#634: A podcast with Caroline Lucas and Mary Colwell

Shared by the Green Alliance.

After more than a decade of campaigning, a natural history GCSE for England is finally on the table. In this special episode, former MP Caroline Lucas and conservationist Mary Colwell sit down to unpack the government’s new consultation: what it gets right, what it’s missing and what bumblebees have to do with it.

A new Podcast with Mary Colwell.

A transcript is available.

Mary's views on the consultation document:

Yeah, there’s lots to welcome about it actually, and from earlier iterations it’s hugely improved. So it really has shifted, um, the focus back onto studying nature, which is really accessible to you, and I think that is the most important thing. The GCSE has to be grounded in localism. It has to be the nature you see on a day-to-day basis. Now, that might not be puffins and dolphins. It might just be, uh, the worms in your garden, the butterflies, the bees, the street trees, the flowers that grow up in the streets in the springtime. It might be the everyday stuff, but that doesn’t mean it’s lacking in wonder. And so to put the emphasis back on what people will see every day is really good.

I welcome the sense of wanting to be a naturalist has come through a lot more strongly. But where I’d say it was lacking is in two or three areas. One is in the keeping of field notebooks and jottings and recordings, actually physically committing down on paper or electronically your thoughts, your observations, your data.

That’s not explicitly put in there as part of a requirement for the GCSE, and that is so important. There is not a naturalist who has ever lived that hasn’t kept a notebook. And notebooks are not only places to write numbers down, they’re places where you express that connection that we were talking about earlier, which is so important.

They’re places where your interaction, your relationship, personal relationship with what’s before you is recorded, and that psychological process sets in train a whole lifetime of connection. The other thing that’s missing, I think, is a sense of the shifting baseline. And I think until we understand that some of the greatest losses in UK nature has happened within living memory.

In the last 100 years, we have lost 50% of the mass of wildlife in the UK. Until we know that, we won’t make sense of what’s before us now. And that shifting baseline, that sense of "this is normal". You look out of the window and this is what’s normal because this is what you see, as opposed to if you’d looked out of the window 50 years ago, you’d have seen a very different world.

But we just gradually get used to less. We gradually get used to an impoverished world. And so if they could put in some way of tackling the shifting baseline in a way that younger people could talk to the older generation, it could be members of their family or their community. What was it like here 50 years ago?

Listen to it here...

#322: Where the wild things are...

An excellent piece in today's Guardian explores the importance of gardens and parks to Britain's wildlife.

The piece explores the "shifting baseline" and the quiet disappearance of animals we used to take for granted, such as hedgehogs. I also remember a fox family that used to live in the grounds of the derelict church opposite the GA headquarters in Solly Street, Sheffield. They are now a huge block of student accommodation, and the foxes are nowhere to be seen.

We cry habitat loss, but it’s theft, really – no one is so careless as to lose their home. We call it progress, but how dare we? How many people, throughout the planning process, will have thought of or cared about hedgehogs? Or considered any of the other residents, both human and wild? The management company would have conducted an ecology survey, no doubt. But, as is often the case, it was probably done in winter, when the hedgehogs were hibernating. Did any residents other than Choel and me know there were hedgehogs on that estate? Did anyone care? The council paved over the gardens to save money on maintenance. The trees and park were lost because the car parks that replaced them can be a source of income. The residents placed there by the council would not necessarily have known or thought about those habitats, making them so much easier to destroy.