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Section 5  – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

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Natural History is undergoing something of a revival but over the last century it went from being a mainstay of UK culture to a backwater interest, as the conservation movement mostly sidelined it in favour of ecological science, and the ‘alternative’ environmental revolution largely passed it by.

Important and facsinating though ecological science is (I am a fan), Natural History works in a different way, which makes it more ‘relatable’ and accessible person to person.  It also relates directly to place, landscape and identity, all of which make give it huge potential for building connections between nature and popular culture.

Traces Of Nature Culture

Nobody was measuring public levels of  ‘Natural History Knowledge’ before the late C20th era of opinion polling and environmental anxiety but the nature ability prevailing in times past has left its traces all over popular culture, such as in entertainment, stories, religion, traditions, folk beliefs, decor and businesses.

If you’ve ever “touched wood” or thrown a coin into a fountain or ‘wishing well’ for luck, you’ve engaged with nature beliefs going back not just to Anglo Saxon times but the Bronze Age.  Such traces provide abundant evidence that ability to identify wild plants was once normal because it was essential for treating illness in people and farm animals, and for food.

Nature knowledge was still common knowledge in the C16th, when William Shakespeare conjured up these lines for Oberon, King of the Fairies, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine: There sleeps Titania sometime of the night …’

Shakespeare’s audience were probably aware of what those wildflowers actually looked like, even if they don’t actually all grow and bloom in the same place.  They would be rarely encountered in the everyday lives of most theatre-goers today.  In The Tempest he had the spirit Ariel sleep in the bell of a Cowslip, which is not a Primrose but how many contemporary playrights or movie makers would know the difference?

Cowslips left and Primroses, right

Living Legends

Natural History knowledge used to be vital in marking out our landscape.  Medieval and ‘Dark Age’ equivalents of surveyors and politicians often referred to specific native tree species in marking out the ‘bounds’ of estates and territories that became parishes.  In The Real Middle Earth, Sussex University psychologist and Shaman Brian Bates shows how the Dark Age folklore which inspired J R Tokein’s landcsapes in Lord of the Rings is geographic not imaginary – it’s this country.

Due to various historical accidents described by writers such as Oliver Rackham, the UK still has more ancient trees than anywhere else in Europe.  They are painstakingly plotted by the Ancient Tree Forum, and the subject of the Woodland Trust’s ‘Living Legends’ campaign.  Such old trees, often hundreds and some thousands of years old, are a key ingredient of the ’mysterious’ feel to many UK landscapes, often refered to by visitors from the European mainland but largely un-noticed by modern UK citizens.

1066

Many such trees were sites of cultural importance or landmarks known to ‘Celts’ and Anglo Saxons.  Richard Muir describes how on learning that the Normans had landed in Southern England in 1066, Saxon King Harold gathered the English army at the ‘Hoar Apple Tree’, a ‘landmark tree’ on Caldbec Hill in the Sussex Downs.  (Hoar means a tree made hoary looking by being encrusted with lichen, probably a very old tree).    We still couple “hoary” with “old” but the living coat of muticoloured lichens was almost totally wiped out by industrial air pollution in the C19th and 20^th, leaving book illustrators and graphic designers with a standard image of tree trunks as just ‘brown’.

1930s

Detail from Walter Spradberry’s  ‘Flowers of the Season’ London transport poster (1933) which could almost serve as an identification guide, showing realistic Harebell, Scabious, Tormentil, Ragwort, Chicory, Feverfew and others.

Before chemical herbicides such ‘wayside flowers’ were abundant and often gathered for Village Show competitions, as medicinal herbs, or for decorating churches and homes. So no surprise that they featured in commercial art used to promote taking a bus to the countryside.  In later decades, graphics in advertisements became more abstract and C21st visualisations of ‘meadows’ and even ‘nature’ brand products routinely show astroturf style blank green grass with or without token yellow blob dandelions or, a variety of multicoloured but unreal, or non-native flowers. [Read more].

1950s

Another indicator of the past knowledge and abundance of wild plants is the diversity of their different local (‘folk’) names collected by poet, writer and naturalist Geoffery Grigson for The Englishmans Flora.  Published in 1955 just before intensive chemical farming started to sterilise the countryside, many of the traditional names relate to pre-Christian magical beliefs about the role of plants, as well as their uses in food and medicine.

Take some of the wild flowers said (it varies) to be traditionally placed in the ‘May Garland’ or ‘Fairy Garland’ at the top of a Maypole: Red Campion, Stitchwort, Dandelion, Bluebell, Blackthorn, Elder, Hawthorn, Rowan, Wood Sorrel and Herb Robert.

For Red Campion, Grigson records 63 local names, for Stitchwort 106, Dandelion 53, Bluebell 83, Blackthorn 27, Elder 17, Hawthorn 74, Rowan 38, Wood Sorrel 57 and Herb Robert, a small pink cranesbill now commonly regarded as a garden ‘weed’ but with an enormous list of magical associations, no fewer than 111, including ‘Pucks Needles’.

 Ancient May cycle nature traditions were exported from Europe to America and became a version of  ‘May Day’ in the US. The traditional garland was of local wildflowers.

When Natural History Was Popular Culture

‘Natural History’ became a hugely popular interest in of the C19th, including in the UK.  As a science it went back to the Ancient Greeks but Natural History Societies and ‘Field Clubs’ sprang up all over the newly industrialised societies including the UK.

Natural History was taught in C19th universities, schools, and informally, among the Societies themeslves, with countless expeditions to record and collect specimens, journals in which to record findings, and buildings to display collections.  London’s Natural History Museum opened in 1881.

More than this, having a good general knowledge of nature where you lived was widely respected and fashionably emulated.  Lacking cars and foreign holidays, efforts were usually local and contributed to municipal and regional civic pride.

In 2014 Jennifer Frazer wrote an anguished account of the rise and subsequent decline of Natural History education in a Scientific American blog Natural History is Dying, and We Are All the Losers.   She pointed out that when ‘Natural History flourished’ in the 18th and 19th centuries, not only Linnaeus and Darwin, but the US Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt ‘were avid and avowed naturalists’. It was ‘a time when basic knowledge of local plants and animals was considered part of a good education — and of being a good citizen’ …. [and]

‘ Anna Botsford Comstock published a textbook in 1911 for elementary students and teachers called Handbook of Nature-Study which exploded in popular sales. Between 1890 and 1940 texts such as hers were an essential part of classrooms across America. The aim was to train teachers and facilitate direct contact between children and living organisms in order to create an “essential nature literacy”’.

‘A Masterpiece of Social Mechanics’

Natural History Societies were open, involving and in the cutural mainstream of the time. To support their activities such as exhibitions, museums and libraries, ‘Societies held fundraising events, including popular musical acts, dinners with visiting speakers and even gambling. This of course made Natural History locally visible and socially embedded, and it was promoted as good for health and social standing.

Diarmid Finnegan records that C19th Scotland had at least 70 Natural History Societies and ‘Botany, geology and meteorology … were recommended … as physically and mentally invigorating pastimes’.   David Page, geologist and ‘enthusiast for intellectual culture’ advocated for more field clubs and science associations because ‘natural history , more than other forms of intellectual culture, offered a stimulating distraction from the debilitating effects of routine urban existence’  Page was careful to point out the dangers of narrow scientific professionalism , a condition incompatible with “the duties of brotherly sympathy , honest manliness , and good citizenship , which render life sweet and society enjoyable’’.

In The Naturalist in Britain, David Allen describes the field club model as a ‘masterpiece of social mechanics’ because, says Finnegan:  ‘With low subscription rates , out-of-doors camaraderie and general informality , field clubs had an appeal that transcended social divisions of gender and class even if the impact of an egalitarian ethos was uneven’.

These days perhaps only competitive sport is credited with such benefits.

C20th: Natural History Decline

The main factor which eventually sent the civic natural history into decline was the growing dominance of professionalised science.  Having succeeded in popularising nature education to the point where it was adopted in the formal education system, once there, its advocates saw it progressively eclipsed by more ‘modern’ sciences, which were regarded as a superior form of learning.  Frazer writes of the US:

‘Naturalists … commanded respect at universities, and taught many field classes and courses … dedicated to identifying and understanding the life histories and evolutionary relationships of particular groups of organisms: flowering plants, mosses, lichens, mammals, fungi, insects, invertebrates, birds, insects, fossils, birds, and so on — a host of tangible living things to which people could directly relate …

After World War II, everything changed … The pendulum swung away from outdoor field studies toward indoors laboratory research on fundamental processes. Scientists who studied underlying processes of biology — evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, etc., — got bigger grants and better publications than those who studied the organisms themselves. Funding and grants for natural history evaporated’.

How Conservation Let Natural History Slip

The foundations of most of UK conservation – government and NGOs – were laid in post-war Britain.  A desire to see it taken seriously inadvertently contributed to a decline in Natural History.

The first UK National Nature Reserve, at Beinn Eighe, purchased in 1951.

In 1949 the UK Government ‘Nature Conservancy’ was set up by Max Nicholson, a lifelong hyper-active polymath with a visionary talent for identifying needs for political or social machinery and then fixing them.  Nicholson played critical roles in founding or operationalising WWF, the BTO, IIED the RSPB, as well as initiating the UK’s urban nature parks movement and the strategic data journal ENDS.  Aiming to convince politicians and the media of the importance of nature conservation, he strong-armed the BBC into funding the start up of the Council for Nature’s ‘intelligence unit’, to promote environmental coverage.  That led to CoEnCo which led to the current UK NGO umbrella group Wildlife and Countryside Link.

A fan of expertise being “on top, not on tap”, of data, and of scientific rigour, as well as being an accomplished naturalist, Nicholson was also a WW2 and post-war Civil Servant familiar with the machinery of power, in which he played numerous senior roles.  Seeing the political authority accorded to Science in post war Britain, Nicholson made sure the original Nature Conservancy had the status of a ‘Scientific Service’, in effect a Research Council.

“we made a policy decision to write off the Natural History Societies, which we considered utterly useless for this new age of conservation” – Max Nicholson

A pragmatist, in 1980 Nicholson told Charlie Pye-Smith and Phillip Lowe, “the important task was to vindicate the role of ecology as a science through serious quantitative and experimental research, and thus make possible the creation of a science-based conservation movement  which in turn could lead to a broader professional environmental programme”.

Nicholson’s vision was largely realised.  There is now a large UK ‘environmental management’ policy community, with professional organisations.  He also anticipated that for political reasons, the fledgling Conservancy would need a ‘strong voluntary support movement’, so he channeled funds into building up “a complete network of County Naturalists Trusts” [now The Wildlife Trusts].  Again he succeeded but as he also said, “we made a policy decision to write off the Natural History Societies, which we considered utterly useless for this new age of conservation”.

At the time it was probably the best option but just as nobody foresaw that the voluntary conservation groups would find themselves fighting to mitigate wholesale change, from road building to intensive farming, blanket forestry and pollution – and despite their best efforts and significant growth in memberships and nature reserve estates, failing overall,  nor did they anticipate the arrival of attention-driven politics, or the national withering of nature knowledge or its consequences.

In the C20th today’s major nature and environment groups made it their task to find ways to persuade naturalists to join conservation efforts, and alert the wider public to the need for environmental action (in which they succeeded, at a conceptual level).  It was not to introduce the wider public to natural history, as that didn’t seem to be necessary.  And nor, with the partial exception of the RSPB and birds, have they ever done so at scale.

C21st: Calls For Natural History Revival

‘Ernest Rutherford famously said “all science is either physics or stamp collecting”. No science has perhaps been a bigger victim of this attitude than natural history’ – Jennifer Frazer

In recent decades some scientists, especially those with ‘field skills’ (ie mainly, natural history knowledge) have become increasingly concerned that their own community is becoming estranged from nature, as an unintended consequence of its attempts to be increasingly ‘rigorous’, and more like technological sciences promising to lead to commercial applications and economic growth.  From the 1970s, computing power and modelling enabled mathematicians to create and test hypotheses at the cutting edge of ecological research, so long as they had data. They had little need to tell one species from another, even if they met them while out for a walk.

In 2007, American scientists and field naturalists Stephen Trombulak and Thomas Fleischner from Arizona pointed out that a 1994 survey  found ‘a surprising number’ of the American Society of Naturalists had themselves equated an interest in natural history with being an ‘unsuccessful biologist’. They issued a call for a ‘renaissance in natural history’, started a journal, and set up an institute to promote it.   In 2014 Joshua Tewksbury and 17 other scientists, published Natural History’s Place in Science and Society, in the journal BioScience. They detailed a significant decline in natural history practice and called for its ‘revitalisation’.

