Guest election blog – Green Party by Rosie Pearson

I am a planning and environmental campaigner, co-founder of the Community Planning Alliance, founder of Essex Suffolk Norfolk Pylons action group, co-founder of the North Essex Farm Cluster and columnist with The Telegraph.

I do not have any strong party allegiances.  I’m interested in policies, not politics.

This is my review of, and my thoughts about, the environmental implications of the Green Party’s approach to nature as set out in their election manifesto.  Here are my highlights and lowlights.

Things I like:

• Thank goodness that someone wants to ‘bring nature back to life’, and how refreshing to see acknowledgement that we are part of nature and that a thriving environment is essential to support human life.  
• This is possibly the standout policy in all the manifestos I have reviewed – the one to introduce a Rights of Nature Act.   Without a legal framework that protects nature, we have little hope of reversing the seemingly irrevocable species declines we are seeing.  Nature must have an inalienable right to flourish.  Perhaps the Costa Rican model might be a good one to emulate.  In 1998, the Costa Rican government implemented the Biodiversity Act. It protects endangered species and biodiversity, and gives the state the means to enforce sustainable practices.
• A pledge to end the scandal of sewage pouring into our rivers and seas by taking the water companies back into public ownership.  Public ownership is possibly the only way to solve this terrible modern scandal.  The current model is failing terribly.   However, increased funding and enforcement would be vital.
• The passing of a Clean Air (Human Rights) Act, giving everyone the right to breathe clean air has the potential to revolutionise the way we plan for housing and infrastructure.  It could, at long last, shift the model away from car-led, road-based development to walkable, compact developments with public transport and cycle paths.   The public health benefits would be pretty spectacular. 

Things I don’t like:

• A new English Right to Roam Act.  This conflicts with nature’s need for an undisturbed home and with the Green Party’s acknowledgement that nature is having a really tough time in the UK.   We should indeed ensure access to green space for all.   But we should not unleash humans (and their dogs) into the countryside where they will unwittingly trample and terrify wildlife, leave litter and light fires. The Right to Roam in Scotland has not come without problems, and England is much more densely populated. For access to green space we already have 140,000km of Public Rights of Way, 197,000 km of country lanes and hundreds of nature reserves and other areas of public access, such as National Trust parkland.   Let’s improve all of above and add more.
• Though I am nitpicking, there is an absence of ‘green’ economic models.  There is no reference, for example, to the potential of Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics, a model that balances essential human needs and planetary boundaries, or Dasgupta’s recognition that nature should be embedded into economic decision-making.  Both approaches argue that we need to balance economic growth with nature. These are models Green Party could champion.

Overall assessment:

The Green Party manifesto has nature at its heart – every policy is delightfully tinted with green.     

Would I vote for these environmental policies?

From nature’s perspective, a right to roam fills me with dread. However, the proposed Rights of Nature and Clean Air acts cancel out this policy and would bring about groundbreaking changes, so yes, I would.

This is one of a series of opinion pieces on the political parties’ 2024 general election manifestos. They were commissioned by Wild Justice several months ago by approaching a wide variety of conservationists and environmentalists long before the date of the general election was known. Some people who originally agreed to write pieces found the date and short timescale impossible and had to back out. We did not know what they would write and their only brief was to pick one or two political parties’ election manifestos and tell us what they liked and didn’t like about their environmental policies. We didn’t tell people what to write and we haven’t edited what they wrote (except to squeeze things into a common format, to correct minor grammatical and spelling errors and typos). The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Wild Justice.

If you think you could produce a review of one of the 2024 general election manifestos then we would need to receive it as soon as possible, but in any case before 26 June, in a similar format to that above, as a word file and with a .jpg or .png image of yourself, the author. Send any potential texts to admin@wildjustice.org.uk and we will look at them. We’ll let you know if we want to publish your piece and we may be able to pay you a small amount for it.