Nature Conservation
Peter Marren
This latest volume in the New Naturalist series provides a comprehensive study of wildlife conservation in Britain, concentrating on events in the last 30 years.As our environment is subjected to increasing assault from climatic changes and pollutants, conservation has become a growing concern for both specialists and generalists alike.The first chapter of this book considers the political and institutional development of nature conservation and reviews the physical and biological nature of Britain, its geology, climate and wildlife habitats.Subsequent chapters cover the loss of habitats and species, how these losses have been managed and the techniques used to survey and monitor the integration of nature conservation policies in industries from agriculture to forestry and fisheries.Marren continues by discussing how nature conservation has emerged from the sidelines to become a major concern. He addresses the role of the media, weighs up the successes and failures of the conservation movement and looks to what the future may hold.
Collins New Naturalist Library91
Nature Conservation
Peter Marren
Editors (#ulink_7a1903af-2bfb-5a2a-a416-0b85ba4966c3)
Sarah A. Corbet ScD
S.M.Walters, ScD, VMH
Prof. Richard West, ScD, FRS, FGS
David Streeter, FIBiol
Derek A. Ratcliffe
The aim of this series is to interest the general reader in the wildlife of Britain by recapturing the enquiring spirit of the old naturalists. The editors believe that the natural pride of the British public in the native flora and fauna, to which must be added concern for their conservation, is best fostered by maintaining a high standard of accuracy combined with clarity of exposition in presenting the results of modern scientific research.
Dedicated to Derek Ratcliffe for reminding us that means should have ends, and that behind the posturing it is wildlife that matters
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ub9b7a372-70c1-5881-986c-49bb2bac8603)
Title Page (#u1ddbab6f-0efb-536b-8064-60facdfcf4dd)
Editors (#ue84e8313-5f86-5a6e-b6f6-7afaf7401270)
Editors’ Preface (#u324d4884-885a-5974-939d-7bd23916fd2e)
Author’s Foreword (#ub8777acd-7efd-524e-9412-0d5ce0db83d3)
1 Introduction: Where We Are Now (#ub1aeabc1-8831-5e6d-a025-68efd7fc390e)
PART I Dramatis Personae (#u83a2fe66-c6f2-5ed2-8522-e05515d888d9)
2 The Official Conservation Agencies (#u9f55e1c3-e2d8-5137-8746-4f1454580910)
3 The Voluntary Army (#u517709a5-e4c1-52ed-8b08-1de9f284d706)
4 Conservation Politics: SSSIs and the Law (#u4e2cfc47-ccde-57f2-8746-d24c17da3c15)
PART II Wildlife Habitats (#litres_trial_promo)
5 Nature Reserves (#litres_trial_promo)
6 The Farmed Environment (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Woods and Forests (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Bricks and Water (#litres_trial_promo)
PART III Living With Wildlife (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Development: Causes Célèbres (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Animals That Get In Our Way (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Biodiversity (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Sea Eagles and Parrot’s Feathers: Invading and Settling (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Summing Up: Whither Nature Conservation? (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendices (#litres_trial_promo)
References (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Plates (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Editors’ Preface (#ulink_ce5a97f5-413f-5a8d-aa95-76cd4241279b)
It is 32 years since Dudley Stamp’s New Naturalist on Nature Conservation in Britain appeared. Published posthumously, it summarised events and progress up to 1965, concentrating on the dominant role of the official Nature Conservancy. Since then, nature conservation has become much more fraught and politicised. It is in continual conflict with the forces of modern ‘progress’, in the increasing demands made on the natural environment by agriculture, forestry, mineral extraction, water use, energy supply, transport, urban development, recreation and defence. The voluntary bodies for nature conservation have also grown to rival the official side in importance. These massive shifts require a completely new book that takes over the story where Dudley Stamp left off.
Peter Marren is the acclaimed author of the 50th anniversary volume, The New Naturalists (1995), whose earlier career was in the Nature Conservancy Council. As a regional staff member in Scotland and later England, he saw things from the front line of nature conservation. His later role, in compiling its Annual Report, gave him an overview of the whole wide field of activities and issues in which the NCC became involved, and an insight into the frequently political nature of skirmishes with opposing vested interests. Then the NCC was devolved, and Peter found himself in English Nature, with a much reduced geographical remit and a new management-cum-public relations style. Unable to stand the combination of internal regimentation and external timidity, he resigned, to start a new career as a freelance writer on wildlife and its conservation. To this he brought a distinctive style, of fluent prose allied to sardonic wit, winning many fans who relish the appearance of his next work.
Peter’s perceptive eye has ranged over an astonishingly broad field in this new book, and he has told its complicated story with his usual flair. This is an honest appraisal of the net results of all the years of striving on behalf of wild nature in Britain – an assessment of the balance between success and failure. He puts all aspects of the business under the microscope: the organisations concerned, the threats to nature, the measures for dealing with these, the politics involved, and the outcomes on the ground. The book is analytical as well as factual, but enlivened by its author’s characteristic flashes of humour. This re-evaluation shows that, despite many successes in saving important wild places, plants and animals, losses have also continued on an unacceptable scale. Nature reserves do, at least, give us some tangible reward for all the effort, but the results from the persuasion approach are often more difficult to measure. In giving us this invaluable reference work, Peter Marren has also conveyed the richness and splendour of our national capital of wild nature, and its importance to our cultural heritage. Its defenders also have sombre lessons to learn from this synthesis if they are to improve their performance during this new millennium.
Author’s Foreword (#ulink_dc88942e-a726-5739-be9b-8d6b4f39ad2f)
This is the first New Naturalist book on nature conservation since 1969. Its predecessor was written by Dudley Stamp, a geography professor and an influential voice in rural planning matters in the 1940s and 1950s. He was well qualified to report the early development of nature conservation in Britain, having been a long-time Board member of the Nature Conservancy, the original wildlife agency which he helped to set up in 1949. Stamp was also a well-practised writer of textbooks on geography and land use, and had contributed no fewer than four volumes to the New Naturalist library, including the outstandingly successful Britain’s Structure and Scenery. Nature Conservation in Britain was his last book, published after Stamp’s untimely death in 1966. It was a mellow look back at the past, broadly successful, quarter-century, in which conservation had developed from the hopes of a few naturalists to a broad-based going concern with its own mini-department in government. It was a relatively short book, concentrating on the work of the Nature Conservancy and the county wildlife trusts, and listing nearly all the nature reserves existing at that time.
Thirty years on, that world has changed utterly. Conservation has become a much more pluralist activity involving many sectors of society, both official and voluntary. It has broadened out from its original base in natural history to address fundamental issues like the future of the countryside and the claims of the urban majority on how land is used, and whether we should be allowed open access to it. It has become ever more difficult to say where nature conservation ends and concern about our own futures begins. Indeed, the very phrase nature conservation means something different today. It is now shot through with fashionable concerns like sustainability, animal rights and habitat creation, some of which might have baffled the conservationists of the 1960s, whose perceptions were rooted more in natural sciences and the development of institutions.
Nature Conservation in Britain (1969). The dust jacket designed by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis was inspired by the Abbotsbury swannery in Dorset, Britain’s oldest bird sanctuary.
Even so, many of the things Dudley Stamp was writing about are still with us. We still conserve wildlife by setting up nature reserves, or designating private land as Sites of Special Scientific Interest. What has changed more is the scale of the resources brought to bear on protecting nature. Bodies like the RSPB and National Trust have more members than any of the political parties or trades unions. Money has flowed into the business (as it has become) from the Heritage Lottery Fund, tax credits and the EU LIFE fund. We stand on the verge of a major shift of agricultural subsidies from food production to sustainable land use. If I was writing this book from the perspective of conservation bodies, that is, in terms of wealth and influence, it would be a story of unalloyed success. Instead, I have chosen to write it, as far as possible, from the more awkward perspective of wildlife. I try to assess to what extent all this power and money has benefited British wildlife, and how far the undoubtedly frenetic activity of the recent past has translated into policies that improve the lot of rare and declining species and wild places. Is the countryside in better shape today than in 1969? Do we have more wildlife now than we had then? Perhaps we should have. The population has hardly grown in that time, and the polluting industries of the 1960s have either cleaned up their acts or disappeared. Persistent pesticides are no longer widely used. And yet the statistics show a steady loss of habitats and species. Although in some ways land use has become more environment-friendly, a short walk with open eyes almost anywhere in Britain is a good antidote to the wilder claims of the prophets of the ‘Things are Much Better Now’ school.
Writing about the conservation product rather than the process poses an interesting problem. The documents of the conservation industry tend to be aspirational: they tell us, sometimes in impenetrable gobbledegook, sometimes in talk-down, creepy-vicar homilies, what ought to happen and what they would like to happen, but all too often do not tell us what actually happened. The emphasis tends to be on the means – plans, strategies, partnerships – rather than the ends. The Nature Conservancy and the NCC did sometimes review events from the standpoint of ecology and wildlife, but their successors seem much more interested in talking up their ‘achievements’. It is rare nowadays that a body tries to take an objective view and balance success and failure. A certain caution about the claims of conservationists is therefore healthy, and wise.
The conservation story would not make sense without a description of the main players, their basic beliefs and actions, and the historical framework against which decisions are taken. I therefore planned this book in three sections. The first concerns the main players, the official agencies, the successors of Dudley Stamp’s Nature Conservancy, and the voluntary bodies, and is also about how our wild places are protected. The second is about the playing field itself – the environment in which our wild species live, and what we have done with it over the past half century. The third is about species, especially those we know about and have polices for: the big ones, rare ones and new arrivals. The main text is topped by an introduction summing up the state of our wildlife at the start of the new millennium, and tailed by a look at where current trends might be taking us. I have not felt it necessary to review every wild habitat in detail; for example, I have not devoted much space to river engineering and floodland, partly because that has been done so well already by Jeremy Purseglove in his prize-winning book Taming the Flood (1989). Because this book is about the natural world, I have little to say about the human environment – food, renewable resources, radiation, ozone, carbon dioxide – nor ‘wider countryside’ issues such as access and recreation, except where they affect wild species and living communities. On the other hand, there is a lot about trees, flowers and birds, and, I hope, not too much conservation jargon.If it has an emergent theme, it might be the gap between aspiration and achievement. The political and physical conditions of a crowded island make the conservation of nature extraordinarily difficult, and wildlife survives largely despite us.
I am lucky to have friends in the business who agreed to cast their eyes over what I had written and put me straight on things, especially Desmond Thompson, James Robertson, Gary Mantle and Graham Bathe. I am grateful also to the three national conservation agencies, English Nature, SNH and CCW for the loan of photographs and other material, and for their patience in answering my queries. Among other bodies that helped in some way are the JNCC, Heritage Lottery Fund, the Countryside Agency and the Wildlife Trusts partnership, especially my own trust, the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, as well as the RSPB, BTO, WWF-UK and the Marine Conservation Society. My old friend Bob Gibbons came to my rescue in the last-minute scramble for pictures with great generosity. My faithful Maureen Symons processed the script with her usual speed and cheerfulness, and Isobel Smales turned it into illustrated pages with sensitivity and intelligence. Thanks also to Myles Archibald at Collins for making it all possible. My old colleague and friend Derek Ratcliffe read the whole draft, and his comments, on the main themes as well as the detail, were most valuable. He would not necessarily agree with everything in it, but writing this book put me constantly in mind of Derek’s unique contribution to the protection of wildlife in Britain, and I am proud to dedicate this book to him.
Peter Marren Ramsbury, January-June 2001
1 Introduction: Where We Are Now (#ulink_822537ec-d0bd-51bd-8e7c-030439262331)
Wildlife in a crowded island
In his classic book, Nature Conservation in Britain (1969), Sir Dudley Stamp began with the world population. By the mid-1960s, wildlife shared the planet with 3,400 million human beings. Thirty years later that number had grown to 5,292 million. Today Asia alone holds most of the world population of the mid-1960s. In 2000, we broke the six billion mark. The United Nations forecast for 2050 is 9,833 million people; if so, in a single century the human population will have nearly trebled.
In Great Britain, by contrast, the population growth is slow. In 1921, nearly 43 million people lived on our island. In 1965, despite the postwar ‘baby boom’, the population had increased by only 19 per cent to 53 million. Today it stands at 57 million and is virtually static. Our population explosion happened early, in Victorian times. In the developing world, most people are young. In Britain we have an ageing population. Mr and Mrs Average will have 2.1 children and will live well into their seventies. If the size of the human population were all that mattered, the countryside and its wildlife would have been under remarkably little pressure in the twentieth century, except around a few cities, mainly in south-east England.
Even so, 57 million people is plenty on an island of only 230,000 square kilometres (88,780 square miles). It gives us an average population density of 3.6 persons per hectare in England, 1.36 in Wales and 0.65 in Scotland. We outnumber every wild mammal found in Britain, with the possible exception of the field vole. We outnumber the commonest wild bird by about five to one. If we all had a decent-sized garden, there would be no countryside.
The New Naturalist Board in 1966. From left to right: James Fisher, John Gilmour, Sir Julian Huxley, Sir Dudley Stamp and Eric Hosking. (Eric Hosking)
It is not the size of the human population so much as our changing ways of life that have created the pressure on our wildlife. Despite a near static population, another 4.4 million ‘homes’ are to be built over the next 20 years, at least half of them in the countryside. Apparently, this is because many people nowadays prefer to live on their own. Our devotion to the car has produced a bonanza of road building so that it can be hard to find a place where the traffic cannot be heard, and the stars shine in a dark sky. It has produced an American-style, road-centred landscape that was only starting to appear in the 1960s: flyovers, filling stations, shopping malls and multistorey car parks. Although roads are thin, they flatten a lot of wildlife sites. A clover-leaf motorway junction was built smack in the middle of Hook Common SSSI in Hampshire. Another motorway cut Aston Rowant National Nature Reserve in half (though zealous geologists promptly designated the road cutting). You get a wonderful view of bisected Kentish SSSIs from the M2.
Even so, if the rest of the countryside was still rich in wildlife, we could lose some of it to further our material convenience without losing any species. However, agricultural improvements, well under way by the 1960s, have transformed the old prewar mixed farms, with their acres of permanent pasture and miles of hedges, into prosperous modern arable units, or rye-grass-based milk factories. The reasons, which might seem inadequate now, made sense then. As a wise giant in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels had observed, ‘whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind than the whole race of politicians put together’. We vastly exceeded that modest goal, but, essentially, the higher the unit production, the lower the value for wildlife. By the 1990s we had achieved what would once have seemed impossible: wheat fields with nothing left over for the wild birds to eat, or fields of grass with scarcely a single wild flower. Another crop that was starting to take over much of the poorer land in the 1960s was Sitka spruce. Forestry was once considered by many to be a friend to nature conservation. Unfortunately the industry went the same way as farming – trees were treated purely as a crop, like wheat – and so it lost the favourable reputation it is now struggling hard to regain. The nation could have fed itself without destroying important wildlife habitats, and the heavily subsidised home-grown trees scarcely dented Britain’s import bill for timber. The destruction of our wild places, it seems now, was unnecessary. If it had a single cause it was an airtight Ministry of Agriculture, the client ministry of the big farming unions and the agro-chemicals industry, but no one else. When the Ministry was finally put to sleep in the government reorganisation of June 2001, no one, least of all the farmers, had a good word to say for it. The officials of MAFF, it is said, were the most blinkered and obstinate in the entire civil service (ask anyone in a conservation agency – or for that matter, on a farm). They made a mess of everything, from BSE to ESAs. The chaos that engulfed the farming industry in the 1990s was the endgame of decades of preventable idiocy.
The New Naturalist Board in 2001. From left to right: Richard West, David Streeter, Derek Ratcliffe and Sarah Corbet. Max Walters is absent from the picture. (Debra Sellman)
A high-density human population makes every acre precious. As Dudley Stamp noted, ‘nature conservation must work out its own salvation in cramped conditions’. Good wildlife habitat, such as chalk grassland and heath, has been reduced to scraps within a predominantly arable or urban environment. Many of our nature reserves seem ridiculously small to visitors from large, continental countries like the United States. Yet the same visitors also marvel at how attractive much of our countryside still is, despite all the pressures upon it. The island scale of the British landscape means that small is often beautiful. Britain has an amazingly complex geology, producing variations in landforms and building stone within just a few miles. A traveller from London to Brighton passes over at least seven different landscapes on gravel, clay, greensand and chalk, past downs, heaths, woods and secluded lakes. The lowland agricultural landscape is a patchwork, and small nature reserves may be big enough to enclose some of the best examples of natural habitats. Even so, in the long run they may still be too small. Even quite large nature reserves cannot do much for wide-ranging, low-density species such as wildcats or golden eagles. Small reserves tend to lose more species than large ones. A famous example is the inability of Woodwalton Fen, a small, brick-shaped nature reserve in Cambridgeshire, to sustain a population of the large copper butterfly. The butterfly survived through the 1930s and 1940s, when the weather was kinder, but the reserve was just not big enough when the going got tough later on. Because they are small, British nature reserves tend to be highly planned, with various zones and prescriptions designed in effect to squeeze the maximum of wildlife out of the minimum of space. Like farms, every acre has to count, which is why there are few places where wildlife is simply left to look after itself. A special site (a steep ravine) had to be found to study the natural development of woodland in Britain. So ingrained is the concept of management that in Britain we do not seem very interested in how the natural world actually works.
This would seem odd in a big, wild country such as Canada or Brazil, but, as we ecologists never tire of pointing out, every inch of Britain is used. Most of the land has a history. Most of it is privately owned, and managed to provide income. British wildlife has long been used to living with the British, and exploiting such opportunities as we offer it. Presumably any species unable to make that crucial accommodation, such as the wolf perhaps, or Cerambyx cerdo, a huge beetle of giant trees in virgin forests, died out. But it is quite wrong to assert that because he has planted a few trees and hedges, and farms most of it, that the landscape is therefore man-made. This is a sinister reasoning, because if man has created a landscape there is an implication that he is entitled to do with it as he likes, and, if necessary, destroy it. In fact, many of our wilder places are almost unfathomably ancient, and were never planned or created. Most of our woods and commons, and even some hedges, evolved naturally in ways that are still mysterious. Whoever coined the term ‘natural history’ must have realised this instinctively. In Britain, nature does indeed have a history that runs parallel with that of humankind, often in harmony with it (man and nature in harmony is the subject of much of British art). Our relationship with the natural world has a history of its own (see, for example, Keith Thomas’ masterpiece, Man and the Natural World). Nature conservation is only the most recent phase in a long-running love affair.
Britain’s oldest farmed habitats can in fact be more ancient than natural landforms. For example, the fields of West Penwith, in Cornwall, with their strange polygonal patterns, are much older than the shingles at Dungeness or the wet levels at Pevensey, which were still under the sea when William the Conqueror invaded in 1066. A few woods have been managed in much the same way for as long as historic records permit us to see (and to carry on managing them in exactly the same way is absolutely the right thing to do: indeed, it is almost a duty to history). Past land uses were not necessarily ideal for wildlife, but they tended to leave plenty of opportunities. Butterflies could lay their eggs in sunny glades created by woodmen, before the canopy closed over again. Meadows were often full of wild flowers because farmers lacked the means to drain them dry or improve the soil (flower fields also made better hay). The highly regulated management of medieval commons could almost have been invented by a latter-day nature reserve manager. Modern conservationists are to some extent stepping into the vacated shoes of farm labourers, shepherds, woodmen and peasants, who would not have been able to read a conservation manual but knew more about conservation in practice than most of us. The challenge today is to obtain similar results by different means. Recent advances include the creative use of bulldozers, JCB diggers and suction dredgers.
