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Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 48 (2012)

MAKING NATURE WORK FOR PEOPLE

CHRIS BAINES

It is almost forty years since I was last in Woodbridge and, as I entered the fourth hour of my drive across from Wolverhampton, I remembered why. It is a hell of a long way from there to here, but it has also been a long way from there to here in terms of the way things have changed. In the early 1970s I was commissioned by the district council, as a young wide-eyed landscape architect, to design the Melton Picnic Site (Fig. 1). As I looked at it I thought ‘this ought to be more than a picnic site, it is right by the tidal estuary, a great place for environmental education, it would be a great place for a broad array of recreation and it would certainly be a great place to involve people in the process of conservation, of planting and digging, and all the rest of it.’ So that is what I did, supported by a guy called Phil Beldon who was naive enough as the countryside ranger to do what I asked him to do; the two of us were partners in crime. We had huge opposition to what I wanted to do, and it came from two sources: the district counsellors, who basically said ‘education is a county matter, how can you possibly justify education for the District Council?’ and the Suffolk Wildlife Trust who said ‘you are devaluing the currency of nature conservation by suggesting that anything of interest might live here.’ There were two wonderful outcomes from the crisis meeting that I sat in. I hired a Tony Soper film about mud flats, thinking this would be a good way to engage people in a public meeting to talk about what we wanted to do. The councillors and the wildlife trust lasted about five minutes of this presentation. They were sitting on the front row and then erupted and stormed out screaming and shouting at each other followed by the local press. Phil and I were sitting there with our mouths open thinking ‘my God, what have we done?’ What we had done was to absolutely motivate the other 130 people, the scout leaders, teachers and all the others who turned up mob handed the following Saturday to work on the site. We had about 80 volunteers I think that weekend.

That was a fantastic success and, as we were there crashing about, the one thing that was making more noise than we were, was a nightingale absolutely singing its heart out, determined to beat the noise that we were making. I stood there thinking ‘there is a message in all of this, there are several messages in all of this’. It is great to return and to think how unlikely it would be to have that kind of response now 40 years later, to the idea that we might mix education and nature conservation.

I will now talk about the arguments that will persuade that broader circle of critical partners to join in. One of the things that I look back on with great satisfaction was that in about 1988, I went on a walking holiday in the Cevennes in May. We walked for seven or eight days, through a landscape where we didn’t see any people; you could walk for several hours through meadows full of flowers like Grass of Parnassus. It was quite extraordinary to be in a landscape where it was several hours’ experience of the kind of wildflowers that I could probably go and find in a nature reserve somewhere in my home county, that had some of those plants; not all of them, some of them. The sound track for that walk was green woodpeckers, nightingales and blackcaps. I came back thinking the 50 years of my life by that stage had

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been a witness to the disintegration of the whole of the landscape around me, and I didn’t have another 50 years. I was sure that somebody somewhere needed to start thinking about how we rebuild, how we restored, how we reintegrated. I initiated something called the re-thinking Biodiversity group. Phil Beldon, mentioned above, was one of the people involved. I knew there was no point in simply going to the great circle of organisations that ought to unite; we needed to find the mavericks in those organisations, the individuals who would say well this may be the party line, but we need to think differently, we need to engage in a different kind of way. We met every month or two for two or three years and it culminated in a Conference in 2002. It was managed by the RSPB and involved the Forestry Commission, the Environment Agency, the water companies and a whole range of other players. All led by individuals that had one way or another either fallen out with or had collaborated with over the years.

It is satisfying now to see presentations about Living Landscapes and Futurescapes; to see that there has been a big shift towards thinking in a more joined up and larger scale kind of way about land and land management. It is not enough to have it bigger and more joined up, it has to be sustained and if you are going to sustain it, as John Cousins has said, the agricultural element needs to make sense to agriculture. We can’t simply say we need to take more land out of agriculture in order to achieve conser-vation. The functionality, other people’s agendas, are a key part of what many of us now are tackling. The great thing is that you discover that in those unholy alliances that emerge, there are all kinds of skills and expertise, there are other resources that can bring their energy and power to bear. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts – not just ecologically, or in whole landscape visual terms, but in terms of the kind of integrity of the community that you are dealing with. The kinds of resources and sustainability of investment that we need if we are going to see year on year reintegration over the next 50 years. It needs to be at least as dramatic as the disintegration of the previous 50 years. If we move in that kind of scale, the landscape should start to move in the right direction.

