Natural Beauty’, or National Trust for short. Its constitution was based on that of a similar American body founded two years previously. In 1906, Hunter drafted a private Bill that made the Trust a statutory body, and gave it the right to make bylaws and to declare its properties inalienable. This meant they could not be sold or taken away without the Trust’s consent: a National Trust property is the Trust’s for keeps. A separate National Trust for Scotland (see below) was established in 1931, and given similar powers to its sister body. A full account of the National Trust was published in 1995 (Newby 1995).
Although the National Trust acquired many places ‘of special interest to the naturalist’ in its early days, such as Wicken Fen, Cheddar Gorge and Box Hill, its management of them was for many years scarcely different to any other rural estate; modern farming and forestry methods that damaged wildlife often went through on the nod. Management of the Trust’s de facto nature reserves, such as Wicken Fen or the tiny Ruskin Reserve near Oxford, was generally overseen by a keen but amateurish outside body. They tended to turn into thickets. The Trust’s outlook began to change in the 1960s after it launched Enterprise Neptune to save the coastline from development, having found that a full third of our coast had been ‘irretrievably spoiled’. By 1995, some 885 kilometres of attractive coast, much of it in south-west England, had been saved in this way.
Since the 1980s, the National Trust has developed in-house ecological expertise, and belatedly become a mainstream conservation body, managing its properties, especially those designated SSSIs, in broad sympathy with wildlife aims. Some of the basic maintenance is done by Trust volunteers in ‘Acorn Workcamps’. Although public access remains a prime aim, some Trust properties are now in effect nature reserves, with the advantage of often being large, especially when integrated with other natural heritage sites. By its centenary year, 1993, the National Trust owned 240,000 hectares of countryside, visited by up to 11 million people every year. It owns large portions of Exmoor, The Lizard and the Lake District, and about 14,000 hectares of ancient woodland and parkland. Like the RSPB, its membership climbed steeply in the 1970s, breaching the million-member tape by 1981. The Trust is now Britain’s largest registered charity, larger than any trades union or any political party. Members receive the annual Trust Handbook of properties, as well as three mailings a year of National Trust Magazine, and free admission to Trust properties (including those belonging to the National Trust for Scotland). It has 16 regional offices in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as a head office in London.
Head Office: 36 Queen Anne’s Gate, London SW1H 9AH [at the time of writing, the National Trust was set to move from its elegant Georgian house in SW1 to a graceless office block in Swindon, to the dismay of most of its staff.]
Director-general: Fiona Reynolds
National Trust for Scotland (NTS)
The National Trust’s sister body in Scotland was founded in 1931, and was made a statutory body with similar powers, including inalienability rights, seven years later. It has the same aim of preserving lands and property of historic interest or natural beauty, ‘including the preservation (so far as is practicable) of their natural aspect and features, and animals and plant life’. The Trust acquired its first property, 600 hectares of moorland and cliff on the island of Mull, in 1932. It is now Scotland’s second largest private landowner with nearly 73,000 hectares or about 1 per cent of rural Scotland in its care, including 400 kilometres of coastline. About half of this area consists of designated SSSIs, among them the isles of St Kilda, Fair Isle and Canna, and Highland estates such as Ben Lawers, Ben Lomond, Torridon and Glencoe. Perhaps its most important property is Mar Lodge estate in the Cairngorms, acquired in 1995, which is being managed as a kind of large-scale experiment in woodland regeneration and sustainable land use (pp. 240-41). Like the National Trust, the NTS was for many years more interested in access than habitat management; for example, it had no permanent presence at Ben Lawers until 1972 and, apart from footpath maintenance, did no management to speak of until the 1990s. Though, with 240,000 members, relatively modest in size compared with the National Trust, the NTS is a mainstream and increasingly important partner in nature conservation in Scotland, all the more so since it is an exclusively Scottish body. It has four regional offices with a headquarters – a classic Georgian mansion – in Edinburgh.
Afternoon sunshine sparkles the native pines of Derry Wood in Mar Lodge estate, now owned by the National Trust for Scotland. (Peter Wakely/SNH)
Head Office: 5 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh EH2 4DU.
Chairman: Professor Roger J. Wheater.
International pressure groups
WWF-UK
WWF currently stands for the World Wide Fund for Nature. Until 1986 it was known (more memorably) as the World Wildlife Fund, ‘the world’s largest independent conservation organisation’, with offices in 52 countries and some five million supporters worldwide. WWF was founded by Peter Scott and others in 1961, and is registered as a charity in Switzerland. Its mission: ‘to stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment, and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature’. The UK branch, WWF’s first national organisation, has funded over 3,000 conservation projects since 1961 (but especially since 1990), and itself campaigns to save endangered species and improve legal protection for wildlife. In the 1990s it produced a succession of valuable reports on the marine environment, wild salmon, translocations, SSSIs and other topics from a more independent viewpoint than one expects nowadays from government bodies. In a sense, it has taken over as the lead body reporting on the health of Britain’s natural environment and the effectiveness of conservation measures. Among its most important contributions has been WWF’s persistent prodding of the UK government over the EU Habitats Directive, which eventually led to a large increase in proposed SACs (Special Areas for Conservation) for the Natura 2000 network (see Chapter 4). All of WWF’s work is supposed to have a global relevance. WWF-UK’s work is currently organised into three programmes: ‘Living Seas’, ‘Future Landscapes’ (countryside, forest and fresh water) and ‘Business and Consumption’ (‘our lifestyles and their impact on nature’). It also works with others overseas to promote sustainable development in ecologically rich parts of the world and good environmental behaviour by businesses. The organisation is funded mainly by voluntary donations (90 per cent), with the rest from state institutions. The UK branch has some 257,000 members and supporters, and 200 volunteer groups about the country. Its youth section is called ‘Go Wild’. It has offices in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland with a headquarters at Godalming in Surrey.
Its logo: the famous panda, designed by Peter Scott. Its slogan: ‘Taking action for a living planet’.
Address: Panda House, Weyside Park, Godalming, Surrey GU7 1XR. Chief Executive: Robert Napier
Friends of the Earth
FoE acts as a radical environmental ginger group, pressing for more environment-friendly policies, both at home and worldwide. It is careful to avoid alignment with any political party or to accept commercial sponsorship, and most of its funding comes from the membership. FoE is particularly effective at ‘media management’ and at shaming commercial interests into adopting more environmentally friendly policies. Founded in America, a British branch took root shortly afterwards in 1971. Its first newsworthy action was the dumping of thousands of non-returnable bottles on the doorstep of Schweppes, the soft drink manufacturers. On wildlife
