Over the last couple of weeks or so I’ve given four talks; to biology sixth formers at a local school, to an RSPB members’ group in Hertfordshire, to a rewilding group in Bristol and to university students in Northampton. All have been fun to do and all have been different. I say that they all have been fun, and I mean it, but I still get an adrenaline rush if I am speaking to an audience and I really don’t know how teachers of varous sorts can teach several lessons each day. I feel as though I’ve done a day’s work if I give a lecture!
The most difficult of these four audiences is definitely the sixth formers. And that’s for two reasons, I think. The first is the gap in age when I am supposed to be telling them about my life as a biologist, or similar, and the world has changed quite a lot since I was sitting in the sixth form of Bristol Grammar School. The second is that this is one of the few audiences to which I ever speak where they haven’t chosen to attend – they have to be there like it or not. And that makes a difference. It’s a tough gig in a way, and I always go away wondering how I could have done it better and that must be good for me.
The second talk to the RSPB group in Hertfordshire was the same day but a completely different audience – obviously much older, more engaged, and I even sold a few books and collected donations for Wild Justice too. This was a group that had supported the Chris Packham/Wild Justice ‘Ban driven grouse shooting’ petition (we’re waiting for news from the Petitions Committee) back in August and I talked to them about why we should ban driven grouse shooting. It seemed a long way, in the dark, through bits of rush hour, and in the rain to the venue but once there it was a great evening among friends. And I had Ruth Tingay’s company on the journey as the two of us were heading up to Scotland early the next morning so there was no chance of feeling sleepy on the drive back.
Last week I travelled to Bristol to speak at an event in a pub in Bedminster – that part of Bristol has gone a bit up-market since I lived in the city. I’d spent the morning at a meeting with DEFRA on general licences and was booked into a hotel within walking distance of Temple Meads station at Bristol Bridge. Bristol is where I grew up (if I ever grew up) and so it’s home even though I don’t think of it that much, or hanker after it, but yet I enjoyed what I found to be a surprising representation of Bristol accents washing into my ears as I walked through the city. I even heard one ‘That’s a good ideal’ with the Bristol ‘L’.
I was a replacement for a better speaker, Ben MacDonald, at this event of a rewilding group and I was alongside the marvellous Guy Shrubsole (whose marvellous book Who Owns England was second on my list of books of the year where Ben’s book, Rebirding was third). The room was packed with c70 folk and it was a great venue with good beer and some old friends in the audience. We talked of rewilding from roadside verges to Dalmatian Pelicans on the Somerset Levels and from reforming a natural tree line in our knackered upland national parks to what can be learned from Knepp, and yes I mentioned banning driven grouse shooting.
We touched on the fact that rewilding means different things to different people, and my view is that many who are opposed to the gentlest most sensible forms of rewilding deliberately misconstrue and misrepresent what it is. But coming away from the event, and sitting on a bus back to the Centre and then walking down Victoria Street, I wondered whether we had slightly fallen into the trap of trying to fit every bit of nature conservaton into rewilding, rather than fitting rewilding into the bigger enterprise that is nature conservation. Discuss – whether in a Bristol accent or not!
And then this week I spoke to a small group of students doing a biodiversity and conservation module at the University of Northampton. That was really fun – they were an opinionated and talkative group and I hope they are running the country soon. I came away buzzing because of them but you calm down quite a lot if you just miss one bus and then have a two-hour journey home by public transport that would take 15-20 minutes by car.
I really enjoy talking about the things I care about, and spreading the word on why we should dump driven grouse shooting, and the fact that it is coming closer and closer to that day all the time, but a long journey on the top deck of a doubledecker bus is an opportunity to relax and that almost always means that strategic thoughts emerge – as they did somewhere around Earls Barton on this journey.
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We went to hear Fiona Reynolds (ex-Nat Trust) speak last week in Lancashire. She is a very good speaker and the thoughts she expressed were more encouraging than we expected them to be. As we had recently discovered she is a Trustee of the Grosvenor Estates, my partner took the opportunity to corner her and mention the raptor persecution on the Abbeystead Estate. She mentioned she would love to see Hen Harriers back on this estate and implied that the new Duke had a different attitude to his late (and unlamented by us) father and that the gamekeepers had been given a severe talking to about this. Do we believe her? I hope so. But secondly, will the gamekeepers take note or carry on in their “traditional” fashion. We all know what that means.
My understanding is that many gamekeepers get paid a bonus on the amount of red grouse available for shooting. If this is truly the case then I guess all the good Duke has to do is to up their wages and stop any bonuses, therefore taking away the need to kill any BoP.
Would hurt his pocket somewhat though through the game season.
Wouldn’t it be nice if it were true.
ah, the disadvantages and advantages of public transport!
Rewilding seems to be a successful, catchy, marketing slogan to bring in romantic punters.
You say “rewilding means different things to different people” you then say ““the gentlest most sensible forms of rewilding “ . which presumes there is some sort of aim/management in all rewilding (think mink ?). So what is the difference between that and conservation?
I think I would have enjoyed your talk about Rewilding Mark considerably more than the one I attended last week about whether or not lynx should be reintroduced to Scotland. The speaker was a youngish guy with dreadlocks who had worked in the New Zealand conservation department and was now doing his PhD on the realities of bringing back the lynx. I had been looking forward to the talk and had high hopes for a positive, uplifting evening. What followed was a presentation of his computer models which said that there was only one place in Scotland – the Kintyre peninsula – which would be suitable as a release site and even then his computer modelling suggested we did not have enough information to justify a reintroduction therefore it is currently impractical. Scotland has a massive over population of deer doing immense damage to agriculture, forestry and conservation projects as well frequently leading to the deaths of motorists, but it’s bringing in a handful of lynx to study their interaction with their environment rather than look at a computer screen that’s impractical!?! The speaker then went on to claim the ‘unofficial’ beavers on the Tay showed what happened when things weren’t done properly they had supposedly created ‘wave upon wave’ of destruction and caused ‘generational’ bad feeling. This of course is the tripe certain groups have been coming out with and this young ‘conservationist’ clearly didn’t want to contradict them, in fact he seemed to be ingratiating himself with them. This is the school of thought that says that the loudest voices must be the right ones and what we do must be constrained by the opinions of crofters, hill farmers, shooters and anglers. That means if we’re lucky we might be allowed to have a wildlife meadow in the far corner of the local park because we will get Sweet FA else if those who are actually doing well at everyone and everything else’s detriment have their way. I did my best to raise these points with him, but hadn’t been prepared for his stance so I wasn’t particularly articulate, but it felt good to try and put him on the spot. I suppose he’ll get his PhD, but he certainly won’t win any prizes for having a spine. Thank God for the Packhams, Tingays and Averys.