When I grew up on the edge of Sheffield, and I was the only little boy in the church choir, not a farmer’s son; I remember so vividly, every farm had heavy horses, the harvest festival really was sheaves of corn and the Church smelt fantastic. I was talking to somebody about their local harvest festival, which is now all packets of dried food and tins – far removed from the smell of the harvest festival that I could remember as you could imagine. That kind of shift is extraordinary in my lifetime. If you go back 80 years, most of agriculture was energy crops, because it was a horse-driven society and most of what was being grown was fuel to drive the transport and the horse-driven economy. What goes around comes around, and we need to be optimistic about how far we can travel, but we also need to be realistic about the bumpiness of the journey.

I make no excuses for starting, where people would expect me to start, in the urban environment. Of all the people on the earth today, half are urban dwellers and one in 100 of them live in the British Isles. This is one of the most urbanised societies on earth. The world is now 50% urban, but we in

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Britain have been urban for three generations. In conservation circles we have been in denial about that for a long time. Even now, if you look at the biodiversity action plans, there are big grey areas, which are where most of us live. Richard Mabey’s book The Unofficial Countryside (1973) inspired me more than any other, it was the first time I had read anybody celebrating the waste tips and the railway lines. I often refer these days to the ‘Beeching forest’, that extraordinary network of connectivity, which is now 40-year-old birch woodland running along active and redundant railway lines. Nobody planted a single one of those trees. If we push in the right direction, don’t push too hard, just encourage, then there is great cause for optimism.

90% of our society has an urban lifestyle. They may not all live in towns or cities (although the great majority do). Even those living in rural villages have essentially an urban lifestyle (they shop at the supermarket, travel on public transport etc.). We are now an extremely urban society and it is hardly surprising, when you look at that urban environment, that people have lost contact. ‘Where does that milk come from?’ is only the start of it. The idea that we might still have a natural life support system that we are absolutely dependent on, is pretty difficult to remember when you are living in that kind of physical environment. Climate change is going to make the quality of life in urban areas even more extremely uncomfortable than it will be in rural areas. We are talking about 3 to 4 degree increases in summer temperatures, which could be fatal for a very large number of people. Premature deaths being a regular feature of urban heat waves, the cooling effects of nature will be increasingly important. The summer shade from trees reduces the hazardous effects of solar radiation and green spaces in and around towns help to counter the effect of the heat island effect.

Given the level of stress in the society we live in and that we are beginning to share with more and more people around the world, that relationship with nature is absolutely fundamental. I spend a lot of time going up and down the west coast mainline from the Midlands to London or up to Manchester. On a Friday night after four or five days of that, I know that second only to the gin and tonic, five minutes in the garden with the birds singing and I can feel the difference, I can feel the stress peeling away. Urban living can be stressful and unhealthy. One of the great British successes of recent years has been the establishment of the link between nature on the doorstep, and a healthier quality of life for people. A trip to the countryside or a walk in the woods has long been recognised as refreshing and restorative. Now we have scientific evidence that the health benefits are measurable, and much more immediate. Relief comes within as little as three to four minutes when we move from a stressful environment into green natural surroundings. Patients recover more rapidly and need less medication if they have a view of trees and greenery from their hospital bed, and there is even evidence that commuters who enjoy a green route to and from work are more productive and less aggressive at work and at home. The immediacy of the effect highlights the importance of access to green space right on the doorstep. It means that the nature we provide in office courtyards, school grounds, parks and gardens has a vital and valuable role to play in healthy living.

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That is a spectacular role that nature plays in our very urban society. It is important to remember that immediacy because that is a very different kind of experience from the trip to the countryside at the weekend or a week’s walking in the Cevennes. Those are also important, but it is the break between meetings and the green space at the back of the office, or effectively playtime at school. It is those moments in a hectic day that can be enhanced enormously if we have nature very close to where we live and work.

