John Selborne
When Sir Neil Chalmers asked me if I would allow my name to go forward for appointment as Patron of the NBN Trust I was delighted to accept. I have followed the development of the NBN from its early days in the early 1990s when I chaired the Joint Nature Conservation Committee. Following the 1992 Rio Earth Summit the JNCC had a key role in developing a UK strategy for Biodiversity Action Planning , building on the Biological Records Centre which collated data from recording schemes throughout the country. The JNCC was one of the founding organisations which formed an informal consortium to carry forward the work of numerous voluntary recording schemes into the electronic age by initiating the NBN project.
At the same time as I chaired the JNCC I served on the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology and was a member of the sub-committee chaired by Lord Dainton which conducted an inquiry into Systematic Biology in 1992. Ten years later the Select Committee conducted a follow up report on Systematics and Taxonomy and then most unusually returned to the subject in 2008. I was the only peer to sit on all three enquiries. In each report we emphasised how critical it was to develop a national capability to monitor and record our biological diversity.
Perhaps however my initial enthusiasm stemmed from the happy chance that I live in the parish of Selborne, made famous by the eighteenth century naturalist Gilbert White who has inspired such diverse writers as Charles Darwin, Edward Thomas and W.H.Auden. When the JNCC organised a conference in 1994 on the Biodiversity Convention one speaker suggested that our National Action Plan should be modelled on Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne.
Since retiring from the JNCC I have served as chair of the Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and currently chair the board of the Living with Environmental Change partnership as well as the Advisory Board of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
I hope that I can help the NBN to influence the debate on how data capture and collation can best provide the evidence base for policy development in the United Kingdom, whether for land use policies, conservation management or for promoting a better understanding of our dependence on the diversity of life. While I remain a member of the House of Lords I will be only too pleased to continue to promote the NBN concept in parliament as often as the opportunity arises.
John Selborne
December 2011.