China’s Natural History Revival Movement

The most coherent and comprehensive cultural and social rationale I’ve come across for a revival of natural history is not from the UK, or indeed Europe or North America but from China.  At least so far as I can judge from this 2023 article in Nature’s  ‘Humanities & Social Science Comunications’, by Siyu Fu and Kristian Nielsen at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Huajie Liu of Peking Universty – find some of his (English Language) work at ResearchGate.Net)

Their account centres on the work of Liu Huajie at Peking University, whose thinking seems very relevant to many of the issues facing the nature movement in the UK.

Siyu and Nielsen write that Liu is ‘widely considered the main protagonist and public spokesperson of the NHRM’ or Natural History Revival Movement in China.

Liu wrote a book Living As A Naturalist (only available in Chinese) in 2016.  ‘Living As A Naturalist’ is a philosophy and a call for a movement, or a movement in practice, depending how you view it.  Siyu and Nielsen write:  ‘the call for naturalism as a way of life applies to individual citizens and communities’. ‘Living As A Naturalist’ also attracted a following of Chinese-speakers living overseas, through viewers of Phoenix TV.

The authors begin Liu’s story in the 1990s, when he ‘became known as a staunch critic of pseudoscience’ as opposed to ‘science proper’.  But after wining an award to study it, ‘Liu had modified or even reversed his original standpoint’ and:

 ‘around 2000, Liu Huajie began publishing academic and news articles, all of which called for a revival of natural history amidst a virtual flood of books in Chinese about nature and experiencing nature’.

In 2007 the Chinese Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)  adopted the concept of building an ‘Ecological Civilisation’ or the EC, which became part of the Constitution in 2012. The rationale included avoiding ‘progress traps’ caused by environmental degradation.

Siyu Fu and Kristian Nielsen say the NHRM ‘entails an alternative vision of EC with associations around nature as an important political force’, and with less emphasis on achieving it through science and technology.

They add ‘Liu Huajie defends natural history as a legitimate and relevant mode of knowledge production’ … and  ‘in contrast to how people in China usually understand science, the natural history approach emphasises inductive learning and emotional engagement with its subject matter, rather than hypothetical deduction and detachment’.

The paper describes how a large number of bird-watching clubs and local and national nature organisations have become established in China and their science or citizen science has influenced local conservation policies.  Liu uses BOWU [Beauty, Observation, Understanding, Wonder] as an acronym to present or memorise the aims of the kind of natural history education that he advocates.  In my opinion, that’s also good advice for the nature movement in the UK.  More about Liu’s approach from the paper in Nature:

To really see nature, one will have to get to know it, which is why, according to Liu, naming natural entities is important.

Liu compares knowing the names of plants and animals to knowing the names of famous actors. To appreciate cultural products such as Hollywood movies, we want to know the names of the actors in the movies. Similarly, to appreciate nature, we need to know the names of plants and animals in nature.

Education in this case means practice and learning-by-doing, not formal training by following a well-defined curriculum. Liu cites the nineteenth century Swiss-born naturalist Louis Agassiz to make his point: ‘Study nature, not books’.

Learning how to practice natural history in the modern age, Liu suggests supervised training. Natural history training is different from professional training or on-the-job training. There are no specific aims or learning goals involved in the kind of natural history envisaged by Liu other than inciting curiosity about nature and love of nature. 

I’d recommend anyone interested in organising action to improve nature ability in the UK to read Siyu Fu and Kristian Nielsen’s paper  Reviving natural history, building ecological civilisation: the philosophy and social significance of the Natural History Revival Movement in contemporary China.

Natural History’s Particular Political Potential

In my view we need both Ecology-the-science and Natural History but there are political reasons why Natural History is now particularly important for conservation.

First, because it is socially accessible to the great majority of the public who are never going to become professional ecologists, and second, because it has a distinct psychology that is far more intuitive than the hypothesis-testing of formalised science.

In a short 2022 article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, The psychology of natural history,  New Zealand researchers Kevin Burns and Jason Low lay out how Natural History has a distinct methodology called ‘prediction error learning’.

This means learning from seeing something unexpected, suprising or remarkable, which is then assessed against prior knowledge, as opposed to the powerful but different process of setting an a priori hypothesis and then testing it, which became the bedrock of ‘scientific methods in the C20th (the ‘hypotheticodeductive research paradigm’).

Because prediction-error learning is enabled by having a baseline knowledge of what’s ‘normal’ in nature and how it works, people with nature ability (naturalists and others observing nature ‘in the field’) are at the frontline for nature conservation. They are most able to notice anything new, including disappearance or non-appearance of something familiar, or the appearance of something unfamiliar, such as the nature-gardeners who noticed the 2024 ‘Silent Spring’.

	Natural History	Ecological/ env science
Learning method	Prediction error	Hypothesis testing
Entry Requirements	None	Academic qualifications
Primary communications Channel	Track 1, System 1 intuitive	Track 2, System 2 Professional analytical
Social open-ness	High	Low
Cultural availability potential	High	Low
Current UK comm’s framing	A hobby/ pastime	A science/ discipline/ profession
Capacity to analyse invisible risks and processes (eg climate)	Low	High

(My interpretation)

People who still directly depend on a particular feature of nature or plant or animal for their livelihood can of course also be in this position.  For example the 1980s ‘Waldsterben’ or ‘forest-decline’ became a huge social and political issue, starting in Germany (see ch. 5 in The Dirty Man of Europe).  The first people to notice something was wrong (perhaps in the 1970s) were locals who went into old-growth forests to collect trimmings from felled Silver Fir or Tannen Baum, the traditional Christmas tree, to make decorative wreaths.  Rather than shiny green foliage, they found it was going sickly yellow or brown.

1981 – ‘Acid Rain’ and ‘Forest Decline’ became a big political issue and scientific controversy in Germany (which still rumbles on, as effects of climate change worsen)

The change was gradual but as these collectors only visited once a year, they noticed before professional foresters did (I asked a German scientist activist what the very first symptoms of forest decline had been, and he sardonically replied “an attack of blindness in foresters”).  Presumably the Christmas décor-makers found an alternative supply of foliage once it became unattractive.  It was only when scientists proposed that air pollution might be to blame for the increasingly obvious decline of forests that it became a big public issue but it was prediction-error learning that first alerted the scientists.

Similarly, from the 1950s to the 1970s, conservation managers, naturalists and field biologists had reported puzzling cases of reproductive problems in wildlife.  These remained unexplained, and largely set aside by scientists who were investigated different hypotheses until the 1980s when US scientist Theo Colborn realised that a common factor was concentration of (endocrine-disrupting)  industrial chemicals in freshwater food chains.

Another case, metioned by Joshua Tewksbury’s group, is the disastrous result of ignoring North American native people’s traditional knowledge of the controlled use of fire in forest management.

Beyond just noticing, getting to know a wild plant, animal or natural place enables people to form an emotional bond with them, so such folk are most likely to want to ‘do something’ about loss or damage.   Consequently, from a social-political point of view, conservation has a profound need for more Natural History ability across society.

Natural History is also democratically participative in that it’s socially porous and accessible in a way that most sciences are generally not.  You can be a naturalist, and learn, teach or share a lot about Natural History, without having to be a scientist, pass exams or know a lot of ‘scientific methods’.  Building on this could help strengthen nature’s place in UK culture.

Naturalists are society’s sentries for nature, those who can sound the ‘alarm call’, as well as, alongside scientists, often being those with most understanding of what nature needs to function and survive.   With different organisation they could also be nature’s rapid reaction force at the local level.

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

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.

2. 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.

3. Recognition of Ecological Land as a category in statutory Local Plans, and its protection from development.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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

Section 7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

download as pdf

There is no national promotional campaign for nature and no systematic effort to increase Nature Ability, Natural History Knowledge or Ecoliteracy, call it what you will, so no, so we are not doing this already.

It’s true that it’s not a new idea to set out to embed nature ‘in culture’ and even just in the UK, there are many more existing moments or activities established in popular culture, which have nature content, than I have mentioned.  Most of those were never started with any intention to roll back a problem of national nature blindness because in the past, it wasn’t seen to be a problem but now they could be built on to help do that.

But isn’t it also true that almost all the communications or outreach activities of organisations in the ‘nature movement’, however you define that, may have some effect in signalling nature and the work done to try and protect or restore it?  Yes that is true but even taken together it is self evidently not tackling the problem of a lack of public nature ability, or sufficiently convincing politicians in government that nature is a real political imperative.

The main reason that existing activity is not doing the job, is that it hasn’t been designed to do so.

The Participation Principle

Ultimately the point of this proposal to invest time and effort to embed nature in culture is to show people who are or may become our elected politicians, that nature is an integral part of social life.  As behaviours shape opinions and behaviours are tangible and visible, we need the valuing of and engaging with nature to be expressed through events and activities.  Both which and how many people are involved, is  important.

For good reasons, most voluntary sector nature conservation effort is either aimed at delivery in terms of species survival and natural ecosystem quality and quantity, and the area of habitats protected or restored, or fundraising, including recruitment and retention of supporters or members.

The logic of nature delivery investment is to achieve the maximum gain for every pound or hour spent, and that generally applies to government nature agencies too.  The logic of fundraising and membership investment is to gain and retain as much support as possible for each pound or hour spent.  But the objective of investing time and effort, and money in a drive for public nature literacy, and to create or promote popular culture nature events, is to maximise participation.

Efficient Businsess As Usual leads to Different Outcomes

So, ‘Business As Usual’ for efficient habitat delivery, and efficient fundraising/ membership recruitment sets priorities which are different from maximising nature ability and sending signals that nature is popular and important to the public.

For example, imagine what happens if one woman takes the time and trouble to grow 100 hectares of wildflowers on her land.  A good thing but it sends a different signal from 100 women growing one hectare each, and a different one again from if the 100 hectares were made up by 10,000 women growing 1 square metre each. (1 Ha = 10,000 square metres).

For targeting agri-environment grants or a NGO buying land, a single 100Ha wildflower meadow makes sense but politically the single landowner is one vote, the 100 are 100 votes and the 10,000 votes is larger than the majorities of many Westminster MPs. It’s participation in activities that is important from the politics-signal point of view.

NGO fundraisers also often pursue a strategy of efficiency, targeting people most likely and able to give the largest donations, which is usually existing long-standing and richer supporters.  This is one reason why nearly all NGOs gave up street collections even before the decline of cash but that also had the effect of making themselves and their cause less salient in the world outside their mailing or emailing lists.  That involved a loss of quality too: the human contact disappeared into direct mail and online giving.

Fundraisers in NGOs often have bigger communications budgets than the communications or campaigns departments, as the organisation relies upon them to keep it going.  Inadvertently, this efficiency also focuses the organisation’s communications and relationships on maintaining and recruiting to it’s funding base. It’s normal for most of what pleople outside a NGO know and think about it, to be down to its marketing and fundraising comms, not it’s a change adovcacy or delivery.

But if you accept the logic of this paper, which is that to make the nature movement more effective politically, nature needs to be more expressed in public culture, targeting the base is not what’s most needed.

The Curse Of The ‘New Project’

Business as Usual nature-related projects are often given aims or objectives about ‘public engagement’ and even ‘sustained’ support but subsidiary to the main tasks of land management for species, habitats and ecosystem function. At the same time, funders may require projects to be ‘new’ activities.  This combination tends to significantly reduce the chances of the projects leading to sustained outcomes of public engagement in terms of nature ability, or nature embedded in popular community culture.

Providing that its current owners are open to growth, investing in a project which already has social ‘roots’ in the shape of people who are commited to and understand it, is probably more likely to yield sustainable results in terms of embedding and expressing nature in social culture, than investing in a completely ‘new build’.  Each new build is like a prototype, a seed, or at best a seedling.  There will be a high failure rate. Existing rooted activities have already gone through a sort of natural selection process and developed some sort of resilience.

So in terms of priorities, I would suggest taking the time and trouble to locate existing projects or activities which are already all or most of the way to making nature part of the culture, or where it already is, and wherever possible building on them, however modest they might be.

Back From The Brink

Many Business as Usual nature projects start, stop and relatively quickly, leaving little trace.  One with quite a good account which is still avilable online, is ‘Back From The Brink’ a £7m scheme which ran for only four years from 2017 to 2021.  This is a short time in which to expect a project to develop much in the way of social roots, especially if they weren’t designed with that in mind.

Nineteen Back from the Brink projects were adminsitered by Natural England with money from HLF (Heritage Lorry Fund), and run by seven nature charities incliuding RSPB and Plantlife.    In 2015 NE announced that Back From The Brink would aim to ‘save 20 species from extinction and help another 118 species that are under threat move to a more certain future’.

