Culture and Nature – 6 – Organising Strategy: Ways and Means

Section 6 – Organising Strategy: Ways and Means

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If anyone buys the idea that we need a national effort on nature and culture, an important question is how could it be done?

The earlier sections make some suggestions about projects, audiences and activities but not about overall organisation and strategy.  Below are three strategy suggestions: about scale and geography of organisation, about audience enagagement, and about PR for the nature movement, and a couple of of thoughts about what people need to know, and candidate political asks actionable in the short term.

Scale and Geography – Use National Character Areas

In a country with a highly centralised system of political power, there is an ever present gravitational pull on any social campaign not focused on business, to direct lobbying, advocacy and effort at the political centre of Westminster and Whitehall.  But then delivery of government policy is often filtered down to less powerful bodies such as Counties and Districts (with the important exception of Unitaries with directly elected Mayors), and most UK politicains have local Constitutuencies.

That, and the allure of a highly centralised and dominant national press and news media (which many countries do not have), and social media with its beguilingly low transaction costs, often leads to English campaigns which try to use ‘grass roots’ indications of support (eg petitions and clicks) for policy asks directed at the National Government in London, with not much in between.

My contention in Part 1 was that this has not proved very effective but it certainly won’t work very well in terms of demonstrating and developing the cultural significance of nature.  For one thing it does not reflect lived experience, unless you are part of the Westminster-Whitehall policy community.  For another, both nature and popular culture are themselves much more granular and dispersed, locally and regionally and across the four UK Nations.

A Devon Parish Map from Common Ground – sourced from the community, so hard to overlook by local politicians

In terms of organisation and logistics, NGOs are then faced with a problem.  The very obvious very local level, embraced for instance in a case-by-case way by Common Ground with its Parish Maps, is the Parish (or Town Council). But the NALC, the National Assoctaion of Local Councils (an excellent body which has done some sterling work on nature) represents 10,000 Town and Parish Councils, which is too many for most projects to deal with.

The County and District tiers are important but socially little loved. They suffer from the baleful effects of too-frequent re-organisation by national government, and a public perception that they do little more than arrange for the bins to be emptied, and, if they are considered at all beyond that, impose Council Tax, fail to handle planning, social services or transport effectively, and seem powerless in the face of National Government.

This is very unfair but Local Government is a largely forgotten force in UK life, until something goes wrong.  It’s even ignored in many University politics courses.  None of that makes adminsitrative Counties and Districts a natural choice for social campaign architecture.  (This little experiment in trying to localise a national campaign to Norfolk Constituency levels might be of interest).

Amazingly, England and perhaps Scotland and Wales, do have an essentially nature-based system of regions which in my view, are at the natural scale, and follow the right natural contours, for working on nature and culture.  In England they are called National Character Areas.

Interactive map of National Character Areas (the colours)

England has 159 National Character Areas (NCAs) but hardly anyone living in them has the slightest idea they exist.  Not even Estate Agents and tourism organisations, for whom they are a ready-researched marketing opportunity. (There are also 48 NLCAs or National Character Landscape Areas in Wales, and there is a system of Landscape Character Types in Scotland).

Government agency Natural England says NCAs aim ‘to help guide land management and other activities to strengthen character and resilience, responding to pressures such as climate change’ but they could be a lot more interesting than that.  The NCAs, which are a national system but really should be called Local or Natural Character Areas, are defined by local regional geology, nature and land use.

It means they reflect the distinctive landscape on a human scale and are described in (relatively) everyday terms the public can understand, without any maths, convoluted science or jargon.  Most of them could be traversed by someone on a bicycle in a day, or in some cases, on foot. (England is a small and varied place).  They depict the characteristic nature, explain why the ‘verancular’ or local building styles vary from one place to another, the industry, farming, habitat and its history, and provide a nature-based expression of locality and identity.

Here for instance is the start of the description for the Bedfordshire Greensand Ridge, set in the South Midlands, the sort of area often wrongly referred to as “unremarkable”.

