Nature Conservation. Peter Marren

activities.

      The Wildlife Trusts partnership, formerly the Royal Society for Nature Conservation (RSNC), acts as a spokesman and administrative centre for the disparate county wildlife trusts. It had its distant origins in the SPNR, which was set up in 1912 for the purposes of ‘securing’ nature reserves and ‘to encourage the love of Nature’. This Society struggled on for years on a shoestring budget without achieving very much (though its surveys are a valuable retrospective source for the state of wildlife in the first half of the twentieth century, see Rothschild & Marren 1997). It did, however, contribute organisation and expertise for the Nature Reserves Investigation Committee in 1942, which produced the original ‘shopping list’ for the subsequent selection of National Nature Reserves and other important sites. In the 1950s the SPNR assisted some of the fledgling county trusts with modest grants to set up their first nature reserves, along with advice on how to look after them. In 1957 the county trusts proposed that the SPNR should act as a co-ordinating body for their activities, in effect as their ‘federal centre’. In the early 1970s a proposal to combine forces with the RSPB was briefly considered, but rejected, largely because the pair were mismatched: the RSPB was already too big. In 1976, the SPNR was granted a royal charter, becoming the RSPNR for a short period, before changing its name yet again to the Royal Society for Nature Conservation (RSNC) in 1981. In 1991, the RSNC joined with the 46 county trusts and 50 urban wildlife groups to form the Wildlife Trusts partnership, which now has a combined membership of nearly 300,000. All receive the wildlife trusts’ quarterly magazine, Natural World, along with a copy of their local trust’s magazine. There is also a junior arm, Wildlife Watch, founded in 1977 with young naturalists in mind.

      The Wildlife Trusts partnership provides the local trusts with a common identity, promotes their common interests and campaigns on their behalf. On occasion it has gone too far down the centralising path, for example, when it tried to impose a common ‘badger’ logo (known as the raccoon by disparagers) on all the trusts. But in general the division of responsibility seems to work well enough, with each partner concentrating on its constituency strengths, leaving the umbrella body to organise training weekends, launch national appeals (for example ‘Tomorrow Is Too Late) and making its voice heard in the corridors of power. It has long had its head office somewhere in Lincolnshire for reasons lost in the mists of time, but the Trusts’ director’s office is in London. Its logo: the ubiquitous badger. Vision: ‘the achievement of a United Kingdom that is richer in wildlife and managed on sustainable principles’.

      I cover the activities of a particular wildlife trust on pp. 75-9.

      Head Office: The Kiln, Waterside, Mather Road, Newark NG24 1WT.

      Wildlife Trusts partnership Director general: Simon Lyster.

       The National Trust

      At the turn of the millennium, the National Trust’s membership was just short of a stupendous three million. The public loves a bargain, and for the modest membership fee the whole of the Trust’s vast estate is open to them. Moreover, to many, the Trust embodies all that is best in the countryside: beautiful scenery, benevolent stewardship and a good day out. However, until recently the National Trust was only on the margins of the nature conservation world. It is not a campaigning body, and much of its work is centred on maintaining stately homes and gardens. Its importance lies in the nature conservation work carried out on its own properties. The Trust is emerging as an important player mainly because, in common with other heritage bodies, it takes a greater interest in wildlife than in the past.

      There are two separate National Trusts, one for England and Wales, the other for Scotland. The former, older Trust had its origins in the concern over the enclosure of commons in the nineteenth century. The desire of a few Victorian philanthropists to preserve ‘all that still remained open, for the health and recreation of the people’ led to the formation of the Commons Preservation Society, the first successful conservation pressure group in history. In 1885, the Society’s solicitor, Robert (later Sir Robert) Hunter, proposed a ‘Land Company’ to buy and accept gifts of heritage land and buildings for the benefit of the nation. In 1893, joined by Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley’s Lake District Defence Society, this became known as the ‘National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty’, or National Trust for short. Its constitution was based on that of a similar American body founded two years previously. In 1906, Hunter drafted a private Bill that made the Trust a statutory body, and gave it the right to make bylaws and to declare its properties inalienable. This meant they could not be sold or taken away without the Trust’s consent: a National Trust property is the Trust’s for keeps. A separate National Trust for Scotland (see below) was established in 1931, and given similar powers to its sister body. A full account of the National Trust was published in 1995 (Newby 1995).

      Although the National Trust acquired many places ‘of special interest to the naturalist’ in its early days, such as Wicken Fen, Cheddar Gorge and Box Hill, its management of them was for many years scarcely different to any other rural estate; modern farming and forestry methods that damaged wildlife often went through on the nod. Management of the Trust’s de facto nature reserves, such as Wicken Fen or the tiny Ruskin Reserve near Oxford, was generally overseen by a keen but amateurish outside body. They tended to turn into thickets. The Trust’s outlook began to change in the 1960s after it launched Enterprise Neptune to save the coastline from development, having found that a full third of our coast had been ‘irretrievably spoiled’. By 1995, some 885 kilometres of attractive coast, much of it in south-west England, had been saved in this way.

      Since the 1980s, the National Trust has developed in-house ecological expertise, and belatedly become a mainstream conservation body, managing its properties, especially those designated SSSIs, in broad sympathy with wildlife aims. Some of the basic maintenance is done by Trust volunteers in ‘Acorn Workcamps’. Although public access remains a prime aim, some Trust properties are now in effect nature reserves, with the advantage of often being large, especially when integrated with other natural heritage sites. By its centenary year, 1993, the National Trust owned 240,000 hectares of countryside, visited by up to 11 million people every year. It owns large portions of Exmoor, The Lizard and the Lake District, and about 14,000 hectares of ancient woodland and parkland. Like the RSPB, its membership climbed steeply in the 1970s, breaching the million-member tape by 1981. The Trust is now Britain’s largest registered charity, larger than any trades union or any political party. Members receive the annual Trust Handbook of properties, as well as three mailings a year of National Trust Magazine, and free admission to Trust properties (including those belonging to the National Trust for Scotland). It has 16 regional offices in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as a head office in London.

      Head Office: 36 Queen Anne’s Gate, London SW1H 9AH [at the time of writing, the National Trust was set to move from its elegant Georgian house in SW1 to a graceless office block in Swindon, to the dismay of most of its staff.]

      Director-general: Fiona Reynolds

       National Trust for Scotland (NTS)

      The National Trust’s sister body in Scotland was founded in 1931, and was made a statutory body with similar powers, including inalienability rights, seven years later. It has the same aim of preserving lands and property of historic interest or natural beauty, ‘including the preservation (so far as is practicable) of their natural aspect and features, and animals and plant life’. The Trust acquired its first property, 600 hectares of moorland and cliff on the island of Mull, in 1932. It is now Scotland’s second largest private landowner with nearly 73,000 hectares or about 1 per cent of rural Scotland in its care, including 400 kilometres of coastline. About half of this area consists of designated SSSIs, among them the isles of St Kilda, Fair Isle and Canna, and Highland estates such as Ben Lawers, Ben Lomond, Torridon and Glencoe. Perhaps its most important property is Mar Lodge estate in the Cairngorms, acquired in 1995, which is being managed as a kind of large-scale experiment in woodland regeneration and sustainable land use (pp. 240-41). Like the National Trust, the NTS was for many years more interested