BirdGirl calls for improved rural access for minorities
ATEENAGE birdwatcher and environmental campaigner has called for improved public transport to help ethnic minorities access the countryside.
Mya-Rose Craig, known as BirdGirl, said some black and minority ethnic people see the countryside as “elitist and possibly racist”, and much more work is needed to overcome barriers and make the countryside more accessible.
“I live in the countryside and I probably shouldn’t tell this story – I remember being 14 and me and my mate bunked off school because we wanted to go to town to go shopping,” she said.
“We didn’t even do it because there wasn’t a bus – we were just stranded in the countryside.
“It shows there is a wider issue of a lack of public transport in the UK – loads of people don’t have cars, our train systems have been dismantled. People don’t have enough time, enough money and resources.
“There is also the other side of people being afraid of going into the countryside and something that people wouldn’t think to do in the first place.”
The teenager, from Compton Martin in Somerset, has been a keen ornithologist for almost all her life and is the youngest person to see half of the world’s bird species.
The 19-year-old has a large following on Twitter, where she posts as BirdGirlUK, and began running nature camps when she was 13.
Miss Craig has set up the organisation Black2Nature, organised two conferences, given more than 50 talks and written articles in her fight for equal access to the natural environment for all communities.
During an event at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Miss Craig, who is of British-Bangladeshi background, spoke of the challenges she faced in confronting racism in her work.
“I think it’s been quite a rough journey, to be honest, and I think it’s really important to acknowledge that,” she said.
“I think to acknowledge as well that I came in and I started this whole conversation around race and engagement.
“But retrospectively, it probably is to be questioned why a 14-year-old girl needed to come in to change the whole conversation around race in the first place and why there wasn’t someone already doing that.”
Miss Craig, who has recently started studying at the University of Cambridge, said the conferences she held had thrown up a number of challenges black and ethnic minority people face to access nature, such having the right clothing or being worried about dogs.
“We had mothers talking about how they didn’t want to let their teenagers, especially their sons, hanging out in green spaces with their friends because they were scared about them getting profiled by the police as being involved in gang activity,” she said.
“We had people talking about how they were terrified going into the countryside because they so absolutely saw it as a space that wasn’t for them. They saw it as elitist and possibly racist, and they were scared. There’s this massive range of issues that we have going on and we are slowly dealing with them and pushing back against them.”
Miss Craig was joined at the event by journalist Anita Sethi, who wrote a book about walking across the Pennines after being racially abused on a train.
“There is a real toxic idea about who belongs and doesn’t belong in the countryside. Black and minority ethnic people are treated as if they don’t belong in countryside,” Ms Sethi said.
“I think this stems from the toxic idea of Britishness.
“The toxic idea that black and brown people are somehow not as British as white people leads into the idea where we are regarded as belonging and not belonging.
“The countryside is seen as a very quintessentially British and English place – a green and pleasant land of England.”