The description includes:

‘… A patchwork of semi-natural habitats including mire habitats, lowland heathland and lowland mixed deciduous woodland species, including coppiced hazel which is important for dormice at Maulden Wood.

… Adders are particularly associated with heathland areas of the Ridge … The Ridge is dissected by the rivers Ouzel and Ivel, which have carved distinct valleys … Springs arising from the Ridge support important wetland habitats, including acid mire and wet woodland.

… Visible heritage of iron-age banks and ditches at Kings Wood and Glebe Meadows, Houghton Conquest Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and iron-age hill fort remains at Sandy. Remnant ridge and furrow at Hockliffe and Potsgrove.

… Historic parklands and estates associated with grand country houses such as Woburn … Estate villages, houses and farmsteads use local building materials including clay brick and tile, locally quarried brown ironstone, thatch and render…

Major communications infrastructure includes the Sandy Heath transmitter.’

The NCA definitions are not just about nature but nature is important to people as part of place and identity, however much or little natural history knowledge they have. As Craig Bennett of The Wildlife Trusts pointed out in 2021: ‘Polling shows that good quality natural places are the most important thing to foster pride in people’s communities – more than pubs or even the local football team’.  (That survey gave people 16 possible reasons to be pround of their local area and ‘our local parks and green spaces’ came top at 36%).

It would make driving around, travelling across or living in England more interesting if there were signs to announce when you are entering one of these areas but I’ve never seen one, although when I travel from my home in North Norfolk to see my daughters in Bristol I cross at least seven of them.

From a nature campaign organising perspective they are an unused gift.  Socially, they connect with people’s lived experience, where they grew up or went to live, and what it is like, in a way that larger regions, or administrative Counties, do not.

‘Place’ is important to people in the UK, as elsewhere, and as the Victorians recognized, natural history provides threads in that fabric.   It’s the sort of rooted background identity which ought to be covered in School Curricula and perhaps captured in a form of ‘Passport’, or ‘Identity Card’ for every resident, as some of the coordinates of ‘home’.  Maybe even something which runs with a home as a property.  At the very least, our NCAs deserve a mention on road signs.

Audiences – Engage Across Values Groups

To make just one over-arching suggestion about audiences, if the UK nature movement is to reach and see its ideas more adopted beyond its base, or less kindly, outside its ghetto, they will need to resonate with motivational values, the underlying deep and largely unconscious convictions of the population.

Many environmental NGOs are perceived to be, and most campaign groups definitely are ‘change organisations’. This in itself is enough to mean they tend to be very strongly dominated by Pioneers, just one of the three roughly equal main values groups dividing the population.  (See How change campaigns get populated by the Usual Suspects).  Which of course applies in politics.

This does not matter if your aims and objectives can be achieved from within, or resourced by a focus on, one values group but it does matter if you want your cause or projects to be perceived as representing or involving the mainstream, or ‘normal’ or ‘average’ people.

As Mark Avery observed, in the UK cancer and health charities raise vastly more money than nature and environment groups.  Their most high profile fundraising activities are often mass sponsored Fun Runs or Park Runs, and their participants and supporters are skewed to the mainstream esteem-seeking Prospector group. Support for environment and nature charities however is strongly skewed to Pioneers (charity motivational values maps here).

Motivational values difference: left my favourite type of charity is environment, right favourite is health.  Warm colours indicate stronger agreement (UK population). This is why health charities have a bigger social and cultural presence in the UK than purely environmental ones, and why adapting environment or nature to be ‘about health’, can involve a wider audience. More ‘nature’ data here

Compared to Pioneers, Prospectors like to do fun and socially visible things, preferably ‘looking good’ as a group of friends. Pioneers not only overindex on nature and global issues but love debating ideas and issues.  This is perhaps why events like the RNN Restore Nature Now march are stronger on talks, information and ideas than looking good or having fun, than the average Prospector would like.  Yet Prospectors are most often swing voters, are disproportionately represented among those in full time employment, and politicians are sensitive to them as ‘aspirational’ voters.

