: this time, England’s ‘crown jewels’ were threatened.15 This imagery speaks directly to a sense of national heritage. The twenty three thousand gems that comprise the Crown Jewels mostly date from the restoration of the monarchy in the seventeenth century. The comparison suggests that NNRs have both material and symbolic value; a treasure to be guarded and not disbursed whose lustre both embodies and represents something of the greater honour of the nation. They have become imbued with symbolic values, as relics of an imagined bucolic past, and lost relations between the English and their countryside.

By labelling NNRs in this way, the idea of selling them is presented as more than shocking, as something almost sacrilegious.

What are the Crown Jewels For? But what are NNRs actually for? The case for national series of nature reserves might seem self-evident after six decades, but it was not accepted in the 1940s without a fight. In the diverse debates about government conservation and countryside planning that ebbed to and fro before and during the second world 29

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 war, the idea of ecological reserves for science, and the Nature Conservancy as a scientific body to manage nature in the national interest, eventually won acceptance following the report of the Huxley Committee in 1947 (Cmd. 7122).

National Nature Reserves were to be just that, a national series of sites where, as the Nature Conservancy’s Director-General Max Nicholson put it in 1957, ‘scientists in the distant future’ could ‘continue to have available for study first-class examples of each type of habitat’; NNRs were ‘open-air laboratories’16 that ecologists could use to understand basic science and the impacts of human activities. This idea of a national series of sites continued into the Nature Conservation Review and the wider SSSI system, using Ratcliffe’s criterion of representativeness. Its continuing power is demonstrated by the Lawton Review: the first function of England’s ecological network is the inclusion of ‘the full range of England’s biogeography’.17 But while Lawton revives Ratcliffe’s (and Tansley’s) logic with the idea of a national stamp album of ecological types, NNRs have long lost their central justification as necessary for the conduct of scientific research.18 Their value as part of a national system persists. Under the pressure to show value for money, they have been presented to the public for several decades by English Nature and Natural England as ‘green gyms’, places for ‘great days out’, and educative ‘go wild’ experiences of all kinds.19 With the Natura 2000 and SSSI networks, they have come to be seen as part of Britain’s natural capital, an ecological portfolio that underpins the battered ecosystems of the rest of the country. So NNRs, as a series, remain useful, if mostly to citizens and not scientists.

The personality of ownership Once the first shock is over, therefore, the essential question remains: if NNRs are sold, will their value be lost? In part the answer to that question depends on whom NNRs are sold to, what are the motivations and capabilities of any new owners and what controls and influences are maintained by government.

The debate about privatization in the 1980s was at least in part motivated by a philosophical position towards private versus public ownership, especially a scepticism of the capacity for government to manage resources efficiently. It was presumed that bureaucrats would wrap reserves in red tape. Lacking entrepreneurial motivation and avoiding any possible risks, they would fail to develop the full potential of the assets held. In particular, proponents of sale believed the public owner would exclude visitors and so there would be a loss of recreational values that the private owner would have an incentive to develop.

Privatisation could release these greater values for the public good.

To an extent, such arguments suggest that privatization might increase benefits with no loss of conservation value. A private owner seeking some financial return from the development of recreation would have an incentive to produce these extra benefits. The public interest could be protected through regulations under which a new private owner would be obliged to achieve the objective for nature conservation and then would be allowed to promote recreation if this is compatible. Financial incentives would thus lead to a greater total value. But on 30

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closer inspection, the issue is more complicated. This simple analysis abstracts from the complexity and uncertainty of managing ecosystems in the real world. In practice our understanding of the relationship amongst environmental variables is very imperfect. The challenge for management is to be adaptive in the face of uncertainty and ignorance. This directly contradicts the essence of private management under which the owner seeks to maximize his or her return subject to a constraint set up by government.

Private management creates an agency problem in which the land manager has different objectives and more information than the government and hence a problem of moral hazard. It may be impossible to design a contract under which private management would take place to guarantee the wider social interest. Given the uncertainty, a contract cannot foresee all the possible contingencies implying a need for renegotiation as new information emerges. In the context of uncertainty, the loss of some possible extra benefits may be a price worth paying in order to avoid a more systematic risk of the deterioration of the conservation status of the reserve. Of course, if the potential recreation benefits are clear and the risk of conservation damage negligible, it is difficult to see why the recreation should not be provided in the public sector anyway. This takes us back to the question of the principles and motivation of the owner rather than its crude personality.

The Big Society and NNRs However, the government’s approach to sell-offs of the 2010s is rather different from those of the 1980s. Now, despite fears of private hotels springing up in Britain’s deepest woods, the Government seems more interested in NGOs or citizen groups taking over NNRs. The magician this time, whose wand will exchange public costs for revenue flows, is not the hidden hand of capitalism, but the welcoming grasp of the ‘Big Society’.

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 When David Cameron spoke about his great passion for building the Big Society in Liverpool on 19 July 2010,20 he met all the spin-doctors’ desiderata of exciting vagueness.

He said “You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom.

You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society”. It was, he said, “about a huge culture change…where people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace…don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face …but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities”. In Cameron’s world, the Big Society is “about about liberation – the biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street”.

Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, cited the Big Society when responding to the Lawton Report Making Space for Nature in September, saying “if ever there was a time for the Big Society to protect our natural environment, this is it”.21 Conservation could not be seen to be the government’s job alone, but what is the job of government in conservation?

If the Big Society offers something more than cover for cutting back the state, it suggests a very different privatisation agenda from that of the Thatcher government. The Big Society is, presumably, not motivated by profit, but rather by the public good. While strongly business-like, such organisations might be expected to be good stewards of living diversity, and sensitive to the importance of the public goods entrusted to them. Indeed, organisations like the RSPB, the National Trust and the Wildlife Trusts, with their millions of paying members, could be held to be more representative of public interests of part of the British public than any of the political parties. They are certainly more numerous.

Maintaining the Value of NNRs So should such transitions set alarm bells ringing? Conservationists will be concerned with the question of whether national interests in the ecology of NNRs can be maintained under non-state ownership. The government (and its deficitreduction advisers) will be concerned whether this can be done more cheaply than by keeping them under state control. Five issues stand out.

First, the good news is that the NNR estate has always been diverse in terms of ownership.

There are 224 NNRs in England, covering just over 94,000 ha. Natural England owns just 21% of this land, with 32% leased, 16% held under Nature Reserve agreement. Since the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, land owned and managed by ‘Approved Bodies’ has been able to be declared as a NNR, and now fully 31% is owned and managed by approved organisations (for example the National Trust, the Forestry Commission, the Wildlife Trusts, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds or Local Authorities). So the present NNR portfolio already depends to a large extent on management by private owners (individual owners, estates, NGOs and other charitable owners), and so extending private ownership does something that mostly seems to work.

Second, private owners pay some or all of the costs of reserve management, and thus if Natural England offloaded reserves, their costs might fall. They could, for example, be freed of the management and pension costs of employing 32

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 management staff. This might suggest Defra could save some money by selling NNRs. But who would buy them? In most cases there is little to attract a commercial owner, and planning control would still constrain most forms of development. The government might have imagined that NGOs would like to expand their reserve holdings, but conservation NGOs are not stupid, and are themselves short of cash: they are unlikely to take on reserves if additional costs are not met. Geoffrey Lean reports that NGOs had told Defra they did not have the money to buy NNRs (or Forestry Commission conservation land), and indeed would only take them as a gift if the government paid for their upkeep.22 Disposal to the most reliable custodians, conservation NGOs, is hardly likely to save the government much money.

Even if the cash was forthcoming, reserves are going to vary considerably in how attractive they are – those alongside NGOs’ existing holdings might be managed easily, but others might be much less easily absorbed. Some (including geological reserves) might not have an obvious non-governmental host. There has been discussion within Natural England of the creation of a new charity specifically to hold NNRs at arms length from government, while new owners are found. This can only be a complex, slow and expensive option.

Third, the management of privately owned NNRs is extensively supported by government payments in the form of management agreements. Such grants would have to continue. Private owners of NNRs are able to apply for Higher Level Stewardship (whereas Natural England is not), thus offering an apparent subsidy for management, but this still has to be paid by government (indeed by Defra), so there is little or no scope for saving. There may though be some modest transfer of funding from Whitehall to Brussels.

Fourth, disposal of NNRs to non-governmental conservation owners would not remove the government’s responsibility to ensure that favourable conservation status is maintained on NNRs. Such regulation, ecological measurement and remedial or regulatory action are not cheap, and will be difficult unless Natural England retains significant ecological and natural history competence. It is not enough for government to rely on the goodwill of other owners: the ethos of NGOs may be unimpeachable, but competence and capacity are vitally important. NGOs may not share precisely the objectives of government and in a period of austerity it is unwise of government to hope to offload public liabilities onto NGOs without repercussions.

Fifth, as thinking about ecosystem services continues to develop, policy makers are gaining new insights into the value of areas of natural habitat, example for carbon storage, flood defence or cultural values. These have often been unseen and unmeasured public benefits of nature reserves and woodlands. Continued public ownership of NNRs seems wise until these values are properly measured, and institutions devised to secure them in perpetuity.

Keep the Pieces Government conservation in the UK has been through lean times before, notably in the 1950s (soon after it began) and the 1980s. The place of NNRs is central to 33

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 the wider question of how public interest in nature is to be secured. Alan Holland and Kate Rawles define conservation, as ‘about negotiating the transition from past to future in such a way as to secure the transfer of maximum significance’.23 The key point for the future of NNRs is how this is to be done.

British NNRs have always been understood as a national series of sites. John Lawton calls NNR’s ‘part of the backbone of national wildlife sites’,24 although he also argues strongly that the ‘network’ of which they are part is inadequate. Making Space for Nature suggests expanding the network, not selling or handing out its vertebrae.

Private owners already have a valuable role in securing nature, in NNRs, SSSIs and other sites and are supported in doing this by hybrid strategies involving advice, direct grant support, indirect agri-environment payments, and light regulation. It is a quintessentially British compromise, and it mostly works quite well. The state gets an excellent deal from private owners, and many private owners are supported by the state to manage land in ways that generates public benefits. However, this does not make the idea of selling those NNRs that the state does own a good one.

The idea of the ‘Big Society’ may endure and prove useful, but we conclude that any immediate sale of the crown jewels of NNRs is unwise. The recurrently beguiling ideological thought experiment of selling off nature reserves, of even donating them to conservation NGOs, offers little and risks much for conservation.

This is not to suggest that change is necessarily bad per se, but privatisation is hard to reverse; sales are easy compared to public acquisition. Public land ownership of conservation land is a vital option in the management of ecosystems in the face of climate change and increasing demands for food and fuel. It should only be given up where there are clear benefits and minimal uncertainty.

References 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

E. R. Lankester (1914) ‘Nature reserves’, Nature, 93 (2315): 33–5 (March 12 issue), quote p. 33.

Miriam Rothschild and Peter Marren (1997) Rothschild's Reserves: time & fragile nature. London: Harley Sheail J. (1998) Nature Conservation in Britain: the formative years, The Stationery Office, London.

Ratcliffe, D. (1977) A Nature Conservation Review, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2 Vols.)

Sheail J. (1998) Nature Conservation in Britain: the formative years, The Stationery Office, London.

Jowitt, J., Carrell, S. and Vidal, J. (2010) ‘Plan to sell off nature reserves risks ‘austerity countryside’, Guardian 14 August 2010, p. 1-2. Most discussion has turned around sales of English NNRs, although disposal in Wales has also been mooted.

7. James Randerson (2010) Cameron: I want coalition to be the 'greenest government ever' Guardian Friday 14 May 2010 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/14/cameron-wants-greenest-government-ever).

8. Keegan, W. (2010) ‘David Cameron's cost-cutting echoes that of Thatcher's first government – and it will be just as damaging, Observer 15 August 2010 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/15/cameron-osborne-tory-cuts-thatcher).

9. Emma Comerford, Dominic Molloy and Paul Morling (2010) Financing Nature in an Age of Austerity, RSPB, Sandy.

10. Juliette Jowitt (2010) ‘Spending review: “greenest government ever” reserves worst cuts for Defra’, Guardian 20 October 2010; Michael McCarthy (2010) ‘Defra: Nature reserves set to go private and Kew suffers’, Independent 21 October.

11. Juliette Jowitt (2010) ‘Spending review: “greenest government ever” reserves worst cuts for Defra’, Guardian 20 October 2010

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

Leo Hickman (2010) ‘The great forest sell-off’, Guardian 29 Oct 2010.

NCC 1988 Annual Report, HMSO, London.

Lean, G. (1989) ‘Sell-off order for nature reserves’, Observer 21 May. Vidal, J., Carrell, S. and Jowitt, J. (2010) ‘”Crown jewels” of Britain’s landscape could be sold off’, Guardian 14 August 2010, p. 6-7.

E. M. Nicholson (1957) Britain’s Nature Reserves, Country Life, London (p. 26; p. 23).

Lawton, J.H. Brotherton, P.N.M., Brown, V.K., Elphick, C., Fitter, A.H., Forshaw, J., Haddow, R.W., Hilborne, S., Leafe, R.N., Mace, G.M., Southgate, M.P., Sutherland, W.A., Tew, T.E., Varley, J., & Wynne, G.R. (2010) Making Space for Nature: a review of England’s wildlife sites and ecological network, Report to DEFRA. Although the boom in climate change research has to some extent recreated that link, with NNRs and SSSIs providing control sites for assessing the impacts of rising anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/ourwork/conservation/designatedareas/nnr/events/default.aspx http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/speeches-and-transcripts/2010/07/big-society-speech-53572 Louise Gray (2010) ‘Review of wildlife sites calls for £1 billion investment’, Telegraph 24 September 2010.

Geoffrey Lean (2010)’ Don't sell our woodland walks’, Telegraph 29 October: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/geoffrey-lean/8097935/Dont-sell-our-woodland-walks.html Alan Holland and Kate Rawles (1993) 'Values in conservation', ECOS: A Review of Conservation 14(1): 14-19 Vidal, J., Carrell, S. and Jowitt, J. (2010) ‘”Crown jewels” of Britain’s landscape could be sold off’, Guardian 14 August 2010, p. 6-7.

Bill Adams teaches in the Department of Geography (wa12@cam.ac.uk ) and Ian Hodge in the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge. They share an interest in the institutional politics of landscape scale conservation in the UK.

Plundering the forest?

Martin Spray reports on the worries surrounding woodland sell offs in his home patch of the Forest of Dean (see also page 52)

“Tree farm!” said the Belgian forester, eyeing a particularly Douglasfirry bit of this longtime Royal (hunting) Forest, supplier of oaks for HM's Men-o’-War, and the first English Forest Park. Now the Forest of Dean is proposed as a sale item by HMG. If it were only a tree farm, that might matter a little; but it is much more. People's concerns are mainly about access, and the Dean’s historical character – though timber-crop, biofuel, and wildlife are talked about, and you will even hear the new caboodle of ‘ecosystem services’ mentioned. “Fear not! Access, ‘public benefits’, wildlife..: all shall be safeguarded.” The local MP is a Minister, so should know. The Shadow Leader of the Lords knows something different: “I fear nothing is safe.

