Mark wrote:
This Defra quote, “Britain is a proud nation of nature lovers, and this authorities is dedicated to turning the tide on its decline after years of neglect. We’re progressing plans to designate 9 new nationwide river walks, one in every area of England.” (see right here) may win a prize for stupidity if solely the sphere weren’t so robust.
Effectively, here’s a problem for you. Write a visitor weblog which begins “Britain is a proud nation of nature lovers, and this authorities is dedicated to turning the tide on its decline after years of neglect.” and ends “We’re progressing plans to designate 9 new nationwide river walks, one in every area of England.”, with as much as 500 phrases of your individual inserted between the opening and shutting sentence to make the case for Defra.
I’ll donate £100 to a charity of your alternative for the entry judged by me to be probably the most convincing (even when not very convincing). Ship your entry as a Phrase file hooked up to an e-mail to mark@markavery.data by midnight on 31 August and good and/or convincing and/or humorous entries and the winner might be printed within the latter half of September.
Mark writes:
That is the profitable entry, by James Gilbert, and I’ve donated £100 to his chosen charity of the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire Wildlife Belief.
James is a contract ecologist and Chartered Environmentalist, presently dwelling in Northamptonshire, all the time out in nature and typically writing about his observations and wildlife encounters.
James writes:
Britain is a proud nation of nature lovers, and this authorities is dedicated to turning the tide on its decline after years of neglect.
For too lengthy now this nation has lazily and ignorantly allowed: inappropriate and unmitigated growth of land; arable fields to be wilfully sprayed with chemical pesticides, showered with synthetic fertiliser — typically poisonous sewage sludge; moorland to be overgrazed, drained, burned, rid of raptors; hedgerows to be grubbed out; the countryside usually to undergo invasive non-native species, together with the annual overloading with thousands and thousands of pheasants launched for merciless sport.
All this (and extra) basically equates to untold, unrelenting habitat injury, destruction and degradation — an assault on non-human life, in large-scale and diverse methods. With growing public consciousness of, and concern for, ecological points, no extra can it’s like this. Braveness along with ecological literacy will assist the nation lastly step off this treadmill of wrongdoing — alas, each are to not be discovered right here inside Defra. Moreover the federal government nonetheless sees now as not the time to deal with an actual and urgent difficulty like biodiversity loss; not the time to make actual and significant long-term optimistic change to the UK’s nature deficit. There are fiscal issues all the time of extra concern — the primary one being the ludicrous and self-harming habit that’s year-after-year financial progress, utilizing finite planetary sources.
And so, as soon as once more, a authorities with our – Defra’s – recommendation, will leisurely let proceed all of the above-mentioned, long-ingrained nature-depleting actions and as an alternative reasonably hopes to deal with nature decline by one silver-bullet-esque mission: to unlock miles of English riverbank.
This isn’t tinkering on the edges, or spitting within the wind. Such a mission will present a brand new gateway into the countryside, turbo-charging wildlife restoration. It is going to imply a greater deal for British wildlife. A mission that may higher join individuals with valuable rivers — rivers themselves broken and degraded, largely modified and polluted: pesticide-spiked, nutrient-enriched, sewage-pulsed, invasive-species choked, microplastic-laden, critically low-flowing (closely abstracted), floodplain-disconnected (straightened, overdeepened), flow-regulated (fish-barriered) and so forth.
So, anyway, what is going to this unlocking of tons of of miles of riverbank seem like — how will we ship an uptick in nature?
We’re progressing plans to designate 9 new nationwide river walks, one in every area of England.
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