13 Summing Up: Whither Nature Conservation?

A changing environment?

St Boniface Down, on the southern tip of the Isle of Wight, was one of the more ecologically interesting corners of Britain at the turn of the Millennium. Formerly an open sweep of chalk downland overlooking the sea – clean bands of green, white and blue – it is changing into a landscape characteristic of the Mediterranean coast: dense scrubby woodland on hot, dry soil, dominated by holm or evergreen oak. The oaks have been spreading for several decades and now occupy some 16 hectares. The National Trust has installed some goats there to try to prevent the wood spreading further. This represents a new type of natural vegetation in Britain. Inside the wood, naturalists have found species all but unknown elsewhere, including a big white toadstool, Amanita ovoidea, and a striking purple cup-fungus, Sarcosphaera coronaria. It is also rich in saprophytic flowering plants that like deep shade: a strange, sparse flora of orchids and yellow bird’s-nest. Recent records of a new British moth, the oak rustic, whose larval foodplant is holm oak, may originate from here. Holm oak is native just across the channel in Brittany. Is the oak wood at St Boniface Down a harbinger of global warming? And if so, which is most important, a new, dynamic but rather species-poor habitat, or the much-diminished, species-rich chalk grassland habitat it is displacing? Should we welcome it or worry about it?

Like giant clay ovens, the towers of Ferrybridge power station gently heat the atmosphere. However it works out, global warming will make life more difficult for many species of wildlife. (Derek Ratcliffe)

Climate change is one of the great environmental bogeys. It is probably real, but hard to distinguish from normal fluctuations in the weather. In Britain its recent symptoms have been warm autumns, mild winters, disappointing springs and wet summers. Many of our insects would prefer a cold winter and a sunny spring. Mild winters mean fewer frosts, and frosts are one of our best defences against the spread of invasive species (frost-free coastlines are often marked by masses of Carpobrotus). But so far, at least, the biological evidence for climate change in Britain is unspectacular. There has been a slight northward extension of the range of some well-recorded species, such as the comma butterfly or the long-winged conehead grasshopper or the Dartford warbler. Three species of tongue-orchid (Serapias species) native in southern Brittany, turned up in southern counties during the 1990s in circumstances that suggest natural colonisation. Orchids have dust-like seed that must drift for miles in air currents, but for most species, the English Channel forms an effective barrier. We have not yet lost any species through climate change. However, a recent report (UK Climate Impacts Programme 2001) predicts the extinction of some moun-taintop species by the year 2050, and the decline of many northerners, such as globeflower and capercaillie. Habitats vulnerable to warming include mountain tops and raised bogs (which depend on cold, wet conditions), chalk streams (which are vulnerable to drought) and ‘soft coastal habitats’ (which shrink as the sea rises). Change is also in store for native pine woods, calcareous grassland and mesotrophic lakes.

Heralds of climate warming? Lesser red-eyed damselfly, Erythromma viridulum, (right) and lesser emperor dragonfly, Anax parthenope, (left) began to breed in Britain in the late 1990s. (Natural Image/Bob Gibbons)

Increasing: the elegant little egret began to colonise Britain in the 1990s. ‘Hundreds in dozens of colonies’ are predicted by 2010, assuming our winters remain mild. (Natural Image/Bob Gibbons)

The long-winged conehead has greatly increased its range, probably in response to milder winters and taller grass. (Natural Image/Bob Gibbons)

Coping with faster rates of change will demand flexibility, and co-operation between users and preservers. The sea is rising. The RSPB predicts that some 100 square kilometres of tidal mudflats will be lost by 2013, and that by 2050 the English Channel will have risen by 65 centimetres. Other world climate scenarios are more apocalyptic; it depends on how much of the polar icecaps will melt. No one can prevent the sea from rising, but the environmental consequences are predictable and can to some extent be planned for. In the 1990s, English Nature campaigned for ‘a living coast’, which advocated ecologically intelligent ways of defending the coast, that involved rolling with the punch of the tide instead of hiding behind walls. It also introduced the idea of ‘set-back’ or ‘managed retreat’, which entails abandoning the old sea walls and allowing salt marshes and other tidal habitats to develop inland. But there is an understandable reluctance on the part of the authorities to surrender hard-won land. For that matter, conservationists may not always be very keen either, since some of the vulnerable areas are nature reserves, assets often purchased at considerable cost. Habitat destruction can be delayed by constructing protective barriers, such as the fibre rolls anchored between wood piles at the mouth of Lymington River in Hampshire (Tubbs 1999), or by abandoning dredging near the coast, but in the longer term it is inevitable. Farmland has already been abandoned to the flood in Essex, on the Humber and elsewhere. Coping with the rising sea will be complicated. For example, no fewer than 60 organisations are represented on a forum to co-ordinate planning and management in the Solent. The one that matters is Associated British Ports (ABP), which has an expansionist agenda, including the development of Dibden Bay, one of the last natural corners of Southampton Water. The forum has made progress with a common strategy, but, not surprisingly perhaps, has not achieved any real consensus over the future of the Solent, and has no real power. This is in the hands of the shareholders of ABP.

