16th March 2013

At the recent launch of the Save the Bees Campaign at the Palaces of Westminster, Sam Burcher had a chat with Bill Oddie writer, musician, comedian and ornithologist, star of the BBC’s The Goodies, Springwatch and Autumnwatch.

SB:  Why is the Environmental Justice Foundation and PAN UK’s campaign Save the Bees so important?

Bill Oddie: I’ve been to several meetings, and not just about bees, but about badgers, and any amount of other things.  And it’s Owen Paterson (the current environment secretary) who is an absolute disaster, obviously a man of enormous arrogance and enormous ignorance.  I was at a meeting about badgers last year and he actually seems to me to have a campaign of his own to control wildlife. He was talking in a meeting yesterday with people wanting to re-introduce hunting with dogs and he said, “No one is keener than me to see the hunting act repealed, because I believe in the management of wildlife.”  Who does he think he is, God?!  Management is the biggest euphemism that you can come up with.  What it means is if something is in the way of making money, get rid of it, and he virtually said that as well.

It’s money, it’s all money.  It’s the same all over the world where the situation is destroying wildlife, natural areas and forests. The reason is to make money, there’s no question about that.  Whatever it is: whether it’s the poaching of lions and elephants, whether it’s chopping down rain forests.  It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s all the same.  It’s the people who already have got a lot of money making more money.  And that is precisely what all of Owen Paterson’s decisions are based on, some wealthy cronies in whatever industry we happen to be dealing with, in this case the pharmaceutical/pesticides industry.

SB:  What can we do?

Bill Oddie: Protest is the only thing you can do.  You can’t listen to Katherine Hamnett (see article Save the Bees), as much as I respect her passion about it. But you can’t say, “It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work” that’s a pretty bad attitude.  The truth is that sometimes protesting works, sometimes it doesn’t.  But sometimes it does and there’s no question about that.  Last year, we at least got a stay on the badger cull because of organised protesting from the people and the NGO’s and so on and so forth.  We’ve still got to fight it again now because of course Paterson is handing out the licences. 

SB:  Have we ever had a decent Environment Secretary and who would that be?

Bill Oddie: Oh, I think there have been, in the past.  Unfortunately, I was not very involved with it.  Like so many people I enjoyed wildlife, it was my job for a long time, but I wasn’t necessarily au fait with who actually did what.  You know, I’ve heard friends of mine, who had to be, because they worked in the area with politicians, local and national government mention people like John Selwyn Gummer who always got a good write up.

SB: What do you think has brought the plight of bees into people’s consciousnesses?

Bill Oddie: I don’t think it is in people’s consciousness yet, not at all.  I don’t think that the public are fully aware of it and it’s understandable.  It’s a very hard concept to grab that something as familiar and as small and as everyday is so important.  You know, it’s really hard.  I’ll give you a totally unbelievable statement from Albert Einstein, not personally to me, I never met him!  He actually said that if bees were to become extinct the aftermath of that would eventually be that the human race would become extinct and he’d calculated that it would take about 5-6 years.

SB:  How about doing a Bee Watch programme for the BBC?

Bill Oddie: Yes, of course, it’s a very good idea, but it isn’t up to me, it’s up to them.

Photo Bill Oddie (c) Sam Burcher 2013