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“We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we pass away. The duty to Nature will remain long after our own endeavors…It will weigh on our shoulders for as long as we wish to dwell on a living and thriving planet, and hand it on to our children and theirs.”
These words were part of a speech made in 1990, less than a month before she ceased to be PM, at the 2nd World Climate Conference and the full text of the speech is worth looking at.
For a commentary on the current state of play on climate change have a look at this video on YouTube.
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I think David Cameron and Michael Gove should read that! Oh and Paterson , Benyon too!
you beat me to it Lorraine! I think our current Tory set see the countryside as somewhere to sell off or somewhere to practice their culling instincts. Or maybe I was wrong and this was really what George was shedding a tear over perhaps?
I never knew Bernard Ingham was such an elegant wordsmith!
MK – I was wondering the same. Sounds much more like John Gummer to me. Or maybe Crispin Tickell.
Tickell persuaded her to make the speech, MT and George Guise wrote it – according to Wiki. It was a speech full of equivocation, imho, which would let her off the charge of U-turning made by Christopher Booker.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/9990332/Margaret-Thatcher-On-two-of-the-great-issues-the-lady-was-indeed-for-turning.html
What matters is it was said by a Conservative leader and Cameron and his lot need reminding of it!
The 1990 climate conference was the only strong Nature message I rememember she gave. Crispon Tickell and John Gummer did the prep work for this position, and the speech came when she was looking to the global stage, as often happens when PM’s are broken at home. I would be more interested to see what other environmental messages she gave. Let’s not forget Nicholas Ridley did try to sell off all the NNR’s, and ?Cecil Parkinson produced the roads to the future programme
David – welcome and thank you.
If you look for it you can probably find any PM/party leader of the last few decades talking about the need for environmental protection and how we are merely custodians of the planet etc. The problem all too often is that is all it is, ‘talk’.
Politicians are very good at it, enjoying summits where they are wined and dined for a few days and then go back to their respective countries to declare that great progress has been made.
Talk is cheap, positive action by central government towards environmental protection isn’t. But who really cares as long as you change your party emblem to a tree?
Gummer tried to sell them off, Benyon was going to give them away. Now the Board of Natural England, the senior directors and access managers are promoting a free for all on them, higher access rights will open the gates to the 4x4s, motor bikes, horses and lest we forget those who want to cull deer.
Didn’t the Thatcher government also abolish the Nature Conservancy Council, presumably for disagreeing with the Great Leader or telling inconvenient truths? My copy of Richard Mabey’s The Common Ground (a later reprint?) ends with an impassioned open letter to the NCCs staff along the lines of “you guys have done a wonderful job, I can’t believe what these b******s are doing” (apologies Richard if you are a reader of this blog…). Unfortunately my copy is in a box at present so I can’t check if this act of vandalism was done on Mrs T’s watch or nice Mr Major’s.
Mark, I remember thatcher saying she wanted this country to be like america. It is, we are right in it. She also said that the eec is no longer doing what it was set up to do, i.e. promote trade between the members.