The limits of uncertainty. Different climate change scenarios predict a modest increase or a severe southward decrease to the distribution of the large heath butterfly (from English Nature: State of Nature report, 2001).

Another change that affects the whole country is eutrophication (nutrient enrichment). Modern farming produces astronomical quantities of waste nitrate and phosphate, most of which enters the ecosystem via the soil or the drainage system. The majority of cattle and pigs are kept indoors for part of the year – in the case of pigs often all year round. A pig generates 11 times as much phosphorus a day as a human being, a cow 20 times as much. A dairy unit of 200 cows produces as much phosphorus as a town of 4,000 people (indeed, probably more, since human sewage is treated first before rejoining the environment). Slurry from livestock units also contains quantities of organic matter – 2,000 kilograms per year per cow (being biological carnivores, human beings average far less – about 43 kilograms a year) – and cattle slurry consumes far more oxygen than human excreta. This slurry, rich in toxins and active chemicals, often went straight into the nearest stream. In 1987 alone there were 3,870 reported water pollution incidents in England and Wales related to the discharge of farm waste, compared with 1,500 incidents in 1979 (George 1990). Only a small minority were prosecuted, and the fines doled out were scarcely a deterrent to wrongdoers, like the Somerset farmer who referred to his fine of £2,000 as ‘cheap money’ compared with the £200,000 it would cost him to fit new slurry tanks. On top of all this, tonnes and tonnes of chemically active, nitrogen-rich fertiliser used on all non-organic farms enter the watercourses every time it rains.

In the 1990s, the Environment Agency (and its Scottish equivalent) took a much tougher stance than had its predecessors on water pollution. ‘Phosphate-stripping’ plants have been built on sensitive waterways, such as the chalk rivers and the Broads. MAFF has tried to create ‘nitrate free zones’ in sensitive catchment areas, and offered farmers grants to clean up their farm waste. Although there has been some improvement in water quality, the scale of the problem is still wholly disproportionate to attempts to deal with it. The result of eutrophication on aquatic ecosystems is well documented (see Moss 2001 for a recent account), and devastating. Obvious signs are the decline of vegetation (pond plants need a firm bed and clear water), decreased oxygenation and increased turbidity. Animals that depend on clean gravel beds and well-oxygenated water, from pearl mussels to brown trout, struggle to survive. Less well known is the effect of soil enrichment on land. The Government’s Countryside Survey 2000 revealed the full extent of the problem – a rapid, nationwide fall of plant diversity, especially in vulnerable places such as riversides and road verges (DETR 2000). For example, roadside plant diversity fell by 9 per cent between 1990 and 1998, no doubt helped by active nitrogen from exhaust fumes. In the nutrient-sinks down in the valleys, where most of us live, colourful wild flowers have been replaced by a few aggressive plants of chemically enriched soil, such as cow parsley, hogweed and, above all, stinging nettle, perhaps the most successful wild plant in modern Britain. Eutrophication can only be reversed at source, by changes in agricultural support that require less nitrates and produce less phosphates, that is, by lower-input, organic methods of farming. Eutrophication is not a threat to the environment; it has gone beyond being a threat: it has happened.

Nettle beds are spreading in river valleys, especially along watercourses where sediment rich in phosphate and nitrate from farm slurry, sewage and arable field run-off has accumulated.

