Chris Rose October 2024

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Parts 1 and 2 of this blog series argued that real world political decisions show that in Westminster, politicians don’t really believe voters really care much about nature, so it can be treated as politically disposable, optional extra.

Consequently, the UK nature movement’s efforts to change government policies, such as the June 22 Restore Nature Now march, will be subject to heavy discounting, and often ignored.  Changing this requires politicians to encounter signs, signals, events and activities in everyday life, which convince them that nature really is valued as part of popular culture. This is not happening, yet.

Part 3 looks at how nature could be better embedded in popular culture in the UK, in seven sections.  Here’s a précis:

Section 1:  Introduction: A Campaign For Nature In Culture

The nature movement needs to think about and work to build and promote public nature culture, not just increase it’s memberships, funds or build better arguments. Unless prospective politicians experience this, they will not, cannot, change Westminster culture. The UK’s history changing culture of food, health and safety, inclusivity and protection of the built heritage, show it can be done.

The first and critical step is to increase and rebuild Nature Ability (aka Natural History Knowledge, Eco-Literacy).  The ability to recognize and put names to species of native plants and animals is the most basic ABC level.  A GCSE in Natural History is welcome but will not be enough, and studies show formal teaching has less effect on Nature Ability than social connections.

We need a national promotional campaign and programme for nature awareness, ability and understanding.  In 2012 the government spent £125m on adverts promoting the ‘Great British Countryside’ but to tourists, not UK citizens.

The great majority of UK children and adults have become more in favour of nature as a concept but unable to put a name to it, or tell if a place is rich or poor in nature, or if it is real or fake.  As a society it is as if we are increasingly in favour of literacy, while becoming increasingly unable to read.

Most people are probably better able to tell one wine or type of architecture from another, than identify plants or animals, or distinguish ancient woods from planted ones.  Most children cannot identify a Bluebell (their parents have not been tested).

‘Professional’ communicators in the BBC, Greenpeace, Department of Education, The Guardian and local newspapers, and outside the UK, even the UN and science publishers,  have shown themselves unable to tell wild from ornamental flowers, wild bees from honey bees, one common bird from another, or bees from wasps.    As a result, the Honey Bee became “The Wrong Poster Bee” in campaigns against pesticides, which led to a boom in Honey Bee (livestock, not at risk) keeping, which itself threatens endangered wild bees.

UK culture places greater importance on knowing about references to nature in literature, such as Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils, than being able to tell a real Wild Daffodil (the sort he saw), from a ‘fake’, an ornamental variety.  Editors and others would not tolerate such ignorance in covering art, sports or politics.  This nature ignorance undermines attempts to protect nature.

Section 2:   Missing The Garden Opportunity

An incidental demonstration of both the potential of nature ability and its present disconnect from political machinery, occurred in Spring this year, when people in the UK noticed a marked absence of insects, especially bees.

Mainstream NGOs and the media said very little about the UK’s 2024 ‘Silent Spring’ while they were focused on an impending General Election and policy.  A massive reduction in insects, especially bees and butterflies, was observed and discussed on social media by wildlife and nature gardeners (and evident even to visitors at the famous Knepp rewilding project) but it did not feature in either the policy asks of the Restore Nature Now march of 60,000 nature NGO followers  (22 June), or in or around the Election itself (July 4).

By the time organised ecological surveys intersected with the event, the opportunity to connect informed public concern (from people with a lot of very local nature knowledge) and a political opportunity, was lost.  If the nature movement is to make the most of citizen constituencies with real Nature Ability, it needs to become more agile.

Gardening is part of Popular Culture – things people do anyway. It’s a huge opportunity and on the upside, most gardeners (a much bigger group than even the most optimistic estimate of  NGO memberships) say they use their garden to feed, watch or encourage wildlife, 87% wanted to bring more wildlife to their gardens by feeding them or providing shelter, and 37% think wildlife is the best part about owning a garden, ‘rating it ahead of growing their own plants or vegetables’.

Yet the changes people make to their houses and gardens to help nature go unrewarded.  Each year £2.4bn is given to farmers to produce ‘public goods’ such as soil conservation, water management or more birdlife yet nothing goes to gardeners who do the same.  They should get a Council Tax rebate for garden and home nature features, such as Swift boxes, flower-rich lawns, green roofs and living places for insects.

Garden Centres and Supermarkets play a huge role in shaping the choice-architecture of UK gardening.  Yet much of what they sell damages nature.  Large NGOs such should start their own Garden Centres and encourage their members to use them, to leverage change in the sector.

Section 3:  Signalling Nature and Marking Moments

We live in a society estranged from nature.  Perhaps the lowest cost, simplest and quickest way to start to elevate the perception or salience of nature is to improve the visibility of what’s already there.  We put up Blue Plaques for notable people but most important nature goes un-signed, un-signalled.  We should, for instance, use existing Public Footpath signs to alert people to the locations of the many types of nature reserves and protected areas such as SSSIs, and include those on OS maps and apps.  We should also sign land with ecosystem functions  such as the US signing of water catchment creeks and forests (and in our case, peatlands).  And we should have a national system to recognize important moments in nature, such as a national Bluebell Day, week or fortnight.  The UK is the global HQ for Bluebells.

The BBC could bring back it’s historic live Nightingale Song Broadcasts, which from 1924 to the Second World War were hugely popular radio moments of truly popular culture.  Light Music programmes were interrupted to enable the country to share the moment and hear the Nightingales sing live.

Winter Starling murmurations around the Brighton Piers, Knot murmurations on the Wash and gatherings of Red Kites in Wales are examples of other other wildlife “spectaculars” which already exist as cultural touchpoints but deserve more recognition.  Night-time “dark sky” experiences including using radar, as is done in the US and Netherlands to reveal over-head movements of millions of migrating birds, could also provide an “expansion of nature experience” for the whole nation.

Section 4:  Nature Events in Popular Culture

Popular public activities and events which simply could not happen without nature say “nature matters to these people”, and so (unlike protests, marches, advocacy) are non-politically labelled opportunities for politicians and prospective politicians to see that “nature matters to these voters”.  There are already hundreds probably thousands in the UK but many need (careful) promotion and help.  Examples:

The Tenbury Mistletoe Fair in Shropshire is an example of promoting local identity (Tenbury sees itself as the Mistletoe Capital of the UK) and cultural reinvention (December 1^st is declared National Mistletoe Day) around a nature-based business (the annual Holly and Mistletoe Auction).

Volunteer-led Toad Crossings to help Toads across roads as they migrate back to their ancestral breeding ponds is an example of direct action to help wildlife which has become established as part of life and road-culture in hundreds of places around the UK.  At Oxton in Nottinghamshire, Margaret Cooper campaigned for an early spring road closure to protect toads in 1999, won the support of the Council, and her 25 years of running it was recognized with a commemorative plaque from the AA in 2024.

The Suffolk town of Harleston puts up flags to welcome Swifts back each May, as well as Swift nesting boxes and community activities about Swifts.

In the commuter Market Town of Petersfield in Hampshire, PeCAN, a group which mainly formed from Councillors and others who met through Extinction Rebellion, turned their attention to local nature and environmental action which now includes regular Eco-fairs, housing improvements, distribution of thousands of free fruit trees for gardens and native hedging plants, a community cafe and work to reduce pesticide use in the town and increase wildflowers in road verges.

In the ‘Golden Triangle’ villages of Gloucestershire, Dyfra works to bring back the native Wild Daffodils (ref Wordsworth) which made the area famous with Victorian and early C20th visitors who came by rail, and replace ornamental daffodils which threaten to eliminate the wild ones through hybridization.

In a non-place-based example, Buglife and the Kent Wildlife Trust enlist car and van drivers to run a national insect survey ‘Bugs Matter’ by counting the number of insects ‘splatted’ on their number plates.  This provides important nationwide data on the decline, and potentially any recovery, of our insects.  Tens of thousands of drivers have taken part since it was started in 2003 by the RSPB, as the ‘Splatomer’ campaign.

