The full transcript of my talk at the Response for Nature launch on 13 October 2015.

On the main stage, we’ve already heard from Steve about the links between the past and future. And from Josie about why protecting nature is crucial for young people and future generations. I hope that I’m going to dovetail those two threads in the next few minutes.

I’ve loved wildlife since I was a lot younger, and at least a little bit shorter than I am today. Aged seven, I learned about the Amazon rainforest at primary school. When I got home that evening I was intrigued and my parents helped me to write letters to Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF.

Several weeks later I remember post dropping through the letterbox for me! When you’re six or seven this is such an unusual event, and you’re perpetually jealous of adults who get post every day (until you grow up and realise it’s mostly bills).

The leaflets and posters I was sent contained stories about deforestation, pollution and overfishing. And that made me angry, really angry. And it made me want to do something about it. That fire is still burning somewhere in my heart.

But it’s only recently that I’ve started delving even farther back in time. Students of the history of conservation will know more about what I’m going to say today than I do.

In decades and centuries past, conservationists, ecologists, writers and campaigners helped to build eulogies, knowledge and protection for and about the nature we enjoy today.

Aldo Leopold, in one of the most important conservation books ever written, A Sand County Almanac, describes sawing down an oak tree. Each ring they cut through takes them farther back in time, and he imagines all the events that have happened during the tree’s life, right back to the family that planted it so as its wood could one day keep him warm in the depths of winter. He was a writer acutely aware of the history he relied on.

People like these put in place the institutions and infrastructure, literal and metaphorical, that we as naturalists rely on today. They did this driven by passion, but also with future generations, to be born after their lives, in mind.

In a sense, we owe a debt to them, one that we can repay by performing similar kindnesses and gifts for future generations. That debt is made all the more acute by the terrible declines in nature around the world and in England, as set out by the State of Nature report two years ago.

I believe that one of the best ways we can repay that debt is by protecting nature for young people and future generations. This is one of the most morally unimpeachable arguments that can be made.

I help to run A Focus on Nature, the UK’s youth nature network. We’re run by and for young people. Back in 2013, when the State of Nature report was published, I wrote that we also needed a Vision for Nature report, looking ahead and setting out where young people wanted the natural world to be by 2050 and how we want to get there.

Over the past year or so we’ve used interviews, focus groups, surveys and social media to gather the views of over 200 young people and set out our vision. We’ve used not only policy recommendations and analysis but also art, photography and creative writing to depict our vision, because we know that it’s as important to move people’s hearts as it is to turn their heads.

We’ll be publishing our final report in just a few weeks’ time.

I believe that a growing UK youth conservation movement, made up of A Focus on Nature, The Wild Network, Bristol and Sheffield Nature Networks, Action for Conservation and many more, can achieve great things in years to come.

I hope and believe that our Vision for Nature report and the Response for Nature report will sit comfortably clasped in the hand of a politician or business leader. Together, these documents set out a clear call from the established conservation movement and from the growing youth conservation movement in the UK. Our recommendations and ideas might not be identical. As young people we’ve deliberately played to our strengths and tried to be radical and idealistic, because we believe that if we dream up our ideal future, then the reality might come close to it.

We’ve called for no new fossil fuel infrastructure in the UK, free public transport to allow easy access to nature reserves, an end to driven shooting, a nature day every year across the UK and in our Parliaments, and for the full reintroduction of apex species like lynx and beaver.

Our reports might not contain the same recommendations or policies. But they do utterly agree on the fact that Governments need to seize this opportunity to protect and restore nature for the sake of wildlife as well as for that of future generations. As young people, the alternative, the ongoing decline of our natural world in front of our eyes, is not acceptable. We hope that those in power will help us, or stand aside and let us do what we can.

By making nature bigger and better connected, by designating more land for it, by taking radical action to tackle climate change, and perhaps by being daring about what creatures we can imagine in our countryside, we can help to make sure that my children grow up in a world where our shifting baseline syndrome refers to increases in wildlife, that they can’t possibly believe the declines in nature previous generations oversaw, where they’re more likely to hear a turtle dove or see a beaver or more likely just explore the natural world near their home than their parents were.