GM (genetically modified) crops, on the other hand, are a threat. It could be bluff, and there may be few harmful side effects. It is a shame we have to risk it. On the basis of experience in the United States, where GM crops are grown routinely, contamination of non-GM crops by GM pollen will be inevitable. That should demand, at the very least, sensitive placement of GM crops, but one of the Government’s farm-scale test trials is taking place just two miles from the headquarters of the Doubleday Association, Britain’s leading organic researcher. Contamination of organic crops could mean that a farmer would lose his hard-won organic status. Thus, one government policy flies directly in the face of another. BTO research predicts that more effective weed control using GM sugar beet would eliminate fat-hen, an important food source for skylarks, and cause their populations to crash by 80 per cent in beet-growing areas; another government policy is to increase skylarks. English Nature was worried enough to stick its head above the parapet and call for more research before the commercial introduction of GM crops. Britain does not need GM crops. They are depressing confirmation that in agriculture, technology and Monsanto still rule supreme. Here, as elsewhere, unpopular policies breed direct action. Greenpeace’s destruction of GM maize crops was non-violent, but there have been less gentle protests at Twyford Down and at Thorne Moor where £100,000 worth of peat-winning machinery was damaged by EarthFirst!, one of several New Age groups operating around the fringes of the law. It all seems a long way from the early days of nature conservation, revolving around field study and the appeal raffle.

The rise of conservationists and the slow death of natural history

The delight in attractive countryside expressed so vividly by past British artists is still something that seems imprinted on our bones, perhaps all the more strongly now that more of us have the means to reach it, but in the meantime have to live in surroundings that are far from delightful. Added to the desire for decent countryside there is perhaps also a sense of communal guilt or even anger that we have so mismanaged things. We are living at a time of declared rights, as in 1215 or 1789, and one of them is that land is communal as well as private, and that people should be allowed to roam over at least the open land. Some think wild animals, too, have rights. The opinion polls place countryside and environmental issues high among many people’s concerns. People riot in the streets about unsustainable use of resources and the lack of respect for mother earth. None of this has helped to bring about a resurgence in natural history, however. From being the province of the amateur naturalist, field study is to a great extent now a paid activity or formalised as educational projects. If you see someone with a pond net, they are unlikely to be simply interested in what lives in the pond. Natural history as our forefathers knew it, incorporating elements of exploration, curiosity and museum-making, seems to hold little appeal today. People have become content to be spoon-fed by the media. Nature, particularly animals and birds, translates well to television (though the words lag well behind the pictures). Wildlife tours are popular, but are essentially passive: you are taken places and shown things. Via the TV, wildlife has become popular entertainment. Britain’s leading wildlife magazine is published by the BBC, but, with the usual exception of birds, no high street magazines cater for British natural history. Who, these days, owns a plant press or a microscope?

Why is this? We still like wildlife, but I think we have become less curious about it, less intellectually engaged. Nature conservation may be a crusade for many, but wildlife itself is less central to our lives. Perhaps people relate to it best in the privacy of their own gardens, just as the shepherds and ploughmen of yesteryear had their own pet names for the flowers they saw every day – shepherd’s needle, pheasant’s eye, devil’s comb, gamber-griggles, slipper-sloppers. Wildlife gardening is popular, but a distance has opened up between people’s media-fed perceptions of the countryside and the reality. You find crowded car parks, but not that many walkers. You can sit in a public place and see the most amazing things going on, and no one is looking. Visitor statistics to nature reserves are misleading. In may cases, people have come to picnic and sunbathe, admire the view or to walk the dog. One nature reserve received half a million visitors a year, claimed the NCC. Of course it did; it had a beach in front of it. Apart from the famous few, such as Minsmere or Wicken Fen, nature reserves receive no more visitors than any other patch of attractive countryside.

The growth of the nature conservation industry has been prodigious. When Dudley Stamp’s book, Nature Conservation in Britain, was published in 1969, the annual budget of the Nature Conservancy was £1,320,000. That of the largest wildlife charity, the RSPB, was only £195,000. In 1999, the Nature Conservancy’s successors, English Nature, SNH and CCW, received a total of £110 million in government grant. Hence the state contributed nearly 100 times as much to nature conservation in 2000 as it did in 1969. Allowing for inflation, it still amounts to a more than tenfold increase. The rise in income of the leading voluntary bodies has been even more spectacular, more indeed than the rise in membership, which is impressive enough. In 2000, the annual budget of the RSPB was £41 million, representing a 200-fold financial growth, while its membership is 20 times as large as it was in 1969. Other bodies, such as the county wildlife trusts, have seen comparable growth, if not quite such a meteoric rise in membership. I calculate that the combined annual income of the voluntary wildlife bodies in 2000 was well over £100 million. The Heritage Lottery Fund contributed £48 million to countryside and nature conservation projects in 2000 alone, and £321.8 million (for 968 projects) since it opened for business in 1995.

