01/03/2026
Yesterday Cambridgeshire County Council announced its four year project “Nature Recovery – From the Ground Up”. An admirable idea. A pity that so much recent effort has involved razing nature to the ground first, not least in our own County Wildlife Sites and Priority Habitats.
The scheme itself is a good one. Helping communities draw up their own Nature Recovery Plans is exactly what should be happening, and the council staff actually out in the field, the ones in muddy boots rather than behind a press release, deserve real credit.
What jars is the timing. While this is launched, our community and others like it are already out in all weathers doing the slow work recovery really means. Planting trees, watering them, pruning them, protecting habitats, teaching the next custodians, and respecting the work of those who came before. Hours upon hours, year after year. Volunteering their time. (It will surprise no one who follows this page, that while we await Heidi Alexander MP’s decision, Coton and its orchard does not feature in Phase 1).
So yes, we welcome the project. We genuinely do. But it is hard not to notice the contradiction when the same authority that speaks about recovery is prepared, when convenient, to bulldoze the very habitats volunteers have spent years protecting.
Nature recovery, from the ground up, works best when you do not keep knocking the ground out from under it.
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