So in terms of audience strategy, it would make sense for a campaign to increase nature ability, and to send participatory signals, to first and foremost try to engage Prospectors.  A lot of Pioneers will probably be attracted to nature events and activities anyway, so long as they are ‘interesting’ enough, and Settlers will join in once the behaviour seems normal.  (For more see this summary and the book What Makes People Tick).

Here is a ‘values planner’ giving a ‘straw person’ idea of the sorts of activities which different motivational groups might be attracted to. Essentially you can most easily engage Pioneers with interesting ideas, Prospectors with (the right sorts of) activities, and Settlers via groups they are already in, and familiar activities.

These values planner activities were adapted to climate change some years ago but could be easily be revised to fit nature.

Pioneers can be attracted to innovative activities but Prospectors want to see them proved successful, and Settlers want them to have become normal before joining in, so rather than inventing completely novel ways to engage with nature, it’s more effective to attach, reveal or insert nature into existing cultural practice.

To take the case of gardening culture, for Settlers gardening might be about survival (grow your own), retaining the familiar (including regular visiting birds or other wildlife), exerting control or rules of your own, and being ‘normal’, so if normal changes, the Settlers change in line with it.  For Prospectors a garden could be an opportunity to display symbols of success (which could include wildlife if there is a clear way to be seen to ‘do the right thing’ and ‘win’), have fun, and do things with friends.  For Pioneers a garden could be many things depending their interests, including a realm of the imagination, an opportunity to experiment, and to make a difference.

The natural social dynamic of behavioural change is that Pioneers innovate and experiment, and if that appears socially successful, Prospectors will emulate it.  Then if enough people pick up that new behaviour, it appear as normal, so Settlers join in.    The current UK trend of increasing gardening for, or with nature, is part way through this change dynamic.

Interventions need to be designed to match these needs and dynamics otherwise they will not spread, or may even cause a build up of resistance and ‘culture wars’.  (The problems faced by initiatives like No Mow May and changing verge management, are a case in point: Pioneers will start them, Settlers may be incensed by Councils “not doing their [traditional, normal] job”, and Prospectors probably are not sure what to think but avoid the controversy).

Knowing about nature in general meets different needs, or gives different benefits and rewards, for different people according to their motivational values.

  • For Settlers, recognizing and knowing the names and ways of plants or animals could help make them feel they belong part of a familiar community, even with friends.
  • For Prospectors being able to put names to nature, explain them to others or to discover the rare and unsual could be an opportunity to hone and demonstrate their abilities.
  • For Pioneers, being able to read and interpret the intricacy and multiple layers of nature, including mysteries, could give them additional self-agency and opportunities to use it to ‘make a difference’.

For all of them, being able to name and understand nature changes the experience of being in-nature from one of just being in a green or blue space, to something more rewarding.   It changes the experience of being in a ‘Nature Reserve’ or at a ‘nature event’ from one of potential boredom or alienation, feeling inadequate or that they do not belong, to one of welcome, fascination, appreciation and belonging.  As John Muir said, “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

For professionals of any chalk, being fluent in nature enables them to be confident about engaging with it as a policy matter, or in professional practice as in education or health, and with members of the public, practitioners like land managers or farmers, and voters or environmental NGOs.

PR: Act Like A Business

The UK nature movement does not need more PR to make politicians or the rest of the population aware that it exists but it does need politicians to take it more seriously. One way it could do that without requiring any clever or expensive new tricks, is to act more like a business in its government relations.

Nature protection as practiced by the environment groups on the June 2024 Restore Nature Now march, is not obviously a business in the conventional sense but it could be taken more seriously by Westminster politicians if it better played to its strengths in terms of employment and economic importance.

With our system of geographic constituencies, even ‘national politics’ has a localist psychological reflex: nearly all MPs strive to be seen to support ‘local businesses’ and in particular ‘small businesses’.  Speaking up for businesses has a very different feel to speaking up for think tanks, pressure groups or policy advocates who are in effect, in competition with the advisers to political parties.  How could this be arranged for nature?