Beware!” A plea from the District Council refers to the ‘Royal Forest’, but the Wild Creatures and Forest Laws 1971 Act gave ‘ownership’ to the Secretary of State.

‘State’, ‘Public’, and ‘Community’ ownership, are used as interchangeables, with the pretence that ‘communities’ are ripe and ready to take over blocks of the Forest as soon as the bell rings. HMG sees a sell-off as freeing an opportunity to fundamentally reform the ‘public forestry estate’, a task which presumably becomes easier as the estate shrinks towards a plot.

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Traditional grazing in an age of austerity The loss of traditional livestock handling skills threatens to unravel that marriage of farming and nature and replace it with a messy divorce. With severe funding-cuts to the budgets of Natural England, National Parks and AONBs, can traditional skills training help to create an environmentally sustainable upland economy?

TOM CAIRNS Traditional grazing – skills and social trends The landscape, biodiversity and cultural heritage of Britain owes more than most countries to a long history of extensive grazing and nowhere is this more apparent than in the uplands. LANTRA’s latest Skills Assessment Research Report (2009), highlights a critical shortage of all agricultural skills, particularly in the livestock sector where 60,000 new skilled jobs are needed over the next 10 years. Traditional livestock management skills are most affected. It concludes that these shortages may even threaten future food production.

In Drivers of Environmental Change in the Uplands (2009), Bonn, Allott, Hubacek and Stewart note that shortages of traditional livestock management skills are most pronounced in upland areas such as Cumbria, Yorkshire, North Wales and Devon.

The Upland Centre’s Report (2009) Social Capital in Hill Farming found that traditional livestock management skills such as shepherding, hill gathering and penning used to be handed down within the family but with an ageing population of livestock farmers, are now at risk with an urgent need to skill-up a younger generation.

With an average age of 58, an entire generation of traditional livestock farmers is coming up to retirement. Some sons and daughters will want to continue to run the family farm despite the long hours, privations and low income but many will be tempted to sell up and either seek a more lucrative future in the world of intensive rye-grass leys or leave the industry altogether. But why should we care if traditional livestock handling skills disappear or if native breeds of livestock are replaced with more productive continental breeds?

In the UK government’s 2007 framework document Conserving Biodiversity – the UK Approach, the critical role of extensive grazing in maintaining biodiversity is highlighted. Indeed extensive grazing is either deemed essential or highly desirable for the conservation of 18 of the 28 terrestrial key habitats for which costed action plans have been prepared by the UK Biodiversity Steering Group.

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Understanding the dynamics of grazing Grazing has not always been a benign influence in the uplands where thin fragile soils and vulnerable habitats have suffered from over-grazing by sheep in places whilst other areas remain under-grazed. There is now a considerable body of experience to indicate that cattle or a mix of cattle and sheep are generally more beneficial to the maintenance of upland biodiversity than sheep alone. But every situation should be evaluated on its own merits.

Cattle have large square mouths that easily tackle tough vegetation which their tongues snatch as tufts to produce a ‘tussocky’ sward that favours a broad range of species. Unlike sheep or equines, cattle do not selectively eat flower heads or particular species in their foraging habits. Cattle can have a significant impact on invasive scrub and bracken by trampling, creating pathways through tall dense vegetation and by breaking up mats of dead leaf litter. Where sheep are run with cattle, this provides an entry into areas where sheep would otherwise never venture.

If grazing by cattle is generally good for upland biodiversity, then why not any cattle? The simple fact is that heavy breeds of continental commercial livestock have been bred to thrive on a rich diet under equable conditions, something that semi-natural upland vegetation most certainly does not offer. Introduce some Limousin cattle onto some extensively grazed hill pasture and they will very rapidly seek out the best grazing and ignore the tougher more invasive vegetation or the steeper slopes Native breeds developed before the existence of intensive rye-grass leys are welladapted to grazing on unimproved semi-natural vegetation. Many breeds of native cattle have developed over centuries to suit the tough conditions that often prevail in upland areas, particularly in winter.

Some native breeds of cattle eg. Highland, Belted Galloway, have thick waterproof coats and cope well in cold wet conditions. As a consequence, they generally require little in the way of supplementary feeding or shelter - although even the hardiest breed may need support in a very cold winter such as 2009-10.

Preventing the end of an era But surely we all know this, don’t we? And anyway, doesn’t this all get supported under the Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) scheme with its cattle grazing and native breeds at risk supplements?

From a purely financial point of view, it is certainly true that these payments provide a lifeline to many extensive farmers and do contribute importantly to maintaining the landscape, wildlife and cultural value of key areas. But the potential for doing more is limited not so much by the size of Europe’s coffers or the pressures upon it by some member states to reduce the CAP bill but by the lack of skills needed to put theory into practice. When the present generation of traditional extensive livestock farmers retires over the next 5-10 years, how many people will be around with the skills to do so?

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Exmoor ponies used as grazing agents at Ford Moss in Cumbria.

Photo: Tom Cairns/GAP

There has been a veritable queue of worthy bodies lining up to warn us of impending disaster but what is actually being done to address the problem?

The number of agricultural and land-based colleges offering conservation management related courses has increased significantly in recent years. Courses such the two-year BTEC National Diploma in Countryside Management have attracted more and more interest from young people, including many with no previous agricultural background. In the long term this is encouraging as is the introduction of a new Diploma in Environmental and Land Based Studies aimed at providing 14-19 year olds with an introduction into land-based environmental conservation work.

However, even with the best will in the world, any college-based conservation management course can only provide a generalised introduction to conservation grazing practices. Even where conservation grazing options can be selected as modules or form the basis of a practical work experience placement, access to the wide range of practical working skills involved in managing native breeds of livestock must necessarily be limited, not least in their duration.

Conservation grazing – the skills and confidence gap As a consequence, many extensive livestock farmers are wary of employing someone who may not have sufficient skills or confidence to deal effectively with native livestock in difficult situations, preferring instead to use contract labour.

Some traditional livestock farmers have even made a virtue of this dilemma by providing contract conservation grazing services to other farmers, wildlife trusts, Natural England, the MOD, the RSPB or local authorities. Equally some local wildlife trusts have developed their own farming activities and provide conservation grazing and other countryside services to other land-users!

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 However, the basic problem remains that there is a skills and a confidence gap between those young (in the main) people wanting work in conservation grazing and the opportunities that potentially exist for employing them. It is possible to volunteer in such situations but how many people can afford to work for nothing for any length of time and what real guarantees are there that they will secure the necessary skills and qualifications?

The answer, in part at least, is some form of apprenticeship/traineeship/internship that allows the participant not only to increase their range of skills in a practical working situation but to acquire that confidence in working with livestock that only comes from familiarity and daily routine. Some colleges and training providers offer one of the government’s New Modern Apprenticeships in Agriculture but this scarcely offers the specialised repertoire of traditional livestock handling skills that is required.

A few particularly keen people have been able to raise the money from local charitable trusts, sponsorships and the like to fund their own apprenticeships whilst some wildlife trusts and other conservation groups have created their own apprenticeships from time to time. All this is worthy but rather ad hoc.

The onset of heritage grazing The Grazing Advice Partnership (GAP) has recently secured funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to establish 21 half-year and full-year traineeships in ‘heritage grazing skills’ across the country over the next two years. These will be placed with hosts that will include wildlife trusts, independent farmers, farm estates and local authority-led grazing schemes. Trainees can expect to receive a tax-free educational bursary of £14,000 pro rata and will have to demonstrate progress in acquiring skills and experience set out in their personal development plans. The intention is for the traineeships to be fully accredited through LANTRA, to government’s skills council that serves the agricultural and land-based sectors.

GAP will closely evaluate and monitor the project that it hopes will serve as a pilot for a larger national provision.

As we enter an era where a million public sector employees are expected to lose their jobs and where the environmental sector has possibly been hit hardest of all, a modest outlay in much-needed skills training would seem not only preferable to paying some of those people to do nothing but would ensure that there is a skill base that is able not only to sustain the traditional rural economy during times of austerity but enable it to prosper when good times return. Skills-training is not a luxury, it is an insurance-policy for the future.

Tom Cairns is Development Manager at the Grazing Advice Partnership. tomc@grazingadvicepartnership.org.uk

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Lakeland valleys and Somerset hills a tale of two managements Just as there can be a world of difference between two Lakeland valleys depending on their management, so apparently can there be between regions of the same organisation.

PETER TAYLOR At the end of September 2010 I had the pleasure of walking Ennerdale in Cumbria with its custodian managers of the Forestry Commission, the National Trust and United Utilities (who own the lake), surveying the evolution of habitats since the whole valley was subject to landscape-scale ‘rewilding’ at the turn of the Millennium. At the head of the valley the changes were hardly discernable – reduced sheep numbers had been augmented by cattle, and the longer term aim under discussion was a cattle-only option. The sward was still cropped low and streamside tall-herb vegetation showed no sign of recovery. But the problem with reducing sheep numbers is that neighbouring flocks then invade the valley and defeat the manoeuvre! Then there were the areas of clear-felled Sitka – some showed no regeneration of this exotic and were sprouting a new native wildwood of birch and rowan, whilst others were rampantly regenerating another Sitka stand.

Such outcomes depended on the age of the stand when cut and the latent seedbank. Should the battle be waged further, or simply surrendered? And further down by the lake, old meadows were now grazed only by cattle, which also had access to the old conifer woods along the valley sides – they were rougher and wilder and much fencing had been removed. Most exciting of all, the river Liza had been allowed to breach her old containment and wander across the valley bottom, creating new meanders and pools. The pace of change is slow – rather painfully slow for the rewilding faithful on the management advisory group, but there is something in the slowness that is very educational.

Floods and ecosystem services As Alison Parfitt pointed out at our meeting, this part of Cumbria is a tale of two rivers. The one at Cockermouth last year, just over the valley watershed, that flooded the town, took out a bridge and claimed the life of a local policeman. That valley was grazed flat and the river totally contained along almost all its courses.

When so highly charged, like an angered deity, the river had retaliated with enormous power. In this valley, Liza had reclaimed her wildness and was a subject of awe to us all, as if her wild spirit got under the skin and we all realised just how much we gained from sitting with her and simply watching and listening.

Is there a lesson for other valleys? How so when the economy of hill farming requires every inch of valley in-bye land for bringing the sheep down off the hill?

Generations of farmers have cleared the boulders and built the levees, and the 40

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010

Ennerdale – the boundary of Forestry Commission and National Trust regimes, with regenerating Sitka in the foreground, and still-bare grassland behind. The Sitka will be cleared again and native species encouraged, meanwhile reduced sheep numbers on the hill have yet to make a mark on the landscape.

Photo: Peter Taylor

sheep have razored the banks as well as the fields. Long gone are the breeding lapwing and curlew and the flower-rich meadows, even within the borders of a National Park. It doesn’t have to be like that, of course, but an alternative would require a major cultural shift – a surrender of hard-won grazing land, uneconomic cattle instead of uneconomic sheep, restoration of streamside vegetation and meandering pools, and all to be paid for under a system of ecological service provision (water quality, flood alleviation, carbon sequestration and increased biodiversity). That is not so difficult, considering the whole upland sheep economy is paid for by the EU taxpayer anyway. All that is required is a shift in what the recipient is expected to provide. And of course, as the Lawton report may presage, such a shift is underway – conservation has finally found a way to package the whole lot into the service economy.

At the pace of cultural change But of course, a cultural shift is required, and this is slow. That’s why the National Trust keeps sheep on the hill in Ennerdale and it is Galloway cattle that come when you whistle in the woods, and not the scary-horned and potential health-and-safety nightmare of an aurochsian Heck, or a wild moose or wood bison. Cultural change is slow, and here the National Trust is committed not just to consultation with local communities, but actually implementing their wishes. The locals like the elderly and majestic Spruce and Larch and so they remain. Paths and bridleways are maintained.

The radical in me wants to lobby for a fully wild valley, ethnically cleansed of its aliens, with beaver, elk, aurochs, and boar. And if the neighbours can be convinced to keep cattle on the fell instead of sheep, then lynx would be feasible. But as we sit around the table, I know that everyone else knows that this is for future 41

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 generations to decide and we will proceed slowly. I like it when I am invited and listened to, and it is nice to give something back and experience some openminded and progressive conservation.

Walton Hill, SSSI I returned then to my own patch of the wild. Across the little B-road outside the house, lies Walton Hill, owned by the National Trust and managed in conjunction with local grazers – who kept the rights, and as part of a small landscape-scale project to maintain the Polden Hills – a string of sites of limestone grassland knolls and a mosaic of woodland that bisects the Somerset Levels. I have been walking the same few hundred metres of path around the hill for over ten years. Here I found my first bee orchid. One early spring, I watched as a goshawk pair completed their almost suicidal diving courtship, and though the wood is narrow along the side of the hill by the old windmill, there is a corner where it is dense with understorey and I never did locate their nest from which I know they reared two or three youngsters. One year I was annoyed that sheep were staying later on the hill and would eat all the orchids. I contacted the Trust’s ecologist – he told me there was not much he could do, that the grazer was tricky to control. I discovered that the original agreement was with Clark’s estate (the shoe people) and a simple letter was dispatched about responsibilities to nature (the site is also an SSSI, but I did not know that at the time). The sheep left the very next day.

Earlier this year, I noticed that the brush-cutter’s van was parked much longer than usual – long after he had cut back the brambles, nettles and old thistle stands. A little walk confirmed my fears – the chainsaws had been at work on the other side of the hill. Gone were the thickets under and around the goshawk’s hide-out of oak, maple and ash in that little quiet corner. Thirty or forty-year old hawthorns had been neatly sawed into piles. All the blackthorn and similarly aged elder had been cleared and burned. Some had been just a metre from the boundary fence which was now neat and open for all to see. Even where some thorn trees had been left at the top where they had been in open ground, they had been cleansed of bramble and their aged clematis and honeysuckle lianas hung limply a few feet from the ground. I guessed the site was being returned to “favourable condition” – the key goal for any SSSI. This had been my favourite spot. It had long ceased to be a quiet place – the farm below the wood had been converted to a skeet-shooting business, day in day out the hill now sounded like a battlefield. It complemented the now ever-present helicopter gun-ships built down the road at Yeovil Westlands. The B-road now suffered from the curse of Sat-Nav and there is a daily rush hour that starts at 7am.

Lorries trundle past throughout the night and there is a patch of road that causes them to bump and rattle their contents, as well as the foundations of the house. I often think of its former life, when the windmill provided flour and the house was a bakery for the nearby villages – it must have been so quiet!

And now, after so many years, the National Trust was another enemy of that which I love. At first sight of the clearances, I found the chain-saw ecologist on the hill and asked him about the cleansing. I didn’t talk much because my heart was 42

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010

Walton Hill – the odd maple, oak and ash will be left but hawthorn, blackthorn and elder are being cleared.

This marginal scrub accounts for roughly 20m on the slope of the hill.

Photo: Peter Taylor

beating part of anger part of grief. I made a plea for the rest of the hill and especially the stand of older sloe bushes which always put on such an amazing display. And I pointed out the forty-year elder and hawthorn and how much we in the house loved their spring show. He responded that they needed to protect the grassland which was very special but he would take into account what I had said.

