West Yorkshire’s Local Nature Recovery Strategy: an urgent call to peaceful arms
Nature is crying out for our help in our region and beyond. Discover how we got here and what can be done to save it before it’s too late …
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, there is a rapture on the lonely shore, there is society, where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but nature more.” – Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Our natural world, like the planet earth, is one of our kind. Everything it consists of, from the complex, delicate and harmonious balance of animals, plants, rivers and trees to all the phenomenon that takes place beneath the thin kármán line, is exceptional. And not just in our solar system or the milky way or the local group of galaxies we belong to. In all the vastness of the universe, there is nothing like our natural world. We are all there is.
James Lovelock certainly thought so. In his provocative 2019 book Novacene – the title refers to the hypothetical post-anthropocene and post-human-centric future – the late scientist argued that our cosmos simply isn’t old enough to have been able recreate the same conditions that have led to intelligent life on earth to be possible elsewhere (life is some 3.7 billion years in the making on a planet that’s 4.5 billion years old in a cosmos that has been around for 13.8 billion years). “Our existence is a freakish one-off.”
We are, it seems, from a gaian perspective – and visiting little grey aliens and flying saucers aside – alone in the universe. And for all our talk of space travel and colonising other planets – which would also require us to create artificial biospheres to sustain life – we remain, as has always been the case, inextricably bound to this impossibly beautiful blue marble we call home.
Yet, as things stand, as a result of being a uniquely curious, ambitious and inventive species, with spiritual and secular delusions of grandeur – as well as a tendency to act in an invasive way – we humans have not only estranged ourselves from this rare cosmic arcadia, but left it in an extremely perilous state.
For its sins, the UK has been at the forefront of this affront, a world leader in “degrading the natural environment” as Professor Andy Purvis, a biodiversity researcher at the Natural History Museum, put it in 2020. The consequences of our destructive interventions on the planet have been catastrophic.
According to the 2023 State of Nature report, which was produced with the input of over 60 conservation and research organisations, including the Woodland Trust, Friends of the Earth and Natural England, the UK is now one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.
When it comes to biodiversity, which “underpins all life on earth”, as the World Health Organization has described it, we’re now in the bottom 10% globally. Over the years, just over half of our biodiversity has been destroyed.
Though most of us are oblivious to this fact – for instance, West Yorkshire is one of the most built-up areas in in the country with 85% of its people living in “dense,
historically industrial towns” that today have all the characteristics of a modern urban environment – the degradation of nature on our doorstep, in Yorkshire, God’s Own Country no less, has been striking.
Roughly 80% of peatlands have been damaged. Approximately 80% of wetlands have vanished. Around 80% of protected sites and rivers are in a less than favourable condition. And over the course of 200 years, the region has lost almost 2,000 species with a further 3,000 still at risk of extinction.
These losses, though extreme in their own right, are even more alarming given that two-thirds of the UK’s known species call Yorkshire home along with more native neighbours like rare fungi. It’s bad for nature, both locally and nationally. It’s bad for humans in so, so many ways. It’s bad for economics, as wrecked as that has been for too many years.
And it’s bad for our long suffering planet, which continues to be exploited and let down, as António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, acknowledged in an interview with the Guardian recently. “Let’s recognise our failure,” he said. “[Because] the truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years.”
As disappointing the response to climate change has been, all isn’t necessarily lost. The good news is that there is now widespread recognition among politicians, in particular – because, ultimately, that’s where most of the power and influence lies – of just how serious a situation this is. But that’s not all.
There’s also consensus that this appalling decline in nature’s once diverse abundance has reached something of a tipping point and that active intervention is necessary to stop and reverse the worrying trend (although, as a caveat, these days that political will must be treated with caution with the Conservatives, for instance, now rolling back on their climate change pledges, with Reform UK, which has been hoovering up former Tories, pursuing a more sceptical, conspiratorial line). Whether there’s a sense of urgency, however, is questionable as you’ll see later on.
In any case, in England, one of the ideas with the most potential that has emerged from this sea change in thinking are local nature recovery strategies. They’re fundamental to what is known as the Nature Recovery Network, which has been described as being “a growing national network of wildlife-rich places, stretching from our cities to countryside, mountains to coast”.
There are 48 strategy areas in total, ensuring that every inch of the country is covered, as per the ecologist John Lawton’s “bigger, better, more joined up” no gaps and no overlaps philosophy. And, of course, that includes West Yorkshire – all 783 or so square miles of it.
How we got here (a very quick and short history)
“It is notorious that there are whole streets in the town of Huddersfield, and many courts and alleys, which are neither flagged, paved, sewered, nor drained; where garbage and filth of every description are left on the surface to ferment and rot; where pools of stagnant water are almost constant,