Conservation Note
Mark Avery on whether an individual can make a difference
Recorded after an autumn statement widely read as hostile to environmental regulation, on what one person can actually do.
Dr Mark Avery had left the RSPB earlier that year after fifteen years as conservation director, and was by then writing and campaigning independently. This conversation followed an autumn statement that was read across the environmental sector as a significant weakening of environmental regulation.
The question put to him was the one people ask when policy moves against them: whether an individual can make any difference at all.
It is a better question than it sounds, and Avery was in an unusual position to answer it. Someone who has spent fifteen years running conservation policy at a large organisation knows exactly how much of the outcome is determined by institutional weight, and is also, having left, in the position of finding out what one person can do without it.
His subsequent work (books, a long-running blog, e-petitions and sustained campaigning on driven grouse moors and raptor persecution) amounts to a practical answer.