Informing not consulting So – early in this October, I was concerned to see a note in the local paper that the Trust would meet with local residents one Saturday morning to outline their plan for the hill. It did not speak of consultation. My sister and I were the only people to show. The ecologist and a naturalist from Millfield, who also manage woodland nearby, were there to explain the plan. I asked if it was a consultation. They looked perplexed. No - they were outlining their plan. And he then went on to explain about limestone grassland and the rare and threatened species it contained. I said I understood a little about the issues - and was there not a debate about the common and the local, public values and pleasure and how to balance that with professional scientific, target-led conservation?

Apparently not here on Walton Hill. It had already been decreed and here was a map. It showed how in nineteen sixty-something the hill had been grassland all the way to the fence and so a lot of rare habitat had been lost. All they were doing was restoring it to its previous condition.

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 No amount of persuasion was going to alter anything. The key man was going to brazen it out and the other just kept smiling. I pointed out that they might get an extra 5% more grassland, that the grass would be shaded still by the bigger trees left standing and by the boundary wood, and that the soil where the thickets had been was already enriched. I pointed out that in ten years, the brambles had not encroached and that the grazing regime was the key to maintaining a balance. I emphasised the word balance. I talked of nest sites for blackcap and thrush, longtailed tit and bullfinch; of feeding for bees and countless insect species; of the thrill of the spring show of elder, may-blossom and blackthorn, summer clematis and honeysuckle....how though these were all common species, you would have to walk miles to find anything like the show we had here. No avail, not against the chalk-hill blue (one of a dozen small blue butterflies that all look the same to the uneducated eye) and the Lady’s bedstraw (we already had a fine meadow of these this summer and that is dependent on the right grazing regime). And they knew what they were talking about with regard to what they expected to achieve – with lots of experience at restoring grassland...and I said, ‘Okay, I am a generalist’. What do I know but from a practised ecological eye? And then at the end, the smiling man said, ‘well, if after 40 years we don’t get it, we can change the plan’.

Of course! The longer term. And here was I concerned about my own selfish patch and the next 10 or 20 years of my enjoyment. My sister remarked, ‘So, like he said, it is all an experiment’. No, I told her, ‘It is a target from headquarters. There will be a grant system somewhere. A box to tick.’ And I thought, that box will be called 'returned to favourable condition'.

I had said to the Trust’s man, as a parting plea, ‘instead of hyper-managing this last little patch of wild hill, why not buy the next one along – right next door, a meadow and hillside that would add 50% to the reserve?’ But, apparently the Trust has no spare money.

And then, as I resigned to the loss, with a little prayer as we passed the blue-berried beauty of the old sloe that he might spare that one if I made a very special plea (he didn’t – the other day it lay on its side still loaded with berries), I realised this was not the National Trust I knew. That other Trust would have remembered where I lived, that I was a local resident who cared and showed an active interest and would have visited and shared their plan and asked for feedback and listened and compromised, even if it were just for that one fine old blackthorn.

Peter Taylor is an ecological consultant and author of Beyond Conservation. He is currently working on an edited volume of rewilding material which has been published in ECOS and resulted from events held by the Wildland Network. ethos_uk@onetel.com

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Cooling off on a hot topic?

Learning from a green disagreement A remarkable debate has occurred on the BANC web site through 2010 at http://www.banc.org.uk/wordpress/debates/#climate . Whatever your views on climate change and however open minded you may or may not be on the subject, everyone can learn from ‘the Green disagreement’…

DAVID WRATHALL Fear and responsibility If you care deeply about life on Earth, can there be anything more challenging than anthropogenic global warming?

I feel as though a large part of my last few years has been taken up with pondering my complicity with a culture hell bent on self destruction. I’m a secondary science teacher and a parent. I have thoroughly enjoyed my years on this planet but I fear for the future and the next generation. I recognise I have limited influence on those around me but what should I be doing or not doing? What are the moral implications of climate change?

Towards the end of the 2010 summer, after watching the Russian forest fires burning out of control and the devastating floods in Pakistan, I began to formulate possible moral analogies to my emissions of CO2. Might it be equivalent to firing bullets into the air, not knowing where they would land or who they might kill? Or was it worse even than this, given that the excess CO2 would continue to linger decades into the future?

After contemplating these terrifying thoughts for a while, I tried to discuss the seriousness of the situation with others. I chose to speak to those I thought wise and with a measure of scientific literacy; but generally found them unwilling to enter into any serious discussion of the matter.

Breaking ranks?

Later I met one of the ‘wise’ friends I’d tried to talk to about my climate change concerns. She was clutching a book called CHILL. Apparently the book claimed global warming was a myth and that we should be much more worried about an impending ice age (the book warns of the potential for a widespread natural cooling period like the previous so called Little Ice Age, 1400-1800). I was a bit stunned but I said I would look into it.

By the time I got home I felt angry, very angry. Angry at my friend but particularly angry at Peter Taylor who had written the book. For years I have seen the evidence 45

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 for anthropogenic global warming (AGW) build and build. How could a “scientist” publish a book refuting all that I knew to be correct? Didn’t he realise the potential damage? Wasn’t it already hard enough to get people to act? Just how much more CO2 would be released because of this book?

I went on line to research the ideas in CHILL and found a book review by Alastair McIntosh, author of Hell and High Water. It was complimentary about how well the book was written, giving it four stars on Amazon, but Alastair did not feel Peter was sufficiently well qualified to make the claims he did.

I realised I needed more information than this, though, if I was to give a proper account, to my friend about why this book was wrong. Then I came across “Climate Change… A Green Disagreement” on the BANC website. This was precisely what I was looking for - an online debate between Peter Taylor and his reviewer Alastair McIntosh.

Admiring the exchanges Alastair argued from my standpoint, penning exactly the frustrations I felt when I was confronted by my friend waving Peter’s book at me. Here is an excerpt from Alastair’s opening challenge to Peter: “Your take spins out well in the likes of the Daily Express and all who are not willing to change their lifestyles… It helps such people to get off the hook by justifying inaction.”

Feeling satisfied that my views were shared by someone else willing to stand up for them and put so eloquently to Peter, I read with anticipation the response. And, somehow this surprised me, Peter’s reply was equally persuasive, well considered and backed by evidence. I continued to read the next counter by Alastair and equally vigorous riposte

by Peter. And, of course, I started to realise that both were making substantive points, and there would be no easy resolution. It is a fascinating debate to follow and I would definitely recommend anyone interested to follow it from the beginning.

There is just SO much at stake here. Not only have the authors staked their credibility on their respective positions, this is the future of life on Earth they’re talking about. Peter is adamant that the scientific and political consensus has led to a grotesque distortion of the evidence (and indeed, maintains that the consensus has been exaggerated), whilst Alastair remains unable to accept Peter’s scientific authority over that viewpoint.

As I read on, I also found it interesting to note my own reactions as they arose. For example, in a throw away sentence Peter sparked irritation as he says of another climate contrarian “who cares what [Roy Spencer] believes about evolution”. “I do”, I thought. I have an MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems and I care deeply about this branch of science. I would go so far as to say that since there is such a mountain of evidence for evolutionary theory, anyone who doesn’t believe in it has a deeply flawed understanding of reality. But then, after devoting years of study to the subject, it’s not surprising I felt this annoyance.

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Keeping precautionary As I write this in November 2010 the debate is coming to a close and the two authors are finding common ground on the need for resilience – community resilience and ecological resilience, whatever the future holds. But even when the debate is over, there will still be conflict over the main science and information that informs people’s views. Conflicting views, conflicting evidence, and conflicting action. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore sites the anecdote of the frog that will not jump out of gradually heated water and eventually cooks, as a metaphor for our society’s lack of response to global warming. Is this the reality? Are we slowly cooking? Will we take appropriate action in time? What is the appropriate action?

I don’t know. I really don’t know where the reality lies. For the moment I’m going to go with the consensus view of the IPCC but I will be keeping my eyes open wider. I’ll be examining the evidence more closely, looking for bias more keenly and maybe I’ll even have the courage to read Peter’s book. But I’ll not stop doing my damnedest to reduce carbon emissions... just in case.

David Wrathall is a secondary school science teacher. dave_wrathall@yahooo.com

Two recent books from ECOS authors suggest different scenarios for climate change, but both agree on the need for resilience of land and communities.

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A Tale of the River Bank Or The Debt in the Willows BILL ADAMS The Rat had made a bright fire in the parlour, and sat in front of it contentedly. The last light of the day was going, and the sky was a milky clear blue. The river ran dark, with the silvery leaves of the poplars, which had been falling all day, drifting slowly upon its surface. The Rat stretched his legs, and closed his eyes.

Suddenly a thunderous knocking disturbed him from his rest. It was Mole, in a state of great distress.

“Quick Ratty, we have to do something, it’s a disaster!”

“What is, my dear Mole?” The Mole hopped from foot to foot, and was wholly out of breath. “Do stop fussing and come in and tell me about it”.

With a tiny glass of last season’s sloe gin in his paw, Mole began his tale. He was not a good teller of stories, and many were the reversals and upsets in his narrative.

The Rat listened patiently, piecing it all together, and filling the Mole’s glass from time to time, until he had it clear.

“So the wild wood is to be sold”, he said.

“Yes”, said Mole, “and Toad Hall with it. Everything’s going. The wood is going to be turned into a theme park, and the river bank land sold for development”.

The Rat looked very grave. “And this is because of something that foolish Toad has done?”

“Yes, that’s it exactly. It’s another of his schemes, and his biggest yet. You know how he’s recently begun playing with money: borrowing and lending, buying and selling? It’s more exciting than motor-cars, he said. Well, anyway, he borrowed money and started the River Bank, and now it has gone to ruin”.

The Rat looked very severe. “Where did he get the money?”

“He took out a mortgage on the wild wood”, said Mole. “And Toad Hall, and the river bank. And then he started doing deals with the stoats and weasels. He lent 48

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 them money, which they deposited in his bank. Then they started buying land and houses, and he lent them the money to pay for them. Then the ferrets started a bank, and loaned the River Bank money so that Toad could increase the amount he was lending. Soon the price of land started to rise, and the Toad sold the wild wood and Toad Hall and the rest. In the end he started to guarantee to sell land he didn’t own, and the Ferrets loaned him the money to do it”.

The Rat shook his head. “That doesn’t add up, he said. Its utter nonsense”.

“Well that’s what Toad says now, of course” said the Mole, “but he didn’t think so at the time. He said he was rich beyond his wildest dreams! He was quite bucked about it”.

The Rat shuddered at the thought of the irrepressible and insufferable smugness of Toad. “What happened?” he said heavily.

“Well, the weasels stopped paying their mortgages, and the value of all the land fell, and soon the whole thing had collapsed.”

“And Toad lost the wild wood?”

“Yes. Well, you see, the weasels loaned him the money in the first place. He mortgaged everything he had, and some things he pretended he had - the wood, Toad Hall, the river bank and all the meadows. Now the weasels and stoats own the lot. And there’s no more money to keep the river clean, or look after the watermeadows. Badger’s simply gone. Nobody knows where. His home has a ‘for sale’ notice on it”.

The Rat contemplated the scale of the disaster. He thought of the dreamy river, and the quiet backwaters where the flowers smiled and the birds sang. He thought of the Otter, whose family had been expanding so much recently that one saw the fellow almost everywhere. He thought of the mysterious woodland beyond the meadows, and the world growing high and blue and dim beyond. He thought of the badger, solid and dependable and strong.

After a time, the rat sighed, and went to the cupboard. He drew out a heavy sack, which clinked as he placed it on the table. Slowly he began to draw from it a collection of old-fashioned pistols, cutlasses and cudgels.

“We are on our own now, and its time we started to look after ourselves”, he said.

“Nobody else is going to”. The Mole watched him with wide eyes.

Suddenly there was a disturbance on the river side of the house, a bright light, and the noise of an engine. A loud horn pooped imperiously.

“I say you chaps, are you at home? Come and see what I’ve got!” It was, of course, Toad. He was dressed in a dark suit, at the wheel of a vast and shining motor-boat: 49

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a sharp-fronted, pyramid-decked racing boat, ablaze with lights. Weasels, in stripy shirts, tried in vain to fend it off from the landing stage.

“Hop in you chaps! This is the real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today — in next week tomorrow! Always somebody else’s horizon!” Toad thrust out his chest and stood as tall as his dumpy frame would allow.

“Toad!” said the Rat. “What’s all this! What are you doing? Where did you get this…”, his appalled eye ran from raked decks to opulent saloon, “…boat? I thought you had lost all your money”.

“Oh, that!” said the Toad airily. Don’t you worry about that! “That’s all old hat.

None of that really mattered. Good old Badger paid all the bills: it turned out he owned the wood all along, or something. The stoats and ferrets own the River Bank 50

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 now, and the wild wood, and Toad Hall. But never mind about all that stuff now! I never really liked them anyway, that horrible rambling old house and that frankly nasty dark wood. The whole area needs development, and the stoats are going to see to that. I am going to have a wonderful new house near the new marina. And I’ve got a new job in the River Bank, which is back again bigger than ever. In fact…”

— here the toad began to swell visibly — “they’ve given me a huge salary, and a bonus on top! My dear old friends, welcome to the new world. Everything’s going to be brand-new! New house, boat, new togs, new everything!”

Toad bowed to the astonished Rat and Mole, and flourished his arm to invite them to step aboard the gleaming motor-boat before them. “Meet Admiral toad, an admirable character, Lord of the river bank! Back from disaster, saved from unjust penury and restored to his rightful place in society! Wonderful Toad! Astonishing Toad! Toad the consummate survivor!”

Very quietly, the Rat drew the pistol from the deep pocket of his coat, and began to raise his arm …

Bill Adams is Moran Professor of Conservation and Development at Cambridge University. wa12@cam.ac.uk

A freshly emerged baby toad. Part of a series which photographed the development from spawn.

Photo: Dave Pressland

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Tayside beavers – rights in the watershed?

Proposals to remove beavers on the River Tay have met with critical reactions. Many nature conservationists will regard the action as ill considered and profoundly wrong.

The River Tay beavers provide an opportunity to learn lessons about beaver behaviour and effects outside the official trials.

DEREK GOW Watch and learn or shoot and stress?

Although little is known about the distribution of the beaver population on the Tay they are known to be breeding - juveniles have been filmed playing outside their lodges - and are probably of mixed European origin - Polish, German and Scandinavian. The source population is thought to have escaped from a wildlife park in Perthshire in 2001. From that small beginning they have migrated up into Angus and other parts of east Perthshire. Estimates of the established population vary between about 30 and 100. Scottish Natural Heritage has asked the Scottish Agricultural Sciences Agency to trap the Tayside beavers and relocate them to captive situations in Britain or wild ones in relevant parts of Europe.

Beavers do not hibernate and rely instead for over-winter survival on their autumn body fat reserves coupled with ‘feeding caches’ of branches which they collect and submerge in the bottom of water courses. While these strategies assist the survival of healthy adults they are less effective for juveniles in their first year of life. These small individuals cannot retain significant fat and are therefore reliant on the strong adults retrieving food from the caches. They are a social species and depend on the close contact of their parents and older siblings for warmth. Beavers live in families based around a central monogamous pair. The splitting of these bonded units through a regime of random capture will result in significant distress. The random removal of adults by trapping in winter could easily result in the death of one year olds from starvation or hypothermia. There is no sentient animal welfare case to be made for this casual action.