Since 2001 the Fairyland Trust has run magical-days out for families with young children, mixing with the entertainment, food, games, music and activities of traditional Country Fairs, with magical-make nature workshops such as Magic Wands, all to increase the Nature Ability of children (and parents).  Hundreds of thousands of people have attended these ‘Fairy Fairs’, and since 2010, a resurrection of the original nature based autumn Halloween celebrations, in The Real Halloween, which also promotes dressing up without use of any new plastic (shop bought costumes being largely plastic and mostly used only once). It’s aimed at a core audience of the ‘esteem driven’ and ‘aspirational’ mainstream, and the Trust now has a Wildflower Fortunes Caravan engaging young adults with wildflowers at festivals.

Section 5:  Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

As the wildlife gardeners of Twitter showed during the ‘Silent Spring’ of 2024 (Section 2), Natural History is alive and well in the UK, and with new audiences not just established Natural History Societies.   But the Nature Ability of these groups is the exception rather than the rule.

From the Celts and Anglo-Saxons, through 1066, Shakespeare’s time and into the C20th, nature knowledge was far commoner in the past and has left its traces in traditions, speech and practices we no longer consciously associate with ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ such as “touch wood” for luck. Modern psychological and cultural studies show this knowledge was acquired through the learning process known as ‘prediction error’, in which people notice anything new or different, such as the missing insects of 2024, and also how people learn to identify species with the help of relatives of friends with nature knowledge.

In the C19th Natural History became hugely popular in the newly industrialised UK  and seen as important as part of citizenship by local and national politicians.  It was taught in schools and universities but in the C20th its learning methods were seen as inferior by the newer sciences testing hypotheses and Natural History fell from favour.  Max Nicholson saw Natural History Societies as “utterly useless for the new age of conservation” compared to ecological science, when he engineered much of the modern nature NGO and government system from the 1950s-1970s.

In tackling the modern epidemic of nature-blindness with Nature Ability, and embedding nature in popular culture to engage citizens, Natural History has far superior potential to teaching ecology, being socially accessible in time and space, and with a culture allowing emotional engagement rather than professionalised detachment.

Section 6:  Organising Strategy and Ways And Means

This section makes three strategy suggestions, addresses what people need to know in terms of Nature Ability, and makes six suggestions for early political asks intended to prick the interest of politicians and align the nature movement to any campaign effort.

It suggests:

• Organising effort at the National Character Area level, larger than parishes, smaller than counties, and defined by nature and land-related cultural heritage
• Using the Cultural Dynamics Motivational Values system to engage all the main psychological groups in society, not over-focusing on the Pioneers who are already over-represented in the nature movement
• for PR, the NGOs and those they work with should act like a business group, as they would be taken more seriously by politicians. The nature NGOs should increase their soft power capabilities, as farming does. In this last respect, the nature movement should lay claim to being the social and political Stewards of Natural Capital.

To increase Nature ability, the first things people need to know are the basic ABC of species identification, focused on native wildlife where they live (in their National Character Area). Then understanding how they relate to each others, their habitats and landscapes. In literacy terms, perhaps the ABC is species, the sentences are habitats and the paragraphs are landscapes.

The six proposed political asks are:

[1] A government funded campaign to promote Nature Ability, including an above-the-line advertising campaign, and a multi-facetted social marketing campaign and a wide array of instrumental projects.

[2] Council Tax rebates for nature- and ecosystem-boosting features (biodiversity enhancing, flood reduction etc) of homes and gardens, and financial incentives for the same ‘public goods’ contribution made by agricultural land owners by farmers but for owners of other land, such as businesses and Councils. Non-agri Environment Schemes – ELMS 2.0.

[3] Recognition of Ecological Land as a category in statutory Local Plans, and its protection from development.

[4] Signing of National Character Areas and all nature reserves and higher level ELMS schemes and nature relevant features, indicating any sort of public access or visibility, (eg along roads, and Public Footpaths using existing signs) linked to the MAGIC system (eg a more user friendly app), including for example Ancient Trees.

[5] A system of official recognition for nationally and regionally important annual moments (a sorted of nature-centred equivalent to Bank Holidays or the Blue Plaque scheme), including a National Bluebell Day.

[6] Issue all voting age adults with a National Character Area natural identity certificate, citizenship profile or identity card (see p.5), and decide (via a Citizens Assembly?) ways it could be used with some ‘official’ recognition, beyond just inspiring questions in pub quizzes’.

Section 7:    Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

As there is no national promotional campaign for nature and no systematic effort to increase Nature Ability, Natural History Knowledge or Ecoliteracy, no, we are not doing this already.

Although many activities of nature NGOs and government bodies have some effect on signalling nature or increasing Nature Ability, even taken together it is plainly not persuading politicians to take nature sufficiently seriously, or tackle the national deficit in ability to recognize and understand nature.

The section uses the case of a fairly Business as Usual scheme, ‘Back from the Brink’, to make the case that routine NGO activity and government funding will not achieve such objectives because despite some rhetorical garnishing about community and public engagement, it is not what they are designed to deliver.

It concludes by suggesting that the nature movement takes inspiration from the establishment of the The Lottery back in 1994, by then Prime Minister John Major:

‘Experience of working in the Treasury, convinced him that the Treasury would never give ‘more than scraps’ of funding to the arts, and he wanted to ensure ‘a rebirth of cultural and sporting life in Britain’. The Heritage Lottery Fund could now be part of the answer to the nature ability deficit, and a political realisation that nature is important to voters is a pre-requisite to restoring nature in the UK’.

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Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

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Note:

The first post, ‘Focus On Culture Not Policy To Restore UK Nature’, from August 2024 is at https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/?p=3115 .  The set of seven sections of the second post run in sequence from https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/?p=3381

Links:

1 – Introduction: A Campaign For Nature In Culture

Culture and Nature – Section 1 – A Campaign For Nature In Culture

2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity

Culture and Nature – 2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity

3 – Signalling Nature and Marking Moments

Culture and Nature – 3 – Signalling Nature And Marking Moments

4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture

Culture and Nature – 4 – Nature Events In Popular Culture

5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

Culture and Nature – 5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means

Culture and Nature – 6 – Organising Strategy: Ways and Means

7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

Nature and Culture – 7 – Aren’t We Doing This Already?

PDF download links:

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Summary-Nature-Culture-and-Politics-blogs.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-1-Campaign-for-Nature-in-Culture-Introduction-.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-2-Missing-The-Garden-Opportunity.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-3-Signalling-And-Marking-Moments.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-4-Nature-Events-In-Popular-Culture.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-5-Why-Conservation-Should-Embrace-Natural-History.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-6-Organising-Strategy-and-Ways-and-Means.pdf

https://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Section-7-Afterword-Arent-we-doing-this-already.pdf

ends

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Chris Rose  10 October 2024

This is Part 3 of a series of posts on Politics and Nature (Parts 1 and 2 were published on 27 August 2024 as Focus On Culture Not Policy To Restore UK Nature).  Part 3 is in seven sections.  This is Section 1.

Subsequent sections (follow this post in order)

2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity

3 – Signalling and Marking Moments

4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture

5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means

7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

 Section 1 –  Introduction

The first part of this blog argued that the impact of UK environment NGOs on government policy has long been limited by a Westminster political culture which disbelieves its claims to represent significant public support.  It gave examples of how ‘for decades UK politicians of both main UK Parties have treated the environment and particularly nature, as a politically optional and ultimately disposable ‘priority’’.

It also argued that ‘with nature almost absent from social connections between voters and their political representatives’ government environmental policies ‘are only weakly accountable to public opinion’.

So long as this political conviction remains in place, mobilisations and marches for nature, lobbying on policies, opinion polling, an avalanche of nature-celebrating books, data-rich reports on the State of Nature, and other calls for action are all subject to heavy discounting.  In effect, the pro-nature movement has limited political capital, compared to other calls on the government which are more present in social connections between voters and politicians.

This part looks at how we could make nature less invisible, and more embedded and expressed in everyday social culture, so it reaches politicians ‘bottom-up’.

