A Campaign For Nature In Culture
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Chris Rose 10 October 2024
This is Part 3 of a series of posts on Politics and Nature (Parts 1 and 2 were published on 27 August 2024 as Focus On Culture Not Policy To Restore UK Nature). Part 3 is in seven sections. This is Section 1.
Subsequent sections (follow this post in order)
2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity
3 – Signalling and Marking Moments
4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture
5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History
6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means
7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?
Section 1 – Introduction
The first part of this blog argued that the impact of UK environment NGOs on government policy has long been limited by a Westminster political culture which disbelieves its claims to represent significant public support. It gave examples of how ‘for decades UK politicians of both main UK Parties have treated the environment and particularly nature, as a politically optional and ultimately disposable ‘priority’’.
It also argued that ‘with nature almost absent from social connections between voters and their political representatives’ government environmental policies ‘are only weakly accountable to public opinion’.
So long as this political conviction remains in place, mobilisations and marches for nature, lobbying on policies, opinion polling, an avalanche of nature-celebrating books, data-rich reports on the State of Nature, and other calls for action are all subject to heavy discounting. In effect, the pro-nature movement has limited political capital, compared to other calls on the government which are more present in social connections between voters and politicians.
This part looks at how we could make nature less invisible, and more embedded and expressed in everyday social culture, so it reaches politicians ‘bottom-up’.
By ‘culture’ I don’t mean ‘high culture’ as in The Arts and Literature, or ‘alternative’ inter-personal philosophies of living more ‘naturally’ but what most people do day to day, hour to hour, week by week, month by month, at work, rest and play: how we spend our time and money for instance on our homes and gardens and in our spare time, how we mark important moments and places, and how that evidences our connections to nature, and actions people are taking to value, protect and restore it.
Such ‘wrap around’ social evidences are needed to make the policy efforts of our environment groups more effective, and could be more powerful and cheaper, than trying to increase the membership of environmental NGOs, although it might also have that result. To do this we don’t need a culture-war about nature but we do need a cultural promotional campaign for nature.
What Would Success Look Like?
We will know if it’s worked, when it passes ‘The Weekend Test’. If, when one politician asks another, “What did you do at the weekend?”, they become as likely to respond with something nature-related that they came across, or did with their friends, family or constituents, as to mention a trip to an opera or a football match, attending a County Show, or getting tickets to Wimbledon. Then we’ll know the UK has a politically mainstream nature culture. (Believe it or not, we once did have something like that).
The Challenge
To embed nature in culture – in things people do and take as normal – I suggest we will need:
- Increased public nature ability to reverse the trend to nature blindness and enable people to be ‘good at nature’. Starting by being able to recognize, name and understand the native plants and animals where they live: the ABC of nature literacy and ability
- Salience: existing nature and conservation efforts need to be more visible and perceptible: sign-posting and signalling them
- Connecting Opportunities and events involving nature, in mainstream culture; connecting to things people do already, building on historic nature culture and place-based identities, and strengthening pro-nature ‘start ups’ which are themselves potential culture-makers
- Organisation of a movement wide campaign effort
- Political asks which can be pressed on government in the near-term, to give the campaign political traction, and align the nature base and organisations themselves
As the first part acknowledged, creating these social signals would be a long-game, not just a one Parliament project. In fact to be most compelling, such evidences need to emerge from activities, events and behaviours which do not signal a political ask but are just social facts.
The near but not quite complete disappearance of nature from our culture has been a long and gradual process, involving an industrial revolution, a couple of agricultural revolutions and several technological revolutions. Now there is a counter revolution which we can make use of. It’s still in the foothills but it creates hand-holds and stepping stones, some revitalising old nature culture, others creating new initiatives.
From a management point of view, organisations need to recognize that while this would be a political project it’s not one to be left to the few NGO staff working in ‘The Political Unit’. Many of them are ‘policy experts’ and have a brief to try and achieve policy outcomes but it’s not about policy. In the words of former Prime Minister Harold Wilson ‘policies without politics are of no more use than politics without policies’, and here, the deficit is politics.
