Raising my voice for a Wilder Future

Here’s the first in our series of guest blogs about the Wilder Future campaign by Jessica McMaster.

Jessica is one of  Tomorrows Natural Leaders, a five-year project led by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust which is training young leaders, upskilling and empowering them to inspire their peers and communities to take action on local environmental projects and campaigns across Yorkshire.

Jessica lives in Sheffield and supported on our Wilder Future campaign by writing to her MP, Jared O’Mara. Here’s Jessica’s story on why it’s important to her, how it all happened, plus some helpful advice on how you can take action too.

Nature needs protecting

[lead]As far back as I can remember, wildlife has always played a strong, positive role in my life, from watching puffins on boat trips off the coast of Britain, to sitting silently parked in our car right in the middle of a city at night as a badger trotted by outside.[/lead]

I grew up on our family walks in the countryside, and learnt so much about our precious natural world from exploring its wild places and creatures here in the UK.

Sadly, I can’t say that I’ve seen more than one wild hedgehog in my whole life, and I’ve never seen the once widespread golden eagle at all, and nor can many people in Britain anymore. British wildlife is in decline, and stronger environmental legislation is needed to restore and protect our beautiful green spaces and wildlife before they are gone forever.

This is why I decided to do my bit for the Wilder Future campaign. With Brexit drawing ever closer, Britain is facing its biggest shake-up of environmental laws ever. The Government was preparing to draw up a new Environment Bill for post-Brexit UK, and this was the perfect opportunity for me to share my concerns and demand a Wilder Future for Britain.

To make my voice heard, I knew I would have to write to my local MP and arrange a meeting if I could. I knew I would be nervous about speaking to a politician, but I was far more nervous about the future of our planet, so that won out in the end!

Writing a letter

The first thing I needed to do was to write a letter to my local MP for Sheffield Hallam, Jared O’Mara. I used the form on The Wildlife Trusts website as a template for my letter. I introduced myself and why nature matters to me, and explained the problem facing native UK wildlife. I wrote about the Environmental Bill, and the key ‘three asks’ of the Wilder Future campaign – all information I got from reading through the information on the campaign page. Finally, I asked to arrange a meeting to speak with him further about these issues. I sent the email and waited for a reply.

And heard back from him the next day! An appointment was booked for the next Friday – time to start preparing!

Preparing for a meeting

The meeting was only to last 10 minutes, so I knew I needed to be ready to speak about three things: 1) why nature is so important to protect for me, for his constituents in Sheffield, and for Britain, 2) what the three asks are for a stronger Environment Bill, and 3) what I needed my MP to do, which was to support the Environment Bill and write to the Government about improving environmental protection. So, I set myself an evening to prepare for the meeting and got started.

I knew I needed to appeal to my MP specifically to capture his interest, so I went on TheyWorkForYou.com to look up Jared O’Mara’s political interests and voting history. I found out that Jared had voted positively on many environmental issues, but cared most about supporting people with physical and mental conditions.

So, I worked this to my advantage: green spaces have been shown to reduce stress and have a positive effect on mental wellbeing. I also found out some handy facts about how air and water pollution have been shown to lead to many disorders such as asthma and heart disea