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Darryl Moore - Plants, Knowledge and Power | Beth Chatto's Plants & Gardens | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Darryl Moore - Plants, Knowledge and Power
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Core Theme
The core theme is the critical importance of education, understanding, and collaboration within the horticultural and ecological fields to address complex global challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss. It emphasizes that true understanding requires embracing complexity and interconnectedness, moving beyond simplistic solutions.
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[Applause]
Hello. Hello. Yep. Good morning,
everyone. Thank you for coming. Uh, as
Julia said, I work with her on various
special projects. I'm a consultant to
Beth Chatau's Gardens and I was involved
in the programming of this symposium
with Julia. So, I hope you're enjoying
it. Are you enjoying
it? Good. Good. Good. And I hope you're
finding it useful and interesting. Are
you good? Thank you. Okay, so we've been
presenting you with a lot of
information, okay? That was the
intention of this. We wanted to bombard
you with all of these fantastic ideas
from all of these really skilled,
knowledgeable people, okay? Because
they're in our industry and we need to
share that knowledge. So, what I'm going
to do is slow things down a bit. I'm
going to just step back a bit and look
at some of the links between some of the
things that people have been talking
about. I'm going to sort of think about
some of the underlying basic principles
of why we're here and what we're talking
about. You know, we think we know about
these things, but perhaps they're not as
straightforward as we
think. So really, it's all about education
education
and Dan and Julia talked about the uh
Beth Chatter Education Trust. Now, the
key term is education there and that's
why we're here. It is about education.
It's about information and it's about
sharing that information. Okay? Because
that's what's important. We've been
talking about all the challenges we're
facing. So, we're not going to be able
to confront those challenges unless we
educate ourselves. That is really
important. Okay. So, education and
information were really important to
Beth Chatau.
She wrote a lot of books, of course,
sharing information, sharing knowledge.
You know, that was from her experience
in the gardens. We all enjoyed the
gardens last night at the party, right?
It wasn't just because it was a party
that it was good. It was because we were
in a fantastic location, a location that
had been carefully thought about over
many years. And all of that thinking was
put into Beth's books. She was generous
in sharing that
knowledge. and right plant, right place.
We had an interesting conversation about
that earlier and that was fantastic. I
really appreciate that and I think you
know Joe's points are really valid. But
I think for a lot of people this is a
very simple message. We can talk to
people that aren't part of our group. I
think what it means is appropriate plant
appropriate place you know and they went
into that fantastically in that panel
session. So thanks for that. But
obviously behind this, and Dan mentioned
this earlier as well, was Andrew
Chatau's work. Beth's husband. He spent
his lifetime researching the natural
habitats of plants and he wrote
endlessly about it. There I spent uh a
weekend there in the house last year
just going through the archive of his
material. There was endless amounts.
There's some typed pages, but then there
are other journals. With this
microscopic writing, it's so hard to
decipher. And now I have the kind of
unenviable task perhaps of trying to
edit that into some semblance to make it
into the book that he originally wanted
it to be, which is called the wild
origins of garden plants. Okay, so that
was the kind of knowledge he was
researching these plants, where they
live, their natural habitats. We've been
talking about those sorts of things
already in other sessions, but you know,
this is what he was doing. He was
looking where they were from. Beth would
want to use a plant. She would go to
Andrew and say, "Where is this plant
from?" And he'd be able to tell her.
Then she could put it in the appropriate
place in the garden, which is why it's so
so
fantastic. This is just one of the maps
that he did. He did some fantastic kind
of handdrawn maps, real works of art in
themselves. So hopefully that book will
be published sometime in the next couple
of years. It's going to take a while to
get through, but there's publishers
involved that are very committed to
making it a fantastic book. So I just
had a conversation with them the other
week and they were totally hyped up
about it, which is
great. Now, obviously what Andrew was
looking at was plant communities, and we
know plants grow in particular
associations in their natural habitats.
find groups of species together in
particular locations. Okay, that's what
plant communities are and we can so sort
of look at those. There are
classifications of those. There's the
national vegetation classification in
this country here which is five volumes
of books which looks at every sort of
natural habitat and the particular
plants that grow in them in this
country. And I sort of use those as
references when I'm doing planting. I
sort of uh think about a particular sort
of planting based on the site I'm using
and then look at these kind of plants
that would grow in that in some other
location which is similar basically use
that then as that's the basis and then
build up a picture from there. There's
similar classifications in the United
States as
well. So plants and plant communities
are obviously important parts of
ecosystems. You know, we talk about
ecosystems and we know what they are,
right? They are generative, nonlinear,
complex systems that don't have an
overall form of control. There's nothing
overall that's guiding them. It's all
the interactions that are going on
within them within them, big and small.
