Description

An interview with Dr Andrew Lucas, a retired ecologist, by Lindsey Thomas, a conservation officer trainee with Buglife and Natur am Byth! Covering Andrew’s background and career, looking at how the conservation sector has changed over the last 30 years and how he thinks things might develop in the future. 

Andrew spent most of his career working in in the Countryside Council for Wales and Natural Resources Wales. The conversation was recorded in the Swansea Llandarcy Natural Resources Wales office. 

Date 

Recorded on 15/12/2025, covers to 1980s to present day, also looks at the future of the sector. 

Location 

Recorded in Swansea but covers most of South Wales, along with some discussion of Rutland Water near Leicester. 

Transcript 

Lindsey Thomas [LT]: 

 To start off with, could you please introduce yourself? So, who you are and what your background is? 

Dr Andrew Lucas [AL]: 

 Yeah, my name's Andrew Lucas. I worked for CCW [Countryside Council Wales] and then subsequently NRW [Natural Resources Wales] since 1992, up until when I retired in 2022. Yes. So just over 30 years. 

 Prior to that I had, as a lot of people do, I had a lot of contract jobs here and there, all over the place. I was a country park warden for a couple of years. My education background was that I did my degree at UEA, University of East Anglia. So I did ecology at University of East Anglia and then much, much later in life I did a PhD jointly supervised between Swansea University and the National Botanic Garden. 

LT: 

 Okay, thank you. Would you say you were interested in the natural world from an early age? 

AL: 

 Definitely. I told my headmaster that I was going to be an ecologist when I was 11. 

LT: 

 Wow. 

AL: 

 It was something that I always wanted to do and I've always said to people who asked me that I was incredibly lucky to do what I wanted to do. Not many people get that chance.

LT: 

 And to know what you wanted to do. 

AL: 

 And to know what, I mean I've never, there was never a time when I didn't know that I wanted to do this. It's strange because it came out of nowhere. My mother was a pharmacy technician. My father was a sergeant in the RAF. And so there's no sort of like history of wildlife in the family, as it were.  

 But I grew up near Rutland Water, which is now an amazing wildlife reserve. But I remember that valley when it was just being flooded back in the ‘70s, so my interest kind of, I think, had a place to go. My first ever job was standing at the gate taking tickets at Rutland Water nature reserve. But yeah, this is what I've always, always wanted to do. 

 My career… like a lot of people, I struggled to get a permanent job in nature conservation. So there was a brief wobble when I thought, well, I went for the job with CCW back in ‘92, and I discussed it with my wife, and we said, well, if I don't get this job, which we know, we needed a permanent job to be able to settle down and start our lives as it were. I said right, I'd retrain, I'd become a paramedic or something like that. But I got the job and that was that. So yeah, it's always what I wanted to do. 

LT: 

 So Rutland Water, was that a quarry? 

AL: 

 No, it's a big reservoir run by, I think it's Anglian Water. It was two large valleys in Rutland that were flooded to provide water for the East Midlands, and as part of that development, they actually created quite a sizable nature reserve on one end of the reservoir. And it's now, you know, it's got the wildlife alphabet soup, it's an SPA, it's an SSSI, it's got everything. Thousands and thousands of waterfowl every year. Amazing site. But that was where I started and I go back now and I look at the woodland and think I planted that tree as a kid. 

LT: 

 When you look at the different roles you've had, is there one position that stands out as your favourite? 

AL: 

 Yeah, I really enjoyed managing the SSSI support team for about 10 years, basically right up to the end of CCW. Because we had a great job, we just sort of roamed around South Wales fixing problems on SSSIs and I had three incredibly dedicated and motivated staff to manage. And yeah, it was a really, it was incredibly varied, we were able to travel, basically we ranged from Pembrokeshire to Gwent. So we did lots of different tasks all over the place, you know. ‘What's the problem with my SSSI?’ Or ‘Can you help me with this management agreement?’ Or lots of things like, ‘Well, can you tell me if this species is still there?’ That kind of thing. 

