I was blessed to grow up in Shropshire. I may not always have thought it was a blessing – when you’re a teenager and what you want most in the world is access to all the temptations a giant city has to offer, then a rural idyll tucked along the Welsh border is not necessarily your first choice  But now, every time I go back to visit my parents there, I think again what a wonderful place it is.   If you’ve never been, picture the opening scenes of Lord of the Rings. It’s that beautiful. I am completely smitten.

Nearby are the striking mountains of Snowdonia, where I went on adventurous school trips and where my wife and I went walking last year, and across the county border in Staffordshire is the vast expanse of Cannock Chase, where I broke my arm when I was six (although I don’t hold that against the park).

I mention these places because they are all, rightly, protected for us and for future generations. But that protection doesn’t come from national law – it comes from the EU’s Nature Directives, bold and far-reaching legislation aimed at protecting our vital wildlife. Before those European laws were introduced, the UK was losing 15% of its protected sites every year. That figure is now down to just below 1%. And if you think that a Tory government outside the EU would still protect the countryside in this way, then it’s worth remembering that George Osborne described these protections as “placing ridiculous costs on British businesses” (a claim his own government discovered to be unfounded).

Some of the most beautiful, quintessentially British areas of the countryside – Snowdonia, Cannock Chase, Dartmoor and many more – therefore owe their status to our membership of the EU.

And it’s not just on land that we have reason to be grateful for being part of the Union. The air we breathe is going to get cleaner too.   This isn’t just a nice-sounding thing to have. Every year, over 23,000 people die sooner than they should have done because of unacceptably high levels of nitrous oxide in the air. That’s appalling – and unsurprisingly, the nitrous oxide itself doesn’t really care whether the air it’s polluting is over the territory of the UK, or France, or anywhere else.

If we want cleaner air, then we need to act together – and the EU has introduced new legislation requiring just that. Labour MEPs like my boss, Anneliese Dodds, and Seb Dance are campaigning to make sure these new laws are now properly enforced.

The quality of air isn’t only important for us. As the RSPB has pointed out, there is categorical evidence that endangered species of birds, singled out for protection by the EU, are faring much, much better than they would be if those laws were not in place. It is undeniable that EU laws, while they can no doubt be improved and better enforced, are working to protect wildlife.

Lastly, British beaches and seas are in a better state because the UK is a member of the EU. The EU has introduced something called the Bathing Water Directive. OK, it sounds like a typically dull Brussels initiative. But it has resulted in 99% of all bathing waters around the UK coast meeting minimum standards for water quality. That’s up from a frankly hideous 27% in 1990. I was eight in 1990, and spent a significant part of my summer holidays swimming in the Channel. I shudder to think about quite what I might have been swimming alongside.

With this level of European level protection – and with a Conservative administration at home whose days of hugging huskies and promising to be the ‘greenest government ever’ are well behind them – it’s little wonder that environmental charities like the RSPB and Friends of the Earth, and respected publications like Nature magazine, are all queuing up to argue that we should stay in the European Union.

So however you are about to spend your Easter holidays – be it climbing mountains, walking through green pastures, braving a first dip in the sea, or just breathing in air that you hope isn’t going to shorten your life in any way – it will be a more pleasant experience because we are a member of the EU.