Environmentalists From England

"It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it makes in the wind. If Waterlog was about the element of water, Wildwood is about the element of wood, as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and in our lives. To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is no accident that in the of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change. It is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost. sends the future as a boy into the greenwood to fend for himself in . There, he falls asleep and dreams himself, like a chameleon, into the lives of the animals and the trees."

"Waterlog (1999), Roger's now-classic account of swimming through Britain, published twenty years ago this year, opens during a rain-storm in the spring-fed moat that lies close to the house. In Wildwood (2007), his epic account of trees, woods and forest cultures around the world, Walnut Tree Farm is the fixed point to which Roger returns and from which he learns,even as he journeys out to the groves of Kazakhstan and the of Australia. And in Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (2008), extracts from Roger's copious journals record both the labour and wonder involved in living in twelve acres of meadow, and woodland; the night-time bark of foxes, the viper-bite of s as he cleared scrub or laid hedges, and the fallen stars of glow-worms in the long grass."

"From water level, I observed the mating joined in flight like refuelling aircraft, and the random progress of the clocks that drifted on the s over the moat."

"In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse outside the ancient village of , in , and began a restoration, repairing stone walls and replacing roof tiles. Among the attributes of Walnut Tree Farm, as the house was called, was a deep, spring-fed . It didn’t surround the house, as with a fortified castle, but was excavated into the land, in roughly parallel lines, at the front and the back of the property. The moat had served its original, Elizabethan owner as a water supply, a cooler, and a status symbol. Over the centuries, it fell into disrepair, becoming silted up from falling leaves and rotting tree roots. Deakin had the moat dredged to a depth of ten feet; staked a wooden ladder by the bank, near the spreading roots of a tree; and began regularly swimming in the cold, greenish water. He gained what he called a frog’s-eye view of the changing seasons, and an intimate familiarity with the creatures sharing the moat, from to s."

"The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever more exclusively of water. Swimming and dreaming were becoming indistinguishable. I grew convinced that following water, flowing with it, would be a way of getting under the skin of things, of learning something new."

", is a lovely plant that provides so very much in the garden or in a row, offering a safe haven and bountiful feast for nesting birds and s. It's also an incredibly useful plant for us. The edible spring leaves are great in salads, and the autumn berries, or haws, can be used in lots of dishes and drinks."

"... I had a very traditional start – as an apprentice at 19, my job was to pick up dog poo and make the head gardener tea. Then at the I learned about conservation, and . Slowly, cogs move and you end up miles away from where you began, without really noticing that it’s happened. ... After school I worked at and did a foundation degree in art. Then a gardening apprenticeship came up and I made a snap decision. I walked around the garden with the head gardener and just thought, oh, this is amazing, I want to work here. I realised I like being in soil and muddy and the creativity that doesn’t involve sitting at a desk."

"Frances is one of the main team of ' presenters, alongside . She has written several books and is a familiar face at garden and literary festivals. The publication of her first children’s book, How to Grow a Garden, and her forthcoming appearance as a guest speaker at Toby’s Garden Festival in May is why I’m calling her today. How to Grow a Garden is a colourful, hardback book which takes young readers on a journey through different gardens, from veg plots to rows and meadows, s, and various exotic gardens. Each garden is beautifully illustrated by Charlotte Ager and is packed with vibrant and fun plants, animals and insects. Throughout, Frances has added little descriptions and facts and each garden has a seasonal to-do list of inspiring and creative ideas for children (which adults will certainly enjoy doing as well)."

"The key consideration when is the , because you need to choose species that can cope with having their roots so restricted. The soil in a small container also tends to dry out and lose its quicker than that in a large one. So unless you have a lot of time and love to give to your containers, it's worth choosing fairly low-maintenance plants that can cope with dry, nutrient-poor, small spaces, or plants that are extremely slow grown. Plants such as s, s and other , ' and other and even many herbs such as , and can cope with slightly drier, nutrient-poor conditions and, dare I say, neglect from us growers!"

"In 1992, almost 2,000 of the world's leading scientists presented us with another way of looking at the world. In , they informed us that the current trajectory of was unsustainable. ... ... Some of us see what is happening but have little ability to act. Others see something else entirely because maintaining the juggernaut of the and is the priority. For them, the does little but get in the way."

