Thursdays and Fridays are the days of the week that I have to solely focus on making money for our organisation, the rest of the week I split time between making money and spending it on our ecological projects/research. Most of our paid work at Little Oak is pretty routine stuff involving maintenance and basically hard and repetitive work and most of the exciting work is in our projects, although we do transfer products from our research and project arm to our commercial arm too.
However even with the routine work we regularly find interesting things growing in people's gardens and are always exploring opportunities to encourage more biodiversity focused management of garden and urban green spaces. We've recently started an Irecord account for one of our show gardens on the Bedzed eco-village, Gillian's Garden, and in the past worked on a project with Sutton Council called Biodiversity gardens where we did biobltiz's in gardens, developed management plans, recording systems and carried out the conservation enhancements.
However this eco-management approach to gardens is a difficult thing to get customers to buy into and the Biodiversity Gardens project was subsidised through funding and in partnership with the council (before we fell out!). With a bit of encouragement and seeding money the take up for the project was encouraging. When we've applied for funding in recent years to continue the project, the main funding agent in our area is Viridor who have so far rejected three applications that we have made- presumably as part of their oppressive and exploitative agenda for the local area.
As always and ever the solutions to the biodiversity crisis is very simple but the decline is systematically, methodically and deliberately being created by corporations like Viridor and in rural areas is being driven by supermarkets and agro-chemical business.
Nonetheless there is a growing number of people who are getting into people power conservation and many more people are now wildlife gardening and making space for nature. Hopefully as things grow we can overthrow the Ecocidal Tyrants that currently control our natural systems. Our best way of doing that is through a combination of displacing them with affordable consumer choices, strong marketing and educational campaigns, forming partnerships and for the stubborn ones- direct action to attempt to stop their destruction. Hopefully in a more ecologically enlightened future there will be legal frameworks that dictate more rights for nature so that's why we are also involved in policy and green politics as our business can only thrive in a progressive political environment. It's certainly not easy but we are certainly making steady progress. With privatisation running a mock and funding streams being cut for traditionally NGO fronted conservation, the role of self funding private organisations like ourselves is presumably going to grow in the future.
Our work with block management companies involves typically sites like this one. There is plenty of scope to set up bird feeding stations, bird and bat boxes, to plant bee and pollinator corridors, wildflower strips and to plant shrubs and trees which provide habitat. Despite our best efforts most sites are managed in an ecological oppressed way and generally the demand is to concentrate on health and safety and basic maintenance. However a site such as this is pretty well maintained and not every client or customer is going to want to create a miracle.
An interesting garden this week was this steep chalk slope in Warlingham. The neighbours had Common Spotted Orchids growing in their lawn and were attempting to develop the slope into chalk grassland.
Gillian's Garden- recently set up a new irecord account for this garden to set up an ongoing recording system
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