Yes, practical steps are great but political ones are the kind that actually make a difference.
That was a quote from a few days ago and from a very thoughtful comment on this blog by Stuart MacKay. The comment was thoughtful but I think this phrase was … well … wrong actually. But it does enable me to replay a debate that went on inside the RSPB for many years and emerges often in conservation talk.
The way that this debate played in the RSPB was essentially a war between nature reserves and policy as to who should have the whip hand and the budget.
The two sides’ cases were as follows – exaggerated and simplified:
- Nature reserves are best as they are certain – once you own land you can manage it and protect it forever and it’s a certainty, whereas all that policy stuff looks good in theory but even when it works all you need is another government and you can lose all the gains you made.
- Advocacy is best because in no other way can you have an impact everywhere at once – it may be a small impact (but let’s make it a large one) in every place but multiplied up to lots of places means that the impact is huge (and you don’t have to keep spending money on it afterwards).
Well, there’s something, quite a lot, to be said for each argument, and I’m pretty sure I have argued each viewpoint at different times with proponents of the other viewpoint just for fun. You can, of course, expand nature reserves to any form of practical action and the argument is the same.
And the arguments can be refined, expanded, embellished, polished and titivated no end. But it’s essentially an argument about relatively small but secure and predictable progress compared with big leaps forward, indeed leaps forward into a brave new world (if you can win the policy debate).
I believe in both approaches and I still do, having seen each work and each fail (but by the very nature of things the advocacy route fails more often).
I was lucky (but was it really luck?) to have worked for the RSPB which excelled at both approaches back then. If you worked for FoE or Greenpeace then it was the political route for you – and some got worn down over the years by the lack of progress because it can feel like banging your head against a brick wall. But others, let’s say in the National Trust for the sake of argument, are committed to the hands-on approach which delivers rather small advances compared with the size of the problem and you have to be content with ‘we did our bit, anyway’.
If success were guaranteed then the political advocacy route is to be preferred, but in the real world it can be a rough troad leading downhill over broken ground when you thought you were approaching the sunlit uplands.
Most investors, for this is essentially a resource allocation issue, would be aiming for a mixed portfolio – obviously trying to invest in the very best longshots but having some sure things too. And that is how that very special investor in the outcomes of horse races might behave too. The conventional wisdom on horse race betting is that a sharp review of the horses in the 3/1-8/1 area might give the bright investor the biggest opportunity for profit (but that is another subject and not for this blog).
It goes without saying, that whichever route you go down then a duff or daft approach won’t deliver the goods as well as an efficient imaginative one, so you need the very best brains and characters involved in any conservation work.
Let’s just explore the options on one issue a bit more – eating less meat and dairy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cattle etc. If you can persuade Boris to close down all butchers, tax meat meals in restaurants or a whole range of other measures then that would have quite an effect. How many staff would you like for the campaign and when are you promising me victory, please? How far do you think you will have got in a decade? Do I get my money back if the answer is ‘nowhere’?
But if you were the National Trust and you removed all meat and dairy from your cafes and put information in the magazines that go to your millions of members (who might not often read them) then how far do you think you would get? What are you going to promise me?
Tricky isn’t it? But it is an exaggerated example of a real dilemma. Massive impact with low chance of success or smaller impact with some certainty and immediacy?
Those are the types of issue with which some of us have had to grapple and it’s difficult to know whether we made the right decisions or not over time – and don’t bother telling me the answer because you don’t know either!
In 2010, in the time just before I left the RSPB, when the Conservative government (actually a coalition one) came into power we did discuss the difficulty that stretched ahead with a Conservative small-government regime. I remember being told by a game-shooting manager (see Fighting for Birds p284 ) that once the Tories got into power then NGOs such as the RSPB would have no access to government at all. It took several years to come to pass but the last 10 years have been very different from the 10 that preceded them, for sure. Then, we seriously discussed putting a much higher proportion of the RSPB’s investment into land ownership and away from advocacy (although advocacy is generally cheap so it doesn’t work out that easily). I wonder what would have happened if someone had been brave enough to do that? I’m not sure that would have been my call. But what have been the great NGO policy victories with government in these last 10 years?
One of my fears, and it does make me shiver sometimes, is that a Tory government in England coupled with Brexit will lead to the dismantling of the environmental legislation that has worked well (not perfectly, but well) for decades and we’ll see a collapse in environmental protection. We already see a failure of government and its statutory agencies to implement existing policies properly so we are losing quite a lot simply by neglect. But that’s another story.
