The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (17 page)

‘Here they are on the wall . . .’

‘Oh God, yes! Suddenly! Two of them!’ – all this from my tape recorder – ‘Wow you’re right! A third one! On the flats, on the old Victorian flats!’

They might have been the rarest birds in the land, red-backed
shrikes or black-winged stilts, they might have been Siberian rubythroats, such was my delight. I said to Helen: ‘I never imagined I would ever feel this way about sparrows.’

The chirping was continuous by now. We were opposite a tiny park, just a garden really, full of bushes: the chirping was coming from inside, and when we went in, we found the birds, hovering around feeders which had been placed deep into cover. It was in a very quiet part of a famous street, almost a backwater in the heart of tourist London; the birds foraged in the garden, and nested in the old flats across the road.

Just a handful of them.

Very shy, hiding in the foliage.

But there they were.

•

Finding a tiny colony of house sparrows in central London does not make up for losing the whole population; but it does something. It’s a smidgeon of light, I suppose. Sometimes I think there is no light; but sometimes I think there is. For we have the losses, the losses which are now so extensive and ruinous they are coming to define the natural world, the losses which are wrecking the earth and its biosphere to an extent hitherto unimaginable, the losses which are making us seem, as a species, like a curse, like a blight upon the fragile, exquisite, isolated planet which is our only home; but we also have the bond.

Our bond with nature may be hidden for much if not most of the time, it may be a signal engulfed by the noise, it may lie buried under five hundred generations’ worth of urban living, but it is stronger than those experiences, for it was forged by fifty thousand generations of living in the natural world before the farmers broke the sod and hacked down the forest and imposed a new order on humankind; and underneath every-thing,
it endures. It is unbreakable. Nor does it belong just to him, or to her; it is the inheritance of every single one of us, it is part of what it means to be human, and it can be found within us – not always easily – and it can be understood, and it can be made the basis of our defence of the natural world in the terrible century to come. So let us leave them behind, the unbearable losses, and go where the bond can be found: let us journey into joy.

5
Joy in the Calendar

It would be foolish to underestimate, however, the obstacles in the way of finding and feeling our inherent bond with nature, which will grow substantially as the century progresses; that needs to be admitted. At some unknown moment between 1 July 2006 and 1 July 2007, according to the demographers of the United Nations, a momentous milestone in the history of humankind was passed with no one being aware of it: the percentage of the world’s population living in towns and cities exceeded 50 per cent. Henceforth, most people on the planet would live urban rather than rural lives, and for the first time would no longer be in close contact with the natural or even the semi-natural world (which farming represents); a majority, and a rapidly expanding one, would no longer have direct access to the rhythms of the growth cycle, to the effects of seasonality, to quiet, to the visibility of the stars, to non-industrialised rivers and natural forests, and to wildlife – to birds and wild mammals, to insects and wild flowers – even where, as in more and more places, wildlife was impoverished. Nature in any form would no longer be part of most people’s everyday experience.

It is worth looking for a moment at just how quickly the
urbanisation of the globe is now proceeding. In 2014 the proportion of people dwelling in towns and cities reached 54 per cent, according to that year’s revision of the UN’s
World Urbanization Prospects
(this document redates to 2006–7 the passing of the 50 per cent mark, previously thought to have taken place in 2009), and this figure is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050: that is, 6 billion out of an anticipated 9 billion souls, or two-thirds of the world.

Nearly all of this increase – 90 per cent – is expected to take place in Africa and Asia, much of it in their ‘megacities’, the mushrooming metropolises of 10, 20, 30, going on for 40 million people which will be one of the most notable facets of human geography in the twenty-first century: by 2030 the world is expected to have forty-one of them. Running these gargantuan settlements, and the hundreds of ‘smaller’ cities which will unstoppably expand to a million-plus, 3, 5, 7 million people and more, will present the greatest social and infrastructural challenges, in providing adequate water, food, healthcare, education, transport, energy, employment, and housing. You can take a positive view. A case can be made for cities, and often is, even for the mega-cities: they can generate jobs and income, and can deliver health and education and the empowerment of women, say, more efficiently than can be done over vast rural areas (as long as the cities concerned are well governed). But these are issues which people involved in human welfare, in poverty and its alleviation, are concerned with, and rightly so; I am concerned with the natural world and the human response to it, and I cannot see how that will be benefited in any way by what we might call the great urban shift.

Instead, nature may come to represent for billions – for two-thirds of the world, by mid century – merely what the city is not: a folk memory of clean air rather than smog, of clean rivers rather than polluted ones, of grass and trees rather than concrete and cars, of wild creatures freely existing, now seen merely in
visual representations. That will be entirely understandable; and if swelling urban environments continue to intensify the stress and the pollution they inflict upon their residents, we could not but wish city dwellers the world over the chance of escape to the trees and the grass, the pure water and the pure air, which are worth so much, especially when we mix our pleasure with them and find it so enhanced, in the picnic by the riverside or the ramble through the forest . . . but something else too, in the great shift, will be lost.

It is the intimate feel for the natural calendar, for the earth’s great annual cycle of birth and death and rebirth, a feel which was one of the key attributes of our prehistoric ancestors and which has persisted among people living in the countryside long after city dwellers lost the conscious sense of it. Not lost quite entirely, of course: even a geek working in the most concrete-and-glass-bound thirtieth-floor neon-lit air-conditioned cappuccino-dispensing digitised electronic bolt-hole will sense it is hotter in summer and cooler in winter – but I mean something subtler. I mean the feel for the switches and the transformations, for the tiny signs, easily stifled by traffic noise and electronic music or submerged by pollution, that great changes are under way with the earth; the feel for the hints of the journey starting, rather than the trumpeted proclamation of the arrival. These signals, above all of the world’s reawakening after winter, have produced intense pleasure and excitement and indeed reverence in us since we began to be human, they have produced the most powerful emotions, and not infrequently in my own case, they have produced joy.