Mass memberships and multimillion pound budgets have given the official agencies considerable power of patronage through grants and other incentives, and the voluntary bodies have acquired considerable influence. As I hope this book has demonstrated, they have helped shape today’s environment, and done their best for the natural world under very difficult circumstances. Even so, nature conservation remains a rather inclusive activity with an off-putting bureaucrat’s language. Most of its many publications offer only a partial view, or are forbiddingly technical. After half a century the industry still lacks an informed, popular literature.

Bill Adams, one of the most perceptive and intelligent commentators on the conservation scene, accuses the conservation priesthood of treating their subject in a dreary, deracinated way. Look at what we have done with nature, he says: ‘We classified it and located it, defined it, and tied it down as a set of objects, as species, sites or habitats. In order to protect nature from industrial rationality, we have increasingly used the logic and methods of industrial rationality itself…We seek to use industry’s weapons on nature’s behalf, but in the process we substantially industrialise nature itself’ (Adams 2001). In short, we are in danger of turning something wonderful into something boring. Children have a much better idea: they enjoy nature, climb trees, splash about in rock pools, play little games with daisies and plantains. It is wrong, thinks Adams, that conservation should be a sectarian activity. Rather, it should become a universal ethic, a set of rules by which we should try to live.

Maybe, but ethics are not what conservationists spend time on. I wonder how many readers will recognise Matt Ridley’s hostile portrait of contemporary conservationists in action:

‘The public – simpleton that it is – thinks that conservationists conserve nature. This is like saying footballers score goals: it is the aim, but it is a poor description of what most of them spend most of the match doing. Most conservationists can and do talk for hours to each other without mentioning an animal or plant. I have seen them do it many times. They talk about committees, guidelines, grant applications, advertising campaigns, legislation, conventions, protocols, conferences, secretariats, treaties, regulations, resources -just like the businessmen they affect to despise…The rare few in conservation who remain naturalists and can tear themselves away from desks and photocopiers long enough to get their boots muddy and actually do something are soon doomed to impoverished obscurity, for little of the money reaches them. The suits and sandals [i.e. conservation bureaucrats] are far too good at intercepting it along the way. The route to fame and wealth is behind the desk.’ (Ridley 1996).

Anyone who has wrestled with the annual reports, corporate strategies and other voluminous documents of the conservation industry will surely see some truth in this portrait. Of course, the embattled conservationist could claim that conservation is a business like any other, needing a strategy, targets, resources and advertising campaigns. And if this means spending most of your life behind a desk scavenging for money, so be it: ‘Gardens are not made/By saying “Oh how beautiful”/And sitting in the shade’. But Ridley and Adams are right: the conservation industry is too inclusive – and far too inclined to place its faith in words rather than deeds. The UK Millennium Biodiversity report, published in 2001, found it necessary to remind us that ‘action planning’ is not enough: there must also ‘be better delivery on the ground’. To read some conservation reports, you could be forgiven for mistaking species and habitats for a substance, like bubblegum, that will roll off the conveyor line in measured quantities once you set up the right inputs. This is what tends to happen when you spend too much time indoors talking to similarly-minded people. The corporate strategists, the hot-air merchants, rise to the top, and the real naturalists stay at the bottom. One wonders how many of today’s conservationists are still moved by the beauty of nature, or have arrived at their calling from a sense of wonder, and the excitement of discovery.

Job opportunities in nature conservation

Does the future of the countryside lie in tourism? In the less intensively farmed parts of Britain, it already contributes more than farming, which survives only by public subsidy. According to Smout (2000), in Scotland the tourist industry contributes £2,500 million to the economy, with 70 million ‘bed-nights’ a year, and employs 180,000 people. The publication Biodiversity Counts estimates that ‘environment-related activity’ generates some £1,600 million and 100,000 jobs in south-west England – that is, some 5-10 per cent of its GDP. Hill walkers and mountaineers alone add £150 million to the economy of the Highlands every year. In the Hebrides, wildlife tourism is the growth industry. The whales, eagles and seabirds that helped contribute £57 million to the local economy in 1996 may already be worth more than sheep or spruce trees, at least when agricultural subsidies are deducted.