"Thousands of , , , , , and are being planted, to create habitats of indigenous – of tree cover and open grazing. A flickered along the prickly spine of the new fence built to separate the sheep from the trees. Further on, beyond a bank of glacial , the infant disappeared behind a drystone wall above what was once a but has become a dry ochre basin of ' grasses. Canalised in a previous century, the Mint is to be re-meandered to its original course through the valley bottom, and Dub Ings will become a tarn once more. Like the new trees, this work – done in partnership with and another local farm – is intended to lessen the effects of flooding on communities further downstream; the memory of is never far away."

"The remains unambiguous, but still the fox hunts continue. Since the ban came into force more than ten years ago, I've seen — or more often heard — a number of hunts in progress. I've heard hounds in tracking rapidly across the open ground of the higher s, their baying echoing around the valley. Or down by the , men with s, turning to see who was driving past. Up here in , the hunt has always been on foot, but for all the lack of pomp and , and money, I still loathe it."

"As well as the human remains, the jawbone of a was unearthed at . Lynx became extinct in the UK about 1,800 years ago, but I found it exciting to think of these beautiful, lithe creatures roaming over my home landscape. There were the bones of a 7,000-year-old that had most likely been dragged up to the cave by an animal. And a short distance away, in fact just an arrow's flight from Kirkhead Tower, is , the place where the last wolf in England was reputedly killed. And although this idea might be fanciful (how on earth would anyone know where the very last wolf died anyway?), there's evidence of wolves right here on the doorstep. had been roaming northern Britain over 1,300 years ago and their bones were found in the cavern. They had been gnawed by a large predator. The most likely candidate? Wolf."

"We speak of as if rock were the epitome of durability. It isn’t. Where rock meets water, it is water that wins in time, every time, and there are few places in England where this is more obviously true than the . Hollowness is ubiquitous here; a landscape riddled with caves and pots and channels. You can even watch them forming in many rivers and becks, where below most drops, you can find circular dishings in the rock, some shallow, some deep, some containing pebbles conscripted to the river’s work; swirling and scouring, day and night. ... It’s not necessarily the speed, volume or power of a river that wins, but its relentlessness. It needs no breath, no sleep, no pause to stretch or shake. And in time, without fuss or ceremony, it will take heat from flesh, life from limb, tree from bank, rock from channel, mountain from continent. It will hollow the land. And it demands total respect."

"19TH JULY SACRED GROVES Ancient Rome The Roman term ' (plural luci) referes to a class of woodland with special religious significance. Luci took the form of sacred groves or clearings, often featuring special trees and springs. They were places of celebration, communion and ritual offering. Well-documented examples include in (now in ) and (now the city of ). The was celebrated within such groves on 19th and 20th July."

"Water reveals how small our lives are in time as well as space. Less than 0.025% of the water on our planet exists in all the world’s rivers, lakes, marshes and biological s combined. A river is water’s chance to flicker and dance under the sun before it returns to the deep, dark ocean, is frozen in or stored away underground, sometimes for hundreds of millennia. Flowing water moves mountains, it hollows and builds land. It provides the medium in which the chemistry of life recycles and reorganises energy and matter."

"... "wild service" ... is an ethos ... giving back to nature — but also, obviously, it's the name of . ... it's, after all, the tree of generosity and hospitality that used to be grown on the grounds of s, because beer was . So when you see a pub called "The Chequers", it's named for this wonderful ..."

"... by the third millennium the ns had developed a type which is shown in art of that period. Egyptian monuments of at least one thousand years earlier show dogs very like the modern and others like the ."

"My training was basically as an ecologist—for is largely applied ecology—and, since serving in Ghana for 14 years in the 1930s and 1940s. I have been back 14 times to East, South and West Africa. Even when I started work, it was already clear that the arid land such as the could not be safely occupied other than by s, who with their flocks and herds of grazers and browsers can use small patches of mixed vegetation scattered over a wide area, seldom causing anything more than limited short-term degradation, for the nomads had worked out a '."

"Some animals lend themselves to use in idioms—the goose is a good example of this. As long ago as 1547 a simpleton was being referred to as a goose; presumably a domestic goose, for a wild goose is anything but a fool."

"When Attenborough joined the , in 1952, what were then called “animal programs” were presented by the superintendent of the London Zoo, a Mr. George Cansdale. Once a week, Mr. Cansdale would bring a selection of more or less compliant creatures to the BBC studio. He “put them on a table covered with a doormat,” Attenborough remembers in the preface to his new book, Adventures of a Young Naturalist, “where they sat blinking in the intense lights.”"

"... when you take into account that third dimension of depth, then 97% of the volume of living space on Earth is made up by ocean."

