Today we chat to Savita Willmott who is the Chief Executive of the Natural History Consortium, a charitable collaboration of organisations connecting audiences and the natural world. And they have recently launched a project in bristol to help take care and spread awareness of bristols environment.
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00:00So I'm Savita Wilmot and I'm Director of the Natural History Consortium which is a charity
00:06and we put on Festival of Nature each year. And tell me a little bit about the Natural
00:12History Consortium. So the Natural History Consortium is a charity and it's a partnership
00:19of 14 organisations. So based here in the west of England and nationally and all of our partners
00:27work together kind of on a shared project which is connecting people and the natural world.
00:34And tell me a little bit about the Festival of Nature for anybody who doesn't know.
00:39So the festival has been running 21 years now amazingly. It started in Bristol and it now
00:47takes place right across the west of England so Bristol, Bath, South Gloucestershire,
00:52along the river and everywhere in between. And it's really about a celebration of the natural
00:58world. So we are you know really creating a platform for as many organisations as possible
01:05and the aim is really to raise awareness of you know nature and how people can take action for
01:11nature as well. Tell me why then, why is it important to raise awareness of nature?
01:18So we know that nature's in decline. That's you know the biggest thing for us. We also know that
01:25spending time in nature is good for us as people, for our mental health, for our physical health.
01:31And we think that lots of people might know about you know the big parks or the big kind of venues
01:37or sites next to them. So a lot of what we do at Festival of Nature is raising awareness of
01:43blue spaces. It's not just kind of green and parks but actually you know ponds and the harbour
01:49and lots of kind of blue spaces are good for us as well. And encouraging people to kind of create
01:55bits of nature, visit little bits of nature they might not have known about before.