Zuzu’s petals
The Self-Isolating Bird Club was the online hit of 2020, but presenters Chris Packham and Megan McCubbin only have eyes on the future…
I’ve always loved this time of year – sharing a feast with the family, watching my son and his cousins playing with their new toys, and the chance to reflect as another year’s over, and a new one just begun.
Being something of a soppy sausage, one of my festive highlights is watching George Bailey (James Stewart), and his unbridled joy at finding that his mouth is bleeding. For those unfamiliar with Frank Capra’s 1946 masterpiece, It’s A Wonderful Life, there can surely be no more hopeful scene in Hollywood history than Stewart’s realisation that all is not lost. Far from it. In this moment, reality is revealed to George, and whaddya know – his life is full of wonder. After the year we’ve all just endured, I’m sure we could all do with a dose of good cheer to remind us, like George, that it’s not all doom and gloom out there. The efforts of conservationists at home and abroad are reaping remarkable rewards for any number of species. So let’s kick off the new year by celebrating these successes, and use this as an inspiration to make 2021 a year to enjoy life in all its rich and varied forms. After all, it’s a wonderful life...
Happy New Year!
“Every single person has the power to get up and make a difference.”
“Iwas the most angry young man,” Chris Packham says. “At times, I’ve become the most angry older man. But that anger, I understood a long time ago, it’s implicitly important that you don’t damage yourself with that anger, you don’t let it become a negative energy, you turn it immediately into a creative force.”
With a new book, Back to Nature, exploring how an increased engagement with wildlife benefits both ourselves and our environment, presenters and conservationists Packham and Megan McCubbin are talking positivity. Chris has just returned from the Isle of Wight, and is bubbling with excitement: “I saw a white-tailed eagle, can you believe it?” The reintroduced raptors are just one of the many projects in the UK offering a ray of hope for the future. But with a recent barrage of bad news, it can’t be easy to maintain a positive outlook…
Megan: We’ve got a long way to go, but there are incredibly positive stories happening all around us. So for me, I like to focus on those and wake up and figure out what I can do today that’s different from yesterday that’s going to make a difference. Because, ultimately, every single person has the opportunity and has the power, the potential, to get up and make a difference. No matter how small their actions might be, there is something positive and a benefit that can come of that.
How do you motivate yourself on the more difficult days?
Chris: They’re very few and far between. I mean, I can see things that will frustrate me and very, very rarely – once or twice a year – they’ll depress me. But I’m such a resilient fighter that, basically, I just don’t allow it to break my step, really. I mean, social media gives you access to some pretty horrific stories and images and those sorts of things, but you just have to become inured to them. I can’t afford to let any of those things get to me, to the point that they slow my desire for progress.
So if anything, in true punk styley, if they make me more angry, I just turn that energy into something positive. For me, that’s been a way of life since my teens and early 20s.
During the first lockdown, a lot was made of the idea that while we were all
indoors, outside our windows, nature was fighting back…
Megan: It’s not fighting back, it’s just quietly reclaiming, and I think that gave a lot of people the escapism, it gave a lot of people the hope that we needed.
I think if you give wildlife and nature the space, it will 100 per cent take over. I mean, look at the site of Chernobyl and how that has adapted so quickly, much quicker than I think any scientist expected. Now there’s foxes, there’s deer, there was a moose…
And I think, in lockdown, a lot of space that was next to wild areas, but was mainly taken over for human land use, became quiet. And therefore, the wildlife that lived next door was able to poke its nose in, have a bit of a wander and explore around. It wasn’t necessarily established in those areas but they were exploring and, given the chance, would have become established over time.
Chris: Look at the grass verges. We didn’t cut them, they were full of wildflowers that normally had their heads cut off by over-zealous councils, highways and private landowners. They couldn’t go out, the machines were grounded and, all of a sudden, we’ve got more insects buzzing around our roads. We’ve got a lot of happier people looking out and seeing all of those wildflowers and thinking, “Well, that looks nicer than a boring piece of verge.”
I think a lot of people woke up to the fact that we have to offer nature so little in order for it to gain so much, that all we needed to do was not cut the verges for three weeks, in one respect.