By ‘culture’ I don’t mean ‘high culture’ as in The Arts and Literature, or ‘alternative’ inter-personal philosophies of living more ‘naturally’ but what most people do day to day, hour to hour, week by week, month by month, at work, rest and play: how we spend our time and money for instance on our homes and gardens and in our spare time, how we mark important moments and places, and how that evidences our connections to nature, and actions people are taking to value, protect and restore it.

Such ‘wrap around’ social evidences are needed to make the policy efforts of our environment groups more effective, and could be more powerful and cheaper, than trying to increase the membership of environmental NGOs, although it might also have that result.  To do this we don’t need a culture-war about nature but we do need a cultural promotional campaign for nature.

What Would Success Look Like?

We will know if it’s worked, when it passes ‘The Weekend Test’.  If, when one politician asks another, “What did you do at the weekend?”, they become as likely to respond with something nature-related that they came across, or did with their friends, family or constituents, as to mention a trip to an opera or a football match, attending a County Show, or getting tickets to Wimbledon. Then we’ll know the UK has a politically mainstream nature culture. (Believe it or not, we once did have something like that).

The Challenge

To embed nature in culture – in things people do and take as normal –  I suggest we will need:

• Increased public nature ability to reverse the trend to nature blindness and enable people to be ‘good at nature’. Starting by being able to recognize, name and understand the native plants and animals where they live: the ABC of nature literacy and ability
• Salience: existing nature and conservation efforts need to be more visible and perceptible: sign-posting and signalling them
• Connecting Opportunities and events involving nature, in mainstream culture; connecting to things people do already, building on historic nature culture and place-based identities, and strengthening pro-nature ‘start ups’ which are themselves potential culture-makers
• Organisation of a movement wide campaign effort
• Political asks which can be pressed on government in the near-term, to give the campaign political traction, and align the nature base and organisations themselves

As the first part acknowledged, creating these social signals would be a long-game, not just a one Parliament project.  In fact to be most compelling, such evidences need to emerge from activities, events and behaviours which do not signal a political ask but are just social facts.

The near but not quite complete disappearance of nature from our culture has been a long and gradual process, involving an industrial revolution, a couple of agricultural revolutions and several technological revolutions.  Now there is a counter revolution which we can make use of.  It’s still in the foothills but it creates hand-holds and stepping stones, some revitalising old nature culture, others creating new initiatives.

From a management point of view, organisations need to recognize that while this would be a political project it’s not one to be left to the few NGO staff working in ‘The Political Unit’.  Many of them are ‘policy experts’ and have a brief to try and achieve policy outcomes but  it’s not about policy.  In the words of former Prime Minister Harold Wilson ‘policies without politics are of no more use than politics without policies’, and  here, the deficit is politics.

But in this case the politics part is about making nature culture, and the people best able to do that may be fundraisers, marketers, communicators and ‘front of house’ staff who understand people, not policies.  ‘Changing culture’ may seem an alien concept to civil society groups more used to thinking about ‘saving Red Squirrels’ or changing farm subsidies but it happens all the time. Take food for instance.

Changing Food Culture

The last few generations have seen a change in British food,  noticed even by some foreign visitors.   In his book Ravenous, on food, health and farming, Henry Dimbleby, the chef and restaurant entrepreneur turned environmental food system advocate and ‘Food Tzar’ under the Conservatives (he resigned in frustration), says of food culture:

Good food cultures don’t just happen: they are made by us … It is sometimes said that Britain ‘lacks a proper food culture’ … but … ours has changed enormously over the centuries … The British were once envied by the hungry French peasantry for our comparatively abundant food, our farmhouse tables laden with suet puddings, savoury pies and joints of beef.  But the Industrial Revolution … created a mass movement of the population away from the countryside.  The resulting shortage of workers meant that food had to be imported from the colonies and beyond.  The rural poor, who had eaten frugally but from the land, were replaced by the new urban poor, who often survived on little more than bread and tea.  As a nation we became severed from the rural cuisine that had been our forte.  It could be argued that we have never fully recovered …’.

Dimbleby highlights the case of Japan as a country which changed its food culture in several steps of ‘deliberate state intervention, as well as historical accident’.

To summarise his account: first, when Japan opened up to foreigners in the late C19th and early C20th its government advisers were struck by the strength of foreigners, and argued the Japanese should drink more milk.  Second, in 1921, the Japanese army, ‘concerned at the state of malnutrition among its recruits’, recommended soldiers eat more protein and fat, and this was promoted to the population in government radio broadcasts and through public cooking demonstrations.  Third, after WWII, defeated starving Japan got US food aid for school meals, and, as Japan got richer in the 1950s, citizens mixed Western and Japanese food styles. Fourth, in the 1990s Japan introduced rules to limit the influence of supermarkets and junk food, and law requires citizens to maintain a healthy weight.

In the UK, it’s the accident, or at least the market bit rather than the government bit which has made most difference to food culture. Dimbleby describes how immigrant Indian, Chinese, Turkish and Thai restauranteurs seized an opportunity to bring ‘foreign food’ to UK streets in recent generations.

At the same time real increases in income and much reduced costs of flying led to mass tourism and adoption of new tastes first experienced abroad (this is me not Dimbleby – see values changes in the run up to Brexit).

So when I was a child in the 1960s, working- and lower-middle class English people drank wine only at rare special occasions and then, we chose from three sorts: red, white or pink. Time spent in Europe on holiday changed tastes, and in the 1980s cheaper imports from Australia were promoted by Supermarkets and newspapers in Wine Clubs, so today most adults in the UK are probably better able to recognize a variety of wines than they are a variety of wild plants and animals.

Stimulated by the cost of obesity, cancer and coronary disease to the NHS which is a perennial concern of UK politicians,  UK governments have tried, albeit much more hesitantly than Japan, to encourage healthier eating.  They have set some limits on salt, fat and sugar and from 2003 ran a ‘Five A Day’ fruit and vegetables public education/ social-marketing campaign (5-a-day was an American idea from 1988).

Precedents For State Interventions In UK Culture

The UK has seen many state-sponsored interventions to change daily cultural practice, just not on nature. Today for instance we speak of ‘health and safety culture’ but Health and Safety, started with a few factory safety laws from 1802 onwards and was turbo-boosted by the Robens Report, under a Labour government in 1972.

The human cost of road traffic accidents led the UK government to run a famous public communications campaign (1971) ‘Clunk Click Every Trip’ on wearing seat belts, and has run campaigns on consumption of drugs and alcohol, including drink driving, and smoking, into the C21st.  The law in the UK has been progressively changed to promote inclusivity and prevent discrimination on grounds of race or sex, in the workplace and public life.  UK governments have intermittently encouraged energy conservation by citizens.  Many of those changes were partly stimulated by civil society campaigns.

1960s campaigns by the press, architects and the heritage lobby such as the Civic Trust, led to the UK adopting a system of Listed Buildings (it’s origins are older).   That system has not only been arguably more successful than we have with our ‘natural heritage’ but it also gradually educated the public, norming and crystallising expectations.  So estate agents and buyers are aware of the difference between real Georgian and neo-Georgian homes, or real Tudor and Mock Tudor but hardly any would be able distinguish ‘original’ real ancient woods from planted ones.

A National Drive For Public Nature Ability

There’s little that Non-Governmental Organisations like better than asking governments to do things.  Too often it’s an easy but ineffective option but in this case it’s appropriate, and necessary, and an achievable objective (cheap for example, compared to the £2.4bn funds paid yearly to UK farmers and landowners).  An old-school above-the-line educational government public awareness campaign about UK nature, and specifically one designed to facilitate a larger programme of nature-ability, is needed.

Such a campaign should be an early ask from NGOs to government.  It would be a signal of intent that this is an important and overlooked issue, and create a space in which to convene a multi-actor multi-dimensional programme involving civil society, government at all levels, businesses and other actors.   So far as I know nothing like it has ever been done in the UK – except perhaps once.

