Thoughts from influential nature conservationists…
PATRICK ROPER
Career highlights
I am not what I think of as a typical ecologist. I was born just before the outbreak of World War II and my early childhood was greatly modified by wartime experiences both for good and for ill. However, I was intrigued by wildlife, particularly insects, from an early age. When I was 10 I joined the Amateur Entomologists’ Society and met many older, experienced entomologists. Boarding school and a family move to East Sussex rather isolated me but I persisted with my studies of insects using the Royal Entomological Society’s handbooks and a battered old Victorian brass microscope to put names to the little creature that abounded on my father’s farm.
At school I was encouraged to develop the scientific side of my education with the aim of continuing to university, but I fell out of love with academia and science and went to try and be a ‘wild rover’ in the Australian outback. An early marriage and children meant I had to find regular work and, over the years, I eventually held senior positions at the English Tourist Board, Alton Towers theme park and the National Maritime Museum. I retained my interest in wildlife throughout and in my sixties became a consultant ecologist and have done many surveys for public and private bodies and given ‘expert evidence’ at public inquiries. As well as working for organisations like the Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre and the Woodland Trust, I lectured on tourism at Oxford Brookes University which is part of the reason for my being awarded an honorary doctorate in business administration.
I retired in 2021 when I was 83, but still undertake small commissions and delight in the magic of nature that first awoke when I was a small child.
How do you define nature conservation?
‘Nature’ in a sense is simply everything from the smallest subatomic particle to the entire universe and the human species and what it does is part of it. Even the most destructive aspects of our species are parts of nature because nothing can be outside of nature. There is a sense, of course, in which we define nature as organisms and inanimate phenomena as things other than ourselves but a word like ‘nature’ is bound to have many definitions.
The word ‘conservation’ is a bit of a double-edged sword as it implies keeping things as they are when nature is plainly always on the move. The two words ‘nature’ and ‘conservation’ are about trying to conform the interests of our species with the interests (as we conceive of them) of other living things and their habitats.
Over the years I have seen conservation emphasis move from being policy based to being evidence based1. It always was a mixture of the two and, although, evidence-based conservation is increasingly shown to be able to produce better results, it does need data to do so and there is far less writing down of what is going on out there than there used to be, and ‘evidence’ is what people record and review not just what they enjoy looking at.
There does seem to be a higher purpose behind nature conservation other than preserving the diversity of this wonderful planet. Years ago, I came across the concept of going with the grain of the universe and that is what I think we should try to understand and work with.
What is the good news about wildlife and nature at the moment?
I don’t think there is very much good news. The outdoor world of my childhood “so various, so beautiful, so new” as Matthew Arnold put it2 has diminished. However, there is more coverage of the issues by the media and more areas are being protected. Often though this creates conflicts with, for example, the current debates about rewilding. Writing this during the recent heatwave I am reminded of the issue of when to cut roadside verges. The interests of wildlife are often best served by letting plants, and therefore much animal life, complete their cycle of development to autumn-dry ripeness, but no one wants to see the sort of tragedies that grass fires can cause during hot, periods of drought.
While there have been many losses of species and habitats during my lifetime, there are some changes in the opposite direction. Here the mewing of buzzards has, for example replaced the song of the skylarks. Box bugs (Gonocerus acuteangulatus), once confined to Box Hill in Surrey, are now quite widespread on other shrubs throughout Britain. The beautiful rosemary beetle (Chrysolina americana), now a widespread species (or pest), arrived in Britain from southern Europe in 1994 and is generally thought to be, along with a growing number of new-to-Britain species, a product of global warming.
But these are small things compared the effects that will arise with the slow shifting of the climatic tectonic plates in the world we have known over much of recorded history.
Beyond the obvious of habitat loss and species decline, what is your greatest concern in nature conservation at the moment?
One of my greatest concerns is the lack of interest in natural history in many in the younger generations, and especially the under-21s. Starting young is important as it gives an opportunity to develop knowledge and skills over a lifetime.
Adkin in his publication The Moths of Eastbourne (1930)3 wrote “almost daily during the summer, one meets small armies of schoolboys each armed with a butterfly net” (an interesting aspect of this is that young collectors were all, apparently, male). Insect collectors, of course, often used to search for early stages in order to rear adult specimens and became extremely knowledgeable about habits and habitats and eventually more concerned with conservation than collecting. They also moved on from Lepidoptera to other orders and made an enormous contribution to entomology.
As a professional ecologist, I often had to work with ‘butterfly’ nets surveying in quite busy places and the public could be interested in what I was doing, but I was clearly an unusual encounter though mostly people understood the importance of the environment and biodiversity.
