About this episode:
Around a table at the Woodland Trust’s headquarters in Grantham, David sits down with three of the most powerful voices in British conservation: Darren Moorcroft, Chief Executive of the Woodland Trust; Craig Bennett OBE, Chief Executive of The Wildlife Trusts; and Beccy Speight, Chief Executive of the RSPB – between them, custodians of millions of members, thousands of nature reserves, and decades of hard-won environmental progress.
It is, on paper, a story of success. The RSPB alone counts more members than every major UK political party combined. The Woodland Trust manages 1,200 sites, all free and open to anyone. The Wildlife Trusts have more nature reserves than McDonald’s has restaurants – and if an ambitious bid for a vast estate in Northumberland succeeds, their newest will be the size of Athens. (Put that in your Veggie Burger, Ronald!) And yet the State of Nature reports – co-authored by all three organisations since 2013 – tell a grimmer story: the UK remains one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet. So if these organisations are succeeding, why is there less wildlife in Britain today than when the first report was published?
What follows is a candid, wide-ranging conversation about why that gap persists – and, more importantly, what it will take to close it. The trio are frank about the limits of their power and the outsized influence of ideology on Downing Street, but also clear-eyed about what is changing: public awareness is shifting, businesses are moving beyond philanthropy, and a growing movement is starting to feel “…like a wave that can be pushed further up the beach than ever before.”
All three believe that tipping-point is closer than it looks. As Craig puts it: if you got rid of the economy, nature would be fine. If you got rid of nature, there would be no economy. Get that truth to land in the right places – and the next State of Nature report might finally tell a different story.
David's thoughts:
There is a feeling in Britain at the moment that we are going backwards.
It’s a feeling that is increasingly being exploited by political movements who still seem to believe that elections should be won on little more than comforting lies, convenient promises and the barrel loads of snake oil currently unable to traverse the Strait of Hormuz. But the truth – uncomfortable as it may be – is that we now live in a world so interwoven by globalism, filtered through varying degrees of nationalism, that meaningful change, whether environmental or social, is extraordinarily difficult for any single nation to achieve alone.
And so, perhaps unhelpfully, the small question of “What does meaningful national action’ actually look like in a globally entangled world?” was the one spinning around my head – as if in an astronaut’s centrifuge – in the weeks leading up to my conversation with Beccy, Craig and Darren (from herein known collectively as BCD [for the divers: the buoyancy control device of the British conservation establishment]).
The episode you’ve just heard came on the back of three international conferences I attended over the past year: the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi, CITES in Uzbekistan, and the IPBES gathering recently in Manchester. Three huge international forums where governments, NGOs, scientists and businesses come together to discuss the future of nature. They are important, serious, necessary spaces, and as a result, appear to achieve very little meaningful action! (That’s a half joke…) The UK takes part in all of these events, both at a governmental level and, indeed, with the input from a host of domestic NGOs (I was at these events representing a handful of them).
At each of these conferences, I found myself wondering: if Britain – arguably a smaller and less globally powerful nation than it once was – still wants to play a constructive role in shaping environmental progress, then surely that has to begin internally. What does positive change look like within our own borders? How do the organisations closest to that work actually think about achieving it?
And, so, that’s the “WHY?” of this episode…
…and, as such, prior to pressing RECORD in the Woodland Trust’s conference room in Grantham this February (2026), I was a little nervous, and little giddy; childlike and naïve. I had spoken to BCD all separately before, at length, but still sat there hoping that they would shock me with an elegant and simple solution that would resurrect biodiversity immediately and permanently. Entirely restore my faith in national and international insitutions, in multi-lateral agreements and treaties, and send me back out into the world (not that Grantham isn’t lovely) a reinvigourated man.
Of course, I knew they couldn’t. But, hope is a very powerful thing. Maybe the most powerful thing of all.
Listening to BCD talk, it is clear that there are genuine, and vital, national ambitions in place. The Woodland Trust’s work to increase access to green space – particularly for communities currently deprived of it – sits squarely at the intersection of environmental and social justice. I love it! The Wildlife Trusts are increasingly mobilising their membership around large-scale nature recovery. This is exactly what we need – “Bigger, Better and More Connected!” And the RSPB continues to build on a legacy that began as a response to the mistreatment of wildlife, while also undertaking vital investigative work exposing environmental crime. Their Investigations Team is awe-inspiring, tying wildlife crime and the social issues underpinning it brilliantly and unignorably; long may it prosper. And the best thing to remember from this episode – one of the most brilliantly politically inconvenient things about nature – is that it refuses to stay in one tribe. It does not belong neatly to the left, the liberal middle class, the countryside vote, the retired birdwatcher, the TikTok naturalist or the landed and/or gentrified. It leaks across boundaries, like phosphates from a chicken farm. Access to green space, birdsong, clean rivers, shade, beauty, flood protection – these are not niche concerns. They may be among the last genuinely common drivers for good that we have.
