The Sea and Me - talk be Tammy Smalley

Friday 31st January 2020

Tammy Smalley, Head of Conservation at the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust, gave us a talk entitled The Sea and Me. She told her autobiographical story of growing up near Skegness, steeped in the local environment of coastal Lincolnshire with the sea a dominant influence, how she came to learn so much about the complexity and variety of wildlife beneath the waves and took her knowledge to Whitehall to argue the case for better protection of the marine environment.

We were treated to a dazzling sequence of pictures of some of the less well-known creatures in our neighbourhood, the Sabellaria reefs, honeycomb worms, brittle stars, sea slugs and many more.

Tammy emphasised the importance of government policy, getting the new agricultural agreements right, for habitats on land and at sea for wildlife and for global heating mitigation. She emphasised the important examples of lowland peat lands and saltmarsh, more valuable than forest, for carbon sequestration, and the need to protect unique but largely unknown habitats such as the Silver Pit, a deep area of the North Sea to the south of the Dogger Bank once a deep lake, thousands of years ago when sea level was lower and much of the North Sea was dry land.

For anyone who missed this talk, you missed a treat. Tammy's self deprecating humour and wit are the perfect counterfoil for the seriousness of her science-backed message to those in positions of power and influence.