We are, by my calculations, exactly half way through this joint petition calling for a wildife-saving amendment to the Environment Bill and we have reached half way to the figure that I regard as respectable – a quarter of a million signatures.
Last week produced 11,000 signatures which isn’t bad, and another seven weeks of the same would see the petition just pass 200,000 signatures by the end of the first week in June. That, in the words of Shania Twain, don’t impress me much, given that the 50+ organisations supporting this petition claim to have over 8 million supporters between them. Now, that 8 million figure is likely to be wishful thinking as I believe it comes from simply adding everyone’s alleged memberships together. So many of us belong to several of the constituent organisations of Wildlife and Countryside Link so the actual figure must be much lower, but it will still be many millions. So where are they?
Another snag is that the Environment Bill, though a UK bill, has implications mostly for England so that’s only c80% of those many millions of members in rough numbers. Although, quite why a Scot can’t support better protection for English wildlife I don’t quite get – I support better protection for Brasilian wildlife weven though I don’t live there. And it’s not as though the English (or Welsh or Northern Irish) are shunned if the cap is handed round to spend conservation cash in Scotland.
It’s perfectly possible for this petition to do far, far better than it looks as though it might do today with a bit of extraction of fingers in certain wildlife and environmental NGOs. Indeed, that’s really all that is needed.
Please sign #stateofnature petition https://bit.ly/3kjLIsX – thank you!
“I support better protection for Brazilian wildlife even though I don’t live there.”
Indeed and one might add that the wildlife itself doesn’t recognise the lines on a map that we call national boundaries. For example many of the migratory birds that spend part of their life cycle in Scotland also spend time in England and vice versa. To take another depressingly familiar example, we know that Hen Harriers reared on one side of the border have an excessively high chance of getting shot on the other.