The UK is one of the least nature-connected countries on Earth but, as our new podcast series uncovers, there is a place already showing how to flip that into a very different future.
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As a new study frames British habits and outlooks starkly outside greener lifestyles, a recent strategy project with InPlace Consulting dropped me and a microphone into an East Anglian landscape partnership demonstrating the opposite, potentially teaching us all what regenerative, resilient leadership really looks like. And they were a little incredulous when I told a launch event ballroom of them they were weird.
The Brecks. I’d never heard of the place until less than a couple of months ago. Now, I am very slightly in love with it, but significantly because of the way that people there helped me look at it. They look at it very not the way most of us in the UK see our natural landscapes, apparently.
The first ever global study of “how people relate to the natural world” has found the country I live in bizarrely disconnected from nature. Weird for somewhere described by Bill Bryson as “one big garden”, with a national landscape across England especially defined by its human-shaped agricultural uses over centuries and the nation that founded the RSPCA. But while local authorities and businesses are beginning to get their heads around the soulful concept of Biodiversity Net Gain units, most of us in ordinary life don’t relate to wild plants and animals much.
The study, which drew on an initial 2024 report, was led by Professor of Nature Connectedness at Derby University, Miles Richardson, which – see? – you can’t comprehend is even a thing. That’s how far we have to go, man. You.
“Nature connectedness is not just about what we do, but how we feel, think, and value our place in the living world” he told The Guardian. And in simple, click-bateable, league table terms, the UK comes out at number 55 of 61 nations studied. Risible.
But why? Richardson thinks the study reveals a tension between business and the environment. The word “value” is a verb, a doing word, and so a choice about how we think we should.
“There’s ways we can rethink the way we do business – bringing nature into decision-making, nature in the boardroom, and biodiversity net gain” he says. “They can start to shift the system, where nature isn’t just simply treated as a resource but as a stakeholder.”
Practically reverent as he sounds towards the need for a functioning economy and an at-this-point quaint belief that the UK still puts “rational” over other views of the world, he suggests we need to go rather deeper than scoring nature credits in business legislation. He talks about making nature more sacred.
Which is interesting. Because I’m not sure the people of the Brecks Landscape Partnership would feel the need to talk that way. Yet they are getting on with putting nature at the heart of their own business in such practical ways it is heart filling.
Because I came away thinking it is the peculiarity of the land itself that has drawn them closer to it – and so, marvellously, to each other.
As times of fearsome change and uncertainty will remind you, in the end, the only resilience is relationships.
Hundred year horizons.
I don’t think they are putting anything in the tea in inland East Anglia. The driest place in the UK has internationally rare chalk streams which make for rather specially filtered water, so they might be. But some of the people living there are definitely doing things differently, in connecting with nature.
The Brecks is a character area that crosses the Suffolk and Norfolk border, cut through by a diagonal line between Cambridge and Norwich. I’ve driven in and I’ve ridden the train in and it is a subtly distinctive landscape out the window. You might notice some weird shaped trees silhouetted on the vaguely undulating, famously wide horizon, but you might not look up from your phone for long. You really should, if you’re driving. When you pay attention, however, it’s a nexus of habitats not quite like anywhere else in the country. Twenty-eight percent of the UK’s rarest species are found here, and this is steadily getting more people’s attention.
But I think it’s the leadership model that should be getting as much attention.
“We can all talk about partnership and some people can pay lip service to it but I think in the Brecks over the last few years we’ve created a genuine partnership where everyone is pulling in the same direction” Andrew Blenkiron, Managing Director of the Elveden Estate, told me.
In six weeks, I switched up my lack of knowledge of the Brecks into a slightly star-struck view of the place, because of the people I met there. They are working with a remarkably shared attitude, that helps them share their different perspectives on it. Being able to combine different knowledge sets helps them all sink deeper roots into their sense of context, and stoke everyone’s nerdy interest in how the place works. This isn’t just useful, it becomes motivational. Connecting.
