On British Values and British Nature

‘Pride’ has always struck me a peculiar and entirely inappropriate way to express your feelings about your homeland. After all, the accident of having been born somewhere is hardly something over which you had either any choice or any control. But for all that, I’m certainly happy enough to call Britain ‘home’; and despite having had the good fortune to visit some wonderful parts of the world, and to work with people from many different countries, I have never seriously considered settling anywhere else. The one - fantastic -  extended period I did spend out of the country, as a student in France, made me realise how many things I do appreciate here. So I take a pretty personal interest in all the talk over the last few weeks about ‘Britishness’, ‘British Values’, and so on. Some of this talk is good natured - possibly triggered by sporting rivalries, although I am not aware of any recent sporting events of note - or well-intentioned commemorations of events from world wars I and II. Some stems, no doubt, from the imminent vote on Scottish independence, and from the rise of ugly nationalism in other parts of the country too. All of it is fanned of course by politicians, such as the minister for education who has his own peculiar views of what British values do, and don’t, imply for the way we teach our kids. Typically, if you’re properly British, the narrative goes, you should know the dates and the exploits of Great Men (and occasional women) from our Glorious Past.

My interest is not, however, particularly in such debates - if you want to read about them simply google “British Values” and take your pick from the 3/4 million hits returned. Rather, it is in something that these debates - and associated phenomena, such as the much ridiculed UK Citizenship Test - omit, but which for me is a key factor that roots me to this place. That is our natural history, in its widest sense - from the seacliffs and grouse moors to the buddleia and valerian cheering up neglected walls (and hungry pollinators) throughout my city right now.

The heros of this British narrative include the likes of Gilbert White and John Clare; key dates include 24^th April 1932. But really this is not a narrative of ‘Great Men’ and their deeds. Rather, it embodies a set of values including a sense of curiosity and wonder at the natural world. These are universal, nor British; but understanding a little of the natural history of the nation to which fate has assigned you is as good a link as any to its deeper culture. Once gained, it’s an understanding - I would argue - that has the potential to enrich almost any interaction with the wider world. And what’s more, this ought to be within the reach of everyone, regardless of means.

‘Ought to be’; but is it? Debbie Coldwell, a PhD student with Karl Evans here in Sheffield, has been trying to find out how people interact with green space within urban settings, and in particular whether ‘nature’ has any impact on these interactions. Part of her study involved asking people to identify from photographs a set of twelve common species - birds (nuthatch, starling, linnet, blue tit), mammals (water vole, fox, hedgehog, mole), and plants (dandelion, daisy, wood sorrel, yellow rattle). Of the almost 300 people she has asked to date, no-one has yet identified all 12; the top score remains 10. But while most people (around 2/3) can identify between 4 and 8 species, almost 1 in 6 people could identify none at all.

Fancy, you might think, not knowing what a dandelion is, or a fox or a hedgehog. I just find that terribly sad, because without this basic knowledge of plants and animals you’re missing all of the culture wrapped up in them, documented for example in the Floras and Faunas Brittanica of Richard Mabey and Stefan Buczacki. I’ve written before about the profound effect that British wildlfe has had on my own life. I think I’d go so far as to say that I don’t think you can fully claim to embody ‘British Values’ without scoring pretty high on Debbie’s test.

Becoming a UK Citizen involves a 45 minute test on modern British life based on the book Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents. This book promises information on (among other things) the values and principles of the UK, traditions and culture from around the UK, and the events and people that have shaped our history. Our natural history is, you will note, entirely lacking. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to introduce immigrants to our country to a range of the kinds of animals and plants that every child ought to be familiar with?

And shouldn’t it be our responsibility to ensure that every child is indeed familiar with these too?

What students want - or what students need?

You can tell from the contrasting expressions on the faces of academics around the department that it’s exam marking deadline time. The harassed anxiety of those with piles of scripts still on their desks is balanced by the smug relief of we happy few who are done and dusted. For me, then, it’s a time to reflect on my teaching, which has led me to an interesting conclusion. Let me backtrack a little. I’ve been lecturing on our level three course, Conservation Issues and Management, for a few years now. Early on, I took the decision to record and then podcast my lectures (if you’re desperately interested, they’re available here). This seemed a great idea to me - it’s incredibly easy to do (although becoming less so with every update of Keynote and Quicktime…), and (not to be sniffed at) it avoids the need for me to prepare any supporting material for the lectures, apart from the slides themselves.

Moreover, the students seem to love it. Over the years I’ve had some great feedback which - driven as we are by the need to do well in the various student surveys - is a valuable outcome. But, I’ve noticed a trend. More or less whatever exam question I set, a proportion of the essays basically regurgitate my lectures, covering all the same topics in pretty much the same order. Clearly, students are using my podcasts for revision - which is great, it’s what they’re for - but, more than that, they’re memorising them. Which is not so good.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I quite like my lectures - though their content continually changes as my own understanding develops, and as new research is published. But they are not an answer to any exam question I've ever set, and reproducing them by rote will get you a moderate mark at best (assuming you do it accurately). Our marking scheme puts a heavy stress on independent reading - i.e., of stuff that wasn’t covered in the lectures - as well as on maintaining a strict focus on the question, rather than writing every damn thing you know…

All of this ties in with the idea that simply re-reading material is a pretty ineffective way to learn (see for example this paper or this blog post) Real understanding is hard work, and goes beyond memorising. Students themselves need to take some responsibility for this (and of course many of them do), but it has also led me to question whether, in giving students what they want (my podcasts), I’m actually doing them a longer term disservice.