 And it was, that was the golden age, really. Basically, we were like a sort of service provider to the local teams. So, they would say, well, there are certain things that we need to know about our sites that we don't have the expertise to do. And they would call us in and we'd do it for them. So, it was a great job. 

LT: 

 Do you have a favourite story from working in the field? 

AL: 

 Oh, crikey. 

LT: 

 Or anywhere crazy you've been sent? 

AL: 

 The first SSSI I ever designated was… this was the kind of place that CCW was. You would never get away with this now.  

LT: 

 Right.  

AL: 

But we're talking about the early ‘90s now. And my line manager was a bit… he was a terrific naturalist and a very good line manager, but he was also a bit of a joker. 

 And my first SSSI that I designated, it's now a PlantLife reserve, but at the time it was owned by an elderly lady who lived in, frankly, lived in a hovel. This house had earth floors. And I would go and see her and talk to her about this wonderful meadow that she had. 

And eventually we designated it and it was fine and eventually became a PlantLife reserve, as I said. But she became quite notorious in the local press because she had, what's the word, sort of artificial, fertilise… When you have a test tube baby, basically. 

LT: 

Oh right, IVF? 

AL: 

 I was just trying… the actual phrase... Anyway, she had a test tube baby at quite an advanced age. And my line manager was, of course, we got the SSSI through without an objection. Shortly afterwards, she gives birth to this baby. And my line manager put it around CCW that in order to get the SSSI designated… 

LT: 

 I can see where this is going! 

AL: 

 Yeah, I'd had this love child with this woman.  

LT: 

 [Laughter] 

AL: 

 And yeah, he spread this rumour all over the place. And as I say, you would never get away with that today.  

LT: 

 People actually believed it, did they? 

AL: 

 Oh, yeah, well, I mean, in a way, it didn't really matter whether people believed it or not. He just thought it was this marvellous joke. 

LT: 

 It is pretty funny, to be fair. 

AL: 

 It is. I mean, that was the kind of, it was the kind of atmosphere we worked in, really. It was you wouldn't get away with that today. 

LT: 

 Yeah, that's so different to what I was expecting. 

 Okay, what part of the job do you think surprises people the most? 

AL: 

 Perhaps what people, certainly with SSSI monitoring, what they imagine that you kind of walk around these wonderful places going, hello birds, hello trees, and just walk around and they don't understand the grind of acquisition of data. 

 What they see is you walking around a site and then the owners will just leave you to it and they don't see you recording quadrat after quadrat after quadrat. Same thing over and over. I mean that's what that's what collecting data is all about. You need a sample size in order to have a meaningful result, but that means replication and that means you're doing it. And so I don't think people appreciate the kind of the repetition and the planning that goes behind that. You're not just looking at any old plant. You're there for a reason to look at very specific things that you need to know. And I don't think people appreciate the kind of, as I say, the grind of the acquisition of data that goes into that. And then the analysis that you have to do afterwards in order to turn that data into a meaningful result. 

 Because I do remember owners who were very proud of their sites and then when we took the site to pieces. And we thought, this is not looking good, there are real problems here. They're not grazing it. The owners I'm thinking of, they were too, in a way, they were almost too proud of their site. So they wouldn't manage it. They wouldn't graze it. They thought, we must leave this alone. And it was a wonderful place, but it was going downhill because they weren't managing it. And what it really needed was a herd of cattle to go through it and really munch it up a little bit. And when we told them, the data doesn't lie, you know, and they were quite upset, to be honest with you. I remember at the time they were quite upset. They felt that they first went through kind of like anger, denial, whatever, and final acceptance.  

LT: 

 Do you find that's changed quite a lot in your career, the sort of conservation grazing side of things? Because that seems quite a big part of what we do at the moment. 

AL: 

 Yeah, yeah. What we know about how grazing influences sites has changed a lot in terms of, we would always frame it in terms of, well, just traditional grazing. What does that mean? Nowadays we're a lot more specific about what that means, the different kinds of stock and that kind of thing. 

