Should nature sector organisations speak out on social justice issues?

By a staff member at the Mammal Society

Photo credit: Alex Berryman

This is an opinion piece and not a reflection of the Mammal Society’s official stance on any of the issues outlined.

Here at the Mammal Society, we have a daunting task on our hands; to continue to protect, research, and restore the wild mammal populations of the British Isles whilst a sixth mass extinction event is underway.

This challenge is mirrored across other organisations within the nature sector; the BTO looks after birds, the Woodland Trust trees, and Butterfly Conservation our butterflies and moths. Yet whilst we all fight to protect and restore the species most at risk across Britain, the world continues to plunge head-first into the climate and ecological crises, themselves fueled by countless other human-caused factors. Deforestation and habitat destruction, the trawling of our seas, and rising emissions are all symptoms of our profit-driven economic system (capitalism), which continues to strip resources from our finite planet. Capitalism itself is fueled by colonisation (the process of settling and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area) and imperialism (the extension of a country's power and influence through military force). Yet the nature sector, which struggles to protect our species as they slip into extinction, remains siloed and separate from these larger social and economic issues.

A prominent example of a ‘social’ issue that isn’t usually tackled by the nature sector is the military industrial complex’s link to the climate and ecological crises. In her latest podcast episode exploring military carbon reporting, the Mammal Society's patron, Gillian Burke, points out that the military sector is one of the largest carbon emitting sectors but has no requirement to report their emissions to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the IPCC. Whilst both conflict and peacetime activities drive up emissions, militaries across the world actively engaged in violence also destroy habitats, threatening biodiversity and endangered species even further.

This has especially been the case with Israel’s ongoing military action in Palestine, which human rights organisations, legal experts and scholars have increasingly come together in decrying as a genocide, including through this report by Amnesty International B’Tselem – an Israeli Human Rights NGO. Backed by the UK, US, and other countries of the global north who have an interest in the power and monetary opportunities found across Gaza and the West Bank (including that through using Israel to gain a foothold in the Middle East, these countries would have better access to a region well-known for its abundance of fossil fuels), Israel continues to kill and starve a civilian population. Not only is this a massive breach of international law and a war crime, but it is also directly linked to ongoing environmental destruction and the climate crisis. As Gillian wrote so aptly in her piece for BBC Wildlife Magazine: “War is the single most destructive human activity... a 2024 study conducted by the Queen Mary University in London estimates that between 156,000 and 200,000 buildings including civilian homes, hospitals and schools have been damaged or destroyed, and 800,000 tonnes of the bombed-out debris across Gaza may be contaminated by asbestos. The reconstruction effort is likely to result in up to 60 million tons of CO2 emissions, the equivalent to the annual emissions of more than 135 countries.”

The genocide in Palestine (as well as those being undertaken elsewhere such as in Sudan and Congo) and other social issues need to be spoken about by the nature sector. Without critically examining the wider picture of why and how species are going extinct, and the root causes that are driving widespread habitat and environmental destruction, the nature sector will forever be scrambling to apply bandages to bullet wounds. Until we, as a sector, understand the underlying hierarchies and systems that intertwine all of our crises – including those of capitalism, colonisation, and imperialism – we will never stop climate and ecological collapse, nor stop species from declining. Until all peoples are free from oppression, the wildlife and ecosystems of the world will also not be free from oppression.

But this might be a difficult ask of the British nature sector. After all, the sector is already struggling just to keep on top of conserving British species, with very little funding, resources, and increasingly regressive legislation, all whilst navigating a stricter encroachment from the British government on our general rights to free speech and protest. In addition, charities in the UK are held to the government’s ‘The Charity Commission’, which means they cannot speak out on issues that aren’t directly related to them for fear of having their charitable status revoked. With organisations and individuals aggressively targeting anyone they deem to be ‘anti-zionist’ – sometimes with threats of legal action – there seems to be a growing tendency for ‘anti-genocide’ to be conflated with being ‘anti-semitic’. In addition, the UK’s charitable nature sector has tight budgets (usually linked to a membership base that may not be supportive of an organisation speaking out on something that is not their specific remit), meaning they could risk both their charitable status and a key source of their income by speaking out for Palestine or other social issues.

Yet there are growing numbers of people within the nature sector who believe that we can never have environmental justice, and a world abundant in the species we all care about, without social justice. Everything is connected; whilst people and planet suffer as a result of ongoing genocides and conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, Congo, and elsewhere, nature – and thus wild mammals, birds, trees, amphibians, bees or whichever other species are the focus of choice – will never have a secure future.