People have known the value of local greenspace for a very long time. When you look at ancient towns and cities in different cultures around the world, there is a very long history of people recognising how important gardens and shade trees are. The relationship between functionality of nature, spiritual and physical, and the quality of life is a thing that, like our countryside, we have pretty well eroded in the last 50 years. We need to rebuild it. It might be a bit confusing for people when it comes in a cardboard box in a supermarket, but most people probably still know that apples, whatever they are wrapped in, do come from a tree somewhere.

It is much more profound than that; our cities would grind to a halt completely, if it wasn’t for the rather less glamorous aspects of biodiversity. I spend quite a lot of my time working for the water industry. There was a moment when I was working with Bradford sewage treatment works in the 1990s, when the whole works literally died. One of the local carpet manufacturers changed the moth-proof chemical in their factory; it all went down the drain and wiped out an extraordinary rich community of creatures, of plants and animals living on the filter beds. It is the algae that take out the pollutants and a whole number of other creatures like midges that feed on the algae in an extraordinarily dynamic process. The little flies and their larvae are things chewing their way through the green slime. Put the wrong chemical down the drain and the whole lot is killed resulting in a massive problem for the city. It is not just about trees in streets, it is not even just about food, it is about the life support systems that we depend upon which fundamentally are dependant on respecting the natural systems that we often have put out of sight and out of mind. Nevertheless, there is great cause for optimism. I am an optimist anyway, but we have seen some big shifts in the persuasiveness and in the battery of arguments that we have been working with. Dynamism and seasonal change are critical parts of what access to nature can deliver for us in an otherwise very sterile world. The ‘walk for health’ programme has literally put legs on that idea. Health professionals have recognised this isn’t just a fanciful idea, this is measurable, it does make a difference and you now see people have healthy walks prescribed in this kind of environment. The benefits are partly psychological – the sound of bird song and a sense of the changing seasons do offer an extra benefit beyond that of a session in the gym – but natural systems also make our environment healthier in physical ways. Living vegetation acts as a natural filter. Leaves are particularly effective in trapping the fine sooty particles, known as PM10s, which cause such serious problems for people with breathing problems.

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The critical thing is recognising the difference between getting your 10,000 paces by walking round Asda and getting your 10,000 paces whilst breathing in the smell of bluebells. Nature makes the difference; it is the sound of birds, the smell of the fungi in the autumn. It doesn’t make any difference to whether our joints work as well afterwards as they did before, but it makes a hell of a difference to our mental well being. Stress levels and mental health are huge issues for a society like ours at this time. In the 40 years since The Unofficial Countryside and the origins of the wildlife movement, we have learnt that those qualities aren’t exclusively rural. I live right in the middle of Wolverhampton next to a wonderful Victorian park, a mature urban park. I have nuthatches on my bird feeders and I have tawny owls in the street trees around me. They are there because that environment is high canopy, broad-leaf woodland. It many respects it is rather better ecologically than all but the richest woodlands. Those places are very special, but if you were a Nuthatch for arguments sake, the park provides not only a landscape full of trees with holes in that you can nest in, it has also got far more ponds to the hectare than the local farmland. Added to that, every morning a big mammal wanders out into my particular woodland glade and hangs up food for you. This is a green territory as far as the birds are concerned. The nuthatches don’t have to rely on a good mast supply on the beech trees when they have got somebody peeling the skin off the sunflower seeds for them!

As an ecosystem, those mature urban landscapes are functioning extremely well. We provide holes for birds to nest in (to make up for the health and safety preoccupation with removing dead branches and dead trees) so species like sparrow hawks and tawny owls are doing well. One of the boundaries that has to be removed is the idea that the countryside stops at the edge of town. If I go to the top of a tower block in Wolverhampton and look out across the landscape, the trees stop when you reach the rural countryside.