 But yeah, and it's become more, well, I can't speak for now because I've been out of the field for three years, but certainly by the time I left it was getting more and more difficult to get the right kind of animals in the right kind of places. Farmers don't want to handle cattle. They're big, they're dangerous, sheep are so much easier. 

LT: 

 Yeah. What would you say the toughest challenges you faced are over the years? 

AL: 

 I spent two years as, I took a promotion and I went to the Dolgellau office and I was completely unprepared. It was my first major management job and I was quite unprepared for the interpersonal conflict that went on in that office. There were several very difficult characters in the office. And it was a very difficult time, both for me and, we had a two-year-old child, Beth had to obviously came up to Dolgellau as well, in this place that she didn't recognise, didn't know. She was pregnant, so she had a baby whilst we were up there. So, it was challenging at home, but also the office was extremely challenging. Lots of very difficult, very prickly characters, lots of interpersonal conflict that I was just completely ill-equipped to deal with, really, in my first management job. So I rather walked into that one, I felt.  

LT: 

 Was that in NRW? 

AL: 

 That was in CCW. So, it was very difficult. And Beth and I looked at each other and after, not even a month, we knew we'd made a terrible mistake. So, then it was basically just a question of sticking it out for an appropriate amount of time until I could leave basically. So I stayed there for two years. But it was very, very difficult. 

LT: 

 So far in the job I've had, everybody I've met has been lovely. It surprised me. 

AL: 

 Everybody is. It was that particular office which apparently had a reputation which I didn't appreciate at the time, otherwise I'd never have gone for the job. 

LT: 

 Yeah. 

AL: 

 But it had a reputation for being very difficult. The characters in the office were extremely difficult. 

LT: 

 It makes such a huge difference, the people you're working with. 

AL: 

 Yeah, absolutely. And it was, it was, I don't want to blow it out of proportion because it was two years out of 30 years. So, it was very much of one off. But it was, it was an extremely difficult time. We thought, my God, we've just made this terrible mistake here. So we just stayed long enough for me to kind of make an exit, and then we left and came back south again.  

I still get, very, very occasionally I find myself driving to North Wales for whatever reason, and I still, the pass that you go through as you come up to Dolgellau still gives me a pit in the stomach. After all these years, it's ridiculous, isn't it? But there we are. But yes, it was a very bad time. 

LT: 

 Okay, on the flip side then, what achievement are you most proud of? 

AL: 

 I think the protected sites that we brought to council, we can actually look at and say we saved that. I think of a woodland site that was going to be basically bulldozed for housing and when we looked at it, it was a fabulous ancient woodland. It had been partly replanted with conifers, which is why people looked at it and thought, nah, it's rubbish. But when you looked at the ground floor, the ground floor was absolutely intact because they planted with deciduous conifers, so they were dropping their needles so that you were still getting the light. It wasn't a dark conifer forest. Anyway, Barry woodlands it was, and the owner was going to basically turn it into a housing estate. We designated it and it was quite a tough council meeting, but it's still there and it's still woodland. And you think, well, yeah, I did that. That was great. 

LT: 

 It's good to hear that that does work. 

AL: 

 It does work, yeah, absolutely. It's good. SSSIs are good at preventing that kind of catastrophic damage. The challenge comes when you need to manage sites, of course. That's where the problems start. 

LT: 

 Yeah, because you always hear the horror stories of places being ripped down when they shouldn't have been. 

AL: 

 Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, you go back and they've had, like, loads of fertiliser dumped on them. Woodlands are a little bit indestructible in that kind of way. You can't really, they tick so slowly that you can't damage them, short of building on them. Even if you cut all the trees down, woodlands go through those cycles.

LT: 

 How has the conservation field evolved since you started? 

AL: 

 Right. Throw another log on the fire. It's changed a lot. I remember telling somebody in my teens that I would never need to know anything about computers because I was going to work with wildlife. I'd never need to know anything about that. Not one of my better predictions. 