There is, in other words, a great deal of brilliant, serious work happening. But is it enough? Because – despite all of this – Britain’s biodiversity indicators continue to tell us a difficult truth: we are not recovering nature nearly as quickly as we need to. In the current climate, I fear that NGOs alone cannot generate the momentum our wild places need now.
The challenge lies in a broader disconnect between the different parts of society that are supposed to drive change: Government waits for business to provide innovation and solutions; Business waits for clear policy and regulation; policy responds to voters; and voters are [INSERT YOUR CURRENT FURY ABOUT THE PROFESSIONAL POLITICAL CLASSES HERE]. All of this, of course, then gets buffeted about by geopolitics and global financial markets.
Still, there is an itch at the back of my neck – somewhere around the point where the spinal cord meets the skull. Could the millions of supporters behind Britain’s larger environmental NGOs be mobilised in a way that makes Whitehall act? Or, at the very least, care?
During our conversation, C offered the analogy that has stayed with me: the work of charities being like a better-informed Cnut. When the tide is incoming – when public opinion and political will are moving in the right direction – charities push it as far up the beach as they possibly can. But when the tide runs out, you don’t waste all your energy trying to hold the ocean back. Instead, you try – just a little bit – to stop it from retreating quite as far as it did before. This is perhaps as close as you will get to seeing a conservationist be in favour of rising sea levels.
Intellectually, I understand that logic.
But emotionally, I find it a far harder idea to sit with. Because it suggests that while good work can always be done, transformative change is impossible without a prevailing tide behind it.
And behind that analogy are thousands of people – conservationists, scientists, volunteers, campaigners and staff across countless organisations, even CEOs of large eNGOs – who dedicate their lives to protecting the natural world. And in these ‘low tide’ moments, they are all still out there busting a gut to keep biodiversity collapse or the climate crisis from worsening. (I’ll never forget a nihilistic environmentalist friend of mine saying: “A good day for a conservationist is when nature is set back decades, not generations.”)
And these people, as we discuss in the episode, aren’t just members of the larger eNGOs. Many also support different groups that tackle the tide in a multitude of different ways. Those that champion individual species or landscapes or different kinds of habitat; those that seek changes to society in the way that we dress, what we eat, how we live, how we traverse our planet; those that see our current protections of animal or landscape welfare as criminally inadequate; those with a £5 direct debit; those who throw orange paint; those that blockade oil refineries, newspaper factories, corporate offices; those that live off grid; those that seek political office to change things from the top; those with placards who seek change from the bottom…
None of these approaches are sufficient on their own. But taken together, they begin to look less like fragmentation and more like an ecosystem: different temperaments, different tactics, different thresholds for compromise, all pressing – however imperfectly – against the same deadening idea that this is just how things are now.
I suppose the point I want to get across in the aftermath of my interview with BCD is that this conversation is just one of many. One way that we are trying to save wildlife. This conversation – and this approach – in isolation cannot change the world, but it does shine a light on one of the mechanisms we already have in place – successfully so – as we wait for the tide to come in again.
Could BCD do more? Yes… I think so. And I think they would say ‘yes’ too. So, if you’re a member, write to them and tell them what you think they should do; get involved. And, if you’re not a member, perhaps think about supporting them, empower them to be able to do more on your behalf. Or indeed think about who best represents the change you think the current moment needs, and do that instead.
Ultimately, if millions of people already support organisations like these (which they do), if concern for nature cuts across class and party lines (which it does), if the evidence is overwhelming and the local benefits obvious (yes, and yes), then the more uncomfortable question is simply not whether the public cares enough. It is why politics still behaves as though they do not.
The tide will turn.
It always does.
And beside the obvious question of “Will we be ready when it comes?”, there is another, more exciting one. A more tantalising one:
“Are there enough of us to turn the tide sooner?”
LINKS:
The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts – https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/
Woodland Trust – https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/
RSPB – https://www.rspb.org.uk/