I have a beaver family on my farm in Devon and have been involved with the species for many years. I know most of the centres that maintain this species in Britain. A hidden detail in the Tay agenda is the ultimate fate of the captured individuals. If they are not to be sterilised and released then there is currently no zoological facility in Britain or Europe which has the capacity to keep around 50 beavers. Even if they could be exported to Europe there is little wild space for them there as a result of either natural re-colonisations or past reintroductions. If there is therefore no space in captivity for captured individuals and no prospect of their release elsewhere then they will have to be killed in significant numbers by rifle 52

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Beavers have been in the Tay catchment since 2001- should they be allowed to stay?

Photo: www.chrisrobbins.co.uk

shots to their heads or lethal injections. It is inconceivable that SNH, the Scottish Executive and their partner organisations are not perfectly well aware of this.

An official study undertaken by Natural England suggests that once established in the wild that European beavers would be protected by EU law. This situation is however complex. Normally it would be an offence to “release or allow to escape into the wild any animal” which “is not normally resident…….to Great Britain”.

European beavers undoubtedly were a former resident and may have survived as a wild species until the 16th century. No definition of what is an ordinary resident has ever been recorded in UK law and if the Tay beavers are established then no licence may be required from any nature conservation body in Britain for further releases.

Genetic nit-picking The Tay beavers in the opinion of SNH are not the ‘right beavers’. To understand this position it must be considered that by the beginning of the 20th century the beaver population in Western Europe had been reduced by human hunting to less than 400 individuals. These were confined to small populations in France, Germany and Norway. A study undertaken for SNH of the semi-fossil remains of beavers in Britain suggested that those in Scotland were more closely allied to the French population than any other. On the basis however that the English sample were closer in type to modern Scandinavian beavers a decision was made to use these for Knapdale. The genetic difference between these populations is insignificant and physical abnormalities have been widely recorded in Europe where reintroduced populations 53

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 have been formed from these single source stocks alone. In Eastern Europe a population of perhaps 2000 beavers survived. These are much more genetically variable than those in the west and will readily interbreed. Both subspecies are already mixed throughout their current wild range as a result of natural recolonisation and past reintroductions. As far as the wider ecology of the beaver is concerned the otters that hunt in the pools they create, the frogs that spawn in their wetlands and the woodpeckers which bore holes in the dead wood they provide will be un-influenced by what type of beaver created the habitat. If the restoration of the beaver in Britain is based on the significant ecological benefit they bring to wetland environments for other species then this dogma makes little sense.

Tayside – what we can study It is to the credit of SNH and their partner organisations that they persevered with the return of the beaver for so long and were ultimately successful with a licence grant for the Knapdale Trial. Those involved with the project however recognise its limits. It will not answer many of its critic’s queries regarding game-fish interaction with beavers or the impact of beavers in intensively developed agricultural environments. The Tay beavers are living in a landscape which affords these study opportunities in abundance.

Knapdale is an unusual site in respect of its ownership being largely held by the Forestry Commission. Throughout most of mainland Britain the opportunity to replicate projects of this type will be negligible. The single largest consummate challenge for those who wish to restore the beaver will be the development of a process which works in landscapes with multiple landownership. This is a social rather than scientific exercise. European beavers are a well studied species. We know the benefits they bring to riparian habitats and the challenges which arise from their presence in the contemporary countryside. There are effective blueprints in Europe which show that the presence of beavers in developed landscapes is quite possible and that where issues do arise these can be managed. These projects rely absolutely on ‘whole-community’ engagement. The fact that beavers have survived on the Tay for some time now with no recorded conflict suggests either a degree of tolerance from private landowners or their pragmatic resolution of any arising issues.

Another perspective on the learning opportunity provided by the River Tay beavers has been summarised by naturalist and beaver expert Roy Dennis: "It seems to me that nature is trying to tell us something with its Tayside beaver colony.

We spend so much of our time and energy and resources trying to persuade nature to do our bidding, to operate within conditions we impose on it. Here is an all too rare opportunity to bear witness as nature unfolds the direct opposite of that process, as nature imposes new conditions on us. We should watch and learn and delight in the possibilities that will flow whenever we are willing to give nature its head."

The beaver population on the Tay is of considerable importance. Although its creation is unconventional its existence offers significant opportunity. All that is 54

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 required to develop this resource is an informed, unbiased appraisal of its worth coupled with a flexible approach to its development. If Scottish Natural Heritage decides to remove the Tayside beavers, the decision will have nothing to do with welfare and little with legality.

Derek Gow runs a wildlife mitigation service and the Westcountry Wildlife Photography Centre. derekjgow@aol.com

Woodland wildlife and amenity at risk? Campaigners voice concerns over the future of the Forest of Dean if forestry land is sold off.

There is much concern over the effects of potential land and woodland sales arising from the Public Bodies Bill currently before Parliament.

The Forestry Minister Jim Paice has has guaranteed protection "of our most valuable and biodiverse forests" and stated that "full measures will remain in place to preserve the public benefits of woods and forests under any new ownership arrangements". Another pledge is that "public rights of way and access will be unaffected, statutory protection for wildlife will remain in force and there will be grant incentives for new planting". Those who are opposed to the measures and cynical of these Government guarantees point out that once land has been sold it may be subject to different agendas with no commitment to long term care for wildlife and other public benefits. There are also worries that some forests could make rich pickings for supplying biomass power stations, given the incentives and government's drive on renewables.

Photo: The Forester

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Nature in Austerity ECOS asked a range of people from across the conservation sector for their views on the effects of the government spending review and the emergence of the Big Society…

Quality matters PETER SHIRLEY Almost whatever happens over the next few months and years the nature conservation world will still be immensely more wealthy than our colleagues of a generation or two ago could ever have imagined. Major funding streams such as the National Lottery and Landfill Tax will still be there, as will at least some of the Aggregates Tax money. The Lottery is perhaps the only funding stream which is increasing its budget at the moment because of increased ticket sales. Membership organisations like the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts might suffer from reduced membership, but they will still have hundreds of thousands of members rather then the few, or tens, of thousands of members of 20 or 30 years ago. And many of those members will be paying enhanced subscriptions through their monthly rather than annual payments.

A glass half full?

I remember when the average Wildlife Trust had one, often part-time, member of staff and a turnover of a few thousand pounds a year. I guess the 47 Trusts turnover well in excess of £100m a year today. To this can be added the turnover and activities of in-house and other ecological consultancies. Many of these are doing work directly related to laws and regulations introduced as a direct result of their parent bodies’ lobbying and policy activities.

Despite all of this activity (and that of statutory bodies) we are told that we are failing to adequately conserve nature. A cynic may well wonder, therefore, what we are doing with our enhanced resources. Of course one answer is that nature conservation is like public health – looking after and improving it is a pursuit that could absorb infinite resources, but we do have to work within finite bounds. There will never be ‘enough’ but it is difficult to know what is ‘adequate’.

This leads me to a couple of thoughts. The first is that whilst many NGOs fulminate against society’s underlying desire for growth, and indeed identify this as one of the main threats to nature, they fall into the trap of at least partly measuring their own worth and progress through the growth they achieve. As ecologically based organisations should they not have more understanding of cyclical processes, of the natural fluctuations which occur in ecosystems, populations, and, yes, in the fortunes of organisations? We should maybe not be so frightened of retracting from time to time.

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Distinguishing wants and needs If we can accept this as part of the natural way of things then let us use it to re-define, refine and re-align ourselves. Let us think about what really needs to be done, rather than what we want to be done. For example do we need to effectively farm species for re-introduction when at least some of the species involved seem to be making their own way here? Do we need to go to the nth degree of DNA analysis to separate what we have up to now treated as a single species? If after hundreds of years of study we could find no appreciative difference in behaviour and requirements then perhaps relatively broad-brush conservation measures will still do the job. Less reductionism and more pragmatism seems to me to be the order of the day.

Challenges are part of life. The current one of achieving more (or even the same) with less is certainly not welcome, but equally it may not be disastrous. Being busy can sometimes mask not being very effective – standing back and identifying what really works might mitigate the negative impacts of the impending period of reduced activity.

Whenever you approach funders, good times or bad, initially there is never any money to spare. But even in the worst of times there is always some money for something – and especially for well conceived projects which meet key needs. The present Government is demonstrating this all the time at the moment.

Announcements alternate between cuts and ‘new’ money.

Peter Shirley is former Director of the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country.

PeterShirley@blueyonder.co.uk

Surviving austerity - an urban, third sector perspective ALISON MILLWARD Business as usual?

After 30 years of continuous activity by the most recent generation of urban nature conservation organisations, we know what we need to do and how to do it successfully. So, despite the uncertainties that have been created by the Comprehensive Spending Review and the possibilities presaged in the Natural Environment White Paper, we would undoubtedly want to continue delivering our core business activities: • auditing the natural assets and biodiversity we have and who can and can't access them; 57

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 • designating the best of the sites - statutory and non-statutory; • defending threatened wildlife rich places from destructive development; • enhancing diversity of habitats, species and users everywhere; • creating more habitat and linking up the fragments to strengthen green infrastructure; • developing planning policy to benefit people and wildlife; • campaigning for legislation to require other sectors to do their duty; • improving access and people’s ability to appreciate greenspace and wildlife; • involving local people in designing, delivering and managing natural assets; • working through partnerships; • bringing nature into local communities that others can't or won't reach; • designing and delivering bigger and better, landscape-scale projects for a new civil society in a changed climate.

We have the evidence to prove that accessible natural green space of high quality in the right locations, generates substantial ecological, social and economic benefits, and is essential to the achievement of a sustainable future for our urban settlements.1

But, business just got harder because of...

The loss of hundreds of local authority posts, especially in parks and planning departments, will undoubtedly slow the pace of change we have otherwise been enjoying in recent years driven by the requirement for PPG17 green space audits; the development and implementation of countless biodiversity, green space and green infrastructure strategies; and the expansion of ranger services and their role in supporting the establishment and involvement of many new ‘Friends Groups’.

Job losses in the statutory agencies will reduce their contribution to partnership working with the third sector at a strategic level on Local Biodiversity Action Plans, Biosphere Reserve proposals and Landscape Partnership Schemes. The transfer of land assets from these agencies to private owners could result in a loss of quality of biodiversity, with economic goals being pursued too narrowly as the new priority. The third sector may be unwilling and indeed unable to take on the management of these assets, without additional funding, let alone purchase them at a market value in urban areas. The privatisation of such land would result in a substantial loss of access to natural green space in urban areas.

The demise of regional planning functions is the most serious threat to delivering landscape scale change, across political boundaries and from mountain top to the 58

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 sea. In the West Midlands alone we have 18 landscape-scale projects in design that had been underpinned by policy in the now defunct Regional Spatial Strategy.

Loss of evidence gathering and the advocacy role of CABE on the value of urban green space is a significant blow, though there is encouraging evidence that GreenSpace and GreenLINK will step into this breach. Their recent publication Blue Sky Green Space2 is a most welcome and timely contribution to the debate on the value of green space.

No funds for land management: Assumptions that the third sector will be willing and able to take on additional land ownership and management responsibilities with no additional funding, are one might say premature.

Timing of funds and income: Assumptions that the third sector would be willing to be paid in arrears against outcomes achieved - a mechanism described as 'cashable carrots' by a civil servant to me recently - is naive. The lessons from the sector's involvement in Welfare to Work during the late 1990s showed that third sector organisations cannot afford to take the huge financial risks associated with delivering large scale employability enhancement initiatives of this type without being paid in part, and up front, for the services to be rendered. Motivating the long term unemployed and reluctant 'volunteers' is tough. We know we can do this but society must be willing to pay the going rate and up front for such a valuable and cost effective service.

On a more positive note...

Fewer people in the public sector will require them to work more efficiently together and with the third sector, to deliver policy. Hopefully, the status of the third sector will rise as a result of this as successful delivery agents of landscapescale projects, and as enablers of local community action to help people advocate, influence and effect change in their own neighbourhoods.

Many hundreds of millions of pounds of funding from BIG, Heritage Lottery Fund and other lottery distributors will continue to be available until at least 2019 to support landscape-scale and neighbourhood-level projects, with a significant relaxation of the requirements of applicants to raise cash match funding.

There is no lack of community-based organisations eager to take more control over the care of their local green spaces, but they cannot do that without support from their public and third sector enablers or access to capital funding. They would relish the opportunity to contribute their local efforts to the achievement of landscape-scale change and would enjoy the journey of getting to know their neighbours better, so contributing to the development of a more civil big society on home ground. These people really do make a massive environmental and social difference to their neighbourhoods, with minimal amounts of external funding, and deserve to be better respected for it.

What we need to push hard for now...

Defining the services: We need to agree and articulate the essential nature and value of the ecological services and multiple social services urban nature supplies to 59

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 society. Having done that, we need to design, justify and deliver ecological networks that link mountain top to the sea and prescribe their function within the towns and cities that they permeate. We must offer suggestions as to how we feel society should best pay for ecological services, be it through taxation of service users, incentives for land managers - an equivalent stewardship scheme for urban green space perhaps - and investment funds for new green businesses.

Sustainable neighbourhoods: We also need a better definition of what a sustainable neighbourhood looks like - the balance of green to grey, the composition of the green, who looks after it, what it contributes to the local economy, and how it contributes to social and economic well-being.

Enterprise and integration: We need to be even more entrepreneurial, to play our part in the development of the green economy, spawning social enterprises and Community Interest Companies as career development opportunities for third sector employees. We will need many more green businesses, large and small to deliver the commissions of local budget holders such as schools, hospitals, GPs, care homes, private companies and corporate bodies with significant land holdings, in the emerging new world of localised decision making. Developing much stronger links with the health sector to persuade them to divert more of their ringfenced funding into preventative medicine and therefore into Green Gyms, access improvements to local green spaces, and the enablers of involvement is a must.

We know how to do all this and do it well in our towns and cities. We just need the right plans at local and regional level, more mutually symbiotic and egalitarian partnerships, and a range of fiscal and charitable incentives to get on with it.

References 1.

2.

Burls, A, Luscombe, G and Millward, A.(2010) Discover Yourself Outside: new landscapes for a civil society in a changing climate'. UK Man and Biosphere Urban Forum. Available at www.urbanforum.co.uk.

GreenLINK (2010) Blue Sky Green Space: understanding the importance of retaining good quality parks and green spaces, and the contribution they make to improving people's lives. Available at www.greenspace.org.uk.

Dr Alison Millward is director of Alison Millward Associates, Chair of the Birmingham & Black Country Wildlife Trust's People and Wildlife Committee and an expert adviser to Natural England and Heritage Lottery Fund. alison.millward@talk21.com

Starting in the cities - biodiversity for all?

MATTHEW THOMAS Michael McCarthy, writing on the recent Convention on Biodiversity deal in The Independent, said “Biodiversity loss has long been the Cinderella of global politics.” In that case, urban biodiversity has long been Cinderella’s pet rabbit – so 60

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Bringing nature to where people are is part of the answer.