 The faces have changed, the staff have changed. I went into conservation in, would have been initially in the late ‘80s, and it was very male dominated. It was the stereotype, you know, a man with a beard and a dog, you know, in a polo length sort of knitted Aran sweater or something like that. That's what everybody looked like. You hardly ever met any women in the field. Whereas now the literal face of conservation has changed. Certainly by the time I left, were there more female staff than male? Possibly. 

LT: 

 There definitely are now. 

AL: 

 And so that face has completely changed, which is a good thing. But it's the makeup of the people has completely changed. The job as well, of course, has become a lot more technological. I do worry that staff don't get out as much as they should do. 

 When I started my first job in CCW, the line manager I was talking about, he was a real character. He didn't actually know that I'd been appointed. So when I turned up, he said, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I'm your new assistant.’ ‘Oh, all right.’ 

It was a very different time. CCW was just coming out of the NCC phase. It was very civil servants, guys wore ties. And anyway, he didn't know what to do with me. So he basically said, right, these are all the SSSIs in Carmarthenshire, spend this next six months, just go around them all. Just go around them all and get to know them all. 

LT: 

 Go forth. 

AL: 

 Yeah, and just, you know, here's a car. Here's a car, you can have that car, off you go and just go and familiarise yourself with all the sites. Can you imagine that happening today? So in some ways we seem to, although we had less technology, somehow we seem to have more time. 

 I wonder whether he's just sent me off for six months and so he could give me time to think about what the hell to do with me. But looking back, I was just given extraordinary freedom to just have a look around and get paid to do it. It's just incredible. You're looking back. You'd never be allowed to do that today. 

 Although the job, you think all this technology has improved things, somehow we seem to spend more time in front of computer screens than we do in the field. That does worry me a little bit. Having said that, I think the calibre of staff, the pressure that we put them under when they're first appointed is far greater than anything I experienced. I think we demand a lot more of our young people. 

 Looking back, if I was sort of transplanted aged 25 into the modern field, it would be a big challenge, I think. Maybe we just, people just accept it because it's the norm, I guess. But I think we demand a lot more of them.

LT: 

 I think that's why I'm really lucky to have got this job, because it is sort of training me. It's not expecting me to know everything straight away. 

AL: 

 No, people get dumped in and they get huge targets and they have to do this and they have to do that and they're bombarded with all this kind of stuff in a way that I never was. Annual assessments were like, ‘how's it going?’ ‘Yeah, it's fine.’ ‘All right then, let's talk about something else.’ So yeah. 

LT: 

 Are there any changes you're excited about in the conservation field? 

AL: 

 The new technology has a tremendous, sort of things like DNA, using DNA for various purposes in monitoring and also satellite imagery. When I was working, a perfect sort of satellite imaging system was five years away and it was always going to be five years away. But you can imagine a situation now where we're so well trained and the satellite information is so good that somebody like yourself comes in on a Monday morning and you immediately get a warning there's been a fire on one of your SSSIs because we picked it up from the signature from the satellite. You know instantly what's happened so you can go out and check it out, or that field looks more improved than it was last year. Go out and have a look instead of just hoping that somebody's just going to wander out there and discover it. And I think the DNA stuff as well gives us opportunities to collect information on sites in ways that we could never do in the past. 

 So, you could imagine, again you could imagine a situation where we need to look at the number of, you know, what's the plant community on this site for sake of argument or is this particular species present? So let's say it's some obscure aquatic invert, that you need a super-duper specialist to be able to identify. Instead, you go out, you take a water sample and you sequence the water. 

 Is the DNA there? Is your species still there or not? I mean, that is tremendous in terms of freeing us from that kind of taxonomic bottleneck that we faced because there's only, you know, this invert and there's only one person in the country who can identify it and she's 80. You know, something like that. If we can harness it in the right way I think there's tremendous opportunities. 

 Going on from that, you could think, and this may be a good thing or it may not, this is the future you're going to face, but what happens when we combine, because I was talking about going around, the grind of collecting data, what happens when you can combine AI with a robot that can go out on the site? We've already got AI that will... I've got it on my phone, identifies species for me. 