Some millennial stocktaking
About 30 years ago, when I was just setting out into the nature conservation world, we used to be slightly apologetic about British wildlife. Almost anything we had, other European countries had better, we thought. Britain has few endemic species worth mentioning, apart from Primula scotica (the Scottish primrose) and the good old red grouse (which, ornithologists insisted, was the same species as the bigger, better-looking continental willow grouse), nor much of world importance, apart from the grey seal (which we were then culling by the hundred) and maybe the gannet. Since then, Britain’s stock has risen considerably. We have places such as the New Forest, St Kilda and the Cairngorms, which are important after all, and more old trees than anywhere north of the Alps. Our marine life, estuaries and Atlantic oak woods are pretty special, and Britain is right at the top of the European liverwort league. I was slightly staggered to hear we have 40 per cent of Europe’s wrens. If Britain sank beneath the waves, quite a lot of species would be sorry.
Britain’s wildlife is important in another way. Natural history is very popular – we have 4,000 RSPB members for every species of breeding bird – and we are very good at it. (Who wrote The Origin of Species? Who lived at Selborne?) Britain probably has the best documented wildlife in the world – all right, we might tie with the Dutch and the Japanese. Our 60-odd butterflies are nothing on the world stage, but the expertise acquired in studying them has been exported worldwide. British bittern experts are in demand internationally, though we have only a handful of bitterns. We might not be much good at protecting wildlife, but we certainly know a lot about it. How well, in fact, are our wild animals and plants faring at the start of the new millennium?
There are some grounds for optimism. The loss of wild habitats with which we are sadly so familiar can now be seen in a historical context – as a feature of the domination of intensive agriculture (including forestry) between 1940 and 1990. The statistics of habitat loss put together by the NCC in 1980 have been much repeated, and certainly paint a grim picture. I will not march through them all again, since statistics tend to have a numbing effect on our jaded twenty-first century minds, and they are meaningless without context. For example, what does the loss of 95 per cent of ‘neutral grassland’ mean? It does not tell us whether all the lost ground was of importance for wildlife, nor whether what remains is of the same value as it was. It does, however, imply that something pretty far-reaching has happened to the landscape, and that perhaps only one unimproved meadow in 20 has survived. Meadows are the biggest losers of the habitat loss stakes, but we have lost almost as much wet peatland and ‘acid grassland’, mainly on former commons and village greens, and about half the chalk downs and natural woods that existed before 1939.
The red grouse, Britain’s most celebrated endemic animal, adapted for life on heather moors. (Derek Ratcliffe)
The official nature conservation agencies publish annual estimates of habitat loss and damage in their annual reports. The loss is ongoing, and although it has fallen since the peak in the agricultural high noon of the 1970s, there is now less habitat to damage. The problem with the figures is that, however they are defined, damage assessment is relative. Some types of ecological damage, such as eutrophication, need a trained eye, while others, such as surface disturbance, may look like damage, but may be harmless or even beneficial. Moreover, the agencies have a bad habit of changing their method of calculation from year to year, and since devolution it has become maddeningly difficult to compare what is happening in England with Scotland or Wales or vice versa. All the same, the losses indicate that statutory protection of wild habitats has not been as effective as many had hoped.
The decline of lowland heath in six parts of England over two centuries. (From Nature Conservation in Great Britain, NCC 1984)
The concensus at the turn of the millennium is that loss and damage has slowed considerably and for some habitats may have halted. SSSIs have acquired a greater land value because of the grants they now attract, and SSSI protection is also more effective than formerly. Also more of them are owned or managed by conservation bodies or benign private owners. For at least one well-documented habitat, hedges, removal is now offset in terms of length by newly planted or repaired hedges (quality is not assessed). Hedgerow removal peaked between 1955 and 1965, when many of the open barley prairies of eastern England were created. The process went on in lower gear, with about 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres) of hedges removed per year, mainly by arable farmers, but also for urban development, roadworks and reservoirs. The Government’s Countryside Survey found virtually no overall decline in hedges between 1990 and 1998, except in neglected ‘remnant hedges’: about 10,000 kilometres (2 per cent) of hedges were removed, and a similar amount planted. But the survey found evidence for some loss of plant diversity, especially tall grasses and ‘herbs’. The reason why hedges have stabilised is because government no longer pays the farmer to pull them up, but pays him to plant them. Stewardship and other agri-environmental schemes are the main reason why hedges are still planted.
We have lost a lot of wildlife habitat, but conservation bodies saved many of the best places, and the story is by no means all doom and gloom. Today’s problem, which I will turn to in the last chapter especially, is the reduction in habitat quality and diversity, which is all the more insidious because it is hard to measure precisely. When we turn to species, the overall picture is the same. Many species – possibly most species – have declined over the past half-century, but relatively few have become nationally extinct. Some once believed extinct have since reappeared, or have been reintroduced in biodiversity schemes. The best-known victim of the past half-century, the large blue butterfly, has been reintroduced from Swedish stock, which closely resembles the lost British race. Thanks to thorough research and ground preparation by Jeremy Thomas and David Simcox, the project has been a resounding success, and several introduction sites are now open to the public. But there is a very large disparity between the small number of recorded extinctions and the much larger number that seem to be approaching extinction. For example, the JNCC considers that about 20 native wild flowers are extinct (though my own tally makes it nearer ten), but some 200 face extinction in the short or medium term. Similarly, some 29 lichens are considered extinct, but 148 are ‘endangered’ or ‘vulnerable’. The implication is that conservationists are good at saving species at the last ditch, but bad at preventing them from getting that far.
The status of plants and fungi in Britain (based on details from the JNCC’s website)
Invertebrates are often ‘finely tuned’ to their environment and are more vulnerable to change than birds or many wild plants. Their fortunes have varied from group to group. Ladybirds and dragonflies are not doing too badly – ladybirds like gardens, dragonflies like flooded gravel pits – but things are currently looking grim for wood ants, and some bumblebees and butterflies. In a recent review I learned that some 200 species of flies (Diptera) are considered endangered and another 200 or so vulnerable (Stubbs 2001). Granted that flies are mysterious things with rather limited appeal, one wonders what the implications of 400 nose-diving flies could be. If 400 subtle, specialised ways of living are under threat, the environment must be quietly losing variety, losing tiny facets of meaning, like a little-read but irreplaceable book being nibbled away bit by bit by bookworms. Interestingly the author of this review blamed some of the losses on conservationists – ‘inappropriate decisions by amenity and conservation organisations’ – as much as farmers and developers. Tidying up is bad for flies.
Not all species are fated to decline. In a detailed assessment of Britain’s breeding birds by Chris Mead (Mead 2000), the accounts are surprisingly well balanced: some 118 species are doing well and 86 are doing badly. However, the fortunes of different species fluctuate, reflecting the lack of stability in the modern countryside. Some once rare birds, such as Dartford warbler, red kite and hobby, are among those that Mead awards a smiling face, meaning that they are doing well – stupendously well in the case of the kite. Among other smiling faces are gulls, geese, many water birds and seabirds and most raptors. Several species have colonised Britain naturally, notably little egret, Cetti’s warbler and Mediterranean gull, and others, such as spoonbill and black woodpecker, may be on the brink of doing so. The commonest bird in 2000 was the wren, which has benefited from the recent run of mild winters and thrives in suburban gardens. Conservation schemes have probably saved corncrake, cirl bunting, stone curlew, and perhaps woodlark, for now. Perhaps the best news of all is the recovery of the peregrine falcon from a dangerous low in 1963, following the ban on organochlorine pesticides, though it still faces persecution in parts of Britain. We are now quite an important world stronghold for peregrines.
About 14 per cent of our moss and liverwort flora is considered vulnerable, endangered or extinct. This is JNCC’s projection of their respective ‘threat status’. (JNCC)
The losers – Mead’s unhappy faces – include familiar farmland birds such as skylark, song thrush, linnet, grey partridge, lapwing and snipe. Even starling and house sparrow have declined markedly. The problem they all face is lack of food on today’s intensively managed, autumn-sown cereal fields. The red-backed shrike has ceased to breed, and the red light is showing for black grouse and capercaillie, which are finding life difficult in the overgrazed moors and upland woods (and no good just putting up deer fences: the capercaillie crashes straight into them). Interestingly, small birds are faring worse, on balance, than big ones. A birder of the 1960s would be shocked at what has happened to lapwings or golden plovers, but pleased and probably surprised at how well many comparatively rare species have adapted to a changing environment. Stranger things lie just ahead. Try imagining green parakeets stealing the food you left out for the disappearing starlings.
Like birds, some of the smaller mammals have declined more than the big ones. Some carnivores, such as polecat and pine marten, are more widespread today than they were in 1966. The grey seal is much more numerous, thanks entirely to the cessation of regular culling. Deer are also more numerous, though this is a mixed blessing. Though increasing, the red deer is threatened genetically by hybridisation with the increasing, introduced sika deer, and may soon be lost as a purebred species. Bats, as a class, have declined. The best counted species, the greater horseshoe bat, is believed to have declined by 90 per cent during the twentieth century. The present population is estimated to be only 4,000 adult individuals. Only 12 colonies produce over ten young per year (Harris 1993). Rabbits have made a slow recovery from myxomatosis, and are back to about 40 per cent of their original abundance, but occur more patchily than before. The otter has staged a slow recovery, aided by reintroductions, but may take another century to recover its former range across eastern Britain. The real losers are red squirrel and water vole, both victims of introduced mammals. Dormouse and harvest mouse are also declining, apparently because of changes in woodland and agricultural land that reduce food availability. Our rare ‘herpetiles’ (i.e. reptiles and amphibians), sand lizard, smooth snake and natterjack toad, have benefited from site-based conservation and a zealous British Herpetological Society. Most of our freshwater fish seem fairly resilient, but the burbot has been lost and our two migratory shads reduced to rarity status because of pollution and tidal barrages. The char, which likes clear, cold water, has disappeared from some former sites. The powan faces an uncertain future in Loch Lomond following the accidental introduction of a competitor, the ruffe, which eats its eggs. Its relative, the pollan of Lough Neagh, is now threatened by carp, casually introduced nearby to please a few anglers. In the sea, we, with the help of our European friends, have overfished herring, cod and 22 other species, and almost wiped out the skate.
We should not, however, judge the success of nature conservation measures solely by changes in the numbers of well-known animals. Birds are important, because everyone likes them, and because losses and gains among such well-recorded species are important clues to what is happening to their environment. In nature conservation, every bird is a miner’s canary. But birds are almost too popular. In the 1960s, many field naturalists specialised in relatively obscure orders, pond and shore life, and difficult insects, such as beetles or bugs. Today, an oft-heard complaint is that taxonomists are an ageing and diminishing band, and that the few professional ones are nowadays tied up in administrative tasks. The number of people who can identify protozoa, or diatoms, or worms is probably fewer now than a century ago. As a result, we have no idea what is happening to them. All too often, biodiversity has been lost from ignorance, even on nature reserves. Britain’s nature reserves are run by people who would know a hawk from a handsaw at a thousand paces, but to whom invertebrates are just wriggly things that live in bushes.
Discovering where the wildlife is
In the 1960s, the study of British natural history was in a reasonably healthy state, better in some respects than it is today. Entomology and microscopy were less popular than in their late Victorian heyday, but with the advent of cheap, lightweight binoculars, birdwatching was growing in popularity, and ecology was being taught at schools and universities. Serious naturalists were making connections between a species and its environment, which led, by extension, to conserving and managing natural habitats. Naturalists were well catered for by a wide range of books in print, not least by 40-odd volumes in the New Naturalist library. The now universal field guide had made an appearance, but there were also handbooks on beetles, spiders, bugs, grasshoppers and even centipedes and rotifers, at affordable prices. Naturalists were not infrequently equipped with a hand lens, and specimen collecting was not yet considered a crime. Television natural history had begun, with programmes such as Look and Survival and, though still in black-and-white, had less manic, less dumbed-down presenters and they were more often about wildlife near at home.
Much less was known about wildlife habitats and sites. Although some places had been thoroughly explored by naturalists, with long typed lists of species bound in massive ledgers, there had been few systematic surveys of habitats or species. The first attempts to census and record the distribution of species had been made in the 1920s and 1930s for certain colonial birds, such as heron and rook. However, the most important mapping scheme to date had been for wild flowers. In 1962, the Botanical Society of the British Isles published the Atlas of British Flora, which mapped the nationwide distribution of some 1,400 native or naturalised wild flowers and ferns using dot-maps based on a grid of 10 x 10 kilometre squares. What made the atlas possible was the invention of punch-card computers. It was all done without sizeable grant-assistance or central organisation, although the production of such atlases was later facilitated by a Biological Records Centre, established at Monks Wood under Franklyn Perring and, later, John Heath.
Similar atlases have since been produced and published for other plants and animals, including lichens (from 1982), butterflies (1984), bryophytes (from 1991), dragonflies (1996), grasshoppers (1997) and molluscs (1999). Pre-eminent among them are the bird atlases, The Atlas of Breeding Birds (1976) and The Atlas of Wintering Birds (1986). The production of a second breeding bird atlas recording breeding birds in 1993 was all the more valuable because it enabled an analysis of change over a 20-year period, providing a temporal dimension to the maps. The same has been done for only one other group, the butterflies, which received perhaps the most lavish and detailed atlas of all, The Millennium Atlas, in 2001. Distribution maps of many British species are now published on the Internet, via the National Biodiversity Network.
Of course, the relatively crude scale of 10 x 10 kilometres does not record actual sites (and so can make a species appear more frequent than it really is). Maps of vascular plants and butterflies have been published on finer scales, and a 2 x 2 kilometre ‘tetrad’ is now standard for county-scale maps (and represents a stupendous recording effort by local naturalists). These reveal some of the detail of actual distribution, fine enough to show the course of rivers and different strata and soil types. Some rare species have been mapped by actual sites; visually, the problem of actual-scale maps is that the ‘dots’ all but disappear – fly-specks on a blank canvas. Some insects, including butterflies, seem to occupy tiny patches of land, measured in metres rather than kilometres.
The venerable Victorian tradition for recording the wild plants of a county has been given a new lease of life by computer-based mapping. Grid-mapping was used in most of the county floras published since 1960. Their compilation by dedicated amateur naturalists, sometimes working as a team, sometimes, especially in the more remote regions, representing a titanic solo effort, is one of the wonders of British natural history. The majority of English counties have a flora published during the past 20 years, generally mapped on a fine 2 x 2 kilometre scale. By tradition they also include an overview of the county’s natural vegetation, progress in conservation and potted biographies of local botanists. The recent Flora of Cornwall has an accompanying CD-Rom holding the entire database of records. Some, such as The Flora of Dorset, record mosses, lichens and even fungi, as well as vascular plants. Others, such as A Flora of Norfolk and A Flora of Cumbria use elaborate coloured maps to compare plant distribution with physical features, a valuable advance made possible by modern printing technology.
Ten-kilometre square records of Arnoseris minima (lamb’s succory) plot the gradual decline to extinction in about 1970 of this once widespread ‘weed’. Hollow circles are records pre-1930, solid circles 1930-1970. (BSBI/CHE)
There are a growing number of ‘county faunas’, mainly of birds or butterflies, but on occasion extending to other vertebrates and at least the more popular invertebrates. Surrey Wildlife Trust has published a wonderful series of local insect ‘faunas’, including hoverflies, dragonflies, ladybirds and grasshoppers. Local bird reports have reached a high state of elaboration. They are often produced annually, enabling the present year to be compared with the last and revealing population trends. By contrast, many fine wildlife journals have fallen by the wayside, victims of rising costs and falling subscriptions, such as the long-running Scottish Naturalist and Nature in Wales. Fortunately the magazine British Wildlife came in the nick of time to rescue serious naturalists, and includes valuable news reports on all the main groups of flora and fauna. There are welcome signs of a revival in regional or specialised publications, such as Natur Cymru, the new ‘review of wildlife in Wales’, and the lively magazine Atropos, which is devoted to moths, butterflies and dragonflies.
Tetrad records of Danish scurvy-grass from A Flora of Norfolk reveal the plant’s fidelity to a natural habitat, coastal salt marshes, and its mimic, the moist, salty verges of main roads. (Alec Bull & Gillian Becket)
A series of Red Data Books has been published on rare and vulnerable species, each one containing a great deal of ecological information on the eternally fascinating question of why some species are rare. The more recent ones include distribution maps. So far there are Red Data Books for Vascular Plants (first published 1977, 3rd edition 1999), Insects (1987), Birds (1990), Other Invertebrates (1991), Stoneworts (1992), Mammals (1993), Lichens (in part – 1996) and Mosses and Liverworts (2001). There is also Scarce Plants in Britain (1993), a kind of ‘Pink Data Book’ for wild flowers that live on the edge of conservation activity. Together they cover nearly 4,000 species, and undoubtedly many more would qualify, especially if we knew more about fungi, or soil and marine life. It is a daunting thought that perhaps a quarter of our wild plants and animals are rare enough to warrant conservation action – and, if our climate is truly changing, that this proportion will rise.
Site registers and monitoring schemes
To conserve species in a site-based system of nature conservation you need to link species to places. During the 1980s, the NCC embarked on a series of grand, nationwide habitat surveys, a kind of resource account of Britain’s wildlife. Cumulatively they produced a detailed documentation of Britain’s wild places as a factual basis for conservation decisions. The NCC drew on existing, scattered information, but the surveys also amounted to possibly the most ambitious programme of field survey there has ever been. First there were the habitat surveys: ancient woodland (‘the Ancient Woodland Inventories’), the coast (‘Sand-dune Survey’, ‘Estuaries Review’), peatlands (‘National Peatland Resource Inventory’) and rivers. Beyond the shoreline there was the Marine Conservation Review (q.v.), analogous to the Nature Conservation Review on land, which classifies maritime communities and documents the best sites. The Geological Conservation Review did the same for rock strata and special geological sites over 41 volumes. Then there were the species reviews. The Invertebrate Site Register documented the best sites of insects and other invertebrates. A Rare Plant Survey did the same for rare vascular plants. The long-running Seabirds at Sea project discovered where seabirds went and what they did once they were beyond the reach of land-based binoculars. These surveys formed a mass of raw material that could be tapped for SSSI notification, species protection, drawing up oil-spill contingency plans etc. The Geological and Marine Conservation Reviews were also major contributions to pure science. Most of this work remains unpublished, perhaps destined to remain forever in sagging, spiral-bound folders thronging the shelves of conservation offices or lodged somewhere in the labyrinth of cyberspace. It is almost unsung, this last, vast outpouring of British natural history. The NCC’s successor agencies continued some of it, and implemented smaller-scale surveys of their own, though generally for a particular, short-term purpose, but none of them had any interest in praising the work of their predecessor. All the same, it was a tremendous voyage of discovery with able captains. Those of its mariners that are not retired are now mostly in administrative conservation jobs, or working as consultants.
Recording rare flowers: Barbara Jones, a trained climber, surveying the Snowdon lily, Lloydia serotina, (below) on Snowdon.
