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.
The love of Nature is deep in England. And I think that what is behind this love is the instinct that Nature has a secret for us, and answers our questions. Take that foxglove over there… It stands singly where there had been such a wonderful display of bluebells that it then looked as if a section of the sky had been established upon earth… That foxglove with its series of petal-made thimbles held up for sale to the bees, puts me at ease upon the subject of — progress. It is quite obvious that the foxglove cannot be improved… The fact is we get perfection in this form and in that form… There is no point in our gazing raptly into the future for paradise if it is at our feet.
—John Stewart Collis, The Worm Forgives the Plough. Vintage, 2009. page 253.
The Worm Forgives the Plough, by John Stewart Collis (Vintage Classics edition)
I turn off the road, enter the wood, and sit down under the tree. The sun gleams upon everything, there is glittering and shining everywhere. A green caterpillar is lowered down by an invisible thread in front of me, and as it swings about, the sun shines through its transparency… A bush over there is glittering with rain-drops, little white lanterns fastened to the lower side of twigs; but if I swing my head slightly to one side, some of those lights turn colour, becoming red and purple…
We have invented a word for it: beauty. I am surrounded here with law, order, and beauty, and am myself absolutely happy here… I begin to grasp the obvious fact that this place is — perfect. And suddenly I realize where I am! I am in the Garden of Eden.
—John Stewart Collis, The Worm Forgives the Plough. Vintage, 2009. pages 232-233.
Without wishing to question the wisdom of the Ancient Greeks, with their six kinds of love, I do think they missed out one of the most crucial varieties. And that is love for the natural world, for the wilds from which we sprung and of which we are still — though we may fight against the idea — a part.
I am drawn to the concept of ‘biophilia’, the idea that we have an innate need to be in contact with nature. It strikes me that the word could be used to express the seventh variety of love. Clearly we need those other varieties — erotic love, the love of friends, playful love, pragmatic love, self-love and universal love. But I believe we also need love of nature.
—Hugh Warwick, The Beauty in the Beast: Britain’s Favourite Creatures and the People Who Love Them. Simon & Schuster, 2012. page 305.
— Maureen Duffy. England. The Making of the Myth from Stonehenge to Albert Square. Fourth Estate, 2001. Page 250.
