Is wildlife and the natural world an escape from your routine? Is it part of your everyday? Is it a means by which you connect with the landscape around you? Perhaps a way to connect with people too?

For me, it’s all the above, and I don’t see that being in contradiction with my day job as an Ecological Consultant. If asked, however, I would call myself a birder, applied ecologist and wildlife conservationist. Again, not a contradiction in my view. 

It’s from all these perspectives I have outlined my personal views on development in the farmed landscape and its effects on wildlife. In doing so, I realise I have not mentioned other issues that will matter dearly to people, such as the loss of Grade 1 agricultural land or the visual character of the places people work and live in. These are beyond my expertise. 

Eight Freeports were announced by the Government last Year. Most recently they have been promoted in the Levelling-up White Paper, released Feb 2nd, as a way to increase prosperity and investment in the more deprived areas of the UK.

A closer look at the purpose and plan for these low tax, tariff free zones puts into question what they mean by the word ‘prosperous’. What will these Freeports mean for local communities and UK citizens?

We all recognise air pollution is a threat to the health of both humans and wildlife. And we know action is needed to introduce policies and measures that will reduce the harmful effects we are facing every day. The burden on the NHS, our economy and nature’s recovery is very visible.

With that in mind, more than 60 community representatives joined the online seminar hosted by the Community Planning Alliance (CPA) on 7th December, the first of three planned events aimed at engaging communities more actively in the air pollution/air quality debate. The lively chat inputs clearly showed the level of interest and concern about many issues, with questions about wood burning stoves and clean air zones being among the challenging topics raised with the speakers.

​The Community Planning Alliance was founded on the back of conversations between campaigners from all over the UK who saw their local green spaces threatened by development (of all kinds). 

We realised that we needed to understand the national, cumulative, scale of these many separate threats. And that is why our Grassroots Map was born.

Now containing more than 500 local campaigns, it paints a stark picture of the huge pressures the UK’s natural environment is facing – and just how broken the planning system is. With each of the habitats that people are campaigning to save being just one in a process of ‘death by a thousand cuts’.