Green Hearts Show the Love

Caring for Nature

When I started this Substack last year, my intention was that it would be a weekly newsletter that I would send out every Wednesday morning. However, it’s not turned out that way! Apart from the brief Christmas newsletter, I haven’t written anything here for a few months. I’ve not abandoned Substack, but I’m now only sending newsletters out when I feel I have something interesting to say.

February is the month of love, with Valentines Day coming up in a couple of days. It’s also the month when we first start to see signs of Spring emerging in the world around us. Snowdrops, Crocuses and Winter Aconites appear in our woodlands and gardens, as do the beautiful Scarlet Elf Cap fungi (these in the photo below are in the wooded area of Edinburgh’s Corstorphine Hill).

For ten years, up to last year, the Climate Coalition ran the Show the Love Campaign every February as a way of engaging members of the public to share their love of nature and to campaign on the importance of natural habitats and wildlife. One of the features of the campaign was that people made their own green hearts to wear as badges or to send out to decision makers. The campaign doesn’t seem to be running this year, but it’s always worth thinking about what matters to you in nature and how you can share that with others.

For example, I love exploring the many greenspaces in Edinburgh. One of my favourites is the Water of Leith, a beautiful river that runs through the city and is home to a wide range of wildlife including Kingfishers and Otters. I volunteer with the Water of Leith Trust, walking along a section of the river most weeks, picking litter and recording the wildlife I see. I also campaign on issues around nature and the environment.

Where are your favourite wildlife havens? How can you help to preserve them and look after them?

Plantlife have written a nice blogpost about some of the flowers associated with love. You can read it here.

Though it’s important to take you own actions to preserve nature and help the environment, we’re often (rightly) told that it’s not enough. We need governments to take the lead and create a legal setting where nature is valued and looked after. Sadly, however, these days, many governments across the world care less about nature than they should. If you’re interested in the state of nature and the environment in the US, I can definitely recommend Rebecca Wisent’s ongoing Owl in America series in her Fearless Green newsletter. In the UK, our new Labour Government seems intent on becoming more Tory than the Tories we recently got rid of (often on issues that don’t relate to the environment, so I won’t go into those here, but George Monbiot has a comprehensive thread on this on BlueSky). Greenpeace gave a largely positive overview of Labour’s progress on the environment in their first 100 days in power, but many conservationists fear that proposed relaxations of planning regulations will lead to large areas of natural habitat being built on. Of course, we need places for people to live, everyone deserves appropriate housing, but nature desperately needs homes too and there are alternatives to building on green spaces. Ruth Bradshaw recently wrote a good piece on this in her Stories of Co-existence newsletter. Also worth reading on this is George Monbiot again in this article on the Guardian website.

I may not be posting here regularly any more, but I still post a couple of times a week on my original blog here. I’m also on Blue Sky here.