Photo: Matthew Thomas

utterly disregarded, it doesn’t even get into the narrative. And yet the urban nature conservation movement (is there one?) holds a key to solving many of the ‘heavyweight’ biodiversity issues of our time; namely, the mainstreaming of biodiversity conservation into popular thought. Urban, after all, is where the majority of people spend most of their time and therefore, where most people form views about what is important.

White Paper wishes Many nature conservationists are looking to the publication of next year’s Natural Environment White Paper, geed on by the Biodiversity Convention deal in Negoya, to mark a leap forward for wildlife. It will be wonderful if it clarifies and strengthens the NERC Act biodiversity duty for public bodies. But it will be truly remarkable if it 61

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 begins to consider the huge opportunities opened up by better engaging people in biodiversity as a part of their everyday lives.

The White Paper could, for example, focus on equality of access - delivering biodiversity in urban areas, where people are. Currently, ‘biodiversity offsets’ (if they happen) are more likely to result in urban biodiversity being exported to distant, rugged mountainsides, where land is cheap and people are free to visit, provided they have a four-wheel drive and crampons (OK I’m exaggerating, but you get the point). The White Paper could build stronger links between the food we eat and our environment – for example requiring better, independently commissioned information in the supermarkets about the effects of eating particular foods on biodiversity. It could create tax breaks for people who want to encourage biodiversity close to where people live and work, rather than plant conifer forests in the Flow Country (remember that?).

Meanwhile the Prime Minister has said he wants a Big Society – more people involved in doing things in their neighbourhoods. That sounds like a great opportunity for local authorities to better involve local communities in their environment. Despite the laudable aims of the ‘90s, Biodiversity Action Planning has singularly failed to break out much beyond the ‘usual suspects’ of the nature conservation world to engage (dare I say it?) ‘normal’ people. Consequently a huge rift usually remains between the aspirations of nature conservationists and the expectations of local communities. Big Society could pave the way for nature conservationists to be more focused on ways of listening to, engaging with and involving people, but there is also a risk the looming cuts will push us to just pull up the drawbridge altogether. More information and support is needed from government to help local authorities and others make Big Society happen for wildlife.

Changing our habits The cuts might mean we’ll have to think and work differently. Urban nature conservationists, working to create new habitats in and around our housing estates, are already helping to build cohesive communities, to encourage healthier, more active lifestyles, and to engage young people (Have you been to John Little’s Clapton Park Estate recently?), so why shouldn’t Housing, Social Services, Health and Education help to fund them? How many Local Biodiversity Action Plan (LBAP) partnerships receive any funding from these areas? Nature conservation should be properly integrated, with clear, widely understood aims and objectives, or it risks dropping off the agenda when times are hard. Local Record Centres are a case in point here. In recent years LRCs have hugely advanced biodiversity data collation and are vitally important for professional ecologists, but many continue to depend on the support of a fragile web of public funding. Unless LRCs can make their data interesting, relevant and widely available to local communities, building on the work of iSpot for example, they will always be a soft option in hard times.

Cuts, Big Society and the White paper - advance or retreat?

Are profound changes about to occur in conservation activity? Well perhaps we are on a cusp – or is it a knife edge? On one side the cuts are snapping – nature 62

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 conservationists are looking at pulling back from the wider countryside, let alone urban areas, to focus on ‘zones of biodiversity delivery’, but what about the vast ‘tracts of biodiversity abandonment’ which would, no doubt, include the towns and cities?

Land banking and biodiversity offsetting risk exporting nature from urban areas to consolidate it in remote countryside, where land is cheap and only ecologists dwell.

But on the other side, perhaps the White Paper, distant Negoya and Big Society offer a real opportunity for biodiversity to be integrated into society. ‘Biodiversity for all’ can be a reality. Yes, we do need to look at larger areas where biodiversity is re-created and enhanced, rather than focusing on fenced nature reserves, but why can’t these areas include our towns and cities? On the South Downs, my ‘home patch’, defuse nitrogen pollution and soil fertility rise, coupled with neglect, are some of the biggest threats to biodiversity. But if one of the main sources of air pollution is the car and the land needs to be grazed by sheep eaten by people, then the links between town and country become clearer and need integrated solutions.

Bringing nature to where people are is part of the answer.

As a certain Professor Lawton has recently written “We will not achieve a stepchange in nature conservation in England without society accepting it to be necessary, desirable, and achievable.” So I suppose the cuts really mean a choice – whether to mope down into Cinder’s territory, or, rather like Countryfile’s Matt Baker, to take a leap of opportunity into those dancin’ shoes and head for the urban limelight (and that’s quite enough from me!).

Matthew Thomas is the Ecologist for Brighton and Hove City Council. The views expressed in this article are his own and not necessarily those of his employer. matthew.thomas@brightonhove.gov.uk

Can we make progress amidst the cuts?

JOHN FOSTER The recent Lawton Report demonstrates that, in spite of all the effort and money allocated, we are still not very good at protecting biodiversity. Regardless of the current political trends it would be high time for a reappraisal. However, whilst the current spending review offers us an opportunity, it also poses some grave risks - especially if it is pushed through too quickly. Defra produced a Discussion Document to prompt views on the coming White paper, with questions for stakeholders and the general public.

This is a welcome example of open government, but disappointingly there are some leading questions. In any case, cuts of 29% will have real impact on nature conservation - especially when it is under the same heading as the partially protected Flood Control.

Set out below are some thoughts on what the conservation sector should prioritise as we look to influence the White Paper and cling onto recent worthwhile progress.

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Wildlife sites - thinking big and joining up The greatest advance in terrestrial biodiversity conservation would come from setting up landscape-scale Conservation Areas. Most Wildlife Trusts are already primed for this, including cross-boundary plans within regions, and other contributors to this issue emphasise this agenda, including Tony Whitbread and Alison Millward. The need exists to retain (at least) part of the existing network of Natura 2000 Sites, NNRs, LNRs, SSSIs and County Wildlife Sites (or their equivalents), but these would take on the additional function of being colonisation sources (slowly in some cases, eg ancient woodlands; rapidly in others, eg many wetlands). Necessarily, these large areas would normally be a mixture of pieces of land held by the public and voluntary sectors.

These large areas must be appropriately managed. Low-intensity outdoor grazing is essential for many types of grassland, wetland, heathland and wood-pasture, but it does not come across well in conventional farm economics. These do not really include externalities such as conservation and animal welfare.

New opportunities or damage limitation?

All the above activity will cost money at a time of financial restraint. Also, decisions will need to be taken at the local level, including at the local authority context and alongside bodies including Wildlife Trusts. This will bring political problems of postcode lotteries. I foresee problems with the introduction of the Big Society if the voluntary sector is restricted by funds. My many years as a Trustee of a local County Wildlife Trust taught me that a substantial part of its money has been grants and contracts from local and central government. In addition, volunteers will have to be well trained if they are to be productive enough to contribute to Big Society ideals. Many voluntary sector organisations are very centralised and topdown. A very basic flaw is that central government is dictating to local government how it should take local decisions.

Much public land will be needed for the large areas of biodiversity conservation.

This must be determined before areas are given up for disposal. Will anyone buy such land if biodiversity and access limit the possibilities for development? Much of this public land, especially the NNRs, will be designated as Special Areas of Conservation, and therefore its disposal and use will be subject to stringent control, including some from European law. Unfortunately, this will come at a time when the Coalition Government may feel the need to be macho about European Regulations and Directives. It will be a difficult time to allocate resources to rare and threatened habitats in Southern and Eastern Europe, but we must strive to protect biodiversity abroad - and not just in Europe.

John Foster previously lectured in Environmental Sciences (including Conservation Management) for 32 years at Hatfield Polytechnic/University of Hertfordshire. He was a Trustee of the Hertfordshire and Middlesex Wildlife Trust for many years, and has been a Chair of his local Constituency Labour Party. Johnfoster29@hotmail.com

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Nature and Big Society - seeing through the baggage GAVIN SAUNDERS Austerity, like freedom, health and plenty, is a relative term. Its meaning depends on what it’s being compared against. Anyone losing their job in the midst of the present cuts, and as a consequence risking their home, their family’s quality of life, and their own confidence in their career, is certainly entitled to bemoan the situation. But for the rest of us, we should be cautious about the adjectives we grab for. We are certainly facing a period of having less money to play with. But is it austere?

Winners and losers There seems, over the last few months, to be a strange philosophical ambivalence within the conservation sector about our collective reaction to what is going on.

That may be partly because for those in Natural England, it is just another shake up in an organisation for whom the dust has never really had time to settle between one upheaval and the next. Or it may be because those in the voluntary sector see themselves doing quite nicely from the pickings of the public sector, taking on some of what the state jettisons, and hoping to gain the necessaries to do so. Or it may be because there is a sneaking agreement with the Coalition’s mood music about the exigency of reducing the deficit.

Or indeed it may be because we’re all too professional to show our true feelings (I watched a Natural England manager, whom I admire, deliver the grim news to a meeting the other day that the impressive capacity and ability his team had developed over the past year to churn out Higher Level Stewardship agreements, is about to be garrotted. He did so with breathtaking equanimity. Or perhaps it shows that some of us can see pros as well as cons – opportunity as well as pain – in what is befalling us.

What buys influence?

More money will not, ultimately, secure the future of wildlife, or human interaction with wildlife. It sure helps though, and when it is scarce, respect for nature is at greater risk of being put to one side as more immediate needs take over. We all know that if the UK’s food security is threatened, to give a very real example, most of the painstaking work to piece back together wildlife habitats across the landscape may well be lost, either temporarily or for good.

But money is only a tool to buy us time to try and renew people’s understanding that nature itself is more valuable than cash. And that renewal will only be nurtured by bringing people closer to nature, personally, collectively and economically. That closeness, in turn, will not be nurtured by conservation being done ‘for’ people, by large, glossy, cash-rich conservation bodies (please give generously so we can 65

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 continue saving wildlife on your behalves). It requires people to connect as individuals with the natural world, by taking part, taking a stake, and taking control of their natural surroundings in the full knowledge of the richness contained there.

If that logic has any truth, then the task for conservation is to embrace the Big Society, big time. It will be harder for those still in the public sector to do so, because this Government does not seem to want to hear solutions from those personae non-grata who still represent big government. Instead it wants to hear the solutions from people themselves. Some conservation NGOs seem to be trying to position themselves as representing ‘the people’ and hence being worthy of being heard. If they succeed in the short term, they will still fall flat on their faces in due course if they cannot demonstrate the sort of community connections which localism really demands.

Making the link to localism The challenge is to grab the localism agenda and show what conservation already does to encourage a Big Society, and where it does not, to damn well start doing it. Seizing that agenda means, for one thing, recognising that the idea of the Big Society was not invented by David Cameron. Big Society is just a simplistic and rather partial new slogan for something many of the more enlightened people in the environment and social movements have practiced – quietly and without political fanfare – for many years. It is about getting people to take control of their own lives and surroundings, rather than expecting the state to make decisions and take action on their behalves. It is an inherently positive notion. What is so disappointing is that the idea has become mixed up with the drive to reduce public expenditure, itself driven by ideology as much as economic necessity. As a result, it also behoves us to shout about the true cost of creating a Big Society. Social mobilisation takes time, and costs money. It needs to be seeded, nurtured, facilitated and supported. It may in the short term actually cost more than the status quo.

The upside of reform - ditching some bad habits?

Meanwhile, as the money gets tighter and public bodies’ finances are slashed, there are going to be many things we can no longer afford to do. Will the loss of financial confidence have an up side? Perhaps it may shake us out of the sleepwalking deadness of BAP (Biodiversity Action Planning) language that has the recent conservation era. Perhaps it will force us to stop talking about nature in ways which only conservationists understand. Perhaps we need a chill wind to blow through our professional culture, before we can reawaken ourselves to the warmth of nature as an emotional and social part of being human, rather than an objectivised set of numbers and functions.

Similarly there are attitudes within ‘corporate’ nature conservation which, if exposed to an icy chill, might be recast – or cast out - to the benefit of the sector as a whole: the attitude that sees the public, or the farmer, as a transgressor who needs to be contained; the view which hides behind legislation to prevent flexible social and economic engagement with the landscape; and the approach that sees 66

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education and public involvement as simply a means to get people to do what we want them to do.

So I for one do not feel cause for unmitigated gloom in the face of what is happening. I am employed by the state – the Forestry Commission – and I have no idea what the future holds for me if I choose to try and stay where I am. But nevertheless, though I question the motives of those in Government who are creating this new climate, I can see that this is a test we as conservationists should, if we are worth anything, be able to pass.

Gavin Saunders is project manager for the Neroche Scheme on the Somerset/Devon border.

The views expressed here are his own. gavin.saunders@forestry.g

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Landscapes in austerity – lessons from the pressures facing AONBs DAVID BLAKE The following is very much my own take on the current situation of financial restraint and policy change and what the future might hold. It should not be taken as AONB policy, nor should it be assumed that any of my colleagues would agree with even one syllable of what I have written here.

Controlling the change Yes, we are experiencing cuts, but then we have been in an increasingly difficult financial environment for some years now and what is different since the election is the rate, intensity and nature of change. Change is a controversial subject. I was recently invited to take part in Natural England’s Leadership programme where about 50 of us, mostly Natural England officers, discussed how they and their organisation can cope with the challenges ahead. It quickly became obvious that if you have instigated change, if you are in control of the speed and form of change that occurs, then it is exciting, inspiring and has a sense of adventure. However, if you have just realised that the things that you thought were protected and secure are now vulnerable and transitory, if change is being imposed upon you by external forces (particularly from ‘above’), if the goals that you once aimed for have been removed and the future made bewilderingly unclear, then it is invariably unwelcome and feared - understandably so.

So here is the choice: are we going to bow our heads and endure, or are we going to drive and direct change towards a future that we have envisioned?

This dichotomy was felt keenly across the English Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs). AONBs range from areas such as Cannock Chase, Arneside and Silverdale, and the Solway Coast all of which are between 50 km2 and 120 km2. At this scale they have simple partnership structures and small budgets. At the larger scale they are more complex partnerships, such as Cotswolds, North Pennines and North Wessex Downs that cover almost 2,000 km2 each. Our capacity to absorb financial cuts, our ability to gain external funds and the level of political support we enjoy from our local government sponsors varies greatly. For some AONBs the current situation offers opportunities and challenges in equal measures, for others it could sound the death knell for hard working partnerships and their dedicated teams.

All in it together The AONBs have small teams, typically about five staff, some of whom will be shared with another organisation or part-time and we are experienced at levering in funding; but we are almost exclusively reliant upon exchequer funding of one kind or another, and this is definitely a weakness as we face a future characterised 68

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 by ‘small government’. Recognising our similarities and the strength that lies in unity, we have decided to approach the future as a family, supporting each other whenever possible and collaborating wherever we can gain advantages from doing so. There are 49 AONBs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and within our teams and partnerships we hold a wealth of skills, expertise and knowledge. We may be able to procure services together or share staff resources. This is made all the easier as we have been working more closely together in recent years and collaborating more with our colleagues in National Parks.

