At around this time, my interest in environmental management was triggered by an invitation from the Secretary of State for Wales to be a founder member of the Countryside Council for Wales. This led to the chairmanship of the UK Conservation Management System Consortium a’ not for profit’ UK organisation which develops and supports software to help nature site managers to produce long term adaptive management plans. I have been re-elected each year since 1958.
It was in my early days in Cardiff that I began to develop multidisciplinary frameworks to promote nature conservation curricula for learning the core skills and competencies to care for a planet in crisis. In my most optimistic moments I think that this is the best we academics can do. In other words it is no use drumming up people and tell them how to act, but rather to teach them to long for the immensity of the human journey with planet Earth and so build a personal body of knowledge to set out on the quest. As I have already said, I can trace this move towards environmentalism to Robin Hood’s Bay, which is now virtually stripped of its rich intertidal fauna that was the delight of Fred Seagrove. In 1967 in the middle of Amazonia, four thousand kilometres from the sea, it was clear that even then the rainforest was being relentlessly raped for its gold and timber.
The late 1960s marked there was a general emergence of environmental awareness. As head of the department I encouraged a small group of postgraduates to publish the Welsh Environment Journal. WEJ was a mixture of reviews, interviews and reportage, which highlighted Welsh examples of global environmental issues. It circulated throughout Wales and several copies turned up in the parliamentary library at Westminster, where they prompted a flow of congratulations from MPs who found the contents informed political debate. WEJ opened up student discussions about the limitations of narrow subject teaching in a world that was increasingly dominated by cross-subject environmental problems with political implications. During one of my field courses on the Welsh nature reserve of Skomer Island this grass roots student interest in curriculum reform emerged as a proposal for a new multi subject degree. Surprisingly, the idea was enthusiastically taken up by academic staff in all the pure and applied science faculties of the University. It became the philosophical thread for an honours course in ‘Environmental Studies’. This course integrated the inputs from eleven departments, from archaeology, through metallurgy, to zoology. It ran successfully, attracting some of the most able students until the university merged with a neighbouring institution in the late 1980s, when the new policy was to abolish all cross-discipline teaching.