Rooted in Restoration: Oxford Students Inspired by NRN Community-Led Conservation
NRN’s Wednesday Meadow Restoration group were delighted to host the new MSc students in Environmental Change and Management (ECM) from Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute at Long Mead – and share with them our experience of restoring nature around Eynsham, during the last five years.
Mike Chippendale and Anna Collins took them around the plant nursery and explained our strategy of using recycled materials and creating our own zero miles compost, as well as the joy of our diverse community who come together every Wednesday, including those of us with learning disabilities and autism, those just graduating, those of us facing mental or physical health challenges, and those of us graduating into older age.
Our local birding expert, Dr Allen Stevens, took them on a mini bird survey and explained the value of long-term monitoring. The students helped our water prof, Dr Lucy Dickinson, as she recorded data from our dipwells. She told them about the declining water quality in our rivers and streams, even over the four years that we have been monitoring.
Catriona Bass gave them a presentation on our mission to create a new nature reserve for Oxfordshire and our challenge to show how a bottom-up network of local people, protecting and restoring the land around them, can scale up and sustain nature recovery in the UK in a way that conventional top-down methods have been unable to, to date. ECM Course Director Dr Avidesh Seenath said, at the end, that on these field trips the students are usually lectured to only by academics. He thought it was extremely helpful for them to see both NRN/Long Mead Foundation's scientific work and to understand what communities can do on the ground.
One of the students put it poetically: “R. W. Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass talks about how, in the West, humanity came to be seen as a force that is either set to conquer nature, or a force that is only capable of destruction. She brings up examples from indigenous culture that prove that humans can live in harmony and symbiosis with other species of nature. But I always thought this stewardship role as specific to indigenous people, lost from Western culture. This place proves to me that even in my close proximity, there are initiatives that play a similar symbiotic role. It was astonishing.”
We may have some way to go in regaining our lost nature-knowledge, but it is encouraging to think that those who will soon be in positions of influence think that we are on the right road…