Maybe it needs a Confederation of Nature Industries?   The idea of a National Conference (touted by the RNN groups), is a good one, especially if it looked like a Business Conference, and included businesses from the sectors who also directly benefit from and in some cases contribute to conservation of British nature.  And especially if there was clearly signalled participation from every Constituency in the country.

Tourism, agriculture (especially Regenerative and Organic Farming), woodland owners, Health and Educational Professionals, Estate Agents (nature adds value), Remote Sensing and Renewable Energy companies, carbon sequestration investors, green roof providers, wildflower growers, and so on, not just policy experts and scientists, could all be involved.

And of course any rally or festival could feature the tools of the trade – from tractors and trailers to boats to conservation grazing animals – to give it tangible and visual presence.  Just as traditional farm and County Shows provide a soft-power platform for farming PR.

Royal Welsh Show – from www.dailypost.co.uk

One or more such big actualizing events each year could transform the way conservation gets communicated, and create multiple opportunities for people to meet, including politicians and their constituents.  A march is not an ideal place to have a chat.

(Yes there is the Bird Fair which raises money for Birdlife International and attracted 13,000 birdwatchers in 2024, although a better model is perhaps Groundswell, which has brought together practitioners of Regenerative farming, Rewilding and Restorative farming).

At present, when the majority of pro-nature mobilisation comes in the shape of attempts at policy literalism – ie to articulate or support policy-ask  demands – news and social media coverage tends to reduce to a shrill ‘tall but thin’ debate between environmentalists on one side and their opponents on the other, directly or indirectly appealing for political backing.   That can reduce to ‘nature versus the economy’ or  ‘nature versus jobs’, so it’s time to have jobs onside.

PR – Communicating Through Jobs

‘Nature protection’ as an industry is relatively new, and in cultural-political terms it comes a poor second to long-established relevant industries such as farming and fishing.

The entrenched political power of the farming and lobby compared to the nature movement, is because in the public and political mind, farming has managed to equate ‘the land’ and ‘countryside’ with ‘farming’ and land ownership.  It is not down rural/urban differences: if anything rural dwellers are a bit more pro-nature than urban ones, or to numbers of votes.

According to Statistia, there were 22,000 people employed as professionals in UK conservation, and 47,000 in ‘the environment’  in 2019.  In comparison,  about 10,000 fishers worked on 5,541 registered fishing vessels in 2022.  Not so many, yet in conventional politics, upsetting fishermen and fisherwomen is probably regarded as a more serious problem than upsetting conservation and environment workers.  Why? Because of culture, or in this case, cultural legacy.

As one UK Minister who had tried to put forward fisheries conservation measures explained, you can have as many facts and scientists on your side as you like but once TV news interviews a craggy blue-eyed fisherman in a yellow Souwester staring into a gale on a dockside and saying his family’s livelihood is at stake, “you are ****-ed”.

Fishers are less numerous but more ‘represented’ in the public and political mind.  This political effect is ultimately why our fisheries are in such a dire way, and our marine environment is even less protected than nature on land.

A still from the BBC series ‘A Fisherman’s Apprentice’ in which biologist Monty Halls joined fishermen at work.   ‘The Billy Rowney crew describe the dangers of life at sea, particularly in bad weather’.

As measured by GDP, farming is a bigger economic activity than the nature conservation business in the UK, and farming covers 71% of the land area (50% as ‘enclosed farms’), whereas only 2.9% is effectively protected for nature.

On-farm UK jobs, that’s farmers, plus spouses, business partners, and workers, were officially put at 292,000 in 2023, with 209,000 farm ‘holdings’ or ‘farms’ of some sort, most under 100Ha (including ‘hobby farms’ devoted to nature). About half the farmers are part time.

Yet just 19% of the farms cover 75% of the farmland.  It’s this last group of ‘agribusiness’ farmers who hold most sway for example in the NFU (National Farmers Union, with 46,000 members), and thus with the government. In Englandjust 7,600 farmers have more than 100Ha of cereals, and only 9,000 dairy farmers have herds of more than 150 dairy cows, in total less than 20,000.  Such capital and chemical intensive farming has been largely responsible for agricultural pesticide, fertiliser and slurry and air pollution, and soil damage.

