“The Don has been used and abused – but water gives life" ~ Owen Hodgkinson

Right to Thrive explores local people's connections to the River Don through a collection of generative interviews. In this series we encourage people to question extractive, human-centred views of nature in favour of recognising and celebrating its right to thrive.

Community Organising Manager at Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust Owen Hodgkinson tells us how his work brings him into contact with the River Don, and thinking about nature equity, multi-species justice and new ways of valuing the natural world.

Owen Hodgkinson

First of all, thank you for talking to us Owen. Can you tell me a bit about the work you do Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust, especially as it relates to the River Don?

I'm a Community Organising Manager at the Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust, and that takes me into work with a wide array of communities represented across Sheffield and Rotherham.

And some of the movement building work that we do is outside the sphere of traditional conservation activities on our nature reserves.

A big part of what we're doing at the trust is engaging individuals and communities in the widest sense, to connect with and take action on nature's behalf, I suppose. And we’re small enough for that to be quite place based and situated, as we've got multi-year relationships with voluntary organisations or individual groups and other people taking action that's often done through us or is you know, increasingly being done through Nature Recovery Sheffield or Nature Recovery Rotherham movements, which came together in the last couple of years.

They pushed for both councils to declare a nature emergency as well as a climate emergency, which they had already declared, so I guess that's the angle I push on from the community organising perspective.

Some of these communities border water, some of them border woodlands, some of them border motorways, they are more or less connected, as you might describe it, to the nature that's available to us, which obviously isn't distributed evenly across the city.

So I guess my role comes back to looking at and dealing with and recognising that inequity, for whatever reason it occurs.

Largely, it's an east and west picture in Sheffield. If you're living on the west of the city, we all know we're called the Outdoor City, it's easier to get that experience if you're living in the west as opposed to the east of the city. And then Rotherham changes again. It's a very green place but in some respects, the quality of nature… There's a whole theory of what kind of quality are you exposed to in nature? And its benefits for health and wellbeing really differ.

Some people aren't afforded as much of that connection.

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