But in this case the politics part is about making nature culture, and the people best able to do that may be fundraisers, marketers, communicators and ‘front of house’ staff who understand people, not policies. ‘Changing culture’ may seem an alien concept to civil society groups more used to thinking about ‘saving Red Squirrels’ or changing farm subsidies but it happens all the time. Take food for instance.
Changing Food Culture
The last few generations have seen a change in British food, noticed even by some foreign visitors. In his book Ravenous, on food, health and farming, Henry Dimbleby, the chef and restaurant entrepreneur turned environmental food system advocate and ‘Food Tzar’ under the Conservatives (he resigned in frustration), says of food culture:
Good food cultures don’t just happen: they are made by us … It is sometimes said that Britain ‘lacks a proper food culture’ … but … ours has changed enormously over the centuries … The British were once envied by the hungry French peasantry for our comparatively abundant food, our farmhouse tables laden with suet puddings, savoury pies and joints of beef. But the Industrial Revolution … created a mass movement of the population away from the countryside. The resulting shortage of workers meant that food had to be imported from the colonies and beyond. The rural poor, who had eaten frugally but from the land, were replaced by the new urban poor, who often survived on little more than bread and tea. As a nation we became severed from the rural cuisine that had been our forte. It could be argued that we have never fully recovered …’.
Dimbleby highlights the case of Japan as a country which changed its food culture in several steps of ‘deliberate state intervention, as well as historical accident’.
To summarise his account: first, when Japan opened up to foreigners in the late C19th and early C20th its government advisers were struck by the strength of foreigners, and argued the Japanese should drink more milk. Second, in 1921, the Japanese army, ‘concerned at the state of malnutrition among its recruits’, recommended soldiers eat more protein and fat, and this was promoted to the population in government radio broadcasts and through public cooking demonstrations. Third, after WWII, defeated starving Japan got US food aid for school meals, and, as Japan got richer in the 1950s, citizens mixed Western and Japanese food styles. Fourth, in the 1990s Japan introduced rules to limit the influence of supermarkets and junk food, and law requires citizens to maintain a healthy weight.
In the UK, it’s the accident, or at least the market bit rather than the government bit which has made most difference to food culture. Dimbleby describes how immigrant Indian, Chinese, Turkish and Thai restauranteurs seized an opportunity to bring ‘foreign food’ to UK streets in recent generations.
At the same time real increases in income and much reduced costs of flying led to mass tourism and adoption of new tastes first experienced abroad (this is me not Dimbleby – see values changes in the run up to Brexit).
So when I was a child in the 1960s, working- and lower-middle class English people drank wine only at rare special occasions and then, we chose from three sorts: red, white or pink. Time spent in Europe on holiday changed tastes, and in the 1980s cheaper imports from Australia were promoted by Supermarkets and newspapers in Wine Clubs, so today most adults in the UK are probably better able to recognize a variety of wines than they are a variety of wild plants and animals.
Stimulated by the cost of obesity, cancer and coronary disease to the NHS which is a perennial concern of UK politicians, UK governments have tried, albeit much more hesitantly than Japan, to encourage healthier eating. They have set some limits on salt, fat and sugar and from 2003 ran a ‘Five A Day’ fruit and vegetables public education/ social-marketing campaign (5-a-day was an American idea from 1988).
Precedents For State Interventions In UK Culture
The UK has seen many state-sponsored interventions to change daily cultural practice, just not on nature. Today for instance we speak of ‘health and safety culture’ but Health and Safety, started with a few factory safety laws from 1802 onwards and was turbo-boosted by the Robens Report, under a Labour government in 1972.
The human cost of road traffic accidents led the UK government to run a famous public communications campaign (1971) ‘Clunk Click Every Trip’ on wearing seat belts, and has run campaigns on consumption of drugs and alcohol, including drink driving, and smoking, into the C21st. The law in the UK has been progressively changed to promote inclusivity and prevent discrimination on grounds of race or sex, in the workplace and public life. UK governments have intermittently encouraged energy conservation by citizens. Many of those changes were partly stimulated by civil society campaigns.
