The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (3 page)

She did so shortly after she and my father finally managed to find another home of their own, in the November of 1955, and we could leave Sunny Bank after all the discord and try to begin again, and she did so with a book. It was a Christmas present that year, prompted I imagine by my butterfly enthusiasm; but whereas Mary might have found me another book on Lepidoptera, Norah chose something else, and I wonder now what sure instinct led her to this, the first real story I encountered, with fully formed characters and a narrative; for I engaged with it at once.

It was an epic, in the old-fashioned, precise sense of the term: a long account of heroic adventures. But it was not large-scale, in the way that
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
are large-scale epics, mainly because its heroes were gnomes. It was called
The Little Grey Men
, and its author signed himself merely by initials, ‘BB’; his real name was Denys Watkins-Pitchford, although it was years before I found this out.

I was from the first page lost in the world of its principal characters, Dodder, Baldmoney, and Sneezewort (all named after rather uncommon English wild flowers). They were very small people, between a foot and eighteen inches tall, with long flowing beards; Dodder, the oldest, had a wooden leg. But they were different from the sort of gnomes you might expect to come across in the genre of High Fantasy which has so obsessed us in recent years, in
Harry Potter
and
The Lord of the Rings
and their imitators. They had no magical powers. They were grounded not in fantasy but in realism. Although they were able to converse with the wild creatures around them – the author’s one concession to the idea of gnomic difference – they lived, and struggled to live, in the world just as we do, concerned about finding
enough food and keeping warm. But there was more: they were a dying race. They were the last gnomes left in England.

I remember the shiver I experienced when I first read those words. I think it was an inchoate sense, even in a boy of eight, of the transfixing nature of the end of things. It was clear that they could not survive the creeping urbanisation and the modernisation of agriculture which even then were starting to spread across the countryside. They were anachronisms. The world had moved on from them: like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, their time was done. So much the braver, then, their decision to undertake a great adventure, to make an expedition to find their long-lost brother Cloudberry – ah, Cloudberry! So sad! – who had never returned after setting out one day to discover the source of the small Warwickshire river, the Folly Brook, on the banks of which they lived, in the capacious roots of an oak tree.

I was wholly captivated by their quest, and by its unexpected denouement; I was likewise captivated by
Down the Bright Stream
, the sequel, which I asked for and was given for Christmas the following year. (In the second book, the gnomes’ existential crisis reaches its climax; they address it in a most original way, ultimately successfully.) But I took in more than the story. I internalised, at first reading, the milieu in which the adventures took place. It was the very opposite of the milieu of
The Lord of the Rings
, with its dark lords and wizards, its fortresses and mountains, its vast clashing armies; it was merely Warwickshire, leafy Warwickshire, Shakespeare’s county, and the Folly Brook, with its kingfishers and otters and minnows, and its kestrels hovering above, a small and intimate and charming countryside with its small and intimate and charming creatures, vivid in their lives and their interactions; and I fell in love with them, and I fell in love with the natural world. I went beyond butterflies into the fullness of nature.

I was immensely lucky: I discovered it right at the end of what one might call the time of natural abundance (at least, in
my own country of England). It was several years before intensive farming would take a stranglehold on the land – before the detestable tide of organochlorine and organophosphate pesticides began to wash over it and burn it like acid burns a body – and something taken for granted but wonderful persisted still: natural profusion. There had been
lots
of butterflies on the buddleia, in the August when I first encountered them.

This is not childhood seen through rose-tinted binoculars. I remember it clearly. It was somehow at the heart of the attraction. I don’t think I could have been affected in the same way by a solitary red admiral, marvel of creation though it is. There were lots of many things, then. Suburban gardens were thronged with thrushes. Hares galumphed across every pasture. Mayflies hatched on springtime rivers in dazzling swarms. And larks filled the air and poppies filled the fields, and if the butterflies filled the summer days, the moths filled the summer nights, and sometimes the moths were in such numbers that they would pack a car’s headlight beams like snowflakes in a blizzard, there would be a veritable snowstorm of moths, and at the end of your journey you would have to wash your windscreen, you would have to sponge away the astounding richness of life.