If you live in the UK you probably missed this government poster

At first glance it could be an advertising campaign to get people to value and visit Britain’s ancient woodlands (woods that have always been woods – what in many countries are called ‘old growth’ forests). Just 2.5% of them remain.

In particular it could be to promote Bluebell woods, for which the UK is famous amongst botanists, as due to its oceanic climate, half of the world population of these beautiful flowers are found in the UK.

Bluebells in Foxley Wood, Norfolk

Carpeting the floor of some woods in April and May, in a blue haze of flowers, Bluebells are one of Britain’s best known, folkloric and loved wild flowers.  It’s not on the scale of Japan’s traditional Hanami or “flower viewing” trips to see blossoming cherry trees but many people make an annual pilgrimage to see the Bluebells in spring.  “Pilgrimage” is the word many of them use.  It’s a cultural, if not formally recognized event.  Consequently if a ‘Bluebell Wood’ comes under threat, it has an added cachet to help mobilise public support in its defence, compared to just ‘a wood’.

In fact, this advert was part of the £125m government funded ‘GREAT” campaign begun in 2012, the year of the London Olympics, to promote tourism.  Hailed as ‘the biggest longest ad for Britain’, it included posters, tv, print and cinema ads in seen in Beijing, Berlin, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Mumbai, New Delhi, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto but not of course, in the UK.

Seeing as a 2019 survey found almost half of UK children couldn’t identify a Bluebell, it’s a shame it wasn’t shown in the UK.

Is That A Bluebell?

Screenshot from Sky News (2019)

Sky News reported:

Half of children cannot identify stinging nettles, 65% wouldn’t know what a blue tit is, 24% do not recognise conkers and 23% do not know what a robin looks like.  Almost all of the children surveyed could not identify a beech leaf or a cabbage white butterfly, while 83% did not know what a bumblebee looks like.

That survey followed numerous others which revealed an epidemic scale state of nature blindness in the UK, affecting not just children but adults, including educators and university students enrolled in ecological courses.

A 2002 study by Cambridge University zoologist Andrew Balmford became famous for finding that children could identify more Poke?mon characters than native British wildlife.  In 2005 Anne Bebbington from the Field Studies Council showed that A-level school students and their teachers, as well as trainee teachers attending courses at Juniper Hall Field Centre, had very little ability to name ‘common’ wild plants. A third of students could only name three species. ‘86% of A-level biology students could only name three or fewer common wild flowers whilst 41% could only name one or less’. Bebbington also found that 29% of the biology teachers could only name three or fewer flowers.

A 2008 National Trust survey found just 53% of children could identify an Oak leaf, Britain’s national tree, and half could not tell a bee from a wasp.  The Trust went on to run a major effort to get children and families to spend more time outdoors in nature, but if adults can’t explain to their children what they are seeing outdoors, how will this be an introduction to nature or equip them to recognize changes in nature?

My 2014 post Why Our Children are not being connected with nature noted that 85% of UK adults agreed “it is vital to introduce young children to nature” but it was evident that this was not happening.

In a 2019 Oxford University project, Andrew Gosler and Steven Tilling quizzed 149 biology undergraduates about birds, trees, mammals, butterflies and wildflowers before they went on a residential field course.  Birds ‘were the best known by the students, while butterflies were the most poorly known group’ but only 56% of the students could name individual bird species rather than generics like ‘duck’, and for butterflies, ‘only 12.8% of students correctly named five British species, and 47% named none’.  Whether students came from rural or urban families only had ‘a small effect’ on their knowledge.

Sarah Wise and I started the Fairyland Trust, which engages families with young children in nature, using activities which embed basic natural history learning through making, in 2001.  It’s deliberately aimed at the mainstream families, engaging adults and children together. 70-90% of the 250,000+ people who have attended its events and activities, have had no previous contact with conservation groups. Over time we’ve learnt and progressively simplified the activities to assume less and less knowledge.  For instance, we discovered that almost nobody knew that butterfly or moth ‘food plants’ are what the caterpillar eats, not the flying adult.

In the early 2000s we were asked to take a Magic Wands Workshop to a Wildlife Trust reserve.  As Magic Wands involves choosing a wand of wood from a British tree, we asked the Education Officers which native trees grew on their site, and were taken aback when they didn’t know, and said they’d have to ask the warden.

At Glastonbury in the ‘Green Kids’ field, we met environmentally-aware parents who were astonished to learn that hedgerows held many different trees and shrubs (which we’d used in a Crowns workshop).  Seeing “hedging plants” sold in garden centres, they had assumed there was one plant to make hedges from.

In 2007, as consultants to Natural England (NE), Sarah and I invented an activity called Ecoteering, designed to enable visitors to recognize key nature features of NE’s National Nature Reserves.  Ecoteering works by using ‘navigation species’ to find your way from one ‘discovery’ feature to the next.  We tried out versions of it on friends and Natural England office staff, and were surprised when one of the latter commented that the navigation species (shown on a photo card) were too difficult to identify, and to distinguish Bracken from Heather would be a role for “a specialist”.

From Navigating Nature in Ecos magazine – opening a ‘discovery box’ on an Ecoteering trail for Natural England

But what does it matter if children, and the adults they become, can’t recognize their own country’s plants or animals?

The Wrong Poster-Bee

In 2010 Friends of the Earth (FoE) asked me to map out possible campaigns they could develop to ‘get back into’ the issue of biodiversity (ie nature).  I suggested quite a few but noticed that whenever I told any non-specialist about the project, they usually said “oh you mean bees”.  It was already a zeitgeist issue, because bee-keepers were reporting ‘collapse’ of their colonies, and a few scientists were fingering agrichemicals as the likely culprits.  The next year (FoE) asked me to outline a bee campaign strategy, and they executed a campaign with some success.

Many more campaigns followed (some such as by Buglife, preceded it). Campaigns to Save the Bees bees from ‘bee killer’ (Neonicotinoid) pesticides became a worldwide phenomenon in the 2010s (see this on some of the history).

Bumble Bees, and hundreds of other types of wild bee, are in decline in many countries.  In some cases they have been reduced from species widespread before agricultural industrialisation to tiny vulnerable populations (such as the Great Yellow Bumblebee, reduced by 80% in the UK).  Three UK Bumble Bee species have become extinct. By 2019 the Large Mason Bee which used to be found in southern England and Wales and the Six-banded Nomad Bee, formerly ‘fairly widespread’, were each confined to single sites.

The success of campaigns in generating public interest led to politicians (including Boris Johnson as London mayor), the media and individuals to promote bee-keeping, especially in urban areas.  This increased bee numbers but of Honey Bees, not of wild bees.  The campaigns to ‘save the bees’ often used images of  Honey Bees which are reared in artificial hives.  Honey Bees were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and are more like livestock than wild animals. They do not need rescuing. In fact like many agricultural animals they compete with wildlife for food.

Above,  for reference, is a Bumble Bee with a Honey Bee

Find a basic UK bee identification chart here. A few truly wild Honey Bees do exist in the UK but are nowadays very rare

‘Saving Chickens’

The US Sierra Club pointed out in 2018 that studies in California, Canada, Ireland and England found that wild bee numbers dropped as farmed bee numbers increased, and wild bees contracted pests and diseases from Honey Bees.

 “Honeybees are not going to go extinct,” said Scott Black, executive director of the US Xerces Society an invertebrate conservation group. “We have more honeybee hives than we’ve ever had and that’s simply because we manage honeybees. Conserving honeybees to save pollinators is like conserving chickens to save the birds.”

In 2018 Greenpeace US drew criticism from a Cambridge bee researcher for featuring only agricultural Honey Bees in its SOS Bees campaign material (no longer online).

In 2019 the Guardian reported:

… growing concern from scientists and experienced beekeepers that the vast numbers of honeybees, combined with a lack of pollinator-friendly spaces, could be jeopardising the health and even survival of some of about 6,000 wild pollinators across the UK.