With a mix of familiar subjects like ancient trees as well as obscure rare plants like Cornish Moss, and the Narrow Headed Ant’s only remaining colony, the scheme’s aim was ‘for threatened species to be restored to a steady state’.  But as well as improving the immediate prospects for rare bats, butterflies, crickets, birds and flowers, Back From The Brink wanted to ensure that ‘landowners and communities’ were ‘working to actively sustain them’.

The post-programme summary states that Back from the Brink involved 59,000 people, including over 10,000 who ‘learnt new skill’s and nearly 4,000 who volunteered their time, while people had ‘185 million opportunities to hear about Back from the Brink’ (eg media mentions).

It aimed to deliver a legacy in these terms:

for threatened species to be restored to a steady state, with landowners and communities working to actively sustain them            

The result was described like this

A legacy of success:  the prospects for targeted populations of our threatened species have been improved from hundreds of practical actions carried out to support them, with more people knowing about and acting for them, and more effective collaborative working by conservation bodies on species recovery as a result.

Which doesn’t say anything about ‘communities working to actively sustain them’.

Back From The Brink map

The interactive map above takes you to two layers of details on each project.   I looked at ten of them and none of the ‘community’ or ‘legacy’ parts mentioned a specific community or group continuing the work, or taking on responsibility as ‘stewards’ for the projects.

Declaring an aim to create sustained community action may reflect over-specifying and inflating aims so the scheme could be announced as ‘ambitious’, especially when it was primarily a ‘shot-in-the-arm’ habitat and species ‘rescue’ operation. More first-aid than a public health programme.  In fact it was not large, compared to HLF’s own land, nature and biodiversity programme, and miniscule compared to government support to ‘farming and environment’ payments (which of course have almost no affect on public nature ability or popular culture as they are generally in the oprofessional farmer-contractor world).

The overall aim for ‘community’ was also bit hyperbolic: to ‘inspire a nation to discover, value and act for threatened species  – aim of 1.3 million people so engaged’.

To set such an engagement aim for a £7m programme of 19 localised and mainly rather specialist projects where much of the effort was necessarily detailed habitat, survey and estate management work needed to directly benefit the wildlife, was over-ambitious but perhaps not intended to be taken seriously.  £7m is not much if you are buying and managing land but it’s a lot if you were primarily doing communications work and community engagement.  £7m could be spent so as to ‘inspire the nation’ but not like this.

‘Engaged’ can mean many things and ‘community’ is often sprayed around in priject specs and promotion like a rhetorical garnish.  In this case community engagement was essentially a side effect in the projects I looked at, not a detectable objective.  These were not bad projects – they were great conservation projects.  They did involve people and in all cases they probably raised nature ability, and in a few cases by a lot, judging by descriptions of numbers and training in Natural History.

But they were conventional Business as Usual projects,  more run by NGOs, more professional than volunteer organised, more parchuted in than embedded in society and unlikely to last as something that people would get involved with on an ongoing basis, becoming part of popular culture.

Some of the projects involved activities and events with artists, poets or musicians but these are injecting ‘Culture’ into nature projects rather than the nature projects becoming part of community culture.

Pick Up The Threads?

It could make sense for NE and HLF to go back to these projects, and pick up the threads of  the ‘collaborative NGO working’ and the glancing through-to-deep engagement with many people no doubt had with them, in a new tranche of projects. These could explore connection to local communities, and see if the nature could become central to events, business or social activities which are or become an ongoing part of community culture. Then communities might be ‘actively working to sustain them’. But as this was a project launched under a Conservative Government the new Labour Government would probably not want to do that.

The Green Recovery Challenge Fund

What several groups running Back To The Brink projects did mention under ‘legacy’, was continuing NGO posts and project work by seeking funding from the the Green Recovery Challenge Fund (GRCF), the next temporary pot of money to hove into view.

GRCF was a small £80m part of government COVID largesse and was also distributed by HLF, in 2021 and 2022.  It initially aimed to create 3,000 jobs in England to ‘restore nature and tackle climate change’, the latter through ‘nature solutions’.

The subsequent evaluation recorded that over three years, 1.7m trees got planted, conservation activities took place on 1,500 square km of land, 25,000 ‘enagement events’ were held involving 400,000 people, and 1,500 jobs were supported.

It involved 159 projects and linked to NE’s Access to Nature programme.  Activities included nature walks, training in identifying species, citizen science, wildlife watching, habitat restoration, school curricula related or forest school type (ie outdoors) activities, gardening, mindfulness, and social media engagement.

An example which involved local distinctiveness was working to restore abundance of the rare but once common flower Sulphur Clover in verges of the Norfolk ‘Claylands’, an often overlooked area.  A great project but it ended in 2023.

Although this funding was put together in a hurry, and ended after three years, it is probably closer in scale and management to the sort of programme that would be needed to make a dent in the problem of the national deficit in nature ability, and developing and running projects to embed nature in social culture.  As well as money, the HLF and its partners have a lot of relevant experience and skills, particularly with social activities and culture.  Such a scheme would have a greater chance of success if it was preceded or accompanied by a national promotional campaign for nature ability.

Conclusion

To UK practitioners struggling to do what they can to make a difference to the nature crisis within the system as it stands, my arguments may seem annoyingly unrealistic but that is partly as their movement has become used to subsisting on a dwindling supply of scraps.

I’d suggest taking inspiration from the establishment of the The Lottery back in 1994, by then Prime Minister John Major. Experience of working in the Treasury, convinced him that the Treasury would never give ‘more than scraps’ of funding to the arts, and he wanted to ensure ‘a rebirth of cultural and sporting life in Britain’.

The Heritage Lottery Fund could now be part of the answer to the nature ability deficit, and a political realisation that nature is important to voters is a pre-requisite to restoring nature in the UK.

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   

Chris Rose, August 27, 2024 –   https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/?p=3115  download this post as a pdf, here

In July 2024 the UK got a new Labour Government.  As part of it’s preparations for fighting the election, the Labour Party cut its ‘Green Prosperity Plan’ to invest £28bn a year in a green transition, by 80%.   We also got a spring and early summer almost without insects, much to the alarm of a small section of the population who follow these things closely but with no discernible political reaction.  At midsummer, London saw the largest ever mobilisation of nature groups, in the 60,000 strong ‘Restore Nature Now’ march. It was ignored by the BBC.  The day after the election, David Attenborough got a standing ovation when he visited the tennis at Wimbledon.  What’s this say about the prospects for nature under Keir Starmer’s Labour?

For decades UK politicians of both main UK Parties have treated the environment and particularly nature, as a politically optional and ultimately disposable ‘priority’.  I’ve reached the conclusion that until nature is less invisible, and more embedded and expressed in everyday social culture, this will remain a limiting factor because Westminster politicians not-so secretly believe the UK population doesn’t really care that much.  To change that, Britain’s nature groups need to focus on culture more than policy.

In this post I look at the political situation for nature and the environment under Keir Starmer’s Government, and at  Westminster political culture.  A subsequent post will look at what could be done to widen and deepen connection to nature as part the culture of UK society.

Introduction

On the morning of 5 July, the day after along with most of the country, campaigners for nature and environmental protection heaved a sigh of relief.  The unpopular Conservative government was gone in a landslide General Election victory for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, which secured 412 seats, a huge majority of 172.

Environmentalists had endured 14 years of broken promises, false starts and regulatory failure on issues from climate change to food and farming, to water pollution and nature protection, punctuated by periodic attempts to consolidate right-wing support by denigrating and reversing pro-nature, pro-climate policies, with ruling politcians even attacking their own nature agency, Natural England.

It’s a bizarre feature of this sad story that UK public opinion was in favour of stronger environmental action throughout, and Conservative voters were if anything, more in favour than Labour voters.  Why this had so little effect on government nature policies has to do with the lowly and untethered place of nature in UK political culture, and that in turn, reflects a social culture, informing political predicates and convictions, which has a very limited connection to real nature.

For generations, Britain’s environment movement has succeeded in protecting thousands of individual nature sites, produced swathes of reports and analyses of issues and now, has taken to cross sector mobilisation in marches.  But with it’s influence largely confined within its own base, that not been enough to stop politicians treating environment as a marginal, optional concern.

Consequently with nature almost absent from social connections between voters and their political representatives, government environmental policies and the outcomes they seek to achieve, are only weakly accountable to public opinion.   Culture, as they say, trumps both process and strategy.  For most of our politicians, nature in UK culture is socially invisible, and thus politically disposable.

This blog explores why in my view, UK campaigners and advocates need to look beyond policies to social culture, meaning popular culture, what people do and value doing.  Without that, nature can’t be really restored in the UK, rather that just celebrated as a nice-to-have concept.  Keir Starmer is said to be a ‘committed environmentalist’ but he is also boxed in by many constraints which we have to be realistic about. All the more reason to make a start on the long game of changing the social invisibility of nature now. It does not involve inventing a wheel: many ingredients for doing so, already exist.

A Nature and Politics Strategy Framework

Here’s a crude strategy framework to show how I at least, see the issues discussed in this paper.  It’s specific to the UK and particular England, where almost all key nature related policies are directly or indirectly controlled from Westminster.  The content and implementation of nature policies is determined by Westminster Parliament, Government and Whitehall Departments and below them, agencies they control.  Behind those policies lie the ideas politicians have about how important nature really is, part of Westminster culture.  Those are somewhat tenuously derived from wider social culture.  NGOs can try to affect all three.

The default focus of UK NGO political efforts has been on Westminster and Whitehall.  Political culture, particularly among MPs, is quite impervious to external influence.  Political and Parliamentary tradecraft is conservative ‘with a small c’.

There is abundant evidence, a lot of it collected by the environmental NGOs themselves,  that the default approach has been an historic failure and UK nature is one of the most depleted in the world.

My conclusion is that this is doomed to continue so long as the political culture in Westminster remains cynically disbelieving about the importance of nature to voters, and the only realistic way to change this, is bottom up social evidence of nature being culturally important to voters, and not just to representatives of the ‘NGO lobby’.

Part 1: The Place of Nature Under Keir Starmer

Wimbledon 2024:  A Good Omen?

David Attenborough receives a standing ovation at Wimbledon, 5 July 2024

On the day after the General Election, Sir David Attenborough received a standing ovation as he took take his place in the ‘Royal Box’ at the Wimbledon tennis tournament.  The 74 seats in the Royal Box are invitation-only from the Lawn Tennis Association and stuffed with top rank celebrities, the rich, powerful and famous.   Outside the Royal Box another 14,000 mainly rich and influential people make up the rest of Centre Court, and it was these people who rose to give Attenborough his standing ovation. Millions more (not me) avidly follow Wimbledon on tv or online.

When It Hits the Fan is an interesting BBC podcast presented by corporate communications gurus Simon Lewis (ex Buckingham Palace) and David Yelland (ex Sun newspaper).  I recommend it.  In the July 2nd episode “Why PR loves Wimbledon”,  Yelland described passes into Wimbledon as the “golden tickets” of UK PR, and the Royal Box as “probably the best bit of PR in maybe the entire world … part of the soft power of this country”.  In this country Wimbledon is a cultural fixture , an occasion for the UK to feel reassured and good about itself.

So was Attenborough’s Wimbledon endorsement, seen on TV and online by millions, a good omen for nature under Starmer?  It was a cultural moment but they were celebrating the David Attenborough, not nature.  It was best summed up by a commentator for Australian Broadcaster @9NewsAUS who said “for much of his 98 years, Sir David Attenborough brought the world’s wildlife into our homes”.  The Daily Express described him as ‘revered’ and ‘iconic’.

All true although as has been discussed many times, for most of his career Attenborough brought us living-room nature-tainment without revealing the reality of environmental destruction that was eliminating the very nature shown in his programmes.  Within the BBC it was known as ‘the bubble’: nature escapism, a treasured part of domestic tv culture.

To be fair to Attenborough, it’s also true that his 2017 series Blue Planet II, made well after he had become a global tv phenomenon,  broke that mould by showing the impacts of plastic and did a lot of heavy lifting to enable plastic campaigns.  And, that in recent decades he departed from his insistence that he was ‘just a film-maker’ and became an overt conservation advocate.

Chris Packham: ‘Restore Nature Now’

A better bellwether of Wimbledon’s commitment to restoring nature would have been to invite Chris Packhamto the Royal Box.  (Or possibly the charismatic Feargal Sharkey, musician and fly-fisherman turned clean rivers activist – of whom more below).

Not world-famous but well known in the UK, Packham (age 63) is a zoologist who built a following through fronting popular TV programmes from The Really Wild Show in 1986, to BBC’s Springwatch (since 2009).  Packham is spikier than the emollient Attenborough, and has become increasingly activist.

