The joint NGO campaign to get a binding target for nature in the Environment Bill is a week old and has raised over 72,000 signatures. It’s a marathon not a sprint, and with collaborative campaigns different organisations do their running at different times. But this has got off to a good start.
Personally, I think this campaign needs another 180,000 signatures to be respectable and noticeable so there is a long way to go.
You can do your bit, please, by sharing the petition on social media and mentioning it to your friends and colleagues. Nature needs more protection and we need to get it in writing from politicians.
#stateofnature petition https://bit.ly/3kjLIsX
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There just seems to be a lack of urgency about this. I appreciate that within the 50+ groups signed up to this there will be a lot of overlaps in memberships, even so, with the RSPB at 1.2millon members and wildlife trusts at 800k, you would think that 250k wouldn’t be an unrealistic target.
There are quite a few groups that I haven’t even heard from yet. Neither do I think it a good idea at 72500 signatures to tell people that the target is 75000. Not very ambitious is it?
Yes, I know that when reached, they will move the target upwards, but it just seems to lack some omphf. Almost as if NGOs have given up whilst the tories are in.
Conservation apathy, petition weariness, media overload, all possible and very likely, but I think people are fed-up with being told what to do by a bunch of people and organisations who’s paid job –funded by us is to do something about it. Yes, you can blame government, but they’re the instrument of policy making and legal modification. Without doubt there are a lot of bills that could be reformed, but the government doesn’t own these reserves or land, it doesn’t implement the desert-like biodiversity management administered on these reserves. Look at those logos and those missing it add up the combined yearly Net Income very near 1 Billion pounds. You can do a lot of conservation good with that amount of money, but still these organisations Oliver Twistsque like still ask, “please Sir can I have more?” At some point we will need to decide the value whether we are happy with these charities as commercial institutions aimed purely at human enjoyment, or as functional organisations that can actually deliver what we pay them to do.
Thomas – you have a point, but it is a very small point. You’re about 40 years out of date if you think that the decline in nature can be fixed by individual organisations acting on their own or on their own land and without policy reform. That view is simply ridiculous. And so if we need policy reform then an Environment Bill, which we are told is going to fix things, is a wholly legitimate target for advocacy – and not just legitimate but important and necessary. The real enemies of conservation success are not the NGOs that try to change the system but those who say it isn’t needed or simply can’t be done.
It would have so much more impact if it was just about the nature crisis. There are so many other things which are causing the nature crisis, all of which will get ignored with no funding because of this obsession with an imagined climate crisis.