 What happens when you can combine a robot that can go over rough ground or doesn't even need to land, could be a drone with AI. You can go out and monitor the site without even visiting it. Think where it's going to be in 5, 10, 15 years time, when you'll be able to send a drone out over a site and it will go out and it will count the plants. You know, it can recognise the plants, it can go out and it will count whatever it is. I mean, it's normally plants, but it could be anything. That is exciting in some ways, but I worry about the erosion of field skills that might result as a consequence of that. 

LT: 

 It's like you just said about the expert possibly being in their 80s, I've found that quite a lot that all of the experts are sort of ageing out of the field. 

AL: 

 Yes. 

LT: 

 But new people are not getting trained in the same things. And you don't know how to get the training sometimes. 

AL: 

 No, and sometimes it's just, I mean, there are young people out there who are very, very good naturalists. But are we attracting them into the field? Are they doing other things? Are they making money elsewhere and doing it as a hobby? A lot of CCW relied on the expertise that was generated by the Phase 1 and Phase 2 habitat survey that basically trained this generation of young botanists who are now all retiring. 

Getting young people in and getting them trained is difficult, but a lot of that expertise is just self-generated. 

You just, frankly, you just need more nerds. People who are prepared to kind of, whose idea of a good time is to sit down with a microscope and look at some obscure beetle. And that's not, training won't help you with that. It will help you to a certain extent, but it only gets you part of the way. You have to really want to do it as well. 

LT: 

 Do you think public attitudes towards conservation have shifted? 

AL: 

 Well absolutely, yeah. I mean when I was at school, and we're talking about when I was in secondary school, as far as I knew I was the only person in the school who had any interest in wildlife. People kind of tend to romanticise the past. I think, well, you know, all the kids were out there building dens and communing with nature. They really weren't. They really weren't. I was the only kid in my school who was interested.  

 So these days, of course, you know, it's been the David Attenboroughs, the Chris Packhams, people like that have brought it to a lot more people. So there's a lot more environmental concern. So even, you know, my kids who are in their 30s and 20s now, neither of them want to go out and count moths. That's what dad does and that's really boring. But they're both environmentally concerned, if you like, about wider environmental issues. 

So there has been, I find, especially amongst our younger people, a great deal more awareness. Whether that will survive the kind of age of populism that we're starting to come into, there used to be at least a lip service of a political consensus that the environment was generally a good thing. I'm not convinced that that consensus exists anymore. So whether that goodwill towards the environment will carry on in the future, we've just assumed that environmental awareness was rising and it would always keep rising. It may not do, but we'll have to see. 

 I mean, things like climate change. I mean, crikey, I've driven here today, it's absolutely chucking it down, there's flooding everywhere. There is going to come a point at which it becomes undeniable, but then people will just say, oh, we just have to live with it. So yeah, sorry, that was a rather rambling answer, but yes, I do think environmental awareness has risen. But not necessarily natural history interest, if you see what I mean. 

LT: 

 Yeah, it makes sense. How would you say this work has shaped you as a person, not just as a professional? Sorry, it's a tough one. 

AL: 

 No, I think, I mean, you do look at things in a different way. You see I think it was, I forget the quote, it was an American book and I forget the author now, but he talks about ecologists living in a world of pain because you see things that other people don't see. So like for instance, okay, take for instance the picture that's just behind you now. 

LT: 

 Yeah? 

AL: 

 Okay. So for the people at home, the picture is it's a lake and an upland hillside. You could look at that, a lot of people would look at that and say how beautiful it is. But I look at that and say crikey that place has been absolutely hammered by grazing. So you see the environment in a different way. You see it more, perhaps it's the same thing as an expert in art will look at a forgery and say that's not the real thing. It kind of shapes you in a different way, I guess. 

 It can ruin TV series, by the way. For instance, when you're watching some TV show and there's a soundtrack in the background, you can hear a bird singing in the background and you think, nah, there's no way that bird would be actually on that stump, in that place, at that time.  

But, yeah, I think you do see things that other people don't see. San County Almanac, that was the book. I'm sure it was a quote from that. But also, you try to understand the pressures that other people are under as well, even if you don't necessarily agree with them or find them quite frustrating.  

