Blue Hearts

11th November 2020

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Blue Heart Campaign

If you have watched David Attenborough’s recent documentary, “A Life On Our Planet”, you will have been moved as you witnessed humanity’s devastating impact on the planet. The programme depicts the way in which Mankind has devoured natural resources for its own purposes, to the detriment of all other living creatures, and ultimately to the detriment of our own species – humankind. We have lived in a way that is simply not sustainable for too many years. The effects of this over-consumption are made chillingly clear in the programme.

Despite this devastation, however, Attenborough ends the programme with a message of hope. It is not too late for us to act in order to reverse the destruction we have caused. Several of us will have witnessed the return of wildlife to our gardens and local green spaces during lockdown, when we paused in our activities and stopped using our cars so frequently. Quickly, nature filled the spaces we had left. Birds and animals become emboldened by the quiet of a vehicle-free environment and visited us in our gardens. Plants were left to grow and rapidly became new habitats for those creatures. Humans were rewarded with a cleaner, healthier planet and emerged with a new awareness and respect for their local area.

However, with national lockdown over, it is all too easy to return to our old ways and to push nature out again as we pursue our daily tasks. As part of the work the college is doing to act on the commitments made in the Green Charter that was signed by several Cornish schools, we intend to leave areas of the College grounds for rewilding as part of the Blue Campaign. This is a programme that was started in 2014 as a response to a report on the State of Nature that highlighted the dramatic decline in biodiversity that year. It has since partnered with Eco-Schools England and Keep Britain Tidy. The campaign encourages and promotes the rewilding of areas that are over-managed, often unnecessarily and always to the detriment of nature. Leaving areas of gardens, road verges, school grounds and community green spaces to become more wild, creates habitats for many different species, encouraging biodiversity and creating a much richer, more enjoyable landscape. Too often, parks, gardens, roadsides and school grounds are cut back for short grass, creating sterile landscapes that are not even always attractive to look at. A hedge teeming with butterflies, birds, insects and a wide variety of plant species is far more enjoyable than a repetitive expanse of the same kind of plant (usually short grass) with no life in it.

Some of the students in the Construction faculty have created blue hearts using recycled materials and we have put these around the college in areas that we intend to leave alone to evolve naturally to encourage wildlife back in to the college grounds. If you see them around the college, perhaps take a moment to enjoy them and to see what species return as time passes.

Perhaps you could try re-wilding an area of your garden, if you have one, and watch nature create a beautiful space for you to enjoy.

More information can be found using the link below.

Blue Hearts