#635: Getting ready

I mentioned the podcast with Mary Colwell in the previous post.

In this podcast she describes her thoughts on when it should be launched..

I’m absolutely convinced it should be launched when it’s ready to be launched. And much as after this long and rather torturous journey, it looks like now being a reality, I think it would be a great mistake to rush it through. I think what we need to do is get everything right. We need to get really good textbooks written.

We need to get really good support materials out to teachers. I would love to see a whole bank, a sort of library of the country’s greatest naturalists giving lessons on whatever turns up in the syllabus. So you’d have Tim Birkhead talking about seabirds. You know, you’d have the perfect people to teach young people about whatever is in the syllabus.

Now, that’s gonna take time, and that will take time to develop well. I think let’s now take our time, get it right, get schools feeling confident and teachers feeling confident that they’re supported enough to teach it, and then we launch it out onto the world.

If it’s rushed through, it has the danger of being a little bit shoddy, a bit insubstantial. It won’t fire the young people’s imaginations about what natural history is. The biggest problem we have is that most people have forgotten what natural history is. They think it’s about climate change and sustainability. We’ve forgotten that it’s about animals and plants, creatures. It’s about the living world around us and knowing that living world intimately, and that takes time to develop those materials because they’ve been lost. They need to be brought back together again and presented in exciting and enticing ways that make natural history such a relevant subject going forward in their lives.

She goes on to say:

I would love to see a greater connection between natural history, as in the studying the subject, and the connection out to all the other parts of life. All the art, the music, the poetry, the literature, the history, the geography, the mathematics. Everything that we do can be traced back to nature, can be traced back to the forms, the sounds, the sights, and the wonder of the natural world.

And the more that nature is put into this much broader context of the human experience of being a living, breathing mammal in this extraordinary planet, the more we can make our relationship with nature evident everywhere in our drama, in everything that we do, then I think that will just slowly build the awe and wonder, which is what sustains all of life.

Caroline Lucas also describes access to green spaces...

We know that access to green space in England and Wales is hugely unequally spread, and we know that people from lower income backgrounds, people from ethnic backgrounds and so forth, are far less likely to have access to green space.

So it feels to me that we need to do far more to make sure in the development and planning space that we build in access to green space right from the start.