The Countryside Council for Wales have been using satellite imagery to map ancient broadleaf woodlands across Wales but the survey stops at these artificial geographical boundaries called the city boundary or the town edge. I suggested that they were not looking properly because the canopies continue right the way through and out the other side. It is extraordinary that we still, as a conservation movement, find that uncomfortable. The experiences of forty years ago of urban conservation, people-based conservation and environmental education devaluing the conservation currency, are still relevant. We are missing a serious trick because the one thing you can say about successful communication is that it works best if you go to where people are already listening. Not just by turning the volume up and hoping that they hear you. People are listening where their daily lives are lived; which for most of us is in towns and cities rather than in the remote rural bluebell woods.

The thing that is also driving this growing understanding and respect for the need to conserve and care for the natural system, is that we are in a situation where the environment is clearly broken. You can’t any longer say

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that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, because we know that there are such serious problems. Urban environments have serious pollution problems. They have changed from when I was growing up in Sheffield with extraordinary smogs, quite often you couldn’t see from one lamp post to the next. Smogs are still extraordinary, but you can see through them now. There are serious issues here with one in six young children having breathing difficulties of one kind or another, and great racks of inhalers at the entrances to every primary school. Part of the remedy is in ecosystems services (dreadful phrase), the role that natural systems can play in moderating the effects of climate change and reducing risks of flash flooding. The attraction of locking onto that is that many of these issues have a higher political profile than nature conservation in its own right. There are many more councillors concerned about health statistics in their town than there are concerned about whether there are nuthatches on the bird feeders. If you can say ‘you could improve the health statistics in your town and, by the way, there would be more nuthatches on bird feeders’, then you start to get somewhere. Every time there is another environmental crisis, local or international, you can trace it back to some breakdown in that natural life support system and we need to get better at spelling out that relationship.

Leafy Edgbaston (Fig. 2) in Birmingham is a fantastic place to walk through or drive through or live in but it is also a fantastically effective way of filtering out air pollution. Particularly of taking out the sooty particles that come from burning fossil fuels which do so much damage to people’s lungs. It is also an extremely good way of slowing down the rate at which the rainfall hits the ground. Flash flooding is about the rate at which the rainfall hits the ground and runs off. We have been making it easier and faster, in both urban and rural areas, for that rainwater to reach a drain as fast as possible, which simply means it gets to the bottleneck rather sooner. In towns, parks,

Figure 2. Leafy Edgbaston, Birmingham.

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gardens and other green spaces, serve as natural reservoirs and soakaways. Now there is an active move to increase this natural water-holding capacity by establishing green and brown roofs on buildings. Urban streams and rivers that have been buried in underground pipes and culverts, sometimes for centuries, are gradually being liberated to help in providing a more sustainable approach to surface water management, and as each new element of the urban wetland network is re-established, the mosaic of wildlife habitats is enriched. Dragonflies, frogs, kingfishers and a host of other water-dependent wild plants and animals are benefiting in our towns and cities as a result of more enlightened flood protection measures. The green spaces provide a living umbrella and a filter for towns and cities and we need to be sure that politicians, planners, engineers and all those other people who might see it as a luxury, understand. Even if it is coming from tree huggers and bird lovers, it doesn’t devalue the message about the quality of life and functionality of that place. It is the place we are stuck with; urban living is where we are going to be from now on, and there are real benefits. There are benefits in terms of the quality of the air and so on, but there are also other issues. A sheltered environment can help reduce the cost of heating and cooling our living space. Heating and cooling, particularly cooling of buildings is the fastest growing use of energy in our society.

By taking green infrastructure more seriously, we can reach the political spectrum more effectively than we have managed to do so far. It is not the highest priority even amongst those people whose job it is to manage land. You might imagine the people whose job it is to make sure lifts work in tower blocks are several steps beyond the point of understanding why any of this matters, but they are much more likely to understand it if their living room has just been flooded, or if their kids have got asthma.

In East London there are now lots of ‘green roofs’. When building a warehouse or a big office, the roof has to be a big part of the solution not part of the problem. Those roofs are now beginning to be ecologically important; there are even skylarks nesting on some of the green and brown roofs on big buildings in urban areas. One of the key reasons is that they are cat-free. It is difficult for a ground nesting bird in our urban and peri-urban landscapes to find a place to survive, but four stories up is a good start.