Of course, only a small part of the tourist industry is directly related to nature conservation. Back in 1985, an NCC-commissioned review of employment opportunities in nature conservation identified some 14,250 jobs’, including the following: public facilities, such as museums, zoos and botanic gardens (3,020); land-owning institutions, such as National Trust and local authorities (2,730), mainstream nature conservation bodies (1,600), media and publishing (1,400) and ‘production and retail of associated goods’ (for example, wild flower seeds, natural history equipment – 1,860). The reviewers, the Dartington Institute, concluded that an ‘identifiable’ conservation industry had developed that overlapped with established industries such as agriculture, forestry and tourism (NCC 1987). The industry has grown considerably since, but calculating actual jobs is problematical. On the basis of the expansion of key voluntary bodies since 1985, the number of jobs in conservation could be twice or three times as high, more still if part-time jobs are included, though what is meant by nature conservation is almost in the eye of the reviewer (for instance, I am not at all sure whether most of what I do counts as ‘nature conservation’, though some of it, like this book, presumably is).

The ‘conservation industry’ offers more varied opportunities than when I started out, in the mid-1970s. Then it seemed natural to apply for an advertised post in the official nature conservation agency, then the NCC. That is still an option. There are careers to be made in government and the prospect of a comfortable salary at the higher grades. You are close to important events and can influence decision-making. You are likely to be among like-minded colleagues and in a culture with a strong esprit de corps. On the other hand, working for a conservation agency can disappoint if your interest lies primarily in science and field-based natural history. You spend most of your working hours in front of a computer screen, or in meetings, and have to put up with mindless rules and hierarchies. Almost everywhere today, in conservation bodies, and even in research institutions, careers are based on managerial skills, not on the quality of your science.

For many, life in the voluntary bodies may be more attractive, especially now that the pay scales are closer to civil service levels and there are so many more job opportunities. There is less of a career structure, but more personal freedom and a less stifling atmosphere. And you will probably get out more. For the more adventurous, there are career opportunities in the media, especially as cameramen and wildlife film-makers, or organising wildlife holidays in Britain and around the world. Another conservation job is the independent consultant where success is rewarded by money, although to be successful in this field you need to be competitive, with good business sense and strong nerves – as well as a willingness to break bread with the ‘enemy’.

Most jobs in the industry require a measure of personal dedication and some basic qualification, generally a degree in a relevant subject. Those going into government research need a background of university postgraduate research, preferably leading to a doctorate. When I was starting out, the main choices were the still running (and still good) postgraduate conservation course at University College London, and two or three postgraduate ecology courses. Today there is a much wider choice; for example, Imperial College and Wye offer postgraduate courses in environmental management or sustainable agriculture and rural development, and there are also full-time or part-time courses available in every imaginable aspect of environmental studies, in many cases for a basic degree. But the best training for conservation work is still to do some, as a volunteer (it also looks good on your CV). Dudley Stamp thought that the most important qualification of all is a love of the natural world: ‘Nature conservation is a vocation, not a job’. Many people today might want to substitute ‘environment’ for ‘nature’. They amount to the same thing, although, again, one cannot help noticing that a commitment to environmental values does not always entail a serious interest in wildlife.

A vision for the future?

In the wake of the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001, Britain’s conservation groups weighed in with an ambitious ‘vision’ of how harmony could be restored between wildlife and countryside. The ‘Rebuilding Biodiversity Group’, chaired by wildlife gardener Chris Baines, made a bid to place biodiversity at the forefront of rural development: wetlands act as flood defences, organic farming works with nature to rebuild soil fertility, woodlands stabilise the land and wildlife makes us all healthier and happier. Baines is convinced that the damage of the past half-century can be reversed by a grand scheme of habitat restoration and creation. The public wants ‘a new vision’, the politicians are convinced that change must come, and farmers do not want to go down the same road again. The bits of the jigsaw are coming together. Britain wants a new start.

