The coronavirus pandemic has taught us some urgent lessons about our relationship with nature, writes Hugh Somerleyton, one of the founding trustees of the WildEast conservation movement.

As we emerge blinking into the steely April sunshine, free at last to resume lives that have been heartbroken, shattered and entombed for much of the past year, we would do well to heed two lessons.

Firstly – these confinements and restrictions, this inability to move freely across the region to work, love and play – mirror exactly the state of nature across the WildEast.

Confined to small redoubts, unable to breed, unable to breath, dissected by unforgiving and restless roads; what we have experienced during the pandemic is nature’s every day.

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Is it any wonder then, deprived of free movement and the opportunity to thrive, nature is hollowed out and hopeless – as we would be if this extraordinary pandemic went on for the span of half a human life.

There will never be a better live lesson in the havoc we have wreaked on nature than the havoc nature has wrought on us. Covid-19 is nature’s red card, make no mistake.

The second lesson is bitter sweet. It is impossible not to have been moved by the extraordinary unity of human spirit, coming together to protect the vulnerable, save lives and defeat Covid-19.

But not enough column inches have been dedicated to the fact that we humans caused this pandemic, through our relentless invasion and destruction of wild habitat and bringing us to the brink of mass extinctions.

It is the physical proximity of humans to nature that allows for diseases like Covid to jump from animals to humans. All this through not giving nature the space it needs to thrive.

In short, we have become "too human" and no longer appear able to share our planet with any other species.

If we had given those species and our planet 0.1pc of the love, respect and collective responsibility we have given ourselves there would be no Covid-19, no climate catastrophe, no threat of mass extinctions.

All species are unconsciously programmed to survive, none more ruthlessly than us humans - but we also have the extraordinary gift of a conscience.

So as we emerge from lockdown triumphant, we should feel a great burden of guilt and an enormous collective sense of responsibly to entirely reset our relationship with our planet and those we share it with.

It couldn’t be more eloquently put than by French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau: "For most of human history man has had to fight nature to survive, in this century he is beginning to realise in order to survive, he must protect it".

The WildEast covenant is simple, nature needs 20pc of our hard-working landscapes to thrive, to be abundant and content.

So let’s give it back and in so doing repay our debt to nature, learn to live lives of coexistence and, therefore. compromise.

The WildEast Map of Dreams is a visual feast of our collective efforts to save nature, to share what Sir David Attenborough called "our witness statement to a life on our planet".

The Duke of Cambridge talked about the need for climate change to be a message of hope. We can do this.

WildEast supports this - but with hope we need action. So as we celebrate beating Covid and indulge in much-missed free movement and socialising, together let us beat the crisis in nature too.

Only together we are WildEast. Only together we can do this.