Sue Holden
She talks to Olivia Edward about why she went off to travel, why she's happy to work with the UK's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and why its easier to cut down a 500-year-old tree than change te colour of a window on a 500-year-old house.
Geography was my favourite subject at school. I had a very good teacher who offered to work with me outside of school hours so I could get into the University of Cambridge.
I think geography is a great subject because it’s very general and can lead you down a whole load of different avenues. Geography gives you a good grounding as you go through life – not just to find the right career but to find those things that interest you and connect you to the world around you.
I started travelling while I was at university. Then, after four or five years working for Shell, I took voluntary redundancy and spent six months volunteering on an environmental project in Africa and then spent 18 months travelling around the world.
It got backpacking out of my system. I wasn’t trying to overdo it, but I sort of did. I eventually began to question travel for travel’s sake. I began to miss the sense of productivity you get from work, or having a home, a garden. Travel can be a very superficial thing, just being on a conveyor belt looking at things, not taking part in life, not really getting beneath the surface experience.
Even in my mid-30s, I was still thinking, ‘I wonder what I’m going to do when I grow up.’ But while I was working at the National Trust, a mentor asked me, ‘What’s your ideal job?’ and I said chief executive of the Woodland Trust. So then I had one of those moments where I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to go and get this now because I’ve said it’s what I want.’
I’m a very practical sort of conservationist. We’ve had a lot of success building relationships with companies on the corporate social responsibility track: Ikea, Sainsbury’s, BT, Disney Stores, E.ON. Yes, of course E.ON are the biggest polluter in the UK in terms of carbon emissions, but we’re the ones using their product. So if we can work with them to incentivise people to think about energy efficiency, that’s great. We find ways of working with businesses to mutual benefit, and because we’re doing that, we’re also able to influence them.
Before we can tell other countries not to cut down their forests, we need to get our own house in order. Ancient woodland now covers just two per cent of the UK. These are woodlands that are more than 400 years old and have never been ploughed. These are the equivalent of our rainforests and contain our most threatened species. They have very little protection, and are still being destroyed. We maintain a database of woods that are under threat from development; 500 woods are currently on that list.
You can cut down a tree that’s 500 years old without asking anyone. You wouldn’t be allowed to do this with a 500-year-old building. You wouldn’t even be allowed to paint its windows without asking English Heritage for approval. The planning system could deliver all of the protection we need. There could be legislation that says that you can’t destroy ancient woodland, but it could also be made a consideration at planning, which it isn’t now.
The natural environment gets attention through water legislation, agricultural frameworks, planning legislation, but it doesn’t have its own legislation, and there isn’t a presumption that you need to take the natural environment into account as a first consideration. It becomes a default consideration: ‘Are we going to destroy anything by doing this development?’ Instead, we should be saying, ‘How can we enhance the natural environment?’
Although there is evidence that biodiversity is likely to be richer if you have a mosaic of habitats, I don’t believe in slavishly keeping every piece of heathland free of trees [by reintroducing grazing]. That’s a bit controversial in the conservation world because people are very focused on certain species, certain birds, certain butterflies. But we’re about habitat: creating healthy habitats in which lots of species will flourish.
Geography made me aware of the complex web of relationships in the natural world. I remember a description of the planet being like a spaceship held together by lots of nuts and bolts. You might think you can afford to lose some of them without anything going too wrong, but gradually the structure will weaken and you’ll reach a point where it can’t be maintained and the spaceship will fall out of the sky.
Curriculum vitae
1966 Born in Morden, Surrey
1977-84 Greenshaw high School, Sutton, Surrey
1984-87 MA (Hons) in geography at the university of Cambridge
1990 Diploma of Management, Henley School of Management
1995-96 Project manager, Wirral Green Alliance
1996-99 Property manager, the National Trust
1999-2001 Area manager, the National Trust
2001-02 Head of change programme, the National Trust
2002-05 Business administration director, the National Trust
2005-present Chief executive, the Woodland Trust
August 2009
For more information, visit www.woodlandtrust.org.uk
August 2009
Geography was my favourite subject at school. I had a very good teacher who offered to work with me outside of school hours so I could get into the University of Cambridge.
