Published on the gov.uk website on the 21st July 2017
From: Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and The Rt Hon Michael Gove MP

Secretary of State Michael Gove sets out his vision on the future of our natural environment

Safeguarding our future

It is a particular pleasure to be here today in WWF’s magnificent Living Planet Centre. It’s an inspirational example of how buildings can contribute to environmental sustainability. The WWF’s commitment to worldwide conservation, to robust research and to engaging people as well as policy makers in these critical issues has ensured it has provided a wonderful example of environmental leadership. I hope that we will continue to work closely together, and with other organisations represented here, as we forge our future approach to the environment.

In 1970, the incoming Conservative Government of Edward Heath created this country’s first Department of the Environment. The new Department published a White Paper on our natural heritage in 1972 which was entitled ‘How Do you Want to Live?’ The Department, with perhaps more idealism, or less due diligence, than has subsequently been the case in Government communications strategy, commissioned Philip Larkin to write a poetic prologue.

And his poem – subsequently titled ‘Going, Going’ – is a lament for the erosion and destruction of our natural environment under the pressures of corporate greed, devil take the hindmost individualism, and modernist brutalism.

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