AFON
Nature is life – by Hannah Puddephatt
Welcome to our series of blog posts in the run up (originally) to the general election (7th May 2015). Over this month AFON members will share their own Visions for Nature: what they want the natural world to look like by 2050 and how they want to get there. Despite the election being over, we have decided to continue the series as more posts keep arriving from our members! We have created a hashtag on Twitter so why not join the conversation? What’s your #VisionforNature?
I want to see us change our view as a society about Nature. From something that “we really should look after better” to a necessary investment regardless of who is in power.In 50years I still see a need to restore and manage the natural world we have; I still see us making mistakes; I still see us picking up the pieces of the past. Yet, I’d love to see a future where we can sit back and let it mostly take its course – realistically that is not going to happen soon.However, I’d hope we’ll be making steps towards it… more than the small steps we are making now and the backwards strides we might end up taking with the wrong guidance.
We just don’t seem to invest enough into the natural world around us. We name what we have, and want, a natural resource. Yet we don’t use very sustainably. We use an exploitative phrase that make us think we own it and then we act as if we have little responsibility for it. And that is because it simply isn’t ours. We share our landscape with many other things and we need to really drill that into our minds. We are the selfish flatmate of the natural world that never cleans the dishes, tries to get out of paying for bills, and is always making a noise at an unsociable hour.
Our mentality to our own kind is almost the same. Some people question our need to spend on Foreign Aid; some people think immigrants and those on benefits are to blame for our problems. Our mentality is to blame others who we do not think can fight back, short-changing those who have nowhere else to go to, or those with such a small voice we feel they can be ignored. Cuts in Government budgets, changing availability to benefits, salary freezes, continually reducing the prices of food, and going back on political promises – these are all examples of us ignoring the needs of those at the bottom, because those at the top are never truly affected by it. Whenever there are cuts, politics never favours things like the environment and nature… yet, it is a fundamental aspect of our lives.
We push farmers to the brink by allowing supermarkets to slash prices of essential food items and we brush it under the rug as supermarket competition. However, that gives the farmers little incentive to back vaccination against bTB – it’s a slow process and could take up to 10 years for it to be approved. Without investment they want to see results now (i.e. short-term management of bTB by culling badgers) they cannot wait such a long time because it might impact their livelihoods. And these people own a lot of the landscape – we need these people on our side!
We put a lot of importance on educating our children because we know they will pick up the pieces. We know bringing them back to nature will create a new generation of nature-lovers to help our cause. But we still need to educate adults. In my opinion paying 5p for a carrier bag is one of the greatest things that has happened, even if it’s not everywhere in the UK. Plastic bags now have value and that surely should have happened from the start. But some do not realise it is a clever way to change our opinions about throw-away plastic and seem to be angry at another ‘green tax’. These are the people we need to educate. They don’t see the importance of recycling and reducing waste, and I’m not sure that they care. Which is surely one of our societies greatest failures.
Only two years ago the State of Nature report showed a depressing decline on wildlife population and distribution. But outside of the Nature blogs and our own Environmental circles how many times have you heard about it since? It’s been swept under the rug again to be ignored until the next report comes out with even more doom for our natural world. Even though the report showed much hope for the targeted conservation efforts; which produced inspiring success stories and showed we can turn the fortunes of wildlife around when we have the public’s support. Yet two years on and we are having to defend laws and directives put in place to defend nature and important wildlife species and habitats from being weakened in the light of economy and business growth.
My vision simply is that society changes its view of nature so that we see it a necessary investment–more so than business and economic growth. More important in politics than issues over immigration. And to see declines in nature as more shocking than our deficit.
