Framing Nature

Laurence Rose, Framing Nature: Conservation and Culture (Hebden Bridge: Gritstone Publishing, 2020)

Laurence Rose is a conversationist who has spent most of his career working for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).  Framing Nature is his second book after The Long Spring (2018).  Most of the books consists of nine essays on individual British species: the white tailed eagle, the corncrake, the fox, the badger, the willow tit, the field cricket, the narrow-headed ant, the otter, and the nightingale.  Most of these species are endangered or have seen a significant reduction in their habitat and range over the past 30 or 40 years, although a couple are making a comeback (e.g. the otter) or have adapted to change (e.g. the fox).  Towards the end Rose turns to a most philosophical approach to conservation that takes him to India and back.  It is interesting to note how international travel in a book about conservation is starting to cause a cognitive dissonance, especially with the casual remark that ‘I went to India’. 

In many ways the book is exactly what you would expect.  It is well-written and well-informed, although perhaps not quite as polished as much contemporary nature writing.  Rose talks a lot about Richard Mabey’s The Common Ground from the early 1980s, which was an inspiration for much of his own conservation work.  The central argument of Framing Nature is that conservation is cultural.  ‘Unfortunately,’ Rose writes towards the end of the book, ‘culture change isn’t something that organisations can just switch on – still less prescribe.’  But he sees hope in the youth movements that are currently having a big impact on conservation thought.  In one of the ideas for change that Rose discussed at a conference in York in 2019, Rose is particularly scathing about National Parks:

Rethink our relationship with land.  Make all public land, Crown land, Royal Family property, National Nature Reserves and National Parks work as national assets and not (only) private assets.  National Parks in particular are among the most nature-depleted tracts in the UK, compared to how they should be, so we should start there, where options such as wildling must be embraced and fully favourable SSSI condition must be a minimum standard across the whole. (223)

This builds on an extended criticism of the SSSI system that comes ealier:

‘Lodge Hill and Knepp [discussed in the nightingale chapte] represent two crossing pathways along which place-based conservation is travelling.  Lodge Hill, supposedly protected by its status as an SSSI, reminds us that the UK’s protected area system is at the mercy of the development planning process and as such is subordinate to it.  It is a system that has failed some of the most important and precious places in the past, and which every year continues to see damage or neglect inflicted on others.  At base the struggle to defend the most important wildlife sites from development is a continual conveyor belt of costly and devisive cases, which can be comprehensively lost but never conclusively won.  It is a 70-year old tool that has rusted in the hands of conservationists who continue to wield it for want of a modern implement, with no choice but to participate in an unfit system.’ 

The trip to India is motivated by Satish Kumar’s idea of Reverential Ecology.  Kumar is ‘the Rajastan-born co-founder of the ecology-centred Schumacher College at Dartington Hall, Devon.’  He sees Reverential Ecology as one of three ecologies (alongside shallow ecology and deep ecology), which calls for mutually beneficial and unconditional coexistence.  It is interesting to note that what comes across as a largely secular book sees a spiritual solution, even if it is a spiritual solution that is located in a very different cultural context.  There is nothing wrong with looking overseas for solutions to our environmental problems, and that might be a major advantage of globalisation.  But it may also be worth looking for spiritual solutions a little closer to home.