It was to this world, the world of the moth snowstorm, that I pledged my youthful allegiance.

•

Yet the twenty-first century will be terrible for the natural world to which as a young boy I became so bound.

I am a baby boomer; I am of that generation born in the rich West in the aftermath of the Second World War, the generation which came to adulthood in the explosion of new freedoms of the 1960s and thought it had inherited the mastery of the universe simply by being young. And perhaps it had. So heady
were its early years that my generation has been wholly defined by them, till now; we were as sharply marked by rock and roll as our parents and grandparents were by the two world wars (the music let everyone be communicants, it let everyone join in and feel they were partaking together of this sacrament, which was youth). But as we come to the end of our time a different way of categorising us is beginning to manifest itself: we were the generation who, over the long course of our lives, saw the shadow fall across the face of the earth.

Let us set it out. Our world is under threat, as it has never been before, from a malady previous generations did not anticipate: the scale of the human enterprise. Down the centuries, in considering human affairs, our attention has been fixed on their direction, on the implausible, wondrous journey from the flint hand-axe to the moon, via literacy and medicine and the rule of law; gripped by the exhilarating course of the venture, we have not noticed its sheer dimensions creeping up on us. We have been the casual watchers of the waterlily pond, that celebrated pond where the lilies, barely noticeable at first, double in extent every day; they may take fifty days to cover half the surface, but we have not grasped the fact that to cover the remaining half, of course, then takes but a single day only.

This is the sudden headlong rush of exponential growth. It took us all by surprise. After the long unfolding of the human story, after all the millennia of history and of prehistory, it happened in a mere four decades, well within a single human lifetime, indeed within my own: between my teenage years and my middle years, between 1960 and 2000, the world’s population doubled, from 3 to 6 billion. (Then it added another billion in the next decade, and will grow by a further 3 billion in the four decades to come.) And not only did the numbers mushroom, in the poorer countries especially; consumption exploded in the richer nations as they grew richer still and the baby boomers, the luckiest generation who ever lived, lapped it up;
and while population doubled, the world economy in the same period grew more than six times bigger. Looking back, this now seems much the most consequential historical event of the second half of the twentieth century, of more fundamental import even than the development and spread of nuclear weapons, or the retreat from empires, or the Arab–Israeli conflict, or the failure of the socialist project.

When did humans, creatures of the genus
Homo
, first begin to modify the world in a measurable way? Almost certainly when anatomically and behaviourally modern people, that is, members of the species
Homo sapiens
, emerged out of Africa some time perhaps around sixty thousand years ago, and began to spread eastwards across the world, to Asia, then down to Australasia, then back north-westwards into Europe, and finally over the Bering Strait land bridge from Siberia into the Americas. Formidably advanced through their possession of language, they –
we
– displaced and almost certainly annihilated the earlier species of humans which had spread out of Africa long before them,
Homo erectus
in Asia and the Neanderthals in Europe (who may not have possessed fully developed speech); and while they were at it, they visited a similar fate on the enormous animals which, over millions of years, had everywhere evolved as the top layer of the mammal and marsupial fauna which we still possess today. We do not accord much imagining to these vanished behemoths. We should. It was a massacre unparalleled. By the end of the Pleistocene, the long epoch of the ice ages, whole continental guilds of great beasts had been extirpated by humans, by the hunter-gatherers, such as the Australian megafauna with its two-tonne wombat, diprotodon, or the megafauna of South America with its colossal ground sloths whose fossils Darwin found, or the megafauna of Eurasia with its giant Irish elk whose ten-feet wide and ten-feet high antlers make you gasp in surprise when you encounter them in the atrium of the biological sciences department at the University of Durham.

No one really knows what happened, of course, and some palaeontologists believe changes in climate may have been responsible, but the most persuasive arguments strongly suggest that humans took them out; we did it. Twenty thousand, thirty, even forty thousand years ago, we were already transforming the world around us, we were destroying on a grand scale; and our populations were minuscule. What must be the effect, then, when not only has the technology for earth modification advanced, in our stirring journey upwards, from the hand-axe to the chainsaw, from the deer shoulder-blade to the bulldozer, from the fish-hook to the mile-long driftnet and from the throwing spear to the automatic rifle, but when we ourselves have undergone an upsurge in numbers which can only be described as gargantuan?