There were also surveys that established a system of baseline monitoring to record how the natural world was changing. A basic ‘phase one’ survey that purported to map all Britain’s natural habitats started in the early 1980s, with the help of the county wildlife trusts. The NCC also started a National Countryside Monitoring Scheme, which compared present and past land use in selected parts of the countryside. A much finer tool for measuring change was handed to conservation workers with the publication, during the 1990s, of the five-volume British Plant Communities, compiled by John Rodwell of Lancaster University, the fruits of a 15-year project to classify all kinds of natural and semi-natural vegetation found in Britain. The vegetation of many SSSIs has been mapped using this National Vegetation Classification, thereby providing a baseline for monitoring change as well as for assessing how much of the different types of vegetation are on protected sites. The species that best lend themselves to detailed census work are birds and butterflies. Birds have long been monitored using the Common Bird Census (now the Breeding Bird Survey) organised by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), along with the regular counts of seabirds by the Seabird Group. The performance of rare birds is the responsibility of the Rare Breeding Birds Panel. For monitoring butterflies, a method was worked out in the 1970s by Ernest Pollard, which involved counting all the species seen along a regularly walked transect. The success of the scheme has meant that fluctuations in butterfly numbers can be recorded, as well as their distribution. Computer techniques have also made possible some novel ‘phenograms’ (see p. 28) combining numbers with dates of emergence. Further evidence of population changes in insects, especially moths, is provided by the ‘Rothamsted traps’ operated under standardised conditions across the country. There has also been a revival of phenology – timing the appearance of flowers or frog-spawn or migrant birds – in relation to climate change.
‘Abundance map’ of the kestrel from The New Atlas of Breeding Birds 1988-1991 showing relative numbers as well as distribution. (By permission, BTO)
From data to action
Surveys and data provision are meat and drink to conservation bodies. It is what they do best. But interesting and often valuable though they are, surveys and monitoring only tell you what is happening. They give a sense of the overall state of health of the patient, but are not in themselves a cure. In practice, looking after wildlife is not based on scientific rationalisation alone, but on negotiation and politics. It is rare that a conservation body has full control over a given situation, even on a freehold nature reserve. Decisions are often made in a cloud of ignorance, or in a spirit of compromise with more powerful interests. Indeed, conservation in practice is to a large extent to do with quarrelling. You make the best case you can, you cite your legal and moral rights, you appeal to the more important party’s better nature. Then, often with the mediation of a third party, you reach the best deal you can, with or without bitter words and recrimination.
‘Phenogram’ of the red admiral butterfly from The Millennium Atlas of Butterflies, plotting latitude at 100-kilometre intervals against months, forms a ghostly outline of Britain. (From Butterflies for the New Millennium survey organised by Butterfly Conservation and Biological Records Centre)
Yet ‘quarrel’ is a remarkably rare word in conservation literature. I think the first time this particular spade was called a spade was in Professor Smout’s book, Nature Contested, published in 2000. More often, like politicians, the parties prefer to sweep disagreements under the carpet, using euphemisms like ‘discussion’, ‘debate’ or even – a popular choice in the 1990s – ‘partnership’. Nature conservation is a quasi-political matter in which the arguing is done as far as possible behind closed doors, and the outcome reported to a supine press with a bland statement. Many conservation bodies have become so used to the self-censorship of uncomfortable facts that they seem to operate on a different plane of reality from the farmhouse or the estate office. Their publications reflect the power of image and presentation in the modern world. It is necessary for conservation bodies to appear slick, dynamic, successful and, above all, relevant. Where the facts of disappearing wildlife appear to contradict this image they can be distorted by the same black arts (‘let’s focus on the positive’) or used to justify an appeal for more money. Ignorance of natural history can be a distinct advantage in this world. Hence, if in the later chapters of this book, I may sometimes seem rather sceptical about the claims of the conservation industry, and its official agencies in particular, it is because I have seen something of this world from the inside. Conservation bodies rarely stoop to deliberate distortion, but their version of events can be coloured by the views of their ‘clients’ and partners, by the attitude of their political masters or by that of a mass-membership. You do not, for example, hear the RSPB talking much about cats, or the Wildlife Trusts about fox hunting. Nature conservation in a crowded island in which all land is property is bound to be difficult, even when everyone agrees that wildlife is a good thing. Conservation can be seen in different ways, depending on how you are affected by it: as a moral absolute, as a cumbersome, bureaucratic restriction, as an unjust imposition by ignorant outsiders, as a potential source of income. I think wildlife is a good thing. Indeed, in my own life I think it is probably the most important thing. I would like my country to preserve as much wildlife and countryside as possible, but without enmeshing rural life in petty restrictions. The standpoint of this book is a love of wildlife but not necessarily conservationists. In these pages you may therefore find a lot of ‘buts’. I hope it will not sound unduly negative. I feel it may be necessary. An account of nature conservation in Britain devoid of individual opinion would be a dull read, indeed not worth reading. I hope this book is worth reading.
PART I Dramatis Personae (#ulink_c939178c-fbf3-5f8b-92c5-dcbf45c2e96b)
2 The Official Conservation Agencies (#ulink_2a2e6cc7-3447-5779-9140-03d6642b5dae)
The British government has always delegated its responsibilities for nature conservation to a semiautonomous agency. The governments of other European countries tend to keep theirs within agricultural departments or National Park bodies. The reason why Britain behaves differently probably lies in our early start and the influence of science in the 1940s (for a good account of this postwar science boom, see Sheail 1998). The founders of the Nature Conservancy, the first official conservation agency in Britain, saw it as a biological service, comparable with a research council or scientific institution, like the Soil Association. They hoped it would develop as a science-based body, using its own research programme to advise government on land-use policies affecting wildlife. As Professor Smout has pointed out, ‘the rule of the bureaucrat guided by the scientific expert has been highly prized in government for most of the twentieth century’ (Smout 2000). They were anxious that nature conservation should not be swallowed up in the departments for agriculture and forestry, where, as a newcomer, and so starting at the bottom of the civil service peck order, its influence would be stifled. Max Nicholson, who directed the Nature Conservancy between 1951 and 1965, had influence in high places and ensured that, as a semi-specialised body, it secured a semidetached status as a research council under the wing of Herbert Morrison, then Lord President of Council. As such, it could not be bossed about by predatory departments of state. There are advantages to ministers in such arrangements. Expertise is ‘on tap, not on top’, and if anything goes wrong it is the agency’s fault, not the minister’s. Dispensable Board chairmen can be sacked, but the minister need not resign. Much of the history of the Nature Conservancy and its successor bodies hovers around the tension between the zeal of semiautonomous agency officials and the brake of government (the appointed Councils of these bodies have tended to be part of the braking mechanism rather than the zeal). It is there between the lines of their annual reports and, now that the papers are at last available under the ridiculous 30-year-rule, you can read about the formative years of that thorny relationship in a fine, detailed book by John Sheail (1998). But here I need to skip over those, to many, golden, well-remembered early years with unseemly haste.
Max Nicholson, Director of the Nature Conservancy 1951-1965. (NCC)
The Nature Conservancy is said to have been the first official, science-based conservation body in the world, and the only one with a large research arm. Although money was always tight, the Nature Conservancy under Nicholson tended to box above its weight. It achieved a good deal, acquiring a nationwide network of National Nature Reserves and research stations, and gaining an international reputation for sound, science-based advice on the management of wild species and natural habitats. I begin the story where Dudley Stamp left off, in 1965, shortly after the Nature Conservancy lost its independence after becoming a mere committee within the newly formed Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). ‘One chapter is concluded,’ wrote Stamp, ‘but there is every sign of a new one opening auspiciously.’
If so, it did not stay auspicious for long. The 1960s should have been a good decade for the Nature Conservancy. The general public had become more ‘environmentally aware’ through events like the pesticides scare (Rachel Carson’s book about it, Silent Spring, became an international bestseller) and the Torrey Canyon disaster in 1967. The threat to our wild places had been underlined by the construction of a nuclear power station at Dungeness (Plate 11) and a reservoir at Cow Green in Upper Teesdale (Plate 13). The Conservancy was closely involved in these issues, and its growing fame was exemplified by the traffic jams on Open Days at Monks Wood Field Station (not to mention visits on different days by Prince Charles and the Prime Minister). However, its status within NERC drew attention to the essential ambiguity of the Conservancy’s role: could a body be scientific, and therefore impartial, and yet advocate a partial view – that conserving nature is a good idea? The Conservancy itself dealt with this duality by dividing its administrative responsibilities under one subdirector (Bob Boote) and its research under another (Martin Holdgate). Unfortunately the Conservancy no longer had full control over its affairs. For example, its budget for nature reserves had to compete for funds with NERC’s broader research, including geophysics, oceanography and the Antarctic. Internal censorship prevented the Nature Conservancy from speaking out on pesticides and other pollutants. Tensions grew in the boardroom, where some members thought it was worth making sacrifices to preserve the link between conservation and fundamental science while others decided that nothing had been achieved by joining NERC, and that the Conservancy would be better off going it alone. The Conservancy’s new director, Duncan Poore, was of the latter view.
Unfortunately there was to be no return to the pre-1965 days: the choice lay between the frying pan of NERC and the fire of a government department. The Conservancy’s committee split, with an influential group voting to leave NERC. A way out of the impasse was offered by the Government’s Central Policy Review under Lord Rothschild – the famous ‘Think Tank’ – which advocated the separation of customer and contractor. As a ‘customer’ of the natural sciences, the logic was that the Nature Conservancy should become independent of NERC, but the same logic prevented it from carrying out in-house research. Rothschild proposed that only half of NERC’s budget should be paid by its parent Department of Education and Science, with the balance found by commissioning research from other government departments. Most of the Nature Conservancy’s own little budget would now come from the new Department of Environment, or, in Scotland, from the Scottish Development Department (SDD). Funds were also transferred from NERC to pay for contract research. By one of life’s little coincidences, the Education Secretary who helped to set up this new Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) was the same person who presided over its demise, 16 years later – Mrs Thatcher.
Rothschild’s report gave the Conservancy the excuse it needed to make public its wish to leave NERC. Government agreed that the Conservancy’s dual role had ‘caused stresses difficult to resolve within the present framework’ (Sheail 1998). Unfortunately the solution, as Government saw it, was to separate science from administration. The Nature Conservancy would become a quasi-autonomous council of the Department of Environment, but its scientific stations would remain behind in NERC. This divorce, representing the exact moment when field-based natural history began to turn into administrative nature conservation, became known as ‘The Split’. The Nature Conservancy Council, usually referred to as the NCC, was established by Act of Parliament in 1973. Its first chairman was a Whitehall mandarin, Sir David Serpell, lately Permanent Secretary at the DoE. He promised to run the new agency on ‘a loose rein’ (which fooled nobody). As a sop to anguished pleas that the NCC must retain some scientific capacity to function properly, it was allowed to keep a small in-house team of scientists under a ‘Chief Scientist’, a term coined by Rothschild. But their job would be limited to commissioning and keeping abreast of research, rather than doing it themselves. In the meantime, its erstwhile Research Branch was reconstituted within NERC as the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE – now renamed the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology).
The Nature Conservancy Council (NCC)
‘No one was entirely happy with the outcome of the “Split”’ (Sheail 1998). Some saw it as a further demotion that threatened the special relationship between science and land management so carefully fostered by the Nature Conservancy. However, that relationship was already falling apart. While the White Paper ‘Cmd 7122’ had talked up the potential of nature reserves as ‘outdoor laboratories’ and the importance of its advice to land managers, the hard truth was that by the 1970s only a handful of nature reserves were used for fundamental research, and farmers and foresters were not queuing up for the Conservancy’s advice (they had their own scientists). Moreover, the crisis in the countryside was growing and it was no longer a matter of experimenting over the best way to manage a wood or a heath but of saving such places from complete destruction. Inevitably this required a shift in emphasis away from scientific research towards site safeguard, which, unless you happen to manage the land yourself, is an administrative task. Most of the Conservancy’s research budget now went on cheap, low-key surveys that helped to identify or characterise the places that most deserved safeguarding. Consequently, the split between the NCC and its former science branch broadened into a chasm. ITE gradually ceased to be a significant part of the nature conservation world – to the deep regret of many of its staff, which included New Naturalist authors like Ian Newton, R.K. Murton and Max Hooper.
The 1970s were a bad decade for the natural environment. In Britain, Dutch elm disease and the removal of hedges created stark, arable landscapes, while in the uplands blanket afforestation transformed many square kilometres of open country into sepulchral timber crops of introduced spruce, pine and larch. Limestone pavements were smashed to bits to adorn suburban gardens and corporate offices. The Norfolk Broads, still crystal clear in the early 1950s, became clouded with silt. The heaths went up in flames during the drought years 1975 and 1976, and, apart from the mountain tops, there seemed to be hardly any wild land that agricultural grants could not convert into profitable farmland. Hence, the NCC was overstretched, using what small authority it had to oppose harmful developments, reach agreements and establish nature reserves. On occasion, it stepped back from events to appraise the situation. In 1977, for example, it published a ‘policy paper’, Nature Conservation and Agriculture, containing the NCC’s thoughts on how to reconcile increasing food production with the maintenance of ‘Britain’s rich heritage’ of wildlife. Essentially the message was that, while vast amounts of public money were helping farmers plough and drain the land, the incentives to preserve wildlife were negligible. You did not have to travel far to see the consequences. A second policy paper, on forestry, was shelved after reported disagreements on the NCC’s Council, which contained members with vested interests in forestry.
In 1977, the NCC at last published A Nature Conservation Review, edited by its Chief Scientist, Derek Ratcliffe, describing the range of wildlife and natural vegetation in Britain, and singling out the 735 best examples of coast-lands, woodlands, lowland grasslands and heaths, open waters, peatlands and upland habitats, all graded according to their international, national or second-string importance. The Review was, and remains, an astounding tour de force, combining a rationale for site selection with a kind of Domesday Book of Britain’s wild places (though, as Jon Tinker pointed out in New Scientist, it had taken eight times as long to produce as the original Domesday Book!). The original purpose of the Review had been to provide a reasoned ‘shopping list’ for nature reserve acquisition. Because of the obvious sensitivities involved – for by no means every landowner would have been delighted to find his property on the list – this aspect was played down, and the Review was presented to the public as a reference book of important biological sites. In commending it in these terms, the Ministers for Environment and for Education and Science were careful to avoid committing themselves to any particular action. The Review sparked no change in environmental policy, but it did form a necessary reference point for site protection. Without some means of assessing the relative importance of wildlife sites, the NCC would be blundering in the dark.
The second key NCC document was its long-term strategic review, published in 1984 and entitled Nature Conservation in Great Britain (‘NCGB’). It was in part an assessment of the successes and failures of the nature conservation movement, and in part a set of ground rules for the future. The failures outnumbered the successes by 21 pages to five, and any impression given by the glossy pictures of a healthy, vital natural environment was contradicted by the lowering bar graphs that showed ‘with stark clarity’ how far wildlife habitats had diminished during the past half-century – a loss of 40 per cent of lowland heaths, for example, and an incredible 95 per cent of ‘lowland neutral grasslands’. Behind the statistics lay a detailed analysis of habitat loss undertaken by Norman Moore – but, as it happened, ‘NCGB’ proved to be the only opportunity to publish any of it. Perhaps Council thought it might depress the minister. The real significance of the review lay not so much in the detail but in its heightened sense of conviction. For the first time the NCC explicitly recognised nature conservation as a cultural activity, and not merely as pure or applied science. ‘Simple enjoyment and inspiration from contact with nature’ was not a partisan activity: it concerned us all. It followed that we should conserve nature in the same way that we take care of other essentials like air and water. ‘Nature conservation has in the past sometimes conducted its business on too apologetic and timid a note’, declared the NCC, looking back at its own history. Timidity had too often meant surrender. ‘We need to play a hard but clean game for our side,’ said the NCC’s new chairman, William Wilkinson. So there were now ‘sides’, us against them. The strategy was heartily supported by most of the voluntary bodies, who rightly saw it as a challenge, heralding a significant change of policy, and expected NCC to honour its brave words to the letter. But in the freewheeling climate of the 1980s, having the courage of your convictions meant having to fight for them. The five years of corporate life left to the NCC were hard ones, and led straight to its destruction.
There were really two NCCs, separated by the watershed year 1981 in which the Wildlife and Countryside Act reached the statute book. The pre-1981 NCC was a fairly low-key organisation with a staff of about 500 dispersed thinly about Britain, struggling along on an annual budget of about £6 million (the NCC had scarcely any income or assets). It advised government on issues affecting wildlife, commented on local plans and developments and grant-aided worthy projects, but was rarely in the headlines. The man in the street had never heard of it, which is not to deny that the NCC achieved a great deal on very little.
Sir William Wilkinson, chairman of the NCC 1984-1991. (English Nature)
The post-Act NCC took a little while to get going, but it became another organisation entirely, more powerful, more centralised, and often in the headlines, especially in Scotland. By 1988, the NCC had 780 permanent staff with a sixfold budget increase to £39 million. An enforced move in 1984 from the old Nature Conservancy’s stately quarters at Belgrave Square to a modern office block in Peterborough gave the organisation a chance to centralise its dispersed branches – an England headquarters at Banbury, scientists at Huntingdon, geologists at Newbury, publicists and cartographers at Shrewsbury were all sucked into Peterborough. The organisation also became computerised and corporatised. Corporate planning was introduced in 1985, requiring staff to complete monthly time records, recording (in theory at least) every half-hour of activity. The Act made nature conservation much more expensive. By 1988, nearly a quarter of the NCC’s budget was spent on management agreements on SSSIs.
The Wildlife and Countryside Act distorted the NCC’s activities for nearly a decade, as its regional staff struggled to notify SSSIs and negotiate agreements over their safeguard. Land not notified as SSSI became known as ‘wider countryside’, and there was little enough time to devote to it (with the honourable exception of urban conservation, largely a one-man crusade by George Barker). Unfortunately, the wording of the Act forced the NCC to adopt a heavy handed approach on SSSIs, in which an owner or tenant would be presented with a formidable list of ‘Potentially Damaging Operations’. Permissions to carry on farming in ways that did not damage the site’s special interest were called ‘consents’. This sort of language understandably put people’s backs up, as did the fact that there was no appeals system and the conviction that notification would lower the land value. Suspicion and potential hostility could be mollified by the farm-to-farm visits of the NCC’s regional staff, who were generally speaking more charming and persuasive than the documents they had to deliver. To the extent that the Act was a success it was theirs, not that of the politicians who created a botched system, nor the civil servants and lawyers who insisted on its rigid application. The local NCC staff rapidly learnt that the only way to make the Act work was by goodwill – hardline interpretations of the law and threats of prosecution simply alienated people, and got nowhere.
In some areas, especially in island communities, SSSIs were seen as an alien imposition. In Islay, teeming with wildlife, a severe dose of SSSIs looked like a punishment for farming in harmony with nature. Things came to a head in the small matter of finding a source of peat for an Islay distillery as a substitute for Duich Moss, one of the best raised bogs in the Hebrides. A team of environmentalists led by David Bellamy, intending to plead the cause of peatland conservation, was howled down by angry islanders normally renowned for their hospitality and gentleness of manners. It was not that the community was against nature conservation, only that they did not enjoy being told what to do by a Peterborough-based quango (a place not particularly noted for its teeming wildlife).
Notifying SSSIs was a much more complicated business than anyone had foreseen. To begin with staff had to find out who owned the land, and even that could be a hornet’s nest with, in Morton Boyd’s words, ‘many untested claims to holdings, grazings and sporting rights’ (Boyd 1999). SSSIs were an absolute, bureaucratic system imposed on a system of tenure that was often the opposite: communal, fluid, and based on non-Westminster concepts of custom, neighbourliness and unwritten rules. Outsiders blundering into these matters could unwittingly set neighbour against neighbour. They could also make themselves very unpopular. Moreover some SSSIs were already under dedicated schemes for forestry or peat extraction, or an agricultural grant scheme. In the Outer Hebrides an EU-fund-ed Integrated Development Scheme was in progress, while in Orkney an Agriculture Department-funded scheme was encouraging farmers to reclaim moorland. The NCC often found itself outnumbered. When, in 1981, it opposed the extension of ski development into the environmentally sensitive Lurchers Gully in the Cairngorms (see Chapter 10), the NCC found itself ranged against the Highlands and Islands Development Board, Highland Regional Council, and sports and tourism lobbies, as well as local entrepreneurs. It won that particular battle but, in the Highlands and Islands at least, the NCC eventually lost the war.