1960s campaigns by the press, architects and the heritage lobby such as the Civic Trust, led to the UK adopting a system of Listed Buildings (it’s origins are older). That system has not only been arguably more successful than we have with our ‘natural heritage’ but it also gradually educated the public, norming and crystallising expectations. So estate agents and buyers are aware of the difference between real Georgian and neo-Georgian homes, or real Tudor and Mock Tudor but hardly any would be able distinguish ‘original’ real ancient woods from planted ones.
A National Drive For Public Nature Ability
There’s little that Non-Governmental Organisations like better than asking governments to do things. Too often it’s an easy but ineffective option but in this case it’s appropriate, and necessary, and an achievable objective (cheap for example, compared to the £2.4bn funds paid yearly to UK farmers and landowners). An old-school above-the-line educational government public awareness campaign about UK nature, and specifically one designed to facilitate a larger programme of nature-ability, is needed.
Such a campaign should be an early ask from NGOs to government. It would be a signal of intent that this is an important and overlooked issue, and create a space in which to convene a multi-actor multi-dimensional programme involving civil society, government at all levels, businesses and other actors. So far as I know nothing like it has ever been done in the UK – except perhaps once.
If you live in the UK you probably missed this government poster
At first glance it could be an advertising campaign to get people to value and visit Britain’s ancient woodlands (woods that have always been woods – what in many countries are called ‘old growth’ forests). Just 2.5% of them remain.
In particular it could be to promote Bluebell woods, for which the UK is famous amongst botanists, as due to its oceanic climate, half of the world population of these beautiful flowers are found in the UK.
Bluebells in Foxley Wood, Norfolk
Carpeting the floor of some woods in April and May, in a blue haze of flowers, Bluebells are one of Britain’s best known, folkloric and loved wild flowers. It’s not on the scale of Japan’s traditional Hanami or “flower viewing” trips to see blossoming cherry trees but many people make an annual pilgrimage to see the Bluebells in spring. “Pilgrimage” is the word many of them use. It’s a cultural, if not formally recognized event. Consequently if a ‘Bluebell Wood’ comes under threat, it has an added cachet to help mobilise public support in its defence, compared to just ‘a wood’.
In fact, this advert was part of the £125m government funded ‘GREAT” campaign begun in 2012, the year of the London Olympics, to promote tourism. Hailed as ‘the biggest longest ad for Britain’, it included posters, tv, print and cinema ads in seen in Beijing, Berlin, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Mumbai, New Delhi, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto but not of course, in the UK.
Seeing as a 2019 survey found almost half of UK children couldn’t identify a Bluebell, it’s a shame it wasn’t shown in the UK.
Is That A Bluebell?
Screenshot from Sky News (2019)
Sky News reported:
Half of children cannot identify stinging nettles, 65% wouldn’t know what a blue tit is, 24% do not recognise conkers and 23% do not know what a robin looks like. Almost all of the children surveyed could not identify a beech leaf or a cabbage white butterfly, while 83% did not know what a bumblebee looks like.
That survey followed numerous others which revealed an epidemic scale state of nature blindness in the UK, affecting not just children but adults, including educators and university students enrolled in ecological courses.
A 2002 study by Cambridge University zoologist Andrew Balmford became famous for finding that children could identify more Poke?mon characters than native British wildlife. In 2005 Anne Bebbington from the Field Studies Council showed that A-level school students and their teachers, as well as trainee teachers attending courses at Juniper Hall Field Centre, had very little ability to name ‘common’ wild plants. A third of students could only name three species. ‘86% of A-level biology students could only name three or fewer common wild flowers whilst 41% could only name one or less’. Bebbington also found that 29% of the biology teachers could only name three or fewer flowers.
A 2008 National Trust survey found just 53% of children could identify an Oak leaf, Britain’s national tree, and half could not tell a bee from a wasp. The Trust went on to run a major effort to get children and families to spend more time outdoors in nature, but if adults can’t explain to their children what they are seeing outdoors, how will this be an introduction to nature or equip them to recognize changes in nature?