I can understand why upland farmers in Wales are feeling the pinch. I've got no time for lowland agri-barons, they're just multi-millionaires basically sitting on vast amounts of money with land. But if you're living hand to mouth in the uplands, it's got to be a very difficult existence. And what do you do if you sell up? Where do you go? What do you do? 

So I hope it's given me an appreciation of the lives that other people live, even if I don't necessarily agree with what they've done. 

LT: 

 Do you think that's partly due to working with landowners, meeting up with farmers and that? 

AL: 

 Yeah, yeah, you do. I mean, I always used to tell the younger staff that time spent talking to landowners was never wasted. Of course, when you're younger, you don't appreciate that. You meet a landowner and you want to get down to business. You've got a job to do and you want to negotiate this management agreement. 

 And it took me a few years to appreciate that when you get invited into somebody's kitchen, there'll be tea, there'll be cake, if you're lucky. So where are you? Where are you from? Are you married? Do you have kids? You have to go through that kind of, there'll be 20 to 30 minutes of personal chat before you get down to business. And that's part of the job. Building that rapport as you as a person is an important part of the job. 

It'd be interesting, actually it'd be interesting to look at because when I was saying the field was incredibly male dominated back in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, now it's much more female dominated. Whether that gets better results because you could make an argument that a grizzled elderly landowner will not take a woman seriously. They just don't think that ‘some little girly’ is going to come here and tell me what to do. On the other hand, you could argue that male-male interactions tend to be more confrontational and that women might have a better sort of sense of dealing with people and getting what they want without that confrontation.  

So, it would be interesting to see whether that actually has any effect or not. To me the benefits will definitely outweigh any perceived disadvantages just because a more balanced, diverse workforce brings diverse opinions and approaches. 

LT: 

 If a young person told you they wanted to go into conservation, what would you tell them? Would you recommend it as a career? 

AL: 

 Yes, I would. As I say, I've been extraordinarily lucky. Absolutely, I would encourage them. But I think you have to kind of, for young people in particular, this kind of contract culture that they have, not that they have, but that they live in, means that it's very difficult because you're a young person, okay, you want to travel around, see the world, but there's going to come a point at which you want to try and settle down and buy a house and live your life, you know, and finding a permanent job is quite challenging. It's all very well having a three-year contract, but can you buy a house on a three-year contract? 

So I would definitely, I would encourage somebody to do it, but they'd need to go into it with their eyes open a little bit and accept perhaps that they might have a tough few years making it work until they landed something. 

But oh yeah, absolutely. I mean it's been very good to me. I can hardly complain otherwise. I mean every career has its ups and downs. As I've said to people before in the lottery of life, I got a winning ticket. This is all I ever wanted to do. 

LT: 

 What skills and qualities do you think people should have that don't normally show up on a resume? 

AL: 

 To a certain extent, if you're interacting with the public, you've got to have personality skills that you need to either have or be able to fake very convincingly. If you're not in a public facing job, then that kind of grinding attention to detail is more important. 

 I always used to like that with young people in the field and I would say, ‘well, what wildlife group are you interested in?’ And if they said, ‘oh yeah, I'm really interested in thrips’ or ‘I'm really interested in slime moulds.’ And I just think that's the kind of person I can deal with because if they've got the kind of attention to detail and stickability to do that, then they'll have that skill will transfer into other areas of their work. So I do like people who are able to do that. 

But at the same time, if you're in a more public facing job you've got to be able to deal with people effectively and in some ways then the person who's mad about slime moulds may not be the best person. They might be, but the personality type, I would say, that does that may not necessarily be the person who is best at dealing with a crowd of people or an individual. 

LT: 

 That's something I find quite tricky, a lot of us, I would say, in this sort of field are a bit neurodivergent, very interested in the science side of things, and then you're also expected to do people engagement. It’s a completely different skill set. 

AL: 

 I have an autistic son, I know exactly what you mean. So yes, I think it does attract a certain kind of person and you've got to go and do that. So yes, there are those kinds of soft skills that you need as well. 

