The Conservation Movement
Kenneth Watkins started the Woodland Trust in 1972 when he disagreed with the Devon Naturalists’ Trust about the pace of woodland acquisition. Discord has been something of a theme in the growth of the conservation movement. The County Naturalists’ Trust movement itself had a faltering start – the Norfolk Trust, regarded as the forerunner of the movement, was founded by Sidney Long in 1926 because the National Trust showed a reluctance to take on land at Cley. When, in 1948, the modern movement itself took hesitant steps under the leadership of Ted Smith the Norfolk Trust remained decidedly cool and aloof for several years.
Ted Smith received more encouragement from the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves (SPNR), a national body founded early in the 20th Century by the Hon. Charles Rothschild. Like Sidney Long, having acquired land in the expectation the National Trust would take it on Rothschild found his generosity rebuffed. The SPNR, though well intentioned, barely survived the inter war years and the early death of its benefactor. Its main contribution to that point, in addition to acquiring some outstanding nature reserves of its own, was the list it had drawn up of the most important areas for nature in the country. This list was to inform the search for nature reserves in the post war years and the faltering efforts of the early 20th century conservation movement at least saw it well placed to take advantage of post war planning.
There had been expressions of concern about the state of nature from the start of the industrial period – through art and literature; in protest and concern; and eventually through regulation and land acquisition. The earliest naturalist societies had grown out of the learned institutions and gentlemen’s societies of the “age of enlightenment”. Enquiring minds like Gilbert White and Charles Darwin had observed nature and poets like John Clare and William Wordsworth celebrated it and despaired of changes to the landscape that came with the industrial age and the agricultural revolution. While the broader issues of landscape conservation were protests about enclosure and the coming of the railways, the early conservation movement arose because of concerns about animal welfare and the RSPCA and RSPB were started in the late 19th century.
In the first half of the 20th century nature itself was not necessarily seen as under threat, the greater concern being haphazard development as the population became more urbanised but there where those like Rothschild who were concerned that Britain’s most important wildlife areas should be identified and protected. Matters moved slowly and it would take a second world war to bring it about. After WWII the time was right for a “grass roots” movement to develop including the County Trusts, SPNR, the Council for Nature and, in the early 1980s, Wildlife Link – a campaigning group.
Kenneth Watkins’ interest was in safeguarding woods by acquisition – whatever the size wherever they were in the UK – and in this his opinion differed with many conservationists of the time.