Kew Gardens’ State of the World’s Plant and Fungi report warned: “Campaigns encouraging people to save bees have resulted in an unsustainable proliferation in urban beekeeping. This approach only saves one species of bee, the honeybee, with no regard for how honeybees interact with other, native species …”

and

Dale Gibson of Bermondsey Street Bees, a commercial beekeeping practice with a focus on sustainability, says they have reduced their hives in London by a third to alleviate the overpopulation crisis. He explains how the dietary requirements of honeybees can make competition for scarce food resource extremely fierce.

“Honeybees are very efficient, almost omnivorous consumers of nectar and pollen; they are voracious,” says Gibson. “There is no off button. They will carry on consuming what’s out there as long as it’s out there. Just to stay alive each beehive will consume 250 kilos of nectar and 50 kilos of pollen. If you have a hive of 70,000 bees, that’s 70,000 times four or five cycles over a single season. You are talking about almost half a million bees that have got to be fed.”

[In contrast even a large a colony of the Buff Tailed Bumble Bee, the commonest species in the UK, will only hold about 400 workers].

The Guardian also noted that:

‘While the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization reports there are more than 90m honeybee hives globally, many rarer native pollinators are in increasingly precarious positions’

So the Honey Bee was the wrong poster bee. Yet like an out of control meme, the Honey Bee continues to be promoted as a proxy for all the wild bees and other insects under real threat from pesticides and destruction of habitat, mostly through industrialisation of farming.

Even now, the UN picks a Honey Bee to represent bees for its World Bee Day , although World Bee Day 2025 information resources created for the Sustainable Development Goals by RELX (formerly science publisher Reed-Elservier),  accidentally uses an image of a wasp colony instead:

Too late, conservation groups were left trying to qualify the story and point out that Honey Bees are not even as important for crops as is often assumed. In 2024 The Wildlife Trusts said  ‘Honeybees are mostly kept in managed hives, and are likely responsible for pollinating between 5-15% of the UK’s insect-pollinated crops. That leaves 85-95% of the UK’s insect-pollinated crops relying on wild pollinators …’..

Tolerating Nature Blindness

The Wrong-Poster-Bee story shows that conservation efforts can be derailed by an inability to distinguish one plant or animal from another, in other words by nature blindness or a lack of nature ability or literacy, or as it used to be called, by a lack of Natural History knowledge.

When the ‘professional’ communicators and educators who relay the ‘messages’ of the nature movement to the whole of society are also unable to tell one creature or plant from another, it undermines campaigns or programmes designed to protect or restore nature.

Mistakes in the UK media regularly provide examples.  Here the EDP, Britain’s largest regional newspapers, provides picture of a Blue Tit to illustrate a story about Bee Eaters.

Not knowing what a Bee-Eater looks like is easily forgiven, as they rarely appear in the UK but the Blue Tit is almost ubiquitous across the country.

With negligible nature ability, people look out of their car windows and make sense of what they see. Understandably, apparently ‘wild’ creatures or plants are likely to be taken as natural.  Many for instance think that Pheasants are wild British birds because they seem to be free-living but Pheasants are not native or wild: they are mass-reared and released livestock.  This misapprehension extends to some producers of ‘educational’ materials and its seems, the BBC, which has awarded it the epithet ‘British’.

Millions of (Ring-Necked) Pheasants are released for shooting each year, with an estimated biomass (weight) equal to twice that of all other breeding birds in Britain.

As the Pheasant is large, obvious and relatively tame, it’s a bird likely to be seen by people driving in the countryside.  Like mass-released Honey Bees, Pheasants are voracious feeders, only not on nectar.  A study from Belgium suggests that wild snakes and lizards have disappeared from areas with large scale Pheasant releases.

David Attenborough’s nature programmes are one of the BBC’s most valuable assets but this doesn’t mean the BBC is nature-literate.  A BBC News voiceover confused Great Crested Grebes with Swans in reporting the results of the biggest UK wildlife photography competition:

Meanwhile, in 2023 the UK Department of Education and The Guardian did not seem to understand the difference between foreign ornamental flowers and native wildflowers.

One reason this matters, as mentioned above, is that many native insects reply on specific native plants as ‘food plants’, while the adult stages may use nectar from many flowers.  Attempts to re-create ‘lost meadows’ (97% of traditional UK hay meadows have been destroyed) or use your garden to help insects will not work if the wrong plants are used.

Proxy Nature

Like most nations, the UK has become progressively ‘greener’ as measured by awareness of environmental ‘issues’ including saving ‘forests’ and ‘nature’, or  willingness to embrace choices such as renewable energy or greener consumer goods.

Yet at the same time the UK has become more nature blind: it is like a society which increasingly celebrates the importance of libraries and literature while simultaneously becoming less able to read.

It’s routinely assumed that because nature is green, and green is good, all that’s green is nature, even chemically sterilised industrial farm landscapes.   Hence the political traction of ‘Green Belt’ and ‘Grey Belt’ discussed in Parts 1 and 2.

‘Nature’, ‘the countryside’ and ‘the outdoors’ have become increasingly synonymous, making it possible to be in favour of them as concepts, and not distinguish between proxies (such as ‘green spaces’) and the real thing.  Launched by then Prime Minister David Cameron, the ‘GREAT’ campaign promoted the ‘great countryside’, and it’s ‘inspiring landscapes’ as one of ten reasons to visit the UK.

The official press release encapsulated the essential ‘greatness’ of Britain’s ‘countryside’ in these words:

‘Countryside: From Constable to Wordsworth, the British countryside has inspired some of the world’s finest artists and poets’. 

True but also indicative of the relative value placed on nature in C21st British culture: important for inspiring formal ‘culture’ as taught in History of Art or Literature courses, but not for itself, or for any direct social connection with nature.

So it’s assumed to be important to know about Constable and Wordsworth but Bluebells or other wildflowers, perhaps not.  Nature-inspired Arts are indeed, their own cultural form but they are only proxies for nature: we can keep the books, poems and paintings more easily than the real nature, just as Attenborough films may outlast their subjects.

The “host” of Ullswater Lake District Daffodils which inspired William Wordsworth’s poem starting “I wandered lonely as a cloud” in 1802, are real Wild Daffodils.  Once common, they are now rare (see ‘Golden Triangle of Wild Daffodils’ in the nature Events in Popular Culture section below).

Today Daffodils are the most commonly planted flowers in Britain but ornamental varieties, not the slighter, delicate wild ones.  Each March hundreds of visitor attractions offer Daffodil Walks, often promoted by reference to Wordsworth but how many visitors realise they are looking at fakes, not the originals?  Even in the Lake District, many roadsides are planted with fake daffs rather than the authentic Wild Daffodils which inspired Wordsworth and his sister.

Here’s Wordsworth’s poem summarised by ChatGPT:

‘The speaker describes a moment of solitude when he comes across a field of golden daffodils dancing by a lake, which brings him joy. The sight of the flowers, compared to stars, becomes a cherished memory that fills him with happiness during his reflective moments, highlighting nature’s uplifting power on the spirit’.

Would we tolerate eradication of the authentic Wordsworth, and its replacement with something which gets the general gist? And if not for the real poem, why for the real plant?

Ask editors from the BBC, The Guardian or the EDP or even web editors at the Department of Education, if they are in favour of banning bee-killing pesticides or creating more wildflower meadows and they’d probably say “yes”, as being in favour of nature in theory, has become a social norm.  Hence all the media coverage, albeit often inaccurate.  But in professional communications culture, getting nature wrong in detail seems less likely to be seen as shameful as a misplaced comma or apostrophe.   This only reflects how the importance of nature ability has dwindled in wider society.

Sunflowers by Banksy?

Thanks to our more embedded social culture of food, architecture, art and sport, editors would not tolerate cakes labelled as bread, a white wine as a Claret, a Tudor house as Georgian, a Van Gogh as a Banksy, or mistaking Wigan Athletic for Manchester City, or US Football labelled as Rugby.  But getting nature wildly wrong is trivial, or perhaps just seen as not being ‘nerdy’.