I’m sorry this is quite a gloomy story. But nobody said that environmental protection and improvement was going to be easy, anymore than fighting for human rights is a doddle. Keep fighting – we will win in the end, and if we don’t then at least we were on the right side and not sitting on our backsides.
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What motivated me to make that comment was the experience we had here in Portugal with the forest fires of 2017. Sadly it took the deaths of 66 people to finally kick the government into action. Now the perimeter of all properties and around buildings must be cleared of brush and trees to try an contain a fire once it starts. There is a large fine if you not. So only government can have effects on a large scale as only it has the resources and the clout to back it up. It’s a similar story on the climate change front. There is simply nothing that can be done at an individual level to make a difference only government level action can work. You touch on the immense difficulties of making this work and climate change is the poster child of the success and failure of this approach. The approach taken with Nature Reserves appears to have relatively quick and long lasting effects but if the rest of the country is paved with concrete then all you have is a collection of very large zoos.
I think the solution is the one you took with driven grouse shooting. It’s not just about killing birds of prey but also carbon storage, flooding of lowland areas, meat being sold that is contaminated with lead, etc. etc. If the true effects are known then you can get a lot more people involved and in ways you never anticipated. If the clamour is coming from only a few sources then it’s easy to fight or ignore but if it’s coming from many directions then it’s very difficult to counter. Then sooner or later politicians realise that their jobs are on the line and action is required.
Other than that I agree with everything you said. It’s a problem that would make Sisyphus give up. But what’s the alternative?
Also want to say that your approach with Wild Justice is also immensely successful and immensely clever. The debate on what can be shot where and when was moved forward in an instant compared to decades of obfuscation and foot-dragging. Such opportunities are few and far between but the effects are dramatic. Thousands of land owners, the world over, must have choked on their champagne and caviar when that came over the horizon.
Another aspect of the “only political action can work” idea is that it gives people something more concrete to work with. Sure you can give money to NGOs to buy land or make the occasional insightful comment on a blog to try and motivate people but that only goes so far to assuage the feeling of impotence. The current system clearly is not working well enough to offset the damage being done to the environment. Who knows what could happen if more people get involved and start trying new approaches.
In Australia, apparently, there is a large fine or even imprisonment if you do clear the fuel load near your property. This may also be the case in California. It will be of small cheer for the unfortunate people in Oz to know that there is intelligent governance in Portugal
Filbert, That bit of right wing “fake news” has been repeatedly debunked but just won’t die. Its simply factually incorrect.
What has actually happened is that the ( fairly right wing and rabidly climate change denying) Liberal/ National coalition Australian govt cut $121m from the Nat Parks budget, = around 500 fewer rangers and cuts of around 3/4 in Fire Management officers (the specialist fire planning and management role). Hence there has been a huge reduction in proscribed (ie managed, pre-emptive) burning because the capacity has simply not been there.
The “greenies” who they’ve tried to blame for the (non existent) backburning (sic) ban hold power at no regional or state level, by the way.
On February 12, 2009 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Liam Sheahan had been fined $100,000 including legal fees because he illegally cleared trees and scrub to protect his property at Thompson Spur Road in Reedy Creek, Victoria. Neighbouring properties were destroyed in a subsequent major fire but Sheahan’s property survived – although damaged – due largely to his decision to create the fire break.
If you think the foregoing is fake, don’t tell me – tell the Sydney Morning Herald, Mr Sheahan and Seymour Magistrate’s Court. The report looks factual to me and there’s nothing right-wing about it. Contrast the situation in Australia with that in Portugal since 2017 – as described by Stuart Mackay above – where fines are levied if brush is not cleared from properties. Or do you think that is also fake?
See https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/12/is-there-really-a-green-conspiracy-to-stop-bushfire-hazard-reduction
I suspect here’s more to the particular case you mention from a decade ago than might first appear. Certainly my friends in Oz, whose town (Taree) was virtually cut off for a while but are OK now, aren’t aware of any such restrictions. Maybe the rules have changed in the last 10 years, but I’m sure that if there were still restrictions like this in place then the Murdock media would be shouting about it loudly.
Going by the information in this document the Sydney Morning Herald version of events appears to be so inaccurate as to be as close to fake news as makes no difference.
https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/downloadhansard/pdf/Council/Jul-Dec%202009/Council%20Extract%203%20September%20from%20Book%2012.pdf
(It’s a long document. Just search for ‘Sheahan’ to take you to the relevant place.)