Like Greta Thunberg, Chris Packham has Aspergers and “says it like he sees it”.  In 2015 he called out major UK conservation groups for their weakness on Fox hunting, Badger culling and the perscution of Hen Harriers.  His home has been attacked by arsonists and he has been villified by pro-hunting groups.  Perhaps down to him, the popular Springwatch series has changed from just promoting UK natural history to actively calling for conservation action.

Packham can also take credit for gradually unifying the UK’s diverse collection of environmental NGOs in public and demure demonstrations.  In 2018 he organised a Manifesto for Wildlife and delivered it to Downing Street with a march of 10,000 people, ‘The Peoples Walk For Wildlife’.

Chris Packham’s Walk for Wildlife, 2018 (photo www.dailypost.co.uk)

The 2018 March was something of a watershed in that it was supported by the main conservation NGOs as well as animal welfare groups, who then backed a second Packham walk slated for November 2022.  That was postponed three times due to rail strikes, and finally cancelled in 2023 after Packham attended another family-friendly four-day event, The Big One (April 2023) led by Extinction Rebellion, with a consortium of groups including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace but without the main conservation NGOs.  XR said 60,000 people took part.

This year Chris Packham got together 350 organisations including businesses, for Restore Nature Now (RNN) another march from Hyde Park to Westminster, on 22 June.  It was billed as the country’s ‘biggest ever march for nature’ and had been planned months before the moment when, on May 22, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak surprised almost everyone by calling a General Election for July 4.  The police estimated 60,000 took part.  Some of the organisers said more. The most A-list participant was actress Emma Thompson.

Emma Thomspon, Chris Packham and pro-nature group leaders front the Restore Nature Now march, 2024. Image from www.restorenaturenow.com

Sky News, ITV News, Al Jazeera  and other broadcasters covered RNN and it was covered in the press but the BBC did not turn up, prompting a spate of angry and disappointed complaints on Twitter (X) and in other social media.

“BBC news didn’t even cover the restore nature demo of 60,000 … why?” – @BellaDonnelly; “Shameful absence of BBC News …” – @NatureNerdTech;  “Shhh! @BBCNews thinks 60,000 or more protesting in central London to #RestoreNatureNow never happened … But it’s OK … @BBCNews features an ugly dog, and a boxer wanting his son to be an accountant” – @artgelling; “where is your coverage of this pivotal pre-election event?” – @dmokell  

More complaints poiting out covergae of Taylor Swift, previous BBC failures and accusing the BBC [fairly] of having a “biodiversity news blind spot”.

Not News

Internal BBC politics probably played a part but for those of the organisers who understood news, being ignored by the BBC could not have come as a surprise. You didn’t have to be David Yelland and Simon Lewis to see the basic problem.  Standing in Parliament Square at the end of the march, as people around us complained about those media present focusing on Emma Thomspon and asking her if she supported Just Stop Oil throwing ‘orange paint’ onto Stonehenge (that happened three days earlier and was condemned by Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer), a campaigner friend said simply: “if they wanted news they should have provided some: there wasn’t any”.

Organisationally, to go from 10,000 to 60,000 was an achievement but it wasn’t news.  Plus news is about an interesting or surprising twist on something people already understand, so the media focused on the most famous person involved and asked her about something controversial because if nothing controversial or consequential is happening, such as some form of disruption, then someone well-known saying something controversial, is second best.   News journalists look for the conflict in events.   If Thompson struggled to move the conversation on, perhaps it was because after the slogan ‘restore nature now’, chanted on the march, there was no single stand-out demand or consequence but a five point rather general and predictable set of ‘aims’, directed at politicians in general, too long to get into a soundbite:

Any one of those points could have been sharpened and directed at particular politicians or other groups, so as to demand a response but none were, nor in the context of an imminent election, did they directly relate to voting.

Beyond demonstrating numbers, it wasn’t clear to me at least, what was at stake, or where the political jeopardy was for any politician in not doing any more than sympathetically acknowledging the concerns of the well-tempered marchers. Is this how environment groups should try to influence the Starmer administration?

The Numbers Game Trap

Depending on what the organisers were hoping to signal, perhaps the most unfortunate fact was that if you are holding a ‘mass protest’ in London, the media idea of “biggest ever” is a lot bigger than 60,000 or even 100,000.

The 2003 Stop the (Iraq) War protest on the same London route, was put at a million strong by the BBC.  The 2019 Second Referendum march against Brexit, also in the same spot,  was reported by Sky News as a million. I was at both and you could see the police starting to lose control as marchers spilt out from the organised routes and flooded through side roads and parks towards Parliament.

From Sky News

That loss of control registers politically: the sense of being physically overwhelmed by manifest public opinion is visceral.  If such a march happens at the weekend, by Monday morning, advisers, officials and Ministers across Whitehall and Westminster will be in “do we need to recalibrate?” mode. If a march passes off unremarkably, it won’t be noticed. If it fails to match the organisers public expectations, that will be noted down for future discounting of your claims.  A case of, to quote Josef Stalin, “how many divisions does the Pope have?”.

It’s all the more awkward because the UK green NGOs still like to claim that between them they have 8 million members, and imply that politicians should therefore listen to them.  In one sense that is probably true but if it’s in fact 8 million direct debits and includes ‘family members’, that’s not 8 million voters. Mark Avery, a colleague of Chris Packham at Wild Justice, has argued that in reality the combined membership of the NGOs may represent just 500,000 ‘committed’ individuals.

Avery, who spent years working for the RSPB, wrote in his Reflections “if government really believed that the wildlife conservation movement had 8 million supporters it might well take a lot more notice of what it said”.

https://www.youtube.com/live/vqjSaJ9z9WA  Feargal Sharkey addresses the Restore Nature Now marchers.

As the march ended, former Undertones singer and fly-fisherman turned rivers campaigner Feargal Sharkey delivered a firebrand “we’ll be back” speech with cadences of J F Kennedy:

“I need you to make a promise today. If, under a new government, (these problems are) not resolved …. if the needs be, promise me you will be back here again, two times more, three times more, and if need be we will be back here one hundred times and bring a million people”.

As Sharkey implied, if you do embark on a numbers game, you had better show signs of winning by upping the turnout.  A million is a lot more people who need to be persuaded to take a day off from fishing, family weekends or pleasant trips of nature reserves or National Trust tea rooms, to join a political march in London.  It’s may be impossible without pinning a march to an impending cliff-edge political decision, as applied in the case of the Iraq War and Brexit.   But in truth the environment groups could get a long way without needing any qualitative change in strategy.  Just more effort and organising might raise the turnout say, tenfold, to 600,000.  The NGOs have the money and mandate to do that, if they have the will.

Turning out 600k in 2025 would at least pass the Avery Threshold but there are other issues than time and cost which I’d suggest are more significant, and underly the very reasons the environment movement struggles to gain real political traction on nature. These do require a qualitative change, with a focus on culture beyond Westminster, indeed beyond what’s obviously political. {See part 3}.

In August Sharkey announced a ‘March for Clean water’ in London on 26 October, supported by Surfers Against sewage and others.

The Business As Usual Trap

After the election, The Independent reported that some of the organisers of Restore Nature Now had re-addressed its five demands to Prime Minister Keir Starmer.  The Independent noted that ‘groups plan a “mass lobby” of Parliament ‘which aims for thousands of people to travel to Westminster to talk to their MPs’, and ‘the first UK Nature Conference’’.

It also reported: ‘A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesperson as saying:

“Nature underpins everything. That is why this government is absolutely committed to restoring and protecting nature. We will ensure the Environmental Improvement Plan is fit for purpose and focused on delivering our Environment Act targets, improve access to nature and protect our landscapes and wildlife.”’

This is the Business As Usual trap: trying to address the problem of inadequate policy or implementation by arguing about policy, and responding to an invitation to discuss plans,policies and process with government, rather than changing politics and culture which create the preconditions for government attitudes to nature.

https://www.standard.co.uk

Living in the UK as I do,  I didn’t watch the Biden-Trump debate on CNN but in the middle of the night I woke up, switched on the radio and heard reports of “panic among US Democrats”.  Sure enough, the first news clip was audible confirmation that Biden was not just old but infirm.  He sounded unfit for office: stumbling, raspy and confused.  My immediate conclusion was the same as American commentators who promptly announced “game over”.

But it was the second clip which really hit me, and might, just might enable Democrats to turn this ‘car crash’ debate back to their advantage: Trump and Biden were arguing about who was the stronger golf player, in a way that said they really thought this was important.

Rake Wars

Hearing Biden (81) and Trump (78) bickering over golf, I was immediately transported back to a small Norfolk village we lived in for a couple of years.

Just down the road, two old men occuppied adjacent Council houses with traditional cottage-style front gardens, divided by a privet hedge.  These men had been at odds with one another since World War II (one had been a conscientious objector), and shortly before our arrival, neighbours had been forced to intervene, when they began fighting one another over the hedge, using rakes.  It seemed funny at the time but then they weren’t using it as a proxy judgement for taking on leadership of the Parish Council, let alone the most powerful nation on earth.

A Way Back For The Democrats

So long as Biden’s capacity due to age was an unresolved issue, it remained a fatal test.  Barring extraordinary developments between now and the election it looks to me like he failed that test.

If the debate had ended at that point, that would be the out-take.  Firm Democrats would despair, committed Republicans would rejoice.   US political analysts seem to agree that to win, the views of undecided voters, Independents and ‘double-haters’, ‘double-despairers’ or ‘double dislikers’ may also be critical but the main damage would have been to Biden.  Trump did himself no new favours but he probably didn’t drive away many more potential voters than those he had already alienated.

But it didn’t end there.  It ended after the hypothetical golf-match, which made neither of the protagonists look suitable or serious as Presidents.

The we-think-politics-is-golf framing could change the significance of the debate.  As numerous commentators have already noted, golf is a game primarily associated with retirees, and often richer, whiter males. Golf in the US was in decline pre Covid and its TV audiences still are. It was and probably is a past-time of an increasingly old demographic. During Covid it got a boost as a ‘safe-place’ escape from the realities of the pandemic.  It’s a big game still in America but far from the national sport.  The proxy golf-off spat will have reminded a lot of potential swing voters of why they didn’t like the Trump-Biden choice.

Is this goodbye to golf as a political metaphor?

My guess is that the debate leaves most Americans with the conclusion that Joe Biden, cruel a judgement as it is, has proved himself “too old”.  If Biden were now to step back, relinquish his candidacy and help his Party find a younger, sharper more vigorous Candidate, younger of course than Trump, then for the potential swing voters, there could be a new more palatable choice, and rob Trump of the “age card”.

A political communications task would be to define why, while Biden is “too old”,  Trump is “too ….”.  Preferably in a single word.  Dishonest?  Unreliable?  Insane? Uncontrolled?  Which one most resonates most effectively with potential swing voters (leaving aside those committed to RFK) is something that can be researched.

When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with the humble is wisdom

Proverbs, 11.2

Age it is said, brings wisdom but it also brings age: none of us get any younger and the age thing is not going to go away for Candidate Biden, it will just get worse.

It looks to me at least that the most useful thing Joe Biden could do to help his Party, his country, and others, is to swallow his pride and lend his wisdom and backing to a new candidate.  He can’t ‘take Trump down with him’ right now but he can still help bring him down, and make space for someone else.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blog at www.campaignstrategy.org 31 December 2023 by Chris Rose

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Here’s a proposal for using the opportunity of 40 countries going to the polls in 2024, to make the most of the climate framing reset brought about by COP28 and the global onset of ‘angry weather’.

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As the UN climate conference COP28 ended, Faith Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, told AFP,  “Two hundred countries have signed a document to say goodbye to fossil fuels”.

Petrostates, climate deniers and even OPEC itself had fought to keep any reference to ending fossil fuels out of the ‘decision statement’ and succeeded in surrounding it with a forest of caveats and a fog of qualifications but there it was, as item (d) in para 28, on page 5, Part II.

Hardly anyone will look at those caveats but Birol has helped ensure that millions already know that governments have acknowledged they should ‘transition’ away from fossil fuels, and crucially, to rapidly triple renewable energy.

Many observers greeted this with a tired shrug: the world had known this was needed for so long, why hadn’t it come sooner?  True enough it was decades overdue but it’s a collective political confession with strategic implications.

New Social Facts

In itself the statement cannot mandate a change in the facts on the ground but it does change the terms in which the world’s governments now talk about climate policy progress, and so, as perception becomes reality, it changes the social facts, in this case the accepted reality of what ought-to-be-happening.

