We know that different kinds of privilege – class, ethnicity, and so on – can determine the destinies of individuals and entire communities. Yet these are mere details compared with
the privilege of being human. Other species exist only with our permission, and if the extensive list of man-made extinctions is anything to go by, that permission can be withdrawn at any time. By the same measure, we have it in our gift to rescue our fellow creatures and allow them space to flourish.
It seems a good time for this book to come out, not long after Attenborough’s TV series Wild Isles highlighted the diversity of wildlife in these islands and the way in which we are systematically reducing it.
Fiona Mathews helped to draw up A Review of the Population and Conservation Status of British Mammals and the first ever Red List of endangered British terrestrial mammals. The Red List, accepted by government agencies (though that doesn’t stop them obstructing its work) tells us that a quarter of Britain’s forty-six native land mammal species are currently threatened with extinction, and that a still larger proportion of our species – forty-four percent – is officially ‘at risk’. Mathews and her husband, the poet and critic Tim Kendall, have now produced a readable account of species and habitat loss that should both inform and alarm.
Working on Brecht’s shrewd principle that if you want to educate your audience you must first entertain it, their writing style is lively and humorous (“The size of a humbug and crammed with juicy innards, cockchafers are the Big Mac of the insect world, but probably tastier and certainly better for the environment”). But there is a great deal of controlled anger and frustration, mainly caused by the attitudes of authority to the problem, which range from indifference to outright hostility. Even bodies you’d think would be on the side of conservation were not always – the first director-general of Nature Conservancy referred to grey seals as “tiresome organisms” and when the National Trust found wild boar on its land it “hired marksmen to exterminate them forthwith, camouflaging the news with dollops of euphemism in case their more squeamish members couldn’t bear very much reality: ‘we have taken the difficult decision to remove the animals from the estate’”.
But these pale beside the determination of central governments to stand in the way of environmental progress. Beaver reintroduction is a win for everyone. “Water quality improves, flood risk is reduced, and a whole host of species increase in number: invertebrates, fish, amphibians, even other mammals such as water voles. Beavers are what ecologists call a keystone species, shaping the environment around themselves to almost everyone’s advantage.” Yet government continues doing all it can to entangle such projects in expense and red tape: In the case of wild boar, governments in both England and Scotland simply refuse to admit such animals exist; they are feral pigs, and therefore not entitled to protection. Nor is there a Red List for marine mammals, like the grey seal.
The book focuses on a series of endangered mammals from various habitats, showing how they are threatened, what has caused decline and what measures can be, or are being, taken to help them. One result of government inaction is activists conducting maverick reintroductions, which is where the book’s title comes from. But while the activists’ frustration is understandable, their actions can have dire consequences, like the spread of disease. Nevertheless it becomes clear that harnessing public opinion in support is the only effective way to change things. “One couple running a bed-and-breakfast had set up hides along the river that flowed through their land, and made a very good supplementary income out of their beaver tours. When officials suggested to them that the beavers should be captured and removed, they calmly replied that their 11,000 Twitter followers would be fascinated to hear about those plans. The officials went away and didn’t come back.”
More people might take such a stand if they understood that economic and environmental priorities do not always have to be at odds, though it seems hopeless to get UK governments to see this. When it comes to forest animals, as the authors bitterly observe, “every victory has to be won against a default policy of intensive monoculture timber production.”. Yet this monoculture is not even good for income: “Only about seven percent of our woodland cover comprises mixed-aged stands, compared with twenty-five percent in Croatia. You’d reasonably expect that, having prioritised efficiency over biodiversity, the forestry sector would be crucial to our Gross Domestic Product; in fact, it contributes less than 0.5% of national GDP, which puts us almost at the bottom of the European league tables. Croatia outperforms us more than threefold, and Sweden fivefold.”
Croatia is also doing very nicely for income with the national park of Plitvice, boasting wolves, bears, lynx, wildcats, beavers, boar and “more biodiversity than the whole of the UK put together.” But the benefits are not purely ecological: “Plitvice employs a thousand people, and its 1.5 million annual visitors pay up to forty euros each, per day, towards the maintenance and improvement of the park. With an ambitious vision, you can save your corner of the planet and make a living. Without it, you can eke out a profit from commercial logging, antagonise the locals, and shoot wild boar on the side to cover the wages of a couple of rangers.”
There is some good news – who knew offshore windfarms could help seals, by providing artificial reefs where fish can spawn unimpeded by trawling? “It may be that the sudden spike in grey seal numbers at Horsey was prompted by the building of an off shore wind farm in the North Sea.” There are also helpful hints for small things we can all do without waiting for government to get off its backside – light at night disorientates both bats and hedgehogs, so closing curtains and turning off outside lights can help. We should also avoid too much gardening – “The obsession with tidiness, the paving of driveways, the wretched proclivity for plastic grass (with which the ninth circle of the Inferno is probably carpeted), and the human intolerance of overgrown land where beetles and bugs can breed” all hinder the cause of wildlife (beetles and bugs may not be everyone’s thing but without them there are no hedgehogs or songbirds).
But the facts are stark and should horrify. By 2050, plastic in the oceans is predicted to outweigh the fish. The Environment Agency’s 2020 report under the Water Framework Directive showed that only fourteen percent of rivers in England are of a ‘good ecological standard’, and not a single river or lake in the entire country is of ‘good chemical standard’. In 2014, 460,000 tonnes of wild-caught fish was used to yield 179,000 tonnes of Scottish farmed salmon.
The message is that we should all be making nuisances of ourselves to our elected representatives about “the indirect ways in which we destroy animals’ lives”. These include the ripping out of hedges, the facing of canal banks with metal in which voles cannot dig burrows, the use of harmful chemicals and much else. And we should be alert to what goes on in our neighbourhood, as this grim anecdote shows:
“In the week of the COP26 summit in Glasgow, when the world’s attention was focused on climate change and biodiversity loss, our parish council sent in contractors under cover of darkness to clear a brambly field that provided habitat for three protected species: hedgehogs, slow-worms and dormice. Despite having been warned about the law, they didn’t bother to carry out any ecological surveys. The rules are barely policed, after all. This is how biodiversity loss happens under our noses – field by field, hedge by hedge.”
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