It sounds attractive, and keys into the aspirant language of modern politics. However, such hopes often rely on brushing previous experience under the carpet: the wish becomes father to the thought. In fact, planning does not necessarily deliver a more diverse countryside, and has often given us the opposite. Community forests and habitat creation schemes provide only second-rate copies of lost originals, mass-produced paperbacks in place of leather-bound books. It is the fallacy of planners to assume that beautiful, life-enriching countryside can be created instantly by design. Landscapes are generally created by individuals doing what seems best to them. You can encourage beauty and biodiversity by the right incentives, but all that drawing-board conservation will ever achieve is a McDonald’s version of Britain, much the same from top to bottom, without meaning or detail. Who needs it?

How will the near-future really play out? Is it really all good news? Most of the doomsters of the recent past got it wrong. The oil did not run out, species did not become extinct, oil spills and acid rain did not devastate Britain’s wildlife, intensive farming did not go on until the last hedge was grubbed up (though air pollution really did give us global warming). On the other hand, ecologists overstated the potential utility of wild animals and plants. Wild British plants have not been very beneficial to agriculture. Arable farming can get by perfectly well without hedges. Ecology was not the big idea whose time had come. History, like evolution, is unpredictable. In 1945, Britain’s greatest plant ecologist, Sir Arthur Tansley, considered it was ‘scarcely probable that the extension of agriculture will go much further, for the limits of profitable agricultural land must have been reached in most places’ (Tansley 1945). Unfortunately, as events were to show, you could grow bananas on Ben Nevis with enough state support.

Integrated, ‘holistic’ rural policies are probably here to stay. The process began with the 1990 White Paper, This Common Inheritance, and advanced a step further in 1995 with its successor, Rural England: A nation committed to a living countryside, and its nod towards Agenda 21 and the principle of sustainability. EU reforms may lead towards a more intelligent land-use policy in which food production will be only one element, and mainly on the better soils. Subsidies seem here to stay; no one will take the political risk of ending them, and conservation will require them even more than agriculture. All the same, it worked in New Zealand, where agriculture is more important to the economy and social fabric than in Britain. In 2001, the central focus of EU agricultural policy was still to modernise the industry and make it more competitive. It might also want to be more environment-friendly, but it does not really know how to go about this, and certainly has not resolved the fundamental contradiction between efficient farming and conserving natural resources.

Arable farming has reduced natural chalk grassland to isolated patches on steep slopes, such as this one, the aptly named Handkerchief Piece in the Berkshire Downs.

In 2001, an outbreak of a non-fatal disease, foot-and-mouth, resulted in the greatest slaughter of livestock ever seen in Britain. The farmers immediately received generous compensation for the loss of their herds, but the tourist industry received next to nothing. If any good is to come out of the disaster it must be to hasten the end of the heedless headage payments that result in far more animals than the land can bear – but no one is banking on it. Just before the outbreak, the Government had set up a ‘task force’ to identify ways in which hill farmers in England can diversify and change from open-air sheep factories to ‘sustainable business enterprises that contribute to the upland economy, society and environment’. Significantly, the task force was not chaired by a MAFF official, but by the chief executive of English Nature, David Arnold-Foster. It found that many hill farmers were not benefiting much from existing agri-environment schemes, neither living in an ESA, nor being able to meet the demands of Countryside Stewardship. Also that agricultural fraud was widespread. We have reached the stage where subsidies on hill farms average £33,000 per year, but the farmer’s net income is closer to £9,000. Not surprisingly, the farmer’s sons and daughters are looking for other work. A quarter of hill farmers are now aged 60 and over. About a third left the business between 1994 and 2001, and, on a recent projection, perhaps another half – 100,000 farmers – will go between 2001 and 2005, mostly from the smaller farms. The family farm will be replaced by the business farm. On traditional farms, nature thrived incidentally. On business farms it will have to be planned for.

