Here are the wonderful gritstone columns on the top of Kinder Low, Derbyshire

(This is a slightly adapted version of my column in Birdwatch magazine last month.) I was fascinated to read Adrian Brockless’ thoughtful piece (The Heat Is On) in December’s issue. Who would have thought that the breeding Black-winged Stilts in Kent might be a consequence of anthropogenic climate change; on the other hand, it could just be to do with the axial inclination of the Earth? However there was one part of his argument with which I wish – politely – to take issue.

Adrian writes ‘It is imperative that the arguments [about climate change] do not become shrill or hysterical’, and further contends that ‘To gain and maintain trust, conservation organisations need to distance themselves from politics and politically motivated arguments [my italics].’

I would argue quite the reverse: I would like to see much more environmental politics and some that was very ‘shrill’ and even quite ‘hysterical’. Because the real issue is the singular, shocking absence of environmental issues (with perhaps the notable exception of climate change) from any kind of contemporary political debate. Surely every reader of Birdwatch would like to see the breeding status of the Skylark or Hen Harrier as subjects of mainstream discussion, because from that would flow reflections upon land usage and practice that affect almost all birds in Britain.

(apologies: this is the best I could do with a Hen Harrier)

But first let’s tackle Adrian’s assumption that conservation organisations should not ‘do’ politics. The answer is very simple: they don’t. In fact, they cannot do anything that smacks of party politics, because of their status as charities. The Charities Commission forbids it. Organisations like the National Trust or the Wildlife Trusts are rightly reluctant to engage in anything that looks shrill or hysterical. They are always measured and – largely – trusted, but this approach creates its own deficit.

What we get as a consequence is a campaign with the hilarious dottiness of ‘Vote for Bob’. You must have seen it somewhere on your e-travels – Facebook or Twitter – that cute red squirrel asking if you have signed the petition and telling you that ‘A vote for Bob is a vote for nature.’ (https://www.voteforbob.co.uk)

Don’t misunderstand me, I hugely admire the wonderfully dedicated personnel who now make the RSPB the most effective voice for nature in Britain. Moreover I deeply respect the 120,237 people who have signed the petition to date, but let’s be frank, the campaign is gentle to the point of toothlessness. And it is exactly what you get when a charity wants to do politics but has to look as if it is not. Worst than all this, for me, is that ‘Vote for Bob’ will probably be the only meaningful statement about the environment at the next election. That’s how little real nature there is in modern politics.

But let’s now look at ‘shrill’ and ‘hysterical’. If we replace those words with ‘impassioned’ and ‘theatrical’ then I would argue that the groundbreaking Hen Harrier Day – based partly on celebrity, guided by clever social media campaigns and filled with strong rhetoric and timed to coincide with the inglorious 12^th – is a form of heady politics. Sometimes it is only when people stand up to be counted and perhaps get carried away and certainly allow themselves to be abused, that voices are really heard.

Hen Harrier Day in some ways resembles another ‘shrill’ protest that took place in the Peak District 82 years earlier. The actual details are relatively mundane. In 1932 a group of several hundred largely working folk from Manchester set out from Hayfield and walked close to the top of Kinder Scout. They were protesting the lack of a right to roam on non-productive private land all over Britain.

(Here’s the route they took from Hayfield in 1932 up William Clough towards Ashop Head on Kinder)

A smaller subgroup eventually got into a scrap with a gang of stick-wielding gamekeepers. Six of those ramblers were eventually judged by a jury, packed with brigadier-generals and colonels, to have been guilty of ‘riotous assembly’ and imprisoned for up to six months. The whole thing became famous as the ‘Mass Trespass.’

The entire campaign for ordinary British people to have the right to walk on ‘our’ countryside spans 120 years. Between 1884 and 1939, 15 parliamentary bills were submitted before the House of Commons and thrown out or defeated by its landowning incumbents. It was not until this 2000 CROW Act that this citizen’s birthright finally made the statute books. It all involved politics. If you like, some of it was ‘shrill and hysterical’, in fact that part – the so-called Mass Trespass of 1932 – is the only part of all this complex political campaign which people now remember.

For me, the devastating implications of the State of Nature Report in 2013 proclaim one loud and unmistakable truth. Nature now needs all the political action it can get. Perhaps what we really need is a lean, mean, non-charitable pressure group, prepared to do loud, attention-grabbing and – yes – even party politics, funded perhaps by donation or some independent trust. Quiet, measured non-political conservation has got us thus far. Nature now needs a whole lot more.