My 2014 post Why Our Children are not being connected with nature noted that 85% of UK adults agreed “it is vital to introduce young children to nature” but it was evident that this was not happening.
In a 2019 Oxford University project, Andrew Gosler and Steven Tilling quizzed 149 biology undergraduates about birds, trees, mammals, butterflies and wildflowers before they went on a residential field course. Birds ‘were the best known by the students, while butterflies were the most poorly known group’ but only 56% of the students could name individual bird species rather than generics like ‘duck’, and for butterflies, ‘only 12.8% of students correctly named five British species, and 47% named none’. Whether students came from rural or urban families only had ‘a small effect’ on their knowledge.
Sarah Wise and I started the Fairyland Trust, which engages families with young children in nature, using activities which embed basic natural history learning through making, in 2001. It’s deliberately aimed at the mainstream families, engaging adults and children together. 70-90% of the 250,000+ people who have attended its events and activities, have had no previous contact with conservation groups. Over time we’ve learnt and progressively simplified the activities to assume less and less knowledge. For instance, we discovered that almost nobody knew that butterfly or moth ‘food plants’ are what the caterpillar eats, not the flying adult.
In the early 2000s we were asked to take a Magic Wands Workshop to a Wildlife Trust reserve. As Magic Wands involves choosing a wand of wood from a British tree, we asked the Education Officers which native trees grew on their site, and were taken aback when they didn’t know, and said they’d have to ask the warden.
At Glastonbury in the ‘Green Kids’ field, we met environmentally-aware parents who were astonished to learn that hedgerows held many different trees and shrubs (which we’d used in a Crowns workshop). Seeing “hedging plants” sold in garden centres, they had assumed there was one plant to make hedges from.
In 2007, as consultants to Natural England (NE), Sarah and I invented an activity called Ecoteering, designed to enable visitors to recognize key nature features of NE’s National Nature Reserves. Ecoteering works by using ‘navigation species’ to find your way from one ‘discovery’ feature to the next. We tried out versions of it on friends and Natural England office staff, and were surprised when one of the latter commented that the navigation species (shown on a photo card) were too difficult to identify, and to distinguish Bracken from Heather would be a role for “a specialist”.
From Navigating Nature in Ecos magazine – opening a ‘discovery box’ on an Ecoteering trail for Natural England
But what does it matter if children, and the adults they become, can’t recognize their own country’s plants or animals?
The Wrong Poster-Bee
In 2010 Friends of the Earth (FoE) asked me to map out possible campaigns they could develop to ‘get back into’ the issue of biodiversity (ie nature). I suggested quite a few but noticed that whenever I told any non-specialist about the project, they usually said “oh you mean bees”. It was already a zeitgeist issue, because bee-keepers were reporting ‘collapse’ of their colonies, and a few scientists were fingering agrichemicals as the likely culprits. The next year (FoE) asked me to outline a bee campaign strategy, and they executed a campaign with some success.
Many more campaigns followed (some such as by Buglife, preceded it). Campaigns to Save the Bees bees from ‘bee killer’ (Neonicotinoid) pesticides became a worldwide phenomenon in the 2010s (see this on some of the history).
Bumble Bees, and hundreds of other types of wild bee, are in decline in many countries. In some cases they have been reduced from species widespread before agricultural industrialisation to tiny vulnerable populations (such as the Great Yellow Bumblebee, reduced by 80% in the UK). Three UK Bumble Bee species have become extinct. By 2019 the Large Mason Bee which used to be found in southern England and Wales and the Six-banded Nomad Bee, formerly ‘fairly widespread’, were each confined to single sites.
The success of campaigns in generating public interest led to politicians (including Boris Johnson as London mayor), the media and individuals to promote bee-keeping, especially in urban areas. This increased bee numbers but of Honey Bees, not of wild bees. The campaigns to ‘save the bees’ often used images of Honey Bees which are reared in artificial hives. Honey Bees were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and are more like livestock than wild animals. They do not need rescuing. In fact like many agricultural animals they compete with wildlife for food.
