Green Capital 2015: Man on a wildlife mission

Wildlife expert and award-winning broadcaster Simon King is a man on a mission to get us closer to nature.

He is evangelical about the benefits of being outside and getting in touch with the natural world. As a Green Capital 2015 ambassador he wants to inspire the rest of us to appreciate nature and why they should care about ‘going green’.

“Without some kind of embracing of green initiatives quite frankly we are all stuffed,” he says with forthright bluntness. “We are animals along with the rest of them and we depend on the same things as everything else.”

However, King is well aware that “some people are almost viscerally adverse to anything with the word green”.

“What I am very keen to promote that what green means is life. Everything about a green initiative is a life-support system – the air we breathe, the food we eat the food we eat is only there because of the green space, green initiatives and green environment.”

But where do you start to re-educate people about the natural world?

King has set up his own charity to help re-engage people with the natural world using the most accessible resource today – technology.

A number of spy cameras trained on a wilderness area in Somerset which beam the natural world onto our computer screens 24/7. It is an initiative which he believes will help spark a connection with wildlife: “Kids are innately interested in nature, but many people in inner city areas don’t feel that they have access to quality green space or are not aware that it’s there and worse still are afraid of it.”

He hopes that by the end of the year Bristol will have a similar network of cameras opening up the secret world of the city’s wildlife to a whole new audience.

“We have become detached from nature,” he says. “It’s really only a relatively recent phenomenon over two or three generations when this great chasm has occurred and I am very keen that through 2015 that we can focus on this.”

King believes that we don’t always need to go to great lengths to reconnect with nature again: “Bristol is so well off – it can be better but it has a lot of green space and resources. Just take your lunch break outside, rub shoulders with our natural neighbours, go out and experience it.”

Ultimately this education about the great outdoors is what King believes will make the difference during Green Capital 2015: “The more that you realise that nature is an interwoven web, that everything depends on everything else and we are very much the part of that web, the more you are going to respect it and the less you are going to be throwing your McDonald packets out of the car window.

“How can anyone be expected to care for something if they don’t know about it? Why would you? If you are ignorant of it why would you care?”
www.simonkingwildlife.com