Framing nature
Conservationist and author Laurence Rose’s new book, Framing Nature, puts the changing fortunes of some iconic British species in a wide historical and cultural context. Matt Merritt talked to him about the issues involved
We talk to conservationist and author Laurence Rose about his new book, Framing Nature
What was the initial inspiration for the book? Was it one you felt you HAD to write?
For my previous book, The Long Spring, I chose a simple narrative, a series of journeys tracking the arrival of spring south to north, through Europe. That enabled me to weave in other narratives, so that I could do justice to nature as
I see it, a simple joy at one level, and a complex tangle of stories and relationships at another. I think of it as a book about place-based conservation.
Framing Nature (conservation and culture) is similar in style, but the way the narrative is built up is very different. The conservation content and cultural perspective are no longer just subtly woven in. Both are an exercise in non-fiction story-telling, but Framing Nature as an essay collection is more overtly that. I tell the stories of nine species: four birds, three mammals and two invertebrates viewed through a cultural lens, and then in three more essays look horizontally across those stories to understand the state of nature as a whole.
As a career conservationist, it is easy to be dismayed at the state of the UK’s wildlife and the fact that most of the decline has happened on my watch. Instead of writing about conservation challenges in conventional ways, broken down into site protection, land management, species protection and the like, I have found it quite revealing to come at it from a different angle. I address four cultural themes – loss and recovery, conflict and coexistence, small matters (i.e. learning to love invertebrates) and hope.
In the Corn Crake chapter, you say that in the 1980s, conservation became less esoteric, that it was becoming about species such as House Sparrows. Alarming as it is, is that an opportunity to engage more people?
It is sobering to think that the distinction between the rare, range-limited habitat specialist, like the Corn Crake of today, and the widespread, countryside generalist, like the Corn Crake of 130 years ago, is sometimes a matter of timing. Just like the recently-departed generations who remember the Corn Crake, we are witnesses to a continually unfolding history. If the Turtle Dove is
the next Corn Crake, which species is the next Turtle Dove?
The pace at which species have been added to the danger list and the rate of decline since about 1980 has changed what conservation is, as a profession. At the start of my career, the public face of conservation was charismatic threatened species like the Red Kite or the Giant Panda. Then the wholesale decline of farmland birds became clear, and before long, people started worrying about sparrows and Starlings. Big Garden Birdwatch went from being a bit of family fun with a serious side, to serious citizen science with a fun side.
So, I think the engagement is there. The challenge now is to avoid a sense across society that loss is normal. For all the advances we can claim credit for, the fundamental drivers of loss haven’t gone away.
One of the things I liked about the book is that, with all the species concerned, you show how multi-faceted our impact on them is. Do you see too much of a tendency to look for simple causes and solutions to conservation problems?
It starts before that – in defining the problem. Is HS2 one problem or a thousand problems? Is the Hen Harrier threatened by driven grouse shooting or by field sports? Or by the fact that “land-based prerogatives have relentlessly narrowed in scope until barely any of the private privileges of land ownership are subordinate to any of the shared benefits of good land management”, as I say in the book.
I think the best conservation organisations, and especially my own, the RSPB, have this analytical rigour and scientific underpinning that is an essential basis for advocating solutions. I’m very open in my book in questioning whether that is enough. Well, clearly it isn’t. The temptation is to think that the rest is down to government to do the right thing. Since leadership in politics is a thing of the past, we can’t hold our breath, waiting. The current mixed messages and unconvincing rhetoric around restoring biodiversity, planning reform and agricultural reform leave me unimpressed.
Conservation organisations are much better these days at connecting things up, especially climate change and nature-based solutions. Then there’s Covid. While Framing Nature – conservation and culture was in production, I managed to sneak in a couple of pages of postscript. “Like some rare astrological alignment, a conjunction of the three great planetary concerns – economic, human and ecological well-being – [have] shown themselves to be a single, interconnected matter. The world’s governments will be judged, therefore, on the interconnectedness or otherwise of the response,” I said.