Above, for reference, is a Bumble Bee with a Honey Bee
Find a basic UK bee identification chart here. A few truly wild Honey Bees do exist in the UK but are nowadays very rare
‘Saving Chickens’
The US Sierra Club pointed out in 2018 that studies in California, Canada, Ireland and England found that wild bee numbers dropped as farmed bee numbers increased, and wild bees contracted pests and diseases from Honey Bees.
“Honeybees are not going to go extinct,” said Scott Black, executive director of the US Xerces Society an invertebrate conservation group. “We have more honeybee hives than we’ve ever had and that’s simply because we manage honeybees. Conserving honeybees to save pollinators is like conserving chickens to save the birds.”
In 2018 Greenpeace US drew criticism from a Cambridge bee researcher for featuring only agricultural Honey Bees in its SOS Bees campaign material (no longer online).
In 2019 the Guardian reported:
… growing concern from scientists and experienced beekeepers that the vast numbers of honeybees, combined with a lack of pollinator-friendly spaces, could be jeopardising the health and even survival of some of about 6,000 wild pollinators across the UK.
Kew Gardens’ State of the World’s Plant and Fungi report warned: “Campaigns encouraging people to save bees have resulted in an unsustainable proliferation in urban beekeeping. This approach only saves one species of bee, the honeybee, with no regard for how honeybees interact with other, native species …”
and
Dale Gibson of Bermondsey Street Bees, a commercial beekeeping practice with a focus on sustainability, says they have reduced their hives in London by a third to alleviate the overpopulation crisis. He explains how the dietary requirements of honeybees can make competition for scarce food resource extremely fierce.
“Honeybees are very efficient, almost omnivorous consumers of nectar and pollen; they are voracious,” says Gibson. “There is no off button. They will carry on consuming what’s out there as long as it’s out there. Just to stay alive each beehive will consume 250 kilos of nectar and 50 kilos of pollen. If you have a hive of 70,000 bees, that’s 70,000 times four or five cycles over a single season. You are talking about almost half a million bees that have got to be fed.”
[In contrast even a large a colony of the Buff Tailed Bumble Bee, the commonest species in the UK, will only hold about 400 workers].
The Guardian also noted that:
‘While the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization reports there are more than 90m honeybee hives globally, many rarer native pollinators are in increasingly precarious positions’
So the Honey Bee was the wrong poster bee. Yet like an out of control meme, the Honey Bee continues to be promoted as a proxy for all the wild bees and other insects under real threat from pesticides and destruction of habitat, mostly through industrialisation of farming.
Even now, the UN picks a Honey Bee to represent bees for its World Bee Day , although World Bee Day 2025 information resources created for the Sustainable Development Goals by RELX (formerly science publisher Reed-Elservier), accidentally uses an image of a wasp colony instead:
Too late, conservation groups were left trying to qualify the story and point out that Honey Bees are not even as important for crops as is often assumed. In 2024 The Wildlife Trusts said ‘Honeybees are mostly kept in managed hives, and are likely responsible for pollinating between 5-15% of the UK’s insect-pollinated crops. That leaves 85-95% of the UK’s insect-pollinated crops relying on wild pollinators …’..
Tolerating Nature Blindness
The Wrong-Poster-Bee story shows that conservation efforts can be derailed by an inability to distinguish one plant or animal from another, in other words by nature blindness or a lack of nature ability or literacy, or as it used to be called, by a lack of Natural History knowledge.
When the ‘professional’ communicators and educators who relay the ‘messages’ of the nature movement to the whole of society are also unable to tell one creature or plant from another, it undermines campaigns or programmes designed to protect or restore nature.
Mistakes in the UK media regularly provide examples. Here the EDP, Britain’s largest regional newspapers, provides picture of a Blue Tit to illustrate a story about Bee Eaters.
Not knowing what a Bee-Eater looks like is easily forgiven, as they rarely appear in the UK but the Blue Tit is almost ubiquitous across the country.
