Concerned Conservationist

Lockdown for me has been one of transition, reflection, and a general slowing down. I am shielding my 80 year old mother as best I can, which has been made easier because we are fortunate to live in a village, with access to nature that is not overrun with hordes of people. I am creating and developing a new business, having moved away from a business that was steadily sucking the life out of me, and a gentler pace of life has come at the right time.

My new journey in my professional life is one of resurrection, getting back to old ways, revisiting the work I love immersed in the natural world and conservation, and working out how I can balance this earning a decent living.

In doing this, I am rediscovering the sheer joy and love of reading books about nature, philosophy, ecology and conservation education. And for some reason this morning, I had a real strong sense of purpose to go and dig out books by Mary Midgley, the renowned philosopher who wrote about our connections with animals.

In one of the books edited by her: Earthy Realism: the meaning of Gaia, I came across a chapter by Maggie Gee. In it she discusses the relationship between scientist Charles Elton and his wife, poet and artist, EJ (Joy Scovell), and reflects on how art and science complement each other. Elton studied animal populations and is argued to be the father of ecology. In one of the books he wrote, Voles, Mice and Lemmings, he explores population fluctuations: surges and crashes and one paragraph by Gee and her reflections on this are very prescient, aptly describing what we are now currently facing:

“The author of Voles, Mice and Lemmings (1942) taught me that populations surge, and then crash. Disease or a plague of enemies will tend to carry off an impossibly inflated population when the conditions are right, or else the animals or plants which are their food source will be exhausted. Perhaps bird flu or famine will do better than treaties or protocols at making twenty-first century human beings cut down their carbon and methane emissions. After all, according to William Ruddiman’s new book, Plows, Plagues and Petroleum, steep declines in the CO2 record tend, historically, to follow major plague pandemics, when farmland reverts to forest. (But, of course, no one wants climate control through lethal disease. Can we really only learn through hideous disasters that tear apart the small ordinary family affections and patterns of work that make human life worthwhile?).”

The alarm bells have been ringing for decades, of course, and many scientists, philosophers and authors have long thought that the damage we are inflicting on Gaia will come back and bite us very hard in the form of pandemics or a scarcity of resources (often centred around scarcity of oil and water and everything that this could potentially lead to). I’ve often thought too that we cannot continue plundering the planet at the levels we have been doing and not expect it to have consequences. Ecosystems have a natural yet dynamic flow with checks and balances. These might not at first seem obvious or apparent and may take place over millennia, but they are there nevertheless. Elton wrote about the fluctuations of species’ populations, and the question we have to ask ourselves is why should homo sapiens as a species be any different? Our arrogance leads us to believe that we can solve the many problems we cause as a result of our actions, and that technology will save us from our ultimate destruction. The current pandemic has given us a very stark warning that we are not as invincible as we like to think we are, and that, after all, we are a part of nature and not apart from it. We do not have dominion, or stewardship, and we cannot carry on behaving as though we can do whatever we like. There will be a reckoning, and we have only ourselves to blame.

If we heed the warnings now, we may have a chance of re-imagining Gaia and living more gently on this Earth. And for all that SpaceX gives us false hope of conquering and colonising new worlds and making these, let’s instead look to cherishing this one we already have.