In my view it’s a big deal because it pairs the problem of fossil fuels and the solution of replacing them with renewable energy.  This reframes the climate issue in terms that are much more tangible, practical and everyday political than those of earlier eras in the ‘climate change issue’.

Previously the climate issue in COP-world has been framed as a question of science, and expressed in inscrutable terms of ‘emissions’, and since the 2015 Paris COP, through the obscure NDCs (Nationally Determined Commitments) and the hard to explain ‘1.5C’.  Those are all still important but they no longer have to act as metrics in tests of whether or not national governments are measuring up to their international obligations.

Now UN climate political commitments can be expressed in a language understood, and in actions verifiable, at ground level.  “Is my home village, street, city, farm or transport being powered by fossil fuels or renewables?”  The global climate issue can become more ‘relatable’,  and connectable to domestic politics.  Too often the national and international have been badly disconnected.

From the previous post – Al Jaber Proves An Unexpectedly Good Choice For COP President

Shortly before COP28 Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, former Environment Minister of Costa Rica, now CEO of the World Bank Global Environment Facility, argued that national politicians could fail in their international commitments with impunity because that was not a political issue at national level.  It was, he said, an even bigger problem than the shortage of finance for positive climate action and misallocation of public subsidies to fossil fuels, in both developed and developing countries.

Reframing the climate issue as an energy choice makes it not just easier to understand but more specific, like replacing non-specific or complex advice to ‘eat healthily’, with a specific diet instruction: ‘eat this, not that’. Of course many NGOs and businesses have framed the issue in those terms for years but the international political system has only now come into synch.

That should help by removing one big obstacle to generating genuine political engagement with the climate crisis: communicability.  As does the fact, which many national politicians have still not caught up with, that new renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels.  Solar is now the cheapest electricity in history.

That ought to remove another reason why many national politicians have been reluctant to seriously engage with climate action: fears that it might not be feasible and affordable.

Finally, it’s an unwelcome reality that every country in the world is now suffering the havoc wrought by angry weather, which an increasing number of people realise is caused by climate change.  This is making the issue increasingly urgent.  As UN climate chief Simon Stiel said at COP28:

the political and economic logic is increasingly insurmountable: Human lives in huge numbers are being lost in every country, while fossil fuels hit household budgets and national budgets alike. Whilst there are vast benefits of bolder climate action.

And polling not just protest shows that in country after country, the public supports climate action.  So at least in theory, serious action on climate change meets the three default heuristic tests of political decision-making: is it urgent?, is it feasible?, is it popular?

In my view, the convergence of unaffordable climate impacts, affordable renewable energy and a new political default that fossils fuels must go, creates significant new campaign and advocacy potential to stimulate pro-climate action.  Of course potential is one thing and realising it is another: how can it be done?  There is one very obvious opportunity to at least make a start.

40 Elections

As readers have probably noticed, this year is due to see national elections held in 40 countries (more by some measures).  UK newspaper The Guardian has called it ‘Democracy’s Super Bowl’, saying they ‘represent more than 40% of the world’s population and an outsized chunk of global GDP’.  Making these into ‘Climate Elections’ could be logistically convenient for campaign planners as a follow up to COP28, and a global signal from civil society would be noticed by the media.  It’s hardly a new idea and rather obvious but sometimes the obvious and the effective can coincide.

Most importantly, it would be hard for politicians to avoid.  The objective ought not be to try and displace other issues and pressing concerns, although many of them from food security and health to children’s futures and economic prosperity, would also benefit from effective action to rein in climate change.  Rather it should be to maximise greater serious engagement by national politicians on the new climate agenda which governments have, however reluctantly in some cases, committed themselves to at COP28.

There would be no need for a one-size fits-all campaign ask, beyond action to ambitiously implement the agenda already agreed at COP28.   That is already fully equipped with references to ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’,  ‘respective capabilities’ and ‘the light of different national circumstances’.  But as Carlos Manuel Rodriguez pointed out,  “climate change performance at the country level is not a political issue” and there is a probably universal need for greater “political control” by civil society.  There are few better opportunities than around a national election.  National climate advocates and campaigners will know what works best and is most needed in their countries.

Nor would it be a failure if some national efforts were much smaller or less successful than others.  We are starting from a low base in many countries, and some governments, including the UK, have been sliding backwards.

For instance UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made a short and embarrassing visit to COP28 in Dubai, spending more time in the large jet he travelled in, than he did on the ground, and avoiding contact with UK climate journalists.  This followed an attempt in September to boost his flagging popularity with his own Conservative base by flaunting an agenda of delaying climate actions, falsely insinuating that fast implementation of green technologies would make households poorer, and promoting more oil and gas exploration.  A member of his government even proposed to abolish a ‘Meat Tax’ which did not exist.

The main reason for Sunak’s ‘bonfire’ of green measures was a hope that it would frighten voters away from the rival Labour Party which is way ahead in the polls.  That was based on a calculation, reportedly much debated amongst his advisers, that a bit of damage to the UK’s international climate reputation would benefit rather than harm them at home.  In the event his popularity and that of his party dropped even further, and it went down badly at COP28.

Behind Sunak’s calculation was probably the out-dated conventional wisdom in British Westminster politics that voters do not really care about climate change.  The only systematic study of how UK Members of Parliament think and talk about climate change is by Rebecca Willis, a political scientist now at Lancaster University.

Her work, recorded in her book on climate change and democracy, Too Hot to Handle , included conducting off the record interviews with a representative sample of MPs in 2016. (It’s quite instructive and worth reading, and may be one of only a few such studies anywhere in the world).  Willis found that even those who took climate change seriously felt they had to be careful because their colleagues saw it as marginal, “niche” or a “lunatic fringe” as one said, while another wanted to avoid appearing like “a zealot”, and a third said they were regarded as a “freak”.

One said she thought that a search among Westminster’s 650 MPs for those seriously engaged with ideas such as leaving carbon in the ground would “struggle to get into double figures”.

Political engagement with climate change has since improved in the UK Parliament particularly in the Conservative Party. The Conservative Environmental Network set up in 2013, now has a caucus of over 150 Parliamentarians, out-numbering groups favoured by Conservative climate deniers by three to one.  Even so, that attitudes like those revealed by Willis still exist, is attested to by Sunak’s backfiring green bonfire experiment.

This perhaps shows that it is in old industrial democracies where climate deniers have been most active, that national politicians are furthest behind the curve of public, scientific and business opinion on climate action.  All the more reason to press the climate case at election time, and make sure that was was signed up to in Dubai, does not stay in Dubai.

Note:

If you are interested, in this Political Studies paper Willis applied sociological political analysis to the ways UK MPs made a ‘representative claim’ for taking climate change seriously.  Here’s the abstract:

This article analyses interviews with UK politicians, through the framework of the ‘representative claim’ developed by Michael Saward, seeing representation as a dynamic interaction between politicians and those they claim to represent. Thus, politicians need to construct a ‘representative claim’ to justify action on climate. Four different types of claims are identified: a ‘cosmopolitan’ claim, a ‘local prevention’ claim, a ‘co-benefits’ claim and a ‘surrogate’ claim. The analysis shows that it is not straightforward for a politician to argue that action is in the interests of their electorate and that climate advocates need to support efforts to construct and defend claims.

Students of motivational values may also notice that the ‘cosmopolitan’ claim would tend to resonate with universalist Pioneer values, ‘local prevention’ (eg of loss of identity, safety or security) with Settler values, and co-benefits (eg better homes and jobs) with success oriented Prospectors.

Willis also has things to say about the need for pro-climate narratives to be more about people and families, appealing to hearts and emotion and less technical.  If you did consider taking climate into the 2024 elections, these might be food for thought.

chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

Blog by Chris Rose chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk  twitter @campaignstrat  1st December 2023   long blog – download as pdf here

To use an old fashioned English term, whither the Climate Convention now?  In other words, where will the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) go, after COP28?   This blog makes some suggestions about how it could handle the fossil fuels issue, possible battle lines for campaigns, and from where I sit, way behind the frontline, shares my perspective on COP (Conference of the Parties).

A lot has changed in the 31 years of its existence.  The ‘science debate’ has been won, climate change effects are no longer a prediction but a lived reality, renewable energy can now effectively replace fossil fuels (though politicians may not really get this), and we live in a multipolar world in which the influence of the old ‘West’ such as the US and Europe, is giving way to blocs around countries such as China and India.  Before Covid intervened, climate protests led by Greta Thunberg, 350, XR and others reached unprecedented levels in many democracies.

One thing that has yet to change, is for the Convention to seriously tackle fossil fuels.  Until a week or so ago it didn’t look like a fossil fuel phase out would even be an agenda item for COP28. Since oil CEO and COP President Sultan Al Jaber was exposed as using the conference to make oil deals, it looks like the central issue. As the Financial Times puts it: ‘Success at theUN Summit in Dubai will be measured by whether a global deal can be reached on ending their use’.

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 This blog proposes:

• The Climate Convention risks becoming a Zombie Convention and losing pubic trust if it does not start a phase out of fossil fuels, the Elephant in the Room
• Al Jaber’s oil business deals around COP and the industry’s investment plans and PR efforts confirm that the fossil fuel industry is going for broke in the end game and business as usual not a genuine green transition
• The oil industry is socially and culturally incapable of transforming itself into part of the green energy industry and only government action can bring that about and ensure the full potential of exponentially cheaper renewable energy is maximised to help the world stay within 1.5C
• Many solution technologies identified as with potential for exponential growth offer a smörgåsbord of campaign opportunities, as their obstruction would be a scandal
• Convention rules should be changed to firewall the influence of the fossil fuel industry away from navigational decisions such as targets, timetables and policies, and instead put into a form of ‘steerage class’, involved only in implementation of a fossil fuel phase out
• All evidence used in Convention decision making should be Positive Vetted and required to show proof of funding to exclude anything with fossil fuel linked sources
• The COPs should be reorganised so they only deal with negotiations, and held separate in time and space from the trade fairs and satellite activities
• National governments should enact similar firewall rules on the fossil fuel industry
• If the work of the Convention is to connect with a gain public traction it needs a simple intuitively understandable scalable concept of what it means on the ground, in the same way that ‘Rewilding’ did for nature conservation
• The Climate Convention’s mission ultimately is about disrupting business as usual. To show they mean business and build credibility and trust, governments should start by disrupting business as usual for the very rich, beginning with a ban on private jets
• Nobody should be allowed to come to the Convention by private jet

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‘Credibility Under Threat’

COP28 in Dubai is where the world’s governments convene to conclude the ‘Global Stocktake’ on how they are doing in tackling climate change, five years on from the COP21 Paris Agreement.  Last year’s COP27, in Egypt, saw growing NGO dismay at the number of fossil fuel lobbyists in the convention (636, up from 503 at COP26).

An attempt led by India the EU to secure a declaration that fossil fuels must be phased out, was backed by over 80 countries but failed. The whole COP was almost derailed by disagreements over finance to help developing nations transition away from fossil fuels and manage climate impacts. UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said “The credibility of this process is under threat. Let’s remember there is nowhere else to go to solve these issues”.

Once the Asian Convention Parties (it was their turn to host) had chosen UAE as the venue, and UAE had selected oil CEO Sultan Al Jaber as COP President, COP28 was always going to be a public test of the credibility of the Convention in taking on the fossil fuel industry.

There were pro’s and cons to Al Jaber’s credentials. On the one hand, he has backed huge renewables projects and a global tripling of renewables, overseen a huge Emirati contribution to energy transition in African countries, and declared the “phasedown of fossil fuels is inevitable”.  On the other, UAE and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company he heads, plans to nearly double oil production, and UAE has failed to report on its huge fossil methane emissions.

Jaber’s appointment was denounced by scientists, NGOs and more than 100 members of the European Parliament and US Congress.

Backed by the US, UK, EU and others, the Convention organisers embraced the gamble, hoping that Al Jaber would show the impartiality required as COP President and bridge divides between both countries and interest groups.

If it the gamble had succeeded, and the fossil fuel industry accepted a path to it’s own phase out, then COP and all who sailed in it would have been hailed as heroes.   If it had clearly failed, or more likely left us with a muddy outcome of many warm words and incremental progress on issues excluding a phase out of fossil fuels, the UNFCCC might have started to look like a Zombie Convention: walking and talking but with no real live political grasp on the question that matters most.

As it is, the pre-event disclosure that Al Jaber’s team was using the talks as an opportunity to do petrostate business and increase fossil fuel production, has inadvertently cleared the water.