J. Morton Boyd, Scottish director of the NCC, at Creag Meagaidh, which he helped save from afforestation. (Des Thompson)
The break-up of the NCC
Replying to an arranged Parliamentary question on 11 July 1989, Nicholas Ridley told a near-empty House of Commons that he had decided to break up the Nature Conservancy Council. In its place he would introduce legislation for separate nature conservation agencies in England, Scotland and Wales. I well remember the shock. Just the previous week we had attended a ceremony to mark the retirement of Derek Ratcliffe, Chief Scientist of the NCC since its establishment 16 years before. ‘Things will never be quite the same again,’ we thought, little suspecting just how different they would be. I was in the canteen at the NCC’s headquarters at Northminster House as a rumour spread over the cause of the emergency Council meeting upstairs. The hurried patter of feet on the third floor, doors banging, chairs scraping, voices raised, all signalled unusual excitement. NCC’s chairman, Sir William Wilkinson, had, it seemed, been given a week’s notice of the announcement, but had not been allowed to tell anyone. He used the time to appeal to the Prime Minister, but she backed her minister. Council had had only one day’s official notice, although some of them did not seem very surprised, and a few welcomed it. We, the staff, were caught completely unawares. As Forestry and British Timber magazine gloated, ‘it was, no doubt, to spare the NCC the horrors of anticipation that the Ridley guillotine crashed down upon it last week. There was no warning, no crowds, no tumbrils, no (or very little) mourning. The end of the Peterborough empire came silently and swiftly’.
No mourning from foresters may be, but it sent a seismic shudder, shortly to be followed by an outpouring of rage, through the nature conservation world. ‘At no time was NCC given notice of such extreme dissatisfaction with its performance as to register a threat to its corporate existence’, wrote Donald Mackay, a former undersecretary at the Scottish Office (Mackay 1995). The only clue in Ridley’s statement was that there were apparently ‘great differences between the circumstances and needs of England, Scotland and Wales…There are increasing feelings that [the present] arrangements are inefficient, insensitive and mean that conservation issues in both Scotland and Wales are determined with too little regard for the particular requirements in these countries’. Evidently, then, events in Scotland and Wales had propelled the announcement.
The sentence had been done in haste. Ridley was about to move from Environment to Energy, where he was sacked a year later for making offensive remarks about the Germans. Nothing had been thought through. The implication was that, as far as nature conservation was concerned, England, Scotland and Wales would now go their separate ways, but left hanging was the not unimportant matter of who would represent Britain internationally and who would referee common standards within the new agencies. Moreover, far from being more efficient, a devolved system implied endless duplication (actually, triplication) and waste. ‘What would you rather have?’ asked Wilkinson, ‘a peatland expert for Great Britain, or three under-resourced experts in England, Scotland and Wales? It’s obvious isn’t it?’ Behind Wilkinson’s disappointment and frustration was the knowledge that his Council had been about to introduce a ‘federal’ system of administration that, he thought, would largely have answered the genuine problems being experienced in Scotland and Wales.
Some of the smoke from Ridley’s 1989 bombshell has since cleared. At issue was the NCC’s unpopularity in Scotland, and in particular its opposition to afforestation. Things came to the crunch in 1987 when, alarmed at the rate of afforestation in the hitherto untouched blanket bogs of far away Sutherland and Caithness (see Chapter 7), the NCC called for a moratorium on further planting in the area. Fatally, the NCC decided to hold its press conference in London, not in Edinburgh or Inverness, lending substance to the accusation that the NCC was an English body, with no right to ban development in Scotland, especially when jobs were at stake. It is alleged that there was a reluctance on the part of the NCC’s Scottish headquarters to host the press conference; its Scottish director, John Francis, had taken diplomatic leave. The Scottish media took more interest in a spoiling statement by the Highlands and Islands Development Board, whose chief took the opportunity to call for a separate Scottish NCC. The Scottish press took up the cry, and from that day on another ‘split’ was probably inevitable. The MP Tam Dalyell was in no doubt that this was why the NCC was broken up: ‘It originated out of a need that had nothing whatsoever to do with the best interests of the environment. It was about another need entirely, that is, the need for politicians to give the impression that they were doing something about devolving power to the Scots as a sop to keep us happy’ (Dalyell 1989).
Just as the Scots resented ‘interference’ from Peterborough, so the Secretary of State for the Environment resented having to pay for things outside his direct control (for DoE’s writ ran only in England and Wales). According to Mackay, Ridley, growing alarmed at the anticipated costs of compensating forestry companies in Caithness, suggested to his Cabinet colleague, Malcolm Rifkind, that Scotland should receive its own conservation agency and shoulder the burden itself. With the Conservative party’s popularity at an all-time low in Scotland, Rifkind must have seen political advantages in such a gesture, and ordered his Scottish Development Department to prepare a plan for detaching the Scottish part of the NCC and merging it with the Countryside Commission for Scotland. The case for Scotland automatically created a similar case for Wales. It seems, though, that Wales received its own devolved agency without ever having asked for one.
The secrecy in which all this took place is surprising, but it enabled ministers to rush the measure through before the inevitable opposition could get going – an early example of political ‘spin’. The NCC had few influential friends north of the Border, where voluntary nature conservation bodies were weak. Moreover, the afforestation issue had encouraged separatist notions among the NCC’s own Scotland Committee and staff. Broadly speaking they saw the future of wild nature in Scotland in terms of sustainable development and integrated land use, which in some vague way should reflect the value-judgements of the Scottish people. It made little sense to draw lines around ‘sites’ in the Highlands where wild land was more or less continuous. Hence they saw more merit in processes – making allies and finding common ground – than in site-based conservation, which, as they saw it, only served to entrench conflict. That, at least, is what I construe from the statement of the chairman of the NCC’s Scotland Committee, Alexander Trotter, at the break-up, that ‘It has been clear to me for some time that the existing system is cumbersome to operate and that decision making seemed remote from the people of Scotland’.
Some of the opposition to the break-up was blunted by the obvious appeal of combining nature and landscape conservation in Scotland and Wales. Many believed that the severance of wildlife and countryside matters back in 1949 had been a fundamental error, and that in a farmed environment like the British countryside they were inseparable. However, Ridley refused to contemplate their merger in England, arguing that the administrative costs would outweigh any possible advantages (a view the Parliamentary committee concurred with when the question was reopened in 1995). The main objection, apart from the well-founded fear that science-based nature conservation had suffered another tremendous, perhaps fatal, body blow, was the void that had opened up at the Great Britain level. Following a report by a House of Lords committee under Lord Carver, Ridley’s successor, Chris Patten accepted the idea of a joint co-ordinating committee to advise the Government on matters with a nationwide or international dimension. This became the Joint Nature Conservation Committee or JNCC, a semiautonomous science rump whose budget would be ‘ring-fenced’ by contributions from three new country agencies. Some of the NCC’s senior scientists ended up in the JNCC, only to find they were scientists no longer but ‘managers’.
Creating the new agencies took many months, during which the enabling legislation, the (to some, grossly misnamed) Environment Protection Bill, passed through Parliament, and the NCC made its internal rearrangements. Separate arrangements were needed under Scottish law, and so an interim body, the Nature Conservancy Council for Scotland was set up before the Scottish Natural Heritage was established by Act of Parliament in 1992. From that point onwards, the history of official nature conservation in Britain diverges sharply. Because of the interest in the new country agencies’ performance, I will present them in some detail. They form an interesting case study of conservation and politics in a devolved government. In Scotland and Wales particularly it has led to a much greater emphasis on popular ‘countryside’ issues, and less on wildlife as an exclusive activity. In England, too, there have been obvious attempts to trim one’s sails to the prevailing wind, with an ostentatious use of business methods and a culture of confrontation-avoidance. Let us take a look at each of them, and the JNCC, starting with English Nature.
NCC’s spending in 1988 (in £,000s)
From NCC 15th Annual Report 1 April 1988-31 March 1989
English Nature
Headquarters: Northminster House, Peterborough PE1 1UA.
Vision: ‘To sustain and enrich the wildlife and natural features of England for everyone’.
Slogan: ‘Working today for nature tomorrow’.
English Nature began its corporate life on 2 April 1991 (April Fool’s Day was a public holiday that year) with a budget of £32 million to manage 141 National Nature Reserves, administer 3,500 SSSIs and pay the salaries of 724 permanent staff. Most of the latter were inherited from the NCC, including a disproportionate number of scientific administrators, and only 90 were new appointments. EN’s Council was, as before, appointed on the basis of individual expertise, and intended to produce a balance of expertise across the range of its functions. However, they were now paid a modest salary and given specific jobs to do. From 1996, under the new rules established by the Nolan Report, new Council posts were advertised. All of them had to be approved by the chairman, a political appointee. What was noticeable about EN’s first Council was that only one was a reputable scientist. None were prominently affiliated to a voluntary body, nor could any of them be described as even remotely radical. This Council was less grand than the NCC’s: fewer big landowners, no wildlife celebrities, and no MPs. In 1995, at the request of Lord Cranbrook, EN’s chief executive, Derek Langslow, became a full member, unlike his predecessors who just sat in on meetings and spoke when required. This made him a powerful figure in English Nature’s affairs.
English Nature inherited the structure of the NCC, with its various administrative branches, regional offices and headquarters in Peterborough. Externally the change from NCC to English Nature was brought about simply by taking down one sign and erecting another. An agency designed to serve Great Britain could, with a little readjustment, easily be scaled down to England alone. English Nature could, if it wished, carry on with business as usual. Even its official title remained the Nature Conservancy Council (for England); the name ‘English Nature’ was only legalised in 2000.
In the event, it opted for a radical administrative shakedown. The new administration was keen to present a more businesslike face to the world with a strategic approach in which aims would be related to ‘visions’ and goals, and tied to performance indicators monitored in successive corporate plans. A deliberate attempt was made to break down the NCC’s hermetic regions and branches into ‘teams’, each with their own budget and business plan. At Northminster House, partition walls were removed, and the warren of tiny offices replaced by big open plan rooms in which scientists, technicians and administrators worked cheek byjowl. There were also significant semantic changes. English Nature saw landowners and voluntary bodies as its ‘customers’; its work as a ‘service’ – one of its motto-like phrases was that ‘People’s needs should be discovered and used as a guide to the service provided’. Its predecessors had considered themselves to be a wildlife service. English Nature was overjoyed to receive one of John Major’s Citizen Charter marks for good customer service. Henceforward English Nature’s publications bore the mark like a medal.
American corporatism comes to nature conservation. This card, carried by English Nature staff in the late 1990s, borrows the language of big corporations (‘strategic change’, ‘inside track’, ‘empower/accredit’).
English Nature’s tougher organisation was mirrored in its presentations. Its annual reports seemed more eager to talk up the achievements of English Nature as a business than to review broader events in nature conservation. Looking back at EN’s first ten years, Michael Scott considered that the ‘strategic approach’ had engendered more bureaucracy along with tighter administrative control: ‘Senior staff talk more about recruitment levels, philosophy statements, strategic management initiatives and rolling reviews than about practical policies on the ground’ (Scott 1992). Nor was EN’s much-vaunted ‘philosophy statement’ exactly inspiring to outsiders, with its talk of ‘developing employee potential’ and achieving ‘efficient and effective use of resources through the operation of planning systems’. To those, like the postgraduates who listened in on EN’s lectures on corporate strategy, it might have sounded impressively professional, but, with the best will in the world, it didn’t sound much fun; and to some they seemed to have more to do with what happened behind the dark-glass windows of Northminster House than out there in the English countryside.
The internal changes were not as radical as they looked. English Nature’s statutory responsibilities were much the same as the NCC’s, and the focus was still on SSSIs, grants and nature reserves. But now that the SSSI notification treadmill had at last ceased to grind, staff could turn their attention towards more positive schemes and participate more in ‘wider countryside’ matters. English Nature reorganised its grant-aid projects into a Wildlife Enhancement Scheme for SSSIs and a Reserves Enhancement Scheme for nature reserves. Both were based on standard acreage payments, and every attempt was made to make them straightforward and prompt. They were intended to be incentives for wildlife-friendly management, for example, low-density, rough grazing on grasslands and heaths, or to fund management schemes on nature reserves. The take-up rate was good. The trouble was that they were never enough to cover more than a fraction of SSSIs. Meanwhile EN’s grant-aid for land purchase virtually dried up. Country wildlife trusts turned to the more lucrative Heritage Lottery Fund instead.
English Nature also took the lead on a series of themed projects to address important conservation problems. In each, the idea was that EN would provide the administration and ‘strategic framework’ for work done mainly by its ‘partners’. The first, a ‘Species Recovery Programme’ to save glamorous species such as the red squirrel and fen raft spider from extinction, was up and running within weeks. The following year, it introduced a Campaign for Living Coast, arguing that it was wiser in the long run to work with the grain of nature than against it. In 1993 came a Heathland Management Programme, the start of a serious effort to conserve biodiversity on lowland heaths by reintroducing grazing. In 1998, this swelled into an £18 million Tomorrow’s Heathland Heritage programme, supported by the Heritage Lottery. In 1997, English Nature proposed an agenda for the sustainable management of fresh water, detailing the ‘action required’ on a range of wildlife habitats, and started another multimillion pound project on marine nature conservation, part-funded by the EU LIFE Programme. More controversial was EN’s division of England into 120 ‘Natural Areas’ based on distinctive scenery and characteristic wildlife. The basic idea was to show the importance of wildlife everywhere and emphasise its local character. Each area had its own characteristics and ‘key issues’ which, for the South Wessex Downs, included the restoration of ‘degraded’ downland and fine-tuning agri-environmental schemes to benefit downland wildlife. The critics of ‘Natural Areas’ were not against the idea as such (though some Areas were obviously more of a piece than others) but saw it as a long-winded way of stating the obvious, involving the production of scores of ‘Natural Area Profiles’ replete with long lists of species. As with the Biodiversity Action Plan, part of the underlying purpose seems to be to foster working relations with others, especially local authorities.
Like its sister agencies, English Nature wanted to present positive ideas for helping nature and avoid the wrangles of the 1980s. It did so with considerable success, helped by the fact that conservation was gradually becoming more consensual. But the awkward fact remained that, by EN’s own figures, between a third and a half of SSSIs were in less than ideal management. Moreover, in its zeal to work positively with ‘customers and partners’, some found English Nature too willing to compromise and to seek solutions in terms of ‘mitigation’. An early instance was the ‘secret deal’ with Fisons over the future of peatland SSSIs owned or operated by the company. Fisons had agreed to hand over 1,000 hectares of the best-preserved peatlands to English Nature in exchange for a promise not to oppose peat extraction on the remaining 4,000 hectares. Those campaigning actively to stop industrial peat cutting on SSSIs were excluded from the negotiations, and left waiting on the pavement outside the press conference. Whatever tactical merit there might have been in a compromise agreement, the protesters felt that EN had capsized their campaign. English Nature argued that to try and block all peat cutting on SSSIs, as the campaigners wanted, would have involved the Government in compensation payments costing millions, and put 200 people out of work. To which, the campaigners replied that that was the Government’s business, not English Nature’s. And who exactly were the ‘partners’ here – the peat industry or the voluntary bodies?
It was English Nature’s misfortune to be seen to be less than zealous when an issue became headlines, such as the Newbury bypass (p. 217) or the great newt translocation at Orton brick-pits (p. 207). Of course, as a government body EN had to be careful when an issue became politically sensitive, but on such battlegrounds it was easy to see it as ‘the Government’ and bodies like the WWF or Friends of the Earth as the opposition; it contributed to the tense relationship between the agencies and the voluntary bodies at this time. The year 1997 was a particularly difficult one for English Nature. It failed to apply for a ‘stop order’ at Offham Down until prodded by its parent department (pp. 96-7). It wanted to denotify parts of Thorne and Hatfield Moors which would clearly enable the peat producers to market their product more widely. This ill-timed decision led to an embarrassing public meeting at Thorne, when chief executive Langslow was all but booed off the stage, followed by an enforced U-turn after the minister politely advised English Nature to think again. EN’s latest strategy, ‘Beyond 2000’, was ill-received, despite its clumsy attempts to involve the voluntary bodies with questions like ‘How can we improve our measurement of EN’s contribution to overall wildlife gain’ (uh?). On top of all that, in November WWF published a hostile critique of English Nature, A Muzzled Watchdog?, based on a longer report on all three agencies I had written for them. It was not so much what it had to say as the unwonted sight of one conservation body publicly attacking another that attracted attention. EN’s refusal to comment, apart from some mutterings about ‘inaccuracies’, did not help its case.
And then, suddenly, all was sunshine again. New Labour had made a manifesto commitment to increase the protection of wildlife. It also lent a more friendly ear to the voluntary bodies, especially those with upwards of a hundred thousand members. English Nature’s first chairman, the cautious and politically acute Lord Cranbrook, reached the end of his term and was replaced by the leftish-inclined late head of RSPB, Barbara Young, who also held a government job in the House of Lords. Council included more credible members. Parliament, investigating the work of English Nature and inviting voluntary bodies to participate as witnesses, kindly concluded that any lack of zealotry on the part of EN must have been due to insufficient money, and so increased its budget.
Thorne Moors SSSI was a bone of contention in the 1990s between English Nature, which sought a compromise deal with the developers, and campaigners who wanted to stop peat extraction altogether. (Peter Roworth/English Nature)
A fresh breeze. Barbara Young (Baroness Young of Old Scone), chairman of English Nature 1998-2000. (English Nature/ Paul Lacey)
A friendlier minister and a more supportive social climate seem to have increased English Nature’s confidence. Opposing harmful developments is back on the agenda. It dared to criticise the Government line on Genetically Modified Organisms. One particular case summed up the change in attitude. In 1999 EN prevented a proposal to tip ball-clay waste at Brocks Farm SSSI in Devon, having turned down the owner’s offer to ‘translocate’ the grassland habitat. ‘The first prerequisite for protecting an SSSI is to leave it as it is,’ said EN’s spokesman. Both the crispness of the language and the conviction behind it seemed a world away from the rather hapless appearance English Nature had created a few years earlier.
Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH)
Headquarters: 12 Hope Terrace, Edinburgh EH9 2AS
Mission: ‘Working with Scotland’s people to care for our natural heritage’.
In 1992, Malcolm Rifkind, Secretary of State for Scotland, told his newly established natural heritage body that if it was not ‘a thorn in his flesh from time to time’ then it would not be doing its job properly. It was expected, however, to ‘work with Scotland’s people’ more successfully than its predecessor, which meant not running too far ahead of public opinion. Scottish Natural Heritage was set up by Act of Parliament in 1992. It combined the functions of the old NCC in Scotland and the Countryside Commission for Scotland, a disproportionately small body compared with England’s Countryside Commission (for Scotland had no National Parks), responsible for footpaths and non-statutory ‘National Scenic Areas’. ‘SNH’ was given a generous first-year budget of £34.6 million and inherited a combined staff of about 530. Its chairman, the television personality Magnus Magnusson, was an unashamed populist and ‘aggressive moderate’, professing to dislike ‘the harsh voice of single-minded pressure groups’ quite as much as ‘the honeyed tones of the developer’. The new chief executive, Roger Crofts, came fresh from the Scottish Office, as did two of his senior directors.
