Weeknotes 12.10.2020
Nature — how we value it, understand our place in it, campaign for it — has been the big theme of the last two weeks. This weekend I co-hosted our annual autumn conservation weekend at Hazel Hill wood. It was an experimental group to see how we could make it work with Covid restrictions, so only 7 adults (including the small lead team of 3 of us) and 2 children. It was strange: no hugs, but also much harder to be fully collaborative around things like food preparation, and mealtimes where you are too far apart to converse normally and to speak in anything other than awkward announcement mode. A reminder that even face-to-face meet-ups are a a shadow of what they could be. But the main thing was that we made it happen, when we didn’t have to. The weather was kind to us, so we were able to be outside almost all the time.
And I am taking away the intensity of colour, unmediated by screens: carpets of yellow hornbeam leaves, bright blue skies, purple ‘amethyst deceiver’ fungi (thanks to Salisbury Natural History Society for identifying those). In our closing circle we reflected on what we had appreciated about the weekend: for me, the experience of being in nature and working together brought out the best in all of us.
TThe nature theme continued at work as we moved into our second quarter. Work this fortnight included:
- Taking part in an open pitching session related to the next phase of our nature work (how do we build on the trees campaigning, and move forward from here). I used the opportunity to practice our basic pitching structure (insight / what if? / solution) and made the case for joining the campaign for a National Nature Service. (My colleague Christian shared a sideways take on pitching which was also very helpful — and a reminder that a ‘failed’ pitch is just more useful information about your audience’s real needs).
My idea differs in that it includes a) a much wider co-design element with young people and b) a wider sense of what nature service might look like (what if you could do your nature service in a school, or in the NHS, working on nature prescribing, for example?). What if it drew on the best elements of programmes like Year Here, or On Purpose, grounded in praxis (a strong foundation in the action-reflection cycle)? I also like the fact that it connects with Friends of the Earth’s practical heritage: in the early 1980s we used the opportunity of the Government’s ‘Community Programme’ to support the construction of the Bristol to Bath railway path (which then became the first section of the National Cycle Network). As a (slightly) more established organisation we were able to channel the funding for the small group of visionary activists that later became Sustrans. In researching this I also loved the photo above of the path opening in Easton in 1984. 35 years later this is unrecognisable: the whole path is densely wooded on both sides, a lovely reminder of how rapidly nature can come back, if we make the space available.
- I also enjoyed doing some of the creative work to support the campaign team to think about where there is scope for testing ideas. What could we test, what would the next step be, where does this sit on the ‘systemically desirable’ / ‘culturally feasible’ matrix?
- One of the more tricky areas to explore was a sense that we in order to address our current predicament we need a shift towards are more holistic understanding or our place in nature. I don’t dispute this — but it is stretching me to think about how to translate this into a hypothesis to test. Situating the problem in relation to the iceberg model helps here: we can test and probe at the level of patterns and possibly even structures, and we see results at the level of events, but probing at the level of the mental model is maybe too deep to be confident of the correlation of observations at the surface?
- I met with Avon Wildlife Trust to feedback on our ‘Finding the Land for Trees’ session (see last week notes), and share options for embedding it into strategic planning in the West of England. I’m hugely excited about their (still nascent) plans for Entry Hill in Bath, but it was also good to be able to show how we’ve now rolled out our local prototype into a national tool.
- I held a review session for our team, looking at learning from the last quarter. We kicked off though by sharing successes — a practice that is increasingly important during this disjointed time. It was great to be able to reflect on our priorities from this time last year (to prioritise actually getting our trees experiments off the ground) and see how far we’ve come. The launch of the tool is a big success for us.
- On Thursday, I joined some of the West of England Nature Partnership’s annual conference. I particularly enjoyed hearing from EcoWild about the work they are doing to build nature connection to address this fundamental disconnect problem (I keep coming back to Alex Evans’s observation, below).
- The launch of the Earthshot prize has also been a creative stimulus. What could we do for nature with £1m? It’s both a lot of money — and really very little when it comes to anything land based. I’ve asked a few people this question in the last week, and have been struck by how hard many people find it to come up with a good answer.
- On a smaller scale I found myself pondering my own interventions for nature. We’ve (still) go scaffolding up, and it suddenly struck me that this is the perfect opportunity to put up swift boxes. But what if there was a better way to join up building works with nature intervention? What if everyone who submitted a planning application for roof works received information about how they could support birds? What if… roofing companies sponsored bird boxes — they could even put logos on them — so every roofing job created a new home for birds? I ran the idea past Bristol Swifts for a quick test. They couldn’t see how they could support it with their tiny capacity but did provide some interesting information about the size of the ‘market’: 200,000 annually (caution: I’m not sure exactly what this figure corresponds to and I haven’t checked it out myself).
Other bits and pieces
- This learnings-led checklist from the National Lottery Community Fund report. Vital for designing effective community-based programmes.
- Investing in our friendships — including our work-based friendships— takes time and effort right now, but it is a genuine investment in our collective wellbeing. Rather like the pitching article above, I found this Guardian piece helpful: they both share a common message about misattunement. And a call to courage in reaching out to that colleague you maybe find a bit stand-offish…
“People who initiate are less likely to be lonely over time and they’re more likely to be satisfied in their relationships. People assume that if the other person is not initiating with me, then they’re not interested. But everybody’s afraid of rejection.” She points to a study published in the journal Psychological Science in 2018 that highlighted a “liking gap” — that we tend to underestimate how much someone we have interacted with likes us. “People who initiate are less likely to be lonely over time and they’re more likely to be satisfied in their relationships. People assume that if the other person is not initiating with me, then they’re not interested. But everybody’s afraid of rejection.” She points to a study published in the journal Psychological Science in 2018 that highlighted a “liking gap” — that we tend to underestimate how much someone we have interacted with likes us. […] And if you do get rejected? “I like to think of it as a misattunement rather than ‘they don’t like me’,” says Franco.
And… breathe. The logic of the slowdown.
Meanwhile, I’ve been gently meditating on the slowdown papers, the best bit of 2020 Coronavirus writing I’ve come across. Amongst other things, they’ve made me revisit the idea not just of the 15-minute city but the ‘restorative neighbourhood’ (credits to Useful Projects for early stage thinking here). In his final post in this batch Dan Hill argues that waiting it out will not deliver the just transition. I am acutely aware of this, having upped the pressure to deliver by getting my local street-level project on the front page (no, front 3 pages!) of the local paper this month. (Makes me feel a little bit queasy every time I look at it now).
But… at the same time we must open up the space for reflection (back in that praxis loop again). Sit down, get a coffee and read this.
