Curious About Environmental Campaigning

Helena [: 00:00:00

Welcome to the Curious about Nature podcast. This is a podcast for folks who want to connect with nature and rewild childhood. Hosted by Rachel Mills, Buttercup Learning's founder. An educator with 20 plus years of experience, with a passion for animation, the natural world and conservation, Rachel focuses on getting digital kids outdoor and having fun in nature, promoting well being and a can do attitude to local wildlife conservation and sustainable living. Join her and her guests for their stories, experiences and tips to support outdoor learning and nature connection.

Rachel [: 00:00:44

Welcome to the Curious about Nature podcast. This week I'm joined by Natalie Fee, an award winning environmental campaigner, author and speaker and founder of not for profit City to Sea. Hi there, Natalie.

Natalie [: 00:00:56

Hi Rachel. Good to be here.

Rachel [: 00:00:57

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Natalie [: 00:01:00

Yeah, of course. I'm the founder of City to Sea, as you mentioned, and we're a campaigning organization and for the past eight years, nine for me, we've been campaigning on trying to stop some of the most polluting items of single use plastic at source. So that's been my main thing for the last nine years, based in Bristol, but before that I was working in tv and media, so I was doing a bit of tv, presenting and producing. I've also written three books, so I'm a writer and a creative, really. I write songs as well. Hopefully trying to make the world a better place through words seems to be my thing.

Rachel [: 00:01:40

Very multitalented, lots of different assets and strings, du boo, as they say there. So where did your sort of interest in environmental campaigning and becoming the voice of nature? Where did that come from?

Natalie [: 00:01:54

I grew up really loving nature. My happy place was in the garden amongst the sort of blue bells and tree stumps. And I grew up in a sort of suburban sprawling area, really, but it was quite green, actually. And my family were from Southampton and both of my sort of grandparents on either sides were on council estates. They both had decent sized gardens. And where I grew up, halfway between Southampton and Winchester, it was quite a leafy suburb. And so actually I spent a lot of my childhood outdoors. My parents were also a bit intense, so I think it was like a bit of a safe space for me out there.

Natalie [: 00:02:36

And I was really into fairy worlds and I'd leave little gifts at the bottom of trees and I was very into the flower fairy. So I think I loved trees and greenery. I wasn't so keen on the sea. So it's quite funny that I ended up becoming an ocean campaigner because I used to have a phobia of the sea, but then I think as I grew older, I could see that there was this sort of disconnect, really, between, I don't know, modern day life and the natural world. And when I was about 21, I went off traveling to South America and I saw the sort of firsthand impacts of deforestation and mining and the impact that had on the indigenous communities there. And so that's when I first got involved in activism, and since then it's woven in various ways. And then it wasn't until the plastic issue really caught my attention ten years ago that I decided to dedicate my kind of work life towards that.

Rachel [: 00:03:41

Yeah. So was that the impetus then for setting up the not for profit group city to sea?

Natalie [: 00:03:46

First of all, seeing it miles way in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and seeing pictures of the albatross chicks that were dying in their nests with their bellies full of plastic, that was the thing that got me. Caught my attention, broke my heart open, made me inspired to do something about it. But then one day I saw it floating, like literally islands of plastic floating down the river Avon in Bristol on one of our super high tides that we get. And that, for me, was the moment when I thought, hang on, it's not just happening millions of miles away for us, it's actually happening on our doorstep here in.

Rachel [: 00:04:25

Yeah, yeah, I think that's what's really interesting about when you talk to children and you talk about animals are endangered and so on, we always think of the big wildlife from Africa in places, but in reality, there's so much on our doorstep that's affected. And I love the fact that your campaigns have been not just UK, but they've trickled across the globe. But I think for children having that connection with something that's immediate and on their doorsteps, really powerful, isn't it?

Natalie [: 00:04:53

Yeah, very much. And I think that there are so many great campaigns. Like plastic is easy to see, obviously, because it's usually bright and it's lit, and so you can see the impact of that quite quickly. But certainly in terms of. And for younger people, it's maybe hard to notice the decline in species, but they can certainly develop that love and appreciation of them. But some fabulous campaigns happening in the UK for our wildlife and how to protect and try and halt the loss of some of the species that we're seeing at the moment.