It would be a brave move to stand up in lecture 1 and announce that “no lecture materials will be provided, you’re on your own, and no, you may not record my lectures” and I’m sure that’s not necessary. But I may need to revisit my podcasting strategy. One option is to do shorter podcasts of key points - more work for me, of course, but it’s the route taken by my colleague Tim Birkhead, who was 2013 UK Higher Education Biosciences Teacher of the Year, so knows a bit about all this.

Either way, I probably need to rethink the balance between getting gratifyingly nice feedback on the post module forms, and pushing the students to fulfil their potential in their exams.

Mixed messages on Marine Protected Areas

I can’t remember the details of the first scientific conference I ever went to - not even its name - but I know it was on marine conservation, in Cardiff, and that a couple of us undergrads had made the trek from Norwich with little idea what to expect. The keynote speaker was Bill Ballantine, some of whose work on Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in New Zealand I’d read as research for an essay. I remember no details of his talk, other than it adding to my general opinion of MPAs as a Good Thing; more memorable was his (grumpy, admirable) single word response - “No” - to a lengthy question from the floor. Anyway, this came back to me recently when I saw a new paper from Ballantine, giving a 50 year New Zealand perspective on MPAs. In particular, he suggests that the struggle to convince people of the worth of MPAs elsewhere could be greatly reduced by using New Zealand’s long (and ultimately successful) experiment as an exemplar. As it happens, another eminent MPA researcher, Timothy McLanahan, has also just published an analysis of the effectiveness of Kenyan MPAs based on data going back almost as far. These long-term perspectives give some context to the latest marine planning developments in the UK, where we are slowly (too slowly according to many voiciferous campaigners, not least Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, whose latest Fish Fight aired last week) progressing towards a network of marine conservation zones (MCZs). Campaigners disagree with other marine stakeholders over how much evidence is needed in order to establish these MCZs, and tempers can get rather frayed (not helped by the use of the word ‘Fight’ in the campaign; see my post from last year) - although there has been a certain rapprochment over the last year (this fishing industry view, for example, seems quite conciliatory to me and is hardly ‘anti conservation’).

So any evidence about the effectiveness of MPAs is to be welcomed, and a new study by Graham Edgar and colleagues published recently in Nature provides the most comprehensive review to date. Let me say at the outset that this is an enormously impressive piece of work: the team surveyed almost a thousand reefs from 87 MPAs and another thousand or so non-protected sites, from 40 countries around the world, using a standard methodology, their coverage allowing systematic comparisons of protected and non-protected areas using neat statistical methods. Their decision to concentrate on reefs, and on reef fish in particular, was both sensible - in that most MPAs are on reef systems, and reef fish are especially well studied - and necessary in order for the study to be feasible. It seems almost churlish to note that the 8000 or so reef fish species constitute 3-4% of described marine species, and perhaps just 1% of all marine species; but it is important that we bear this in mind when interpreting their conclusions: we have far less quantitative data on the effectiveness of MPAs for the groups constituting the majority of marine biodiversity.

Nevertheless, the scope of this study was broad enough that certain generalisations emerged. In particular, the authors were able to identify five factors that are key to the conservation success of an MPA. (“Success” here is defined using various measures including numbers of all fish species, numbers of species in key groups such as sharks, biomass of all fish, and of large fish.) These factors they term NEOLI, for No take (no fishing allowed), Enforced (effective enforcement of regulations), Old (long-established), Large (in terms of the area protected), and Isolated (separated from similar habitat by an extent of deep water or sandy substrate). They found that MPAs possessing four or five of these attributes score markedly higher than non-protected areas, particularly for total fish biomass, large fish biomass, and shark biomass. But MPAs with one or two NEOLI characteristics only were ecologically indistinguishable from unprotected sites.

And here’s where the mixed messages begin, in terms of the effectiveness of MPAs as a conservation strategy. First, across their entire dataset only four MPAs had all five NEOLI characteristics. Just five more had four characteristics. In other words, although MPAs can be very effective at achieving conservation objectives for reef fish, hardly any actually are. And as the authors say, “The low proportion of MPAs possessing four or five NEOLI features (10%), and thus regarded here as effective, probably overstates the true proportion of effective MPAs worldwide. Our survey strategy deliberately targeted well-known and well-regarded MPAs, with most large and long-established MPAs included in this study.” This is sobering indeed.

But the second mixed message is rather more subtle. Many proponents of MPAs talk them up as ‘win-win’. That is, MPAs are good for both conservation and for fisheries, largely because fish populations can build up within a reserve and then ‘spill over’ to the surrounding area, where they can be fished. This is certainly an argument I've made in the past. Yet the ‘I’ of NEOLI stands for Isolation, precisely because Isolation avoids spillover, so that protected fish stay within the MPA - in other words, an Isolated MPA specifically excludes the “presence of continuous habitat allowing unconstrained movement of fish across MPA boundaries”, which is exactly what MPAs are supposed to deliver to surrounding fisheries. Thus, one of the major contributors to the success of an MPA in conservation terms, is that it does not benefit fisheries.

This is, I think, extremely pertinent to the current debate within the UK, where conservation outcomes of MPAs are often conflated with other potential outcomes. The danger here is that we end up with reserves that are suboptimal for all objectives. As in all conservation initiatives, it is much better to have specific, measurable objectives defined at the outset, so that the effectiveness of any intervention can be properly assessed. Scientific evidence has a key role in this planning process, and - frustrating as it feels - this can take time. Isn’t it worth taking just a bit more time now, to ensure our seas are properly - and effectively - protected for future generations?