Although the nature conservation responsibilities of SNH were similar to its predecessor – new legislation had not changed the statutory instruments in Scotland, which were still SSSIs – the ground rules were different. SNH’s founding statute emphasised the magic word ‘sustainable’ for the first time in British law, although exactly what was meant by the duty of ‘having regard to the desirability of securing that anything done, whether by SNH or any other person (sic) in relation to the natural heritage of Scotland, is undertaken in a manner which is sustainable’ – is open to interpretation! It was plainly ridiculous to make sustainability a duty of a minor government agency but not of the Government itself (‘like giving a wee boy a man’s job’). SNH put on record its view that sustainable development in Scotland required serious changes in government policy and the way public money was spent. But it, like English Nature, also espoused a corporate ethos that sought consensus and partnership, which inevitably means doing things more slowly. Confrontation was the policy of the bad old days.
Des Thompson, SNH’s senior ornithologist, surveying Flow Country patterned bogs by the Thurso River in Caithness. (Derek Ratcliffe)
The second ground rule was accountability. To give at least the semblance of bringing SNH ‘closer to its constituents’, it was organised into four local boards, each with its own budget, work programme, and salaried board members, and responsible for three or more area ‘teams’. Predictably enough, the regional boards proved expensive to run, sowed wasteful bureaucracy and duplication of effort, and set one local ‘power base’ against another. They were abandoned in 1997, and replaced by a new structure with 11 ‘areas’ overseen by three ‘Area Boards’. This was SNH’s third administrative upheaval in five years.
Another significant change was what the former NCC’s Scottish director Morton Boyd called ‘the fall of science’. The minister in charge of environmental affairs at the Scottish Office was Sir Hector Monro (now Lord Monro of Langholm). He had served on the NCC’s Council ‘and had grown to dislike scientists’ (Boyd 1999). The role of science must be advisory, he insisted, and should not be used as the basis of policy. Hence SNH’s top scientist, Michael B. Usher, was not the ‘Chief Scientist’, as before, but the ‘Chief Scientific Adviser’, and he was eventually excluded from SNH’s main management team. Nor were SNH’s local boards particularly rich in scientific experience. The scientists sat on a separate research board under Professor George Dunnet, later named the Scientific Advisory Committee. It was rich in IQs but poor in influence, and, fed up with being repeatedly ignored, Dunnet resigned in 1995. As Boyd commented, the standing of scientists is not what it once was. Not only were they held responsible for the disputes that had made the NCC unpopular in Scotland, scientists were also seen as an unacceptable ‘élite’. The new approach had to be ‘people-led’.
Humility? The NCC’s scientific advisory committee dwarfed by the great beeches of the New Forest. (Derek Ratcliffe)
With the Scottish Office breathing down its neck, landowners asserting themselves and voluntary bodies inclined to be publicly critical, SNH was obliged to tiptoe over eggshells. Crofts kept in close touch with his minister and senior civil servants, and some saw SNH’s new relationship with Government as one of servant and master. Rifkind’s words, it seemed, were more to be honoured in the breach than the observance. When SNH tried to introduce notions of sustainability into transport policy, for instance, it was firmly put in its place by his successor, Ian Lang. The only thorns he would be prepared to tolerate, it seemed, were rubber ones.
All the same, SNH’s reports give the impression of substantial progress in uncontroversial matters, with various initiatives carefully ticked off against Scottish Office targets. It has, for example, played a useful role in helping walkers and landowners to find common ground through an Access Forum. This has worked because landowners saw voluntary agreements on access as a way of staving off legislation, while the ramblers saw it as a means of ‘trapping them into compromise on a matter of rights’ (Smout 2000). The result was a grandly named ‘Concordat on Access to Scotland’s hills and mountains’. Though legislation is coming anyway, the talks have at least defused the situation by liberalising entrenched attitudes, and access is not now the contentious issue in Scotland that it became in England.
In terms of wildlife protection, SNH has kept a lower profile than the NCC, although it has experienced much the same problems. SNH’s approach has been more tactful, and it has tried as far as possible to build bridges with bodies like the Crofter’s Association, and with local communities. Local accountability was impressed upon it even more strongly by the new Scottish Parliament. In the early days, SNH inherited several outrageous claims for compensation by the owners of large SSSIs. It also had to cope with a statutory appeals system for SSSIs imposed on SNH by a group of landowners in the House of Lords led by Lord Pearson of Rannoch. Although in practice the appeals board was given little work to do, its existence tended to make the SNH cautious about notifying new SSSIs, and conservative about recommending Euro-sites. National Nature Reserves were also reviewed; those with weak agreements and no immediate prospect of stronger ones were struck off, or ‘de-declared’ (see Chapter 5). SNH was similarly cautious about acquiring land or helping others to acquire it. For example, SNH smiled benignly at the new owners of Glen Feshie, part of the Cairngorms National Nature Reserve, despite knowing nothing about them, and was not allowed to contribute so much as a penny towards the purchase price of Mar Lodge (only to its subsequent management). Like English Nature, it has stepped back from direct management into a more advisory role.
SNH are probably right that the future of Scotland’s wildlife will benefit more from changing attitudes and shifting subsidies than from putting up barricades around special sites. While about 10 per cent of Scotland (and Wales) is SSSI, compared with 7 per cent in England, nearly three-quarters of the land is subject to the Common Agricultural Policy, while the equally profligate Common Fisheries Policy presides over Scottish inshore waters. Hence the Scottish Office’s 1998 White Paper People and Nature, while voicing doubts about basing conservation policy on SSSIs, does at least contain a ray of hope by underlining the legitimate claims of ‘the wider community’ on the way land is managed; on what Smout has called ‘the public nature of private property’. The forthcoming National Park at Loch Lomondside and The Trossachs may come to symbolise a new ‘covenant’ between land and people. SNH has also won plaudits for determinedly tackling wildlife crime, and for its leadership in trying to resolve the age-old conflict of raptors and game management. The Scottish Executive recently showed its appreciation of SNH, and the challenging nature of its work, by increasing its budget. It is difficult for outsiders to know to what extent SNH has helped to change hearts and minds in Scotland, but it can surely be given some of the credit.
Countryside Council for Wales (CCW)
Headquarters: Plas Penrhos, Ffordd Penrhos, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2LQ Vision: under review (May 2001)
The Countryside Council for Wales was formed in 1991 by merging the Countryside Commission and the NCC within the Principality. Unlike Scottish Natural Heritage, ‘CCW’ had no custom-made legislation, just a ragbag of texts from Acts dating back to 1949. Unlike English Nature, it started with a serious staff imbalance. While over 100 staff from NCC took new jobs (or continued their old ones) in CCW, only four from the smaller Countryside Commission decided to stay on. And so CCW had to start with a recruitment drive. Having evolved in different ways, the NCC and the Commission were chalk and cheese, and welding them together was no easy task. The NCC had statutory powers, and enforced them. The Countryside Commission was more of a clap-happy, grant-aid body. Sir Derek Barber compared them with monks and gypsies, all right in their own way, but not natural partners.
CCW was warned to be ‘mindful of the culture and economy of rural Wales’. It would have to build on the Welsh NCC’s relatively strong links with farmers and Welsh institutions. CCW inherited the NCC’s headquarters at Bangor, and decided against a move to Cardiff. Apparently this was only because the minister responsible wanted the CCW and its job opportunities to lie in his own constituency, but to outsiders it seemed to signal CCW’s affiliation with the rural, Welsh-speaking heartland rather than the industrial south. Small, culturally homogeneous countries have advantages denied to larger ones. People know one another; there is a lot of cross-participation and a pervading sense of identity. It is important to ‘belong’, and to be seen to be ‘people-centred’. CCW might have been straining a little too hard in describing its goal as ‘a beautiful land washed by clean seas and streams, under a clear sky; supporting its full diversity of life, including our own, each species in its proper abundance, for the enjoyment of everybody and the contented work of its rural and sea-faring people’. But behind this embarrassing guff there was an open-faced willingness to start afresh, and in a spirit of community.
CCW is much the smallest of the three country agencies, and began life with a relatively miserly budget of £14.5 million. With that it has to administer over 1,000 SSSIs covering about 10 per cent of the land surface of Wales, attend to all matters of rural access and carry out government policy on environment-sensitive farming. Its governing council was, like the others, well stuffed with farmers, businessmen and ‘portfolio collectors’, but scarcely anyone whom a conservationist would regard as a conservationist. Presumably CCW relied on their worldly wisdom more than their knowledge of the natural world. CCW’s chairman for the first ten years, Michael Griffith, was a Welsh establishment figure with farming interests and, it is said, a gift for getting on with ministers of all hues and opinions. The present chairman is another prominent farmer, a former chairman of the NFU in Wales. CCW’s first two chief executives both had a professional background in countryside planning rather than nature conservation, Ian Mercer in local government and National Parks, Paul Loveluck in the Welsh Office and the Welsh Tourist Board. Inevitably, therefore, it was the ‘holistic’ view of things that prevailed (‘I work for the rural communities of Wales, not for wildlife,’ was a phrase often heard on CCW corridors, perhaps to annoy the ‘Victorian naturalists’ from the former NCC). Senior posts were found for people with no background in nature conservation. People who ran processes were more highly valued than those who worked on the product. Some believed that core wildlife activities were being neglected at the expense of access work that overlapped with the remit of local authorities. Any blurring of functional boundaries held political dangers for a small, newly established body.
CCW went through much the same time-consuming reorganisations as its big sisters in Scotland and England. It organised its staff into Area Teams and Policy Groups, and delegated authority downwards while reserving all important decisions (and, it is said, many trivial ones also) to headquarters. Like English Nature, CCW was keener on mitigation than confrontation, especially where jobs were at stake. For example, it bent over backwards to accommodate the development of the ‘Lucky Goldstar’ electronics factory on part of the Gwent Levels SSSI. On the other hand a series of high-profile cases gave CCW a chance to make itself useful, such as the proposed orimulsion plant in Pembrokeshire, which it successfully opposed, and the wreck of the Sea Empress, from which it drew worthwhile lessons. CCW’s bilingual reports generally seem more down-to-earth and better written than the grammatically strained productions of English Nature and Scottish Natural Heritage, perhaps because they are concerned more with events and issues than with internal administration.
John Lloyd Jones, chairman of CCW. (CCW)
Among CCW’s most distinctive policies are its championing of environment-friendly schemes such as Coed Cymru, introduced in 1985 to regenerate Wales’ scattered natural woodlands, and its administration of Tir Cymen (now renamed Tir Gofal), Wales’ integrated agri-environmental scheme. Judging by the desire of the Welsh Office, and later the Welsh Assembly, to take over Tir Cymen, it has been a success. Like SNH,
CCW has also done its best to promote the Welsh countryside as ‘a leisure resource’, producing a stream of colourful publications, and devoting loving attention to matters like footpaths and signs. Some grumble that in its determined wooing of ‘customers’ and ‘partners’, CCW has been neglecting its statutory role of protecting wildlife. Possible signs of weakness are CCW’s failure to publish comprehensive data on the condition of SSSIs (although it admits that most of the National Nature Reserves in its care are in unfavourable condition), and its slow progress on Biodiversity Action compared with its sister agencies, earning it a black mark in the review, Biodiversity Counts. It has had to struggle hard to retain its authority, and seems much less firmly entrenched in Welsh affairs than its English and Scottish sisters.
The relationship of CCW with the turbulent political climate of Wales in the 1990s is a story in itself, which I continue on p. 54.
Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC)
Headquarters: Monkstone House, City Road, Peterborough PE1 1JY Mission: it is not allowed to have one.
The JNCC is the forum through which the three country nature conservation agencies deliver their statutory responsibilities for Great Britain as a whole, and internationally. These are primarily the drawing up of ‘Euro-sites’ for the Natura 2000 network (SPAs, SACs), the setting of common standards, and advising government on Great Britain-related nature conservation matters. Its committee, chaired by Sir Angus Stirling, formerly the National Trust’s director, consists of three independent members, along with two representatives from each of the country agencies, and one each from the Countryside Agency and the ‘Council for Nature Conservation and the Countryside’ (CNCC) in Northern Ireland. The JNCC is based in Peterborough, with a small sub office in Aberdeen, specialising in seabirds and cetaceans. All members of its staff are assigned from one of the three country agencies. In 2000, it had 84 staff and a budget of £4,735,000. Among the Committee’s projects were some grand-scale surveys inherited from the NCC, especially the Marine Nature Conservation Review, the Geological Conservation Review and the Seabirds at Sea project. JNCC also runs the National Biodiversity Network and publishes British Red Data Books, as well as a stream of scientific reports. Its most important task was co-ordinating the UK proposals for Special Areas of Conservation (SACs), based on submissions by the four country agencies (including Northern Ireland). Denied any real corporate identity, the JNCC is nonetheless the principal centre of scientific know-how in British nature conservation.
The JNCC has a problem: it lacks an independent budget and its own staff. Its annual grant has to be ‘ring-fenced’ from the three agencies, who, along with their control of the purse strings, also dominate its committee. Their influence has not been benign. From the start, the JNCC was seen as a refuge for reactionaries from the old NCC who refused to move with the times. Senior refugees from the NCC’s scientific team quickly discovered how much they had lost influence. People with international reputations found themselves pitched into low status jobs, or dispensed with altogether once a Treasury review, brought at the request of English Nature, had scrapped half of the JNCC’s senior posts and humiliatingly downgraded its director’s post. The JNCC’s first chairman, Sir Fred Holliday, a former NCC chairman, resigned after five months, complaining that he had been kept in the dark over the Scottish SSSI appeals procedure. In 1996, its new chairman, Lord Selborne, traded a leaner structure – downsizing its staff from 104 to 66 – for more autonomy within its core responsibilities. Even so, the JNCC was visibly struggling against the devolution tide. The four country agencies often failed to reach a consensus view, or indeed take much interest in matters of UK concern. As this book went to press, a government review body has recommended that the JNCC became a separate body within the newly organised government department, DEFRA (the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs).
Sir Angus Stirling, chairman of the JNCC. (JNCC)
The whip hand: the agencies and their budgets
As the smallest of the country agencies, the Countryside Council for Wales might have expected a struggle to make its mark. It also had the bad luck to receive a right-wing ideologue as Secretary of State in the person of John Redwood. Towards the end of 1994, Redwood took a hard look at the role of CCW. It is said that he was outraged to notice that a third of CCW’s budget went on staff salaries. In fact this was normal for a nature conservation agency, or, indeed, any government agency, but others had been cleverer at disguising it. As far as Redwood was concerned, CCW was both overmanned and overstretched. It should be ‘encouraged to concentrate on its core functions’. In May 1995, the Welsh Office produced an ‘Action Plan for CCW’ which proposed to reduce its running costs over the next two years by handing over supposedly peripheral activities, such as the funding of Country Parks, to local authorities. It also proposed to ‘privatise’ some National Nature Reserves and hand over CCW’s flagship Tir Cymen scheme to the Welsh Office. Furthermore, CCW was ordered to cut down its travelling and stay in more, with the help of computer technology. To encourage it in all these things, CCW’s budget was cut by a third.
Redwood’s attack was badly received, not just in nature conservation circles but also, much to his surprise, by parts of the Welsh establishment and the media. This was linked to a related matter, Redwood’s refusal to implement new, more environment-friendly planning guidelines, thus creating an undesirable divergence of approach on planning matters between England and Wales. John Redwood failed to find much empathy with the Welsh; as John Major expressed it in his memoirs, Redwood did not take to the Welsh people, ‘nor they to him’.
Ironically, the Redwood fracas helped to put CCW on the map and sparked a good deal of favourable publicity for its work. When Redwood resigned in order to challenge John Major as Conservative Party leader, William Hague, his more politically astute successor, demonstrated a change of tack by visiting some of CCW’s offices, and talking to staff in a friendly spirit. There is a story that, on his visit to Snowdon, the fit young Hague simply tore up the mountain, leaving CCW’s warden, a heavy smoker, trailing far behind. CCW was able to stave off corporate starvation by negotiating an EU Life fund to supplement its budget, thus pioneering a rich and, until then, surprisingly neglected alternative source of income. An ostentatious display of good housekeeping was rewarded in 1996 by a 20 per cent increase in grant-in-aid, bringing things more or less back to normal. But that was not the end of CCW’s financial tribulations. Its funding body passed from the Welsh Office to the Welsh Assembly in 1999. The architect of the Welsh Assembly, Ron Davies, had been a strong supporter of wildlife conservation in Wales, and his ‘moment of madness’ in Brixton was also a misfortune for CCW. Its Corporate Plan was rejected by the Assembly with the warning that the agency might have to muddle along for a while without a pay rise. Other warning signs were First Secretary Alun Michael’s dismissal of CCW’s request for the Assembly to debate its new ‘vision’, A Living Environment for Wales. There was talk about restructuring environmental activity in Wales, for example, by merging CCW with the Environment Agency, and having another look at the possibility of hiving off some of its functions to local authorities.
English Nature nurtured more constructive relations with its paymasters. In 1992 it was given an extra million pounds for restoring peatlands and to speed up the designation of EU Special Protection Areas for birds. The National Audit Office in 1994, and the Commons Public Accounts Committee in 1995, made critical comments about some aspects of its business, but on the whole supported EN’s strategic approach to its tasks and wholehearted use of business language. EN endured a lean year in 1996, but fought off a further cut the year after. The incoming Labour Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review increased EN’s grant-in-aid by 16 per cent to £44.6 million, followed by another generous increase in 1998, coinciding with the appointment of Barbara Young as chairman.
Scottish Natural Heritage has had to tread carefully. The generous settlement it received in 1992 was tempered by an awareness that its every move was being shadowed by the Scottish Office, which expected SNH to be a ‘people-friendly’ body and avoid the controversies of the recent past. That it was as vulnerable as CCW to hostile trimming measures became clear in 1995, when the Scottish Secretary Ian Lang decided to carry out the dreaded ‘high level review’. He was purportedly concerned about SNH’s involvement in wider issues like agriculture and transport, and looked down his nose at the £800,000 it had spent fighting the proposed super-quarry at Lingerbay on Harris. His successor, Michael Forsyth, was similarly put out when he learned that SNH had spent £1.8 million buying out the peat-cutting rights at Flanders Moss, which, to make matters worse, lay in his own constituency (in his view, that sort of public money should be spent on schools and hospitals). Like Redwood, Lang wanted SNH to concentrate on its core activities and to trim what he saw as peripheral matters, such as public access to the countryside. But even if it had, the savings would have been insignificant. At the end of 1996, in which its budget had been cut by 10 per cent, SNH published its answer in Natural Priorities. This was a fairly defiant restatement of SNH’s responsibilities over a broad range of heritage issues, and even hinted that it could do with a bit more co-operation from the all-powerful Scottish Office’s environment, agriculture and fisheries departments. But the net was tightening. In 1998, chief executive Roger Crofts estimated that SNH’s spending power had fallen by nearly a third since its establishment in 1992.
The publication of the Scottish Executive’s 2001 policy statement, The Nature of Scotland, made it clear that Government intends to involve itself directly in the detail as well as the broad thrust of nature conservation north of the border. Increasingly, SNH and its sisters in England and Wales are becoming processing instruments, responsible for implementing legislation and as a conduit for government grants, but of diminishing importance as policy makers. By 2001, the dynamic of nature conservation was definitely moving from the state to the voluntary sector. In all the major recent events in nature conservation – biodiversity, the ‘CROW’ bill, SAC designation, devolution – the agencies have been either bystanders or supine instruments of government policy. This, some would say, is what comes of replacing scientists with bureaucrats. All the same, I think the agencies could win back some of the respect and influence that their predecessor, the NCC, enjoyed, if they showed more leadership, concentrated on outcomes rather than outputs, and spoke up fearlessly for the natural world. Or maybe I am just misreading the runes, and that it is the fate of the nature conservation world to complete the circle, back to the charities and pressure groups that nurtured it.
