Fragmented and narrow: ‘the environment’ in the UK, 1970-2000

As part of RENEW’s Collaborations Theme, colleagues at National Life Stories at the British Library have been recording oral history interviews with academics, research council staff and project officers involved in previous efforts to bring disciplines, communities, publics and policy makers together to address environmental problems. We are now digging into this incredibly rich dataset and offer here some early thoughts about how ‘the environment’ (including its biodiversity) in the UK was often attended to in ways best described as fragmented and narrow. Fragmented, in the sense of broken up into multiple separated issues. Narrow, as in narrowly defined and excluding some forms of environmental engagement. In this blog, we explore these two qualities through interview extracts which can be listened to via the audio links. There’s so much more to unpack but, in the meantime, we hope to give you a flavour of these people’s stories. 

Fragmentation – the environment in bits 

Sociologist Steve Yearley remembers when he started following the work of environmental organisations in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, he was ‘surprised to find […] that they didn’t seem to overlap very much at all’. One set of people were concerned with nature conservation; another with ‘human impacts on the broader environment’, such as waste and pollution: 

Above: Plots of birds on Nicholas Watts’ Vine House Farm in 1982 and 1992. Courtesy of Nicholas Watts. © British Library Board

Elsewhere, attention to wildlife was further subdivided into study and conservation. For example, Martin Sanford tells us that in the 1980s, members of the Suffolk Naturalists Trust focused on recording rather than conserving nature:  

On the other side of this naturalist-conservationist divide, Peter Shirley found that in his work for The Wildlife Trusts in the 1990s, he could leave his entomologist’s magnifying glass at home: 

As natural history societies, The Wildlife Trusts and Friends of the Earth got on with their different environmental work, they did so surrounded by a large and growing number of other environmental organisations – lists in contemporary publications run into several pages. 

Meanwhile, the work of each organisation tended to be fragmented into packages of work on particular environmental issues. Sue Clifford recalls projects led by the organisation Common Ground on, among other things, orchards, parish maps, agricultural fields, the river Stour and trees felled by the hurricane of 1987. The WATCH group led by Mary Hollingsworth encouraged children to attend to one problem at a time: 

Likewise, Steven Yearley recalls that at any one time, Friends of the Earth ‘would have four or five campaign themes which most of their work was about’. 

While some interviewees regarded all this diversity as a strength, others were aware of a potential downside. For example, Diane Warburton remembers her worries in the 1980s and 1990s that ticking-off of one environmental issue after another was leaving underlying causes unchanged: 

Above: Detail from WATCH club leaflet, 1990s. Courtesy of Mary Hollingsworth. © British Library Board

Narrowness – only these things are environmental 

With the huge range of fragmented interests and concerns sketched above, we might imagine that UK environmentalism was a very wide field in the period. In fact, it is clear from the oral histories that ‘the environment’ excluded as much as it included. 

In the countryside for example, agriculture tended not to be thought part of ‘the environment’ or as ‘environmental’ in itself. This explains the appearance in the 1980s of special meetings and projects concerned with agriculture and the environment and the creation of organisations such as the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG). FWAG’s first Farm Conservation Adviser for Devon for Devon, George Greenshields, suggests that his engagements with farmers in the mid-1980s tended to preserve the separation of agriculture and environment: 

Above: Clipping from Farmers Weekly 31 December 1976. Courtesy of Poul Christensen

In cities in the period – though such things as urban nature reserves appeared for the first time – much of life and its setting tended to fall outside a relatively narrow understanding of what ‘the environment’ was about. For example, in London in the 1970s, Diane Warburton found that organisations concerned with ‘community development’ did not see their work as in any way concerned with environmental matters: 

In the 1980s, Judy Ling Wong was involved in forming and then running the Black Environment Network (BEN). She quickly discovered that the environmental interests of ethnic minority (global majority) communities were not easily included in the remit of mainstream environmental organisations that were then ‘one hundred percent white’: 

Maxwell Ayamba was concerned to counter a similar exclusion of ethnic minority ‘perspectives on the environment’ in the BEN-inspired Sheffield Black and Ethnic Minority Environmental Network in the 1990s: 

We might observe in summary that in the UK in the recent past, ‘the environment’ and ‘environmental’ tended to refer to a varied but nevertheless narrow set of concerns and issues. ‘Social’ and ‘economic’ issues, agriculture, gardening and much of urban life tended not to be thought of as environmental in themselves. 

Conclusion

We can see just from the few examples discussed above that ‘the environment’ mattered – in the senses of both taking form and being of concern – in particular ways in the period. Problems of fragmentation and narrowness obviously extend into the present. The RENEW Programme seeks to counter both through a ‘people in nature approach’, interdisciplinary research and engagement with a spectrum of stakeholders. For example, projects are seeking to integrate agricultural and environmental aims, to reduce the perceived distance between business and biodiversity and to reject social and cultural uniformity in biodiversity matters. 

Above: Cardboard Water Quality Indicator used in River Watch project, 1990s. Courtesy of Mary Hollingsworth. © British Library Board