Cocker - Our place: can we save British nature before it is too late?

Environmental thought and politics have become parts of mainstream cultural life in Britain.
The wish to protect wildlife is now a central goal for our society, but where did these green ideas come from? And who created the cherished institutions, such as the National Trust or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, that are now so embedded in public life with millions of members?

From the flatlands of Norfolk to the tundra-like expanse of the Flow Country in northern Scotland, acclaimed writer on nature Mark Cocker sets out on a personal quest through the British countryside to find the answers to these questions.

He explores in intimate detail six special places that embody the history of conservation or whose fortunes allow us to understand why our landscape looks as it does today. We meet key characters who shaped the story of the British countryside Victorian visionaries like Octavia Hill, founder of the National Trust, as well as brilliant naturalists such as Max Nicholson or Derek Ratcliffe, who helped build the very framework for all environmental effort.

This is a book that looks to the future as well as exploring the past. It asks searching questions like who owns the land and why? And who benefits from green policies? Above all it attempts to solve a puzzle: why do the British seem to love their countryside more than almost any other nation, yet they have come to live amid one of the most denatured landscapes on Earth? Radical, provocative and original, Our Place tackles some of the central issues of our time. Yet most important of all, it tries to map out how this overcrowded island of ours could be a place fit not just for human occupants but also for its billions of wild citizens.

Mark Cocker is an author, naturalist and environmental activist whose ten books include works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir. His book Crow Country was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008 and won the New Angle Prize for Literature in 2009. With the photographer David Tipling he published Birds and People in 2013, a massive survey described by the Times Literary Supplement as a major literary event as well as an ornithological one.

Also by Mark Cocker

Loneliness and Time: British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century

Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europes Conflict with Tribal Peoples

Birders: Tales of a Tribe

Birds Britannica

A Tiger in the Sand: Selected Writings on Nature

Crow Country

Birds & People (with David Tipling)

Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet

This book is dedicated to my mother Anne Marjory Cocker (ne Simpson) who gave me the gift of birds and flowers, and also to our much-missed grandad, George Bramwell Simpson, 18961972, who loved to take his grandchildren in the back of his Mini Clubman to visit the farmers and farms of Reaps Moor, north Staffordshire.

The question of all questions for mankind the problem which underlies all others and which is more deeply interesting than any other is the ascertainment of the place which man occupies in nature.

Thomas Huxley

By the side of religion, by the side of science, by the side of poetry and art stands natural beauty, not as a rival to these, but as the common inspirer and nourisher of them all.

George Macaulay Trevelyan

The explicit acceptance of the view that the world does not exist for man alone can be fairly regarded as one of the greatest revolutions in modern Western thought.

Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World

To renew the living fabric of the land so that it also replenishes the spirits of its human inhabitants seems to me as close as one can come to a single expression of the aims of a total conservation policy.

Richard Mabey, Common Ground

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand Country Almanac

As long as nature is seen as something outside ourselves, frontiered and foreign, separate, it is lost both to us and in us.

John Fowles, The Tree

THIS BOOK HAD its origins in the wish to write a short polemical work on the state of British nature, whose declining fortunes I have observed and endured for most of my life. I quickly learned that I am constitutionally incapable of polemic, but the idea of saying something about the origins of environmentalism its achievements and failures during the twentieth century and about the state of the British countryside has remained.

Instead of pronouncing from a soap-box I have tried to present the subject in the form of a physical journey, partly because I thought it might help to hold the readers interest if I could evoke something of the British wildlife and British places that motivate all our efforts, alongside the more technical material about countryside history and politics. In the end, I also found that presenting the book as a personal journey closely mirrored my own evolving relationship to its subject.

While I have been attached to the more-than-human parts of life since my earliest childhood in Buxton, Derbyshire, I have found it complicated to unravel why the state of nature in this country is as it is, but also to work out what I think and feel about this unfolding story. Progress has been slow, and the book has cost me proportionately more hard labour than any other I have written. On occasions, it has felt like a physical voyage.

I should explain some of the books limitations. There is precious little on marine conservation. I have no excuse for this except that it is a massive subject in its own right, and it has been well covered by the likes of Callum Roberts in his wonderful The Unnatural History of the Sea. He is a professor of marine conservation; I am a landlubber from Derbyshire with no special knowledge of sea life. Nor have I covered the long history of ideas, dating from the early modern period and even back to Classical times, which has brought us to our present engagements with nature.

Even the full story of British conservation could only truly be told in a multi-volume work running to many hundreds of thousands of words. You have only to scan the fastidious volumes of environmental history by John Sheail to appreciate this. Mine is no more than a watercolour of the full panoramic picture. I have provided an outline of the rise and work of the chief voluntary organisations, along with the forty-year fortunes of the statutory conservation body, the Nature Conservancy (Council). Yet I have attempted to search the landscapes themselves and sift an almost overwhelming mass of material on these themes to find a series of fundamental, interlocking truths, an understanding of which is essential to any grasp of the British countryside in the early twenty-first century.

Finally, I should say a word more about the choice of format. For better or for worse I am usually branded a nature writer. Whatever that means, I am committed to the literary genre in which I operate. It is a book form usually viewed as a merging of lyrical responses to nature with the political, scientific and ethical materials that arise from our relationship with the other parts of life: a blend of the private and the public, the emotional and the technical.