We are beginning to see the whole business of the use of nature, natural systems, vegetation and soils as part of the counterpoint to climate change and more extreme weather patterns being taken seriously enough to get built into the planning system – and that means it happens. For example, I have spent the last three years advising on the 2012 Olympic village. All of the housing has green and brown roofs. It wasn’t an issue; it was assumed that we needed to moderate the rate at which the rainfall that fell on the building reached the drains. If it takes several hours, or several days, to percolate through a layer of vegetation and roofs, that helps downstream where the bottlenecks are. This sort of thinking is embedded now and it is starting to happen without having to push too hard. In Peterborough, on the site of some old clay pits, a housing complex includes a wetland with the biggest, or most dense, population of great crested newts anywhere in the British Isles. Ironically, there are five times as many newts there now, as

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there were before the housing development started. The development process itself has significantly enhanced the habitat for that species and for many other things too.

The wetland is not just there because it is a nice landscape to look out on or it adds value to the property. It is there because it is needed to deal with storm water run-off which otherwise would cause problems in the rest of Peterborough. Having it there has also brought many people face to face with kingfishers, frogs and a whole range of other things. It is important that contact with nature becomes a casual, day-to-day occurrence. If you can’t expect kids to be allowed out of sight, then you have to bring the nature to where they are in sight, but it is still stimulating. The greatest likelihood of that happening is in new housing and development.

We can expect to see many more of those landscapes, which is critically important in terms both of the human relationship and the closeness of them, and also in the business of continuity. Migratory swallows need reed beds; they fly by day and drop down to reed beds to roost at night. The big significant swallow roosts are a long way apart. We have more of them now than we did ten or fifteen years ago, and some of them are fantastic, but if we had a landscape where water management was taken more seriously – where wetlands were inserted wherever we could fit them, where temporarily available land was perhaps allowed to flood and develop this kind of habitat quality, then the journey would be so much easier for swallows. It would also make it easier for other species that we expect to recolonise this reintegrated landscape to penetrate and travel through the big conurbations. We are lucky to have a neglected network of canals which has provided a wet, green corridor system. There are 2000 miles of them, running right through many industrial cities. Wolverhampton for instance, is riddled with canals.

We can begin to plug the gaps and we can do it off the back of other people’s budgets. As climate change pushes the boundary for species further to the northwest, then we need the urban areas to be landscapes that can accommodate that gradual incremental shift. Species are not going to suddenly stop breeding south of Birmingham and start breeding again north of Birmingham. That is too big a leap. They need to travel through Birmingham, or Sheffield, or Manchester, or any of those other conurbations if they are going to get out to the other side.

One of the things that I am starting to get engaged with is the rapid rail link. If somebody was to say to us, ‘how would you like a continuous ecological corridor from the south east of England to the north west sweeping right through urban and rural landscapes?’, we would bite their hand off. We have got ourselves into a position where we are opposing it, generally speaking, because of the environmental damage it would do and we are trying to squeeze it down to the narrowest possible line on the map. As Richard was saying, we should say ‘please can we have it, but can it start now before the railway and can it be now at least a mile wide?’. That way we might have enough land to do something serious about building the sanctuary, the recolonisation resource and to accommodate this climate change pressure that is beginning to go up the environmental agenda.

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There are some very positive examples of the way in which that different scale of thinking is starting to happen. In Lewisham, there is a place with the charming name of ‘the quaggy brook’. There is nothing very quaggy about it, it runs through a string of parks in east London and 60 years or so ago the stream was concreted, metal railing and privet hedges down the sides, you would never have known it was there. The approach to flood management was that you get it through as fast as possible and out the other end. About five years ago, the stream was liberated; the concrete and hedges have been removed and the stream has returned to a free-flowing, natural system flowing through those open spaces. It is certainly delivering nature conservation; along the edges there is lady’s smock, orange tip butterflies are back and there are fish breeding in the gravel shelves under the footbridges. It has not been done first and foremost for nature conservation or to create an ecological corridor. It has been done so that the park can become a safety valve to deal with storm water at times of flash flooding. It has also meant that thousands of kids can now go, as I did as a child, and get their feet wet and put their noses within half an inch of the water. All this can happen in the context of a park landscape with a management system, rangers, an education programme and all the stuff which gives confidence to parents who are paranoid about the idea that you might get anywhere near the edge of something.