Rachel [: 00:05:28

Yeah. So your primary campaigns refill, which is the free tap water initiative, I think that's had such a huge impact on people. I know that it certainly had for myself, it's just become second nature now. To take a refill bottle everywhere and ask people for tap water, rather than buying bottled water or getting fancy water at a restaurant, for instance. And then we all know about, obviously, the cotton buds. That I think has been one of the things that kind of captured people's imaginations, wasn't it? This idea of cotton buds floating in the sea and the image of, gosh, I've forgotten what it was called.

Natalie [: 00:06:04

Seahorse holding.

Rachel [: 00:06:05

Yes. My brain just went. When you have one of those moments where the words are just gone completely very well.

Natalie [: 00:06:12

Yeah.

Rachel [: 00:06:12

Seahorses. Seahorses. And I think for younger kids, that obviously has that visual impact. I also love what you've been doing with the plastic free periods. I haven't used any period products other than menstrual cup for many years, and we get to that age now. My daughter's sort of preteen, but we're starting those conversations early around what period products can we use that are plastic free? If my daughter or other children are keen on getting involved in environmental campaign, what tips would you give for them to maybe set something up in their local community or school?

Natalie [: 00:06:50

That's a lovely question, because there have been some really incredible examples. Kids against plastic was a sort of a sister team, and they set up, and they were running kind of campaigns, getting their shops to say no to straws and plastic bottles, and they would go round and do things locally, just talking to people. And that really grew, and they've become real leaders in that space, which has been incredible to see them grow like that, I would say, certainly with the support of some great parents behind them. There was that young lady about two years ago, she was ten, in Wales, and she ran a campaign trying to get plastic toys banned on the COVID of magazines, and that got lots of local press and another sister team, Caitlin and Ella, I think they were called, and they ran a campaign to get the Burger King toys banned. So I think there's some really good examples of how young people really can use their voice in a very positive way, because it is their future that they're having a voice on and people actually do pay attention when it's coming from a young person. So I think that is some good examples. But I would say, first of all, just see who else is doing it and speak to them about how you can support them, or if you can't support them or they don't need help, you can ask them what they learned. So you can get learnings from people and then get down with a bit of planning.

Natalie [: 00:08:13

So actually scope out, like, who's it targeted at? When are you going to do it? How are you going to measure whether it's been successful or not and have a little campaign plan set out? My latest book is called do good, get paid. And whilst young people might not be going out to get paid right now, there is a chapter on there on campaigning and how you can get your message out there and how you can promote it, because it's important to feel like you're having an impact. The last thing I'd say is have fun because it's important to enjoy what you're doing, especially at a younger age. Yeah, no, any age in life, Rachel. Any age. Who am kidding.

Rachel [: 00:08:51

Yeah, no, it should all be playful, shouldn't it? We can spend our entire lives being very serious about things. We're only here once and make the most of it, isn't it? And enjoy it.

Natalie [: 00:09:00

Although campaigns can be hard hitting, there's like that behavior change thing of the carrot and the stick. And sometimes, like our refill campaign that you mentioned is very much the carrot. It's like inspiring behavior change, making it accessible and easy and timely for people so that behavior changes and making it normal. So that's the sort of slower behavior change. But then there's the stick. When we see something that we are either really angry about or we're really sad about, and we can take that energy and galvanize it and use it to fire our campaigns.

Rachel [: 00:09:34

Yeah, absolutely. And I liked your point about the fact that there are campaigns out there already and rather than reinventing the wheel, get involved with something first rather than trying something completely new or trying to do a version of it yourself. I think that's a really important point to make. You mentioned your book there, and I know you've written other books as well. Do you have any kind of favorite resources for children on nature and conservation? Either that you've written yourself or you've come across.

Natalie [: 00:10:02

I recently came across a printed newspaper called the great imagining, and that was really fabulous. It was all about positive stories and that was brought by the house of fairy tales team. So that might be a nice resource for people to look at, but I think really, nature is my favorite resource for learning and play. I recently trained as a nature facilitator and the thing that I love most about it was the magic happens and we're just left to our own devices in nature in a way, and we can just create and have fun and imagine.

Rachel [: 00:10:37

Yeah, I completely agree with you. It brings me back to what you used to do as a child. Actually, because that whole flower fairies imagination side of things, I completely relate to that. My daughters started to pick up on that as well. The next generation, just using your imagination, sparked by books, but then going outside and actually exploring. I think it's a free activity. Why would you not want to do it?

Natalie [: 00:11:00

Exactly.

Rachel [: 00:11:01

Your book is quite an interesting one. How to save the world for free. What was the idea behind the book that you wrote?

