The £960 Great Tit

Guest post by Dr Susan Warren

Joyful Nature celebrates and supports a caring and compassionate relationship with the wonderful diversity of non-human life, with which we are fortunate enough to share this planet. Given that, this might seem an odd title for a post!

However, the ‘£960 Great Tit’ is an excellent example of the current focus within nature conservation, where the emphasis is on measuring the economic value of different elements of nature, be it individual species or particular habitats.

[photo credit]

Words such as ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural capital’ appear regularly, serving to highlight the economic worth that we can secure from nature: everything from beavers alleviating flood risk and improving water quality, to vultures ‘clearing up’ cattle carcasses (thus keeping feral dog populations and rabies under control).

Many organisations and individuals herald this financially-based approach as the means by which we can finally show the true ‘worth’ of nature in the face of our never-ending exploitation of the planet’s natural resources.

In essence, species and/or habitats can be put into a spreadsheet or a balance sheet and assessed alongside the other resources to be gained or lost through a new development or enterprise.

Perhaps this sounds logical: finally, a way for us to prove to government, business, and individuals why nature matters, and to properly account for it in our decision-making processes. As a practitioner and researcher who has worked in the environmental world for 30 years, I can really understand the allure.

But treating nature as just another asset to be assessed and
managed to suit our needs is dangerous ground. 

What happens when the number crunching shows that the economic value of a particular woodland or species is less than that of a new road or business park, or is worth writing off in the name of jobs and economic growth?

I suspect, like me, you’re probably not going to be enamoured of this economically-based approach.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend the past four years exploring our relationship with the natural world as part of my PhD research.

What this has brought home to me more strongly than ever is that this economically-based approach simply serves to reinforce an outdated, but strongly held, story that nature is here to serve us, and to meet our needs. It challenges and changes nothing, at a time when we so desperately need to re-imagine our relationship with nature.

What we need in its place is a new story, one based in empathy, compassion and love for the natural world.

In this story we understand ourselves as sharing the planet with a myriad of other species, appreciating their lives, their homes, their families in a much richer, mutually respectful and peaceful way.

Let’s use the great tit as an example of this:

In the current story we talk about the value of this bird in monetary terms, £960 to be precise, calculated on the basis of its predation of caterpillars in apple orchards, thus increasing crop yields (BBC Wildlife, May 2018). This is an interesting fact, and shows us how nature is clever at balancing things out.

But if you really wanted to get people to relate differently to a great tit (and the natural world in general), we must focus on telling a richer story of this brightly coloured little bird, with its splendid plumage and noisy ‘teacher, teacher’ call.

They are part of my life year-round, flitting between the trees behind my house, and meeting with me out and about on riverside and woodland walks. Just now, in deepest winter, they are busy hanging out with other members of their wider family, especially blue tits and long-tailed tits.

They give me joy and happiness, and are very much part of my sense of place in the world.

This richer engagement with nature is something that writer and teacher Sharon Blackie talks about in her book ‘The Enchanted Life’. This book also calls for new stories, or myths, about how we live in the world. In her 2018 TEDx talk, Sharon eloquently describes the need for mythic imagination: the ability to re-imagine stories that are better and help us to see our place in the world differently, and entwine and enmesh us back into this planet, rather than standing above it.

As Joyful Nature’s founder Anna says, “When we build a relationship with nature, we have more care and compassion for ourselves and for the earth”. This is surely a vital pathway to creating a new story of how we live with and sustain our beautiful planet.

Dr Susan Warren is an environmentalist and researcher, with life-long experience of joyful, awe-inspiring and very necessary engagement with the natural world.

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