Time to Get Angry: Beyond the Cosy Consensus in British Nature Conservation
Hardly anyone would dispute that the RSPB has been a phenomenally successful organisation. It is one of the largest civil society organisations in the country, it enjoys considerable political influence, and it can point to numerous conservation successes (Bittern, Cirl Bunting and Red Kite, to name but three). And yet, on its own terms, the RSPB has failed in its most fundamental mission: to protect wild birds. Over the course of the organisation’s existence, wild bird populations in the UK have declined, in some cases catastrophically. According to a recent report, biodiversity loss in the UK is worse than in all other G7 countries, and is the third worst in Europe (ahead only of Ireland and Malta), and in the bottom 12% of all countries and territories globally. I’m not seriously suggesting responsibility for this grim situation lies squarely at the RSPB’s door. But there is something curious about the positivity and enthusiasm underpinning popular nature conservation discourse, given the dire prognosis for Britain’s wildlife. How did we get to a point where the feel-good factor surrounding nature conservation in the UK persists in the face of catastrophic biodiversity loss?
Part of the answer must lie in the fact that, for too long, we have assumed that encouraging lots of people to enjoy, appreciate, and value birds/nature will automatically lead to positive outcomes for wildlife. Much of the public discourse around nature conservation is focused on encouraging people to “connect” with nature and appreciate the birds and wildlife that can be found in their local area. And by this measure nature conservation in the UK has been very successful. Indeed, in the UK we often congratulate ourselves on our supposedly high levels of environmentally literacy. The UK nature twitter community can be relied upon to periodically circulate angry tweets directed at hunters in Southern Europe or the Middle East, posing alongside images of a haul of Quails or Golden Orioles. The subtext is usually pretty clear: why can’t these barbarians appreciate nature like we do in the UK? But we in the UK are in no position to lecture anybody: biodiversity loss, bird population declines, and the destruction of nature have intensified at precisely the same time that the number of Brits ostensibly concerned about these things has dramatically increased. Simply “caring” about nature is clearly not enough.
Why? In part, because enjoyment of nature (like many things in the UK) is individualised: enjoying nature is often something we do because it enhances our own individual well-being, be that physically or psychologically. Our love of nature allows us to present a particular kind of wholesome self-image to others through, for example, regaling dinner party guests with a wildlife-themed anecdote, or sharing photos online. This safe, individualised relationship to nature is, in the age of Springwatch, compounded by the public personas of the burgeoning number of nature/wildlife celebrities, most of whom strive to be as inoffensive as possible. Anything more confrontational tends to be channelled into very specific campaigns (such as Hen Harriers/grouse shooting), and cut off from a more radical questioning of our society’s relationship with nature, or of the priorities of the nature conservation community. So it’s no surprise that the growing low-carbon birding movement — which calls for a thoroughgoing examination of the birding and nature conservation sector’s relationship to the climate crisis — has been studiously ignored by mainstream conservation celebrities and organisations, given their fear of difficult questions and their intertwinement with a high-carbon consensus.
This aversion to anything that smacks of controversy or difficulty also underpins the frequent insistence — which I discussed last year in a contribution to Javier Caletrio’s blog– that birding and politics be kept separate (much to my exasperation, #MoreBirdsLessPolitics continues to be a popular hashtag among nature photographers). But this is merely a symptom of the broader failure of British nature conservation: we assume simply liking nature absolves us of complicity with the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss; we prioritise our individual experiences of nature over nature itself, and we prioritise civility and cosiness over confronting the bigger picture.
We need a new paradigm for birds and nature conservation, one that is radical, political and confrontational. Consider, for example, the decline in farmland birds. You don’t need me to tell you that resident farmland birds such as Skylark, Grey Partridge, Yellowhammer, Tree Sparrow and Corn Bunting have all experienced catastrophic declines over the past half century. What is more, we know exactly why these birds have declined. It’s because of what is euphemistically called the “intensification” of agriculture. But what does “intensification” really mean? It means changes in land use arising from a push to increase yields as much as possible so as to maximise profit margins. The correct word for this is capitalism. Although it’s uncontroversial to say farmland birds have declined because of the “intensification” of agriculture, many would likely spit out their coffee at the suggestion that capitalism is the cause of the Yellowhammer’s decline, even though this amounts the same thing. We call it “intensification” rather than “capitalism” in part because the latter sounds too confrontational and too political for the conflict-averse mainstream of UK bird conservation.
The decline of farmland birds should, therefore, occasion a new militancy among birders and nature conservationists that confronts the fact that we live in a society organised along a set of social, political and economic principles that are anathema to healthy bird populations. We should be clear that the real reason there aren’t any Corn Buntings near your house is because the rapaciousness of British capitalism has totally subordinated wildlife to the demands of the market. But instead of militancy, most of us opt for denial, disengagement, or a vague, deeply apolitical sense of sadness: a passive misty-eyed nostalgia for a lost pastoral ideal of the English countryside. So while we may get angry about isolated incidents — a dog off a lead at a nature reserve, an overzealous photographer at the nest site of a schedule 1 species — we are weirdly sanguine about the sheer scale of the biodiversity crisis, and demonstrably unable or unwilling to acknowledge (let alone challenge) the rapacious capitalism that is, frankly, the root cause of climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss.
I’m under no illusions. It’s unlikely mainstream organisations like the RSPB will fully embrace a more radical or confrontational approach (but the talk of a conservation restoration revolution in this blog is an encouraging). And few birders will embrace the radical eco-socialist politics that I think we need if we are serious about nature conservation. Fine. But if you truly want to keep politics and birds separate then admit that either you are toothless in the face of environmental catastrophe, or you care more about your experience of birds than birds themselves. Keeping birds and politics separate has failed. The cosy, genteel paradigm of mainstream conservation has failed. It’s time to get angry.