Okay? So, so that's really really
important. And of course, ecosystems are
important because they're part of Earth
cycles, biogeeochemical cycles. Merlin
mentioned them yesterday and these are
things like the water cycle, the carbon
cycle, nitrogen cycle and there are
others and basically these are cycling
these elements through ecosystems
through the soil through the atmosphere
through the oceans and these processes
keep the planet in a relative state of
balance. They keep it in that Goldilock
spot, that condition which is just right
for life on Earth, for our life and the
life of all the other living species. So
that's why they're really important.
That's why we talk about them. That's
why we sort of are concerned about the
state of them
currently. So you know, they operate in
a state of relative equilibrium. They're
changing because they're dynamic
systems. So they're not static. They're
kind of just moving around according to
all the interactions that are going on
them. But they need to be in relative
states of equilibrium to keep that goldilocks
goldilocks
condition. And to do that, they need to
be diverse. They need to be complex.
They're entangled. They're all sort of
interconnected relationships. Charles
Darwin at the end of uh the origin of
the species talked about the entangled
bank, which was his description of an
ecosystem. I mean Merlin's book
entangled life is a reference to that
quote in
Darwin and complexity. Complexity is
really important. You know we think
we're intelligent species. We called
ourselves with a lack of hubris homo
sapiens intelligent animals. Yet
ecosystems are more complex than we
think. They're more complex than our
intelligence can handle. The American
ecologist Frank Egler said, "Nature
isn't more complicated than we think.
It's more complicated than we can
think." Okay? It's just bigger than our
minds can handle. Even AI
AI
can't comprehend how op how ecosystems
work because they may be able to look at
all the possible permutations of what's
going on in them. They may be able to
second guess what's going to happen
next, but because it's happening in real
time, which choice of those permutations
are they going to choose? If they could
do it, they would be an ecosystem
themselves. So complexity is
key. And resilience. If we want to have
these ecosystems and relative states of
equilibrium, they need to be resilient.
they need to be uh able to face the
numerous environmental challenges that
are going on around
them. Now, resilience is about when an
ecosystem can bounce back from these
challenges. So, if an ecosystem
collapses, if it's resilient, it'll be
able to reconstitute itself. It doesn't
necessarily mean it's going to be in the
same state exactly, but it needs to
perform the same functions.
And of course habit uh ecosystems are
resources and habitat for so many
different species. Okay, we know that we
talk a lot about biodiversity these days
in the garden world and that's a good
thing because it is really really
important and of course we talk a lot
about charismatic fauna you know I mean
Rebecca was talking about it and it's
brilliant and there's all those things
and people do focus a lot on the three
bees birds bees and butterflies they're
not so keen on slugs snails spiders bugs beetles
beetles
Peter is, John is, we know that. We
heard it in their talks. But, you know,
it's all of these things together. They
all play important roles in ecosystems,
you know. So, if we're thinking about
biodiversity, we've got to be thinking
about all of these things. If we love
biodiversity, we need to be thinking
about those things. We love other
creatures. We love cats. We love dogs.
We love lambs gambling around in fields
in the spring and then put them on
plates on dinner tables. Is that loving
life? Well, there's a cognitive dissonance
dissonance
there. Okay. So, thinking about life,
all life shares the same operating
system. We have different hardware, but
we all have the same software. We're all
carbon-based cellular forms using
chemical processes. Okay, these chemical
processes transform energy of different
sorts and use them with the information
our DNA provides to perfor allow us to
live the lives we do to allow other
species to live the lives we do. So I
think it's just interesting to look at
this quote from Paul Nurse who's a
genetic biologist. It's from his book
called What is Life?
We are bound by a deep connectedness to
all other life, to the crawling beetles,
infecting bacteria, fermenting yeasts,
inquisitive mountain gorillas, and
flitting yellow butterflies, as well as
to every other member of the biosphere.
Together, all these species are life's
great survivors. The latest descendants
of a single, immeasurably vast family
lineage that stretches back through an
unbroken chain of cell divisions into
the far reaches of deep time. Yesterday
we heard Eddie talking about that vast
tract of time, that geological time,
that huge expanse where life developed
from down here all the
way to here, right Eddie?
And those points where these things
happened are really crucial because life
began early on with that one cell. That
one cell that came together, those
components, those chemical components
that came together. Okay? They came
together and then through evolution,
through adaptation, there were changes.
