Lavender Jones’s letter on the proposed cuts to the Booth Museum of Natural History’s service (Letters, January 2) is a powerful and informed call for action.

We live, now, in a world where nightingales, swallows, cuckoos, and even starlings and Sparrows are disappearing from our parks and gardens. Today, finding field mushrooms or cowslips in the countryside is a red letter day, when our grandparents took them wholly for granted.

We are living, indeed, through the biggest mass extinction of the world’s wildlife since the death of the dinosaurs. Yet this is the time that Brighton and Hove City Council wants to slash the Booth Museum’s service.

The Booth Museum’s work is central to the task of combating the extinctions that impoverish our world.

Its education, monitoring, surveying, recording and analysis is crucial to the task of turning the decline in biodiversity around.

The proposed cuts to the museum would be added to the recent cuts in the conservation mowing service for our wildlife-rich Downs grasslands. Yet, at the same time, the council is hypocritically seeking to have the city designated as a Biosphere Reserve – which implies the highest standards of sustainability in all aspects of nature.

If we care about the kind of world our grandchildren are to inherit we must fight to preserve and expand services such as the Booth Museum and all our practical conservation services.

Halting these cuts is part of a much wider fight. We need the unity of all those threatened by the attempts of the major parties to make nature and the poor pay the price for the crisis of unsustainable capitalism.

David Bangs, Ewhurst Road, Brighton