When I was a child, collecting was not a lonely activity. I had several friends who would join me on ‘field trips’ into Epping Forest where I lived and we would search for moths on tree trunks or for caterpillars. In an hour or two we usually found large numbers of different species and today I often wonder where all the caterpillars have gone. I also had some wonderful excursions with more experienced entomologists who showed me how to find things I didn’t even know existed. It was exciting. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, in the absence of colour television, excellent books were being published, often covering all known British species in one group or another. While some excellent material is still being published such as Steven Falk’s wonderful book on wild British bees4, much material is often very expensive and not comprehensive.
If you had a limited budget for nature conservation in Britain, what would you prioritise and why?
I would put as much money as possible into public relations for nature conservation. Much is already being done to get important messages across but this can always be strengthened to help counter the tidal wave of persuasion for consumerism. In my commercial experience good PR is the most cost effective way of influencing hearts and minds.
One of the topics for which I would like to see more stress is the value of gardens and allotments. We increasingly see overhead shots from drones of various bits of Britain and I am often struck by the varied habitats and potential for wildlife in housing estates and other urban areas which stand out like small oases surrounded by well-sprayed farming monocultures. Dave Goulson and others have discussed the positive value of this in their writing recently.
How do you feel about your input into the subject – what, if anything has it achieved and would you do it differently if starting again today?
I have spent much time and thought on trying to bridge the gap between enthusiastic conservationists and the general public who often pay brief attention to nature and then move on. I am particularly proud of the help I gave The Woodland Trust in acquiring the 262 hectares of Brede High Woods in East Sussex which has given free access to the public to a delightful example of ancient wood and heathland in the High Weald.
After the acquisition I worked for many years with the Trust on the ecology of this and other areas and I have written a book on Brede High Woods commissioned by The Woodland Trust5.
For around 20 years from 2000 to 2020 I worked as an independent consultant ecologist and was commissioned for a variety of work by many wildlife organisations, local authorities and developers. Not world transforming activities but one I found socially useful. Balancing the demands of developers and others with the needs of wildlife in these days of critical housing shortages is, I believe, important work.
On a very modest scale I have my Square Metre project. I started recording wildlife from a square metre of our garden in 2003 and the project is still going nearly 20 years later. It has featured on several TV and radio programmes and in magazines and newspapers and I have given many talks on the project. So far, I have identified around 800 plants and animals in the square and there are many more unidentified. Apart from its sheer biodiversity, the changing face of the square gives much cause for reflection. As Goethe said, “it is a pleasant occupation to enquire into nature and into one’s own self at the same time”.6
I often hear or read about the debate between people who want to plant trees and those who would prefer natural regeneration. In the Square Metre and its immediate surroundings 12 self-sown woody species have arrived without my help: birch, hornbeam, sallow, holly, yew, sycamore, hawthorn, oak, hazel, privet, ash and, remarkably, wild service.
I say “remarkably” of the wild service because I have studied and written and talked about the tree for 50 years and probably helped to secure its future in the wider countryside. I have often said that the species rarely reproduces naturally from seed but one came up less than a metre from the place I usually sit to study the Square Metre.
In contrast to this close focus long-term study I worked in the 1980s on the development of tourism, mostly wildlife oriented, in the Falkland Islands. Again it was important to strike a balance between the economic needs of the islands and environmental conservation.
Anything else you’d would like to say..?
I often read about ‘evidence-based conservation’ and agree with many of its precepts, but while nature conservation has to be practical and as scientifically sound as possible, I believe it is important not to forget to pay attention to the spiritual mythos alongside the practical logos. Much appreciation of wildlife has arisen from the work of poets, artists and musicians. Ralph Vaughan-William’s composition The Lark Ascending inspired by a poem of George Meredith’s has recently been voted several times as the nation’s most popular piece of classical music. Maybe this has done more for skylark conservation than whole squadrons of ornithologists, though I believe it is of paramount importance that the arts and the sciences work together in nature conservation and much else.
As the Irving Berlin song goes “There maybe trouble ahead … but let’s face the music and dance.” We will all have to play a part in getting through the impending environmental crisis but, at the same time, let us continue to be inspired by the wonder of the universe and reflect upon our position within it.
References
1 Sutherland, W. J. et al. (2004) The need for evidence-based conservation. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol 19, No 6 June 2004
2 Arnold, Matthew (1867 ) Dover Beach. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach
3 Adkin, R. (1930) The Moths of Eastbourne. Part 1. Transactions of the Eastbourne Natural History, Photographic and Literary Society. Supplement to vol x.
4 Falk, S. (2015) Field Guide to the Bees or Great Britain and Ireland. Bloomsbury Publishing plc.
5 Roper, P. (20xx) Brede High Woods. The Woodland Trust, Grantham
6 Goethe, J.W. (1823) In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Maxims and Reflections, Penguin Books 1998