LT: 

 Okay, now that you're retired, what does your relationship with conservation look like? Are you still involved? 

AL: 

 Not really. I mean, I don't know, somebody wrote in my retirement card or something like that, they said, oh, I'm sure you'll be on the committee of the local Wildlife Trust and be giving us a hard time about something or another. And I think, hell, no, no, no. All these, you know, the people like yourself, the last thing you need is blooming old fogies like me coming in and telling you what you should or shouldn't be doing. So my relationship with conservation now is quite distant in that kind of way. 

 I don't get involved in the politics or management of, you know, I'm not interested in being on the management committee for a particular nature reserve or anything like that. I'm not interested in that. What I do is I do things that I enjoy. I've done a little bit of contract work to help with the pension. That's just involved the fun end of the job as far as I'm concerned. So I don't do any planning, I don't do any report writing. I go out, I collect data. That's all I want to do. I don't want to get involved in politics, I don't want to be writing up reports. 

 So I personally don't want to, I want to step back. I've done my bit, it's up to you guys now. I've got involved in a voluntary capacity with organising local bird watchers to help with BTO surveys. But that's just me rounding people up and emailing them and saying this is what you have to do and making that happen. I'm not interested in getting involved in the small P political side of it. I'm relatively detached from it. I want to have time to enjoy my natural history now. 

LT: 

Last question then. Would you say you're optimistic about the future? 

AL: 

 I think you always have to be otherwise you would just sort of oh what's the point? I used to do careers talks at Swansea University and come in and talk about your career and stuff. And I would always say, we've got environmental degradation, we've got climate change and all this kind of stuff that's going on. The only good news is that we have you. You young people are the most environmentally engaged generation we've ever had, far more than my generation was, no matter what people say.  

So, I think I am optimistic about the future, but I think that things might get worse before they get better. But there's been, I mean you see that politically with young people being much more engaged with things like the Green Party. I'm not making a political point here, I'm just saying that young people are just much more open to that kind of discussion and concerned about those issues and they're concerned about issues of animal rights, which has crossovers. 

So yes, I think you have to be optimistic about it. But I think, as I say, I think things might get worse before they get better. 

LT: 

 Is there anything else you'd like to talk about? 

AL: 

 I just wish that with protected sites, it would be heartbreaking when we were going to a place and we were the first person who'd been there for 10 years. There's a lot of activity around designating an SSSI and then we just leave landowners alone. And I think it's a terrible shame that the visit from the NRW officer isn't an annual thing. 

Oh, it's June. I bet whatever his or her name is will be around soon to look at my plants or I'm sure they'll be around to count my birds or look at my butterflies or whatever it is. And I do wish that that was valued more, even though it does, you know, you could say, well, what have you done today? Well, I went out to this SSSI, I walked around it for half an hour and I chatted to the landowner for half an hour. That doesn't really, that doesn't tick many boxes, but I do think it's tremendously important. 

 So that's the one thing that I feel, as I say, I feel a little bit sorry for younger people coming in that they don't just kind of get just sent out. That somehow we have all this technology and somehow we have less time. And I don't know how that's happened. But no, it would be that's the one thing that I think if I could change anything at all, it would be I'd be a senior manager. I never got to get senior level at all. And that I never got to senior level because I was too keen on the coal face stuff.  

LT: 

 Get stuck behind the desk or something. 

AL: 

 Yes, and I was whinging to my wife about this and saying, oh, I never get promoted. She said, well, yeah, but what happened, the problem is, you want to get promoted but still do the same job. You can't have it both ways, you know. And ultimately, I'd be out at the tops of Bannau Brycheiniog or whatever it was, and sit down for lunch and think, yeah, I think I'm doing all right. 

But no, sorry, to get back to that point, if that is something I had the power to change, I would be a senior manager walking around the office in June and I'd be collaring conservation officers and saying, why are you here? Why aren't you out? I don't want to see you here. Come back in September. So that's what I would, if I could change something, that's what I would.