The UK’s education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, has announced the launch of a GCSE in natural history, a key part of helping bring back the study of plants and animals into the lives of young people. Long championed by the environmentalist Mary Colwell, this qualification is welcome.
The world is facing both a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis, each resulting from the damaging effects of our species on the natural world. The UK is among the most nature-depleted countries on Earth – even its national parks are mostly farmland. Despite this, a psychological phenomenon known as shifting baseline syndrome means that limited personal experience of change, particularly as people grow up, results in a lack of awareness of the sheer volume and diversity of animals and plants that have been lost in recent generations.
Not only that, but around 83% of people in the UK now live in urban areas. Children growing up in towns and cities have less exposure to nature, what is there is less likely to be wild, and they experience fewer opportunities to roam in green space than previous generations. Some argue that this disconnection from nature is associated with a range of mental and physical health issues. This means that generations are becoming further isolated from nature, just as the world needs people with the ecological literacy to enable them to address the environmental challenges of coming decades.
