When the saintly Tony Blair said "Although now is not the time for sound-bites, I can feel the hand of history on my shoulder ..." (or somesuch), I fear that I must have cringed and groaned, probably in equal measure. And maybe there was a bit of envy in there somewhere as I've never been much good at soundbites (or had a good scriptwriter for that matter). Anyway, academics tend to prefer mouthfulls rather than bite-size chunks of ideas, and the written word to the spoken one.
So it came as a bit of a surprise to find that I had uttered such a bite which had been captured in the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust's annual report to members. Earlier in the year I was filmed (as a Trustee) at at Langford Lakes, one of the Trust's education centres / nature reserves. It was an unscripted experience, and I recall there were numerous takes owing to our being interrupted by a rumbling train, over-flying ducks, the wrong kind of shadows, and the chattering of passing walkers, and I have no memory of the questions or answers. But apparently, I said this:
Humans can only live on this planet because of the goods and services that the natural world provides. At heart, this is what environmental education is trying to teach us.
I think myself rather too self-satisfied by this.
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