It is extraordinary: we are wrecking the earth, as burglars will sometimes wantonly wreck a house. It is a strange and terrible moment in history. We who ourselves depend upon it utterly are laying waste to the biosphere, the thin, planet-encircling envelope of life, rushing to degrade the atmosphere above and the ocean below and the soil at the centre and everything it supports; grabbing it, ripping it, scattering it, tearing at it, torching it, slashing at it, shitting on it. Already more than half the rain-forests are gone, pesticide use has decimated wild flowers and the insect populations of farmland and rivers, the beds of the seas are deeply degraded and most of the fish stocks are at danger levels, the acidity of the ocean is steadily rising, coral reefs are under multiple assault, 40 billion tonnes of climate-changing carbon are loading the atmosphere every year and currently one-fifth, and rising, of all vertebrates – mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians – are threatened with extinction. Many are on the brink, if not already gone. The Vietnamese rhinoceros was discovered in 1988, one of the thrilling secrets of the Indochinese jungles which war had for so long kept out of reach; it was extinct by 2010, slaughtered for its horn, believed
in traditional Asian medicine, quite erroneously, to be a cancer cure. We knew the dodo for three times as long. The nightingale, the world’s most versified bird, was revealed in 2010 to have declined in England by 90 per cent in forty years; that is, to have vanished from nine out of every ten sites where it sang as the Beatles were breaking up. The Mediterranean bluefin tuna, a fish glorious in form and function but unfortunately glorious too in taste, is starting to look doomed by the appetites of sushi eaters; all seven species of sea turtle are endangered, three of them critically; and amphibians are sliding in a bunch down the steep slope to oblivion, with the golden toad of the cloud forests of Costa Rica famous for its disappearance, while the golden frog of Panama may not be famous, but has disappeared just the same. Loss is everywhere, and the defining characteristic of the natural world in the twenty-first century is no longer beauty, nor riches, nor abundance, nor, if you like, life force, but has become vulnerability.

It cannot be stressed enough: these losses are not caused by natural events, such as tsunamis or volcanic eruptions. They are the work of people – of us – and as we continue to grow, and our needs continue to expand, so will the devastation. The proximate causes can be easily enumerated – we can see that they are habitat destruction, pollution, over-exploitation or over-hunting, the havoc caused by invasive species and, increasingly, a changing climate – but the ultimate cause of the great spreading ruination remains
Homo sapiens
: just one of the earth’s great array of millions of radiated life forms, whose numbers, having exploded beyond the planet’s ability to carry them, are now firmly on course to wreck it.

In a curious historical coincidence, at the very time when the explosion in numbers was beginning, a new vision of the earth it was so direly to affect was vouchsafed to us. We can put a precise date on it: Christmas Eve 1968. The person directly responsible was William Anders, an American astronaut, one of
the crew of Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to leave the earth’s orbit and circle the moon. When, on 24 December, he and fellow crewmen Frank Borman and Jim Lovell emerged in their craft from behind the moon’s dark side, they saw in front of them an astounding sight: an exquisite blue sphere hanging in the blackness of space. The photograph Anders took of it is known as
Earthrise
, and its taking was without doubt one of the profoundest events in the history of human culture, for at this moment, for the first time, we saw ourselves from a distance, and the earth in its surrounding dark emptiness not only seemed impossibly beautiful but also impossibly fragile. Most of all, we could see clearly that it was finite. This does not appear to us on the earth’s surface; the land or the sea stretches to the horizon, but there is always something beyond. However many horizons we cross, there’s always another one waiting. Yet on glimpsing the planet from deep space, we saw not only the true wonder of its shimmering blue beauty, but also the true nature of its limits. Seen in the round, not really very big at all – the Apollo 8 astronauts could cover it with a thumbnail – and most assuredly, isolated. Only the one. Nowhere else for us to decamp to, in the never-ending blackness. Thanks to
Earthrise
, we now understand it in the intuitive way, in our souls: what we are wrecking is our home.