August is a tired out month. Spring and early summer’s flowers have bloomed and set their seed. Garden birds have fledged their young and vanished to the woods to feed on summer’s bounty. Ponds and marshes are reduced to puddles, ringed with mud, where green sandpipers – already southbound from the taiga – chase fat black flies, filling the hot, still air with joyful calls.
Verges are cracked and dry now too, spring’s lustrous grasses – false oat, tall fescue, cock’s-foot – reduced to yellowed straw, whining with Roesel’s bush-crickets. Here and there a meadow grasshopper sings – inasmuch as rubbing a leg along a wing is song – a sound as brittle and spiky as the grass stems all around it. August is a brittle, tired out month.
It is easy for us nature lovers to become brittle and tired out too. After all, news on nature and our environment is unrelenting in its sadness. Just recently the British Trust for Ornithology has published research revealing that the UK has lost 73 million birds in the past fifty years. Or, more correctly, we have hounded 73 million birds from the UK, through our ruthless industrialisation of the landscape. Similar well-evidenced statistics exist for all the biodiversity – the plants, the insects, the worms, the fungi – with which we share our country and the world. And which – ay, there’s the rub! – make our planet habitable.
Faced with such statistics, and the evidence of my own ears and eyes, I frequently find myself despairing. This spring I hardly walked in my familiar landscapes – the landscapes which have always nourished me – because I couldn’t face the absence of birds I loved here as a child. Gone are the willow warblers, redpolls and spotted flycatchers in the garden where I grew up, where my parents still live. Gone are the tree sparrows in the ancient hedges around the village church. Gone are the nightingales and turtle doves I used to hear one village to the south. Gone too the tree pipits and nightingales on the heath a few miles east, where, as a boy, I learned their thrilling songs.
If, like me, you are a melancholic creature, it’s all too hard to bear. But the bottom line – I have come to realise – is that melancholy is not the answer when the business of the day is reversing cataclysmic declines in biodiversity and the disastrous erosion of our shared environment. Indeed quite the opposite is true. Lady Macbeth – heartless and violent as she was – may be no moral role model, but, when counselling her courtiers to ‘Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once,’ she has an important message for our environmental movement. The time to act was 70 years ago; but – given that society and government didn’t act – the time to act is now.
Where, though, should we go, Lady Macbeth? The answer has been well known – and largely ignored – for many years. As long ago as 2010, the UK government published the Lawton Review into England’s ecological network and how it should be enhanced, to help nature thrive in the face of climate change and other pressures. Its conclusions, which have come to be known as the Lawton Principles, are that our ecological network needs to be bigger, better and more joined up.
Each of these ideas is remarkably simple. And yet – somehow, in our complex modern world – they seem beyond our comprehension and our power to act. By bigger, we mean simply that we must devote much more of our landscape to nature – in the UK and across the world – in order for our ecosystems to continue bestowing on us the riches that we take for granted. It’s simple: for our own sake, give nature far more space.
By better, we mean that those few heartlands for nature still in existence – those priceless, ancient stores of wildlife, wild genes and ecological interactions – must be better buffered, better protected in law and better managed, so that nothing more is lost.
And finally, more joined up. In the course of the 20th century, and into the 21st, we have torn up the UK countryside, laying waste to almost all of nature’s refuges and severing the veins and arteries of the landscape, through which wild species and their genes could flow, disperse, recolonise and integrate. Lawton is quite clear: if we are to maintain a landscape which supports us as we move into the climate crisis, we must put together again the Humpty Dumpty shell of nature, to create a coherent, functional, joined up whole, through which wild species and wild genes can move, in which they can adapt to changing climate. For all our sakes.
Call me madcap, but I want to live in a landscape blessed both with biodiversity and with bioabundance, in which rare species and their habitats are safe from harm and common species are everywhere. I want swallows hawking over every village pond and spotted flycatchers in every churchyard. I want riots of native wildflowers along all our roads and insects clouding around lights by night. I want hedgehogs snuffling through every garden and toads in every shaded corner. I want corncrakes rasping through the night and curlews burbling from our heaths and ragged grassland. I want swifts under every roof, sharing their space with swarms of house sparrows and starlings. I want grey partridges croaking in our fields and corn buntings tinkling in our hedges. I want adders. I want swallowtails. I want hen harriers. I want lapwings. I want life!
Achieving this is the weighty work of our Norfolk Wildlife Trust Nature Recovery Team. These are such simple words – recover nature – but it is the challenge of our lives, on which our lives and livelihoods depend. We need a giant shift in the way we manage every square inch of our countryside. And, as Lady Macbeth informs us, the time to act is now. Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once.