In many respects, AONB Partnerships offer a model that is fortuitously and ideally suited to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

• We work in partnership with local communities, which helps us understand the Big Society rhetoric; • We work across administrative and thematic borders. At a time when regional boundaries are disappearing, the boundaries of Local Enterprise Partnerships are appearing and cross-cutting themes such as climate change are assuming top priority, this is a vital characteristic of a fit-for-purpose body.

• We connect the strategic with the local just as a new government decides that “localism” will be one of their guiding principles. We can drive action forward at all levels and all sectors in a collaborative, coordinated fashion.

• We are highly cost effective and add value right across communities, the environment and the economy at a time when government and business are striving to be more joined up, smarter and leaner.

• We can give practical expression to concepts such as ecosystem services and the Ecological Restoration Zones of the Lawton Report.

• We communicate a shared vision for the future of our most cherished landscapes that inspires people far and wide. Who doesn’t need a bit of inspiration now and then?

This may be a period of radical and painful change. But there are opportunities in this for the folk who are prepared to grasp them, and its not just AONBs that can do this. I can’t think of a nature conservation organisation that does not have a role in the future, but rising up to grasp that opportunity may be beyond the means of some organisations: working in partnership and a collaborative approach is perhaps the only way forward.

Dave Blake is Project Development Officer with Cranborne Chase & West Wiltshire Downs AONB. The views expressed here are his own.

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Shaping the Nature of England – Defra’s discussion document JOHN BACON The Natural Environment White Paper consultations The Defra consultation on this White Paper was launched on 26 July with a closing date for responses of October 30. The Papers presented 15 questions for consideration. Immediately after the closing date the Defra NEWP Team held two one day workshops, in Birmingham and Bristol on a first come first served basis.

Some 50 to 60 organisational representatives attended both workshops representing the countryside and nature conservation government and nongovernment/voluntary sectors. The briefings included a presentation from Richard Benyon the Under-Secretary for Natural Environment and Fisheries. The NEWP team had also held workshops for staff from Defra Departments.

We were told that 350 full responses had been received by the NEWP Team by the closing date along with several thousand responses to their short survey. The website now states over 13,000 responses were received in total which the NEWP Team will be working through. They have additionally now published further resources to help organisations facilitate grassroots engagement. A Guide for Facilitators, a Briefing Note for Participants, and a Feedback Form can be found on its website at: http://ww2.defra.gov.uk/environment/natural/whitepaper/ The deadline for returning the feedback forms from any grassroots engagement is 31 December 2010. There is to be a ‘Water’ White Paper developed by June 2011 in parallel with this Environment one.

Evidence base This is the first environmental “white paper” for 20 years. The previous one had little mention of climate change as an issue – this is an indication of the development of the climate science base since that time and the need for this current review, which is intended to set a policy and action framework for the long term.

There are many statistics that tell of both successes, but mostly failures, of environmental policies since the 1940s; for example it is a sad reflection of past failures that 19 out of 45 priority habitats are currently assessed as degraded.

Defra is keen to see accepted the huge value of all the many benefits that the environment delivers for society. Their website sets these out in various reports and reviews e.g. National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA), The Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity (TEEB), Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing countries (REDD).

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Personal observations My involvement in helping to provide a written response for VINE (Values In Nature and the Environment) to the White Paper and attendance at the Birmingham Workshop have confirmed in my own mind a few observations: Population and resources: It is a salutary lessen that world Governments did not head the warnings of the 1960s when books such as The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome in 1972 urged a change of direction. If actions to find, agree and introduce a policy of limiting human population growth had been successful then the last 50 years would not have been wasted and we would not now be facing a world population that will soon exceed 9 billion. When you dig down really deep you find that all our current environmental problems stem from that population growth tied to the understandable wish for all people to have a standard of living that approaches that in the western world.

Implications of resource constraints: The Earth’s natural resources are used in every way to support the life systems of the continually expanding human population but no longer can these be taken for granted. As the availability of resources becomes limited, global population migration will become common place on a scale that will lead to huge social tensions.

Everything’s connected, so our own small steps count: The issues surrounding climate change have perhaps for the first time brought home to governments just how much ‘everything we do relies and depends on everything we do’ – with grateful acknowledgement to the Honda advert!

A global outlook: So clearly there is a critical need to reassess priorities for the management of nature conservation and the environment not only in England and the UK BUT EVEN MORE ACROSS THE WHOLE OF PLANET EARTH. We are a species running out of control and history only predicts an unhappy ending for such species!

Out of our misery?: As an aside: perhaps in a wicked pessimistic moment we should hope that large, or as we now understand even ‘small’ asteroids, (Ref: BBC2 Horizon 3 November 2010 – The Good, The Bad and the Ugly) may save us the agony of a long drawn out and painful decline … and so put an end to a more painful and slower decline which will result from disease and resource shortages!

Taking responsibility in a global context: So if we graciously ignore the obvious temptation to believe that there is a hidden agenda of political and fiscal objectives – and I think the crisis that is facing the Earth means that we should - then the coalition government is to be congratulated on initiating this White Paper. That is must be converted into long-sighted and achievable action - not just here in the UK but even more importantly at an international global level - is now crucial. Yes we have to set an example here in England and the UK if we are to be listened to, but global action is now the priority.

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 Defra’s bold efforts: Those that have sent in written responses or attended the workshops know that choosing the best policies and actions is going to be a huge task. From what I saw of the Defra White Paper Team I was impressed with their approach to the task, their clearly displayed organizing skills, and their determination and commitment to make a difference. We should all be sending them constructive thoughts and positive vibes to help them in their huge task. They need all the help they can get.

Creating a groundswell: Then of course we will have to see whether our Government and governments across the world will be courageous enough to take steps that sometimes will be unpopular with the majority of the population?

Internet lobbying groups (e.g.www.avaaz.org; www.foe.org.uk; organisations@1010uk.org) have for the first time provided those in the environmental society with a way to let their voices be heard on a scale that demands attention. There is a groundswell developing – the question is can it be made large enough to achieve the difference that is needed?

Population measures – on the radar?

Amongst all the strategic issues which influence the context for wildlife conservation, the most difficult and contentious policy area is that of trying to limit population increase. A European country has recently encouraged people to have larger families because of the need for there to be enough young people to support the burgeoning elderly population. Certain religions have moral policies that prohibit followers using family planning aids despite their clear adverse effects on individual/global poverty and suffering. China has taken a lead with its one child policy because it could see the problems of over population coming its way, but even with their controlling communist political system it has not been popular. How much more difficult is it for democratic governments to make progress where individual freedom is so prized! The ‘freedom of the individual’ on this one issue puts at risk the future of the human species. Environmental history shows that humans do not take remedial action until situations become critical – are we approaching that point when population control is no longer the unthinkable? Or do we go blindly on like lemmings over the cliff edge?

John Bacon is a founder member and current Chair of VINE (www.vineproject.org.uk). A 40 year career in nature conservation was spent working to manage National Nature Reserves and SSSIs variously for the National Trust, Nature Conservancy, Nature Conservancy Council and English Nature. Now retired he has returned to where he started, wearing a ‘volunteers’ hat!

Over the last two decades he has expanded his focus from wanting to help solve nature conservation problems on to world environmental issues because of the direct causal linkages he has recognised. The views expressed above are entirely his own.

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Book Reviews

NATURE’S SPECTACLE The World’s First National Parks and Protected Places John Sheail Earthscan, 2010, 347 pages Hbk, £65, ISBN 978-1-84971-129-6 In November 2010, as this review was being written, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) reached an agreement which commits 193 countries to protect 17 per cent of their terrestrial land area for biodiversity. With this, another step has been taken in the often unrecognised and unappreciated efforts around the globe to manage land for the benefit of more than just human needs. But where and how did

this altruistic concern for nature begin?

John Sheail’s meticulously researched book provides some answers.

There are many types of history and history books. This volume is a global review of the national policy and legislative background to the development of protected areas from the mid-ninetieth to mid-twentieth century. For those working to support the CBD’s current goal of a “comprehensive effectively managed and ecologically representative network” of protected areas it is a worthwhile read, providing the context behind much of the protected area estate we have inherited.

Nature’s Spectacle charts the development of what could loosely be called the ‘western’ concept of National Parks and reserves (‘loosely’ because much of this development happened in the colonised lands of the south). The development of Parks came about thanks to a combination of factors which included: advanced mapping and surveying techniques to categorise and define land tenure (of course generally overruling or ignoring pre-colonial governance structures); the rapid development of the railway (and the need to find supplementary ways of funding expansion such as tourism); the emergence of the middle classes with a passion to experience ‘scenery’; the need to ‘manage’ publicly owned land not suitable for agriculture; and a growing awareness that rapid habitat destruction and resource use was putting at risk water and forest resources and reducing the game so much loved by hunters.

As the book relates, the concept of protecting nature for its own sake was initially rarely a consideration. That the iconic Yellowstone National Park in the US became the bison’s last refuge was 73

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 not a factor in its designation; as Sheail states “Congress had never envisaged Yellowstone as a wildlife sanctuary”.

Most of these first Parks were developed by those with “dominant settler ambitions” primarily created for commercial reasons, whether that was tourism, protecting agricultural lands from flood or drought, or game hunting.

This commerce was sometimes ‘protected’ by national armies and management was based on ‘scientific resource management’ undertaken by ‘experts’ with often little understanding of the areas being managed. Sheail describes, for example, how Lord Onslow in 1930, when president of the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire, noted that the British Empire possessed some two-thirds of the world’s game which he suggested should be managed in much the same way as the great hunting and shooting estates of Britain. It was the same Lord, however, who led the push for an African Convention in the 1930s which Sheail describes as the high-point of inter-war global nature conservation.

As concern for species loss grew worldwide, this really quite rapid development of the concept of nature conservation and eventually ecosystem integrity is also charted; as are the challenges. As Sherman Strong Hayden in 1942 noted the three major obstacles to wildlife conservation were the lack of involvement of people, the lack of understanding of the benefits of conservation and the lack of government engagement. Issues we are still trying to tackle today.

One minor criticism of the book is the short final chapter which reviews the 74

last half-century of the protected area movement. In comparison with the rest of this well informed and referenced book this is an incomplete survey, which fails to address what should have perhaps been the key issue of this book: how we can reconcile this top down 150 year legacy of protected area establishment and management and draw on the best from what came before and avoid or eliminate some of the socially, culturally and politically unacceptable aspects such as expulsion of people from their land and disregard for long held governance regimes.

Sue Stolton

BUGS BRITANNICA Peter Marren and Richard Mabey Chatto & Windus, 2010, 500 pages Hbk, £35, ISBN 9780701181802 A collaboration of the dream-team of Peter Marren and Richard Mabey, Bugs Britannica could not really fail. A weighty tome, it has the look and feel

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 of a coffee table book, until you open it and find it packed with informative, humorous and entertaining accounts on what the authors call the “small life of Britain”. ‘Bugs’ here includes all forms of animals without a backbone, for example the single-celled amoeba, earthworms, spiders, butterflies and moths, bees and wasps, winkles and shrimps. It includes indoor animals and some that are traded or kept as pets.

Set out in rough evolutionary order, the numerous entries vary in length, some just a paragraph, others several pages long. The emphasis is on describing the cultural story of British people and small life, compiled following publicity and appeals, although some stories from abroad are included. The book is not a biological textbook, but a refreshingly different work, one that will hopefully appeal to a wider audience than books on ‘bugs’ normally would. Although containing many colour photographs, they do not dominate the text.

In fourteen and a bit pages on spiders, we learn that, amongst other things, a bride who finds a spider on her wedding dress can consider herself blessed, although a spider on her neck suggests a secret lover. Considerate people in Egypt put a spider in the bed of newly weds for ‘extra luck’. This reviewer’s wedding night could have turned out to have been a lonely one if he had honeymooned there.

Alarmingly, glow-worms were considered to be excellent fishing bait in Elizabethan times, while in the more distant past the Cambrian period was “full of phallic creatures lolling in the mud”. Amongst these were penis worms, one of which, Priapulis caudatus,

is apparently now found regularly in British waters. They are named after Priapus, the Roman god of fertility.

The two pages on earwigs (without a photograph, but we know what they look like), start with a list of vernacular names from around Britain. We are then delightfully informed that the word earwig derives from the Old English ear wicga, literally meaning ‘one that wiggles in your ear’. It seems that although there were many old remedies to get an earwig out of an ear, earwigs were also used to cure diseases of the ear. Those in need of treatment must have really looked forward to the pouring into their ear of a concoction of ground-up dried earwig mingled with ‘hare’s pisse’.

The characteristic humour of Peter Marren runs through this terrific book, which is highly recommended.

Michael Jeeves

THE STORM LEOPARD Martyn Murray Whittles, 2010 258 pages, Pbk, £19.99 ISBN 978-1-84995-004-6 The Storm Leopard is an enthralling book. Martyn Murray journeys from the Cape of South Africa to the Serengeti Plains, sampling the mundane and especially the extreme places, and immersing the reader in the richness of Africa. He is partly in search of personal time out and contemplation, but mainly probing some of the great wildlife challenges of our time – how to care for ecosystems under stress, how people and their different values can coexist with 75

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 charismatic but often inconvenient wildlife, and how nature can stay untamed where there is still scope for this to happen.

The book introduces these topics gently, but tackles them honestly and thoroughly – the author knows the landscape of Africa and all it entails from previous encounters. He is as much at home roughing it across the continent as he is in his native west of Scotland. His knowledge of the conflicts, the trade offs, and the messy reality of caring for wildlife shines through. He yearns for the wild spirit of Africa to be spared, understood and celebrated. Yet he knows why deals are struck and how the essence of the wild is diluted - the land and its key habitats compromised. In snippets he makes links with key environmental headaches facing us in Britain too.

Whether researching the dynamics of impala, camping with his soulmates, haggling for a roadworthy jeep, or holding forth on elephant welfare with a wildlife reserve director, Martyn Murray captures the vibes of Africa, its customs and its moods.

ecological importance, Jim Crumley’s latest book is one of several new titles about these charismatic, but sadly demonised predators. Of those that I’ve read, this is the book that has touched me the most, and it’s not just because the author is a fellow Scot, writing about the loss of wolves in our country.

Rather, it is because it is a very personal book, full of the author’s experiences and feelings, and his ecologicallyinformed uncompromising advocacy of the reintroduction of wolves to the Highlands. There is a real power to the writing here, which conveys a tangible sense of a wolf’s view of the world. This is immediately evident from the prologue, in which the wolf is revealed as the ‘painter of mountains’, because its return to a depleted landscape facilitates the growth of new green vegetation, in the absence of overgrazing, which changes the bleak colour of the mountain itself.

Jim Crumley Birlinn, 2010, 235 pages Pbk, £9.99 ISBN 978-1-84158-847-6

This view of the wolf is contrasted with the stereotypical, misguided images so prevalent in mainstream culture today, of the wolf as a rabid, terror-inducing childstealer, battlefield scavenger and graverobber: a perception that we’ve inherited from centuries of anti-wolf propaganda and demonisation. The book relates the author’s experiences of visiting areas where wolves still thrive, including Alaska, Norway and Yellowstone, and meeting people there who live with and study them. From those encounters a very different image of wolves emerges, which debunks the misconceptions and untruths that surround this mammal, that our species has probably had a longer relationship with than any other.

