Celebrities join forces in film trailer for new Wildlife Trusts campaign

Sir David Attenborough, Stephen Fry, Catherine Tate, Alison Steadman and Asim Chaudhry are supporting a new campaign from The Wildlife Trusts that calls for more help to restore nature. The Wildlife Trusts #WilderFuture campaign launches today (28 March) and will see an animated film trailer starring Wind in the Willows characters Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad play across 500 cinemas in the UK for the next week. The film is also being released on social media, and is available for viewing on the charity’s site. The trailer shows how the lives of Badger, Ratty, Mole and Toad are disrupted by roads, river pollution and intensive agriculture, and calls people to join the campaign by committing to play their part in nature’s recovery.     Currently there is no legislation to help nature recover, and The Wildlife Trusts aims to build support for strong environmental laws and for a Nature Recovery Network. The charity hopes that the trailer will inspire people to help by nature by contacting politicians to call for strong environmental laws to help nature recover, creating new homes for wildlife in their garden or local area, and checking out the events and volunteering opportunities at local Wildlife Trusts.   Stephanie Hilborne, CEO of The Wildlife Trusts, said: “We are a nation of nature-lovers, yet we live in one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. If we want to put nature into recovery we have to create a mass movement of people calling for change. Our film is a sad version of The Wind in the Willows – showing how Ratty and Toad have hit the buffers – but it ends with a message of real hope. It’s not too late to create strong laws which will help our wildlife make a comeback – and it’s not too late to establish a Nature Recovery Network which will enable us to plan a wilder future.” President Emeritus of The Wildlife Trusts and narrator of the film trailer, Sir David Attenborough added: “It is desperately sad that so much of our country’s wildlife has been lost since Kenneth Grahame wrote his wonderful book The Wind in the Willows. Of all the characters in the book it is hard to know whose descendants have suffered the most. Water Voles, Toads and Badger’s friends in the book, Hedgehogs, have all seen catastrophic declines. “I am backing The Wildlife Trusts’ campaign to rally people to secure a ‘wilder future’ by restoring large areas of wildlife habitat, in city and country. What we create may not look exactly like the countryside that Kenneth Grahame drew such inspiration from, but our wildlife won’t mind just so long as it has the places it needs to live and thrive. “As a society we know how to put meanders back into straightened rivers and how to build bridges for wildlife. We know which wild places we should be protecting and expanding. But we need ambitious new laws to ensure we do this, laws that ensure we map out nature’s recovery. Meanwhile we can all make a practical difference. Together we can make the next chapter for wildlife a happier one.”  

from UK Fundraising https://ift.tt/2WwWBdR