3 The Voluntary Army (#ulink_4c6460be-9867-52c3-8b35-a6e3d52a404f)
This chapter is about the private sector of nature conservation, the voluntary nature conservation bodies – who they are and what they do. Perhaps few countries in the world have as many charities, trusts and associations active in the same broad field as Britain. Wildlife and Countryside Link, the forum where many of them meet and share ideas, serves 34 national bodies and many more local ones, varying from special-interest trusts (butterflies, reptiles, sharks) to international pressure groups (Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth) and world-famous charities (WWF, RSPB, National Trust). Every county in England and Wales has its own wildlife trust (Scotland and some of the smaller counties have federated trusts). Learned societies with small but enthusiastic memberships exist for practically every animal, plant or mineral that occurs in Britain: for example, water-beetles (the Balfour-Brown Club), microscopy (Quekett Microscopical Club), seaweeds (British Phycological Society) and molluscs (Conchological Society of Britain and Ireland). Hedgehogs, sharks and bats have their own societies. There is even a group busily recording the distribution of nematode worms. Some special-interest bodies have recently become active in nature conservation; for example, the venerable British Mycological Society (fungi) now has a part-time conservation officer, responsible for biodiversity projects and compiling a red data list.
In their glorious diversity, ranging from the National Trust to small groups that meet once a year to dine and reminisce, finding an adequate name to cover everyone is problematical. Government refers to them with statist disdain as non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Some prefer the term voluntary bodies, but this too, seems somewhat vague and reductionist (what is the alternative to a voluntary body – a compulsory body?). Besides, a voluntary body such as the RSPB has a membership larger than any political party and, if it is voluntary, it is every bit as professional as its official counterparts. Voluntary bodies now campaign successfully for new legislation and assist the Government in its statutory responsibilities, such as maintaining biodiversity. Perhaps the fact that they defy easy labelling says much about nature conservation in practice. Conservation is not, though it is sometimes portrayed as such, a homogeneous mass movement, working to a common programme. Although the ‘vol. bods’ do often pool their resources, as in the campaign to preserve peatlands, they have separate aims, and different sorts of members, ranging from committed activists to folk who simply enjoy wandering in pleasant countryside. They are united by a common interest in nature conservation, but that does not make them the same.
The influence of the voluntary bodies in the 1990s owed nearly everything to their mass memberships – no modern political party can afford to ignore a body with a million members. Their social base has obviously broadened. Nature conservation used to be caricatured as a concern of the urban middle classes, and there is still some truth in that. However, a membership survey of the RSPB in 1982 suggested that a large proportion were in technical and clerical occupations, while 14 per cent were unskilled manual workers (Smout 2000). Today, perhaps one in ten people are members of an environmental pressure group of some sort. Many, of course, are members of more than one. Young people tend to gravitate towards environmental campaigning bodies, such as Greenpeace, where there are opportunities to join in the action. They think they can change the world. County trusts are traditionally the home base of older, reasonably well-off people, interested in wildlife and worried about the effect of developments on the local countryside. They think we are doing well if we manage to save just the best bits of our backyard.
The phenomenal growth of the voluntary bodies is very recent. In 1960, the RSPB had only 10,000 members, not many more than it had in 1945. Membership increased in the 1960s and 1970s, but really took off in the 1980s, when events propelled nature conservation from the hobby of a few to a mainstream issue. With power has come controversy. The assertiveness of some pressure groups has exhumed the old accusation of urban-based sentimentalists imposing their will on genuine countrymen; it is the raison d’être of the Countryside Alliance. There are also contrasts between places where conservation bodies are strong and others where they are weak. Donald MacKay (1995) observed that ‘the more south-east England become agitated over conservation issues in Scotland, the stronger became the Scottish anti-conservation lobby, and the harder it became to recruit to the Scottish conservation cause’. It was not that the Scots man or woman was less keen on nature, but that they were Scots first, and wanted to do things in their own way. They now have their chance. Paradoxically, all this growth has not led to more field study or better-informed naturalists. Although birdwatching is more popular than ever, the expert amateur naturalist, and especially the all-rounder, is becoming an endangered species. Specialists in less popular groups belong to a small and ageing population. Love of wildlife is expressed differently in 2000 than it was in 1900. It has become less ‘hands-on’ (naturalists used to collect their subject), less based on knowledge-seeking, more of a personal lifestyle choice, more of a fashionable cause and less of a hobby.
For ease of reference, in what follows, I treat the main voluntary bodies one by one. For reasons of space I omit bodies whose interests are not primarily in the conservation of wildlife, such as the Ramblers Association and the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), natural allies though they often are. Similarly, I have to exclude learned societies and clubs, such as the Ray Society, whose main interest lies in promoting field study and the advancement of science. Even so the number of players, each with a different focus or stance, is considerable, and perhaps baffling to some. Possibly if one started again with a clean slate, there would be far fewer ‘vol. bods’. But today’s ‘conservationists’ have a large range to choose from and can pick and mix. In this account of their background and activities, I emphasise the role of the county wildlife trusts, the one body that every naturalist should join, since they cater for what should matter most to most of us – the flora and fauna on our doorsteps.
The Big Three
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB)
Britain’s (and Europe’s) largest wildlife and conservation society was formed in 1891 and acquired its Royal Charter in 1904. However, the RSPB’s mass popularity and power are relatively recent. It broke the 100,000 tape only in 1972, but in the 1980s its growth was meteoric, reaching half a million members in 1989 and one million by 1997. The RSPB ‘works for a healthy environment rich in birds and wildlife’. It has good things to offer to its million members: free access to most of its 140 nature reserves and an excellent quarterly magazine, Birds. The RSPB has a grand UK office at Sandy Lodge, Beds, and separate headquarters in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as nine regional offices. It employs around 1,000 full, part-time and contract staff; its network of nature reserves throughout the UK covers some 111,500 hectares and receives over a million visitors a year. With in-house science expertise, RSPB investigates the impact of human activity on birds, as well as the needs of threatened species both at home and overseas. It has acquired matchless skill in presenting the conservation case, and in detecting and admonishing failures of policy. It has also successfully mounted legal challenges over conservation designations, and deals with an average of 350 planning cases per year. With birdwatching a popular hobby on both the Government and Opposition front benches, British birds receive far more sympathetic attention than any other forms of wildlife. The RSPB has been criticised in some quarters as exercising too much power; for example, in buying up a lot of land in Orkney or the Hebrides, where it is seen by some as an inappropriate outside influence. Gamekeepers have also fallen out with RSPB over raptors.
From the start, RSPB has been active in education, with special clubs for children (the Young Ornithologists’ Club, recently renamed ‘Wildlife Explorers’, magazine Bird Life) and teenagers (‘RSPB Phoenix’, magazine Wingboat). It claims to have helped make the national curriculum more wildlife-conscious (though it would help to have more teachers who know their natural history). Internationally, RSPB represents the UK on Birdlife International, and contributes to bird protection overseas (for example, the publication Important Bird Areas in Europe was largely RSPB-funded). The RSPB is now rich: income in 2000 was £38 million, mainly from membership subscriptions and legacies, supplemented by grants, fund raising appeals and sales of goods. Today it often works in partnership with other conservation charities, and also with farmers and land owners. Increasingly RSPB champions wildlife more generally, as well as their habitats. Its slogan: ‘for birds for people for ever’. You can read a sympathetic account of the RSPB’s eventful history in For the Love of Birds, written to celebrate its centenary (Samstag 1989). For hostility, try Isles of the West by Ian Mitchell (1999).
UK Headquarters: The Lodge, Sandy, Bedfordshire SG19 2DL.
Chief Executive: Graham Wynne.
The county wildlife trusts
Membership of the wildlife trust of one’s home county is the logical first step for anyone interested in natural history. Nearly every county in England and Wales has a wildlife trust, many of them based on older natural history societies. Most of them were formed in the 1950s and 60s. Some, such as the trusts of North Wales or ‘Bucks, Berks and Oxon’, are federated, and Scotland has a federal system with different regions under a unified Scottish Wildlife Trust. The purpose of the trusts is to acquire land as nature reserves and encourage interest in wildlife. The founders of the Kent Naturalists Trust (now the Kent Wildlife Trust) spoke for many others who ‘saw the speed of change of farming practice and urbanisation as a severe threat to our lovely county’.
The first county to receive its own wildlife trust (as opposed to a natural history society or field club) was Norfolk. The Norfolk Naturalists Trust was established by Dr Sidney Long in 1926 as a ‘special non-profit paying company to hold and manage nature reserves’. Behind its formation lay a dissatisfaction with the National Trust, which came to the boil when the latter refused to take on Cley Marshes on the grounds that it was only of interest to naturalists. Norfolk had acquired several nature reserves by the 1950s, but although F.W. Oliver’s prediction that one day every English county would have its own county trust proved right, it took a long time. It was not until 1946 that the Yorkshire Naturalists Trust was founded, on the Norfolk model, and again with the immediate purpose of looking after a nature reserve, Askham Bog. The Lincolnshire Naturalists Trust followed two years later, largely through the efforts of A.E. Smith, later Secretary of the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves (SPNR). With the support of the Nature Conservancy, many more county trusts sprang up across England in the 1950s – Leicester and Cambridgeshire in 1956, the West Midlands and Kent in 1958, Surrey and Bucks, Berks and Oxon (‘BBONT’) in 1959, Essex and Hampshire in 1960, Cornwall and Wiltshire in 1962. The first Welsh trust, the West Wales Naturalists Trust, was formed in 1956, and the Scottish Wildlife Trust, covering the whole of Scotland, followed in 1964. Many of them emerged from the embers of an earlier natural history society, often through the efforts of a few dedicated local naturalists. For example, the Somerset Trust for Nature Conservation was formed in 1964 by members of the venerable Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society, led by Ernest Neal and Peter Tolson. The Cornwall Naturalists Trust took over and much extended the activities of the Cornwall Bird Watching and Preservation Society. Many county trusts have changed their names (and acronyms) two or three times since. Originally they were naturalists trusts. Later some became trusts for nature conservation. Now they are nearly all wildlife trusts – and one rather dreads their possible future reincarnation as sustainability or biodiversity trusts.
Most trusts acquired a full-time conservation officer as soon as they were up and running, with the help of ‘pump-priming’ grants from the NCC and other bodies. During the 1980s, NCC grants helped the trusts to become more professional and to acquire a small corps of promotional, educational and marketing staff, as well as computer systems. In the 1990s, some trust nature reserves profited from English Nature’s Reserve Enhancement Scheme, and still more by the Heritage Lottery Fund which, by 2000, had awarded a total of £50 million to buy land as nature reserves or fund capital improvements. A further £6 million worth of projects came from the Landfill Tax Credit Scheme. At the same time, increased public interest in nature conservation resulted in big increases in membership. For example, the medium-sized Somerset Trust, with 9,000 members, now has an annual income just over £1 million and assets of £3 million, together with about 30 full-time staff housed in beautiful surroundings at Fyne Court. Between them the county wildlife trusts now manage some 2,300 nature reserves, ranging in size from under a hectare to several square kilometres, and extending over nearly 70,000 hectares.
The activities of the county trusts have much in common, but they always reflect the nature of their constituencies. The Welsh Trusts have become adept at running seabird islands and restoring reed beds; the Scottish Wildlife Trust specialises in restoring peat bogs. Among their core activities are acquiring and managing nature reserves and campaigning against harmful developments. More recently, their work has become more inclusive, embracing ideas of sustainability enshrined in Agenda 21 and interpreting them on a local scale (see p. 78), or helping farmers to sell environment-friendly products, as in the Devon Wildlife Trust’s ‘Green Gateway’ scheme. The nature of the membership is also changing. Twenty years ago, most trust members were keen naturalists. Today, many join out of a broader concern for the environment (that is, for our own quality of life), and often include whole families. Trust activities reflect such changes, with a greater emphasis these days on communities, education, and participatory activities.
The Wildlife Trusts partnership, formerly the Royal Society for Nature Conservation (RSNC), acts as a spokesman and administrative centre for the disparate county wildlife trusts. It had its distant origins in the SPNR, which was set up in 1912 for the purposes of ‘securing’ nature reserves and ‘to encourage the love of Nature’. This Society struggled on for years on a shoestring budget without achieving very much (though its surveys are a valuable retrospective source for the state of wildlife in the first half of the twentieth century, see Rothschild & Marren 1997). It did, however, contribute organisation and expertise for the Nature Reserves Investigation Committee in 1942, which produced the original ‘shopping list’ for the subsequent selection of National Nature Reserves and other important sites. In the 1950s the SPNR assisted some of the fledgling county trusts with modest grants to set up their first nature reserves, along with advice on how to look after them. In 1957 the county trusts proposed that the SPNR should act as a co-ordinating body for their activities, in effect as their ‘federal centre’. In the early 1970s a proposal to combine forces with the RSPB was briefly considered, but rejected, largely because the pair were mismatched: the RSPB was already too big. In 1976, the SPNR was granted a royal charter, becoming the RSPNR for a short period, before changing its name yet again to the Royal Society for Nature Conservation (RSNC) in 1981. In 1991, the RSNC joined with the 46 county trusts and 50 urban wildlife groups to form the Wildlife Trusts partnership, which now has a combined membership of nearly 300,000. All receive the wildlife trusts’ quarterly magazine, Natural World, along with a copy of their local trust’s magazine. There is also a junior arm, Wildlife Watch, founded in 1977 with young naturalists in mind.
The Wildlife Trusts partnership provides the local trusts with a common identity, promotes their common interests and campaigns on their behalf. On occasion it has gone too far down the centralising path, for example, when it tried to impose a common ‘badger’ logo (known as the raccoon by disparagers) on all the trusts. But in general the division of responsibility seems to work well enough, with each partner concentrating on its constituency strengths, leaving the umbrella body to organise training weekends, launch national appeals (for example ‘Tomorrow Is Too Late) and making its voice heard in the corridors of power. It has long had its head office somewhere in Lincolnshire for reasons lost in the mists of time, but the Trusts’ director’s office is in London. Its logo: the ubiquitous badger. Vision: ‘the achievement of a United Kingdom that is richer in wildlife and managed on sustainable principles’.
I cover the activities of a particular wildlife trust on pp. 75-9.
Head Office: The Kiln, Waterside, Mather Road, Newark NG24 1WT.
Wildlife Trusts partnership Director general: Simon Lyster.
The National Trust
At the turn of the millennium, the National Trust’s membership was just short of a stupendous three million. The public loves a bargain, and for the modest membership fee the whole of the Trust’s vast estate is open to them. Moreover, to many, the Trust embodies all that is best in the countryside: beautiful scenery, benevolent stewardship and a good day out. However, until recently the National Trust was only on the margins of the nature conservation world. It is not a campaigning body, and much of its work is centred on maintaining stately homes and gardens. Its importance lies in the nature conservation work carried out on its own properties. The Trust is emerging as an important player mainly because, in common with other heritage bodies, it takes a greater interest in wildlife than in the past.
There are two separate National Trusts, one for England and Wales, the other for Scotland. The former, older Trust had its origins in the concern over the enclosure of commons in the nineteenth century. The desire of a few Victorian philanthropists to preserve ‘all that still remained open, for the health and recreation of the people’ led to the formation of the Commons Preservation Society, the first successful conservation pressure group in history. In 1885, the Society’s solicitor, Robert (later Sir Robert) Hunter, proposed a ‘Land Company’ to buy and accept gifts of heritage land and buildings for the benefit of the nation. In 1893, joined by Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley’s Lake District Defence Society, this became known as the ‘National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty’, or National Trust for short. Its constitution was based on that of a similar American body founded two years previously. In 1906, Hunter drafted a private Bill that made the Trust a statutory body, and gave it the right to make bylaws and to declare its properties inalienable. This meant they could not be sold or taken away without the Trust’s consent: a National Trust property is the Trust’s for keeps. A separate National Trust for Scotland (see below) was established in 1931, and given similar powers to its sister body. A full account of the National Trust was published in 1995 (Newby 1995).
Although the National Trust acquired many places ‘of special interest to the naturalist’ in its early days, such as Wicken Fen, Cheddar Gorge and Box Hill, its management of them was for many years scarcely different to any other rural estate; modern farming and forestry methods that damaged wildlife often went through on the nod. Management of the Trust’s de facto nature reserves, such as Wicken Fen or the tiny Ruskin Reserve near Oxford, was generally overseen by a keen but amateurish outside body. They tended to turn into thickets. The Trust’s outlook began to change in the 1960s after it launched Enterprise Neptune to save the coastline from development, having found that a full third of our coast had been ‘irretrievably spoiled’. By 1995, some 885 kilometres of attractive coast, much of it in south-west England, had been saved in this way.
Since the 1980s, the National Trust has developed in-house ecological expertise, and belatedly become a mainstream conservation body, managing its properties, especially those designated SSSIs, in broad sympathy with wildlife aims. Some of the basic maintenance is done by Trust volunteers in ‘Acorn Workcamps’. Although public access remains a prime aim, some Trust properties are now in effect nature reserves, with the advantage of often being large, especially when integrated with other natural heritage sites. By its centenary year, 1993, the National Trust owned 240,000 hectares of countryside, visited by up to 11 million people every year. It owns large portions of Exmoor, The Lizard and the Lake District, and about 14,000 hectares of ancient woodland and parkland. Like the RSPB, its membership climbed steeply in the 1970s, breaching the million-member tape by 1981. The Trust is now Britain’s largest registered charity, larger than any trades union or any political party. Members receive the annual Trust Handbook of properties, as well as three mailings a year of National Trust Magazine, and free admission to Trust properties (including those belonging to the National Trust for Scotland). It has 16 regional offices in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as a head office in London.
Head Office: 36 Queen Anne’s Gate, London SW1H 9AH [at the time of writing, the National Trust was set to move from its elegant Georgian house in SW1 to a graceless office block in Swindon, to the dismay of most of its staff.]
Director-general: Fiona Reynolds
National Trust for Scotland (NTS)
The National Trust’s sister body in Scotland was founded in 1931, and was made a statutory body with similar powers, including inalienability rights, seven years later. It has the same aim of preserving lands and property of historic interest or natural beauty, ‘including the preservation (so far as is practicable) of their natural aspect and features, and animals and plant life’. The Trust acquired its first property, 600 hectares of moorland and cliff on the island of Mull, in 1932. It is now Scotland’s second largest private landowner with nearly 73,000 hectares or about 1 per cent of rural Scotland in its care, including 400 kilometres of coastline. About half of this area consists of designated SSSIs, among them the isles of St Kilda, Fair Isle and Canna, and Highland estates such as Ben Lawers, Ben Lomond, Torridon and Glencoe. Perhaps its most important property is Mar Lodge estate in the Cairngorms, acquired in 1995, which is being managed as a kind of large-scale experiment in woodland regeneration and sustainable land use (pp. 240-41). Like the National Trust, the NTS was for many years more interested in access than habitat management; for example, it had no permanent presence at Ben Lawers until 1972 and, apart from footpath maintenance, did no management to speak of until the 1990s. Though, with 240,000 members, relatively modest in size compared with the National Trust, the NTS is a mainstream and increasingly important partner in nature conservation in Scotland, all the more so since it is an exclusively Scottish body. It has four regional offices with a headquarters – a classic Georgian mansion – in Edinburgh.
Afternoon sunshine sparkles the native pines of Derry Wood in Mar Lodge estate, now owned by the National Trust for Scotland. (Peter Wakely/SNH)
Head Office: 5 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh EH2 4DU.
