Ahead of today’s United Nations World Wildlife Day, nearly two hundred singers snuck in to St Paul’s Church on Saturday afternoon just before Evensong, to give the waiting public an impromptu performance and to deliver a message to Church Of England Commissioners on behalf of the Wild Card campaign.
The choristers were members of more than a dozen climate choirs (part of the Climate Choir Movement) from all around the country. Holding up an array of banners, including depictions of British native species under threat, they sang a specially composed song to urge the church to commit to rewilding thirty per cent of its 100,000 acres estate by 2030.
The C of E is among the UK’s largest landowners, with assets valued at around £10 billion. Some of it is prime agricultural land, but it is all graded accordingly, and wildlife campaigners believe that swathes of the lower-graded areas are suitable for rewilding.
Britain is ranked globally in the bottom 10% of nations for biodiversity, and is the worst in the G7, so urgent widespread rewilding would not only help improve this, but also demonstrate some UK effort to answer the UN’s call for an area the size of China to be urgently rewilded in order to help towards global emissions targets. Rewilded land quickly begins to act as a carbon sink – a much cheaper and holistic way to draw carbon from the atmosphere rather than the currently proposed and uneconomical capture technology.
Wild Card’s church campaign began last year when Chris Packham unveiled a nine-metre scroll outside St Paul’s, containing a long list of reasons why church investors should extensively rewild their landholdings. Land campaigner Guy Shrubsole has worked with botanist Tim Harris to uncover information about the secretive Church Commissioner’s holdings, and their research shows that just 3% of church land is woodland, putting them at the bottom of the league among the UK’s biggest landholders. For context, the EU’s tree cover is 39%, and the National Trust has managed 18% and currently rising.
Under pressure from campaigners, in 2023 the church took the significant step to divest its pension funds from fossil fuels. But a recent motion passed by the General Synod stated that “the climate change and biodiversity loss crises are intricately linked”, so maybe it’s time to take the next step. More than 100,000 people who have signed a petition think so.