Natalie [: 00:11:08

So that one really was in 2018, when the WWF report came out and said that just in my lifetime, we'd lost half the world's wildlife. And so I'd been campaigning on plastic already for about four years at that point. It was another one of those moments for me, when I was just bowled over by that statistic and couldn't quite believe what I was hearing. And so my response to that was to try and write something which not only shared the sort of urgency and the scale of the situation of the biodiversity crisis, but also gave hundreds and hundreds of solutions, and in a quite a playful way as well. And I thought, yeah, I could maybe use my platform as a plastics campaigner to start talking about those wider issues.

Rachel [: 00:11:56

Yeah. It seems to me that sometimes people get so overwhelmed by possibilities of what they might be able to do, or maybe they're feeling anxious, so they get stuck. What actions do you think that we could all take to save the world?

Natalie [: 00:12:12

I think it depends on what you're most passionate about. So I think because there's so much we can do and there's also so much we can't do because of the systems that we live in. I think, start with what you love best. So, whether you love drawing, whether you love writing, whether you love performing, whether you love maths and spreadsheets and arguing cases, I think, feel like where your passion is and where your talents lie, and then use that for then the next thing. What do you care most about? Is it birds? Is it butterflies? Is it rivers? Is it like all those different places that you could put that energy and then look into what is happening in that space? I'm thinking, for example, there's somebody at the moment in the UK called Hannah, and she's a writer and she's running a campaign for birds, migratory birds, because their numbers are steeply declining here in the UK. So she's running a campaign to try and get new build houses, to have this little brick in it, a swift.

Rachel [: 00:13:17

Brick, which has got a hole in.

Natalie [: 00:13:18

It, and the swifts can come in and nest. And she's encouraging people to write to their mp so that they back this bill, which is happening currently in parliament. So she's focused in on the things she loves the most, which is the swifts. She's focused in on legislation, a very clear ask with a brick. And now she's getting people to write to their mps. Somebody else I know who got involved in that campaign has been, like, handwriting and painting swifts on the envelopes, and a more craftivist approach to activism. So that's maybe a good example.

Rachel [: 00:13:52

Yeah, some really nice approaches there, and I think that's the way to spark kids ideas around what they can do and get involved in. It's interesting that the environmental campaigning has become your career. Do you have any thoughts about job opportunities for children or maybe teens or young adults that are thinking about they want to get involved in this kind of work?

Natalie [: 00:14:15

I think as an employer, it's always great to see that people have done voluntary projects and that they're motivated. And so whether they come and do some work experience, some internships and volunteering is a good way into those organizations and to get some experience. But even just being involved in the eco group at school or in the community and doing things locally, like hosting a clothes swap or a bring and buy sale or things like that, are either raising money for a local organization or raising funds to do something locally as well.

Rachel [: 00:14:52

Yeah, you touched on there a little bit about politics and politicians. What changes would you like to see from world leaders, politicians and corporations?

Natalie [: 00:15:02

So many. Yeah, I think coming in on plastic, what we want to see is more legislation around a proper deposit return system so that you can take your bottles back and get money back for those, so that they have a value, so the plastic has a value to it, and higher taxes around virgin plastics. So people are encouraged to use recycled plastics, which will increase the volume of better quality recycling, recyclate. And then we would like to see there being binding targets for refill and reuse, because lots of companies want to do it, but because it's voluntary, it's not a level playing field. So actually, we'd like to see 30% of packaging reusable or refillable by 2030, and we'd like that to be enshrined in law.

Rachel [: 00:15:51

It's interesting about plastic at the moment. I think a lot of people think I put it in my recycling bin, then that's it. It's sorted, isn't it? And see, it's not as simple as that, because different parts of the country have different access to different facilities. And I think if we think about big corporations as well, that are looking, especially at things like packaging, for instance. I've always found it very difficult to find as a company looking to work with suppliers, I get a lot of information back from bigger corporations saying, oh, we recycle our plastic or we do this or that or whatever, and then actually, when you dig down really deep into it, they're not really sure what actually happens, where it goes and so on. So I think that kind of transparency of what's happening in the UK, I think that's really important to know and to investigate further.

Natalie [: 00:16:43

Really. Yeah. And we're going to see some changes coming through when the Environment act is going to make recycling uniform across the UK. So what's the same in one county as another town, another city? So that's going to help. But you're right, we need to be able to see more clearly what happens to the plastic once we've exported it from the UK, because we're still exporting so much of our. And that's a good thing that people can do. Write to their local waste, local council or local who's got the waste contract and ask them, where is it going? So, yeah, those are great things that people can do.