With negligible nature ability, people look out of their car windows and make sense of what they see. Understandably, apparently ‘wild’ creatures or plants are likely to be taken as natural. Many for instance think that Pheasants are wild British birds because they seem to be free-living but Pheasants are not native or wild: they are mass-reared and released livestock. This misapprehension extends to some producers of ‘educational’ materials and its seems, the BBC, which has awarded it the epithet ‘British’.
Millions of (Ring-Necked) Pheasants are released for shooting each year, with an estimated biomass (weight) equal to twice that of all other breeding birds in Britain.
As the Pheasant is large, obvious and relatively tame, it’s a bird likely to be seen by people driving in the countryside. Like mass-released Honey Bees, Pheasants are voracious feeders, only not on nectar. A study from Belgium suggests that wild snakes and lizards have disappeared from areas with large scale Pheasant releases.
David Attenborough’s nature programmes are one of the BBC’s most valuable assets but this doesn’t mean the BBC is nature-literate. A BBC News voiceover confused Great Crested Grebes with Swans in reporting the results of the biggest UK wildlife photography competition:
Meanwhile, in 2023 the UK Department of Education and The Guardian did not seem to understand the difference between foreign ornamental flowers and native wildflowers.
One reason this matters, as mentioned above, is that many native insects reply on specific native plants as ‘food plants’, while the adult stages may use nectar from many flowers. Attempts to re-create ‘lost meadows’ (97% of traditional UK hay meadows have been destroyed) or use your garden to help insects will not work if the wrong plants are used.
Proxy Nature
Like most nations, the UK has become progressively ‘greener’ as measured by awareness of environmental ‘issues’ including saving ‘forests’ and ‘nature’, or willingness to embrace choices such as renewable energy or greener consumer goods.
Yet at the same time the UK has become more nature blind: it is like a society which increasingly celebrates the importance of libraries and literature while simultaneously becoming less able to read.
It’s routinely assumed that because nature is green, and green is good, all that’s green is nature, even chemically sterilised industrial farm landscapes. Hence the political traction of ‘Green Belt’ and ‘Grey Belt’ discussed in Parts 1 and 2.
‘Nature’, ‘the countryside’ and ‘the outdoors’ have become increasingly synonymous, making it possible to be in favour of them as concepts, and not distinguish between proxies (such as ‘green spaces’) and the real thing. Launched by then Prime Minister David Cameron, the ‘GREAT’ campaign promoted the ‘great countryside’, and it’s ‘inspiring landscapes’ as one of ten reasons to visit the UK.
The official press release encapsulated the essential ‘greatness’ of Britain’s ‘countryside’ in these words:
‘Countryside: From Constable to Wordsworth, the British countryside has inspired some of the world’s finest artists and poets’.
True but also indicative of the relative value placed on nature in C21st British culture: important for inspiring formal ‘culture’ as taught in History of Art or Literature courses, but not for itself, or for any direct social connection with nature.
So it’s assumed to be important to know about Constable and Wordsworth but Bluebells or other wildflowers, perhaps not. Nature-inspired Arts are indeed, their own cultural form but they are only proxies for nature: we can keep the books, poems and paintings more easily than the real nature, just as Attenborough films may outlast their subjects.
The “host” of Ullswater Lake District Daffodils which inspired William Wordsworth’s poem starting “I wandered lonely as a cloud” in 1802, are real Wild Daffodils. Once common, they are now rare (see ‘Golden Triangle of Wild Daffodils’ in the nature Events in Popular Culture section below).
Today Daffodils are the most commonly planted flowers in Britain but ornamental varieties, not the slighter, delicate wild ones. Each March hundreds of visitor attractions offer Daffodil Walks, often promoted by reference to Wordsworth but how many visitors realise they are looking at fakes, not the originals? Even in the Lake District, many roadsides are planted with fake daffs rather than the authentic Wild Daffodils which inspired Wordsworth and his sister.
Here’s Wordsworth’s poem summarised by ChatGPT:
‘The speaker describes a moment of solitude when he comes across a field of golden daffodils dancing by a lake, which brings him joy. The sight of the flowers, compared to stars, becomes a cherished memory that fills him with happiness during his reflective moments, highlighting nature’s uplifting power on the spirit’.