Reflecting the growing interest in wolves and increased public awareness of their

A main thread throughout the book (and from which the title is derived) is

The Storm Leopard is a sheer joy to read. Congratulations to the publishers Whittles for discovering Martyn Murray – this is nature writing at its finest.

Geoffrey Wain

THE LAST WOLF

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 the author’s quest to ascertain the truth, or not, of the various tales about wolves in Scotland and particularly the ‘last wolf’ stories. Close examination of the historical texts upon which dates such as the last reputed wolf having been killed by one MacQueen near the Findhorn River in 1743 reveal that there is very little, if any, substance to them.

Indeed, one of the most illuminating and entertaining chapters is entitled ‘Last wolf syndrome’. It highlights the standard elements of the typical prejudiced view of wolves that are common to many ‘last wolf stories’.

Part of the power of the book derives from its clarity about the essential ecological role that an apex predator like the wolf fulfils. The author is in no doubt that Scotland has been ecologically impoverished, and indeed culturally deprived, by the extirpation of the wolf, and that its return is essential for both a revitalisation of the land and a cultural renewal that sees humans once more re-connected with the rest of Nature.

However, the real strength of the writing here comes from another perspective that is more akin to the shamanistic world view of traditional native cultures, where animals such as the wolf are treated with respect, reverence and as teachers. Drawing on dreams and his own intuition, in addition to his intimate knowledge of the landscape, Jim Crumley makes a strong case for the area surrounding Rannoch Moor as offering perhaps the best location for a wolf reintroduction to Scotland. Cleverly interweaving that with a wolf’s view of retreating to the same area as the species was wiped out over 200 years ago, the essential message that emerges from the book is

an ultimately positive one. This is perhaps best exemplified by the conclusion that the author reaches in his search for what was the ‘last wolf in Scotland’. The answer he provides, that ‘the truth is she is not yet born’, will resonate in the heart of all those who yearn for a wilder, more natural Highlands, and I highly recommend this book as an insightful and valuable contribution to the cause of wolf reintroduction.

Alan Watson Featherstone

EXTINCTIONS AND INVASIONS A social history of the British Fauna Ed TERRY O’CONNOR & NAOMI SYKES Windgather Press, 2010, 245 pages, Pbk, £28, ISBN 978-1-905119-31-8 For any ecologist interested in the dynamics of extinction, alien invasions and introductions, as many are in this age of shifting climates and values, this is a seductive title. The cover also promises to dispel some myths of popular as well as academic culture. On reading the text, I find new material is marginal but I don’t want to treat it harshly for promising more than it delivers. Authors don’t necessarily have much say in how a book is packaged and branded. More accurately, the cover should read – ‘this is an additional look at the social history of some key species lost or introduced as drawn from recent archaeological reviews’.

A full quarter of the book is a no-doubt excellent archaeological bibliography and index, and of the 200 pages of text, 146 concern mammals, and the rest consists of small chapters devoted to birds, fish, molluscs and insects. As nearly all the authors are archaeologists, 77

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 most of the treatment relates to digs and their interpretations of the social status of the animals – for example, as food, ritual ornaments, commensals and the like. The treatment is interesting enough but probably more for archaeologists than ecologists as it doesn’t add greatly to our insights of historical processes we are already familiar with. We have known for some time when forests grew back and when they were cleared, when fens were drained or royal hunting reserves established. Derek Yalden’s seminal History of British Mammals has already given us a detailed picture of aurochs, boar, beaver, lynx, elk, horse and bear with regard to habitat loss and hunting pressure and he has a short chapter here that updates that work.

With regard to mammals, there is nothing particularly myth-busting.

There is evidence that beaver hung on for longer than previously thought, perhaps even into the early 19th century, that I could go along with.

David Hetherington has a chapter on lynx which is rich in detail and updates Yalden in that there is evidence it hung on past Roman times, but there is little else that adds to our knowledge.

Yalden’s chapter of concluding remarks is restricted to mammals - where the only surprises relate to genetic confirmation of the brown hare’s introduction in Neolithic or Bronze Age times and confirmation that Exmoor ponies are also early introductions.

The bird sections are sparse. One chapter is restricted to domestic fowl, blue peafowl, turkey, pheasant and helmeted guinea-fowl, of which only the pheasant is of ecological interest – with little surprise that it may or may not have been introduced by the Romans, but is 78

more likely a Norman or post-Norman bird. The other chapter deals with extinctions of crane, stork, bustard and pelican as well as the great auk and white-tailed eagle – and one surprise is the apparently ubiquitous white-tailed Eagle through Roman times and surviving until the 19th century, but there is no linking discussion to modern programmes of re-introduction. There is also no treatment of the issues of climate cycles that some of these species indicate, such as the Medieval Warm Period when a stork nested in Edinburgh, or earlier warm periods when pelicans occupied the more remote marshes of Somerset and the Fens. There are paragraphs on ‘dubious’ species, with discussion of some odd bones of Fea’s petrel, but no mention of the archaeology of the Eagle Owl which would be of greater interest. On social history, there is nothing on the English Kite, which is a surprising omission and no treatment of modern introductions of little owl or colonisations of collared doves and starlings as commensals – as might be expected from the title.

The treatments are clearly not comprehensive but if you do not have Yalden’s work, or archaeology is your bag, then this is a useful volume. I would have liked a greater tie-in to palaeo-ecology and modern social issues of nativity, invasiveness and reintroductions but this compendium from archaeology has made some attempt in this direction by including Hetherington and Yalden, so perhaps I have expected more than the science can deliver at this time.

Peter Taylor

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010

BIOLOGY AND CONSERVATION OF WILD FELIDS DW Macdonald and AJ Loveridge (eds) Oxford, 2010, 762 pages Hbk, £85 (pk £42.50), ISBN 978-0-19-923444-8 David Macdonald and Andrew Loveridge have brought together many of the world’s leading felid experts to produce this impressive review of the world’s cat species. The editors are notable authorities on cats and mammals from Oxford University, and have harnessed the thinking from recent international events on cat conservation into fresh chapters for this extensive work. They deserve the status of ‘editors plus’, for they add value to many parts of the book with their own contributions and the whole collection results in a rich and inspiring reference book.

The 29 chapters broadly fall into reviews and case studies. Reviews include an introduction to the 36 cat species; conservation of cats and management of conflicts; and tools and techniques for studying wild felids. Case studies include the history and future of the Scottish wildcat; conflict between hunters and reintroduced lynx in Switzerland; the future of the endangered Iberian lynx; cheetahs and ranchers in Namibia; factors influencing human tolerance of pumas; reserve boundaries as attractive sinks for African lions; and tiger range recovery at the base of the Himalayas. Tables, illustrations and photographs accompany the text, reinforcing the book’s high standards of communication and analysis.

The book’s hallmark is a strong recognition of the link between wild felid conservation and human attitudes and land uses. It will help both scientists and researchers focusing on the cats

themselves, and it will appeal to conservation managers who need a multi-disciplinary approach. As the editors stress: “Issues in felid conservation encompass not only the biological and social sciences, but lead us through dilemmas in governance, and development to, ultimately, difficult judgements and thus politics.”

Geoffrey Wain

OCEAN ZONING Tundi Agardy Earthscan, 2010, 220 pages.

ISBN 978-1-84407-822-6 Ocean Zoning is an important and timely book. Its subtitle – ‘Making Marine management more effective’ is something I’m sure we would all ascribe to. As the UK Marine Act kicks in, and news from the CBD meeting in Japan calls for at least 10% of our seas to be protected, we need information on successful measures by which to implement such protection and this book is a very useful contribution.

The book begins with the stark statement: “The global ocean is ailing” and then sets out to explain the concept of zoning as a “set of regulatory measures used to implement marine spatial planning… that specify allowable uses in all areas of the target ecosystems.

Different zones accommodate different uses or different levels of use.”

The book then looks at marine management challenges and how the concept of ocean zoning can overcome these, followed by a chapter explaining the steps required to implement zoning principles. Examples given include chapters on zoning within the Great 79

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 Barrier Reef in Australia, case studies from New Zealand, Africa, Canada, US and other areas including the UK. The examples are clearly illustrated and show a wide range of approaches that are possible and the varying degrees of success that have been reached. The book concludes with a chapter on principles underscoring ocean zoning success and ways to implement zoning.

In general the book is very clearly written in accessible language and with detailed references.

Given the plethora of current consultations surrounding the implementation of the Marine Act in the UK this book is very timely. The chapter dealing with zoning efforts in the UK is particularly useful. The author describes the Irish Sea pilot project and how Defra and JNCC used this as a test case for planning across several geographical scales. This in turn informed the ‘marine spatial plan’ aspects of the Marine and Coastal Access Act. There is also information about the separate Scottish legislation. The book was written before the Act was finally passed and therefore paints a rather rosy picture of what might be possible. We now see from the details of the consultations that the marine spatial planning part of the Act is to be rather fragmented. The author makes a good point in the introduction when she suggests: “ to consider marine spatial planning as the framework…..making …zoning possible.

It is the zoning that is new and different”.

At the moment the approach in the UK seems to be business as usual but with new labels – a danger that this book notes has occurred elsewhere.

This book deserves a wide readership from both those lobbying for effective 80

implementation of the UK Marine Act, but also from those in government so they can see what is actually possible.

The book shows that implantation of conservation legislation at sea requires a different approach from that on land, and that clear zoning of which activities are acceptable in any one area can be transparent, successful and fair to all.

Mick Green

IMPRESSIONS OF NATURE A History of Nature Printing Roderick Cave British Library, 2010, 191 pages Hbk, £60, 978-0-7123-0673-7 This elegant book describes the development of nature printing: a topic which informs and inspires not only botanists, but textile designers, printmakers, graphic designers and even tattoo artists. It includes illustrated examples from across the world including North America, Europe, Australia and Tahiti.

Nature printing is the process of rendering prints from the surfaces of natural objects, from plants, animals and fish. The book notes that “In the 21st century, when photocopiers, scanners, laser printers, and digital cameras make it very simple to capture images derived from the living world, nature printing has lost some of its old magic.”

This publication will revive interest in the subject through its scholarly treatment and its high quality physical production - a tribute to the British Library publishing stable. The book explains the history of the subject, illustrates the bewildering range of techniques, and celebrates many of the

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 pioneers. This is a treasure trove which helps you see and appreciate different dimensions of nature.

Geoffrey Wain

FLORA OF CARDIGANSHIRE Arthur O. Chater Published by the author, 2010 Hbk., x+930 pp., 978-0-9565750-0-5 £40 + £3.50 postage from Summerfield Books, 3 Phoenix Park, Skelton, Penrith, Cumbria, CA11 8SD. This 51/2 cm thick A4 tome is one of the weightiest local floras I’ve seen for a while, and also one of the more interesting. There is the usual introductory material, the individual species entries – many with distribution maps, references, and a three-language index. There are also appendices of tree size and age statistics, and, under species or genus headings, notes on an abundance of cultivated species and cultivars. There are also general articles, mainly of trees: limes, for instance, and Quercus petraea & robur; and we are treated to five pages on yews in and outwith churchyards.

D.E. Allen, C.D. Preston and P.A. Smith have assisted to make the preliminary chapters on recording history, geographical background and habitats more thorough than in some floras.

Environmental factors are analysed and there is a separate table of altitudinal limits of species. The chapter on conservation is mainly of historic interest, and includes lists of SSSIs and other reserves. Perhaps the 30 plus pages of botanising history are too many; perhaps the habitat reviews tend to be heavy with species names. There are certainly too many photographs

wasted because printed too small – but many are helpful, and the text is written in (for a flora) an easy style.

Maybe 13 hawthorn taxa and 13 segregates of Polygonum aviculare, is being a little too thorough. However, 34 pages of where conifers and their relatives are planted in Ceredigion must be a boon.

The author has already contributed many publications, including on Ecuadorean, Nepalese and European floras, as well as such essays as ‘Woodlice in the cultural consciousness of modern Europe’. Once again, a private initiative has produced something of quality.

Martin Spray

EATING DIAMONDS Loren Cruden Whittles Publishing, 2010, 126 pages Pbk, £15.95 ISBN ISBN 1-904445-07-1 Loren Cruden is a wordsmith who is in tune with nature. Prose and poetry offerings alternate, but a lyrical style is embedded in both. The title refers to having a craving to taste sparkling snow and “sitting on a mountainside eating diamonds.” Loren wades through thigh deep snow on her remote American mountain, dragging supplies up steep short cuts, affirming “It is a good day to die”. She likes living in big landscapes and contending with wild weather - this puts human things in perspective. She lives simply without electricity, delighting in moonlit walks.

Her Mother taught her to coexist with rattle snakes and bears. Loren fosters good relations with all local wildlife and communes with Coyotes and Cougars.

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 The book is exquisitely illustrated with black and white wildlife sketches of animals on both sides of the Atlantic.

She mixes tales of Native American shamanism with Scottish Selkies.

As an American who now lives on Skye, she is surprisingly insightful about Scottish islands and the erosion of Gaelic language and culture. Tourists are both a hated irritant and an income source. She muses whether community buyouts could reclaim heritage as well as the land. She views the highlands and islands as “a place now bereft of large land animals other than livestock and deer, and where indigenous humans have been chivvied aside in favour of sheep and southern incomers”. With fewer wildlife encounters people are becoming less knowledgeable about biodiversity. She also reflects on the potential for using wind and wave energy, commenting it wouldn’t take much to revitalise Scotland’s heritage of wise relationship with the land. I urge you to dip into the delights of nature writing revealed in Eating Diamonds.

Jocelyn Murgatroyd

TACKLING WICKED PROBLEMS THROUGH THE TRANSDISCIPLINARY IMAGINATION Brown,VA, Harris,JA and Russell, JY Earthscan, 2010, 312 pages Pbk, £34.99, ISBN 9781844079254 The political orthodoxy in liberal Western democracies is that investment in the STEM disciplines - science, technology, engineering and maths – provides the most assured basis for future economic vibrancy and social well-being.

Innovation and problem-solving using 82

rational scientific knowledge is the key.

For example, the valourisation of these STEM disciplines is implicit in the EU’s drive to develop a ‘knowledge economy’.

C P Snow’s ‘two cultures’ thesis from 1959 offers the classic exposition of this ideology – it is the sciences which will solve mankind’s problems; the humanities have had their day – but the thinking has deep roots traceable back to Bacon and Descartes in the 17th century.

Tackling Wicked Problems Through the Transdisciplinary Imagination provides a welcome and incisive critique of this position, offered from a uniquely Australian perspective. The authors challenge, both philosophically and pragmatically, the presumed hierarchy of disciplines for guaranteeing human security and problem-solving. The philosophical challenge exploits a Kuhnian view of science, a Habermasian view of rational deliberation and embraces Feyerabend’s and Midgely’s plurality of knowledges: all knowledge must be viewed as partial, plural and provisional. Jacqueline Russell’s chapter delineates succinctly the organising paradigm inspiring the book: an open and critical transdisciplinary approach to inquiry. The pragmatic challenge is taken up through 15 short case studies organised around five modes of transdisciplinary inquiry: specialist, community-based, organisational, individual-focused and holistic.