Rachel [: 00:17:18

You have been recognized for all the fantastic work you've done. And I've written this down because there's so many rewards and awards and recognition over the last few years. So here we've got you down as you've won a Sunday Times Volvo Visionaries award, you've been listed as one of the UK's 50 new radicals by the observer, and Nestor been awarded an honorary Doctor of Science in recognition of your services to the environment by Bristol University of West England. And you've won the Sheila McKennay Award for environmental justice in 2017 for city to seas switch the Stick campaign and also named Bristol's 24/7 Woman of the year for 2018. Out of all those things, and maybe more, what's been the biggest highlight or achievement for you?

Natalie [: 00:18:10

It's funny hearing them all back, because I'm not very good at congratulating myself. I'm always thinking, seeing what more needs.

Rachel [: 00:18:15

Congratulations.

Natalie [: 00:18:17

What more needs to be done and looking forward. So I think getting the honorary degree at UE was really so special because I dropped out of university after about six weeks and I'd been very much pushed into it. I wasn't ready to go and I wasn't allowed to have a gap year and I needed one and so I just dropped out of uni. And I'm not an academic, I'm more of a sort of artist and communicator. I know you can be both, but I was definitely not to be awarded a sort of doctorate science for my work in the city. To see, I think was lovely, but I think really the most pleasure comes from seeing the impact. Like recently we ran a campaign called cut the cutlery and we managed to get the uk government, english government, to ban plastic forks, knives, plate and polystyrene cups and takeaway boxes. That's so huge.

Natalie [: 00:19:15

And that's all credit to my team, who are just completely amazing and come up with the ideas these days and carry them through. So the fact that we're able to do that kind of thing, I think is, for me, the most satisfying. Yeah.

Rachel [: 00:19:30

I'm curious to know what your plans are next.

Natalie [: 00:19:33

Actually at city to see, we're doubling down on refill, so we're trying to really make it more accessible in supermarkets, more affordable for people, and make it law as well, so that it's a lot easier for those changes to come about. So that will be the main focus area for us. Also still working closely with everyday plastic and city to see are trying to get supermarkets to offer more loose options for fruit and veg, so less packaging. And personally, I've got a couple of interesting projects on the bubble. I'm doing some comedy songs with my husband. We've got a comedy song about beavers that we're going to have some fun with this Christmas. And I'm working on my own more sort of spiritual folk singer songwriter album, or an ep at least, which will start to come out next year in 2024. I'm going to be starting a project with a local oak tree in December 2023, running for a whole year from winter solstice to Winter Solstice, where I'm going to meditate under the tree every day for a certain time and film it and see what comes from that.

Natalie [: 00:20:46

So no holidays for me next year? Yeah.

Rachel [: 00:20:50

You sound like you're going to be very busy. The music combining that with environmentalism is really interesting. What does it mean for you?

Natalie [: 00:20:58

I feel like I've spent pretty much the last ten years doing that outward fighting, trying to change things, and now I'm feeling, maybe it's just I need a bit of a rest, but now I'm feeling like a bit more inwards and bit more quietly focusing on my local environment. I think we are part of nature and creativity is a two way street, and I give to nature and I receive from nature and I think creating, whether that's words, books, songs for me is an act of connection and an expression of that relationship.

Rachel [: 00:21:37

Yeah, I look forward to seeing where the music takes you next. Where can we find you online and in person then?

Natalie [: 00:21:44

In person, I tend to do different events and literary festivals and gigs and things. So you can go to my website, nataliefe.com and you can find my books on there. And then depending on what kind of social creature you are, you can find me on LinkedIn or on instagram. As Natalie Fee underscore, my husband and I's comedy band name is called the funny Turns. Like the seabird, the turn. So we're the funny turns and city to sea you can find on all of those channels as well.

Rachel [: 00:22:17

Thank you so much for joining me this morning, Natalie. It's been a real pleasure.

Natalie [: 00:22:20

Thanks so much. Rachel.

Helena [: 00:22:23

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Curious about nature. If you would like to keep getting nature and outdoor learning stories and tips, hit subscribe on the podcast so you never miss an episode. Don't forget to give a five star rating and review to support our podcast reach. To deepen your child's connection with nature and natural world education, please check out the nature Curious subscription box. Head over to the website buttercuplearning.com to further support your family's nature journey.