Those cells divided. We had new species
develop. And our species was one of
those down the line.
He goes on to say, "As far as we know,
we humans are the only life forms who
can see this deep connectivity and
reflect on what it might mean. That
gives us a special
responsibility for life on this planet,
made up as it is by our relatives, some
close, some more distant. We need to
care about it. We need to care for it.
And we to do that, we need to understand
it." understanding it. Education, it's
that's what we need. We need to think
about it. We can't care about things if
we don't understand them. We can't have
empathy for them if we don't understand
them. That's why education is so
important. Okay? But not everyone thinks
like us. You know, we're a safe
community here. We can talk about these
things. But we're in a world which is in
a state called poly crisis. There are
all these different challenges facing
us. We talk about the climate crisis and
biodiversity loss which are you know
obvious ones uh which are relevant to
our professions but other people think
differently. Now this is an a a image
from the world economic forum and it's
of global risks. Okay. So these are the
people that are controlling banks
controlling governments. This is the way
that they think and these are global
risks which are threats to business as
usual capitalism to keeping things going
to keeping the power structures in place
and the inequalities within those power
structures. So what do they think's
important? Well, the size of these
circles represent their importance as
far as they see them. So it's a bit
unclear to see but societal societal
polarization is one lack of economic
opportunity economic downturn. Okay. So
you're seeing the kind of social
political economic things that they
think are
important. The different colors
represent the different kinds of things.
There are economics, geopolitical,
societal, technological, and
environmental. The environmental ones
are the green ones. those little ones up
in the corner, right? That's how they're
thinking. And look at all the
connections between all the social,
geopolitical ones. And look at this
fewer connections coming from the
ecological environmental ones. Now, they
put these into a chart, basically a
table, it's a bit blurred, but basically
the first one on the the right hand
side, which are two-year risks. So,
they're thinking in times, two years, 10
years. Two years time. The main one is
uh misinformation and
disinformation. The second one is
extreme weather events. This isn't the
causes of extreme weather events. It's
the effects e economically of those
events. Then there's uh it's hard to see
but there's interstate armed conflict
other things. Then in 10 years time we
have extreme weather events. We have uh
critical change to earth systems. those
biogeeochemical systems that I mentioned
just a bit earlier. Then there's uh
diver biodiversity loss, ecosystem
collapse, uh etc. So, you know, in 10
years they think these are a problem.
Well, if they're going to be a problem
in 10 years, they are a problem now. And
why would you wait 10 years to address
those problems? You know, what makes you
think you're suddenly going to deal with
all these other problems? We do need to
deal with them. Of course, we do. But
you know these environmental problems
underly all the other problems. If we
don't address those, we're not going to
be able to address the other problems.
So, you know, these are the challenges
we're up against. We all want to make
the world a better place. We want to do
good things, but we've got to convince
other people as
well, right? So, as you know, there are
these multistresses going on in the
world in a world of poly crisis. Plants
also face sort of these similar sorts of
situations often caused by a lot of
these same factors. So we you know
plants generally in their lives deal
with stress. That's what they do. Every
species has to deal with stress. That's
what it does. But when there are a
number of factors operating on plants,
it's called multiffactorial stress.
Okay? And you can see from this uh image
here that there are different types of
stresses. Climate, which is heat,
drought, flood, some of the things we
were talking about yesterday. Uh soil,
again, some of the things we were
talking about
yesterday. Biotic, viruses, funguses,
some of the things we were talking about
yesterday. And anthropogenic, okay,
again, things we were talking about
yesterday. Pesticides, heavy metals,
pollutants, these sorts of things. So,
plants can usually deal with these
because they've developed over a long
period of time. Plants have been here
for 420 million years, which is a lot
longer than our species has been here.