Conservation and environment groups should take nature-blindness and the de facto tolerance of it seriously, as it speaks volumes about nature’s lack of traction in wider society, including in politics.

Without an intervention to increase basic nature knowledge, they face an uphill task, when every time they want to engage a wider public with a campaign, project or make a case for action, it has to involve trying to explain almost every bird, animal or plant they are talking about, or accepting that audiences nod but really don’t understand.  The net effect of constantly raising concerns about things people do not understand, is of course to create an impression that your concerns are esoteric and marginal.

A Natural History GCSE Won’t Be Enough

The best known current attempt to increase Natural History knowledge through UK formal education is the Natural History GCSE for 16 year olds, developed as a result of a campaign led by Mary Colwell, UK, formerly of the BBC Natural History Unit. (More here).  It has been quite an achievement to steer her proposal through the educational system, not least as many educationalists themselves lack nature knowledge. The earliest that teaching of the new qualification will take place is 2026.

Mark Castle, of the small Field Studies Council which trains people in field skills, has argued for natural history to be available to younger children as well.  The Field Studies Council is calling for a national Skills for Nature Plan.

Any additional teaching of Natural History is to be welcomed as a contribution of overcoming the UK’s deficit in nature ability but despite what many adults might hope, it is far from a silver bullet.

Numerous studies have found that formal school education has a relatively weak effect compared to family influences.  A 2022 Swiss study of nature ability in teachers and primary children reported that ‘contact with living beings’ and ‘support of family members’ were important while ‘their school education was rather insignificant’.  The Oxford studymentioned earlier found that ‘family influences, self-motivation and knowledge of birds, rather than formal education, best predicted students’ overall Natural History Knowledge’.

In 2007 Sarah Pilgrim, David Smith and Jules Pilgrim from Essex University examined  ability to ‘identify local plants and animals, name their uses, and tell stories about them’ in four Lincolnshire villages, four suburban wards of south London, and three maritime towns in East Anglia. They found  ‘respondents with the highest ecoliteracy levels acquired it from parents and relatives, environment-based occupations, and hobbies’.  Those whose knowledge came primarily from TV and schooling were ‘least competent at identifying local plant and animal species’, with book-learning falling in between.

Knowledge of wildlife and in particular plants, is vastly greater in the few societies who still live a pre-industrial lifestyle. For instance ‘by the age of 8’ Zapotec children in Mexico ‘can reliably identify hundreds of wild plants and recall associated culinary and medicinal knowledge’.  We can be fairly sure that they acquired this knowledge from relatives, as would have happened in pre-industrial Britain.

My conclusion is that the adult community, including parents, grandparents and their friends, need to be involved in giving children nature ability, as well as teachers. More than this, ‘children’ should not be the only target in any UK campaign to enhance nature ability.  We have generations of adults who need to be reached, and that requires a multi-channel social marketing approach, in the same way that public health, occupational safety, food and other social and cultural campaigns have worked.

Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

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“Where Have All The Insects Gone?” – 2024’s Silent Spring

An incidental demonstration of both the potential of nature ability and its present disconnect from political machinery, occurred in Spring this year, when people in the UK noticed a marked absence of insects, especially bees.

Populations of many insects are notoriously volatile and affected by weather at any timescale but by May 2024 it was clear there were far fewer butterflies and Bumble Bees than usual in our own Norfolk garden.  Then we visited the Knepp rewilding project in Sussex and found much the same thing.  We met a fellow Knepp visitor who turned out to be a botanical surveyor from North Wales.  She told us she’d enjoyed hearing the nearby Nightingales but had “expected more abundance”.  I remember saying vague, and to my regret, slightly dismissive things about availability of blossom and insect broods but as we walked on, I had to admit to myself that she was right.   I too was disappointed that the UK’s most famous re-wilding site seemed short on insects (and Swifts).

On May 10 we walked round this orchard at Knepp and saw just one Bumble Bee, despite all the apple blossom.

In Hampshire on 22 May Melanie Oxley of PeCAN (see section on Nature Events) wrote in the Petersfield Climate Action Network blog:

‘A few days ago I led a small group of children armed with insect nets, into a meadow area in the countryside. It was a very warm spring day. In 45 minutes we had caught just two insects, a seven-spot ladybird and a small white butterfly.  Just one pollinator! There was the nature emergency staring us in the face. The children were disappointed and I was heartbroken’.

“Just one pollinator!  There was the nature emergency staring us in the face”.

Back in Norfolk on 25 May as I assembled a demonstration ‘Bug Hotel’ for the ‘Queen’s Garden’ at the Fairy Fair (26 -7 May) at Bradmoor Woods, it was obvious that there were almost no flying insects about.  In previous years on the same dates, we’d been worried about wild bees moving in before we’d have to dismantle and take it away, at the end of the Fair.  We had no such problem in 2024, though the display of wildflowers in pots had few visiting insects to show visiting families.

Also on 25 May, over in Bantry, County Cork in Ireland, Michele Hallahan posted “alarming absence of insects is starkly noticeable this year.  Birds are starving as a result”.

On June 9 Lyn Lambert tweeted from Blashford Lakes in Hampshire:  “insects were worryingly almost missing”, and on June 14 near Newcastle Upon Tyne, John McCarthy wrote: “My walk this afternoon … Bright and warm, slight breeze. But something was missing! INSECTS. There are no bees and hardly any insects … Rachel Carson #SilentSpring”.

On June 22, day of the Restore Nature Now march, @SophieAmandaH tweeted about an absence of larger Hawk Moths in her light trap.

It was Insect Week organised by the Royal Entomological Society from 23-29^th June.  Some people reported lots of insects, many more, very few.  It varied a lot from place to place and across species groups.  From Northern Ireland, meadow-restorer Donna Rainey, @donnarainey4 welcomed an uptick of insects after “a real absence of invertebrates locally for a few weeks”.

One thing that struck me was the number who had put their faith in wildlife gardening and local rewilding, seen it produce results, and were now in need of hope, reassurance and guidance.   “What to do about it seems unanswerable” said one, and another: “I already have an established wildlife garden, usually buzzing with bees and grasshoppers but nothing this year.  I’ve also rewilded other areas.  What can we do now?!”

The following day, Sussex University scientist and naturalist Dave Goulson posted his thoughts in the shape of a video on Youtube, Where have all the insects gone? (58k views).

“Social media in the last few days has been going absolutely berserk aboutinsects having disappeared about the lack of bees in particular in people’s gardens a few a few people disagreeing saying they’ve got plenty but most people saying they’re they’re really worried because they’re they’re not seeing any bees, [and] some say they used to a week or two ago they had bees and they all disappeared … and it seems to be widespread panic that we’re suffering from a very sharp kind of insect apocalypse, so I thought you might be interested in in my take …”

Goulson delivered a “don’t panic” message about the near-term absence of insects related to a “mild really wet winter followed by a really cold and wet spring” affecting both insects and the plants they rely on, followed up with “it’s worse than you think and we should be panicking” about the long-term trends (he guessed 90-95% of insects had been lost over 100 years) and drivers of decline like pesticides and climate change.

The difficulty with this, which long bedevilled climate change communications, is that humans are hardwired to respond to short-term threats, so there is no better time to respond to a gradual long-term change than when it’s acutely manifest in the short- term.   Nature groups need to work out how to do this, or else the shifting-baseline effect will mean the opportune moments to raise the alarm are never seized.

As with climate attribution, where thanks to the work of Friedi Otto and colleagues we now have near real-term attribution of climate change to real weather events, the ‘biodiversity’ community needs to be able to relate things people notice and are concerned about, to probable causes, while the relevant events are ongoing and the critical context (see CAMPCAT) validates the message.

As it was, the highly motivated engagement with the UK’s ‘Silent Spring’, which verged on the cusp of despair, drew a slow and strangely tepid response from established conservation organisations.

I am pretty sure because they’d also noticed but didn’t know what to say.  The UK’s mini ‘Silent Spring’ preceded and followed the June 22 Restore Nature Now march and yet it didn’t seem to feature at that event, although I may have missed it.

