A funeral for nature

In this blog post, Rob Delius, an architect and head of sustainability for Stride Treglown, explains the thinking behind the Funeral for Nature event due to take place in Bath on 20 April.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you have an interest in climate or the environment.

It’s a challenge that we come across regularly – how do we engage with people outside of our sustainability bubble? Many of the events I attend feel like we’re preaching to the converted so what can we do to spread those messages wider, how do we reach a bigger audience?

This was on our minds at Stride Treglown when a few years ago we floated a large mock-up of a sinking house in the river in Bath, tethered to the iconic Pulteney bridge. We wanted to do something really visible and capture people’s attention about climate change and get people talking. It worked. Tens of thousands saw it in person and over a million on social media. It was also covered widely by the press nationally and internationally. That’s quite an audience!

After sinking house I had been thinking a lot about how we could spread a similar message about the state of nature, how we could share the shocking fact that the UK has sleepwalked into being now officially one of the most nature depleted countries in the world.

At the end of last year I happened to see a small group of Red Rebels in Bath at the back of a large Unite to Survive protest. They were captivating. With their other-worldly dress and quiet presence they unsurprisingly drew a lot of attention from onlookers. I wondered whether a much bigger gathering of Red Rebels, not just a dozen but perhaps 250 of them, maybe the largest number of them ever assembled, staging a mock ‘funeral for nature’ procession, would create a spectacle so visually striking, so jaw-dropping in its audacity, that it would not fail to capture people’s attention and get people talking about the state of nature and sharing this message widely.

I contacted Extinction Rebellion and the Red Rebels. A plan was formed. A website created. Word started to spread. Soon groups in Sweden, Denmark, Italy and the States contacted us saying that they wanted to hold their own simultaneous Funeral for Nature events. As the website started getting more hits and the message got out more and more people were registering from all over the UK to take part, and soon we also were getting messages from groups in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Germany saying that they were planning to come over and join us too. It seems we had captured people’s imagination and created a vehicle for them to express how much they want to see change.

So this is where we are. Every day we are getting closer to that 250 number and it’s promising to be one of the biggest and most spectacular events in the South-West this year. We want to keep building the numbers, go beyond the 250, make it as big and bold as possible and send a huge nature S.O.S. that can’t be ignored. So we’d absolutely love it if you can join us too! Let’s get that message out and inspire change.

The event is taking place in Bath on Saturday 20^th of April. All details and the registration form are on www.coderedfornature.uk.