My wife’s neice built a house on an “acerage plot” in NSW and had to clear the bush for 80m round the site, or was it more, before they got permission to build. A fire went safely round them a couple of weeks ago, a little less intense than the present ones.
You’ve just reminded me that the increasingly severe fires they’ve been having in Portugal have been in attributed by some largely to be the result of year on year expansion of eucalyptus plantations to supply the paper industry. It’s absolutely useless for wildlife but monocultures of highly flammable trees are brilliant for driving ‘wildfires’ to the extent of loss of property and human life. This is a case where some might point to increased drought due to climate change, but in fact it’s more likely to be something else – therefore the real solution is missed too. This is one of the many reasons why reduce, reuse, recycle is vital for people and nature, but how often are they mentioned? https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-portugal-eucalyptus-fire-20170620-story.html
Your call for a balanced approach is surely right. Like most either/or arguments, both extremes are bad and the real question is ‘where should the balance lie roughly?’.
Despite calling nature reserves secure, I think the RSPB, the Wildlife Trusts and others should never forget Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Do you get the analogy? A very popular, countrywide institution which had become rich in assets over decades due to some people’s generosity and much hard work, seen by a government in need of sudden cash, as a prime plum to be asset-stripped. A bit of legal and political jobbery later and low-and-behold, all those carefully stewarded assets have been sold-off to be ploughed up for maize harvests, shale gas wells and lovely out of town housing estates (I’ve reached the 21st century now, in case you were wondering).
And if you say that we live in a much more democratic society now, then look at our recent history and ask yourself if people mostly vote for what is ethically right and good, or for what they believe will make them richer (in money). I believe even the National Trust has lost land sometimes to an act of parliament, despite it’s right to hold land ‘inalienably’. Sometimes the innocent doves have to be a bit more ‘cunning as snakes’ and see things from their enemies’ perspectives.
Regarding the neo-libs dismantling nature-protection legislation: yes, also very worried.
and if you don’t think it could happen now, what about in 20 years, 50 years, or even 100 years? https://www.rspb.org.uk/about-the-rspb/about-us/our-mission/ says they want to double their landholding by 2030. Riper and riper…
Yes, obviously we need both approaches and I think this is something the RSPB is still getting right. The cost of running the reserves (which are nothing like zoos btw!) is obviously a concern and currently a lot of effort and money is being put into visitor facilities at high-visitor-number sites to generate more income that way. And expanding the fantastic reserve holdings is still, rightly, a priority.
We need advocacy, but be careful what you advocate for! What happens in practice will be greatly influenced by money. To give one example: as Martin Harper has commented, if floating wind turbines in deep water do not become the future at sea and the planned capacity is provided by static turbines in shallow water, the outlook for seabirds is grim. We want to be green, but not at the price of trashing nature.
Isn’t it three points on a triangle rather than binary? Public engagement is equally important. I realize the political advocacy doesn’t mean only seeking to persuade politicians by argument, but informing and educating the public – and running public campaigns – can ultimately make as big a difference as anything else. And it affects both the others. A strong public engagement policy will tend to position nature reserves in different places and with different management objectives. Similarly political advocacy works better not just with a million members but with those members having clear and forceful views. I think the RSPB has sometimes struggled with the balance here too – I’ve certainly heard discomfort at establishing reserves nearer towns (where the best birds might not be) and also at running campaigns which might not get the full backing of an (often rather conservative) membership.
Of course it is just as difficult to call in ‘value for money’ terms as the others, and may often involve longer term goals: but may also have more lasting benefits. Fox hunting will surely be gone when it’s gone, perhaps quite soon now, and I trust it will be the same with driven grouse shooting on our uplands, as Stuart argues above. Maybe it’s just horses for courses: we won’t be buying many grouse moors any time soon, nor (in England) are we likely to make much headway with the government. But we are making progress in getting the public behind us and that will make a bigger difference as time goes by.
A big challenge with the mixed portfolio approach is gaining internal alignment. And explaining what you stand for in the outside world. At one end of the spectrum the RSPB is talking about blue tits in back gardens, at the other it is advocating policies on energy, transport and climate.
This doesn’t make the approach wrong, but it does make it hard to tell a clear, consistent and compelling story that integrates the three imperatives of mission, members and money. As a result there are many and varied version of what the RSPB stands for. Whether this helps or hinders its impact is an interesting debate.