It comes at a time when cultural leadership is starting to fill the void left by the shrinkage of political engagement. Young people armed with social media and moral outrage are holding the rest of us to account. Give them the vote.
DO YOU SEE TOO MUCH OF A TENDENCY TO LOOK FOR SIMPLE CAUSES AND SOLUTIONS TO CONSERVATION PROBLEMS?
You also make the point with both Willow Tits and Nightingales that manmade landscapes – accidental landscapes, in many cases – are where they flourish, now. Can the rewilding movement play a part in creating more of those?
We could get sidetracked into definitions of manmade, accidental, (re)wilded, brownfield, semi-natural, wilderness, nature reserve and the like. Taking a step back, we need – as part of the conservation mix – approaches to land that are bolder, bigger, more experimental and less prescriptive, and we need a public investment system (notice I didn’t say subsidy) that allows that to happen. Conservationists are quite controlling, we need to channel that tendency where it helps and hold back where it hinders.
I’m slightly concerned that rewilding has become synonymous with reintroduction for some people, and could become a poorly regulated rich person’s hobby; we know where that can lead.
But generally, the private initiatives that are emerging from outside the conservation mainstream, and well outside government, are exciting, partly because they are unpredictable.
Your writing also seems to take a very landscape-wide view – although you’ll focus on one species, you set it in a very wide context (I really enjoyed all the Wheatear observations in the Corn Crake chapter, for example). Do we urgently need to start thinking in such landscape-wide terms?
No, because the thinking, with a fair degree of consensus, has been happening for some time. Sir John Lawton’s ideas in Making Space for Nature in 2010 were not new, but the genius was in the mantra he coined: More, Bigger, Better, More Joined Up. Governments have since signed up to this but have made heavy weather of delivering it. The Prime Minister’s recent pledge to protect 30% of England, and implicitly of the UK, for wildlife is good.
But only if it is done according to the Lawton principles. Most of it can be done with the stroke of a pen from behind a desk, but the real challenge is ‘better’. This is a very big task, given that about 80% of the land that currently has some form of protection is either SSSI in unfavourable condition or, especially, nature-depleted National Parks with a huge restoration challenge. On the other hand, it means that it isn’t a huge task to identify where this 30% would be, only what happens there.
On a personal note, I also enjoyed the many historical references (especially the early medieval stuff like connecting White-tailed Eagles to the Battle of Brunanburh). Are you a history buff?
Yes, very much. For a writer, history lends itself to story-telling and stories can lead to deeper understanding. The Whitetailed Eagle is a perfect example. If you go back 4,000 years (where the book begins, at the Tomb of the Eagles in Orkney) then it is a species we have loved and revered for 90% of the time and persecuted for 10%. So we shouldn’t think of our tolerance and awe for raptors as a new-found thing. Indeed, it has made me wonder how much ordinary people, whose voices we will never hear, actually approved of the systematic extirpation of this or any other species. We characterise today’s raptor killing by shooting estates as Victorian, but maybe it’s just a subculture, and we risk besmirching the values of ordinary Victorians.
Finally, what next? For you, and for the UK’s birdlife?
I’m part of a team in an exciting lotteryfunded programme called Back from the Brink. I decided some time ago that it will be my last salaried role in conservation.
It has everything I would want to bow out on: species recovery at its heart and partnership working across all the taxa. I should have been retiring at Christmas, but Covid has stretched the timetable and I’m going to be around until this time next year. After that, I’ll go back to where I started, as a volunteer, and more writing.
It’s exciting to see the many species that are responding to decades of research and concentrated intensive care: Bitterns and Bearded Tits, Nightjars and Wood Larks, Cirl Buntings and Choughs. The concern, of course, is where our relationship with nature in the broad sweep of the human landscape will eventually settle. If we extrapolate forward with no change, Armageddon. But since bold, radical ambition is needed to recover from Covid and tackle climate change anyway, it is obvious that we must apply it to nature, too.
I SHOULD HAVE BEEN RETIRING AT CHRISTMAS, BUT COVID HAS STRETCHED THE TIMETABLE AND I’M GOING TO BE AROUND UNTIL THIS TIME NEXT YEAR...