How can we grow a love for wildlife?

By Fran Southgate

Living Landscape Advisor 

Each of us in this community of wildlife guardians, comes to a love of wildlife and a connection with nature through different paths – a fond memory of childhood forest adventures, a desire to catalogue species before they vanish, being charmed by a mesmerising encounter with a wild animal, being fascinated by a worm! The journeys which have led us here are sometimes short and sometimes lifelong. Some of us are lucky enough to have guardians who introduced us to nature, and others are not but have sensed its importance nonetheless.  

Some engage fully, ferociously, and passionately with protecting nature, and others happily rest at the periphery supporting experts to protect nature for them. Neither is right or wrong, they are just different ways to do the same thing. The connection between us all is the will and the desire to protect something that we sense is fundamental and irreplaceable to us and to our lives. We also know we should be protecting nature for its own sake, not just because it is essential to our own lives.  

My journey to a love of nature began in a suburban garden as a young girl. I remember clearly the sensation of standing there knowing the tug of a feeling that nature, wildlife, wildness, was a thing that I needed to do something to protect. I also remember feeling bewilderingly bereft of any idea how to do that. Luckily my life took me on a serendipitous journey through soul destroying jobs, chance encounters, lucky breaks and hard graft to where I am now. Always though, there was an instinct to discover and nurture this thing called nature.  

Half way through my life and 25 years into a conservation career in the midst of our sixth mass extinction, even now I’m not sure if I fully understand how I can best help our natural world as it struggles. Something hints at a truer connection with nature, recognising a community of species of which I am a part, a knowing of what a wilder place looks like, and this keeps me connected to the cause. Slowly but steadily nature teaches me what it needs – if I listen.  

I often wonder how our members and supporters come to us, and for what reasons they stay. I understand how hard it is to know what to do to reverse the damage that we have done to nature, and how difficult it can be to stay hopeful about that.  

We do our jobs at Sussex Wildlife Trust to be the ‘experts’, guides and mentors, who can help others to work out what they need to know and do for nature. We know in theory how resilient nature is, given the chance, but how urgent is our need to support that resilience now, and so we continue to work with you to nurture that love of nature in any way we can. We still have a lot to learn, but the growing of that knowledge, and the working together is a pleasure in itself.