Can the catastrophe of modern farming be nature’s opportunity? We are threatened by the NFU with the spectre of ‘unsightly’ scrub on abandoned hill land. We need lose no sleep over that. More low, scrubby woodland extending up the bare, denuded hillsides of northern England and Wales would be wonderful. We might even see the reappearance of an almost forgotten habitat, ungrazed subalpine scrub and that all-but-lost wonder, a natural tree line. Unfortunately it won’t happen. Fewer farms does not mean fewer sheep (or deer). The quota levels remain unchanged. Pasture management may become even more intensive, involving yet more ploughing and reseeding as the more business-like farmers that remain use every available opportunity to increase their profitability. At no time in history have Britain’s farmers and landowners simply abandoned the land. However, some form of restructuring of hill farming does seem likely. There is at least a rare opportunity to get off the treadmill of cheap food production and redirect subsidies towards schemes that benefit the environment.

On the better soils, farming will be more intensive than ever. On the less good and the bad, there may be more room for wildlife. The greatest threats to wildlife will come not so much from habitat destruction as neglect. Methods of reducing eutrophication and coping with invasive species will be badly needed and are likely to be expensive (undoing often costs more than doing). With building programmes averaging two million ‘homes’ per decade – a city the size of Plymouth or Aberdeen every couple of years – the pressure on the countryside will be greater than ever. The countryside near the cities will become urban playgrounds. We must therefore take care that it remains countryside, and does not become suburbia. It will be hard for the authorities to resist the temptation to turn woods into ‘safer’ parks, or to plant red maples and daffodils on every roadside and picnic site, or shower us with streetlights and signs (including parking charges to pay for the daffodils and security cameras). Multimillion euro projects will come to the aid of some wildlife habitats, such as lowland heaths and acid bogs. The challenge will not be finding money so much as finding experienced stockmen and graziers. Created habitats, such as broad-leaf plantations and resown set-aside, will increase, which will be good news for the already common species capable of exploiting them.

Projected changes to farmland and former farmland over the next half-century. – (English Nature)

Some traditional land uses that supported wildlife, such as grouse moors, will probably go out of business. If moor management continues, it will be to provide purple hills of blooming heather to attract tourists in early autumn rather than grouse for London restaurants. The rare breeds boom will continue, usefully grazing our wild places before being eaten by the better-off. I hope the conservation industry will go on encouraging traditional crafts – and new ones – that depend on the sustainable harvest of natural materials. In Britain the historical link between land use and nature is so strong that to break it would spell disaster. Sites managed sustainably by skilled reedsmen and charcoal-burners are, as a rule, better managed than by weekend volunteers, contractors or well-meaning idiots.

Protected sites will get bigger. European SACs are of a more sustainable, landscape-scale size than SSSIs (Portugal has only 50, but they cover 8.4 per cent of the entire country). The European Commission may possibly prove to be better at conservation than the UK government, and will almost certainly be more generous. As part of a much bigger pool, we will absorb European ideas and practices, and this is also to the good. There is, however, a danger that non-European SSSIs will lose out if conservationists jump wholeheartedly onto the European gravy train, and still more if they insist on going down the road of community planning and habitat creation. Other ideas floating around include English Nature’s ‘Lifescape’ concept, which aims to ‘join up the dots’ of our special wildlife sites with corridors such as hedgerows and broad field margins ‘through which species can move, making sites more ecologically viable’ (English Nature 2000). It is hoped that local communities will contribute to the process, and that larger, less inclusive conservation areas will help build bridges between conservation and other land interests – and, most importantly perhaps, with educational institutions. An active generation of young field naturalists should be a number one priority; it does not yet exist.

The web and tangle of conservation institutions shows no signs of unravelling. Devolution triplicated it. The communications revolution makes better co-ordination possible, but spins its own webs. I suggest there is no chance at all of a single body emerging to administer nature conservation, access and rural planning in England. The investigators of a proposed merger between English Nature and the Countryside Commission in the mid-1990s concluded that it would cause more problems than solutions. The resulting body would collapse under its own bureaucratic weight. The splicing of the wildlife and countryside agencies in Scotland and Wales has not been a happy experiment. In both cases, wildlife has lost out, and by focusing on peripheral instead of core activities, the CCW and SNH have hazarded their own futures. In summer 2001, the Welsh Assembly was debating the question: Should CCW exist? The point is not the survival of that particular body but the probability that, if nature conservation becomes a dispersed activity, it will also become a low priority.

