The “Georgian” Welsh poet W. H. Davies (1871-1940) wrote the much-loved lines:
What is this life, if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad day light,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
This is Leisure, a modern sonnet (in his 1911 Songs of Joy and Others), in a long tradition of poetry that reflects on nature, including Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. I’ll hardly be the first to observe that modern life is very far from tranquil, or that people rush through parks or countryside looking only at a tiny screen, or talking on the telephone. (John Fox’s My Musical World, a lifetime in music, page 252, for example.) It’s interesting that Davies anticipated this view of modern life by a century. If we were transported back to 1911, we would surely find it a slow, peaceful and carefree existence, at least if we were lucky enough to be out of poverty. It is striking that the poet’s sensitivity picked up the acceleration and lack of awareness of nature that go with Western culture, all the way back then in Edwardian times.
How nice to come across a politician who actually understands about human impact on the environment:
Ultimately fracking cannot be compatible with our long-term commitments to cut climate-changing emissions unless full-scale carbon capture and storage technology is rolled out rapidly, which currently looks unlikely.
Sure enough, a specially-tamed pro-fracking scientist, Quentin Fisher, accused the Committee of “putting the ‘ill-informed views of anti-fracking groups’ ahead of evidence-based scientific studies.” Quite what evidence he thinks he has for believing that carbon emissions don’t contribute to climate change is unclear. Of course gas is not as bad as coal, but since coal is on the way out in the UK anyway, the comparison is spurious: the choice is gas, nuclear, or renewables.
In her new book she [Naomi Klein] turns her guns on capitalism’s role in climate change. She argues that “we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because these things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism… We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”
On this central point, Klein is undoubtedly right.
But it’s difficult to spot climate change as it happens, because it moves so spasmodically and is by its nature “place-based”. What do I know about the mines of Nauru or gas flares on the Niger Delta? What can I do about flooding in the Maldives or New Orleans? “Sacrifice zones” is what Klein chillingly calls the places most depredated: “Poor places. Out-of-the-way places. Places where residents lack political power, usually having to do with some combination of race, language and class.” But even in the rich world, most people don’t notice the dwindling of nature in their parks and gardens; or if they do, they are so sickened, they have to stop noticing right away. Which is why Klein sees the living wage as a climate issue. The main reason so many people are so careless is because they are worn out.
The Apollo butterfly, Parnassius apollo, extinct in Britain
One of the odd things about British attitudes to nature is that the right-wing [Daily] Telegraph newspaper has such good graphic coverage of many issues, such as the ongoing extinction of species in England over the past two centuries. The gallery of beautiful photographs is shocking for its immediacy: there are species I’ve seen, and others I feel I should have, like the Red-Backed Shrike (1988). The Scottish Wildcat is not quite extinct in Scotland — I’ve been lucky enough to glimpse one, as far from anywhere with domestic cats as is now possible in Britain — but has gone from England. Here are birds and butterflies, weevils and the handsome Blue Stag Beetle (1839). The lovely Apollo butterfly is one of 421 species we have already lost.
Local extinction isn’t quite as bad as the ‘real thing’ — extinction from the planet, the fate of the unhappily flightless Great Auk (1820s), hunted until it was gone. It was simply too easy for anyone with a boat to collect a bird or two for their dinner, and this magnificent bird was gone for ever.
That’s the point, really: the reasons for each extinction are banal, stupid. The Red-Backed Shrike was wiped out by three things.
First was the steady nibbling away of its heathland habitat for farmland and housing.
Alongside this was the intensification of agriculture — destroying “useless” and “waste” corners of scrubland, “improving” grazing with fertilizer and so (unintentionally or not) allowing taller grasses to outcompete all the flowers of the meadow; and in turn that did away with many of the insects on which Shrikes prey, if they had not been destroyed by insecticides applied to nearby arable crops.
Finally, the illegal collection of eggs, of what was towards the end a very rare and therefore perversely tempting target, helped to eliminate what conservationists, nature-lovers and egg-collectors all presumably agreed was a beautiful and exciting species.
In short, progress or development (call it what you like), greed and stupidity — in equal measure — threw away something we all loved.
Trichodes alvearius, still common enough in the Dordogne
A handsome Soldier Beetle like Trichodes alvearius, for instance, is common enough in continental Europe. When I photographed it in France, I knew I’d never seen it in Britain, but supposed it had never lived here. Discovering that it went extinct in the 19th century — that my great-grandfather might well have seen it as he strode about the countryside as a boy — is poignant.
In fact another species of Trichodes, T. apiarius (if this reminds you of bees, you are right: the name means ‘of bee-hives’, as does ‘alvearius’: both species frequent hives, their larvae growing there, feeding on bee larvae), was also driven to extinction here (1830).
