Mark Avery's Reflections: confessions of a career 'conservationist'
RSPB veteran discusses direct action, threatening the government and his fondness for authoritarianism while plugging latest fodder for the bargain bin
In a year or so, Mark Avery's latest work Reflections will sit alongside Prince Harry's Spare and other unsold classics emblazoned with yellow stickers advertising not-to-be-missed discounts, in piles at the front of book shops. It’s a temporary staging area before they’re pulped or taken round the back of the building with a load of other unsellable masterpieces and sprayed with lighter fluid.
I haven't read Reflections and I don't plan to for good reason. I was among 100 or so suckers squeezed into a hard-to-find bowls club with no sound system somewhere in Northamptonshire and subject to an hour-and-a-half lecture by the author. I’ve done my time and can vouch the experience left my friend Gary Baxter truly shaken.
“I’m going to talk to you mostly about the ideas that are in the book,” Avery began, “You can get more of that if you bought the book… It’ll only cost you £18*, which is cheaper than you could get it on Amazon this morning.“
According to Avery, during his 25 years at RSPB, he was instrumental in diverting the charity away from just bird conservation to embarking on a political crusade against the countryside, mainly by wrongly blaming it for climate change.
“I will take some credit in getting the RSPB into climate change a long time ago,“ he boasted. “There was a time when I was told that… climate change wasn't for a nature conservation organisation and… nothing to do with us, which I thought at the time was wrong and in retrospect it looked bonkers, but that was what some people thought back then [when] the RSPB was involved in things like owning and managing nature reserves and species recovery projects.“
When I began working at Fieldsports Channel in 2020, I was disappointed to see how wrapped up in ludicrous climate policies the shooting community, farmers and gamekeepers were - bans on muirburn because of CO2, cuts in livestock to reduce methane - pointless exercises that have no effect on Earth’s temperature.
I wasn’t living in the UK when these crazy green policies were debated so don’t know how it happened, but if only the countryside hadn’t given in to them, it wouldn’t have the Achilles heel it has today. Thanks to people like Avery, wildlife charities - led by the RSPB - are now constantly on the attack, using unproven theories about a crisis that doesn’t exist to destroy country pursuits, traditions, farms, businesses and livelihoods.
Avery effectively sowed the seeds for subsequent baseless accusations that farmers and rural communities are destroying biodiversity and spreading racism.
“Rewilding is quite a sexy subject,” he insisted, referring to the new definition of neglect where you can claim taxpayer-funded subsidies for doing nothing. “I think we should do a lot more rewilding, but we should mostly do it in the uplands where food production is pretty unpopular. You might see lots of sheep running around in the Yorkshire Dales, but they're not feeding very many people. Some of them are actually knackering the landscape too.”
A true green advocate, Avery even gets his power from Wild Justice partner Chris Packham’s friend Dale Vince, a multimillionaire who made much of his wealth from government green subsidies after putting up nature-killing wind turbines.
“Buy green electricity,” he urges the people in the room. “I get mine from Dale Vince’s Ecotricity. He's got a bonkers scheme for green gas, which is just complete cobblers, but the idea that I'm paying slightly more for my electricity and that is going to set up wind turbines is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned. I can afford it.”
Avery said that while working at the RSPB, he’d learnt techniques to deal with ministers and the government to try to get them to do what the charity wanted.
“The NGO line is, well, the government isn't doing enough and what it is doing, it should’ve started years ago. And the good thing about that is that it's almost always true. You can always start with that on almost any issue.
“When I used to go and talk to politicians as RSPB’s director of conservation, I felt like I had a million [of the charity’s members] walking through the door behind me and all agreed with everything I said. But I was speaking on their behalf and on nature's behalf and the person I was talking to would know that the RSPB had more members than the political party for which they were an MP, whichever party it was. In fact, at the time RSPB had more members than all the political parties in the UK put together. So that was quite easy.
“I did once threaten a government minister. He was getting a bit uppity. He happened to be a Lib Dem and I quite liked him. He was a bit up himself. He said, ‘Well you, mostly agree with our policies. What you ought to do is to give us all your members' email addresses so we can contact them.’ I said, ‘Well, I don't think we can do that. Doesn't work like that. But we could do something else. We'll certainly contact them and tell them whether we agree with your policies. Would you like us to do that? Because we're not getting very far in this meeting about what we think you ought to do on this subject.’ He looked a bit shocked.”
Avery pointed out several times that he’s left wing and votes Labour because “we should tell people what they're allowed to do”. This, of course, starts with children.
“[Wildlife charities] all do things for kids. I’m quite keen on kids, but if we’ve got a biodiversity crisis, investing in people who aren't going to have much impact on the world for the next 30 years is a slightly peculiar thing to do. I mean… investing in a lot of stuff for children and children's education is a long-term solution to a very immediate problem, which isn't necessarily what you do in most circumstances.”
However, as if on cue, a member of the audience exposed himself as a lifelong victim of climate propaganda during the Q&A after Avery’s talk. He seemed perfectly happy denying himself the good things in life, such as meat, to save the planet from what he thinks is certain doom. Listening to him declare decades-long dedication to the cause shows how successfully the left and organisations like the RSPB have brainwashed and indoctrinated ordinary people into believing complete nonsense. Mind controllers working for enemy governments would be in awe if they listened to him pledge “direct action“ (usually crimes or terrorism) to get everyone to do what he’s doing.
“I found out about the climate crisis in 1990. I went vegan straight away. The last time I flew in a plane was 1994. I decided about 15 years ago, if I can't cycle there, I won't work there. My carbon footprint is massively small. So I've done everything I possibly can, but then I realised quite a while ago, that's not enough. So I need to take direct action… My grandson says, ‘Granddad, when is it gonna happen when everybody else does what you do? When everybody else says enough’s enough?’ The climate science is absolutely and utterly irrefutable. The end of humanity is really, really on the horizon. When are people going to get it? When are people going to understand that and be motivated or activated to take action? So Mark, earlier you said that you are not there yet [to take direct action]. So how bad has it got to get for everyone in this room to say, enough's enough. We need to take direct action now.”
To his credit, Avery diffused the loose cannon, who didn’t explain direct action, although it can involve theft, vandalism, violence, threats and intimidation. At the same time, Avery didn’t dismiss it as dangerous and extremist.
“It depends what you mean by direct action. Direct action is not necessarily the way that you persuade everybody in this room not to fly, not to drive their car… to become vegan, not to eat meat,” he responded. “It's quite difficult to change people's views... You can do it through regulation. You can persuade the system to change how things are. So when you have a government that issues more licences to take oil and gas out in the North Sea, the system clearly isn't doing the types of things it should be. We ought to have more solar, more wind power.”