Despite its name, the NFU is not a Trade Union: it supported abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board which had regulated pay of farm workers, and has been described as an ‘English Agribusiness Lobby Group’.  It has organised and lobbied to have farmers appointed to National Parks boards, to lift bans on neonicotinoid pesticides, and against establishment of zones to control nitrate pollution of water.

Yet by the same media alchemy as the Souwestered fisherman, no matter how big the farm business, ‘the farmer’ only has to appear along with a family member holding a lamb or a box of vegetables in an advert or on TV, to become a “family farmer”.

In contrast, the 67,000 conservation and environment professionals are fighting the battle for public support, from a position of almost complete invisibility.

They are unlikely to live and work on a ‘family nature reserve’, or in a ‘family wood’, or on a ‘family river’.  Their families are at home, elsewhere.  They rarely have a telegenic farmhouse kitchen Aga to meet journalists beside, or heart-warming story of ‘the family business’ for MPs to repeat.  (Theses are deficits and absences which the NGOs – the landowning ones especially – could fix.  It’s one reason why farmer-led Rewilding projects have had a relatively good media reception).

NFU branded Boris Johnson feeds an unlucky lamb.  Photo Yorkshire Post, 2021

Nor are the nature professionals represented by a well-organised business lobby.   Politics is about people, and causes, interests and issues are represented by people with stories. Nature can’t tell its own stories to politicians.  The NFU does a very good job in making sure politicians meet their people and not their accountants.  The nature groups need to look at how they can do the same.

BBC Countryfile presenters with some old-school farm props.  Perhaps the pond dipping net represents natural history.  Picture from The Guardian.

Farming also looks more politically weighty if you present it as it ‘Farming and Food’. Include everyone involved in the food chain, including transport, packaging and processing, wholesaling, retailing and catering as well as farming and fishing, and the UK ‘Food and Farming Industry’ comprises 4.2m people and 6.5% (£148bn) of gross national ‘value added’.   Actually growing a carrot or sheep or catching a fish is the work of just 10% of those 4.2m. Ninety percent of them work in the chain, including catering, retail and manufacturing.

But when it comes to media representation, it suits both ‘halves’ to up put a farmer or fisher out front.  In the 1980s, farming rep’s spoke of the countryside as their ‘factory floor’ but they learnt that ‘Factory Farming’ invokes awkward thoughts.  The industry knows an individual farmer or fisher, looking as hands-on and small-scale as possible, enjoys far more public sympathy and cultural authority than a food chain executive.

PR – The Natural Stewards Of Natural Capital?

If the nature organsiations did decide to have a festival or trade fair, they could include a section for accountants and economists, as accounting for the value of natural assets, or Natural Capital created by nature, is now becoming a big business, and attracting its own sector of analysts and business consultants.  The £148bn ‘value added’ by agriculture mentioned above is from old school financial accounting of wages, dividends and sales of products and services etc..  It doesn’t account for the loss of assets created by nature, such as damage to soils, loss of peatlands storing carbon, or any increase in such assets, such as if expanded tree growth mopped up more pollution, both now and in the future.

In recent years the government has started to try and count the value of nature and (but not only) ‘ecosystem function’ in alternative national economic accounts, rather than just GDP measured in £ financial transactions.  The government Office for National Statsitics (ONS) explains:

Natural wealth includes things like the productivity of soils and access to clean water. Any natural resource or process that supports human life, society and the economy forms an important part of our natural capital… [it] is an important part of a wider move to better understand inclusive wealth, as discussed in The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review

Natural capital monetary estimates should be interpreted as a partial or minimum value of the services provided by the natural environment, as a number of services, such as flood protection from natural resources, are not currently measured …

As Natural England put it:

The value of the environment and natural capital is routinely understated. For example, the Office for National Statistics estimate that England’s woods and forests deliver a value of services estimated at £2.3 billion annually. Of this figure, only a small proportion – 10% – is in timber values. The rest of the value derives from other more ‘hidden’ benefits to society, such as human recreation and air pollution removal, which improve health, and carbon sequestration which can help combat climate change

Looked at this way, the ONS says ‘in 2021, the total asset value of ecosystem services in the UK was just over £1.5 trillion’.  ONS adds: ‘In 2021, cultural services made up the majority of the asset value (61%), followed by provisioning (32%) and regulating (7%) services’.  [Conventional agricultural output comes under ‘biomass’ which comes under ‘provisioning’].