And equally, we can encourage it, we don’t just have to stop doing things, we can positively do things. We can restore habitats, we can repair ecosystems, we can reintroduce species. We’ve got all of these technologies at our disposal, we just need to get on with it.
Do you think the current ‘green revolution’, especially among young people, will succeed in making genuine change?
Chris: We know from scientific research that in order to change a population’s mind about something, you need 25 per cent or more of that population to change their mind. There are problems with the science and our understanding of it. And that is that at 24.9 per cent, you’re not going to do it, you need to get to 25. And the trouble for the campaigners is that they don’t know where they are. It’s impossible to canvas and census where a population stands on its beliefs. So you could be at 24.9 per cent and you just need to win that other fraction of a percentage point to get over the line. Or you could be at 14, 13 or 10. And that’s why some of these movements start backsliding, because people get tired and they get fed up with doors slamming in their face.
They don’t use that as an energy, they don’t use that to fuel their determination. They eventually get worn down, they grow up, end up wearing blue and brown, in the words of The Clash. But if you had that luxury at one point in your life, you don’t have it now. This is not about tomorrow, climate change is already here, it’s burning America, it’s burning Australia, it’s flooding Indonesia, it’s flooding Yorkshire. And the impact will be immediate and catastrophic.
And this is not my observation, this is global science presenting data that’s been analysed and peer-reviewed. There’s no ambiguity about it whatsoever. So it’s hard, but we don’t like things that are easy. Aldous Huxley said, “There’s nothing like a good struggle against contentment”.
“We had a goshawk fly into our window during lockdown.”
If you want 25 per cent of the population, you need to reach out to as broad a part of that population as possible. It’s no good preaching to the converted, it’s no good looking at focus groups within that population, because there simply won’t be enough people there.
For you, what are the big conservation success stories in recent times, here in the UK, that give you hope for the coming months and years?
Megan: Storks are back, that’s pretty cool. Chris: Eagles are back. And ospreys, in Poole Harbour.
Megan: There are so many conservation gems that are incredibly exciting and positive. For the first time, we have breeding white storks, on the Knepp Estate, the first time since 1416 – over 600 years – and they are breeding successfully, and they had chicks that fledged. So, that is an incredibly exciting thing to come forward.
You know, we moan that the beavers aren’t back properly yet but there are talks about them being more introduced. Recently, the beavers on the River Otter were allowed to stay. It’s all these steps that are important and are worth celebrating. Are there enough steps? No, but there are small ones that are going on. The eagles, that’s brilliant – eagles on the Isle of Wight.
Chris: We had a goshawk fly into our window during lockdown. A goshawk – a goshawk! When I was a kid, the idea that you’d ever have a goshawk flying into your window, that you’d have peregrine, raven, red kite on your garden list in the south of England, was beyond anyone’s comprehension.
So, we do see positive things.
I know what you’re going to say to me, you’re going to say ‘Yes, but, as you’ve already confessed, Chris, from the same time, we’ve seen catastrophic declines in turtle dove, 95 per cent’. Turtle doves nested in my school grounds when I was a kid and now there are none in Hampshire. But at the same time, that’s what I’m saying, you’ve got to try and balance these things out. And also turtle doves are increasing on that Knepp Estate. So, it’s not that we’ve lost them and we’ve got no chance of getting them back, they’re getting them back because they’re doing the right thing.
It’s just that not enough people are being encouraged or told or made to do the right thing. And that’s what we’ve got to work on.
Back to Nature offers practical advice for people who do want to ‘do their bit’, but is also a reminder of why nature matters so much to us…
Megan: We wanted to provide options for people to get involved, to start helping. But also remind them about why we’re doing this in the first place. Because, you know, it comes from a love of wildlife, it comes from being in awe of it, it comes from that fascination as a kid. Where Chris had a ladybird on his finger, or I had a pet tortoise, or whatever. It comes from those kind of interactions and then it builds up
Chris: Activism, we say in the book, you know, it’s putting a hole in your fence for hedgehogs. You’ve taken some action, you’ve done something positive for a species, an environment. Not just one, the hedgehog fleas that come with it and all of the things that it eats and the things that eat it…
FIND OUT MORE
Back to Nature: Conversations with the Wild by Chris Packham and Megan McCubbin is published by Two Roads.
“If you give wildlife the space, it will 100 per cent take over.”