It revealed that for the fossil fuel industry, the climate crisis is still an opportunity for Business as Usual.  It’s not just UAE, you could argue that’s true in many other countries including the US, UK, Australia and even Norway but it was UAE’s choice to put Al Jaber front and centre.  If Al Jaber’s trip to the summit of climate negotiation is remembered for anything at all, right now it looks like it may be for an unintended confirmation that the emperor has no clothes.  Perhaps one of the greatest political wardrobe malfunctions of all time.

‘Get Norfolk Greener’: A Small Experiment In Localising A Climate Campaign

Long blog: pdf here

Tiktoks by the UEA student campaign Get Norfolk Greener

Earlier this year I worked with a class of 28 third year University of East Anglia (UEA) students on a group project in which they created and ran a short campaign – ‘Get Norfolk Greener’ – which localised the climate and energy propositions of a national campaign backed by 40 voluntary organisations.   While for the students it was first and foremost an exercise in learning-by-doing,  the element of localisation can make many campaigns more ‘real’ and tractable for a wider range of audiences (especially Settlers and Prospectors), and might be relevant to a number of change efforts.

At least in the UK, localisation to Parliamentary Constituency level may be vital to building a resilient and durable base of support, not just to achieve objectives but to conserve and consolidate gains.  In a post last year, I argued that to tackle the impacts of intensive agriculture, nature campaigns need to be resourced and organised at the Constituency level (just as the farming lobby is).   My experience of working on recent nature and climate/ energy campaigns is that this is still sorely needed in the UK, with many campaigns overly reliant on national public opinion and social media.

The national campaign the UEA students localised is Warm This Winter, whose objectives include access to cheap renewable energy, help with energy bills and upgrading homes with heat pumps and insulation.  The very need for the WtW campaign in 2023 is at least partly due to previous failures to convert public support into durable consolidated gains and groups of constituents confident to make the case with MPs.

The Need To Anchor Gains

Any campaign can make progress when it runs with the winds of public opinion in its sails, and those winds carry also along a flotilla of politicians, the media and corporates. The trickier test comes when it encounters significant headwinds.  Fairweather friends may fall away, and forward progress may be reversed if the tides and currents run against you.  This is why campaign groups need an engine which does not depend on favourable winds (usually paying supporters), and to put down anchors against backsliding (eg social or legislative).

The UK’s most successful climate campaign was Friends of the Earth’s ‘Big Ask’ campaign in 2005 – 2008 [see analysis here and here].   Fortuitous competition between the main parties to look green before a General Election swept the campaign to victory and, unusually, success was consolidated in law, in the shape of the 2008 Climate Change Act.  That statute imposes a legal duty on UK Governments to set and meet carbon reduction budgets to bring about a 80% cut in emissions by 2050.    So far it’s acted as an anchor stopping the UK from drifting backwards on climate but it hasn’t prevented significant climate obstruction.

The greatest success for obstructers of action on climate in the UK came between 2010 and 2015.  Right-wing Eurosceptic and climate-sceptic Conservative MPs exploited Prime Minister David Cameron’s small majority and forced him to U-turn on supporting for onshore wind energy.  Cameron declared he would get rid of the “green crap”, and defunded household insulation programmes, despite having the worst housing stock in Europe.

The Sun, 21 November 2013

In 2019 I tried to find out how exactly this had happened, given that UK public opinion had remained overwhelmingly in support of wind power throughout.  When nobody seemed able to tell me, I looked into it myself – detailed in the blog Killing The Wind Of England.  A critical factor was that while NGOs and the renewables industry had won the ‘air war’ of national public opinion, they had failed to turn this expressive support for wind power into instrumental political support at a local level.   There was no social ‘anchor’ in the form of an established lobby at the local level, which was where their opponents acted to manifest one. Consequently it didn’t take much in terms of opposition, to make it feel like a lot.

The UK’s geographic Parliamentary Constituencies and ‘first past the post’ election system makes its party politics particularly sensitive to a ground war of well-organised constituency-based lobbying.   In 2017 a long-running government tracker poll on wind found that just one person in a panel of 2000 was ‘strongly opposed’ to wind.  But such opposition was concentrated among Conservative Party members, and the anti-wind campaign was organised within the Party.  MPs were systematically bombarded with letters, emails and face to face visits from activists, as well as the threat that both members and MPs would defect to the more right wing UKIP Party.  One MP previously supportive of wind flatly refused to accept polling evidence on the grounds that it did not reflect his postbag.  By localising their campaign, the opponents of wind power flew under the radar of wind power’s supporters.

The ‘Green Crap’ Legacy

Cameron’s about face over green policies had a dramatic and lasting effect.  In 2012 the UK was upgrading homes a year with loft and cavity wall insulation at a rate of over two million a year.  By 2013 that plummeted 92% and 74%, and has never recovered.    This has had serious consequences, especially for poorer people struggling to pay for food and heat their homes. When gas prices spiked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Simon Evans at Carbon Brief calculated that ‘cutting the green crap’ ten years before had added £2.5billion to British energy bills in 2022 (and more since).

Chart from CarbonBrief

Meanwhile the restrictions introduced to make it almost impossible to build onshore wind in England remain in place.  In 2023 it was found that despite being one of the windiest places in Europe, only two English wind turbines had been built in the past year, whereas Ukraine had managed 19 despite being at war.

The UK Government has just about managed to argue that it is still on course to meet its Climate Change Act commitments because of building windfarms offshore, and the statistical legacy of shutting down coal power.  However the same pattern of organising opposition to energy infrastructure as was adopted against wind turbines is now being applied to energy grids (pylons) and misinformation campaigns are being run against adoption of heat pumps.

Get Norfolk Greener

UEA offers a module in ‘Activist Campaigning’ from within its undergraduate courses in politics. For the past fifteen years it’s been run by Dr Ben Little but he asked me to fill in for him in 2023 while he was seconded to help direct the UEA Civic University (outreach) project. UEA is based in Norwich, in the English county of Norfolk.

Ben’s design of the module was built around some teaching (for which I used some of the campaign training content I use with NGOs) and a group project, which students would design and implement, with an assessment based on their reflection on their experience of doing the project.  We needed to find a project ‘client’ so I contacted half a dozen NGOs, looking for a campaign they already had or had in mind, to which a group of about 30 students might feasibly make a useful contribution, over a month or so’s preparation and three week’s implementation.

The energy and climate NGO Possible agreed to help and suggested we connect with Uplift and the Green Alliance which were organising a campaign for WarmThis Winter (WtW), a coalition of 40 mainly national NGOs* (of which Possible is one), ranging from environment and nature groups to energy-poverty and community organisations.

The WtW campaign ask was (and is) straightforward: individuals were invited to use an online form with a pre drafted letter to ask their MPs to sign a ‘Pledge’ which essentially committed then to do everything they could to encourage more government action on the energy and climate crisis.   It read:

“I pledge to help keep my constituents warm every winter by urging the Government to rapidly expand home retrofit schemes, support the swift deployment of homegrown renewables to speed up the net zero transition away from volatile fossil fuels, and provide further financial support to vulnerable households. I will work alongside Parliamentary colleagues to ensure the Government goes further to tackle the energy crisis at every available opportunity, including upcoming fiscal statements and the Energy Bill.” 

We set out to localise this ask, and work on securing the support of all nine Norfolk Westminster MPs, eight Conservative and one Labour.  By way of context most of Norfolk is rural, with one small city (Norwich, population 200,000) and relatively few towns.  A national survey found most of Norfolk is above average for ‘agreeableness’ meaning people tend to be ‘cooperative, friendly and trusting’, below average on ‘open-ness’ meaning they lean towards being ‘conventional, down-to-earth, and traditional’, and above average on ‘conscientiousness’ meaning they tend to be ‘self-disciplined, cautious, and compliant’ as well as socially conservative.

Not surprisingly, Norfolk can be slow to adopt innovations, and is often seen as a bit of a political backwater.  Many people living in Norfolk quite like its sense of relative isolation from the rest of the country.  It’s the sort of place where constituents often vote for MPs as individuals rather than by party.  I once asked a friend who was our local Mayor how the local elections had gone, and she said “not bad Chris but it all got a bit too political for my liking”.

Not then, perhaps, optimal political campaign territory, especially for one which had to be run in short order (teaching and preparation one day a week Feb – April, a month break and three weeks of implementation in May).  On the other hand the default assumption might have been that no MPs would respond to the WtW pledge campaign, or just one would (the South Norwich Labour MP, Clive Lewis, who had a long track record of being active on climate), so we had a default benchmark.

www.warmthiswinter.org.uk

The national WtW format used online resources to encourage individuals reached through participating organisations, to start and join local lobbying events, and contact their MPs asking them to sign up, by email, social media, face to face or phone.  WtW provided some good online training webinars from Uplift, 350, and Hope for the Future.  Experience suggests that the ‘usual suspects’ mobilised and aggregated by such formats tend to be a thin layer of high-agency Pioneers and so we hoped to use campaign design to make our campaign more accessible and relevant for more of the constituents of Norfolk MPs, and provide evidence that there are impacts they are concerned about, and solutions they support.  Here’s a couple of slides from an early briefing:

Students formed six Research Groups, on positive case studies (solutions that work, with relevant benefits), problems to stop or avoid, understanding our MPs as people, relevant voter attitudes, finding constituents willing to talk to MPs about problems or solutions, and work being done on problems or solutions, by local (District) councils.  These were then used to populate a website, social media posts and construct localised communications to the MPs, and to explain the campaign.

[It’s a convention that UK MPs are not obliged to respond to members of the public who are not Constituents.  Basically this means campaigns need to engage registered voters, not eg students registered to vote elsewhere.  Although MPs are expected to reply to constituents, in practice some do so rarely, especially to tiresome ‘usual suspects’ who contact them about nationally organised petitions and campaign asks.  During this campaign a number of Constituents of Richard Bacon, MP for South Norfolk, were reluctant to take part given that he rarely responded to them.  He was even subject to public criticism from his own local Conservative Party for being unresponsive].

Gathering content in the situation research phase

Students produced a ‘portfolio’ for each of the nine Constituencies, aiming to match three problem and three solution examples, with a constituent endorser/ messenger/ proponent for each.  [‘Finding people’ proved a slow process, not least because only one of the students had actually lived in Norfolk.  It was also disappointing, though after working on other UK local projects, not surprising, to find that NGOs involved with the WtW coalition were unable to help us find the minimum three constituents in each MP’s area.  This wasn’t because of a lack of goodwill, just not being organised that way, and in some cases channelling all their political work through their senior, staff which of course means that the MPs are not necessarily hearing from their voters].

How the elements of the portfolio were intended to combine in making the case for the Pledge to MPs.

How the Research Groups work applied

Students taking part in a Civic University community ‘Climate open Space’ event in Norwich, doing a bit of networking with  whoever turned up.

Comparing MPs positions to the WtW pledge asks

Researching Local Stories

Students investigating energy and climate problems at local level looked at nature and landscape and energy poverty.

It’s well known that the Norfolk coast is experiencing accelerated coastal erosion, flooding and saltwater intrusion as a result of climate change but other impacts are less well known.  In 2018 UEA research by Dr Jeff Price studied 834 species from Norfolk’s characteristic flora and fauna, to see what would happen if the average temperature was allowed to increase 2.C.  He found most of Norfolk’s bumble bees, larger moths and grasshopper species would die out, along with the Swallowtail Butterfly, only known in England from the Norfolk Broads, and many traditionally ‘common’ species such as Grey Partridge, Water Vole, Common Frog and Common Lizard could be lost.

Climate heating is leading to introduced species such as Alexanders displacing native flowers such as Bluebells which are adapted to cooler conditions.

Page from Get Norfolk Greener website, for S Norwich

Page from Councils section of the Get Norfolk greener website – Kings Lynn and west Norfolk Council covers the Constituency of James Wild MP and part of that of Liz Truss MP, and is one of the more active Councils in Norfolk on the climate and energy crises. Students surveyed national studies of local Councils, Climate Emergency declarations and subsequent actions, and made direct contacts. They found that Great Yarmouth appeared to have no climate plan at all.

Passiv Haus scheme in Norwich – overall practical climate action as a result of Council policies is at a very early stage compared to many parts of the UK.

One decarbonization expert told me the County was about a decade behind the next-door county of Suffolk, and a further ten years behind cities like Manchester.

Energy Poverty

To show the basic facts about energy poverty in each Constituency, the campaign used figures from the group End Fuel Poverty which break down to local levels. Students also reserached more personal local stories.

Energy poverty stats for Great Yarmouth – Constituency of Brandon Lewis

Voter Attitudes

The campaign drew on an accessible and relevant survey conducted by Survation for Renewable UK in 2022 on voter attitudes to forms of renewable energy and the attitudes of politicians to renewables.

