The natural world should be used but not abused, says Ingo Schüder

I first set my foot into Oxfordshire to attend the interview for my current post with Wild Oxfordshire. Moving down from Newcastle, the exceptionally fine and dry summer and early autumn had been an additional bonus to my recent promotion, compensating for all the effort that comes with moving your family to another part of the country.

My office in Little Wittenham is set in in a beautiful landscape. I work in an old tower, which red kites frequently circle. All this is just a stone’s throw away from the River Thames, where my new colleagues and I go hunting for tracks of otters and bats and watch kingfishers and dragonflies move playfully across the water.

I can see the Wittenham Clumps from my office window.

What a fantastic landmark it is! It is always brimming with people coming for a walk, enjoying the relaxation that comes from being in the natural environment.

With all that natural beauty, one may be fooled into believing all is well with the natural environment in Oxfordshire.

A quick look at the media and some strategic documents produced for the county reminds me that this is not so.

Doing my research, I realised that only four per cent of the county retains any special value for wildlife.

Air quality is apparently the worst outside London. The average commute to Oxford city is 51 minutes.

The pressure from housing development and other infrastructure is enormous.

As in many other parts of the country, people’s access to natural green space is not as great as it could be and many people are suffering mental or physical ill health.

I better stop there before you and I get too depressed. Let me share some encouraging things with you instead.

Firstly, the natural environment can actually often act as a solution to the many challenges we face.

Did you know that seeing a squirrel makes you 15 per cent happier?

Or that one square metre of green roof could offset the annual particulate matter emissions of one car?

Or that one hectare of floodplain woodland has an economic value of £1,396 per year, because it helps purify the water, reduces the risk of downstream flooding, enhances biodiversity and offers opportunities for informal recreation?

Secondly, there are many people and many good organisations who understand that the natural environment is a fantastic asset.

This asset, used in a sustainable way, can provide many social and economic benefits, combining growth and innovation with creating and maintaining a quality environment where people want to live and work.

This is where Wild Oxfordshire comes in. Our role is to act strategically in the county.

A couple of years ago the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) challenged the environmental sector to work in a different way and to form new Local Nature Partnerships.

Wild Oxfordshire’s role is to co-ordinate the Oxfordshire Nature Partnership, enabling and facilitating partners to work in a more integrated and cross-sectoral way to achieve greater benefits for people, the environment and a sustainable economy.

This can be hard work at times, but we believe it is worth putting more and more of the “natural solutions” in place.

I was intrigued by the symbolism of the cooling towers of Didcot A coming down within a few days of me starting my new post.

For hundreds of years the Wittenham Clumps had acted as the major local landmark but were surplanted in 1968 by these man-made structures.

I wonder, is it time for all of us to look again at the natural environment to act as a landmark to guide us in our decisions about the future of this county?

Ingo Schüder is the new chief executive of Wild Oxfordshire (wildoxfordshire.org.uk)