Figure 3 is symptomatic of the problem we have got. If you look carefully, you will see that the traffic lights are still working. We live in a society where there is brilliance. There is excellence in depth and almost no excellence in breadth. It would be more than your life’s worth as a traffic light engineer to produce lights that failed because there was a couple of feet of water over the wire, but nobody seems to have the right to say ‘I don’t think traffic

Figure 3. Shrewsbury on a bad afternoon.

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congestion is going to be terribly bad at this junction, maybe we could switch the lights off’. This flood is the River Severn bursting its banks; it is not coming locally, it is coming from upstream. We need to think about how to restore the water-retentive qualities of that upstream landscape. In the Severn Valley, between Shrewsbury and the Welsh border for instance, there are landscapes that could be restored to a wonderful, biodiverse, wet-meadow landscape, whilst continuing to produce high added-value food. It would be different to the ones being produced in most of that landscape currently and it could provide the kind of recreational range that brings more people into contact with kingfishers and dragonflies and dead fish.

Whilst we are addressing the business of keeping water back longer so that it does less damage when it reaches the bottlenecks, we have to do that if we are going to secure a sustainable supply of drinking water. Because that is where it is coming from too. If it is all shed straight down the river then that is why we have droughts in summer. We need to think about the landscape upstream and begin to make it more water retentive for both those reasons. For the first time in my lifetime, the Environment Agency is now asking for wet woodlands in river valleys. For 35 years, the idea that you planted a tree anywhere in the flood plain was anathema to them. Now they are saying wet wood is a good idea; if that means that water has more of a struggle getting through that bit of the landscape, then it isn’t a bad thing. Of course, that also means that we can begin to restore one of our rarest habitats. If we do that, then the willow warblers and the other migratory species that depend on those wet woodlands will benefit.

Further up the Severn valley, the intensively farmed foothills of the Welsh Mountains shed rain very fast. The hedges that crossed the slopes have been taken out and the ground has been rolled between crops. Nobody is making the connection and saying to the landowner ‘we would rather pay you to keep it on the land, than to shed it off the land’. We need to make that complete shift in our thinking of what the role of those land managers is in our society. Over-grazing by sheep is also having a dramatic effect on that landscape. If you look at the few surviving broad-leaved woodlands in any of the uplands, more often than not, they look like that because they are grazed. Although the trees are still there, there is no deep leaf litter and no ground flora. The difference between a woodland heavily grazed by sheep and cattle, and a woodland that has a foot of leaf litter (and moss and bluebell bulbs), in terms of its capacity to hold back the rain water, is spectacular. I am beginning to notice how many bits of those upland fells still have their bluebells; perhaps we should think about fencing the sheep out and allowing the woodland to restore itself as the upper canopy over what is clearly remnant ancient woodland. On the top of the hills we are beginning to see that after 70 or 80 or 100 years of trying to drain this landscape to get a few sheep on it, we are now starting to celebrate the wetness of it. We could block those drains and restore healthy populations of Sphagnum. If we do that, then there is a fighting chance that there will be rather more territory for mountain hares, for instance, in the Peak District. The re-wetting of mountain top blanket bog may seem very remote from the flat farming landscape of Suffolk, but there are important ecological links. Iconic species

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such as the curlew, the oystercatcher and the golden plover may breed in the summer uplands, but they transfer to coastal wetlands such as those in East Anglia as their winter feeding grounds.

