The joint NGO campaign to get a binding target for nature in the Environment Bill has raised over 82,000 signatures; 72,000 in Week 1 and 10,000 in Week 2.
That may not sound great, but if you have been paying close attention, as I have, you’ll know that the first four days of the last week produced just a thousand signatures each and that rate doubled to 2,000/day for Friday-Sunday (traditionally actually quiet days for sign up). Two thousand signatures a day for a while would see the first major milestone of 100,000 signatures reached on 25 March. What would your guess be?
Personally, I think this campaign needs another 170,000 signatures to be respectable and noticeable so there is a long way to go, and quarter of a million signatures is the minimum acceptable. After all, we have most of the major environmental organisations committed to supporting this campaign…
But it’s a marathon not a sprint, and with collaborative campaigns, different organisations do their running at different times. I have privileged inside information on who is doing what, and to some extent who will do what in future, and I’m quite prepared for this total to keep increasing in fits and starts with occasional bursts.
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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I’ve signed but I’m not quite sure what it means. Bluntly, the conservation lobby is failing to present a compelling and vivid picture of what the future could look like. I’m convinced that its there to deliver: what could the future landscapes that save our biodiversity be like ?
I feel there are a number of factors at play. The biggest one is you can only go so far being against things – just look at Jeremy Corbyn. To create a compelling picture you need to work across as wide a spectrum as possible – but conservation has become quite inward looking. And you need to ride trends to your own advantage – the 1990s conservation response to the tree planting mania is a pretty good example of how not to do it. Whilst the failure to turn people’s day to day experience of their local environments into a movement for green space where people live is another.
Objecting always leaves you negotiating to minimise damage. Conservation needs to challenge with big, bright proposals: it’s absolutely right to oppose Sizewell C, but rather than accepting the usual trivial ‘compensation’ we should be pushing for change on the scale the biodiversity crisis demands: transformation of the Suffolk coast into a giant Minsmere of heathland and wetland habitats, a completely new and exciting landscape. Coincidentally, I’ve got the picture in front of me right now – an illustrated concept plan created by the Forestry Commission and partners over 15 years ago for a funding competition. It wasn’t the right time then – the money went to a reed bridge over a road – but surely it is now ? More and more similar concepts are starting to see the light of day – surely we can scale them up, bring them together to create the sort of future vision that will pull in the signatures ?