Unlike most national surveys which poll about 2000 people, this involved over 6000 and so could be broken down to Constituency level.

Broadland page of Get Norfolk Greener website, showing attitudes of voters in Jerome Mayhew’s Constituency.     (Contrary to the assumptions of many politicians, this and other polling shows most Conservative voters are more not less enthusiastic about renewable energy than Labour voters).

The political geography of Norfolk.

Campaign Name

Once the research was finished, the campaign needed a name that would ideally sound ‘normal’, sum up what it was for and trying to do, and relate to locality (identity – weighted to Settler but not excluding to others).   Students used these functional cues to brainstorm possible names.

In 15 minutes the students came up with these names: Green Norfolk Nine, Get Norfolk Greener, Warm Up the Pledge, Norfolk Climate Action, Heat Norfolk’s Homes, Pledge Against Poverty, UEA Student Pledge,Norfolk Student Pledge, Give Truss The Trust, Norfolk Students Warm This Winter, Climate Action in Norfolk, UEA Action For Norfolk Energy, End Fuel Poverty in Norfolk, Keep Norfolk Warm This Winter,Norfolk MP Pressure Group, Chris & The Cool Kids, The Student’s Pledge To Save The hedge, The Student’s Pledge to Give Norfolk The Environmental Edge.

There are pros and cons to all of these.   Immediately after that session we had a talk on how local councils work from Felix Brueggemann, Communications Officer for North Norfolk District Council and asked him what he thought.  “Three word names are popular” he said, tapping ‘Get Norfolk Greener’.  So we adopted that.

Felix Brueggemann of NNDC

Logo

Students developed a logo for the campaign following similar principles to the name.  It wanted to say ‘place’ (identity) and ‘green’.  A map of Norfolk was tried, a long with a green tree but the map of Norfolk is not very recognizable and the campaign was not about tree planting.  In the end it was based on the road signs you see when entering Norfolk, a ‘you are here’.

The Plan

Above: overview of how the campaign design localised the WtW pledge: framing it as a local campaign, and bringing that to Constituency level with messengers and evidences.

Campaign Launch

For logistical reasons and because we hoped to to engage some of the 3,700 staff, 4,000 post-grad researchers and 12,000 undergraduate students at UEA, the campaign was launched at a (pre-existing) ‘Green Day’ held at SIZ, the UEA Student Information Zone.

Students made a flier with a QR code linking to the website and social media.  After considering free coffee as an incentive to other attract students, the team chose animals because so many students miss contact with pets or wildlife.  The campaign paid a local animal rescue charity (Wild Touch) to attend with animals used to meeting people, attracting crowds to talk to.

Realising that a lot of people were still walking past, two students found a small whiteboard and turned it into a stop-and-talk device, in the shape of an instant opinion survey.  This led to several deeper conversations and local stories, together with the insight that many students didn’t know what an ‘energy crisis’ or ‘energy poverty’ actually meant.

Re-Purposing The Affordable Energy Calculator

As part of the national WtW campaign, Greenpeace, working with Cambridge Econometrics, had produced an online Affordable Energy Calculator.

With the answers to a few simple questions about any home, this neatly converted the complicated and techy question of upgrading homes with heat pumps and insulation into a simple, personalised results in money terms.

Greenpeace agreed to let students repurpose the Calculator.  They set out to visualise the results of householders willing to use it as a way to send a message to their MP, which could also be shared with local and social media.

Stimulus from an ideas generation session on using visual language to combine householder, saving money and their home to personalise and visualise the Affordable Energy Calculator.  Students considered various ways to say ‘savings’ or ‘more money’ in visual terms, and what emotion should be conveyed (eg angry, hopeful, cross, celebratory etc).

Candidate visuals included a piggy bank and a presentation cheque (above) but they opted for a changeable Estate Agents’ type sign, retaining the Greenpeace colours and ‘shouting out’ to the MP.

This could turn the act of using of an online App into a publicly visible if micro real-life public event, on the archetypal ‘doorstep’.

Sign design on a student’s computer for use by bill payers outside their homes

Broadland Constituent Sophie, in Fakenham, holding an Affordable Energy Calculator sign calling for MP support.  After a bit of experimentation, students opted for the handmade changeable £ numbers, mimicking changeable signs on cars in used car lots (at the suggestion of our printers).  

Instagram posts. Lydia from NR14 south-east of Norwich, and her large poorly insulated house with a huge potential saving.  

Outside Norwich City Council offices – article in East Anglia Bylines

The campaign was covered in several local radio interviews

MP Sign-Ups

During the 19 days from the campaign launch to the end of the module, the campaign succeeded in holding one face to face video meeting, with Duncan Baker, Conservative MP for North Norfolk.  During the call he agreed to sign the Pledge, becoming the fourth Conservative MP to do so (of 47 MPs nationally to date).  Duncan Baker is a member of the Conservative Environmental Network and a member of the UK Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee.

‘Thumbs up’ as Duncan Baker MP backs the Pledge

As well as students, the call was joined by local resident and businessman Matt Higham, who runs a Deli in Wells next the Sea.  He described how high temperatures in 2022 had forced his shop to shut because the refrigeration system could not cope, and called for more rapid action against climate heating.

Duncan Baker said: “I am delighted to sign this pledge because it is so important to create a cleaner and greener future for generations to come. I also wholly agree in doing all we can to retrofit our housing stock to help keep households warm every winter. From small changes we can do ourselves to larger actions within governments we need to continue investing in sustainable and renewable forms of energy”.

Later the same day, Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for South Norwich also signed the WtW Pledge, saying  “Glad to sign this pledge from @ThisWinterUK and @GetNorfolkGreen. My Energy Equity Bill demands a rapid expansion of retrofitting and a universal energy allowance. I am very proud to see this student-led campaign fighting for energy equity in Norfolk”.

From Get Norfolk Greener social posts

Jerome Mayhew MP wrote to a Constituent explaining the reasons he would not sign the pledge, while Chloe Smith, MP for Norwich North, issued a statement explaining why she would not be signing “for now”.

Five Constituents wrote to NW Norfolk MP James Wild but despite several follow up messages, no reply was received.  Constituents also wrote to Richard Bacon and Brandon Lewis but received no response. The campaign was unable to find Constituents to write to Liz Truss and George Freeman.

Both Freeman and Bacon were involved with a campaign against electricity pylons to carry power from offshore wind energy to connect with the National Grid, through their Constituencies.  George Freeman and Chloe Smith both had Government Ministerial jobs at the time (the usual UK Government convention is that Ministers do not support non-governmental campaigns, although in practice they do manage it if it suits their purposes).

Conclusions

Get Norfolk Greener was a student learning process and neither a test of a model for NGO campaigns nor a test of the student’s abilities by results.

Achieving two MP sign-ups was better than might have been expected and as many of the students commented in their reflections, has we started active campaign earlier, had the long Easter holiday not existed, and had we gone on longer, we could have achieved more.  Sentiments many readers may have encountered in professional campaign evaluations.  They also identified the need to build up a stable of social media post material in advance and the missing local events in Constituencies.

One major disappointment was our general failure to effectively utilise the community of UEA (some 3,700 staff and 4,000 postgrads as well as 12,000 undergrads) as a ‘pool to fish from’ to find Constituents (and then their friends or neighbours).  There are a number of reasons why this may have been the case.

Perhaps the toughest job fell to the students researching the attitudes and activities of District Councils. They accumulated a lot of information and intelligence and made some useful 1-1 contacts but were not helped by the May 4 Local Elections which distracted Councils and prevented Officers from making any public statements, which I should have anticipated.  If the project had gone on longer and we had succeeded in running at least one event in each Constituency, bringing together MPs with Councillors and the public could have been very useful.  As it was the Affordable Energy Calculator home visits turned out to work well and absorbed a lot of the available time.

In my opinion Get Norfolk Greener’s work probably meant WtW achieved more than it otherwise would have done in Norfolk.  One rather obvious reason for that is that although the national WtW coalition is in theory impressively large, only a small proportion of the organisations behind seemed to be actively engaged on the ground, as opposed to sharing asks online.  Fewer still seem to be able (or ready?) to turn out members, supporters or other contacts willing and able to engage with their MPs as Constituents.

There may be many reasons for this but perhaps especially in the case of issues that affect land in rural areas, it puts them at a disadvantage compared to interest groups such as the NFU (National Farmers Union), long seen as the most effective lobby in Westminster politics.   (As discussed in previous posts on intensive farming and Bovine TB in cattle and badgers here and here, the NFU is assiduous in encouragingindividual farmers to act as messengers and engage face-to-face with political processes).

NFU post encouraging farmers to join the Boards controlling National Parks in 2023. Of course it’s right to have some farmers on such Boards but they are often over-represented and National Parks are not supposed to be farm-parks.  Agricultural intensification is still taking place in the UK’s ‘National Parks’, to the detriment of nature, amenity and ecosystem function.

As to climate and energy, the 2010-15 situation documented in Killing The Wind Of England has changed – now for example there is an organised green group – Conservative Environment Network (CEN) – amongst Conservative MPs with over 150 MP members and 500 Councillors.  Duncan Baker who signed the WtW Pledge is one but so is Jerome Mayhew who didn’t, and George Freeman who is now a CEN ‘alumnus’.   On the other hand, the Conservative ‘Net Zero Scrutiny Group’ of about 20 – 30 MPs, ex MPs, Lords and political supporters formed in 2021, has been actively lobbying to obstruct progress in ending use of fossil fuels, and shares members and and has many ties with the same political network that forced Cameron into the ‘Green Crap’ reversal.  They are very unrepresentative of public opinion in the UK, including amongst Conservative voters but may be more cohesive and determined than CEN – it’s hard to tell.

At any event, there is much to be gained by the proponents of pro-environmental action organising to have a more effective ground game.  In the case of Get Norfolk Greener, although we were admittedly an unknown quantity, despite contacting NGOs, we struggled to find three Constituents in each of nine Constituencies, who were prepared to sign a letter asking to meet with their MP.

So, how ambitious would it be for national NGOs to set up a reliable pool of say six people in each Westminster Constituency prepared to meet with their MPs to press the environmental case at a Constituency level?

There are 650 UK Westminster Constituencies.  650 x 6 = 3,900 people.  The average number of voters per Constituency is 74,000.  Six would be 0.008% of the Constituents.  Not a very large proportion.

In his recent book Reflections former RSPB executive Mark Avery argues that the much quoted nominal 7m combined memberships of conservation NGOs in the UK probably actually represents about 500,000 individuals but that is still a large number.

If Mark Avery is right and the real number of ‘committed wildlife conservation supporters’ is about 500,000, finding 3,900 committed enough to meet their MP when needed would mean persuading 0.78% of them.

But of course there are other people who might ‘strongly agree’ that their MP should act on a cause they care about – in WtW’s case for example, the agenda is much broader than just that of environment groups.  In reality, building such representation is also not just about asking people who are paying supporters of cause NGOs.  In the case of Get Norfolk Greener some of those who did contact their MPs did so because I know them as friends, and I asked.  The same was true of some of the friends of students.  Activating those strong social bonds cannot be done just through mailing lists and social media.

And it’s true that in some of the national UK NGOs there are people whose job is to organise in this way, although not always with contacting MPs in mind.  Plus there are often just one or two of them, far fewer than devoted to other tasks.  Some national NGOs make a virtue of working closely with the many existing (and new) local campaign groups at the ‘grass roots’, which is a good thing so far as it goes but it can be a very lop-sided relationship, where the volunteer locals gradually burn out as they are left to do too much of the groundwork, especially in evenings and at weekends, with little or no access to the resources of the established NGOs which have been accumulated through marketing and fundraising.

I don’t know how true this is in other countries but in the UK at least it seems to me that one reason there is such a gap between public opinion on issues like climate change, and the actions of politicians, is that the expressed opinion captured in polling or manifest online is not sufficiently expressed face to face.

It’s long been said said that “all politics is local” and that remains true, even when it comes to tackling global issues like climate change.

Thanks Due

The UEA Activism project had useful ‘remote’ support from Uplift, Green Alliance, End Fuel Poverty Coalition and the Norfolk Wildlife Trust (NWT), and collaborated with the Greenpeace group in Norwich on the Affordable Energy Calculator home visits.   Nick Acheson, an Ambassador for NWT spoke to students about nature in Norfolk, John and Rory Scott of KSBR gave an introduction to the techniques of qualitative research, John Tully of UEA ran a session on project management, Dr Jeff Price shared his research, and Jenny Kirk organised interview practice with  UEA Broadcast Journalism students.  Thanks to them all and the UEA Broadcast House facilities team without whom I would have thoroughly failed on IT.  Finally thanks to all the students, who taught me a lot.

