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Sophie Yeo is a freelance journalist based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She has written for publications including the Guardian, the Washington Post, and National Geographic. She tweets at @some_yeo.
Four weeks ago, I set up a newsletter. It is called Inkcap, and it focuses on nature and conservation in the UK. It was an idea I had been contemplating for years. As an environmental journalist, I have long felt that ecological issues in the UK are underreported by the media.
In 2017, I quit my job as a staff writer at Carbon Brief in London and became a freelance journalist. The reasons were personal, but it was also an opportunity: after four years of writing exclusively about climate change, I was keen to devote more time to the crisis taking place in the natural world.
This turned out to be difficult: in the UK, we have few publications that are interested in covering nature and conservation, and even fewer that care about the destruction taking place within the British landscape.
Mostly, the journalists that are covering this crisis are spread thinly, writing about the Amazon one day and plastic pollution the next. Equally, there is pressure to produce regular stories, and too little space for nuanced coverage of the debates within the world of conservation.
It is crucial that journalists cover the global environment, but I believe it is also important that we remember the devastation taking place in our own backyards – the species in decline and the landscapes at risk – and hold the perpetrators of this destruction accountable.
If we fail, then we risk conceptualising environmental destruction as another country’s problem, while we in the UK lead essentially green and pleasant lives. I often wonder how the public, many of them rarely escaping the city, are supposed to care about the crisis facing the natural world if no one tells them that it is happening in the first place.
Inkcap seeks to change this. Each week, I write and publish an original and in-depth article on nature and conservation in the UK. I seek to bring attention to underreported issues and shed light on underlying debates.
I want to recognise that the UK’s natural environment is a beautiful and complex place, and that conserving and improving it is also a complex task in which everyone has a stake. Last week, for instance, I focused on the fiery debate around stork reintroductions and, this week, I am looking at the racism embedded in the UK’s natural history collections.
I am a freelance journalist, but these are articles that I would struggle to sell to UK publications. Inkcap is an opportunity for me to tell the stories I think deserve to be told – and that you, my readers, believe to be important.
Each edition of Inkcap features a round-up of the week’s news, which I personally curate from around 200 sources, including mainstream and local newspapers, blogs, and non-governmental organisations. I also summarise reports and studies that have been released each week. I hope this will become a one-stop shop for those who want to keep abreast of what’s happening in nature and conservation, in a world where information is often scattered and piecemeal.
The middle of a pandemic may seem like a strange time to launch such an undertaking. In fact, it has given me time. Journalistic work is drying up, and I fear for the future of the media more than ever. Inkcap aims to ensure that in-depth coverage of environmental issues doesn’t disappear, even as layoffs are announced and freelance budgets are slashed.
Inkcap is free for now, though I have no funding and I am volunteering my own time. However, I am reluctant to become beholden to sponsors, and so I plan to move to a subscription model in around three to six months’ time – hopefully when most people are back on their feet after the worst of the pandemic has blown over. In the future, if I can persuade some people to pay a small monthly fee, then I can continue to provide independent environmental journalism for as long as my readers want it.
In the meantime, I hope you will let me prove Inkcap’s worth by subscribing here and following on Twitter at @inkcapjournal. You can read the latest edition online here; the next issue will go out on Friday. If you have any story tips or feedback, please get in touch at [email protected].
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This is a great initiative and if the stork article is anything to go by it will be well worth reading. It was balanced and presented both sides of the argument for a change, rather than the over-simplistic accounts I’ve seen previously. Looking forward to reading more in future.
Absolutely agree Ian. Just read the stork article too. In my ignorance, I hadn’t realised there was a controversy over their introduction, so I learnt that at least!
Good luck with this project Sophie.
Thanks Ian! I welcome future ideas for other thorny debates to investigate, too… 🙂
Sounds like a worthy initiative. Aren’t you rather undercutting yourself though with the usual photograph used by ‘conservationists’ of themselves grinning broadly in front of a landscape they can only have reached by producing massive volumes of carbon dioxide. The ‘h’ word springs to mind.
I notice some people, like Arka Kinari, have chosen to get consistent with their principles: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-52852377
Crikey you are a bit quick to start flinging around the ‘h word’ M Parry! You must know a lot about Sophie to have reached this conclusion. Maybe rather than looking for whatever you can find to knock her down you should encourage her for trying to do something positive and useful?
Incidentally the piece on the Arka Kinari people you admire includes this comment “Grey Filastine and his Indonesian partner Nova Ruth had spent years flying around the world performing at music festivals, playing their unique mix of traditional Javanese melodies and contemporary electronic music.” so presumably it would be possible to find pictures of them grinning broadly in some location they could only have reached by producing massive quantities of carbon dioxide. But so what? What people may have done in the past does not have to invalidate what they seek to do in the future. If you condemn everyone who does not meet some standard of ethical purity you may find you run out of allies.
I thought it was Yew Cogar Scar before I got back from SpecSavers
I spent 18 months living in America – this picture was taken then.
Thoroughly enjoyed the read so far Sophie and I will follow up most of the links. A great idea and well written good luck with it and I’m one of the Stork sceptics as most of the medieval illustrations are of Black storks not White.
For Heaven’s sake Paul, don’t go giving people ideas!
To be honest Ian I would rather see efforts towards creating enough wetland in Somerset or East Anglia to have Dalmatian Pelican back or to have WTE back inland in England as the sites named after it in Northern England are not likely to be suitable or persecution free Arnagill ( Masham Moors), Arncliffe ( Wharfedale) or the one whose name I can never remember above the A19 between Thirsk and Teeside.
The Roman accounts of early Britain also contain reference, according to the late James Fisher, of what was undoubtedly Spotted Eagle in the wet woodland of East Anglia and the Fens.
I received by first weekly newsletter at 08:31 this morning – it’s very good. I may not be able to resist paying to subscribe when that comes in in the autumn. Well done!
I’m glad you’re enjoying it so far!
If anybody wants inspiration on just what individuals can do, regardless of the corporate charities, which dominate funding then, read the blog on woodland rewilding, you don’t need vast amounts of land or money all you need is motivation to get your piece of heaven. Instead of writing about conservation – do it!
There used to be a very good online nature news platform a few years back that offered a digest of stories from both national and local newspapers – sadly, I can’t remember its name, and it stopped I think because of the ill health of its producer. It was particularly useful for keeping track of the discontent local people felt at some unspeakably ghastly action of slavish mainstream conservation dogma like tree felling, scrub clearance, fencing and grazing, to the detriment of the “wild” nature of the places these people had valued for years, all driven by agri-environment funding. It was a sharp learning curve for these local people to realise that they could not stop this, that consultation never came with a blank sheet to start with, and that there would only be one outcome with no compromise. This burgeoning, rumbling discontent passed by journalists on national newspapers who just churned the press releases of the NGOs. They still do.
You have made a great start, Sophie, in filling the void left by that platform closing down. I’ve got a couple of leads from your digests, so thankyou, and remember – Stork was introduced into the UK and Ireland in 1920 – the margarine, that is, made from palm oil, but a Knepp-version also has butter in it – I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!