But most people’s philosophy about this, which seems clear, I found to be understated.
When Andrew Emery and I first rolled into Thetford, he was stunned to see a bright gold statue of Thomas Paine standing in King’s Street. M’colleague and mate from InPlace Consulting, having asked me in to head up the work here, is a historian and storyteller himself – the full-on dressing up, guided walks kind – and he knew exactly who Thomas Paine was and that he was such a strident philosopher he was the daddy of at least two revolutions. That’s before mentioning a queen of rebels, Boudica, more than half a millennium before ol’ Tom, who had one of her main anti-Roman encampments just outside the town.
The connection to the land I found when talking to people across the Partnership was more practical and evolutionary than the big historic stories of change we like to imagine – but no less conscious. The disruption here is more developmental, based on observation and a bit of trial and error, but no less intentional.
Everything about the Brecks has to be intentional, and that’s part of its secret. It is such a human-shaped environment over thousands of years, you have to surrender any fantasy of an untouched Eden – nature demands attention, especially where it is living in particularly fine balance around us. But a high-maintenance relationship is one you really get to know. And that means you know all the quicker when something is wrong and why. And who else is paying attention.
That a big network of generational agriculture businesses want to work with conservationists who want to work with historians who want to work with local authorities who want to work with communities and government agencies and corporate service providers and specialist researchers, combining nature with technology with storytelling to enrich everyone’s connection to the landscape… degrees of such cooperation happen every day across the country. But for all those types of organisation locally to want to be part of that, to find out what they all know, to not only enrich their own tasked perspectives but to help each other in their efforts? That’s more revolutionary.
But all that is unlocked, I found, by one shared attitude.
“It’s remarkable what you can get done when no one cares who gets the credit.”
Original Brecks Landscape Partnership lead Nick Dickson is quoted by a lot of people in this, and they all nod with conviction to it.
This doesn’t sound like a corporate board room. It sounds like nature’s own MO.
This wasn’t always the case. When Nicole Wade took us out on land for the first time, she introduced us to Nick, whom Suffolk Country Council tasked with setting up the first Landscape Partnership bid to the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which they entitled Breaking New Ground. I asked him whether he puts something in his own tea.
“It just turned out that I’m super-passionate about the idea of innovation and collaboration – doing new things, looking at landscape and conservation as opportunities to do some really exciting stuff. And the Brecks is the perfect canvas for that.”
He too points to the landscape itself as giving him the cues, but it takes someone with a different perspective on the Brecks to help you even see things. Plenty of people living here have barely scratched the surface of what’s there, as Nick’s successor Nicole suggested to me. At this year’s Outdoor Festival, she says:
“The amount of times we had people come up to us and say, gosh, I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never walk to this spot, never realised that this wildlife was here or how biodiverse it is… Last Thursday we were river dipping and the amount of excitement from people of all ages about the invertebrates they were finding… and that’s just a tiny snapshot of life in the rivers here.”
Seeing a place through someone else’s eyes unlocks a new understanding. And so maybe, just a bit, your vision for being there.
At the launch event for our resulting assessment document: The Brecks: A Field Guide To Resilience, hosting a panel with the audience that afternoon in the Bury St Edmunds Athenaeum, it became clear I’d missed a big theme this whole time: Everyone here has their eye on the future. I’d noted every time the word was said to me over those six weeks, but without philosophising about it as I do, champions of the Brecks are living with an out-of-time attitude – thinking of life 100 years from now and investing in that.
As it emerged to me properly holding the mic, I stood up from the panel and addressed everyone in the ballroom there pointedly:
“Is this typical? Do you all think this way here?”
Everyone in the room swivelled heads at each other like they weren’t sure I wasn’t an idiot and then looked back at me incredulously and collectively said: Well, duh!
I took it in for a second and then said:
“You should know this is not normal elsewhere.”