So plants can deal with them, but when
they have two factors operating at once,
then it's a problem. They can't
necessarily do it. So just looking at
climate, heat, and drought, we often
think about those things as going
together. Of course, they don't. Think
about 2020, the spring then when we just
gone into lockdown. We had a really dry
long spring. a lot of plants died. You
know, it wasn't any hotter than normal,
but there was a drought. So, those
things don't normally go together. And
think about yesterday when Tracy was
talking about stomata. What plants do in
those different conditions? Well, they
do totally opposite things. When it's
hot, they open their stomata to release
water to transpire to cool themselves
down. When it's drought, they close the
stomata to retain that water because the
moisture is not in the soil. can't pull
it up with their roots in conjunction
with all the fungi and bacteria. So, you
know, if you have heat and drought, then
plants are going to be, you know, trying
to make a decision. What actually
happens is drought wins out, so they
close their stomata. But there are other
conditions also in
heat, they are opening their stomata,
but then there's likely to be more
airborne pollutants, pathogens. So,
they're going to be taking in pathogens
because they're having their stomata
open. So, you know, they're under all
these challenges. They have to sort of
try and deal with these in different
ways. And plants when they're living
their lives have a different strategies
for dealing with the conditions they
find themselves and their environ they
find grow in environments that suit
them. We know that. But they also
transform those environments in
different ways as well. So, it's an
interaction going on. And plants like to
live in a certain range. We know there
are all the different conditions they
need, the soil, the heat, the water, all
of these different sorts of things going
on, but and they want to be in a
particular position according to their
species. They want to be in a a sweet
spot in the middle, which is called
their idealized niche. Okay? But plants
very rarely get to live there. They live
somewhere else in that kind of
ecological spectrum, either down there
or down there. And that is their
realized niche. Okay. So to deal with
that they have what's known as
plasticity. They can sort of change
their function or their morphology their
form slightly to deal with those
situations. So phenological plasticity
you know they may come out into leaf
earlier they may die back sooner they
may flower at different times according
to those situations they find themselves
in. And like any life form they have to
do that using the energy they've got. So
they will make decisions. These
decisions are called tradeoffs. We make
trade-offs all the time. We have certain
amount of time or money to do things.
So, we make decisions as to what we're
going to do with that. And plants do
that as well. These are the tradeoffs.
Now, plants do this as individuals. And
if those kind of traits that they
develop are passed on to the next
generation, then they're adaptations.
So, some of these things could be like
if it's a lower light situation, the
plants will grow not quite as tall, but
they'll grow bigger leaves. Or
conversely, they may grow taller with
smaller leaves to be able to, you know,
get above the other plants that are around
around
them. Now, if there are adaptations, if
there are number of plants in the same
area, in the same population, in the
same plant community, then that's
considered an ecotype. Okay? So they've
got these slight differences to other
members of their species. They can still
reproduce with them. They've got the
same DNA, but they're slight
differences. And then if they adapt even
further, then we have new species. So
that's the basic kind of processes that
they're dealing with. They're the
decisions that they're making as they
live their
lives. Now, obviously, we talk about the
climate crisis a lot and we should talk
about the climate climate crisis a lot.
You know, uh, we know that since the
industrial era era, we have been putting
carbon dioxide into the air. We know
we've been doing that by burning fossil
fuels. So, you know, it's a really,
everyone knows that 99.9% of scientists
say this and even, you know, most of the
public know this. We're still not doing
enough. And, you know, whatever we're
doing, good whatever good work we're
doing in our professional practices,
nothing is going to change unless we
change this. Okay, we can't necessarily
change that as individuals. We can do
things about it individually, but we
need to do things collectively and it
needs to be political decisions doing
this. You know,
uh petrol companies have known this for
a long time. In the 1950s, a petroleum
conference in the United States, uh
there was a biological chemist told
petrol companies that this is what's
happening. You know, 1950s, they knew
that. So what did they do? Did they
change? No, they developed strategies to
undermine what he said and everyone else
since has been saying. So, you know, we
need to be thinking about these things.
But obviously in the garden world when
we talk
about climate crisis, we often focus on
global warming. You know, global warming
is important. It's when that carbon's in
the atmosphere, right? It can't escape
uh because of the greenhouse effects.
So, we're getting warmer and warmer.
We're seeing this, of course, we are.
And that's quite an obvious thing that
we sort of
notice. But you know this is a bias on
temperature and we need to be thinking
wider than that. We need to be thinking
about all the consequences. And often we
think about plants and our work. We
think about okay well if it's getting
hotter then we can get plants from
somewhere else that's hot. But these
things aren't directly mappable. You
know in 2050 London's supposedly going
to be the same temperature as Barcelona
is now. But that doesn't mean we can
just get plants from Barcelona and put
them in London because the conditions
are totally different. They're not the
right plants for the right place or the
appropriate plants for the appropriate
place. Okay, so these things aren't
directly mappable. The geog the
geography is different. You know, are
plants near a coast? Are there breezes
from the coast? Are they in the mid of a
middle of a continent? All of these
sorts of things. Latitude, altitude.