Some of the UEA 2023 Activist Campaigning module students

A qualitative research training session with KSBR

UEA wrote up the project here

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Given the effort invested in creating the WtW coalition, I  suspect it’s likely to continue in some form until the next UK General Election, and will try to build on that bridgehead of 47 MPs.

*The groups being: 350.org, 38 Degrees, ACRE – Action With Communities in Rural England, Ashden, Bioregional, CPRE, The Countryside Charity, Centre for Sustainable Energy, Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, Chartered Institute of Housing, Citizens UK, ClientEarth, Climate Cymru, Debt Justice, End Fuel Poverty Coalition, Fair Energy Campaign, Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Fuel Poverty Action, Global Action Plan, Global Witness, Green Alliance, Green Christian,Greenpeace UK, High Peak Green New Deal, Hope For The Future, Hope Valley Climate Action,Intergenerational Foundation, Islamic Relief, Make My Money Matter, Moorlands Climate Action, NEON, New Economics Foundation, Northern Housing Consortium, Operation Noah, Oxfam GB, Parents for Future UK, Possible, RSPB, Save the Children, Stand As One, The Climate Coalition, The Wildlife Trusts, Uplift, WWF UK, We Care Campaign, Women’s Institute

Chris Rose

Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk (the opinions expressed above are my own and not necessarily shared by UEA or any of its staff or students).

This blog introduces four chapters of an essay on nature and farming inspired by Jake Fiennes’ 2022 book Land Healer.

Left: Taliban Alley, right, Great Farm a few miles away after Restorative Farming

Chris Rose, September 2022

‘Taliban Alley’ is the not very PC name given to a country-road not far from where I live, in Norfolk, England. It was coined by Jake Fiennes, in Land Healer: How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside. The farmland in Taliban Alley is a scene of agri-desolation caused by intensive farming.  It contrasts with what Fiennes has achieved on similar land, a few miles far away.

A former game-keeper, Australian sheep ranch hand and London night club PR, Fiennes is a scion of an old landed-gentry family now best known for movie roles played by his actor brothers Ralph and Joseph.  But don’t judge him by that.  In my view Jake Fiennes has done something rather more important.

Fiennes has shown by deeds not words how the ecological sterilisation caused by agricultural intensification can be put into reverse, not by taking whole farms out of production but by changing agricultural practice within farms, by farmers.  His work on East Anglian estates has brought birds and plants back to working farms long hammered by chemical agriculture, while maintaining economic viability.  The UK’s mainstream nature and countryside groups need to join the revolution in Taliban Alley.

‘Revolutionizing’

Not surprisingly, his book is making waves in UK farming and conservation circles.  It’s been described as ‘radical’ as it can actually be delivered (in relatively short order), and ‘revolutionizing’, because of the implications.  For anyone who cares about nature and biodiversity, and indeed food-security, water-quality or climate change, the implications are huge.

‘Taliban Alley’ gets its name from Fiennes’ moniker for bad-farming: ‘Taliban Farming’, which he defines as farming that kills everything which it does not want. Mostly that means with ‘pesticides’, such as insecticides, fungicides and herbicides, and where they don’t do the trick, pollution by artificial fertiliser.  This is not just an English or even a British problem, it’s the unsustainable model exported around the world by agri-business and the agrochemicals industry after World War Two.  In other words, ‘conventional farming’ based on max-input max-output.

The 3Rs

In the UK Fiennes has become something of a poster-boy for a loosely defined new agricultural revolution, not that the adherents see themselves that way.  It brings together the ‘3Rs’ of Regenerative Farming, Rewilding and Restorative Farming, the latter being on-farm restoration of nature (Fiennes’ particular focus).

Groundswell – see Chapter 1

Events such as Britain’s Groundswell agricultural conference and festival are bringing together these often overlapping communities. Land Healer sold out within hours at this year’s Groundswell.   Yes there are risks of greenwash and free-riders but the opportunity is considerable, and in my opinion, historic.  Fiennes’ work has revolutionary potential because it comes from within, not outside farming.

Britain’s Long Good-Bye To Nature

Outside (top) and inside Winks Meadow, Suffolk, a diminutive Wildlife Trust nature reserve and remnant of what was and what could be (see Chapters 2 and 4)

In a parochial UK perspective, we now live in one of the most nature depleted countries in the world. Intensive farming is the main reason.  Between them the nature and countryside NGOs have eight million members, over a tenth of the population:  most of their supporters are voters, all are consumers, the majority are investors.  Dozens of concerned UK NGOs have charted the decline of countryside nature over generations but have not stopped it.  There has never been a national campaign to do so, indeed there have been few individual campaigns.

In campaign-design terms, UK conservationists have failed to divide farming into good and bad, and thus failed to triangulate the issue into one where ‘good farmers’ and ‘bad farmers’ argue in a three-cornered fight while others represent the public interest.  As a result, the mainstream agri-business lobby has maintained a monopoly in representing farming in politics and the media, and NGOs have lacked the most basic campaign ingredients, the problem and the solution .

At the same time, dwindling cultural connection to nature has rendered even the environmentally-concerned public blind to the difference between nature-rich countryside and green but sterile cropland.  So there is no on-the-ground constituency to engage, organise and mobilise in a political ground war.  Which could and should be changed.

Taliban Alchemy

Fiennes’ cheerful identification of nature-annihilating farmers as ‘the Taliban’ provides a binary frame distinguishing bad and good farming, problem and solution: communications alchemy which opens a Pandora’s Box of potential.

The road to Taliban Alley near my home in North Norfolk 

‘Taliban Alley’ is just one locational example of ‘bad’, and Great Farm up the road is an example of the ‘good’ but there are more Taliban Alleys and examples of the opposite, all over the country.  This communications gift opens the way to construction of campaigns which British NGOs have long tried but failed to create, or deliberately avoided because they were self-inhibited.

For decades the main UK nature and countryside NGOs worked on the assumption that the best route to influencing what happened the 70-80% of UK land which is farmed, was to promote examples of ‘good farming’ by ‘good farmers’.  Their example would gradually inspire others to do likewise. It made some progress but was ultimately a failed strategy.  It recruited perhaps 2-5% of farmers.

By the same logic, and because the largest were themselves land-managing organisations, the NGOs set on maintaining ‘credibility’ and good relations with ‘farming’ as a whole rather than ‘good farming’.  They effectively handed over the test of their legitimacy to the farming lobby.

No Line In The Sand

To stay within the tent of conventional farming the major NGOs eschewed endorsement of alternative approaches such as organic farming.  The price was an inability to draw a line in the sand, and say this or that farming practice is unacceptable.

The only exceptions were illegality and outright destruction of significant areas of wildlife habitats.  By the end of the 1980s there weren’t many such places left to convert to intensive farming.  The NGOs focused on doing what they could do protect the remnants, amounting to 5 – 8% of the land, well below the 16% or so estimated to be necessary to sustain nature.  It’s expanding but oh, so slowly.

A focus on places (sites), and the creation of nature reserve networks which were good in themselves and which pleased their members, meant that most NGOs did not engage with what was happening on farmland, which was a wipe-out of birds, insects, plants and wildlife across the landscape, largely driven by pesticides (see Chapter 3).

Data from the ‘Common Bird Census’, later refined as the Farmland Birds Index, showed that most of the birds present in 1970 had simply vanished by the second decade of the C21st.  This happened not so much through big-chunk ‘habitat destruction’ as a fine-grained thinning of the natural fabric within farms, including through every intensifying use of chemicals, a subject all the larger NGOs avoided until very recently.

England’s countryside looks green but …

Most birds disappeared (see Chapter 2)

From the 1990s onwards the NGOs invested hope in AES or Agri-Environment Schemes funded by the EU and government. Eventually they covered the majority of farmland yet the majority of birds still disappeared.  This comfort-blanket of hope further stifled ignition of campaigns.

UK AES schemes (as of 2012) – a complex layer of sticking plasters which overall,  failed (see Chapter 2).

By 2013-19 the NGOs got together to produce detailed reports itemising this ecological catastrophe in State of Nature reports (see Annexe).  But whereas they promoted exemplar good farmers, the ecological wipe-out was represented only in statistics, with very limited emotional resonance.  As Stalin famously pointed out, when one man dies it is a tragedy, when a million die, that’s just statistics. The UK conservation formula has been to show the good through human examples, and the bad through anonymous statistics, and that fails.

Stalin

I explore these and other themes in four parts of an essay on Land Healer, nature and farming in the UK:

1. The Significance of Land Healer
2. An Historic Failure To Protect Nature
3. How Pesticides Ran Amok
4. Where To Go Now

& Annexe – State of Nature

Proposals

Part Four makes proposals which in summary are:

Local Resourcing and Organisation.  NGOs need to run a ground war campaign and that requires local logistics and assets including people familiar with farming and agrochemicals and resourcing as serious as that given to land management or fundraising.

Nature Ability.  The UK needs national campaigns of public education in Natural History (aka ecological literacy),  so enough people have the ability to discern the detail of nature to form an effective political constituency. Show people polar opposite examples.

Set up Taliban Farming Demonstrations.  As the (good farming) 3Rs begin to take effect we need to demonstrate bad farming, and having their own ‘Taliban Alley’ examples could enable NGOs fearful of farmer conflict to to show that without annoying individual farmers.

Taliban Geography.  To create public conversations from which specific campaigns could emerge, go out and map good and bad farming at a Parish level: Taliban through to Restorative.

Develop the Practitioner Lexicon.  Systematize and give names to the steps involved in Restorative Farming as described in Land Healer, such as  ‘hedge fattening’, to enable the public to recognize and appreciate good farming, and enable farmers to be recognized and rewarded.  Create a Farm Nature Code equivalent to the Highway Code.

A New Social Enterprise.  Work with 3R farmers and landowners, private investors, food retailers, the catering and hospitality industry, and NGO supporters, to develop business of certified, branded retail outlets supplying nature friendly food. Be a business voice not just an external commentator.

Enable Stake holding in 3R Farming. Trial and introduce a system of private Countryside Contracts in which individuals finance good farming in return for access and agreed influence.

Agrochemical Free Buffer Zones. Campaign for a legal requirement for Regenerative/ Restorative/ Organic farming of up to 2km around all Nature Reserves and Protected Areas and make it mandatory across farmed areas of National Parks and AONBs.

Rewild BTB Hotspots. Campaign for the withdrawal of the most persistent problematic BTB (bovine TB) areas from livestock farming. (BTB is a long running UK policy failure).

Open Up The Policy Community.  Democratize representation of farming to government by requiring Ministers not just to consult the NFU (National Farmers Union) on policy but consult the full range of farming, environmental and civil society organisations.

Reward Everyone Who Helps Nature.  Campaign to democratize the use of public money for nature (public goods) so it is not restricted by ‘eligibility rules’ based on agricultural holdings but on outcomes. There in no natural justice in paying a farmer if s/he produces two Song Thrushes where there was one before, and not a householder with a garden.

Treat Farming Like Other Industries. Licence chemical farming by activity and location.  Set environmental quality targets based on a return to 1947 levels of ecological health.  Impose planning or other controls on any activities producing or likely to produce significant harm.

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Part Four also covers recent developments which could be built on to build campaigns that join the 3Rs revolution.

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The dramatic contrast between ‘Taliban farming’ outside Winks Meadow and the interior ancient hay meadow – a brief visit in midsummer 2022 as a thunderstorm arrived.  As Jake Fiennes said out to me at Great Farm, it’s the contrast between Taliban Farming and rich nature which enables people to ‘really get’ it.

A Campaign Strategy Ltd Blog.  Contact Chris Rose

Andrew Taylor of Connect CEE and the NGO Transilvania Executive Education has edited a new book Rethinking Leadership For a Green World (Routledge/ Taylor and Francis).

Pat Dade and I contributed a chapter which summarises what we know of change dynamics and leadership through a values lens: Values and Leadership in the Anthropocene.

One of our main conclusions is that leadership on responding to issues such as climate change will require respect for the diversity of motivational values.  Values-projection by a Pioneer vanguard can backfire, as if conflicts over change polarise along values lines, they will slow or stop the uptake of necessary social change and new behaviours.  Once values splits arise, they can threaten social cohesion and prevent rather than catalyse change.  We discuss examples such as Brexit and how Pat’s Values Modes model relates to the work of other researchers such as Inglehart, Haidt and Schwarz.

I’ve made an author’s proof of our chapter available for free here.

There are a lot of interesting perspectives and insights in Andrew’s collection, such as The Weaponisation of Climate Change by Elesa Zehndorfer of Roehampton Business School.