‘I’ve always wanted to do something that mitigates the impact of human activity’

Ian has been a Prospect member since 2018, and works as a Fieldwork Officer at Kew Gardens. What does being in a trade union mean to him? “It’s important to have a collective bargaining and negotiating power rather than to fight issues on your own,” he says.

He works on a project called the UK National Tree Seed project which is based at the Millennium Seed Bank and he does a lot of important work for this: “I’m currently working on planning seed collection trips across the UK,” says Ian. “I’m currently trawling through botanical records, flicking through maps, trying to find where our target populations exist and we’ll go to the locations and try and collect the seeds.”

Ian loves what he does and is proud of things he has achieved while working at Kew: “I’m most proud of the seed collecting that we’ve done over the past year,” he says, “We’ve managed to collect seed from 300 individual trees which will go some way to add to the 14 million already banked by the project.”

“Our job is to conserve the genetic diversity that is here now,” Ian says. He is passionate about the environment and being able to play his part in looking after it is of great importance to him.