Nature lovers shift from global to local concerns

A decade ago the cry was to save the rainforest. Now it's more likely to be "let's visit the wood down the road".

The British public seems to be shifting its environmental concern from the global to the local. That, at least, is one conclusion to be drawn from the remarkable increases in membership of "soft" environment groups, like the 47 county Wildlife Trusts, whose main attraction is their vast network of nature reserves suited to a family day out.

At the start of the 1990s, a great wave of concern for global environmental problems saw people flocking to join groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF, then called World Wide Fund for Nature. But from the mid-90s on, in Britain at least, groups that protect pieces of countryside that can be visited have run far ahead of campaigning bodies.

Take the Wildlife Trusts, covering the country from Cornwall to Scotland with an immense network of 2,500 nature reserves, whose typical members have long been thought of as a retired couple who enjoyed a country stroll.

In 1995, the trusts' total membership was 225,000. But in 2000 it was 343,000, while this year it stands at 413,434, which represents an 85 per cent increase in seven years and a 20 per cent increase in two years.

The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, which runs the much-lauded Wetland Centre at Barnes in London among others, saw its membership top 100,000 in August this year, up by more than 50 per cent since 1995. The Woodland Trust, which looks after more than 1,100 woods, has seen its membership hit 115,000 so far this year, doubling since 1998.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, with another great network of reserves, has gone from 890,000 members in 1995 to more than a million today, while the National Trust, with its 248,000 acres of countryside, went from 2.32 million members in 1995 to 2.84 million this year.

The campaigning groups are showing slight rises after substantial mid-1990s declines. Greenpeace UK had 279,000 members in 1995, which fell to 168,000 members in 1999. Since then it has risen back to 221,000. The WWF had 193,000 members in 1995, and now has 158,000. Friends of the Earth, which only has more recent figures, posted a membership of 97,000, up from 91,000 in 1999.

What accounts for the difference? Simon Lyster, director-general of the Wildlife Trusts, whose tenure has coincided with the steep increase in membership, attributes it to much more professional marketing and the fact that the trusts have set out deliberately to broaden their appeal.

"Wildlife used to be seen as such a middle-class thing, but increasingly even relatively deprived areas have a green space which is biodiverse, where you will hear a bird sing and see a frog in a pond, and which is valued by these communities," he said.

Dr Lyster also stressed the shift from global to local concern. "People would like to save the world, yes, but they have other priorities. They like to enhance their own environment, and they are much more concerned about their local area than perhaps they once were."

Blake Lee-Harwood, campaigns director for Greenpeace UK, said he felt the figures indicated the rise of the leisure culture in the 1990s, but also that people's disengagement from the political process was occurring within environmental politics.