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People doing their bit for fish and moths

<span>Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian</span>
Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

The efforts of campaigners to highlight important issues can often be overlooked by a historical approach that focuses on individuals, often academics or politicians. An example is in the obituary of the biologist Victoria Braithwaite (Obituary, 9 November), which asserts that “until the early 2000s everyone knew that fish do not feel pain”. But almost 20 years earlier, we had produced and started to widely distribute a leaflet called Fish Feel Pain. And of course hundreds of thousands of people were already refusing to eat fish on those very grounds.

In that same era, our group and others were campaigning on a range of other matters – such as traffic pollution, junk food, the arms trade, non-renewable energy, single-use plastics, environmental destruction – which may have seemed marginal at the time but are now acknowledged as mainstream concerns.

While individuals make valuable contributions to human progress, it is generally the collective power and influence of grassroots cultural, ethical and political movements that first raise the issues and go on to make the real difference.
Dave Morris
London Greenpeace

• While moths may be showing a population drop nationally, Dr Callum Macgregor is correct to observe that the situation is not “almost hopeless” (Moth survey shows steady decline in Britain since 1980s, 12 November). The Allerton Project Research Farm in Leicestershire joined the same survey 25 years ago, while making changes to our farming and wildlife management. Since then, both the numbers and species diversity of moths have increased. Outside the common agricultural policy and with the right incentives, other farmers could turn this single result into a national trend.
Alastair Leake
Director of policy, Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust

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