I think geography is a great subject because it’s very general and can lead you down a whole load of different avenues. Geography gives you a good grounding as you go through life – not just to find the right career but to find those things that interest you and connect you to the world around you.
I started travelling while I was at university. Then, after four or five years working for Shell, I took voluntary redundancy and spent six months volunteering on an environmental project in Africa and then spent 18 months travelling around the world.
It got backpacking out of my system. I wasn’t trying to overdo it, but I sort of did. I eventually began to question travel for travel’s sake. I began to miss the sense of productivity you get from work, or having a home, a garden. Travel can be a very superficial thing, just being on a conveyor belt looking at things, not taking part in life, not really getting beneath the surface experience.
Even in my mid-30s, I was still thinking, ‘I wonder what I’m going to do when I grow up.’ But while I was working at the National Trust, a mentor asked me, ‘What’s your ideal job?’ and I said chief executive of the Woodland Trust. So then I had one of those moments where I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to go and get this now because I’ve said it’s what I want.’
I’m a very practical sort of conservationist. We’ve had a lot of success building relationships with companies on the corporate social responsibility track: Ikea, Sainsbury’s, BT, Disney Stores, E.ON. Yes, of course E.ON are the biggest polluter in the UK in terms of carbon emissions, but we’re the ones using their product. So if we can work with them to incentivise people to think about energy efficiency, that’s great. We find ways of working with businesses to mutual benefit, and because we’re doing that, we’re also able to influence them.
Before we can tell other countries not to cut down their forests, we need to get our own house in order. Ancient woodland now covers just two per cent of the UK. These are woodlands that are more than 400 years old and have never been ploughed. These are the equivalent of our rainforests and contain our most threatened species. They have very little protection, and are still being destroyed. We maintain a database of woods that are under threat from development; 500 woods are currently on that list.
You can cut down a tree that’s 500 years old without asking anyone. You wouldn’t be allowed to do this with a 500-year-old building. You wouldn’t even be allowed to paint its windows without asking English Heritage for approval. The planning system could deliver all of the protection we need. There could be legislation that says that you can’t destroy ancient woodland, but it could also be made a consideration at planning, which it isn’t now.
The natural environment gets attention through water legislation, agricultural frameworks, planning legislation, but it doesn’t have its own legislation, and there isn’t a presumption that you need to take the natural environment into account as a first consideration. It becomes a default consideration: ‘Are we going to destroy anything by doing this development?’ Instead, we should be saying, ‘How can we enhance the natural environment?’
Although there is evidence that biodiversity is likely to be richer if you have a mosaic of habitats, I don’t believe in slavishly keeping every piece of heathland free of trees [by reintroducing grazing]. That’s a bit controversial in the conservation world because people are very focused on certain species, certain birds, certain butterflies. But we’re about habitat: creating healthy habitats in which lots of species will flourish.
Geography made me aware of the complex web of relationships in the natural world. I remember a description of the planet being like a spaceship held together by lots of nuts and bolts. You might think you can afford to lose some of them without anything going too wrong, but gradually the structure will weaken and you’ll reach a point where it can’t be maintained and the spaceship will fall out of the sky.
Curriculum vitae
1966 Born in Morden, Surrey
1977-84 Greenshaw high School, Sutton, Surrey
1984-87 MA (Hons) in geography at the university of Cambridge
1990 Diploma of Management, Henley School of Management
1995-96 Project manager, Wirral Green Alliance
1996-99 Property manager, the National Trust
1999-2001 Area manager, the National Trust
2001-02 Head of change programme, the National Trust
2002-05 Business administration director, the National Trust
2005-present Chief executive, the Woodland Trust
August 2009
For more information, visit www.woodlandtrust.org.uk
August 2009
