Seven-Tenths (29 page)

At the extreme opposite is the deep-frozen brick of supermarket cod, prawns, sole fillets, tuna steaks. This sanitised object represents merely the pinnacle of an industrial pyramid of slaughter, destruction and waste. To speak with refined, Western sensibilities in mind: in terms of seemliness it is no longer possible to propose fish-eating as somehow less objectionable than meat-eating. In terms of ecological damage, the worldwide plundering of marine life may turn out to have been even more disastrous than the felling of rain forest for the benefit of beef ranchers.

Popular conservation has helped promote the notion that there must have been an ideal ‘balance of Nature' which existed before
Homo
began upsetting it. This is nonsense, of course. The history of life on Earth is full of episodes like the great Permian extinctions at the end of the Palaeozoic. These not only wiped out the ubiquitous trilobite, which had survived since the Cambrian, but about 96 per cent of all living species of fauna as well.

If there is an unfortunate consequence of James Lovelock's elegant and serious ‘Gaia' thesis, it is that it lends itself to being hijacked by all manner of fringe theorists and used to support their own dotty notions. Thus, the idea that the biosphere might in some sense be self-regulating so as to maintain conditions favourable to life has been peverted, turning the planet into a sentient Mother Earth. Anthropomorphising it as ‘she' makes ‘her' struggles to maintain an immemorial balance in the face of
Homo
's despoliation seem intentionally remedial, even noble. In this reading, ‘Gaia' comes across as a somewhat sainted landlady, trying her utmost to accommodate her latest lodgers who have turned out to be slobs and vandals intent on ruining her delicious mansion. Such an idea is absurd and unscientific and should not be blamed on James Lovelock. It is what happens when people full of millennial
Angst
, guilt feelings and moralised views of biology adapt a serious hypothesis for their own purposes. They are dealing with a goddess, or maybe an old tyrant who once let all but 4 per cent of her animal lodgers die out. We are dealing with evolution. Conditions on this planet are constantly changing, and always have been. The extinction and evolution of species is as mutually dependent and constant a flux as the Earth's crust is itself plastic, wobbling to the belches of vulcanism and to the tuggings of celestial bodies.
Homo sapiens sapiens
is only one of an
estimated 30 million species, and it is possible to argue that since he is as ‘natural' a creature as, say, the crown-of-thorns starfish,
Acanthaster planci
, any results of his presence, no matter how devastating, are also ‘natural'.

There is often a blurring of motivation in public ‘Green' campaigning which amounts to a principled dishonesty. The millennial perception is that
Homo
's remodelling of the balance of the biosphere has fatally endangered everything. The astutely televisual selection of species of cetaceans and large mammals (whales, dolphins, elephants, pandas) has actually come to stand for the sudden awareness of
Homo
's threat to
himself
. In recent years there has been a panicky rise in the number of TV and radio programmes, magazine articles and scientific papers devoted to the physiological and psychological threats to man's continuing existence. In the first case it is constantly repeated how menaced he is by his own poisons, effluents and by-products, as well as by his thoughtless exploitation of delicate global structures. In the second, it is a darkly lurking shibboleth that urbanisation leads inexorably to a breakdown of social behaviour, to mental illness, endemic envy and dissatisfaction, to out-and-out psychosis and mass murder (‘Just look at what's happening in America …'). Man is perceived as being threatened simultaneously from without and within. The timely adoption of lovable big animal species to gather like a lens the varied gazes of his self-concern cannot be dissociated from the approaching millennium. We reach for pandas as a child for his teddy.

It is entirely proper to wish to preserve every species on Earth, whether (to our eyes) magnificent creatures or humble slime-moulds, and not only because of their interdependence.
Homo
is an aesthetic animal and has pungent notions of the sublime. He feels diminution when the familiar vanishes. He experiences with the greatest upset the ghost of loss which stalks his waking days as well as his sleeping hours. It mobilises in him a tenderness akin to vulnerability, to the point where a large part of his wistful concern for whales and the environment generally is displaced fear for himself, an intense longing looking for somewhere to alight. It becomes vital for him to know that whales and wilderness still exist somewhere on Earth, even if he never
sees or experiences them at first hand. They represent cardinal points on the map he has inherited from his ancestors, representations of an earlier world where such things fixed the terms of daily living. Obscurely he feels that without them he is lost, or at least that he cannot shed them without consequences he can neither foresee nor articulate. If only he would say so! The high principles are there, to a fault; but so is dishonesty, because in shifting attention on to certain choice species he postpones recognising his poignant lack, his own strange delicacy. To this extent
Homo
needs more self-interest and not less, provided it attends to that interior chart, to the space which is the ancient and common legacy of his species and whose territory he necessarily inhabits.

What alarms him most and makes him most confused and despondent is the speed at which environmental changes have taken place. This is a comparatively new phenomenon. It is not until the late nineteenth century that a sustained note of mourning is heard for parts of the familiar scenery that have vanished. Since it had to do with a rapid rise in industrialisation and population this note was first heard in Britain. It was typically sounded by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his 1879 poem ‘Binsey Poplars', on the cutting down of a row of trees near Oxford to make way for housing (‘After-comers cannot guess the beauty been'). Thereafter it is heard increasingly, quite distinct in tone from a generalised literary
eheu fugaces
. The snows of yesteryear are, after all, nearly always followed by the snows of this year and those of next. Hopkins was recognising something new: the destruction of trees that never would be replanted.