Would we tolerate eradication of the authentic Wordsworth, and its replacement with something which gets the general gist? And if not for the real poem, why for the real plant?
Ask editors from the BBC, The Guardian or the EDP or even web editors at the Department of Education, if they are in favour of banning bee-killing pesticides or creating more wildflower meadows and they’d probably say “yes”, as being in favour of nature in theory, has become a social norm. Hence all the media coverage, albeit often inaccurate. But in professional communications culture, getting nature wrong in detail seems less likely to be seen as shameful as a misplaced comma or apostrophe. This only reflects how the importance of nature ability has dwindled in wider society.
Sunflowers by Banksy?
Thanks to our more embedded social culture of food, architecture, art and sport, editors would not tolerate cakes labelled as bread, a white wine as a Claret, a Tudor house as Georgian, a Van Gogh as a Banksy, or mistaking Wigan Athletic for Manchester City, or US Football labelled as Rugby. But getting nature wildly wrong is trivial, or perhaps just seen as not being ‘nerdy’.
Conservation and environment groups should take nature-blindness and the de facto tolerance of it seriously, as it speaks volumes about nature’s lack of traction in wider society, including in politics.
Without an intervention to increase basic nature knowledge, they face an uphill task, when every time they want to engage a wider public with a campaign, project or make a case for action, it has to involve trying to explain almost every bird, animal or plant they are talking about, or accepting that audiences nod but really don’t understand. The net effect of constantly raising concerns about things people do not understand, is of course to create an impression that your concerns are esoteric and marginal.
A Natural History GCSE Won’t Be Enough
The best known current attempt to increase Natural History knowledge through UK formal education is the Natural History GCSE for 16 year olds, developed as a result of a campaign led by Mary Colwell, UK, formerly of the BBC Natural History Unit. (More here). It has been quite an achievement to steer her proposal through the educational system, not least as many educationalists themselves lack nature knowledge. The earliest that teaching of the new qualification will take place is 2026.
Mark Castle, of the small Field Studies Council which trains people in field skills, has argued for natural history to be available to younger children as well. The Field Studies Council is calling for a national Skills for Nature Plan.
Any additional teaching of Natural History is to be welcomed as a contribution of overcoming the UK’s deficit in nature ability but despite what many adults might hope, it is far from a silver bullet.
Numerous studies have found that formal school education has a relatively weak effect compared to family influences. A 2022 Swiss study of nature ability in teachers and primary children reported that ‘contact with living beings’ and ‘support of family members’ were important while ‘their school education was rather insignificant’. The Oxford studymentioned earlier found that ‘family influences, self-motivation and knowledge of birds, rather than formal education, best predicted students’ overall Natural History Knowledge’.
In 2007 Sarah Pilgrim, David Smith and Jules Pilgrim from Essex University examined ability to ‘identify local plants and animals, name their uses, and tell stories about them’ in four Lincolnshire villages, four suburban wards of south London, and three maritime towns in East Anglia. They found ‘respondents with the highest ecoliteracy levels acquired it from parents and relatives, environment-based occupations, and hobbies’. Those whose knowledge came primarily from TV and schooling were ‘least competent at identifying local plant and animal species’, with book-learning falling in between.
Knowledge of wildlife and in particular plants, is vastly greater in the few societies who still live a pre-industrial lifestyle. For instance ‘by the age of 8’ Zapotec children in Mexico ‘can reliably identify hundreds of wild plants and recall associated culinary and medicinal knowledge’. We can be fairly sure that they acquired this knowledge from relatives, as would have happened in pre-industrial Britain.
My conclusion is that the adult community, including parents, grandparents and their friends, need to be involved in giving children nature ability, as well as teachers. More than this, ‘children’ should not be the only target in any UK campaign to enhance nature ability. We have generations of adults who need to be reached, and that requires a multi-channel social marketing approach, in the same way that public health, occupational safety, food and other social and cultural campaigns have worked.
Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk
