The case for doing nothing

Annie Spratt at Unsplash

Sit back. Put your feet up. Do ab-sah-lutely nada. And you know what? You’re already helping. Because nature benefits when you leave it be. 

And boy, does nature need a break. According to last year’s State of Nature report for the UK by the National Biodiversity Network (NBN), we’ve basically taken a wrecking ball to biodiversity since 1970. A quarter of our mammals and nearly half of our birds are considered at risk of extinction. Graphs showing abundance and distribution of species read like Waugh.

Why? Urbanisation, climate change, farming methods, changes in water and woodland use, invasive species, pests, pathogens and pollution are the main factors. Big stuff, the kinds of things that it takes government and whole industries to sort out. So we can’t really do anything except pick up litter and switch off the lights, right?

Wrong. There’s one area of pressure on nature that the NBN left out of their report. It’s the desire for green space to be kept tidy. For every inch to be mown, strimmed, clipped, weeded, denuded. It’s a rare summer’s day when the birdsong and the bee-buzzing aren’t drowned out by someone firing up a Black and Decker. 

3 farmers in East Anglia are spearheading efforts to change all that. They’re going to stop squeezing their land for every drop of utility, and instead they’ll be devoting a fifth of their properties to nature, creating a wilded area the size of Dorset. And they want all of us to do the same - designate 20 per cent of any outdoor space we have for nature.

It’s an astonishingly simple idea. By leaving a corner of the garden alone, we could provide a vast, linked network of wild patches ideal for feeding and sheltering invertebrates, birds, bats, amphibians and endangered mammals like hedgehogs. 

There are an estimated 10 million acres of garden in the UK. If we all let a fifth go fallow, that’d be as almost as much land as the UK’s biggest landowner has (FYI it’s the Forestry Commission). 

So for the love of all creatures great and small, and for the benefit of future generations, go on, do nothing!