I doubt whether we shall see many fundamental changes among the voluntary bodies. As far as the county trusts are concerned, vive la difference. Local trusts are better at establishing relations with local authorities, farms and businesses than a remote headquarters would be. The county-based system works with the grain of human nature: the English, at least, are a nation of club members with a strong sense of local identity. There are, however, signs of division, between generations, between radical eco-activists and conservative naturalists. There is also a dangerous popular perception that wildlife means birds. On present trends, the RSPB may have five million members by 2020, but the other 99.9 per cent of wild animals will depend on crumbs falling from the bird table. As for wild plants, the BBC currently regards them as a minor component of its gardening programmes. The small charity Plantlife would have a glorious future ahead of it – if only we could manage to interest a tithe of the nation’s millions of gardeners in wild plants.

‘Tomorrow’s Heathland Heritage’, funded by the EU, the Heritage Lottery Fund and landfill tax credits, was one of the most ambitious habitat restoration programmes of the 1990s. It aims to clear heathland of invasive scrub, and, where possible, introduce hardy cattle, such as this long-horn bull at Hartland Moor NNR in Dorset. (Natural Image/Bob Gibbons)

Environment-friendly river engineering on the Kennet at Ramsbury, funded by the Environment Agency. The idea is to create more river bed variety, with pools and riffles, along with more natural sloping banks.

Finally, what about species? Which animals and plants will fare best in the twenty-first century? ‘Rebuilding biodiversity’ is the goal. A few optimistic spirits have voiced the hope that the countryside of 2100 will be as rich as that of 1900. Their enthusiasm has overtaken their ecology. Under a planned programme of habitat restoration, the more opportunistic species among our wildlife, that is to say the common or invasive ones, should thrive, while those that require stable, semi-natural conditions will be confined to protected sites, namely the Natura 2000 sites and the larger SSSIs. Here, again, planning is not necessarily the solution. Global warming threatens biodiversity, come what may, especially the species of uplands and mountain tops. The current run of dull, wet summers may also harm the fortunes of many of our insects, irrespective of how well their habitats are cared for. The biodiversity process may ensure that extinctions remain few, at least among popular species. We will have to be careful to distinguish between glamour and substance, between quantity and quality. A disused opencast mine turned into a sort of wild garden with open access, laboratory-assisted wildlife and all the facilities may seem a more significant attraction than some midge-ridden bog miles away from anywhere, and of interest only to the specialist. In 1980, the great countryside debate was about the impact of intensive farming on wildlife. In 2001, it was about the future of farming with wildlife almost an afterthought. In books such as Graham Harvey’s The Killing of the Countryside you get a sense that wildlife is brought in as supportive evidence – as prosecution witnesses so to speak. The debate is really about our own world, our own futures. Skylarks are one of the Government’s ‘indicators of environmental health’, but it is our (spiritual) health that is meant, not that of the skylarks.

Perhaps the time has come to release field-based natural history from the belly of the conservation industry, where it has been confined these past 30 years. Is there not still something to be said for dumping the burden of care for a while and just enjoying nature for its own sake? A few years ago I was in the rain forest of Sabah, standing on a hillside overlooking a vista of glorious, virgin dipterocarp forest, with a sore on my hand, a tiger leech in my sock and strange, drunken sounds reverberating in the thick jungle air. It was a moment to savour, but my companion was unable to clear his mind of what was likely to happen to it: ‘In a few years all this will be gone. It will be wall-to-wall oil-palm, like the rest.’ Maybe, but concern about the future should not hold back delight in the present. In the ‘wildscape’ of the near-future, conservationists will have a considerable say. Many things, good, less good and indifferent, will be done in the name of nature conservation. But the objects of the great debate, the badgers and lizards and beetles, do not know that their names are on the annexes of a dozen conventions, nor that there is a five-figure Species Action Plan resting on their tiny heads. They just get on with their own lives, much of which are still mysterious. If we explore their world it should not only be because we need information for an action plan, but because we are intelligent beings with an innate curiosity about the natural world around us. To break free, naturalists will have to put the conservation industry behind them for a while, and rediscover that older quality embodied in the credo of the New Naturalist series, that ‘inquiring spirit of the old naturalists’ that James Fisher set out to reinvigorate, half a century ago. We should resist seeing wild animals as pets or ‘targets’ and respect their indifference to us, and the complete lack of personal contact every time a beast or bird looks us in the eye. We should affirm that there is more to nature than nature conservation. It is good for us to be reminded that nature is an infinitely more complex and tested scheme than anything we try to impose on it.