Defra quote challenge – winning entry by James Gilbert – Mark Avery

Mark wrote:

This Defra quote, “Britain is a proud nation of nature lovers, and this government is committed to turning the tide on its decline after years of neglect. We are progressing plans to designate nine new national river walks, one in each region of England.” (see here) might win a prize for stupidity if only the field weren’t so strong.

Well, here is a challenge for you. Write a guest blog which begins “Britain is a proud nation of nature lovers, and this government is committed to turning the tide on its decline after years of neglect.” and ends “We are progressing plans to designate nine new national river walks, one in each region of England.”, with up to 500 words of your own inserted between the opening and closing sentence to make the case for Defra.

I will donate £100 to a charity of your choice for the entry judged by me to be the most convincing (even if not very convincing). Send your entry as a Word file attached to an email to mark@markavery.info by midnight on 31 August and good and/or convincing and/or funny entries and the winner will be published in the latter half of September.

Mark writes:

This is the winning entry, by James Gilbert, and I have donated £100 to his chosen charity of the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire Wildlife Trust.

James is a freelance ecologist and Chartered Environmentalist, presently living in Northamptonshire, always out in nature and sometimes writing about his observations and wildlife encounters.

James writes:

Britain is a proud nation of nature lovers, and this government is committed to turning the tide on its decline after years of neglect.

For too long now this country has lazily and ignorantly allowed: inappropriate and unmitigated development of land; arable fields to be wilfully sprayed with chemical pesticides, showered with artificial fertiliser — sometimes toxic sewage sludge; moorland to be overgrazed, drained, burned, rid of raptors; hedgerows to be grubbed out; the countryside generally to suffer invasive non-native species, including the annual overloading with millions of pheasants released for cruel game.

All this (and more) essentially equates to untold, unrelenting habitat damage, destruction and degradation — an assault on non-human life, in large-scale and varied ways. With increasing public awareness of, and concern for, ecological issues, no more can it be like this. Courage together with ecological literacy will help the country finally step off this treadmill of wrongdoing — alas, both are not to be found here within Defra. Besides the government still sees now as not the time to tackle a real and pressing issue like biodiversity loss; not the time to make real and meaningful long-term positive change to the UK’s nature deficit. There are fiscal things always of more concern — the main one being the ludicrous and self-harming addiction that is year-after-year economic growth, using finite planetary resources.

And so, once again, a government with our – Defra’s – advice, will leisurely let continue all the above-mentioned, long-ingrained nature-depleting activities and instead rather hopes to address nature decline by one silver-bullet-esque project: to unlock miles of English riverbank.

This is not tinkering at the edges, or spitting in the wind. Such a project will provide a new gateway into the countryside, turbo-charging wildlife recovery. It will mean a better deal for British wildlife. A project that will better connect people with precious rivers — rivers themselves damaged and degraded, mostly modified and polluted: pesticide-spiked, nutrient-enriched, sewage-pulsed, invasive-species choked, microplastic-laden, seriously low-flowing (heavily abstracted), floodplain-disconnected (straightened, overdeepened), flow-regulated (fish-barriered) and so on.

So, anyway, what will this unlocking of hundreds of miles of riverbank look like — how will we deliver an uptick in nature?

We are progressing plans to designate nine new national river walks, one in each region of England.

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