I started posting on Substack a couple of years ago, when the melancholy of lockdown made it impossible for me to distract myself from my growing despair about the damage being done to the natural world. It was clear that all the wildlife was disappearing; as a boy naturalist I had taken a keen interest, and I still have the old notebooks listing the birds I saw and the nests I found, but now when I walked out there was little to see but crows and blackbirds, and the odd pigeon. Most of the people in the first village I can remember worked near to their homes in the countryside, and although our forebears had worked hard to eliminate all the creatures labelled vermin, it was still a countryside where grass-snakes and hedgehogs were commonplace, where the summers brought swallows and swifts and cuckoos in their millions. There were turtle doves in the hedgerows, and curlews, larks and peewits in the fields. It was, in short, still the English countryside that we had loved for hundreds of years, tamed and domesticated as it was. It was not a wilderness; even the wild places were really man made deserts, but we had grown to love it and it seemed stable. There were still poppies in the cornfields, and wildflower meadows full of the buzz of insects. It was a lovely place to live.
Some years ago, having moved a couple of miles to the cottage where I live today, I realised that I had never met one of my next-door neighbours, so I went to see her and introduced myself. A couple of years later I told someone about this and realised that I hadn’t seen her since. If she had died I might no more have known than if we had both lived in a tower block in an anonymous city. There are a few people in the village who are true locals, one surname that may go back to the time of the enclosures, but most of the people here have moved out because they were attracted by the idea of life or retirement in the countryside. Their view of the countryside has to be superficial; even beauty is superficial, after all, and I suspected that few of them had any idea of what was actually going on. They had not had my dubious advantage of remembering what the countryside was like sixty or seventy years ago. The first piece I wrote for Substack was about Shifting Baseline Syndrome, the idea that every generation adjusts its idea of the health or beauty of nature with reference to how it seemed when they first began to take notice, so that each generation’s loss becomes the new generation’s normal. To people who had never taken much interest in nature, the loss of the beauty of poppies in the cornfields, of swallows or cuckoos bringing summer with them, or of mayflies courting above rafts of water crowfoot on the river, did not affect their enjoyment of the beauty of the countryside because they did not remember the beauty that was lost.
I started writing because I wanted people to know that the countryside had been eviscerated, not to spoil their fun but because it seemed to me that nothing was going to change if people didn’t realise what was going on. They had their bird feeders and were maybe members of the RSPB or the Nature Trust. Maybe they watched Springwatch, which seemed calculated to create the illusion of thriving ecosystems filmed in wildlife hotspots with cameras on every nest. There were no uncomfortable facts; in earlier years there was a ridiculous feature where Chris Packham entered an antique Airstream caravan and mutated into a bird nerd. (One wants to spell this berd nerd, or maybe bird nird, but that’s English for you). This ridiculous pantomime was devised because the producers thought we just wanted a glorified bird table. They were embarrassed about giving us too many facts. I wanted information, and thankfully the programme slowly changed so that Chris was able to give us information, some of which was about the losses of biodiversity; it would have been dishonest not to give out that sort of information in a country with one of the worst losses of biodiversity in the world. But this honesty irritated those who are making money by destroying the natural world, and a result of their lobbying Autumnwatch has been axed, and the other Watches are probably on notice not to give too much inconvenient information to the licence payers of this democracy.
When I started writing my aims were quite limited. I wanted to raise awareness of biodiversity loss in people who, I suspected, were sublimely unaware of it, as long as the verges and the hedges were trimmed and the sun shone now on then on the waving monocultures in the fields. Not to get them down, but because change does not happen without raised consciousness. I tried to amuse people with my writing too; no point in them getting depressed and switching off. Above all I tried to avoid politics. In that spirit I went to see my MP. The best thing one might say of him is that he is a loyal foot-soldier of his party, never seeming to have any problem voting for whatever his party wants him to vote for, apparently lacking any inconveniently original thoughts or ideas. I suggested to him that, where once the left and the right stood for ideas that were thought of as diametrically opposed, so opposed that change seemed impossible without revolution, nowadays the situation facing us as the world warmed up suggested that we were all equally in danger and thus also on the same side and should not evaluate climate policies on party lines but as humans with a shared future (or lack of it). I suggested we should all aim to work together to agree on changes that would be for the good of all and of the planet, and drop our petty party politics. We needed coalition and cooperation, and a bloodless revolution in the way we led our lives. We should agree to consign bloody violent revolutions to history.
You can imagine how well that vision went down with Sir Bill. And when I emailed him about the state of the River Wye, his response made it quite clear that he is intellectually more suited to dealing with constituents who are worried about dog shit than by the complex causes of the damage to the lovely rivers in his constituency, being destroyed by hundreds of thousands of tons of chicken shit. Sir Bill is very much a business as usual kind of man. If platitudes could save the Wye he’d save it.
Big business has driven the creeping poisoning of the countryside by agricultural chemicals. From my point of view the issues are quite simple because no matter how one obfuscates by discussing food production and crop yields there is actually no future in dousing the living planet with biocides and expecting it to be able to feed us while it lies dying. But the issues can be muddied very easily in the minds of ‘business as usual’ people like Sir Bill. The river issue is much starker, much clearer, because behind the damage to the rivers is one company, Cargill, answerable to almost no-one except the 18 or so family members who own it, who are ruthlessly dominating global food systems and profiting from the destruction of precious ecosystems worldwide in order that they can become richer billionaires than they were last year. Evidently their mindless acquisition of wealth is more important than the survival of the Brazilian Cerrado region, the ecology of the Wye Valley and anything else that gets in the way.
It is hard to start off lamenting and describing the loss of wildlife in one’s village without eventually coming to some fairly revolutionary conclusions, when giant corporations like Cargill are so clearly devoid of any ethical principles and powerful enough to suborn any democracy that tries to rein them in. Especially tonight, reading that our national treasure Sir David Attenborough is to be allowed on television to show us the richness of our wildlife, filmed with huge difficulty and expense on a few offshore islands and in other remote spots where it can still be found, but not allowed to include in this series the last episode dealing with the causes of the massive losses of biodiversity in these islands. You can be sure that what Sir David wanted us to hear was meticulously fact checked by the experts on the staff of the RSPB, the WWF and so on, who were involved in the filming. The issue is not about whether the programme tells the truth, but that this truth is inconvenient to those who profit from damaging our countryside. Our national public service broadcaster, that we pay for, has decided not to transmit factual information about the risks to our environment and to our planet (and ultimately, of course, life on Earth), because big business doesn’t like it. The same people who pushed for Autumnwatch to be dropped, the same people who profit from the industrialised destruction of our countryside.
We need as never before a way of living that meets our needs fairly, and looks after the planet. If you were to start to devise such a system now it would not look at all like capitalism. Developing such a system would be rewarding and exciting, but if we cannot even hear national treasure Sir David talking about the loss of biodiversity on our public broadcasting network, it would be foolish to think we can make these changes without a fight.
Driving over Wenlock Edge, Wheathill and then taking the back lanes home, I was struck by my usual dilemma. I saw such beauty in the ermine clad hills, the pines chevron of snow, while knowing that the lapwings and fieldfares were gone.
We are going to "the big one" in London on April 21st, a protest against the damage done by Big Business to our World. I hold little hope that it will achieve anything, but at least we can register our feelings. .I admire your tireless work to educate people and will continue to read your excellent work
You are so right about the shifting baseline. It is so very difficult to fight and be heard and understood. Thank you for making me think and consider what I can do.