Nature Conservation. Peter Marren
approach to its tasks and wholehearted use of business language. EN endured a lean year in 1996, but fought off a further cut the year after. The incoming Labour Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review increased EN’s grant-in-aid by 16 per cent to £44.6 million, followed by another generous increase in 1998, coinciding with the appointment of Barbara Young as chairman.
Scottish Natural Heritage has had to tread carefully. The generous settlement it received in 1992 was tempered by an awareness that its every move was being shadowed by the Scottish Office, which expected SNH to be a ‘people-friendly’ body and avoid the controversies of the recent past. That it was as vulnerable as CCW to hostile trimming measures became clear in 1995, when the Scottish Secretary Ian Lang decided to carry out the dreaded ‘high level review’. He was purportedly concerned about SNH’s involvement in wider issues like agriculture and transport, and looked down his nose at the £800,000 it had spent fighting the proposed super-quarry at Lingerbay on Harris. His successor, Michael Forsyth, was similarly put out when he learned that SNH had spent £1.8 million buying out the peat-cutting rights at Flanders Moss, which, to make matters worse, lay in his own constituency (in his view, that sort of public money should be spent on schools and hospitals). Like Redwood, Lang wanted SNH to concentrate on its core activities and to trim what he saw as peripheral matters, such as public access to the countryside. But even if it had, the savings would have been insignificant. At the end of 1996, in which its budget had been cut by 10 per cent, SNH published its answer in Natural Priorities. This was a fairly defiant restatement of SNH’s responsibilities over a broad range of heritage issues, and even hinted that it could do with a bit more co-operation from the all-powerful Scottish Office’s environment, agriculture and fisheries departments. But the net was tightening. In 1998, chief executive Roger Crofts estimated that SNH’s spending power had fallen by nearly a third since its establishment in 1992.
The publication of the Scottish Executive’s 2001 policy statement, The Nature of Scotland, made it clear that Government intends to involve itself directly in the detail as well as the broad thrust of nature conservation north of the border. Increasingly, SNH and its sisters in England and Wales are becoming processing instruments, responsible for implementing legislation and as a conduit for government grants, but of diminishing importance as policy makers. By 2001, the dynamic of nature conservation was definitely moving from the state to the voluntary sector. In all the major recent events in nature conservation – biodiversity, the ‘CROW’ bill, SAC designation, devolution – the agencies have been either bystanders or supine instruments of government policy. This, some would say, is what comes of replacing scientists with bureaucrats. All the same, I think the agencies could win back some of the respect and influence that their predecessor, the NCC, enjoyed, if they showed more leadership, concentrated on outcomes rather than outputs, and spoke up fearlessly for the natural world. Or maybe I am just misreading the runes, and that it is the fate of the nature conservation world to complete the circle, back to the charities and pressure groups that nurtured it.
This chapter is about the private sector of nature conservation, the voluntary nature conservation bodies – who they are and what they do. Perhaps few countries in the world have as many charities, trusts and associations active in the same broad field as Britain. Wildlife and Countryside Link, the forum where many of them meet and share ideas, serves 34 national bodies and many more local ones, varying from special-interest trusts (butterflies, reptiles, sharks) to international pressure groups (Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth) and world-famous charities (WWF, RSPB, National Trust). Every county in England and Wales has its own wildlife trust (Scotland and some of the smaller counties have federated trusts). Learned societies with small but enthusiastic memberships exist for practically every animal, plant or mineral that occurs in Britain: for example, water-beetles (the Balfour-Brown Club), microscopy (Quekett Microscopical Club), seaweeds (British Phycological Society) and molluscs (Conchological Society of Britain and Ireland). Hedgehogs, sharks and bats have their own societies. There is even a group busily recording the distribution of nematode worms. Some special-interest bodies have recently become active in nature conservation; for example, the venerable British Mycological Society (fungi) now has a part-time conservation officer, responsible for biodiversity projects and compiling a red data list.
In their glorious diversity, ranging from the National Trust to small groups that meet once a year to dine and reminisce, finding an adequate name to cover everyone is problematical. Government refers to them with statist disdain as non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Some prefer the term voluntary bodies, but this too, seems somewhat vague and reductionist (what is the alternative to a voluntary body – a compulsory body?). Besides, a voluntary body such as the RSPB has a membership larger than any political party and, if it is voluntary, it is every bit as professional as its official counterparts. Voluntary bodies now campaign successfully for new legislation and assist the Government in its statutory responsibilities, such as maintaining biodiversity. Perhaps the fact that they defy easy labelling says much about nature conservation in practice. Conservation is not, though it is sometimes portrayed as such, a homogeneous mass movement, working to a common programme. Although the ‘vol. bods’ do often pool their resources, as in the campaign to preserve peatlands, they have separate aims, and different sorts of members, ranging from committed activists to folk who simply enjoy wandering in pleasant countryside. They are united by a common interest in nature conservation, but that does not make them the same.
The influence of the voluntary bodies in the 1990s owed nearly everything to their mass memberships – no modern political party can afford to ignore a body with a million members. Their social base has obviously broadened. Nature conservation used to be caricatured as a concern of the urban middle classes, and there is still some truth in that. However, a membership survey of the RSPB in 1982 suggested that a large proportion were in technical and clerical occupations, while 14 per cent were unskilled manual workers (Smout 2000). Today, perhaps one in ten people are members of an environmental pressure group of some sort. Many, of course, are members of more than one. Young people tend to gravitate towards environmental campaigning bodies, such as Greenpeace, where there are opportunities to join in the action. They think they can change the world. County trusts are traditionally the home base of older, reasonably well-off people, interested in wildlife and worried about the effect of developments on the local countryside. They think we are doing well if we manage to save just the best bits of our backyard.
The phenomenal growth of the voluntary bodies is very recent. In 1960, the RSPB had only 10,000 members, not many more than it had in 1945. Membership increased in the 1960s and 1970s, but really took off in the 1980s, when events propelled nature conservation from the hobby of a few to a mainstream issue. With power has come controversy. The assertiveness of some pressure groups has exhumed the old accusation of urban-based sentimentalists imposing their will on genuine countrymen; it is the raison d’être of the Countryside Alliance. There are also contrasts between places where conservation bodies are strong and others where they are weak. Donald MacKay (1995) observed that ‘the more south-east England become agitated over conservation issues in Scotland, the stronger became the Scottish anti-conservation lobby, and the harder it became to recruit to the Scottish conservation cause’. It was not that the Scots man or woman was less keen on nature, but that they were Scots first, and wanted to do things in their own way. They now have their chance. Paradoxically, all this growth has not led to more field study or better-informed naturalists. Although birdwatching is more popular than ever, the expert amateur naturalist, and especially the all-rounder, is becoming an endangered species. Specialists in less popular groups belong to a small and ageing population. Love of wildlife is expressed differently in 2000 than it was in 1900. It has become less ‘hands-on’ (naturalists used to collect their subject), less based on knowledge-seeking, more of a personal lifestyle choice, more of a fashionable cause and less of a hobby.
For ease of reference, in what follows, I treat the main voluntary bodies one by one. For reasons of space I omit bodies whose interests are not primarily in the conservation of wildlife, such as the Ramblers Association and the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), natural allies though they often are. Similarly,