Since then, this process has accelerated so that today only the most purblind twenty-year-old could fail to notice a vanishing of things even since his own childhood. Those twice his age and more may have the vividest childhood memories of entire landscapes which are now gone, while people brought up in horsedrawn days before World War I can find themselves in alien terrain. This is a disturbing thing to have happened and leads to the ironic conclusion that it may often be easier to deal psychically with sudden disaster than with steady attrition. French and Belgian farmers whose fields were churned into wastelands by trench warfare knew they had
only to wait a few years before most of the greenery sprouted back again. Conversely, those people who grew up to the rich, tangled hedgerows and small fields of the British countryside in the 1930s, 1940s and even 1950s know they will never see them again, nor many of the flora and fauna associated with them. The process is mostly irreversible, not because the species would not return if allowed to or – like a row of poplars – were replanted, but because roads and housing are never ploughed up but only proliferate.

Looking back, it strikes us as curious how seemingly unaffected people once were by the extinction of a species within their lifetime, as though they were isolated zoological events without particular consequence and foreboding nothing. Only now and then is it possible to detect misgivings beneath the breezy pragmatism, even sometimes a current of unease. ‘Last chance to see what Audubon saw,' wrote an unnamed columnist standing in front of a cage in Cincinnati in 1913. This contained ‘Martha', the sole remaining passenger pigeon in the world. This species,
Ectopistes migratorius
, had within living memory been the most familiar bird in the whole of North America and was prettily illustrated by Audubon in his
Birds of America
. Its wholesale slaughter by settlers peaked in the mid-nineteenth century with massacres involving entire flocks of tens of thousands of birds. The last flock of this handsome creature – it was somewhat larger than an English woodpigeon and beautifully marked – was sighted in Illinois in 1895. The last recorded wild specimen was shot in Quebec in 1907. ‘Martha', meanwhile, had been bred in Cincinnati Zoo in 1885. She died at 1 pm on 1 September 1914, aged twenty-nine, and with her an entire species. ‘The main cause of their extinction is plain for all to see,' wrote Richard Carrington some forty years afterwards. ‘Men cannot escape the moral responsibility for the callousness, the greed and the supreme irreverence for life that led to the passing of the passenger pigeon.'
*

This particular bird had followed many other species, which included the dodo – hunted to extinction in Mauritius in the late seventeenth century – and the great auk. This last, the garefowl, was
also flightless. It was hunted in the North Atlantic for its fat, sometimes being killed because it was associated with superstitious belief. One was burnt in Ireland in 1834 for being a witch. The very last specimen was killed ten years later. Today in New Zealand heroic efforts have been made to save the kakapo. This large green-and-yellow bird, something between an owl and a parrot, cannot fly, never attacks and never defends itself. When it can be encountered at all (for, scarcity aside, it relies on exquisite camouflage) the kakapo has a further claim to be remembered as an example of Nature's diversity for it smells strongly of freesias. Aesthetics apart, the loss of a species has consequences which can never be entirely predicted. The extinction of the dodo eventually had effects on the very landscape of Mauritius, certain hardwood trees failing to seed themselves and beginning to die out. Only in recent years has it been established that the dodo played a central role in the seeding and distribution of these trees by eating their fruit. The bird's digestive tract softened the seeds' testa and assisted germination. Now turkeys are being imported from America in the hopes that they may act as substitute dodos.

While endangered species embody poignant reminders of our own mortality, it is the vanishing of entire landscapes that upsets us most. There is nowhere left to turn for solace and with which to recreate the continuity of our lives. Sights, smells and sounds may all vanish. I pretend not to mourn the wild profusion of the natty yellow-and-black striped caterpillars of the Cinnabar moth which once stripped to the bone the clumps of groundsel to be found on every patch of wasteland in southern Britain. Likewise, I miss the sheer variety of other butterflies and moths (including many rare species) which appeared even in the most suburban garden as late as the early 1960s. One knew where Yellow and Red Underwings would be and when in May to look for the Angle Shades moth just after it had hatched and its colours were at their freshest. The subtlest peach and brown and olive tints seemed to hover a fraction above the surface of its wings as if pure colour stood off its scales by the thickness of dust, glowing and velvety. It now seems both important and hopeless to wish for other people such pleasure and ravishment, whether of looking at moths or being frisked around by dolphins. It
is true that after-comers can never know exactly what they have missed; but missing things in our own lifetimes sets in motion the inarticulate hollowings of loss, and in turn we apprehend how quickly ordinary beauty is being made to vanish as if the hand of man held a wand whose touch made some things disappear for good and turned all the rest to lead. Each generation adapts to an impoverished world, but for the first time people are conscious of having to make do with remains. This has its effects.

In 1918 a steamer was wrecked near Lord Howe Island, about 400 miles off the east coast of Australia. Its rats swam ashore and changed the landscape for ever. Two years afterwards one of the islanders wrote, ‘This paradise of birds has become a wilderness, and the quietness of death reigns where all was melody.'
*
Such events have become common on islands, where casually or accidentally introduced domestic animals (goats, rabbits, cats and dogs) as well as vermin can decimate native species and upset an entire ecology.

Of all the laments for a vanished landscape, perhaps that by Edmund Gosse tells Britons most vividly what they have done and what they may no longer see. No chance shipwreck caused the disaster. On the contrary, if anything it was caused by zoology allied to a strong religious bent. At the ages of nine and ten Gosse spent countless hours with his famous naturalist father examining rock pools on the Devonshire coast, ‘a middleaged man and a funny little boy'. His account was published in 1907 and refers to the years 1858 and 1859, immediately after the publication of
Omphalos
. In the intervening half-century the whole seascape changed. The passage is a beautiful description of a lost world, and one of the first examples of a sensitive and passible man fully aware of what has gone and how its going was part of a pattern destined to be repeated at ever-gathering speed. In its prescience, it is a warning of the possible consequences of scientific fieldwork, even of ‘eco-tourism'.