Alexander von Hanold a couple of years
you know discovered that plants on
similar latitudes are sort of compatible
around the world they have similar sort
of str life strategies morphologies
these sorts of things or altitudes as
well altitude is another factor you can
play in with plants in that way the
geology you know Eddie was talking about
geology the minerality under there you
know what's under the ground what's in
that geology what how does that affect
plant communities moisture of Of course,
we know that we know how important water
is for plants. Humidity, we don't talk
so much about humidity. Alfred Tanley,
the British ecologist in the 1930s wrote
about it in his books. You know, we
don't talk about humidity. And again,
this goes back to the stamata being
open. They try and create their own
microclimates, their own humidity around
them. But we need to be thinking about
humidity. So, we need to be thinking
about all of these wide ranging factors.
You know, the weather is changing, but
it's extreme weather events. That's not
linear. Again, climate is like an
ecosystem. It's emergent. It's
nonlinear, and it's complex. We can't
predict it. It's erratic. We're having
these situations which we don't know are
going to happen when, how often, or
where. And this is all because of
feedback loops. These feedback loops are
happening. and what they something will
hit the tipping point that would go on
to a next thing. These positive
feedbacks, it'll build and build and
build. We can't predict these things.
We're not been predicting them as it is.
And so, we're unprepared for
them. So, thinking about plant selection
in this changing world that we're in,
you know, it's fine to just think, okay,
we'll go out and get a load of new
plants. We have to be careful because
that mindset's a legacy of colonialism.
when British botonists went around the
world stealing plants from different
countries, treating them as resources
like they treated minerals and people
that they could just transport from one
part of the world to another part of the
world for the profit of empire. So we
need to be careful how we think about
that. It's not to say that we shouldn't
use plants from other places, but we
don't want to repeat those mistakes. We
need to be working with others in our
field in different countries. We need to
be thinking about this and we need to be
thinking about consumerism because the
easiest thing is just get something new,
buy something new, buy something new.
Capitalism has got us into this problem.
Capitalism is not going to get us out of
it. So, we need to be thinking about
that. We need to be thinking about local
plants. You know, we've had a great
discussion about this this morning and
Rebecca was talking about it as well.
And I think you know that sort of uh
consideration of the terminology is
really important. You know I like to say
local plants because then it's local to
a particular place. The term native is
problematic. Ethmologically it developed
in medieval French. It meant that a
child was native to its mother. Think
about the word nativity. Okay. So that's
what it was. Then in the 16th century it
began being related to people and place.
What else was going on then?
Colonialism. Okay, so that was built
into the system. That was built into
that word. We can see it then used in
Nazi Germany about people and place. We
can see it used in other countries and
all the problems we have talking about
the global situation, about migration,
about people and place. So let's kind of
avoid that. But let's look at the
importance of local plants as has been
discussed this morning. Um, and
obviously these plants have all of these
relationships which we talked about
before, Chris talked about, Rebecca
talked about, they have relationships
with different
insects. We need to think about that.
And when I work and think about planting
plans, I have all these spreadsheets
which note all the different
interactions between plants and insects
and try and use those to sort of put
together these kind of novel ecosystems
we're creating. Okay, we are looking at
plants from other places. We're looking
at things. We're trying to second
guessess things. We're trying to deal
with the complexity of the world out
there. But using this as a basis is
really important. So thinking about
these kind of localisms is really important.
important.
But having done that and using this kind
of method you Chris mentioned about
warmer winters. So this winter over the
last winter in one of our projects in
London, we've got a real microclimate.
We do a lot of projects in central
London in the London Bridge area and we
created this uh it's called waste to
wildlife garden. We used to call it the
rubble garden because we got crushed
concrete from local buildings and
recycled sand from local buildings that
were being demolished in the area.
Created these mounds at the entrance to
Guy's hospital. So it was a barren area.
It couldn't break through surface. There
were services and tunnels underneath.
that we built up. We crowded these
things and we because we're using
crushed concrete, we were using a lot of
local wild flowers. Crushed concrete has
a high lime content like chalk
grasslands like low limestone areas in
Yorkshire for instance. So thinking
about plants from those kind of areas to
match that minerality. Okay. So there
were plenty of sort of native plant not
native plants local plants um in there
and so you know plenty of opportunity
for different creatures but as Chris
says you know a lot of things uh with
warmer weathers are changing I mean
we're in these projects we're finding
that perennials are not dying back in
the winter they're staying evergreen
over winter that's one change and then
the knock-on effects of that you know we
saw a moth caterpillar in the winter
Right? And it was on lemonium plat
platilum. Okay. An introduced plant. It
could have been with any of the other
local plants, but it wasn't. It was
choosing that. So, what's really
important is that these things are
changing. They're not
fixed. The idea that things are static
is what I'd call ecology without
evolution. Things change. Things are
dynamic. That's the very nature of
things. That's what I talked about right
at the beginning. That's what we're
trying to get across about things are
complex and they're changing all the
time. We can't be predicting what
insects going to be using which plant in
a hundred years time because you know a
couple hundred years ago they may not
have had the same relationship anyway.