Coastal

We are beginning to see a significant shift in thinking about how we change the coastline. Tidal habitats are being seen increasingly as functional and economically valuable. Planned coastal retreat that has been so successful around Essex’s Blackwater estuary, along the southern shore of the Humber and elsewhere, is seen as a suitably sustainable response to the problem of rising sea level and tidal surge. The Essex marshes that the Essex Wildlife Trust have been restoring by taking the flood defences down, as part of a sea defence change, are a good example. The re-flooded farmland at Abbotts Hall and elsewhere has restored the salt marsh habitat and the shallow tidal creek network with almost miraculous speed, and this in turn is helping to revive the fortunes of many species. The creeks in particular are proving significant for the recovery of several commercial fish species, since they provide essential spawning habitat and restore one of the critical elements in the potential recovery of the marine ecosystem. At Abbots Hall, the creeks have re-established themselves within about four years and fourteen species of fish are now breeding, three of them commercial species.

We now need to be bold and say ‘we can do better than that’. The southern North Sea needs to be revived. We need to bring back the fisheries because that is another way of measuring whether the sea is healthy or not. We need to look not just at the coastline and the hatchery areas, but also at the dismantling of the North Sea installations for gas and oil as the next generation of offshore reefs. There is a brilliant scheme off the coast of California, which is restoring the reef communities as no-go fishery areas in that particular case using a Chevron gas field that is redundant.

40 billion pounds is earmarked to move the gas and oil installations in the southern North Sea. Add to that the wind farms which are going out there which could have their bases designed as artificial reefs. No fisherman (not even a Spanish fisherman) could hardly argue that he hadn’t seen them. We have a real opportunity to collaborate in a quite different way. I think unholy alliances are going to be the flavour for the future.

I was particularly inspired when I attended a conference about half a mile outside Solihull in the West Midlands. It was in an area populated by corporate head quarters – all stainless steel, glass, and car parks. The kind of place that, from a conservation point of view, we regard as anathema. We fight to stop it happening on the green fields, we are appalled by it. I went out from the station in Solihull on the bus, the dedicated bus, and nobody was most surprised than the driver, that anybody was getting on this dedicated bus, I was the only person of course. The first things I saw as I arrived were six pairs of lapwings. I began to look around, I saw a hare, and thought ‘this is clearly a place of value to conservation’. But why? There were no people on foot. It was far enough away from suburbia to have access to the wider countryside and some of those survivors. Most significantly, there were no cats. This isn’t a diatribe against cats, but those species cannot cope

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with the cat population that we have. This sort of commercial office development has a unique quality about it, much of which you would hate, but some of which might be just another part of our armoury in lacing together the way in which the landscape can be reintegrated, rebuilt in the 21st century.

The UK’s nature conservation movement has come a long way from species and habitat preservation on isolated nature reserves to the present commitment to whole landscape restoration. The RSPB’s Futurescapes initiative, and the Wildlife Trust’s Living Landscapes and Living Seas campaigns are inspirational – but we need to be even more ambitious. We need to forge stronger links between conservationists and other influential groups in society. We already have a much more positive relationship with many in the farming and forestry industries, but we also need to engage more actively with others such as urban developers, civil engineers, health professionals and the insurance industry.

The move from nature study to nature reserve preservation is a hundred year old revolution. The evolution from preservation to conservation was the great achievement at the close of the last century. Now, we are embarked on wide scale rebuilding of whole landscape linkages. We need to be even more energetic and ambitious in our determination to rebuild biodiversity and restore our natural heritage. I believe we will be helped enormously in that endeavour, if we make the case to politicians, policymakers, planners and to all our other potential partners, that working with nature is good for people and that it makes sound, sustainable economic sense.

Open your minds is what I am saying, don’t lose sight of the specialist expertise and the knowledge that you have, but think of ways in which it can be applied to that bigger objective of weaving together landscapes so that they have the integrity that we lost in my lifetime so far.

Chris Baines Baines Environmental Ltd PO Box 35 Wolverhampton West Midlands WV1 4XJ

Professor Chris Baines is one of the UK’s leading independent environmentalists and an award-winning writer and broadcaster. He works as an adviser to the house building, water, finance and aggregates industries, and also advises government agencies and local authorities on sustainability. He is best known as a champion of wildlife gardening and his book How to Make a Wildlife Garden has been in print since 1985. Chris is a national Vice President of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts, President of the Thames Estuary Partnership and the Association for Environment-Conscious Building. In 2004 he was awarded the RSPB’s medal of honour.