Chairman: Professor Roger J. Wheater.
International pressure groups
WWF-UK
WWF currently stands for the World Wide Fund for Nature. Until 1986 it was known (more memorably) as the World Wildlife Fund, ‘the world’s largest independent conservation organisation’, with offices in 52 countries and some five million supporters worldwide. WWF was founded by Peter Scott and others in 1961, and is registered as a charity in Switzerland. Its mission: ‘to stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment, and tobuild a future in which humans live in harmony with nature’. The UK branch, WWF’s first national organisation, has funded over 3,000 conservation projects since 1961 (but especially since 1990), and itself campaigns to save endangered species and improve legal protection for wildlife. In the 1990s it produced a succession of valuable reports on the marine environment, wild salmon, translocations, SSSIs and other topics from a more independent viewpoint than one expects nowadays from government bodies. In a sense, it has taken over as the lead body reporting on the health of Britain’s natural environment and the effectiveness of conservation measures. Among its most important contributions has been WWF’s persistent prodding of the UK government over the EU Habitats Directive, which eventually led to a large increase in proposed SACs (Special Areas for Conservation) for the Natura 2000 network (see Chapter 4). All of WWF’s work is supposed to have a global relevance. WWF-UK’s work is currently organised into three programmes: ‘Living Seas’, ‘Future Landscapes’ (countryside, forest and fresh water) and ‘Business and Consumption’ (‘our lifestyles and their impact on nature’). It also works with others overseas to promote sustainable development in ecologically rich parts of the world and good environmental behaviour by businesses. The organisation is funded mainly by voluntary donations (90 per cent), with the rest from state institutions. The UK branch has some 257,000 members and supporters, and 200 volunteer groups about the country. Its youth section is called ‘Go Wild’. It has offices in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland with a headquarters at Godalming in Surrey.
Its logo: the famous panda, designed by Peter Scott. Its slogan: ‘Taking action for a living planet’.
Address: Panda House, Weyside Park, Godalming, Surrey GU7 1XR. Chief Executive: Robert Napier
Friends of the Earth
FoE acts as a radical environmental ginger group, pressing for more environment-friendly policies, both at home and worldwide. It is careful to avoid alignment with any political party or to accept commercial sponsorship, and most of its funding comes from the membership. FoE is particularly effective at ‘media management’ and at shaming commercial interests into adopting more environmentally friendly policies. Founded in America, a British branch took root shortly afterwards in 1971. Its first newsworthy action was the dumping of thousands of non-returnable bottles on the doorstep of Schweppes, the soft drink manufacturers. On wildlife matters, FoE has taken the lead on major issues, such as the protests over the Newbury bypass, on peat products and GM crops, dumping in the North Sea and pressing for stronger measures to protect SSSIs. FoE are a streetwise organisation with a youngish membership, and its language is characteristically urgent and emotional (‘Our planet faces terrible dangers’, ‘We can’t allow environmental vandals to lay waste the earth’ etc.). By persistently hammering away at an issue in an outraged tone, whilst also seeming well informed, FoE builds up a momentum for change. Its quarter of a million UK members receive a highly professional quarterly magazine, Earth Matters, and plenty of appeals, stickers and campaign literature. Its slogan: ‘for the planet for people’.
Address: 26-28 Underwood Street, London N1 7JQ.
Executive director: Charles Secrett.
Greenpeace
The most headline-making of all respectable environmental organisations was founded in America in 1971. The public first heard about Greenpeace when a group of activists sailed into an atomic testing zone in a battered hire-boat. A UK branch was formed the same year. Greenpeace is an international environment-protection body, funded by individual donations. It specialises in non-violent, direct action: front page pictures of activists being hosed from whaling ships, or waving banners at the top of chimneys, or on derelict oil platforms, alerts public opinion and raises awareness of an issue. Famously, its ship, the Rainbow Warrior, was blown up in Auckland harbour by French agents in 1985. Behind the headlines lie quieter activities: producing reports, lobbying governments, talking to businesses and even conducting research. Greenpeace concentrates on international campaigns, such as nuclear test bans, or the banning of drift nets or mining in the Antarctic. Among recent activities that impinge on nature conservation in Britain are campaigns for renewable energy and against GM crops. It exploits ‘consumer power’ by dissuading companies from using products from ancient forests and peatlands. Greenpeace has 176,000 supporters in the UK and a claimed 2.5 million worldwide. Its slogan: ‘Wanted. One person to change the world’.
Lord Peter Melchett, former chair of Wildlife Link and Executive Director of Greenpeace until 2001. (Greenpeace/Davison)
UK Office: Canonbury Villas, London N1 2PN
Executive director: Peter Melchett (until December 2001)
The link body
Wildlife and Countryside Link (and predecessors)
Wildlife and Countryside Link (originally Wildlife Link) is an umbrella body representing 34 voluntary bodies in the UK with a total of six million members. It is funded by the member organisations, which also take turns to chair its meetings, plus donations from WWF-UK, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR), English Nature and the Countryside Agency. It functions through various working groups and ‘task forces’, as well as ‘one-off initiatives’ covering a wide range of environmental issues at home and abroad, including rural development, trading in wildlife, land-use planning and the marine environment. Wildlife Link has played an important co-ordinating role in shaping current wildlife protection policies, enabling the voluntary bodies to pool their resources and experience and present a common agenda. It has a small secretariat based in London. In keeping with the spirit of devolution, there are now separate Wildlife and Countryside Links in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The need for an umbrella body to represent the proliferating voluntary societies was appreciated as early as 1958, when the Council for Nature was formed as a voice for some 450 societies and local institutions, ranging from specialist societies to local museums and local field clubs. Headed by the glitterati of the 1960s conservation world, it helped to establish nature conservation in hearts and minds with events like the two National Nature Weeks and the three Countryside in 1970 conferences. It also helped to set up the Conservation Corps, later to become the BTCV (p. 70), while the Council’s Youth Committee, under Bruce Campbell, did its best to ‘make people of all ages conscious of their responsibility for the natural environment’ (Stamp 1969). Its publications were a monthly broadsheet, Habitat, and a twice-yearly News for Naturalists.
Despite its influence, the Council for Nature was always short of money. By the mid-1970s, it was ailing badly, and four years later had ceased to function. Its publication Habitat was continued by the Council for Environmental Conservation (CoEnCo, now the Environment Council) while its function as an umbrella body was taken on by the newly founded Wildlife Link, then a committee of CoEnCo under Lord (Peter) Melchett. Wildlife Link scored an early success with the Wildlife and Countryside Act (see next chapter). In 1993 the name was changed to Wildlife and Countryside Link to emphasise its wider remit.
Secretariat: 89 Albert Embankment, London SE1 7TP.
Chair: Tony Burton (2001).
The special interest groups
The British Association of Nature Conservationists (BANC)
BANC was founded in 1979, and acts mainly as a forum for practising conservationists and planners through its influential journal, Ecos. Something of a trade journal, Ecos usually contains short articles on a wide range of conservation-related subjects, as well as news and reviews. BANC also holds conferences on particular topics, and publishes pamphlets on issues ranging from conservation ethics to feminism.
The British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (BTCV)
Established as the Conservation Corps in 1959, the BTCV organises practical tasks for people who wish ‘to roll up their sleeves and get involved’. A sister organisation was formed in Scotland in 1984. It runs some 200 courses each year for up to 130,000 volunteers on habitat management, such as footpath maintenance, fencing, hedge laying and dry-stone walling, along with wildlife gardening and developing leadership skills. It also works in partnership with local authorities and with government schemes such as the Millennium Volunteers. BTCV organises weekend residential projects and ‘Natural Break’ working holidays; for example, 29,000 volunteers assisted the National Trust to the tune of 1.7 million hours in 1994-95, ‘the equivalent of one thousand full-time staff’. Among its publications is The Urban Handbook, a guide to community environmental work. Its hands-on, open air, communal approach appeals particularly to the young. Its quarterly newsletter is Greenwork. Mission: ‘Our vision is of a world where people value their environment and take practical action to improve it.’
Head office: 36 St Mary’s Street, Wallingford, Oxfordshire OX10 OEU.
British Trust for Ornithology (BTO)
The BTO was established in 1933 as a research and advisory body on wild birds. Its main task is the long-term study and monitoring of British bird populations and their relationship with the environment. From just one full-time administrator in the 1960s, it has grown into a leading scientific institution with a staff of over 50 and an annual income of nearly £2 million, mainly from funds and appeals. The Trust’s work is a fusion of ‘amateur enthusiasm and professional dedication’, its members acting as a skilled but unpaid workforce. Among its many schemes are the long-running Common Bird Census and its replacement, the Breeding Bird Survey, which it runs jointly with the RSPB and JNCC. Other projects include a Nest Record Scheme, the Seabird Monitoring Programme, special surveys of wetland, grassland and garden birds, the census of special species such as skylark and nightingale, and the administration of the National Bird Ringing Scheme. The Trust also helps organise special events such as the recent Norfolk Birdwatching Festival, and contributes to bird study internationally. It publishes the world-renowned journal Bird Study, currently reaching its 48th volume, as well as a bimonthly newsletter, BTO News, and a quarterly magazine, Bird Table. Membership: 11,490. Mission: to ‘promote and encourage the wider understanding, appreciation and conservation of birds through scientific studies using the combined skills and enthusiasm of its members, other birdwatchers and staff.
Address: The Nunnery, Thetford, Norfolk IP24 2PU.
Director: Dr Jeremy Greenwood.
Butterfly Conservation
Although we have so few species compared with most other European countries, butterflies are next to birds in popularity. In 1968 the British Butterfly Conservation Society (BBCS) was formed by Thomas Frankland and Julian Gibbs with the purpose of saving rare species from extinction and promoting research and public interest in butterflies. Growth was slow at first, but the Society took on the responsibility for the Butterfly Monitoring Scheme in 1983, and acquired its first nature reserve three years later. Since shortening its name to ‘Butterfly Conservation’ in 1990, the society has acquired considerable in-house expertise. With 10,000 members, it is said to be the largest conservation body devoted to insects in all Europe.
With an office in Dorset, probably today’s richest county for butterflies, Butterfly Conservation has a network of 31 branches throughout Britain and runs 25 nature reserves. It has also opened an office in Scotland. It is funded mainly by grants, corporate sponsorship and legacies. The Society’s most substantial achievement to date is its ‘Butterflies for the New Millennium’ project, a comprehensive survey of British butterflies involving thousands of recorders in Britain and Ireland, culminating in the publication of a Millennium Atlas in 2001 (Asher et al. 2001). Butterfly Conservation is the lead partner for several Species Action Plans, and administers some 30 other projects under its ‘Action for Butterflies’ banner. The Society also helps to monitor butterfly numbers using fixed transects (‘every butterfly counts, so please count every butterfly’), and contributes to butterfly conservation internationally; Martin Warren, its conservation director, co-authored the European Red Data Book. The Society publishes a quarterly magazine, Butterfly Conservation, and a range of booklets. In 1997, it helped to launch a new Journal of Insect Conservation. Aim: ‘Working to restore a balanced countryside, rich in butterflies, moths and other wildlife’.
Address: Manor Yard, East Lulworth, Wareham, Dorset BH20 5QP.
Chairman: Stephen Jeffcoate. Head of Conservation: Dr Martin Warren.
The Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG)
FWAG was the brainchild of an informal gathering of farmers and ecologists at Silsoe College, Bedfordshire, in 1969 to work out how to fit conservation into a busy, modern farm. (For a full account see Moore 1987.) Under the auspices of FWAG a network of local farm advisers was established, generally of youngish people with a degree in ecology but with a background in, or at least knowledge of farming. By 1984, some 30 advisers had been appointed, and a Farming and Wildlife Trust was launched to fund the local FWAGs, supported by grants from the Countryside Commissions and other bodies, as well as by appeals. The FWAG idea has helped to break down stereotypes and change farming attitudes. Its advisers became skilled at spotting ingenious ways of preserving wild corners, and planting copses and hedges without harming the farmer’s pocket. A notable achievement was the creation or restoration of thousands of farm ponds. An external review indicated that FWAG is strongly supported by farmers, with a high rate of take-up of advice.
Some saw the FWAG project as essentially a public relations exercise, and criticised it for being too much under the thumb of the National Farmers’ Union and hence reluctant to criticise modern farming methods. However, it has undoubtedly helped to find a little more space for wildlife on innumerable farms – up to 100 farms per county per year – and has built bridges with the farming community by organising farm walks and training visits, and appearing at the agricultural shows.
Head office: The National Agricultural Centre, Stoneleigh, Kenilworth, Warwickshire CV8 2RX.
Marine Conservation Society
Formed in 1978 (‘Underwater Conservation Year’), this small but active national charity with 4,000 members is dedicated to protecting the marine environment and its wildlife, especially in the offshore waters of the British Isles. It publishes an annual Good Beach Guide, an Action Guide to marine conservation and a ‘species directory’ of all 16,000 species of flora and fauna found in British waters. It campaigned successfully for protection for the basking shark, and is the ‘lead partner’ for the UK marine turtles Species Action Plan. Among its multifarious activities for volunteer divers and beachcombers are ‘Seasearch’, a project to map UK marine habitats, a schools project called ‘Oceanwatch’, and an adopt-a-beach project for communal cleaning up. Another project, ‘Ocean Vigil’, records cetaceans and sharks. Fund raising is called ‘Splash for Cash’. Internationally, the Society surveys coral reefs in the Red Sea and Sri Lanka, and is helping the Malaysian government to establish a marine wildlife park at the Semporna Islands. Members receive a quarterly news magazine, Marine Conservation. Its slogan: ‘Seas fit for life’.
Office: 9 Gloucester Road, Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire HR9 5BU.
Plantlife
‘Britain’s only national membership charity dedicated to saving wild plants’ was established in 1989, and now has some 12,000 members and a permanent staff of 18, based in London. Plantlife aims to achieve for plants what the RSPB has done for birds, that is, to improve their lot through a programme of campaigning, practical conservation work and public education. As a small charity with big ideas, it often works in tandem with bodies with similar aims, for example, as a member of the campaign to save peatlands, and has formal links with botanical societies and institutions nationally and internationally. Under its ‘Back from the Brink’ campaign, Plantlife is the ‘lead partner’ for Species Action Plans on a range of rare flowers, bryophytes and fungi. It also runs 22 nature reserves across 17 counties, mainly meadows, heaths and bogs with an outstanding flora. It contributes to plant conservation Europe-wide via the newly founded Planta Europa network, and commissions research reports on matters of current concern, such as bulb theft, controlling the sale of invasive plants (‘At war with aliens’) and managing woods for wild plants (‘Flowers of the forest’). Its magazine, Plantlife, was recently voted the pick of the bunch. Its goal: ‘A world in which the riches of our wild plant inheritance are not diminished by human activity or indifference but are recognised, cherished and enhanced’.
Address: 21 Elizabeth Street, London SW1W 9RP.
Director: Dr Jane Smart.
Plantlife ‘flora guardians’ clearing invasive ‘parrot’s feather’ weed from a plant-rich waterway. (Tim Wilkins/ Plantlife)
Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT)
WWT is ‘the only charity concerned solely with wildfowl and the wetland habitats they rely on’. In 1946, Peter Scott leased 7 hectares of land at Slimbridge, Gloucestershire to establish the Severn Wildfowl Trust, renamed the Wildfowl Trust in 1954. Slimbridge has become home to the most comprehensive collection of ducks, geese and swans in the world. The Trust originally specialised in breeding endangered species, most famously the Nene or Hawaiian Goose, and Slimbridge later became a major research and ‘discovery’ centre. Nine more autonomous ‘Centres’ were established at Peakirk, Walney, Arundel, Martin Mere and Washington in England, Caerlaverock in Scotland, Llanelli in Wales and Castle Espie in Northern Ireland, all but the first being designed as refuges for wild birds (with excellent viewing facilities) rather than as captive breeding centres. The Trust also helped Thames Water to set up the Wetland Centre, on the site of Barn Elms Reservoir in London. It organises wildfowl surveys and advises on conservation worldwide, for example, on the design of a new wetland reserve in Singapore and on reed-bed filtration systems in Hong Kong. It changed its name in 1989 to reflect the Trust’s wider interest in wetland habitats. In 1992, WWT produced a global review on the conservation and management of wildfowl, and played a leading role on the first international conference devoted to these birds. Today it has some 70,000 members, while up to 750,000 people visit its Centres each year. Its newsletter is called The Egg. There is also a biannual research newsletter, Wetland News.
Main Centre: Slimbridge, Gloucestershire GL2 7BT.
The Woodland Trust
Founded by Kenneth Watkins in 1972, the Woodland Trust has been one of the voluntary movement’s surprise successes, striking a chord with our British love of trees and woods. It acquired its first property, Avon Valley Woods in Devon, near Watkins’ home, in 1972, and its 1000th, Coed Maesmelin, near Port Talbot, in 1999. The Trust’s straightforward purpose is to acquire woods of historic, scientific or amenity value, open them to the public and manage them in sympathy with their character. Although still only a medium-sized charity, with 63,000 members, the Trust has a sizeable income – £16.3 million in 1999 – from legacies, landfill tax credits, corporate sponsorship and appeals. It also sells timber on the Internet. It has offices in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and a headquarters at Grantham, Lincolnshire. An admirable proportion of the Trust’s budget goes straight into conservation; for example, in 1999, it spent £5 million on acquiring woods and £6.3 on managing them. Many Trust properties are SSSIs, managed by agreement with one of the conservation agencies, and nearly all of them are de facto nature reserves, with nature conservation a primary aim. Today it owns or manages 1,080 sites covering 17,700 hectares.
With its open house policy, the Woodland Trust aims to promote public enjoyment (‘Wild about Woods’) and to ‘engage local communities in creating, nurturing and enjoying woodland’. It publishes an attractive quarterly newsletter, Broadleaf, and many of its properties have their own leaflets. The Trust also contributes towards the national Millennium Forest project. Though on occasion a little too anxious to plant trees where no trees are needed, the Woodland Trust has saved many fine woods from oblivion, and its overall influence on British woodland management has been benign, and considerable. On ancient woods, its aim is ‘no further losses’.
Address: Autumn Park, Grantham, Lincolnshire NG31 6LL.
Chief Executive: Mike Townsend.
Membership of the large conservation societies (in thousands)
Afterword: my own county trust
The county of Wiltshire has been the domain of great naturalists ever since John Aubrey wrote the first county natural history (Memoires of Naturall Remarques) in 1685. Richard Jefferies lived at Coate, near Swindon, and the location of his Bevis stories is preserved today as a country park. The county boasts one of the classic floras – Donald Grose’s 1957 Flora of Wiltshire. Its lep-idopterists include Baron de Worms, who was in charge of a chemical laboratory at Porton Down, and the Marlborough schoolmaster Edward Meyrick, perhaps the greatest microlepidopterist that ever lived, who lies in my parish churchyard. For 150 years we have had a flourishing Archaeological and Natural History Society based at the county museum, with its own journal. Even the county’s coat of arms commemorates its most characteristic, certainly its most spectacular, species, the now nationally extinct great bustard, standing back to back, in their proper colours.
The Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, then the Wiltshire Trust for Nature Conservation, was formed in 1962. At that time nature conservation was scarcely more than the hobby of a few hundred local naturalists. As one of the founders, Lady Radnor, recalled, ‘We thought then, very innocently, that if we could stop egg-collecting and the men with butterfly-nets, if we could persuade government to ban some of the more deadly pesticides then all would be well’. Agricultural pesticides were the big issue then. A Trowbridge farmer recalled how, walking through the town centre in the early 60s, there was often a lingering niff in the air: not the emissions of some factory but the agricultural sprays from farmers’ fields.