“Cultural services” means ‘the non-material benefits we obtain from ecosystems through recreation, tourism, and their associated health benefits’.  

The ONS states that on these accounts for England in 2020, ‘the total annual value for the ecosystem services we are currently able to measure was £35.7 billion’, and,  ‘over half (57%) of the annual value in England in 2020 was derived from cultural services, predominantly recreation and tourism (£12.4 billion) and health benefits (£5.5 billion) associated with this’.

As the diagram below shows the value of tourism and recreation, plus health benefits from outdoor recreation, outweigh agricuture and water abstraction combined, and that’s before you include the positive effect of nature on the value of homes, its role in removing pollution, or natural greenery cooling cities.

The 2021 ‘Tourism and outdoor leisure accounts, natural capital’ accounts ‘main points’ state:

  • ‘Nature contributed an estimated £12 billion to tourism and outdoor leisure within the UK in 2019.
  • The number of outdoor-related activities participated in across the UK rose from 1.2 billion to 1.5 billion between 2011 and 2016.
  • Outdoor-related activities in urban settings accounted for over 60% of all nature-based spending in 2019 within Great Britain.
  • Between 2011 and 2019, 8% of all estimated tourism and outdoor leisure spending in Great Britain was driven primarily by nature’

In 2020 agricultural biomass (ie crops and livestock) made up £5.4bn of ‘Provisioning’ services in England.   So from this perspective, although this accounting system is still in development and counted as ‘experimental’, nature looks rather more important than if you judged the nature movement of the 28 main NGOs on its £0.5bn financial turnover estimated by Mark Avery in his book Reflections.

In Natural Capital accounts, agriculture contributes £5.4bn in England against (see above) £12.4bn from recreation and tourism.

In 2022 Alice Fitch and others published an analysis in the journal PLOS One putting ‘the natural capital contribution to tourism’ in the UK at £22.5 billion, or 0.9% of UK GDP’.  That includes a wide range of ‘Tourism and Outdoor Leisure’ activities which use the natural environment from sea-angling and visiting a beach to birdwatching.

The 67,000 conservation and environment professionals are not just concerned with nature and environment on farmland, and nor are the nature and environmental NGOs but they have a good case to make that they are de facto,  the principal and longest-standing social advocates of protecting and increasing our Natural Capital.

They should also have a key role in explaining nature to economists.

Consider this from with Partha Dasgupta, author of the government review in biodiversity and Natural Capital, speaking to the Leslie Hook of the Financial Times in 2021:

PD: “Depreciation is not accounted for in GDP.  The ‘g’ in GDP. Stands for ‘gross’ not ‘net’. No one would know from national statistics that natural capital is being degraded even as GDP is growing.  That’s a serious shortcoming of GDP, for ecosystems can be degraded very easily and violently; you can wipe out a whole ecosystem by trashing it”…

Leslie Hook: “… [your] review says .. nature is a blind spot in economics … what would you like changed?:

PD: “change really needs to come internally from the teaching profession.  It’s not a giant intellectual step to introduce nature into economics.  Economic reasoning involves capital assets which are used to produce goods and services we like and enjoy and care about … To rebuild economics, we would need to add natural capital to the binary classification we economists use, namely produced capital, such as roads, buidings machines, and equipment, and human capital, such as health and education” …

… “The hard work lies in modelling ecosystems … but received economics does not include natural capital because economists  are unfamiliar with ecology.  Many of the most prominent economists today have a math background, and most have no knowledge of ecology.  And yet mathematical models of ecosystems bear a strong resemblance to models of economic systems, so it should be relatively easy for economics courses to include natural capital”.