The book emerged through a series of sustained informal seminars conducted under the auspicies of the Human Ecology Forum at the Australian National University, Canberra. Unsurprisingly, the 23 authors are eclectic in their affiliations – anthropologists, ecologists, sociologists, psychologists, educationalists, epidemiologists – but all demonstrate a shared

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 commitment to this form of inquiry.

They also share an ethical commitment to ecological sustainability and social justice, the explicit normative goals which animate the overall project.

There are few books which mount such an audacious challenge – one that is both theoretically and practically informed - to the presumptions of the positivism underpinning the STEM ideology. And yet the century we are now living in needs new paradigms for comprehending the indivisible reality of human experience and materiality, a new scientia for a new era. It also needs new practices of deploying knowledge for practical benefit and which overthrow the Cartesian divide between facts and values. Materialism, reductionism and objectification have had their day – and have failed us.

The people of this planet face uncharted times ahead. Yet it is abundantly clear that the STEM disciplines by themselves – without a transdisciplinary imagination to temper the hubris and over-determination which they seemingly cannot shake off – are hopelessly inadequate for tackling problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss and obesity. Tackling Wicked Problems takes a bold path to show that there are different ways better and fairer ways which remain more faithful to embodied reality - of making knowledge work for us.

Mike Hulme

DO WE NEED PANDAS? The Uncomfortable Truth About Biodiversity Ken Thompson Green Books, 2010, 160 pages Pbk, £9.95, 978-1-900322-86-7

THE SOUND OF A WILD SNAIL EATING Elisabeth Tova Bailey Green Books, 2010, xv+183 pages Hbk, £12.95, 978-1-900322-91-1 The early Chinese had the Myriad Creatures; we, being more scientific, have biodiversity. And we worry that some has gone to the edge or beyond; we want to keep as much as possible; but do we know which bits of nature to defend at all cost? We seem not to; we find it difficult not to focus on the rare, charismatic, or iconic ones. Common or plain ones are... well, common and plain.

At the end of his book, Ken Thompson recalls the nature conservationist who told him he yearned for the extinction of pandas, so that effort might be refocused onto species that – in ecological terms – really matter. So, what really matter?

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 Non-ecologists may need help to follow some steps in his argument, rather than take them on trust. Fuller referencing would also boost the clout of some non-ecological points – for instance: on the penultimate page, the derision of monetary valuation of ‘ecosystem services’, considered “by some critics as ‘selling out on nature’ [and neglect of its] beauty, cultural importance and evolutionary significance”. There is some discussion of the ‘efficiency of conservation’ as “objectives achieved per dollar spent”, but near silence for the so-called subjective values which are fundamental to conservation as an ethic, and as an aesthetic concern.

This is an interesting, provocative, and annoying, book, well worth attention. It is interesting not least because written by a botanist; provocative because Ken throws a few brickbats, for instance at Native-is-Best dogmatism and the extensive ignoring of discussion of biodiversity and ‘ecosystem function’ “by those at the sharp end of conservation”; annoying because we seem to keep setting out for one perspective, yet find ourselves with a quite different prospect.

The book is fairly brief, the language is lively and jargon-free, and we are given plenty of intriguing details and statistics – a hectare of Ecuadorean forest is likely to contain more tree species than the whole of the extratropical Northern Hemisphere; the main carrier of malaria in Africa, called Anopheles gambiae, is shown by DNA barcoding to be seven species; worldwide, we describe 300 new organisms each day. Such details keep the reader interested; however, in a few places the trees mask the wood. More important, I think it was a mistake to restrict the referencing throughout the book.

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The abundant statistics and data are important: Ken is concerned with ‘biodiversity’ (which he sensibly sloganises as “the living part of ecosystems“): how and why it is important, and how we have tended to misplace its importance and so take a misguided approach to nature conservation. His reading of relevant ecological research is that “the conservation case would be immeasurably stronger if it could be shown that, to work properly, ecosystems actually need all [...] the species they currently have” – but they don’t. His reading of the mistake is that whereas “smart conservationists have always acknowledged that conserving biodiversity itself is not a sensible route to protecting the ecosystem services on which we all depend”, we’re (still) not all smart.

He moves from a quick scan of the content of biological diversity (putting some but perhaps not enough emphasis on what we still lump as ‘bacteria’) to the environmental factors that influence it, and that it influences, to discussion of biodiversity in relation to ecosystems and

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 their functioning, and to its value in a conservation context. As a scientist, Thompson has the tricky task of dealing with a word (concept) that in most usage “is not a value-neutral measurement of an external analogue in the way temperature is, but is instead a positive good, a goal to be strived for, like the equally positive term health”.1 I am tempted to conclude that Ken does not appreciate the priority given to intrinsic value(s) by many conservationists, and their consequent inability to accept and work with such ideas as ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural capital’.

I feel that Elisabeth Bailey would come to a similar conclusion. For her, I think, ‘value’ is manifest primarily in such nebulosities as beauty, companionship, entertainment.... Prostrated – literally – for decades by a mystery infection, she was boosted by, and maybe became partly reliant on, the company of – of all things – a snail, brought to her bedside by a friend, in a pot of violets.

The biodiversity that Elisabeth benefited from and describes with awe and cheerfulness, is reduced to Viola sp. (a few), Neohelix albolabris (one), and whatever lived in the soil (10n, where n is a bewilderingly large diversity of organisms, almost as little known as the surface of Mars). The ecosystem they constituted is superficially reminiscent of some of the undiverse systems recently studied by ecologists that have given us the uncomfortable feeling that the equation diversity = stability with which some of us were schooled was rightly dropped as both naive and askew, but still echoes dangerously. Meanwhile, N. albolabris may be only one of the crowd in the ecological drama of Maine woodlands, but in Elisabeth’s recoveryhabitat it played the hero.

And the heroine: these snails are hermaphrodite. From being woken by hearing it feed, to admiring its offspring (from stored sperm) several seasons later, Elisabeth watched enthralled. As well as intensely studying her snail, she read deep into the literature on Mollusca, and her book brings the reader, in gentle language, many of the fascinating things she found there. This is not the best introduction to the biology of this amazing class of animals, but it is a delightful one. I think it is also a splendid instance of the importance of serendipity, and of the therapeutic value of what is awkwardly called ‘contact with nature’. I doubt if Elisabeth thought of her snail as a service provider.

Richard Mabey famously, if not originally, wrote about a ‘nature cure’. In a different way, and for a different sickness, Elisabeth describes her partial recovery. It happened to involve a snail. In rather different ways, her book and Ken Thompson’s show us aspects of the importance of the myriad creatures – very few of which are pandas.

1.

Arran Stibbe & Francesca Zunino (2008) The discursive construction of biodiversity, in M. Döring, H. Penz & W.Trampe (eds) Language, Signs and Nature: Ecolinguistic Dimensions of Environmental Discourse. Berlin: “In essence”, says the Convention for Biological Diversity (UNESCO 2005), “biodiversity [...] is a multi-dimensional and multifaceted concept that refers to the diversity (in terms of both the variety and the variability) of all organisms and their habitats.” No wonder many of us are confused!

Martin Spray

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010 the tabloid image of being under siege from the urbanised fox, these incidents forced a national debate on how to manage the fox in places of high numbers and bold behaviour. We also live with urban carnivores in the form of our cats and dogs, and don't always appreciate the impacts on wildlife and on other people, that our own influence on our pets may have.

URBAN CARNIVORES Ecology, Conflict, and Conservation Stanley D Gehrt, Seth PD Riley, and Brian L. Cypher (eds) John Hopkins University Press, 2010, 285 pages ÂŁ39.00, Hbk, ISBN978-0-8018-9389-6 When carnivores become scavengers, especially around our towns, they become an issue for us. Scavenging can be welcomed if it helps us observe and study the animal, or cursed if it leads to disturbance and even safety concerns.

Some people feed and adore garden foxes, while others, especially in parts of London, seem infested with them and have to guard the patio door. During 2010 the media indulged in two fox incidents in London: in Spring a slumbering fox struck out in a nursery garden when it was disturbed by a toddler, and just a month before, it was alleged that in Hackney a fox entered a bedroom and injured two children in a deliberate act. While we should reject 86

Thus carnivores in and around towns is a growing issue for conservation groups and for councils, but can a book with chapters on the urban effects of coyotes, racoons, and skunks be relevant to practitioners here in Britain? The answer is most definitely yes, Urban Carnivores is an impressive reference – rigorously argued, packed with examples, and wide ranging in scope. The book is scholarly but straightforward to read. It takes an in-depth look at the role of carnivores in urban ecology, and reviews a range of approaches to conflict management. As well as the North American specialities noted above, there are chapters on domestic cats, dogs, foxes, badgers, puma and bobcat, all of which offer lessons for UK situations of these or similar critters. The management examples cover practical actions as well as education and outreach initiatives.

This book is both a stimulating read and a well researched guide to getting to grips with these mammals when they reach our backyards.

Geoffrey Wain

ECOS 31(3/4) 2010

BANC 2010 Annual Meeting report

Upbeat at WWT Bitterns have been booming at the London Wildfowl & Wetlands’ Trust Centre. Six bitterns, WWT’s highest ever count, are reported on the 42-hectare SSSI reserve, calls of one resonant male being heard from the reed-beds early in January 2010. Created from four Thames Water reservoirs, the Wetland Centre was opened in May 2000 BANC members at the London Wetland Centre.

by Sir David Attenborough.

Photo: Adrian Kòster A wonderful piece of newly created environmental magic, adjacent to the tidal River Thames, now part of 20% of the Earth’s land-mass wetland.

This was the scene for BANC’s annual meeting, 16 October 2010. It was a highwater mark achievement, enthusiastically attended. Brainstorming ideas, discussion about ECOS with Rick Minter and new Council members were key to success. Also as a field visit, WWT expert John Arbon led the discussion as we toured the London Wetland Centre. Not just seasonal birdlife, BANC members discussed migrations, fish, dragonflies, damselflies, plants and site management. The grazing marsh with its commercially resident bovines and ovines is a feeding ground for many species including a record 66 snipe.

Adrian Kòster gave his special thanks to Derek Bensley, BANC Council’s treasurer for over 10 years, to be succeeded by Emily Adams, now into a Ph.D on UK honeybee health, beekeeping practice, husbandry and regulation at Lancaster University. A warm welcome was given to new Council members. We were joined by Adrian Phillips, Vice-President, also other members who gave much good advice. Adrian also gave thanks to Ruth Boogert, Secretary, following our recent challenging years.

Adrian Kòster, BANC Council

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ECOS 31(3/4) 2010

Advance notice for students

ECOS annual student essay competition Your opportunity to influence conservation thinking, and your chance to get noticed…

Starting in 2011, ECOS is hosting an annual student essay competition. Two prize winners and two runners up will be announced each year, and their short essays published in following editions of ECOS. Vouchers for ethical products and for books will be awarded. There are two categories: Academic style; and Journalistic [or campaign] style. Submissions will be due by the end of July 2011.

If you are an HND, undergraduate or postgraduate (other than Ph.D.) student at any UK academic institution, or if you completed a course within the past year, you are eligible. A call for essays on conservation will be announced each year and widely circulated to Universities and Colleges along with the guidance. The competition sponsors and the full details will appear on the BANC web site soon and will be published in the next ECOS.

ECOS in 2011 The next ECOS is under preparation and includes: Austerity and change – how can we cope? More analysis, views and opinion on the age of austerity, big society, potential sell offs, funding cuts and the implications.

Jobs and funding – a review of the conservation job market, and a trends report on conservation funds and income.

Ecosystem services – master or slave? What economic analysis is driving conservation policy? What does paying for ecosystem services mean?

White Paper fallout – views and reactions on the White Paper. What did we want? What did we get?

All this, plus a review of the eagle owl debate, an assessment of the International Year of Biodiversity, tips for eating aliens, and comments on CAP reform. Please feel free to send us your thoughts and check out the web site – your ideas and feedback are always welcome.

Thank you for your support during 2010. www.banc.org.uk 88

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I 32 (2)

Strategies for boar, big cats, dog owners, & wild goats

I 31 (1)

Natural aliens; climate resilience; tips for the recession

www.banc.org.uk BANC inspires innovation in conservation.

President:

John Bowers

Vice-Presidents:

Marion Shoard

I 30 (3/4) Ecological skills; Getting started

Adrian Phillips

in conservation

Chair:

Adrian Koster

I 30 (2)

Nature at our service?

Secretary:

Ruth Boogert

I 30 (1)

30 years back – and forward

Treasurer:

Derek Bensley

I 29 (3/4) New nature – old creatures I 29 (2)

Nature’s tonic

I 29 (1)

Walking the talk in conservation

I 28 (3/4) Climate Change adaptation – helping nature cope

I 28(2)

Nature’s Id

I 28(1)

Loving Nature?

I 27(3/4) Accepting the wild?

I 27(2) I 27(1) I 26(3/4) I 26(2) I 26(1) I 25(3/4) I 25(2) I I I I I

25(1) 24(3/4) 24(2) 24(1) 23(3/4)

Shores and seas – the push for protection Species reintroductions Aliens in control Carbon, conservation and renewables The extinction of outdoor experience Wilder landscapes, wilder lives?

Superquarry finale & last chance for the countryside Wild boar and wild land Extinction of Experience Urban greening Nature conservation – Who cares?

Citizen Science

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www.banc.org.uk

Editorial 1.

Reasons to be cheerful? Geoffrey Wain

Feature articles

Winter 2010 issue 31(3/4) www.banc.org.uk

2.

The nature of nature conservationists – freeing the spirit or toeing the line?

Gabrielle Overgaard-Horup & Cara Roberts

15. Don’t badger the Badger. Ian Rotherham 18. Thinking big – a better deal for connecting nature.

Tony Whitbread 25. Conservation and Big Society - opportunity or threat?

Mike Townsend 28. The Crown Jewels and the Big Society - What future for National Nature Reserves? William M Adams and Ian D Hodge 36. Traditional grazing in an age of austerity. Tom Cairns 40. Lakeland valleys and Somerset hills - a tale of two managements. Peter Taylor 45. Cooling off on a hot topic? Learning from a green disagreement.

David Wrathall 48. A Tale of the River Bank Or The Debt in the Willows.

Bill Adams 52. Tayside beavers – rights in the watershed? Derek Gow 56. Nature in Austerity...

56. Quality matters. Peter Shirley 57. Surviving austerity - an urban, third sector perspective. Alison Millward 60. Starting in the cities - biodiversity for all? Mathew Thomas 63. Can we make progress amidst the cuts? John Foster 65. Nature and Big Society - seeing through the baggage.Gavin Saunders 68. Landscapes in austerity – lessons from the pressures facing AONBs. David Blake 70. Shaping the Nature of England – Defra’s discussion document.

John Bacon

73. Book Reviews

2 0 1 0 B r i t i s h A s s o c i a t i o n o f N a t u re C o n s e r v a t i o n i s t s ©2 ISSN 0143-9073 G r a p h i c D e s i g n a n d A rt w o r k b y F e a t h e r s t o n e D e s i g n C h e l t e n h a m .

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