The transformation of the Wiltshire Trust from a modest local charity to a business with over 50 full or part-time staff and an annual turnover of well over a million pounds has taken place quite recently – mostly since 1990. Financially the Trust’s main benefactors have been the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and the Landfill Tax Credit Scheme, both created in the mid-1990s. Lottery grants have provided many trusts with their biggest windfall, enabling them to buy those long-needed fences or set about restoring wetlands by ambitious damming and drainage schemes. Typically the Fund would provide three-quarters of the costs, leaving the Trust to make up the rest from other donations or its own resources. The Wiltshire Trust was among the first to see the opportunities this presented. As it happened, the HLF’s administrative body, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, was already a good friend of the Trust, having helped it to acquire three nature reserves, including Ravensroost Wood, the Trust’s showcase reserve near Swindon. The opening for business of the Heritage Lottery Fund coincided with the sale of a traditional farm at Jones’s Mill near Pewsey, which the Trust was anxious to save. Its director dashed over to take pictures and filed an application that same day. Two weeks later it had enough money to purchase the important part of the site, which is now a well-loved nature reserve. The HLF has since helped the Trust to purchase sites of national importance, including Clattinger Farm, a ‘time warp’ vista of flower meads untouched by the plough or agricultural chemicals, Coombe Bissett Down, one of the best British sites for burnt-tip orchid, and, most recently, a 235-hectare property at Blakehill Farm for restoration to its former flowery glory. The Wiltshire Trust passes on its experience of working with the Lottery by chairing the Trust partnership’s working group on Lottery funding. Gary Mantle, the Trust’s director since 1990, attributes part of its success in this field in part to the Trust’s relatively modest size: ‘We’re lean and hungry, fleet of foot’. It is also, as I am able to attest (wearing my other hat as a Lottery assessor), impressively businesslike. When it says it will do such and such, it does it. The Lottery appreciates bodies that demonstrate value for money.
James Power and Gareth Morgan of the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust at Clattinger Farm, which became a Trust reserve in 1997.
Landfill Tax Credit, introduced in the mid-1990s, is the great unsung windfall for voluntary nature conservation. Essentially it is a tax levied on every ton of rubbish buried. Twenty per cent of the tax collected can be retained by the operator and given away to a registered environmental body of its choice. The rules are complicated, but the potential largesse is enormous, with £100 million becoming available for good causes in the first year of operation alone. Wildlife bodies have often been a little slow to spot a potential winner, but the Wiltshire Trust sniffed the air like an emergent vole and pricked up its ears. For several years it had worked with the Hills Group, a large aggregates and landfill operator, on the Braydon Forest countryside management project in the north of the county, in an effort to preserve some glorious countryside close to Swindon and open it to the public. The Trust got itself on the list of eligible charities, and brought along its shopping list of activities. The upshot was that it received a present of £200,000 towards a range of activities. There is, however, a potential conflict of interest between landfill operators and environmental bodies since the latter would really prefer rubbish to be burnt or “recycled rather than buried. A shake-up of how the landfill tax is spent seems imminent.
Like other county trusts, Wiltshire runs a network of nature reserves. Among the 40-odd examples are Blackmoor Copse, famous for its woodland butterflies, which it took over in 1963, and several fine sweeps of downland, including Morgan’s Hill, Great Cheverell Hill and Middleton Down. Two, Ramsbury Meadow and High Clear Down, lie within walking distance of my home. All the Trust’s reserves are run by volunteers; unlike some trusts, Wiltshire has no full-time paid wardens. The Heritage Lottery and other donors have enabled the Trust to specialise in grassland management – an obvious choice since Wiltshire has more chalk downland than any other county, and also a fine series of unimproved neutral grassland meadows. However, the Trust no longer regards nature reserves simply as an end in themselves, but as demonstration sites, and as kernels within a wider area where sustainable and wildlife-friendly land management is the aim. The Wiltshire Trust is ‘farmer friendly’ and many landowners have served it in one way or another. ‘Farmers appreciate a pat on the back,’ says Gary Mantle. ‘It’s nice for them to hear a conservationist say “what a fantastic bit of land”, instead of being criticised all the time, especially when times are hard.’ The trouble nowadays is that managing almost any wildlife habitat has become uneconomic unless it is subsidised in some way, and the kind of stock farmer the trusts rely on most is going out of business.
Most county wildlife trusts contribute to the local planning process by providing details of places of local importance for wildlife which are not quite important enough to be SSSIs. In Wiltshire, these places are called, simply, ‘Wildlife Sites’. They are generally good examples of diminishing habitats, such as coppiced woodland or chalk downs, but also include sites for rare species. Their protection depends on the local authority, generally the district, but in the case of roadsides the county council. ‘Wildlife Sites’ are non-statutory, but in Wiltshire they appear in local plans with a presumption against development. The Trust is given an opportunity to object to unfavourable development, and if necessary defend its stance at a public inquiry. Broadly speaking these places receive about the same level of protection as SSSIs did in the 1970s – perhaps more so, given that local authorities are much more environmentally friendly than they were then.
In other traditional areas of trust activity, the focus has broadened. The county’s local biological records centre, long based at the county museum in Devizes just across the road, is now under the Trust’s wing. This in turn is now part of the National Biodiversity Network, a computerised Wildlife Sites system and public information service. Like all trusts, the Wiltshire one stands up for wildlife at public inquiries, ‘fighting hard to stop the destruction of important wildlife habitats’. But it also joins in the wider struggle to find acceptable policies that would avoid such destruction in the first place, both with ideas and by involving its members and the wider public in local and national campaigns.
Most recently, the Wiltshire Trust has become interested in broader environmental issues. The underlying premise is that it is no longer possible to separate wildlife issues from our own future. The Trust wants to demonstrate that it is doing its bit to promote ideas of energy saving, fair-trading and ‘sustainable gardening’, and practising what it preaches. Behind it lies a conviction that the Trust ought to have the support of at least 100,000 residents in the county, not just its current 10,000 members. To achieve that it needs to come to grips with issues that concern a lot of people, not just those who are keen on natural history. In 1994, the Trust took on the role of managing the county’s local Agenda 21 process. At the time, Mantle went on record as saying he was uncertain whether this would be a complete waste of time or the most important thing they could do – though it would be one or the other. Six years on, having seen the impact of Agenda 21 on tackling issues such as global warming by energy efficiency advice, minimising waste and working for fair trade at home and abroad, he believes they made the right decision. The Trust’s strategy for 2000-2005, headed ‘a sustainable future for wildlife and people’, is upbeat about ‘presenting a positive, hopeful face to the world’: ‘Working to a common purpose we can make a real difference’.
The Trust’s founder, Lady Radnor, recalled a line by Rudyard Kipling: ‘And gardens are not made, By saying Oh how beautiful And sitting in the shade’. Today life seems more complicated than it was back then: ‘the tunnel has grown longer and darker, and taken some very nasty turns’. Wildlife trusts are richer, which enables them to do more, and also to rethink the ground rules about what a local trust is for and what it has to say to the world. Gardens are indeed made by hard work, but they also need creativity and hope, as well as clean rainwater and sustaining soil.
Director: Gary Mantle OBE
Office: Elm Tree Court, Long Street, Devizes, Wiltshire SN10 1NJ.
Growth of a county wildlife trust: Wiltshire Wildlife Trust 1985-2000
4 Conservation Politics: SSSIs and the Law (#ulink_0fb726d8-36e8-503f-8a96-cc337da2cd91)
I have in front of me a thick volume published by the then Department of the Environment and titled Wildlife Crime: A guide to wildlife law enforcement in the UK (Taylor 1996). Its purpose is to try and sort out the legal labyrinth of wildlife law as it stood in 1996, mainly for the benefit of policemen and other law enforcers. More than half of it is devoted to species – birds and their eggs, badgers, deer, seals and salmon, as well as the trade in endangered species. Lists of protected birds in their various grades and schedules take up seven pages, non-avian protected animals and plants another four. On the face of it, Britain’s wildlife looks well protected. But although protection laws may look like nature conservation, much of them are about animal welfare issues. Kindness to animals is an issue for the RSPCA. Conservationists are more concerned with the survival of populations and species than with individuals. However, the legal benefit enjoyed by our wild animals is decidedly mixed. The law has evolved, rather like the landscape, in an ad hoc way, and the result is chock-full of anomalies. Pat Morris (1993) has pointed out that while it is technically illegal to shine a torch at a hedgehog, you can squash one flat with your car without worrying about prosecution. An antique dealer risks a heavy fine for selling an old coat trimmed with pine marten fur, but the law does not help living martens very much. The badger is an exceptionally well-protected animal, but the Ministry of Agriculture slaughters thousands of them. Contrariwise, in the interests of the environment more deer need to be culled, but no one insists on it and so deer continue to multiply. In practice, the government nature conservation agencies spend remarkably little time on species protection. Unlike the US Fish and Wildlife Service, who carry guns and have the power to arrest, Britain’s wildlife agencies have no special powers of enforcement. They devote far more time to managing species under the Biodiversity Action Plan (see Chapter 11), but until 2000 the Plan had no basis in British law. The really important species laws boil down to two: the Wild Birds Protection Act of 1954 and its subsequent amendments, which protect virtually all wild birds, and the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, which protects a lot of other rare animals and plants, mostly from imaginary threats, like collecting, and, more importantly, protects all species of bat, as if they were honorary birds. It is easy enough to protect a species on paper – you simply declare it protected – but quite another thing to bring a successful prosecution. In practice, most prosecutions are to do with birds and bats. Egg collectors, errant gamekeepers and careless timber treatment companies are the principal targets. Animal smugglers are dealt with under international codes enforced under EU regulations.
Protecting a species is pointless unless its habitat is protected too. As the law stood until recently, you could convict someone picking rare orchids in a meadow, but do nothing to prevent a developer or farmer from destroying both the meadow and its orchids. Hence, nature conservation in practice is directed at saving the habitat. Most land in Britain is privately owned and dedicated to some sort of productive use that is usually not nature conservation. In 1949, Government was persuaded by the principle that some portion of the land should be set aside for nature in the interests of at least that part of the population which cares about such things. The principle was not new. The Norman kings set aside land for game for their own selfish purposes. And as Professor Smout reminds us, the eighteenth-century enlightenment took the view that while most of the land is destined for agricultural improvement, some of it should be set aside to delight rather than for productive use – ‘most for man, a little for nature’ (Smout 2000). The contribution of twentieth-century conservationists has been to work out where the best spots for nature lie. The next stage is to see to it that these valuable areas are looked after in a way that ensures they stay valuable.
The Nature Conservancy and its successors evolved methodologies for grading semi-natural land according to its value for wildlife. These were based on attributes such as size (generally the bigger the better), diversity and ‘naturalness’ – based that is, on the quality of the habitat rather than on rare species in isolation. The original idea had been to preserve all the very best examples of woods, heaths, chalk downs and so on as nature reserves. However, that was never going to be enough, so an alternative to direct ownership (or at least proxy management) was needed. From 1949, the Nature Conservancy was allowed to ‘schedule’ any area of land of special interest ‘by reason of its flora and fauna, or geological or physiographical features’. These were (and are) called SSSIs or Sites of Special Scientific Interest. This clumsy term has caused much head-scratching. Here ‘Scientific’ really means ‘nature conservation’ in an adjectival sense. Every now and then someone suggests changing the name, but nothing has ever come of it for fear of adding to the confusion. In any case, until 1981, SSSIs did not amount to very much. The job of the Conservancy was to identify SSSIs, say why they were important and notify them to the local planning authority. In the case of a development requiring planning permission, the local authority would then decide whether to allow the development or refuse it. Of course the local authorities had their own plans and guidelines that were broadly in favour of SSSIs – but ‘the national interest’ always came first, and this could be interpreted in all sorts of ways. Moreover, the most common threats to SSSIs – agricultural improvement or tree planting – did not normally require planning permission. Altogether the Conservancy had been given a very poor hand. It could offer only pennies in compensation, while the ‘improvers’, by way of the Ministry of Agriculture and the Forestry Commission, could offer pounds.
The shrinking of a wildlife site. The Wye and Crundale Downs was recommended by the Wildlife Special Committee as a 1,500-acre (607-hectare) ‘National Reserve’ in 1947 as ‘a first-class example of typical Kentish chalk communities with many characteristic and rare plants and insects’. By 1970 the site had been reduced by ploughing to 415 hectares. Today it measures about 257 hectares (based on W.M. Adams, Nature’s Place).
It is not surprising then, that, before 1981, many SSSIs went under the plough or turned into spruce plantations. For example, in 1963 a farmer received a ploughing grant for the destruction of Waddingham Common SSSI, one of the best natural grassland sites in Lincolnshire. The farmer offered to leave a token acre unploughed. Representatives of the Nature Conservancy and the local wildlife trust insisted on five acres as a bare minimum. The farmer laughed; the entire site was ploughed (Sheail 1998). In Wiltshire, 15 out of 27 chalk grassland SSSIs were ploughed out of existence between 1950 and 1965. In Kent, most of Crundale Downs, proposed in ‘Cmd. 7122’ as a ‘National Reserve’, went the same way (see above). The Nature Conservancy was urged to do more to obtain the co-operation of owners and occupiers through moral persuasion backed by ‘suitable annual payments’. Unfortunately the cash-strapped Conservancy was unable to pay anybody very much, and certainly could not compete with grants for agriculture and forestry.
If anything, the situation worsened after Britain’s entry to the European Community in 1973. In 1980, the NCC’s chief advisory officer, Norman Moore, estimated that 8 per cent of all SSSIs had suffered damage during the past twelve months, of which the main causes were agricultural improvements and the ‘cessation of traditional practices’ (due mainly to agricultural improvements). There had, in previous years, been attempts to strengthen SSSI protection, but they had all failed. In 1964, Marcus Kimball MP had presented a Private Member’s Bill that would have imposed a mandatory period for negotiations over the fate of an SSSI, during which agricultural grant-aid would be withheld. The agriculture departments quashed that idea on the grounds that no one knew how many SSSIs would be designated, and that it would cause ‘unnecessary disruption to farm businesses’. The Conservancy seemed to agree, stating that it preferred doing things by voluntary means. Four years later, the 1968 Countryside Act offered another opportunity to strengthen SSSIs, but again it was lost, largely through resistance by the agriculture lobby. The Act did enable the Nature Conservancy to enter formal management agreements with owners, but gave it no extra cash to do so. Moreover it effectively restricted the incentive on offer to a laughable one pound per acre. Until this limit was waived in 1973, not a single agreement was made (Shearil 1998).
It was clear to many that something needed to be done if Britain were to have a system of nature conservation worthy of the name. In 1977-78, the Amberley Wild Brooks case (see Chapter 9), decided that, on occasion, conservation and amenity aims should outweigh agricultural production. The Government’s own review body advised that legislation would be necessary to reconcile agricultural production and countryside conservation. By then there was growing public concern about the diminishing quality of the countryside, epitomised by the piecemeal loss of moorland on Exmoor, despite its National Park status.
The Wildlife and Countryside Act – origins and arguments
When the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher came to power in May 1979, they inherited the bare bones of a Wildlife Bill. A new law was needed to implement an uncontentious Euro-directive for Special Protection Areas for certain wild birds, and also to ratify the Council of Europe’s Berne Convention on wildlife and natural habitats. Beyond that, the review committee had advised that something had to be done about strengthening SSSIs, but no one was sure what. Enter Michael Heseltine, the flamboyant new Secretary of State for the Environment, who combined a ‘managerial’ broadbrush approach to government business with a genuine interest in wildlife. In his memoirs, Heseltine mentioned that one of his first acts had been to summon the chief executive of the RSPB – the most important figure in nature conservation by virtue of his then 400,000 members – and ask him what he would like Heseltine to do. ‘If I may say so,’ added the Secretary of State, encouragingly, ‘you are unlikely ever to find a minister more sympathetic than me.’ It seems to have been Michael Heseltine’s influence that assured the eventual passage of the Wildlife and Countryside Bill, despite opposition within Cabinet (which at that time contained several country landowners). However, after laying down broad principles on involving landowners in safeguarding SSSIs, he characteristically left the details to his officials, and most of the Parliamentary business to his deputy, Tom King.
Hurriedly, Department officials drew up a consultation paper on ‘the conservation of habitats’, based on the recommendations of the review committee and setting out what the Government proposed to do about SSSIs. The answer, it seemed, was not much. Great faith was placed in the beneficence of landowners and in ‘the voluntary process’. In the anticipated rare cases when this was not enough, the NCC could in future apply to the minister for an order, not to save the site but to purchase breathing space in which to continue negotiating. However, not all SSSIs would qualify for the order; indeed it seemed that it would apply only to an unspecified number of sites ‘of national or international importance’. This was probably not what the chief executive of the RSPB had asked for – it was more likely that it represented what the barons of the CLA and NFU were prepared to accept. At this stage, the NCC had not been asked at all.
It might seem surprising, therefore, that the NCC’s new chairman, Sir Ralph Verney, expressed himself broadly satisfied with this Lenten fare. His main complaint was a technical quibble over who should draw up the list of ‘sites of national or international importance’, his Council or the minister. On this point, Heseltine told him that it was politically impossible to impose further restraints on private landowners unless matters were handled directly by government. The NCC meekly replied that it hoped the minister would at least consult his statutory wildlife advisory body about all this, since only the NCC had the appropriate knowledge and experience to advise him. It pointed out that the NCC had spent nearly ten years reviewing and categorising Britain’s wild places, and really knew a lot about it.
From the standpoint of progressive, early twenty-first-century green legislation, this must sound like the Dark Ages. However, back in 1979, nature conservation had not yet assumed the public importance it has today. The Conservative Government was reluctant to tie the hands of private landowners with more regulatory red tape. The late Sir Ralph Verney was himself a Buckinghamshire landowner of ancient lineage, a past president of the Country Landowners’ Association and sometime chairman of the Forestry Commission, with a long record of meritorious service on government royal commissions and advisory committees. He listed his recreation in Who’s Who as shooting. Verney’s deputy was Viscount Arbuthnott, a Scottish aristocrat, Lord Lieutenant of Grampian Region, past president of the Scottish Landowners Federation, as well as a past chairman of the Red Deer Commission and an influential figure in rural matters generally north of the border. It would be hard to hold all these important jobs without an underlying philosophy, and inevitably their views on the countryside were a landowner’s perspective, imbued with concepts of stewardship and ‘balance’. NCC’s Council contained others that had interests in farming and forestry, soon to be joined by a right-wing MP, Sir Hector Monro, close to the levers of power. Verney saw the NCC’s role as ensuring that conservation was ‘properly integrated’ into a balanced rural land use. Some saw such views as an acknowledgement of the lowly place of nature conservation in the rural pecking order. Promotion of a single interest seemed respectable when it came from the Ministry of Agriculture or the Forestry Commission, but unacceptable in a less powerful quango like the NCC. Nor, as the NCC’s staff were well aware, did these comfortable notions of integration and stewardship sit easily with the well-documented losses of natural habitats.
The NCC’s acquiescence was also in part tactical. As Verney and most of his Council saw it, an important principle had already been established – that, as a result of a recent streamlining of capital grants on farms, farmers already had to give the NCC advance notice of agricultural improvements on SSSIs. That meant that changes in farm practice could at last be made subject to regulation. The door had at least opened, and, with the right kind of positive encouragement, the NCC might find itself in ‘a good position to orchestrate the proper evolution of the SSSI system’, they hoped.
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