The corncrake (1990s), the chequered skipper (1976), the Mazarine blue (1903), the large copper (1864), the large tortoiseshell (about 1953), the Norfolk damselfly (1958), the Burbot (1900s), the greater mouse-eared bat, mosses, moths, sawflies, shrimps, spiders, snails, flowers, grasses, ferns, solitary wasps, the roll-call of doom drones on and on.
If we do nothing there is no doubt at all what will happen, not only in Britain but across the planet. In the plain words of the Lost Life Project:
The world is currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction event, caused largely by human activities that continue to damage and destroy biodiversity across the globe.
But the point is, there is hope. If we press for help for our rarest species, we may yet save them. Some species like the corncrake have with help come back from the brink, and can be found in a few lucky places.
How to press? Lobby your local MP. Speak to the other candidates. Ask them what they will do for nature. Will they ensure that all the schoolchildren in their constituency get a chance to see a nature reserve, go pond-dipping, hear birdsong? Will they insist on gardens for hospitals, hospices, and old people’s homes to assist with healing and wellbeing? Discuss it on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, with your friends. Join a conservation group, a pressure group. Give some money. If you can’t think of anything better, sign a petition! There are plenty more sharp questions you can ask (feel free to ask me for some more suggestions).
While inveighing against all things Brussels, the English gentleman was able to take the fullest advantage of the Common Agricultural Policy, developing the agribusiness of the seventies and eighties, expanding subsidized yields by grubbing up hedges and copses, ploughing up verges and making vast stretches of monoculture kept sterile by aerial doses of pesticide. As a result, millions who grew up before this onslaught mourn the loss of grasshoppers, skylarks, the songthrush, even the common [house] sparrow, and many unseen others, which their children will never know. The countryside of Shakespeare and his successors in all the arts, Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Lark Ascending’, for instance, no longer has a true point of reference.
— Maureen Duffy. England. The Making of the Myth from Stonehenge to Albert Square. Fourth Estate, 2001. Page 250.
Responsibly-caught scallops on a fishmonger’s slab. Supermarkets are often not so careful
With the possible exception of dynamite fishing, it would be hard to devise a more effective means of destroying both living creatures and their habitats. Scallop dredges operate by raking through the seabed with long metal teeth, dislodging the shellfish from the sediments and trapping them in a net whose underside is made of chain mail. The teeth rip through any sedentary creatures in their path, as well as the fish, crabs and lobsters unable to escape in time. The steel mesh smashes animals missed by the teeth. Where they are used, divers publish heartbreaking photographs of the seabed before and after they have passed. It looks, where the dredges have worked, like a ploughed field, lifeless, covered in fragments of shell.
— George Monbiot. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. Penguin, 2014. Page 252.
Eating Swordfish, Halibut, King Prawns is Hypocrisy
King Prawns
We rightly deplore the apparent unconcern with which [Bluefin Tuna] is being driven to extinction. But it is not a world apart from the habits of liberal, well-educated people I know in Britain – friends and relatives among them – who, despite widespread coverage of the impacts of unsustainable fishing on television and in the newspapers they read, continue to buy species such as swordfish, halibut and king prawns, which are either in dire trouble or whose exploitation causes great ecological damage.
— George Monbiot. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. Penguin, 2014. Page 246.
I have an unhealthy obsession with sheep. It occupies many of my waking hours and haunts my dreams. I hate them. Perhaps I should clarify that statement. I hate not the animals themselves, which cannot be blamed for what they do, but their impact on both our ecology and our social history. Sheep are the primary reason – closely followed by grouse shooting and deer stalking – for the sad state of the British uplands. Partly as a result of their assaults, Wales now possesses less than one-third of the average forest cover of Europe. Their husbandry is the greatest obstacle to the rewilding I would like to see.
— George Monbiot. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. Penguin, 2014. Pages 154-155.
But the loss of these individual species pales in comparison to current trends of animal extinction. The large-scale destruction of habitat, the degradation of water and soil quality, the pollution of the air, and the loss of rain forests and coral reefs are wreaking global havoc on biodiversity. The butterflies and parrots of the Amazon are no longer as numerous or diverse as Bates found them, and if Darwin returned to the Galapagos Islands he would find that the very symbol of the islands, the Galapagos tortoise, as well as the large ground finch and sharp-beaked ground finch, have gone extinct on some islands. Under relentless human assault, Nature’s forms are not endless, nor are the most beautiful being spared.
What a tragic irony, that the more we understand of biology, the less we have of it to learn from and to enjoy. What will be the legacy of this new century — to cherish and protect Nature, or to see butterflies and zebras and much more vanish into legend like the thylacine, moa, and dodo?
— Sean B. Carroll. Endless Forms Most Beautiful. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006. Pages 303-304, 304.