Journeying into joy, it is where I would start from. And the loss of this, the loss of familiarity with the cadences and pulses of nature which will extend to so many more of us in the two-thirds urban world of the years to come, seems to me to be sad beyond words, not least because it will go unmarked and unmourned, since for someone struggling for food and basic
healthcare and education for their children in a megacity shanty-town without sanitation or energy supplies, that will be the most minuscule of their concerns. The rhythms of nature? It will be no sort of concern at all. Of course. And yet it is a great loss nonetheless, as I increasingly feel looking over the joy I have indeed encountered there, the joy I have found in the calendar and in the signals of the awakening world, beginning with the winter solstice.

The winter what?
many people will say, especially young people. Believe me, they will. And this, the most significant moment of the year! The moment when the days stop shortening and start getting longer again, celebrated for millennia. It is the reason (or one of the reasons) for Stonehenge; it is the reason for Newgrange, Ireland’s premier prehistoric monument; it is the reason for Christmas in December. (The Wiltshire megaliths are lined up to the winter solstice sunset; the grand tomb in County Meath is aligned to the winter solstice sunrise; 25 December was chosen by the early Christian church as the conventional date of Christ’s birthday since it was the date of the winter solstice in Roman times.) Now it has shifted, partly because of the replacement of Julius Caesar’s Roman calendar by the Gregorian calendar from 1582 onwards, and it occurs on 21 or 22 December. It is not actually a day, but a precisely calculable moment in the earth’s orbit when the tilt of its axis is farthest away from the sun: thus in 2010, for example, it was 11.38 p.m. on Tuesday, 21 December, but as it had occurred after sunset, the celebration, as such, was held the day afterwards.

Not by many of us, though. A diverse band of druids, pagans, hippies, and sundry sun-worshippers gathered at Stonehenge that day to mark the moment with rituals and dances, as is their wont, providing useful colour for the news media; but otherwise, the modern mass of humanity got on with their lives while paying the most significant day of the year scant attention. It is the archetype of the momentous marker that we have forgotten,
the winter solstice, in our harried urban existence where we don’t see the stars for the street lights and never notice the sunset – we do that on holiday, don’t we?
Darling? Come and see the sunset!
– and certainly not three days before Christmas when everyone is feverishly preparing for the winter break.

Yet as I have got older, I have come to love it. For whether or not in our flurry of living we lose touch with the rhythms and processes of the earth, behind everything they continue in all their power, and the solstice represents the start of the most powerful of them all: rebirth. The moment when the days begin to lengthen again is the moment when new life begins its approach, even at the darkest point, which is why it has been so widely celebrated in so many cultures right round the world – the miracle of rebirth never ceased to amaze. Death was being refuted. It was wondrous that new life should arrive quite as unfailingly as old life should die, especially since a human individual’s life itself was linear – it only went in one direction. But the earth was different. Its way was not linear; it moved in a cycle, and although you might fear that one year the cycle would break down, it never did.

Ageing has made me more appreciative of the miracle (partly, I suppose, from a rueful recognition that it isn’t going to happen to me) and what that has produced has been a heightened awareness of its advent, even though each year, for most people, it may lie buried deep under the pre-Christmas frenzy of packed stores and heaving parties and crammed buses and suffocating trains and chaotic airport terminals – but if you do take the trouble to look closely, you will see that behind all the craziness, it is happening. Going back to 2010, for example, on Christmas Eve, Friday, 24 December, had you broken off briefly from your last-minute panic present-buying, you would have seen that sunset was at 15.55, but the following afternoon, when the world was recovering from Christmas lunch, it was at 15.56, while on the Monday, 27 December, when some people were drifting
back to work and some people weren’t and others were wondering whether they should or not, it was at 15.57; and by New Year’s Eve, Friday, 31 December, with everyone getting ready for the final seasonal splurge, it had broken the four o’clock barrier: it was at 16.01. And so it goes on each year, in these wholly unremarked-upon, these virtually imperceptible yet remorseless gradations, until it’s some time at the end of the first week of March, say, and you’re home from work early for some reason, maybe you went to the dentist or something, and you look out of the kitchen window at about ten past six and you notice it’s still light, and the light has a special calm but intense quality to it, and this is something different, something new: it’s evening. Evenings are back. And you open the kitchen door into the garden and a blackbird is singing from the roof opposite, and a song thrush from the tree next door, both of them liquid and loud and confident in this new-found radiance, in a moment in time which those who have experienced it will realise, Philip Larkin captured with exquisite perfection:

On longer evenings,

Light, chill and yellow,

Bathes the serene

Foreheads of houses.

A thrush sings,

Laurel-surrounded

In the deep bare garden,

Its fresh-peeled voice

Astonishing the brickwork . . .

and you suddenly realise that the whole world is on the tremulous verge of something immense: spring is coming.

The winter solstice is the beginning of that. Friends have said to me their least favourite months are January and February, but I’ve never thought so; I’ve always least liked November and
early December, when the movement of the earth is only down towards the dark. The first two months of the year may be harsher in terms of weather but ticking in the background is the wondrous phenomenon, the unstoppable movement back towards the light, and for marking its onset, I have got to the stage now where I look forward to the winter solstice more than Christmas, which so swamps and dominates our culture. Not that I have anything against Christmas itself: having been brought up in the Christian fold, I have reverence for its story and enjoy its customs and music and celebrations, in the way that you can if you’ve been lucky enough to have had them refreshed for you through children, even though they are so naffly commercialised, and even though I recognise that for some people the whole business can be a hateful period of truly glacial isolation.