SINCE YOU’RE reading this supplement, I strongly suspect you of being a political radical. Because it is highly possible that you put peanuts out for the blue tits. There can be no more glaring sign of daring political unorthodoxy.

Any one who feeds the birds is expressing a desire to subvert the political thinking of the country and the world.

Feeding the blue tits is a clear signal that you have a concern for wildlife. That you think wildlife is a good thing; that you think wildlife should be conserved at the expense of other matters more obviously beneficial to yourself and to humankind.

And that is radical. It is not unusual, certainly not. There are vast numbers of people who feed blue tits and/or believe that wildlife matters, that non-human life is important and that conservation is a good thing.

There are, for example, more than one million members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The great majority do not consider themselves birdwatchers; they just think that birds are a good thing for their own sake, and that humans have a duty to ensure that they survive.

Conservation is never thought of as something that involves millions. The wildlife/conservation lobby is regarded as small, specialised and unrepresentative. The direct opposite is the case; most people, when asked, have all kinds of good feelings about non-human life. But those feelings are grossly under-represented.

Conservation groups are a little patronised, a little undervalued and a little bit inclined to be ignored. But all the same, they are representative of the feelings of most people, and all the people who have these feelings cannot be anything else but politically radical.

Not radical as in wishing to overthrow the Government, or change the political system. The whole business is much more radical than that. Those of us who value wildlife want to change the way that the country thinks. That starts with politicians. And there we have the problem.

Politicians cannot do anything but think in four or five-year chunks.

Anything outside such a time scale is beyond their remit and their self-interest. For a politician to think about a second term counts as wild long-term thinking, not to say the tempting of fate. To ask voters to compromise the next four years because of the benefits that will accrue during the next century sounds like political suicide. No politician will take that on.

George Bush, in one of the great betrayals of history, refused to take it on in Kyoto, and has pursued ever since his policy of long-term environmental damage in exchange for short-term good cheer among the electorate.

That is how politicians think and cannot help but think. But we, who feed blue tits, cannot help but have a wiser way of looking at things.

For the feeding of the birds implies, inexorably, a wish for a change in political thinking. Every peanut says that we think conservation is important and therefore, conservation should rise up the political agenda.

Each peanut implies that we are interested in the world that we will leave to our grandchildren. Each peanut implies that, like all living things, we have a vested interest in the survival of our genes, and that means an interest in a place suitable for their survival. Four years, five years, we instinctively reach beyond that. We are wiser than politicians, for we lack their specialist viewpoint.

The urge for conservation comes from three very powerful impulses. There is the feeling that conservation is our duty and one of stewardship. Then there is a feeling that conservation is a matter of self-interest. If we don’t look after our world, we will have nowhere decent to live, and nor will our descendants. And finally we feel that conservation should be carried out because we deeply wish to share our planet with non-human life.

Give or a receive a rose, pat a dog, walk in the park, listen to a blackbird, see the first primrose, watch the blue tit coming back for more — all these feelings represent a desire for conservation that may be deeper than we know. But it cannot be accomplished by means of a five-year vision.

What the bird-feeding radicals want is new priorities and a new political vision that looks at generations rather than electoral terms. And we want it quickly. We are running out of time.

We may end up being the cursed generation — the last generation that had a chance to do something, and failed. But that will not happen if the radicals get their way. So hang our your peanuts and remember that it is a revolutionary act.

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