That's how evolution works. That's how
life on this planet works. Okay? So we
can't get fixed. We can't get stuck in
one kind of place, one static mentality.
We need to be adapting to all these
changes. We need to be considering all
that complexity. The Greek philosopher
Heraclitus said it is not possible to
step twice in the same river. Okay, so
think about that change
flux. That's mind-blowing. You know,
we've got all of these all of these
factors. You know, Sheila kind of
mentioned some of them at the end of
yesterday. I've just introduced a few
more. Okay, so we're trying to deal with
all these things. We're trying to work
them out. What do we do? You know, are
we just paralyzed? Do we do nothing? Or
do we how do we make the right
decisions, the right, you know, the
right courses of action? Which is why we
had panel discussions yesterday where
they're all on and everyone talking
about these things. So, we need to be
discussing these things. There are no
right or wrong answers. I mean, I speak
to him all the time and she's always
like, "Oh, yeah, but what's the right
answer? What's the right thing? What's
this?" And it's like, there isn't one
right answer. This is complex. We want
those right answers. We want things
simplified. Of course we do. We want to
take courses of action. So what do we
do? We need to work together as a
unified industry. We need to break down
silos, which is what we're trying to do
with this symposium. We have got
academics talking about their research.
We've got gardeners talking about what
they do in practice. We've got designers
talking about how they work. Okay, this
is really important that we are talking
across the industry, that we have
dialogue, that we have discourse, that
we work together and we need to make
this accessible to everyone in the
industry. We need to break down barriers
so everyone can engage with this
information. We need to translate this
complexity, you know, which was, you
know, a lot of this academics research
is, you know, not accessible to it's
quite hard to understand. You know, we
saw some of that yesterday, but we also
saw, you know, the academics doing, you
know, great work trying to translate
this into other language. But we need to
take that further. We need to break it
down, make it more accessible as well.
The way we talk about these things, how
do we communicate? What platforms do we
do use? How do we communicate with each
other? How do we then communicate that
information with the public that aren't
part of our world? Eric's going to talk
about that later. So, you know, these
are all things we need to be doing. And
it's not just a top- down thing. It's
not translating scientific research
down. It's about practical hands-on
experience. What's happening in the
field? What am I seeing when I'm out
gardening in the projects? So, if I
design a project, I make sure that I
look after it for the first year. That's
built into the process at stage one. So,
I'm there with my hands in the soil all
the time. I'm, you know, picking up
litter and I'm talking to people on the
street. I do public projects, so I'm
talking to people telling them why we're
doing things. But, you know, we need
that practical information to come up as
well. We need to see what changes are
happening. So, it's all of these things.
It's using science. It's using
traditional ecological knowledge, local
knowledge. And we need to experiment.
You know, there is no silver bullet. We
need to be trying different things in
different situations. And certainly
working in urban areas, we have a lot
more freedom to be able to do that. And
people are a lot more accepting. You
know, people do understand these things.
People think the public don't understand
wild landscapes in in urban areas.
That's just not true. They like messy
situations. They understand that it's
good for biodiversity. The public are,
you know, ahead. They're there. And, you
know, if we just talk to them more about
it, then they totally get it and they'll
be on board. If we if I'm out doing some
afterare on a project and I have a
conversation with someone, they will
then go and tell someone else and they
will tell someone else and they will
tell someone else. Okay? So, we need to share
share
information. We're skilled knowledge
workers. You know, this is what
education is about. We're skilling
ourselves, upskilling, and we need to
recognize that, and we need to be proud
of that. David Cameron when he was prime
minister in all his eonian arrogance
said that if people weren't good
academically they should become
gardeners right yeah well thank god him
gone so John is going to address some of
these issues so I'm not going to go into
them but you know if we really believe
what we're doing is important. If we are
providing these frontline ecological
services that are helping ecosystems
that are helping biodiversity, then we
need to be sharing. We need to be
educating. We need to be working
together. We need to be caring. We need
to be doing and we need to be sharing.
And these need to be forms of activism.
Thank you. [Applause]
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