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Ethical
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Salvation army

Stump up for an acre
of rainforest,track polar bears,or breakfast for Britain... Lucy Siegle
reveals how to help save the planet in your spare time

Sunday September 25,
2005
The Observer

One
way to knock 10 years off without getting a layered haircut (standard
reality television advice) is to keep up to date on the subject of
endangered species. In the near future, nothing will date you more than
asking for cod in a chip shop or talking about river otters - fast
approaching extinction - not even quoting lines from Top Gun or
reminiscing about the day Take That split. Cultural fashions move
notoriously fast, but these days biodiversity moves even faster.

Given that
10-30 per cent of all species are now under serious threat of extinction,
according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, conservation has never
been so critical. With that in mind I recently spent two Saturday
afternoons at my local park conservation scheme. Mostly my tasks involved
fishing crisp bags out of the boating lake where the herons nest - not
glamorous, but conservation is all about getting your hands dirty. Just
ask True, the Trust for Urban Ecology (http://www.urbanecology.org.uk/),
which runs programmes at urban ecological parks, or the UK's biggest
practical conservation organisation, the BTCV (http://www.btcv.org.uk/).

Inevitably there will be people who yearn for a more epic experience.
They should try Earthwatch (http://www.earthwatch.org/), a US
organisation with a UK arm, which sends paying volunteer environmentalists
to help scientists on conservation expeditions. This is the stuff of
heroic conservation - assessing marine mammals in Brazil, caring for
chimpanzees, observing cheetahs - but it shouldn't be confused with an
eco-holiday. 'The smaller and softer your suitcase, the greater chance it
has of getting on the plane,' advises the booking form for a 'polar bears
in Manitoba' expedition.

For the cagoule-phobic there's armchair conservation. Join Friends of
the Earth's (http://www.foe.co.uk/)
campaign for sustainable palm oil. A stealth ingredient in one 10th of all
goods we buy in supermarkets, palm oil is derived from Indonesian
plantations, encouraging the loss of habitats for the last remaining
Orangutans and Sumatran tigers. Lately, you can also eat your way to
conservation. Jordans Cereals are now grown on 'conservation assured' UK
farms, with lots of hedgerows but no chemicals.

Cheque-book conservation is always popular. For £25 you can buy an acre
of rainforest or Patagonian Steppe to be managed by the World Land Trust
(http://www.worldlandtrust.org/).
This helps to counteract a perennial problem - 'charismatic' beasts such
as snow leopards, pandas, great apes and elephants clean up in terms of
money and attention, leaving the less photogenic species out in the cold.

Naturally, it's not their fault; it's ours, for thinking species loss
is just about protecting our favourite mammals. In fact, all accelerated
loss of flora and fauna is a loss of life-sustaining diversity and food
and medicine. All good reasons to support the Millennium Seedbank project
at Kew Gardens, which aims to collect and conserve 24,000 seeds by 2010,
and has already collected nearly all the seeds for the UK's flowering
plants. It makes the threat of extinction a little less final.

[email-masked]

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