Conference Highlights: Baroness Rosie Boycott

Baroness Rosie Boycott opened the conference with a thoughtful keynote address. She reflected on themes that would reappear throughout the day, beginning with the contrast between her own childhood memories of time spent in nature and what her grandchildren now experience.

Noting how dramatically these everyday landscapes have changed, she highlighted the importance of recognising that people’s sense of “normal” shifts as the environment deteriorates. This raises fundamental questions: Which normal are we trying to return to and how far back is that point?

Baroness Boycott introduced a bill to criminalise ecocide in the last UK Parliament. She recalled the first time she encountered the idea that nature might need legal representation. While it feels intuitive to imagine a grand tree deserving such protection, she asked the audience to also consider the smaller, easily overlooked forms of life.

Change, she emphasised, is not only a matter of policies or technology. It is also cultural. It demands that we rethink how we see and value the natural world.

She stressed that cases of ecocide should not be viewed in isolation; they are vast in scale and present across the globe.

This is why the ecocide bill matters: because it is an idea that takes root in your heart and because it helps build a legal framework capable of preventing some of the worst damage.

She concluded by reminding us that we cannot safeguard human rights, without protecting the living world on which all life depends.