When Will We Ever Learn?
Where have all the flowers gone? And the birds, the butterflies, the moths, the mammals, the bees. I have heard said a number of times that we compare the state of things now with the state of things in our youth, a nostalgia for the good old days. Unfortunately when it comes to nature this is very much the case, but worse. What I recall from my childhood, my parents consider less than in theirs. Even worse is that my children’s memories and my grandchildren’s memories will be based on an even smaller baseline.
Michael McCarthy’s book, The Moth Snowstorm (2015) mingles his fascination for all things natural with his personal story of his relationship with his mother and his brother. Having been Environment Correspondent for The Times and then Environment Editor for the Independent he has written - and researched - about all matters affecting this living world. At the root of his lifetime work was an incident from his childhood that imprinted itself on the young Michael: the seven year old seeing for the first time a buddleia covered in butterflies. It is this profusion of colour, activity and life that imprints itself on him. This is his baseline.
The title of his book though, points to how things have changed. Not that long ago (at least that is how most of us would like to think) you could not drive at night without having to wipe the windows because of the rush of insects, mainly moths, that end their lives on the curved glass of the car. This is a memory I do not have from my childhood as we had no car, but I do remember in my early days of driving, in the mid-seventies, how the windscreen was spattered from May through to October. Others have told of how they could not travel far without having to stop and clean the headlights.
This Moth Snowstorm is but a distant memory. Gone, along with the lapwings I used to cycle out to a local farm to watch, my Dad’s binoculars wrapped in my cycling cape, packed into my saddlebag, which always seemed to hang to the right, never straight. Go back another generation and gone are the swathes of cowslips my Mother used to pick as a girl.
Some of this reaction can take place extremely quickly. Half a dozen years after a young McCarthy stood open-mouthed in front of a festooned buddeleia, Julian Huxley (in the Forword of Rachel Carson's seminal Silent Spring) was commenting on the ‘virtual disappearance” of “swarms of Red Admirals and Peacocks” from such trees.
In Waterlog (1999), Roger Deakin’s excellent book about his swimming journey through Britain, the author reminisces about his love of the I-Spy books of his childhood. Still retaining the collection some forty years later, he marks the shift in populations by the remarkable low scores given to some species in the 1950s:
…the linnet and the song thrush score a mere twenty points, level pegging with the starling and the house sparrow…
…a grass snake scored a surprisingly low twelve, not much more than a frog, toad or scarecrow at ten…
An otter scored a mere twenty…
In many respects these real-life indicators can say much more than tables and charts. McCarthy adds serious research, pointing out that Peter Marren, worked out that “Northamptonshire, between 1930 and 1995” lost 93 species of wild flower. Revised down later by Kevin Walker, The Flora of Northamptonshire and the Soke of Peterborough (2012) suggests that 86 species of plant have been lost. The earliest records used in this study date back to 1712; however the largest drop in numbers has taken place between 1950 and 1987. (The Flora works on the assumption that a plant is deemed extinct from the County if not seen for 25 years - though there is the proviso that they may reappear or have just not been recorded in some areas.) Thirty-seven may not appear to be a large number when stood against the total plant population, but their loss should still be mourned.
The extinction of plants over the past sixty years is not a lone statistic. The reduction on the number of insects that depend upon them and live with them is well-rehearsed, as is the reduction of the birds and the animals, and the fish. In the US such reductions in that period can be immediately traced back to the introduction of the chemical warfare across crops during the Silent Spring (Rachel Carson, 1962). Here in the UK, the diminution, what McCarthy calls “The Great Thinning” has many roots, one of the most significant being the 1947 Agricultural Act which called upon farmers to ensure that this country never depended upon the import of food ever again. Self-sufficiency became the drive behind a huge expansion of land used for the growth of food, the development of more efficient strains and the use of chemicals to fight off the harbingers of low yield, the insects and the weeds.
It will be fair to say that it is my generation that have reaped the rewards of this expansion, meat, milk and bread always available. It is also this generation that replaced the chemicals of Rachel Carson’s era with the neonicotinoids that are only now being considered for a ban, given the reliance that crops have on pollinators. It is only recently, in generational terms, that we have been looking at the environment holistically. The relationship between the soil, the plant, the insect, the bird, is only now being given centre stage and the interaction and reliance on each other is only now beginning to be understood. This does sound rather stupid, as surely we have always known this. Perhaps we have, but we have also known that what we want, we want now, we want for us, and hang everybody else, including our grandchildren and their grandchildren.
However, there are positives. Not positives as in there are still larks in the sky. Yes there are, but as a farmer friend was told, when proudly announcing to an environmental organisation that there was a lark in most fields: where you have one, there should be two; where you have two, there should be four, and where you have four, there should be eight, and so on. How many larks can you hear now? How many did you hear as a child? How many did your parents hear when they were children?
Whilst the recovery of many of these species is slow or non-existent, we do not have the option to remain detached, to dismiss this and leave this situation for somebody else. There are so many ways that we can help now, by counting and monitoring, by improving habitats - our own, in the community or in the County - and by having due care and respect for what we eat and where it comes from, how it is grown, how we care for our gardens, our verges, our village greens.
There are a number of organisations in Northamptonshire that welcome support in any form, but primarily in involvement and in help to stop this downward spiral, and to hand on to our children a village, a town, a county where they don’t have to ask “Where have all the flowers gone?”
Organisations
Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire
Butterfly Conservation - Bedfordshire & Northamptonshire Branch
This article first appeared in The Nene Quirer in May 2018