"Obviously, terrestrial mining does have very serious and significant impacts. But, largely speaking, they are much more controllable in a terrestrial setting. They are much more visible — so that third parties can verify them and make sure that mining companies are adhering to . Whereas, they would be far harder to see and verify and attribute to individual mines in the deep sea."

"I knew the moment that I put my head underwater in a coral reef in that there was no other career possibility for me."

"There are few better guides to the glories of s than Callum Roberts. Reef Life is a vibrant memoir of the joys, as well as the grind, of a research career beginning in the 1980s that has spanned a golden age of coral reef science. It is also a fine introduction to the ecology of reefs and the existential threats they now face. Roberts is well equipped for the task. He is chief scientific adviser to ', and has given us two of the best books in the last 15 years about the ecology of the sea and its fate in human hands: An Unnatural History of the Sea and Ocean of Life. Roberts revels in the details of life on a coral reef."

"More than two centuries have passed since 's discovery. passed from American to French, then to hands, but it was never colonized, perhaps because it was too remote even by Pacific standards. It was briefly a U.S. Naval air command base in World War II and the debris of conflict still liter the islands and lagoons. But underwater, it remains much as Fanning described it. Palmyra is one of the last places on this planet where shallow water marine life is still as varied, rich, and abundant as it was in the eighteenth century. A diver stepping into the seas around this today is able to take a trip back in time to an age when fishing had not yet touched life in the sea."

"patterns were used to map dispersal routes of from 18 sites in the . The sites varied, both as sources and recipients of larvae, by an order of magnitude. It is likely that sites supplied copiously from “upstream” reef areas will be more resilient to recruitment overfishing, less susceptible to species loss, and less reliant on local management than places with little upstream reef. The mapping of connectivity patterns will enable the identification of beneficial management partnerships among nations and the design of networks of interdependent reserves."

"Roberts is a and an occasional columnist for the '. His command of research is prodigious, and his generosity with example is prodigal. He is good on the big picture, but he understands even better how to burnish an argument with gleaming detail. ... Roberts has a way of bringing marine disaster closer to home. The long summer vacation of British parliamentarians is not a reward for their legislative labours but a consequence of the , in which a choked with sewage and refuse became so vile that parliament's windows were hung with sheets soaked with bleach. ... He is good on the horrors of oil spills but he points out that the Gulf of Mexico's fishing fleets kill more marine life in a day than 's notorious ' disaster did in months. Oil companies are easy to demonise but the biggest source of oil pollution is either run off from land or directly injected by the two stroke engine of the recreational boat: the floating fuel and oils concentrate on the surface, poisoning the eggs and hungry larvae of hundreds of species."

"If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just."

"Business itself is now the most powerful force for change in the world today, richer and faster by far than most governments."

"In a way, campaigning with The Hepatitis C Trust is business as usual. I've always felt that activism is my rent for living on this planet."

"I can't emphasize enough how important parent-rearing is, because by hand-rearing we are denying s their birthright unless it is possible to wean them with ... other birds of their own species."

"Parent-rearing keeps the pairs occupied for weeks or months, according to the species. They need the occupation. Rearing reduces the monotony of the days and weeks and years which have little to distinguish them. Boredom and lack of stimulation is a very real problem for the more intelligent species. Many s enjoy family life and most "owners" obtain a lot of enjoyment from seeing family groups in an . (And I do mean an aviary and not a little suspended cage where close confinement can result in aggressive encounters.)"

"Parrots were not designed to live in houses. They are noisy and destructive and suffer probably more than any other animal when kept in an unstimulating environment. They need constant interaction, either with a human or another parrot, to keep them happy and healthy. Keeping a parrot is so much more demanding than keeping a dog or cat. Alas, the fact that many owners have failed, and failed miserably, is evidenced in the growing number of parrot refuges. They are filled with feather-plucked or phobic parrots whose former owners had no idea of their emotional needs."

"... Colombia has one of the highest, if not the highest, number of bird species within its shores of any country worldwide: currently believed to be 1,875 (Compare that with just over 300 species found in the UK!). This high number is attributable to its unique location and to its . It is the only country in that has an Atlantic and a Pacific coast and it is also unique in stretching from to the . Three mountain ranges of the magnificent occupy the western part of the country; in the east the habitats vary from lush and flat s to sandy desert. Given this variety of s, it is not surprising that Colombia has the second or third highest number of parrot species worldwide, a total of 52. This is exceeded by Brazil with about 72 species and possibly by Australia with 52 or 53 species. (These numbers could be revised at any time as DNA research often indicates that a particular species is, in fact, two species.) There is a sad statistic connected with Colombia's 50 plus parrot species: at least 12 are in imminent danger of extinction."

