This month at the National Trust we’ve been busy launching a major political advocacy campaign, our first in 15 years. The state of nature in the UK is so dire that I felt we had little other option. So I’m asking our members and the public to write to their MP and call for proper, concerted action to halt and reverse nature’s decline. A decline that has led to 73m birds vanishing from our skies since the 1970s, left only 14 per cent of English rivers in good health and millions of people locked out of opportunities to access green space.
Despite this alarming picture, successive governments have failed to make meaningful change happen. Our current government has repeatedly blamed a series of small animals—snails, spiders, bats, newts and, the latest on the chopping block, fish—for hampering development. It has chipped away at wildlife protections that shield the little nature we’ve got left and it hasn’t taken enough meaningful action to bring wildlife back to these isles, as it said it would in its manifesto.
I’ll be honest: the National Trust isn’t known as a campaigner, even if we do speak out on various issues. In a recent focus group, we asked our members how they would feel about us launching a campaign challenging the government’s environmental record. “Well, it would be like your Grandad turning up in a new outfit,” came one response.
But campaigning goes back to the founding of the Trust. This organisation I’m proud to lead was borne of three campaigners in the wake of the Industrial Revolution who wanted ordinary working people to be afforded open space and access to heritage. We rallied to save country houses after the war and stopped the coastline from being ravaged by development in the 1970s. Fifteen years ago, we ran a successful petition—even backed by the Daily Telegraph—to stop damaging reforms to the planning system.
Campaigning is in our DNA, and if ever there was a time to rediscover those roots, it is now. I hope our new outfit gets people talking.
Nature has been in the press this month for other reasons too. Images of wildlife are set to appear on banknotes for the first time, after the public selected the theme in a poll run by the Bank of England. The fallout from the news, which saw accusations of “wokery”, was described by the BBC as a “very British backlash”.
The BBC isn’t wrong. But these manufactured dichotomies are damaging. They suggest we’re living in a zero-sum game where if wildlife wins, history has to lose. It doesn’t work like that.
The National Trust is perhaps the country’s best-known case study of the happy marriage between nature and history. We and our members have cared for the nation’s beloved natural landscapes, historical buildings and collections, together, for the past 131 years. I would argue it’s what makes the Trust special and what makes thousands of people visit our properties and the landscapes we care for every day.
I wasn’t surprised that Sir Winston Churchill’s granddaughter dismissed the row about banknotes. Churchill himself was a great lover of wildlife and nature. At Chartwell, his former home in Kent, we care for the study where the great man wrote his speeches, the garden where he painted and the wildlife that still calls the grounds home.
Sir Winston tried to reintroduce lost butterflies, so we’ve dedicated a border to attracting butterflies. We keep his beekeeping tradition alive. We tend to his apple orchard and let wildflowers grow to attract pollinators. We allow visiting black swans to make use of the former swimming pool.
The two things are entirely interconnected at Chartwell and everywhere else. And they always will be. Our history is both societal and natural, and nature is part of our cultural heritage. They are two sides of the same coin, so to speak.
If people want to get irate about wildlife, can I instead suggest taking issue with the UK being the most nature-depleted country in the G7 and one of the lowest-ranked in the world? Or, on the subject of history, that every week, heritage buildings, pubs, libraries and museums—places where history is made and told—are having to close because of spiralling costs.
Now those would be things worth fighting for.
