Conservation director: 'Stuff will just slip away'

The following are excerpts from his presentation to the environment scrutiny committee this week.

"The amount we've lost is astronomical.

"We've lost 60% of our swifts. When I moved into my house 20 years ago there used to be about 30-odd swifts flying around my street in spring.

"We've watched that decline with great sadness and there are only four flying around our house this year. It's just decline after decline. Next year we may have none at all.

"34% of our swallows have declined in our lifetime.

"95 out of every 100 hedgehogs have disappeared in your lifetime.

"98% of turtle doves. Water voles, Ratty from The Wind In The Willows... 97%. One of our most loved species.

"29% of our birds are on what's called the red list of species of conservation concern.

"These are not just things you haven't heard of. This is the house sparrow. This is the starling.

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"Were this a football match, nature and we would be 5-0 down.

"Without the wildlife trusts and the AONB Partnership and the rivers trusts and conservation-minded farmers and landowners and the county council's work, we would be 10-0 down.

"We can and must fight back.

"Because this isn't just about nature for nature's sake. We are absolutely reliant on the natural world for our physical and spiritual health and wellbeing.

"Utterly reliant, and we've become divorced from it.

"We live at a time when we know more about it than we've ever known, yet we're more divorced from it then we've ever been.

A Dingy skipper butterfly.

"We need to connect habitats on a massive scale, the biggest scale we can, and connect people with nature.

"Everywhere, in towns and cities as well as in the wider landscape, we need to make smarter, wiser planning decisions.

"The county council needs to manage its own estate for nature as best it can.

"It needs to up its game for biodiversity in the fantastic way it has for climate.

"You're national leaders around climate change in the public sector. Can you get there with biodiversity too?

"You need to understand your supply chain. What impact does it have on biodiversity?

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"We're failing because the political will to reverse declines in nature has not been there, and these declines are catastrophic.

"There's been a failure globally, nationally and regionally and a lack of leadership on an epic scale.

"People don't like change. They like tidiness. Nature doesn't like tidiness.

"We build things in the wrong places. We manicure and spray every grass verge, every hedge.

"I had a parish councilor say to me a few years ago when we talked about a verge conservation programme, 'We've got enough wildflowers, thank you.' No you haven't. I assure you, you haven't.

"But that's the attitude, some people think that, and they're so wrong.

"We're so far past just conservation. We're in a period of recovery of nature.

"Even if County Durham was an absolute paradise for wildlife, which I assure you it isn't, it would still be in my opinion worth declaring an ecological emergency.

"Because you have to conserve the best and build out from there on the wider landscape, to recover what we have lost and conserve what we have.

"We won't notice these things slipping away. They will go out with a whimper. They'll just disappear.

"We'll look up and we'll think, God, all the swifts have gone from around my house. Stuff just will slip away.

"We are trying and we are failing despite our fantastic, in many cases, efforts. We're all failing.

"We are inextricably linked to nature for our physical and mental wellbeing, and for our economy which relies in large part on clean air and water and a supply chain of pollinating insects and good soil."