"This is an almost unique case of how a can be endangered by trade without specific demand. It was literally unknown in until only five years ago. There was always a local trade, within the and islands, the only places where it occurs. These islands form a chain from northern to in the Philippines. Then suddenly, hundreds of birds were captured and exported. In 1992 about 1,000 were captured, at least 700 of which were exported. In that year, at least 200 died from disease and neglect at the premises of one dealer in Jakarta. I saw dozens crowded together in the cages of a dealer in Singapore. This would have been appalling whatever the species."

"There are only three s in which date back to the 17th century: (1621), (1670) and the (1673). (, the country's only other Royal Botanic Garden, began in 1759.)"

"When chosen for their color and texture, herbs need not look out of place among other s. Popular garden plants, such as , s, s, and are easily accommodated in a ."

"An excellent teacher and a brilliant botanist with a wide range of interest, encouraged students to explore and record the , and awarded a gold medal annually for the best (collection of pressed plants)."

"The Hebrew name for is , meaning 'sweetness', from which we get the . Myrtle also symbolizes love. Its use in s may have come from ancient Greece and Rome or from the . There is a tradition that the sprigs of myrtle in the bouquet should be planted in the newly weds' garden and if they root then the marriage will be a success."

"Undoubtedly the major edible —, , , , elephant yam, and —could play a more important part in the food production and economies of countries if they received more attention from s and agronomists."

"Butterflies attract attention and cash because they are popular and attractive, and because there are rightly seen as symbols of wildlife in decline."

"The oak has long been a symbol of strength and, with the growth of the Royal Navy, also patriotic pride. It once fought our naval battles and carried our cargoes, framed our houses and spanned the roofs of cathedrals and barns, fed our pigs, tanned our leather and nourished our earliest industries."

"England is said to be one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. It has lost most of its big wild animals. A thousand years ago in my village, which was quite a big place even then, s used to build their dams on my river. Perhaps a thousand years before that the villagers might have heard a wolf howl from a distant down of a rumour of bears in the forests that extended that extended for after mile. Even a hundred years ago, there would have been far more wild flowers, particularly at the edge of the cornfields, colourful blooms whose names attest to their former familiarity: , , ."

"s of hunting camps built about 9,500 years ago indicate that by that time Britain had become densely wooded. At , in the is , bones and antlers from a variety of s were uncovered, including and in abundance, wild boar, (a prehistoric wild ox), , wolf, , , fox and hedgehog."

"... being rare often means your genetic resources are limited, and that makes you vulnerable to change. Small populations are also liable to be picked off by chance events, like a shrub growing up in front of you, or that new borehole for a new housing estate dug a few metres away. Conservation has recently come to the aid of many threatened plants, drawing many a little further back from the brink, but perhaps at some cost to their inherent wildness ... But the wise conservationist will aim at preventing flowers from reaching that state of extreme vulnerability in the first place."

"An average produces about five s of debris per per year. The get through this mountain of raw by sheer numbers. Fungi make up about 10% of the weight of living matter () in a wood. They are the weightiest component of all, bar the trees. You would require a convoy of dump trucks to remove the fungi of just a small copse. Yet all we see of them are their scattered in autumn."

"I can't say I have ever had much of a passion for proper . In fact, on about the only occasion I ever did any, I disliked the experience very much. I was about 23, and, wearying of ever finding a full-time job in , I got myself enrolled as a temporary member of staff at a northern university where I spent about four months on a cold, treeless fell, counting s. It was very boring and drove me to the bottle."

"Anyone who has witnessed Bill Oddie’s passion for nature, or watched the personable and wonderfully erudite wildlife presenter in action, might be forgiven for thinking that he could never really have been anything else. But such a role was not the natural end of a career that began with comedy sketches in a university amateur drama club. While most young people will recognise Oddie from such well-loved programmes as the BBC’s ' and ', his career is really a tale of two halves, and “the comedy years”, as he laughingly refers to them, made up a considerable period of his life. He was at Cambridge at the same time as and , and later become part of the comedy trio ‘’, whose humorous sketches delighted audiences throughout the 70s."

"... in many ways, the days of conservation are, sadly, a little bit numbered ... the point I'm trying to make is ... how much wildlife has decreased or, in some cases, completely disappeared. But, the only places where our wildlife is flourishing — and this is really, more or less, all over the world — are ... s ... Managing a reserve is really just on a big scale."