Creator OF THE MONTH
Land justice campaigner and podcaster
MAY in the hills
IN NADIA SHAIKH’S ideal world, nature would be our default setting. The outdoors would not be a space simply “reduced to recreational use”.
Here, true agency isn’t “following lines on maps”. It’s having enough curiosity to “follow the call of a blackbird or the path of a butterfly” and to care for our environment.
Curiosity is how it began for Nadia growing up in Jarrow, Tyne and Wear. On trips to seaside funfairs, she could be found “poking around” in tiny things: moss on a brick wall; midge larvae in stagnant water. Now 37 and living on the Isle of Bute, she says this hasn’t changed.
But after almost two decades in nature conservation – a scientifically motivated sector “still governed by the very ideologies that separated humans from nature” – Nadia’s perception of the systems designed to save the natural world is different. In conservation, humans are often seen as the problem. Yet “a child picking a wildflower or crisp packet blowing out of a bin into a hedge is not the reason we’ve lost millions of birds from our landscape.”
Looking for answers, Nadia learned about the colonial legacies of the countryside. At work, she was “increasingly seen as the ‘diverse’ person” and “never saw [herself ] as a competent outdoorsperson based on how everyone else looked and acted.” Unable to reconcile nature conservation’s gatekeeping of knowledge and land, focus on the status quo, statistics, growth and “empty solutions” – as well as the “unbearable” duality of t
