We are living through an extraordinary time. I keep thinking about the origin of the word ‘apocalypse’ which means ‘uncovering’. What is this crisis revealing to us?
During lockdown, as my social interactions have shrunk, my awareness of the non-human world has expanded. I’ve loved spending time in my garden and the surrounding countryside every day. I’ve been noticing and relishing small changes: the blossoming trees, budding flowers and changing light. My toddler blows dandelion heads and we watch them fly in the breeze. He stops to hug trees. He examines sticks and stones and leaves. He’s teaching me to pay closer attention.
I’ve been humbled by my almost-total ignorance of my habitat. I’m now grasping the opportunity to learn more about the wealth of life on my doorstep, starting with trees. When I see a tree I can’t name, I pick a leaf from its branches and take it home to identify with my child. It’s like ‘snap’ for him and an education for us both. It’s overwhelming to think how long it might take me to recognise all the different trees. And then there’s the birds. And the butterflies. The flowers and fronds.
The poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote:
To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields - these are as much as a man can fully experience.
This week I forced myself outside at 4am to listen to the dawn chorus. I’d seen George Monbiot tweet:
Because everything sounds and feels so different, by walking then, you double the size of your world. The northern European dawn chorus is among the most intense on Earth. Don’t go through life without experiencing it.
How had I got to the age of 34 being oblivious to it? I’ve also been listening to a beautiful nature podcast called The Stubborn Light of Things, in which presenter Melissa Harrison urged listeners to get up early, promising the dawn chorus would ‘lift your heart’.
For weeks I’ve been roused by the birdsong outside my single-pane windows. Now I had a name for the phenomenon. I dressed warmly and stepped into the garden. I was needlessly early. BFG joined me around 4.20 with the first chirrups. It was cold so we huddled to keep warm. With one ear pressed against his chest, receiving his steady and familiar heartbeat, my other craned to distinguish the different calls chiming in to the chorus. Their variety filled me with wonder but I also felt sad that I couldn’t identify birds by their song. How much richer it would be if I could know when each bird was joining the fray. Then a bird chirped right above our heads, singing from her nest atop the telegraph pole in our garden, with her chicks around her. Suddenly I was beaming. I didn’t know there was a nest there. I had a front row seat for her contribution to this waking ritual. Now I enjoy the song from our bed, under the comfort of covers, and picture her raising her beak with the rest.
There have been other joyful firsts. Yesterday we saw a mole in our garden with its startling pink nose. I made nettle soup and relished eating weeds that would normally go to waste. BFG even made string from nettles. This homespun education has been rewarding.
I’ve also felt changed by reading The Overstory by Richard Powers. It’s a novel about peoples’ relationship with trees and it invites you to think in tree time. One line:
This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees where humans have just arrived.
A world of trees. That’s it. I have lived in a human-centric world in which the predominant culture is one of our dominion over the earth. But the new coronavirus holds a deep ecological lesson to shatter our illusions of control. We are part of all that surrounds us. Just look at what nature can do. A disease can jump from animals to humans and spread with lethal speed. Imagine the disruption coming down the track from climate change and further ecological collapse, with the looming threat of food shortages. What happens if we lose our pollinators? If global bread baskets are wiped out by drought?
Alongside the fear, I see hope. We now know that another world is possible. The homeless can be housed. Cycling and walking can be prioritised over cars. Flights can be grounded. Carbon emissions can fall. We can breathe cleaner air. As Arundhati Roy said, the pandemic ‘is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next’.
Let’s not talk of ‘saving the planet’, but of saving ourselves. Whatever we do next, our home planet will keep spinning. Nature adapts. We’ve seen, during lockdown, how quickly wildlife recovers when given space. This is what the Rewilders have been preaching for years. I was listening to a recent interview with Paul Kingsnorth where he said:
We’re in the sixth mass extinction at the moment and that’s a big thing but it also tells us that there have been five before. So there’s no reason that earth won’t go on after this one. So our question is whether we want it to go on with us in it.
Musing on what might come after us, he didn’t predict, but observed,
I expect the dinosaurs would have imagined that a planet ruled by hairless apes was pretty hideous, but here we are.
Here we are. For now. Everything is fragile. Nothing can be taken for granted. I’d like us to stick around, to enjoy the blossom and the birdsong for many, many years to come. I’d like my toddler to grow old, knowing far more about trees and birds and bugs than I ever will, and go on to enjoy a toddler of his own discovering it all anew.
I feel that world is within reach. We can use this crisis to better prepare for the next, to build a healthier relationship with the web of life of which we are just one part. There is a remarkable opportunity here for transformation. It’s a time for big ideas and bigger dreams. I hope, like the young British poet Tomos Roberts, that we’ll look back on this time as The Great Realisation. I hope we let the green things in and become changed by them. I hope we have a Green Recovery. I hope our voices calling for it will be as cacophonous as the dawn chorus and just as beautiful.