Elsewhere, according to the Carnegie UK Life in the UK Index, published this week, we are not living like this. It declares its two lowest indices of wellbeing as Environmental, at 61%, and Democratic, at a staggering 41%. Around the country, it suggests, people are not taking part in nature or the running of where they live much.
Across the relationships surrounding the Brecks Landscape Partnership, however, I found people quietly lit up by being part of where they live, enthused with knowledge of it and possibilities for it and by a determination to protect it for generations ahead. And they’ve been learning how not to get in each other’s way doing it.
That they recognise the need for a central organising partner like the Landscape Partnership team, in the middle of everyone else’s different specialisms, yet show up independently with enough shared outlook is remarkable. An organisation like the Breckland Farmers Wildlife Network scotches any urban ignorance about farmers’ connection to the future, not just the land, and it appeared in the Brecks independently of the Partnership, as Richard Evans so warmly showed me. But a multi-thousand hectare land manager like the Elveden Estate laid out its enormous production with an eye on nature a century ago, and now combines tech with conservation with being one of the UK’s biggest food producers so openly it is also inspiring, as Andrew Blenkiron brought alive for me. That they all want to help the RSPB’s decades-long efforts under Tim Cowan to support the Stone Curlew, as a symbol of nature’s vulnerability, must help Nicole and Nick and the Partnership not feel alone in their world view and efforts.
As Tina Cunnell, clerk of Brandon Town Council, told me:
“I think there’s a lot of mileage in finding new ways for people and the environment to exist together. If you’re going to live somewhere, how beautiful is this? But we still have industry, we still have commercial ventures also in the area – but they can all be in the same space and work together. ..I mean, the industrial estate has a country wildlife area in it because one of the plants there is so rare. But it’s still an industrial estate. It’s still doing all the things it’s supposed to do, but it’s also taking care of one of the most important species in the country. Why can’t that be rolled out across many other things? ..I do think what we have here is a fantastic pilot for the rest of the country. Even if I wasn’t involved in it, I’d think it was incredible”
This sounds like leadership we are missing in more obvious sight right now.
One of the most telling signals from our launch day for the new chapter of Landscape Partnership was how enthusiastic everyone was about who else was in the room, and how much this spilled into ideas during our table discussions; “There’s some dynamite in these notes” said Partnership facilitator Jude to me at the end of the day, grinning at the boards of post-its pinned up.
While nowhere is utopia, not everyone in the Brecks seeing all this or working so inter-relationally, it’s not insignificant that one of the most popular of the sixty projects the Partnerships have delivered over the last dozen years was Imogen Radford’s introductions to outdoor swimming. People in the Brecks found themselves, you bet, feeling suddenly alive plunging into the Lark and the Little Ouze, immersed quite literally in nature.
Leaving the event, the report and the wonderful series of recorded conversations for it, I feel my time in the Brecks reflects the importance of the word experience, and why I am trying to make them all the time, as an artist; once you’ve wedded to something personally, you are beginning to love it. And love is a verb.
And you may well discover you are not alone in doing it.
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Get introduced to the Brecks with me in the first in our new series A Field Guide To The Brecks and follow all the subsequent walks and talks I had with people, shared over coming weeks. Why is it a fascinating place and what can you learn from what’s happening in this part of the UK?
Plus, download our full guide and learn from all we found in a deeper way, for wherever you live:
The Brecks: A Field Guide To Resilience >
You can also read a follow-up blog from the Partnership about our launch day together right here >
With a huge thank you to our partner in the Partnership, Nicole Wade who was such a helpful support and guide, putting together a wonderful launch event for a new chapter of the Brecks Landscape Partnership. And to Nick Dickson who took Andrew and I out on land the very first time and filled us with wonder for the place at the beginning, which you can hear in the final podcast of the series at the end of the year.
And to Andrew and InPlace Consulting for the invaluable, deeply qualifying co-writing and invitation to dive into what has become a favourite project for me.