I hope that any such course includes a bit of Natural History and not just mathematical ecology but the most important question is who and what represents Natural Capital socially, culturally and politically.

In The Lie Of The Land, Guy Shrubsole describes how landowners and farmers pulled the trick of describing themselves as ‘stewards’ rather than ‘owners’ to imply that they were on the same side as the public interest.

But as he says, to ‘steward’ means looking after something you do not own, and that is what the nature movement has been for Natural Capital, since long before the term was invented.  The environmental NGOs have resisted pollution and loss of biodiversity, whereas farming has overall been the main driver of loss.

The nature groups and their allies should now act like businesses and take the opportunity to occupy that space.  Otherwise they may find that the agribusiness and landowning lobby pulls the same ‘stewardship’ trick for Natural Capital, as it did in claiming privilege to ‘speak for the countryside’.

What People Need To Know

At its most fundamental, nature ability, Natural History Knowledge or nature literacy starts with being able to recognize and name plants and animals: the ABC, the alphabet of nature.  Which species?   The local ones, of the area where live, and in England, their wider National (Natural) Character Area.

After that comes knowing something about the ways of creatures and plants, how they interact, and their homes, the habitats they live in.  Once know those are understood, people can start to ‘read’ whole landscapes.   So perhaps if you make an imperfect analogy with literacy, the ABC is species, the sentences are habitats and the paragraphs are landscapes.

With training in environmental problems and conservation needs in mind, the next level of useful knowledge would be about things like how and why a diversity of wildflowers needs low nutrient not high nutrient soil, the relationship between insects and food plants, what fertilisers and pesticides are, how to make garden nature features, how to introduce children to nature, how hay meadows, heathlands and wetlands come about, how rivers and floodplains work, how flood control works (beavers), how carbon fixing works, how we know whether species are vanishing or not, shifting baselines, and reading the landscape and recognizing old and new woods and grasslands  – uncommon knowledge.

Who Could Be Involved

Obvious organisations which might contribute include the Field Studies Council and others focused on Natural History and particular sectors such as the BTO for birds and the BSBI for plants, and Natural History Societies.

All the nature conservation organisations are candidates, from the National Trust down to the smallest newer or most specialist groups but to get new and additional results in terms of nature literacy will require going beyond formal educational methods, and involving bodies from outside the existing ‘nature movement’, which are in touch with and just as important, in tune with, the wider public, from media and business to hospitality, Local Government, sports and entertainment.

Half A Dozen Political Asks

The introduction argues that some early political asks would be useful to align project partners and help provoke political interest in the idea of a national drive for Nature Ability. To achieve any scale would require some things to be resourced by the government or bodies like HLF.

Some suggestions:

  1. A government funded campaign to promote Nature Ability, including an above-the-line advertising campaign, and a multi-facetted social marketing campaign and a wide array of instrumental projects.
  1. Council Tax rebates for nature- and ecosystem-boosting features (biodiversity ehancing, flood reduction etc) of homes and gardens, and financial incentives for the same ‘public goods’ contribution made by agricultural land owners by farmers but for owners of other land, such as businesses and Councils. Non-agri Environment Schemes – ELMS 2.0.
  1. Recognition of Ecological Land as a category in statutory Local Plans, and its protection from development.
  1. Signing of National Character Areas and all nature reserves and higher level ELMS schemes and nature relevant features, indicating any sort of public access or visibility, (eg along roads, and Public Footpaths using existing signs) linked to the MAGIC system (eg a more user friendly app), including for example Ancient Trees.
  1. A system of official recognition for nationally and regionally important annual moments (a sorted of nature-centred equivalent to Bank Holidays or the Blue Plaque scheme), including a National Bluebell Day.
  1. Issue all voting age adults with a National Character Area natural identity certificate, citizenship profile or identity card (see p.5), and decide (via a Citizens Assembly?) ways it could be used with some ‘official’ recognition, beyond just inspiring questions in pub quizzes.

 

All sections

1 – Introduction And Nature Ability

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?

Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

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