We Are 10!

Amazingly, Habitat Aid is 10 years old. It started off as what now looks like a lunatic plunge into the unknown. I'd had 30+years in the City and needed another career. I was a keen but strictly amateur naturalist and gardener/smallholder. I think people thought I was having a midlife crisis (probably) or that I'd made so much money it didn't matter (weak laughter). We downsized dramatically. To the surprise of most the business has kept food on the table and, more importantly, done some good things. Anyway, our tenth anniversary has given me an excellent opportunity to go off on one... I wish I'd kept tabs on what we've given away to charities and community projects, how many acres of wildflower meadows or orchards we've had a hand in, or seed packets, or numbers of ponds, or miles of hedges. Wildflower meadows are now particularly dear to my heart. Largely unprotected, almost completely destroyed, our most diverse and attractive habitat. I think the biggest meadow site we've seeded is over a hundred acres. Wildly exciting. Most aspects of what we do have been very satisfying, not least helping our network of suppliers, many of whom have been with us since we started. We have made some modest progress in changing minds, like promoting local provenance meadow seed, for example. People have been very supportive, from David Attenborough to an appreciative pupil from a Primary school in County Durham (thank you for the letter, Lucy). Thanks everyone, not least my long suffering wife! This keeps me going; sometimes, as you can imagine, it can be difficult. I do wish we were having a wider impact. The business is still pretty modest, and we find it difficult to be heard. Projects are complicated and can go wrong (don't tell!). People don't pay much for plants and seed, and can find them baffling. Selling online seems to be more and more difficult for small companies who don't want to use Amazon. Social media audiences follow enthusiastic and luminous personalities. Folk have odd ideas. Things get weird very quickly. TBH I'm hopeless at it. One of the reasons we set up Habitat Aid was to get across sound information on how to try and improve our natural environment. Worthy but dull on Facebook. Hopeless. Although we know more about what's happening in our own back garden than we did 10 years ago, it's still remarkably little. Some of the charities we support are working hard to change that, but we're still blundering around in - at best - the twilight. Our understanding of what we're doing to the natural environment here remains depressingly sketchy. The conservation lobby is often at loggerheads with other interest groups. I'm delighted to see a new activism abroad, like the recent People's Walk for Wildlife and various online petitions. I'm uncomfortable though about the confrontational element of some of this stuff, and the over-simplification and sensationalising (is that a word?) of complicated real world issues. For example, banning neonicotinoids on its own isn't going to "save our bees". Don't get me wrong. I think banning them is a very good thing and was very overdue - but bees have other problems too. We continue to find out how many. We're also finding out how many other impacts neonics have too. In the meantime farmers are flooding their oilseed rape fields with pyrethroid based pesticides instead. Specialist evidence based conservation charities really struggle to put across complicated messages without compromising them."Personalities" or campaigning groups often eclipse them, too. NGOs are, however, getting better at persuading people that wildlife friendly can also be people friendly. Most are also engaging better with the real world, although there are a couple of ivory towers out there which need to be bazooka-ed. It must be a concern to them, however, that their supporters continue to be overwhelmingly white middle class folk of a certain age, from outside urban areas. It's a symptom of "nature deficit disorder", I guess. There's also shifting baseline syndrome to fight among the younger generation. Lastly there's the commercial sector. Retailers sell lots of THINGS to try replace degraded habitat. Bee boxes, bird boxes, hedgehog boxes, bat boxes, dormice boxes, hibernacula, bird feeders, even bumblebee colonies.* This all just widens people's disconnectedness with nature. Together with the over-simplification of key messages they are encouraged to think that nature is easily and cheaply replaceable. They're not looking at it either. Our efforts to get people to take pleasure in the small things - a new butterfly in the garden, a new plant in the meadow - generally fall on deaf ears. I still run into far too much greenwash in the corporate sector at large. Perhaps naively I think this is often down to ignorance. I've become increasingly suspicious of government, although encouraged by the Blue Planet effect. This means that - for the first time ever - the environment will win votes. Best of all, it might win votes among the under 25s. This realisation just might drive a good environmental deal post Brexit, although as this will mean short term cost and higher food prices the jury is still firmly out. At the least, we should get improved biosecurity and wave goodbye to the Common Agricultural Policy. This is apparently my 362nd blog. There does now seem to be a wider understanding that something is needed to reverse what Chris Packham calls an "ecological apocalypse" here. There are more active efforts being made to that end, like rewilding. Much hasn't changed over the previous 361 blogs, though. We still worry about animals like hedgehogs much more than we do about the drivers behind their decline. These are common to many, many other species. Biodiversity loss is still the Cinderella of the Green movement, which is much more concerned about energy and sustainability. We still spend peanuts on it, least of all on the poor souls slaving away in this area - or in horticulture generally, come to that. I'm still convinced that the way to improve biodiversity here is by recreating and rejoining (as best we can) destroyed and splintered natural habitats. This not only means huge changes to the way we use and value land here, but also getting people to see the benefits of habitat creation. It can be beautiful and wildly exciting (sorry! - Ed.). *Plants and seed sellers often pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap. "Wildflower seed" in particular could be anything from anywhere and often fails. Retailers seem to sometimes actively encourage people's confusion; between actual and other sorts of "meadows", and the provenance of plants, for example.