‘Britain is too full’
Chris Packham on why we need to educate women to reduce the birth rate
At his home on the edge of the New Forest, the crusading environmentalist and television presenter Chris Packham is eloquently fulminating on a range of subjects he holds passionately dear. The badger cull: “It will go down as one of the country’s greatest shames in conservation.” The lack of diversity in his chosen field: “Conservation is all middle-class white people. If I do an event with kids, they all turn up in four-by-four Volvos.” The absence of a campaign to fight what he views as the nature-wrecking intensification of British agriculture: “We’re up against agrochemical businesses like Monsanto. That’s why no one’s getting involved: no one has the balls.”
Don’t get him started on the trapping of thousands of migratory birds on MoD property in Cyprus, a cause for which he has participated in a forthcoming documentary. “If this was drug trafficking, or human trafficking, that was going through the base, the MoD wouldn’t back down. But because it’s killing birds it’s, like [dismissively], ‘Oh, that’s a bit of environmental damage…’ ”
And, last but not least, another bird-slaying menace: cats. “It’s the giant fluffy elephant in the room, called Tiddles,” the host of BBC’s Springwatch says. “Neither the RSPB nor the RSPCA nor any of the other welfare organisations are brave enough to take it on.”
God bless Chris Packham, unarguably our natural world’s greatest, most high-profile champion. For sure this former punk – still a gig-going indie music fan – is a controversial, divisive figure. He angers the Countryside Alliance with his fierce opposition to foxhunting, and is the frequent target of social media attacks from the wider bloodsports fraternity. But this bothers him not a jot.
But what, I wonder, if he woke here in his isolated thatched cottage in Hampshire woodland to find a badger carcass pinned to his door?
“I’ve had it,” he shrugs. “They tie dead birds and foxes to my gate.”
Doesn’t he fear for his safety? “I’m not very good at personal safety,” comes the 55-year-old’s cheerful reply. “I don’t fear physical injury. Mental injury is far more dangerous.”
When it comes to “mental injury”, Packham knows of what he speaks. Last year, Fingers in the Sparkle Jar, a beautiful, vivid autobiography, was published. The memoir was not only a hymn to the animal-loving childhood of a lonely boy from suburban Southampton but also an exploration of the emotional challenges faced by a kid bullied for his hobbies and manner, and who was almost suicidally broken by the death of, first, aged 15, a pet kestrel and, later, in adulthood, two pet dogs, the second of those in 2003. After the latter loss Packham found himself considering an overdose; he only stopped because he didn’t have enough pills.
Equally, if you read closely, you could divine the factor behind the social awkwardness, obsessions and bouts of depression: Asperger’s syndrome.
When I talked to him last year, Packham revealed his “condition”, which was diagnosed in 2005, and talked about the challenges it brought him, professionally and personally. On Springwatch, the filming crew know not to mess with the contents of his precisely ordered location caravan. Asperger’s also means that personal interactions are a challenge.
Talking about his girlfriend, Charlotte Corney, owner of Isle of Wight Zoo, he told me: “She’s writing a parallel book – How to Live with a Person with Asperger’s. Whenever I say something inappropriate, she makes a note of it. But I can’t say that some of my behaviour doesn’t upset her.”
It’s in his nature, and his “condition”, to answer honestly, all the time. But the one question he ducked before was when I asked what his sister, the fashion designer Jenny Packham, thought about him writing the book, which exposed the difficulties in a childhood home shadowed by his monomaniacal behaviour. So, over cups of tea in his elegant cottage, I try again.
He pauses to gather his thoughts. “Just because you love someone and you’ve been with them all their life, that doesn’t mean you’re the best person to treat them.” Is he saying he pushed Jenny away? “I didn’t push anyone away,” he interjects. “It’s just that they can’t reach me. There are no humans there,” adds this man who freely admits he finds the company of animals easier. “I think Jen’s come to accept that I have chosen to talk about some of the things that she thought were painful. She texted me a little while ago, a reference to an article about ‘curing’ autism. I texted back saying: ‘That would have saved you a lot of boring dinner times.’ And she texted back: ‘I would have missed the colour,’ ” he says with a smile.
As we’re talking, his girlfriend comes through the door, flustered after an arduous trip on the passenger ferry from the Isle of Wight (she counted two giant rabbits among her luggage). She’s a cheerful soul, clearly well used to Packham and his ways. His other immediate family consists of his stepdaughter Megan, the daughter of a former girlfriend. She’s in her penultimate year of studying zoology at Liverpool University. Since he split from her mother 14 years ago, he and Megan have remained close.
For his part, Packham has no regrets about not having biological children. Overpopulation is something he finds seriously vexatious.
“Overcrowding in the UK will have a profound impact on the economics of this country. And this is not antiimmigration,” he says, “this is just an observation about the number of human organisms in a confined space.”
He’d touched on this point, and a quick-fix, when we spoke last year. “One thing we’re absolutely assured of is that if we could emancipate all the women in the world, the birth rate would drop considerably. Because educated women have fewer kids, for obvious reasons: they have a greater scope to enjoy a richer life. We know that for a fact.”
We take off for a soggy walk in the woods. We’re accompanied by Scratchy, his beloved black miniature poodle. Alas, his brother is no longer with us. “Itchy died just before Christmas,” Packham says. “He got cancer of the prostate. It was really… grim. Scratchy’s been distraught. We both have.”
Deep attachment to animals is a facet of Asperger’s. Packham is aware that this is both blessing and curse. Having been deeply traumatised by the passing of previous pets, he was determined to stop history repeating itself. So, every day of the life of “the boys”, Packham tried to prepare himself by imagining their deaths.
“It was a crude means to building some vision of the world without them… But to be honest, having lost Itchy, I’m not entirely sure that that has wholly worked,” he says, fighting back tears.
So, in his bluntly pragmatic style, Packham has been imagining his own death, too. As we speak, Itchy is lying in a freezer in an adjacent barn, in anticipation of being cremated. When Scratchy dies, he’ll be cremated, too. Then, at Packham’s own passing, his ashes will be mixed with the poodles’. The commingled remains of one man and his two dogs will be scattered in the nearby woods.
Is he worried that losing Itchy might tip him into depression again?
“Yeah, yeah… Well, I haven’t been the happiest bloke in the world since Christmas,” he says. “But I have got the perfect distraction at the moment, I’m largely preoccupied with Scratch.”
He’s also preoccupied with the imminent return of Springwatch. First up is an Easter special, filmed in Japan, centred on the country’s cherry blossom culture and biosystem. Then comes the series proper. Will there be any particular issues he’d like to see explored in this year’s run of the show?
“Well, we don’t do issues, really. We report on any science that might influence the issues. So on Autumn- or Winterwatch, I can’t remember which it was, we did a report on some new work that had been done with badgers, which showed that badgers and cattle actually never meet…” And he’s off again, eyes shining as he relays yet more irrefutable badger-saving, farmer-defying evidence.
The paperback of Fingers in the Sparkle Jar (Ebury Press) is published on April 6. Cherry Blossom: The Greatest Spring on Earth is on BBC Two on April 21; Springwatch returns to BBC Two on May 29
‘I don’t fear physical injury. Mental injury is far more dangerous’