This is a blog about hope, although you have to wade through a bit of cocktail-napkin analysis to get there.

The election, in particular an election where we vote to return a party that, in Government, hasn’t had a great record on the environment, can be cause for some soul-searching (I’m writing elsewhere about the potential implications of a Conservative government for nature might be, and what the top pundits think).

This morning the RSPB’s Chief Executive Mike Clarke has written that he believes more people care about nature – indicated in the RSPB’s highest ever membership numbers. I agree with Mike that we’re too fast to dismiss people’s environmental concern. I’d be interested to know though whether the RSPB factor into the pickup in their membership numbers the limited economic recovery of the past 18 months or so.

In A Focus on Nature’s Vision for Nature blog series I’ve been heartened to hear many young people saying that we need to make nature something everyone cares about, not just a small clique within society. Absolutely!

Nature is something everyone relies on, can enjoy and should have a right to. Something I haven’t heard enough of for my liking (across the whole conservation sector) is how we engage those who have least access to nature – for all sorts of reasons: those with disabilities, black and ethnic minorities, those of lower socio-economic status and the majority of people in urban areas. And how do we make this access to nature benefit the most deprived in our society who, evidence shows, could benefit from it in economic, community security and health terms? How do we not only grow concern about nature but also make that concern more diverse, fast? Right now we’re representing a very white, mostly male, middle class section of society.

There’s also often a tendency to believe that people don’t care about nature because they’re too concerned about the X Factor or football. And there’s a belief that we need to reach out to them through these kinds of channels, and start where people are. I’ve written about this in the past.

But believing that people can’t be concerned about the results of the football, or the X Factor, or hold in their head and their heart a concern about their weekly budget and the state of our countryside writes off a huge audience of people we could be appealing to and also feels to me slightly (dangerously) sneering.

The X Factor is in fact the go-to example of an environmental hinterland where those whose immersion in popular culture is so great that the environmental sector may as well write them off or only ever hope to appeal to them through a crude kind of nature face-off TV show. Where is the acceptable cultural line and who gets to draw it? If I listen to Radio 1 once a month am I in or out? Is three times a month too much?

Now, let me say something daring, that perhaps betrays my personal political leanings. I believe that left-wing politics (not necessarily represented by any political party in the UK right now) that tends to be more in favour of regulating the private sector and believes in the sanctity of public institutions and public goods is more likely to be good for the environment. Our natural world, like our climate, is a collective good that we all share a responsibility for and a right to.

A politics that promotes a more individualistic, private property-based, that prioritises wealth creation, deregulated society and economy is, I reckon, broadly more likely to result in the over-consumption, shrinking government departments, private industry stranglehold on politics and policy-making and large private land ownership of our countryside that are behind a lot of the environmental challenges we face.

That’s not to say that fiscal tools such as ecosystem services don’t have a role to play. But on the whole, I am worried that as European politics shifts further to the right this will be worse for nature.

The current challenge to our most important European nature laws, threatening to do away with or weaken them, spurred by a desire to check whether they hinder economic progress, is a great example.

Now, all that said, I know that money is an important concern for families. In fact, the British Social Attitudes survey from this year shows that it’s the number one concern. And I’m not saying we’re ever going to debunk people’s concerns about money. However, we might be able to make the idea that happiness and wealth are only loosely linked more mainstream, and to better demonstrate that an economy without a sound environment is a destructive paradox.

A huge swathe of research shows that the same person who thinks that status and wealth are important is also perfectly capable of holding the values of caring about the natural world for its own sake (as well as about their community and about people’s wellbeing on the far side of the world), as long as those values are properly stimulated and reinforced. Believing that people’s values are static and fixed is one of the worst mistakes we can fall into.

In fact, the latest British Social Attitudes Survey shows that people’s belief about the percentage of our country that’s far right wing or left wing differs quite a lot from the percentage that actually are right wing. Perhaps a secret belief that everyone else is right wing leads some people to think they’re voting with a majority that’s no more than a mirage.

Two quotations from an article summarising the survey illustrate this:

‘Overall, Britons are marginally more likely to describe their personal political stance as a “left of centre” (36%) than “right of centre” (33%).’

‘While Britons are more likely to define themselves as “left of centre”, there is a perception that the political views of the population as a whole are more likely to be “right of centre”’

95% of Britons believe that it’s important that free healthcare that’s available for all remain – one of the most important elements of our social welfare system, and a crucial public institution, matters to 95% of us. It is also our most trusted institution, even if the media might make us believe we’re all fed up of its failings.

We’re honest too – upon finding a wallet in the street only one third of us would keep the money for ourselves.

Perhaps my favourite statistic: 30% of Britons are worried about the environment.

One third of us!

How many of these people are part of a conservation organisation (financially or otherwise)? Not many of them.

It’s the same percentage as those who list UK membership of the EU, education and house prices as a concern. But compare the media coverage of these issues. I know which one I feel gets least coverage.

And the two thirds who didn’t list it as a personal concern? I would hazard a guess that this might be more to do with lack of information than with them not caring about the planet or proactively wanting to see it go to pot.

So, what’s going on here.

Perhaps the media, quick to make it look like our politics is evenly balanced or even more right of centre, and like our NHS is failing, is partly at fault here? And perhaps we need to examine our own personal biases too.

So, the one myth we need to bust, the one lesson to learn?

Far more people care more about the environment than we probably think. The media and our secret beliefs may make us think otherwise, but we absolutely shouldn’t let these prejudices guide our thinking in the wrong direction or dishearten us over the next five years. The situation is nowhere near as bleak in reality as our normal sources of information would have us believe.

Who gives a flying… about nature? Lots of people, and many more than we currently reach out to.