Insect week and the ‘missing insects’ were discussed on BBC Radio’s Today Programme on 24 June, and on July 19, Tony Juniper, Chairman of Natural England, wrote a personal Opinion piece in The Guardian Where are all the butterflies this summer? Their absence is telling us something important which reiterated Goulson’s emphasis on the longer term drivers.

Scientists and nature groups have some long-running structured surveys which try to measure the ups and downs of insects in a standardised way, to avoid relying on ‘anecdotal’ reports from Twitter or elsewhere.

In an August article also called Where Have All The Insects Gone?, Manuela Saragosa explored the world of insect-counting for the Financial Times.

She mentioned Britain’s Hoverfly Recording Scheme (Hoverflies are important and endangered pollinators and the UK Hoverflies Facebook Group has nearly 7,000 members) run since at least 1991, and the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, which has been going since 1976 (and has a sister more popular app-based Big Garden Butterfly Count 18 July – 10 August,  with 135,000 counts in 2023), along with the Rothamsted Insect Survey which as been using light and vacuum traps since 1964.

It’s data from such surveys which proves that the UK’s insects have massively declined.   But like most science, such surveys are run and analysed slowly and carefully.  On 29 July Butterfly Conservation, organisers of the Big Garden ‘Count did give a mid-survey update:

‘… very low numbers of butterflies have been spotted so far in their annual Big Butterfly Count. On average participants are seeing just over half the number of butterflies they were spotting this time last year.  The unusually wet and windy spring, coupled with the colder than usual temperatures so far this summer could be contributing to the lack of butterflies. While there is a chance of a later emergence of the insects if there is a prolonged sunny spell, numbers are currently the lowest recorded in the 14-year history of Butterfly Conservation’s Big Butterfly Count’.

[In October I was at a nature reserve with a summer population of Nightjars, birds which feed on night-flying insects.  I was told that scientists studying the birds had found they were badly underweight due to lack of food during the late May – early August breeding season and had probably not reared few if any any young.]

Opportunity Missed

But by August and September many nature oriented Twitter users were reporting slightly larger numbers of bees and butterflies.  It was, now, in communications parlance, a ‘falling’ rather than a ‘rising’ issue.  Engaging a potentially huge audience catalysed by those with the natural history ability, the time, the motivation and the stories – about the nature gardens and places they had lovingly created – was an opportunity missed.

2024’s Big Garden Butterfly Count results were published on 18 September.  They were confirmed as the lowest ever in the Count’s 14 year history.  Butterfly Conservation called it a Butterfly Emergency and Tony Juniper said it was a “warning” of what lay ahead but the findings were no longer so salient.  It was autumn.   The surge of concern driven by the unexpected stillness and silence of flower-filled gardens and hedgerows at the crest of spring and the height of summer was long gone.

People who are active custodians of nature in their gardens on a daily basis, are a growing cultural phenomenon.  They use social media on a short communication cycle.  There will be more opportunities for that to reach out to MPs, government, Councillors and Councils but not at the pace of formalised science, citizen-science or otherwise.

To embed this locally-rooted contemporary nature awareness in political consciousness, will require a more agile way to engage politicians while the public is actively engaged by real events.  In strategy jargon it needs a tighter OODAloop. While the 2024 Silent Spring surge existed, it had nothing to connect it to politics, not even on July 4, General Election Day.

My Twitter ‘nature sentries’ are not typical of the general population: many of them have devoted large amounts of time, effort and money to maximising the suitability of their homes and gardens to support wildlife.  Used to sharing examples of bees and other insects visiting their gardens, and in some cases able to identify a lot of insects and plants including wildflowers,  they are very ‘tuned in’ to nature and likely to notice unusual absences or changes.   But they are just the tip of a gardening culture which is increasingly pro-nature.  They are potential ‘mavens’ and ‘connectors’ who could be used to engage friends, relatives and neighbours – if they engaged at the opportune moment.

Nature’s Changing Place In Gardening Culture

“Norwich is said by fame to be a City in a Wood, or a Wood in a City’ some calls it a Grove in a City, or a City in a Grove; and others say, it is a Garden in a City, or a City in a Garden.” 

 The Records of Norwich 1736   [thanks to Patrick Barkham for tracking down this quote when I couldn’t find it]

‘A nature-literate Britain must become a widely shared political objective. To achieve such political backing, nature ability and quality must become aspirational, for example by being attached to popular past-times like gardening, and being seen as a desirable feature in gardens and homes’.

Why Our Children Are Not Being Connected With Nature, 2014

Gardening is a major part of UK culture because of what we do, not because there are a lot of gardening books, university degrees in it, or gardening museums.  We spend a lot of time and money on, and in our 16 million gardens.  More of us are now including nature in our plans.

According to the UK’s HTA (Horticultural Trades Association), UK households collectively spent around £8 billion on retail garden products in 2023, much of it from about 1400 garden centres and retail nurseries. 91%  believe gardens and green spaces benefit the environment and wildlife and 51% say they use their garden to feed, watch or encourage wildlife.

78% of British adults (about 43m people) have access to a private garden.  62%  use them to grow plants, trees and flowers. 34%  grow some herbs, fruit and vegetables. 84% of British adults believe gardens and green spaces benefit their state of mind, and 79%  their physical health.

The average UK garden is 16m x 16m or 256m², excluding window boxes and balconies, and the combined area of the UK’s domestic gardens is roughly the same as Somerset – with obvious potential to both increase living space for native flora and fauna, and increase nature ability, such as recognizing and understanding wild plants.

For instance the Fairyland Trust has been running ‘Fairy Gardens’ Workshops (children take away coir pots with plug plant of native wildflowers to plant at home) and campaigns about planting wildflowers in gardens, since the early 2000s.

Wildflower plug plants in ‘Fairy Gardens’ at a Fairy Fair, and wildflowers established from a ‘Fairy Garden’ planted into the ground in a garden (Greater Stitchwort, Wild Strawberry and Red Campion).

The Trust worked out that if all 16m gardens grew a square metre of Dandelions at the density found in one garden in Norfolk, that could support 1.7m extra colonies of Bumble Bees. While if all gardens included a four square metre patch of wildflowers, it would add an area equivalent to half of all the remaining natural flower rich meadows in the country.

Birds are already part of garden culture in a way that wildflowers are not just yet.  The BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) says we spend £2-300m on wild bird seed every year.  A 2012 study  found a majority of households feed birds (64% across rural and urban areas in England, and 53% within five British study cities, fed garden birds. That is about 18m households feeding birds in their garden, considerably more people than even the most optimistic estimate of the membership of environment groups.  Another investigation found that over 40 years, such feeding has affected the fortunes of national bird populations, with those using garden feeders going up, compared to those that don’t.

Horticulture Magazine’s website has reported that there ‘has been a conscious move towards organic and eco-friendly products, with 46% of gardeners using organic fertilisers instead of those filled with chemicals’, and  87% wanted to bring more wildlife to their gardens by feeding them or providing shelter.  It also found 37% thought wildlife was the best part about owning a garden, ‘rating it ahead of growing their own plants or vegetables’.  This is a real change from attitudes prevalent in the 1990s when research for early Plantlife campaigns found that even many people who were pro-nature baulked at the idea of wild-flowers in gardens, as ‘wild’ implied a loss of control.

The Wyevale report found that 46% of gardeners were consciously selecting organic fertilisers ‘rather than those which contain potentially harmful chemicals’.  Slug pellets, previously their top selling slug product ‘were not even in the top 3, with an organic alternative now clinching the top spot’.

In 2016 1 in 5 reported they were changing their gardens by reducing the size of lawns in favour of other features.  These trends suggest that it might not be that difficult to encourage people to make further changes to help nature, especially discrete features each with their own logic, such as:

• More ponds, small marshes & wet ditches for frogs, and swales to help water soakaway into the ground rather than overloading drains, and rain gardens
• Wet mud for Swallows and House Martins to make their nests with
• Swift towers and boxes in gardens and on homes
• Green roofs with low nutrient substrates to allow high diversity of wild plants
• Green Walls and rain gardens
• Bramble and nettle patches for butterflies and other insects
• Hedgehog holes through fences to create roaming on ‘Hedgehog Highways’
• Low nutrient unfertilised and chemical free flower beds and mixed length lawns for wildflower and insect diversity
• Leaving areas of fallen leaves and deadstems in place for spiders, overwintering insects and foraging birds and animals

There’s no shortage of examples of nature-improved gardens. Expertise goes back to Miriam Rothschild (whose wildflower garden became a SSSI), and study to Jennifer Owen’s work on a single garden from 1971 – 2001, and almost every environmental NGO has given ‘wildlife gardening’ advice but it’s generally remained socially invisible, a matter of personal choice, carried out in private.

Open Garden Days and community-level networks based around particular actions can make a difference to that but scaling up and sustaining such initiatives requires resources and continuity which have often been lacking.

To take just one of many hundreds of such projects, in 2013 the Warwickshire Wildlife Trust launched a Help For Hedgehogs campaign and in 2015 sought funding for a dedicated Hedgehog Officer, in post for a year, to set up a Hedgehog Improvement Area (HIA) around Elmdon Park in Solihull, involving gardens and open spaces.  The HIA was announced in 2016 and the project engaged 26,000 adults and 12,500 school children but was ended in 2020

 A Hedgehog Highway sign from Hedgehog Street run by the PTES and BHPS

To give such activities sustained social visibility requires some sort of permanent organisational scaffolding, which not only enables it with funding but signals that it has public backing and political legitimacy.  In the 1950s-1970s farmers got grants to destroy nature (eg hedges, wet meadows), while being invited to consider leaving unwanted “corners’ for it.  Later, agri-environment schemes were set up to incentivise nature-friendly farming, but only for farmers and rural landowners.  It’s time this recognition extended to gardeners and urban land.

 Crediting The Value Of Home And Garden Nature

A Lapwing nesting on a green roof in Switzerland

In a 2022 post I  suggested giving local Council Tax payers a rebate in proportion to the nature features they supported by their homes and gardens, in the same way that farmers are now paid for ‘environmental public goods’ on agricultural land:

Reward Everyone Who Helps Nature …  democratize the use of public money for nature (public goods) so it is not restricted by ‘eligibility rules’ based on agricultural holdings … but on outcomes. While the majority of finance would still flow to farmers as so much land in the UK is farmed, there in no natural justice in paying a farmer if s/he produces two Song Thrushes where there was one before, and not a householder with a garden, or other landowner. One way to deliver this would be through Council Tax rebates for nature.

In 2023 Ross Cameron from Sheffield University made a similar call to use council tax or water bill discounts to incentivise greener gardens.

Bumble Bee on an English Green Roof – from www.livingroofs.org

Such payments could also incentivize property owners in developed areas (and not just gardens) to reduce rain run off into overburdened sewers, by diverting it into domestic wetlands and allowing it to recharge groundwater and reduce flood risk.

Running such a scheme would require identification of qualifying features, as has already been done on a coarse scale for agri-environment schemes and is required by the biodiversity net gain planning requirements for new built developments (see 13 CIEEM principles).

These features could and should be related to characteristic local nature, and so could give each home and garden a ‘Nature Score’ and an ‘Ecological Vernacular’ rating, creating new social selling points and become something to be proud of, in the same way that an historic Blue Plaque or Listed Feature, or inclusion of a garden in the Register of Historic Gardens is seen to enhance the value of a property.   They would need to be detailed, recognizing the fine scale of most gardens and the importance of ‘ecological details’, such as food plants for insects (see some moth foodplantsand a Jersey example), birds and animals, or nesting places such as Swift Bricks.

In the past two years Swift Brick advocate Hannah Burn-Taylor has made waves with her one woman Feather Speechcampaign, seeking to convince politicians to mandate Swift Bricks in new homes. It is an extraordinarily modest demand, and so far it’s not succeeded. It shows how little traction nature has in Westminster.

Swift Brick campaigners 20 September 2024

Concern for Swifts was set up to campaign on exactly the same problem of Swifts losing their nest sites, back in 1995, when Burn-Taylor was nine. 15 years before, in his seminal 1980 book The Common Ground, Richard Mabey wrote of Swifts, ‘how good it would be if we also found room for them in our modern buildings, as they do in Amsterdam, where re-roofing is illegal unless access for swifts is retained’.   The UK is still a long way behind.

Garden Centres

Garden Centres and Supermarkets play a huge role in shaping the choice-architecture of UK gardening: they are the default go-to gardening hubs selling everything from seeds and live plants to fish, machinery, plastic grass and garden ‘care’ products, meaning mainly herbicides, fungicides, insecticides and artificial fertilisers.  They are the shop front of a horticultural industry whose prevailing ethos has long been not nature but artifice, with plants as ornaments.

Garden centre plants

Camouflaged by their benign trappings of cafeterias and floral hanging baskets, conventional Garden Centres are the arms suppliers for a domestic war on nature.  Many of the flowers they sell are so artificial that they are useless for nature because they contain no nectar or pollen, or it’s inaccessible, and they are not food plants for native wildlife.

In 2017 Dave Gouslon from Sussex University found some garden centre plants labelled ‘bee-friendly’ actually contained systemic insecticides (ie insecticides inside the plant).  Most Garden Centres also sell ‘lawn improver’.  These can contain a mix of herbicide to kill truly bee friendly flowers like Self-heal or Dandelions, moss killer, and to make grass look bright green, artificial fertiliser which may also be toxic to insects.

Well into the 2000s this ‘normal’ was so ingrained that it was common to see ‘weedkiller’ such as Glyphosate (aka Roundup) advertised in magazines of conservation organisations.  UK readers will remember Therese Coffey, who served as Secretary of State for the Environment in the Conservative administration of Rishi Sunak, and is said to be a keen gardener, and who made a point of endorsing Glyphosate.

Therese Coffey talking to the NFU conference in 2023 – from The Independent

As the Wyevale Garden Centres report highlighted above hints at, there is change at the margins. Whereas in the early 2000s wildflower seeds and wildflower plug plants (small rooted plants that can be easily planted and give much better results than using seed) were only available from a couple of specialists, I found ten online in as many minutes, including established major suppliers, and many more companies sell seed.  There are also dozens of companies offering ecological landscaping and habitat creation services.

Coffey and the conventional garden centres represent the market ‘laggards’.  The ‘wildflower’ customers, along with installers of green roofs and other ‘new green features’, are market innovators followed by the early adopters.  This is the cultural change dynamic tracked for any innovation by CDSM, Cultural Dynamics Strategy and marketing, in their Values Modes model.  The Inner Directed Pioneers experiment and innovate, and if it looks socially successful, they are emulated by the esteem seeking Prospectors.  Once a behaviour spreads enough to be seen as ‘normal’, it’s adopted by the change resistant security-driven Settlers, by ‘norming’, ie changing to stay in line with a new normal. (Social change dynamic #13 &  book here).

This process can be speeded up if large and familiar actors signal that they are adopting the new ways – ripe territory for campaigns seeking a social tipping point.  If the environmental NGOs were now to pressure Garden Centre chains not just to stock and promote nature friendly products like wildflower plug plants grown without pesticides but also stop selling garden chemicals, in line with demands of campaigns such as the Pesticides Collaboration (environment groups and unions) to ban pesticides in urban public places it could catalyse rapid behaviour change.

Of course there would initially be an internal furore in the horticultural industry with many arguing against change, and the most effective way to quickly convince them of the need to change would be the prospect of competition.  Nature groups could set up their own garden centres, and urge their members to use them – groups like RSPB and National Trust have plenty of properties where this could be done, with or without acquiring additional adjacent land, and plenty of corporates and possibly Councils would be interested as potential partners.

All sections

1 – Introduction And Nature Ability

2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity

3 – Signalling and Marking Moments

4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture

5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History

6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means

7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?

Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk