The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (9 page)

The insight is from evolutionary biology, which in recent decades has moved on from exploring how, through Darwin’s principle of natural selection, the peacock evolved its resplendent tail and the parrot its formidable beak, to looking at how in just the same way people evolved to be people; specifically, it is from the relatively new discipline of evolutionary psychology, which examines the ways in which the human mind adapted itself to the issues that Pleistocene hunter-gatherers faced in their daily lives, as over thousands of generations they gradually evolved inherent traits and instinctive reactions which remain with us still. The consequent account of what appears to be psychologically ‘hard-wired’ inside us, the list of putative human universals, is long and fascinating,
from our fondness for sweet foods to our fear of snakes and spiders, from children’s enjoyment of hiding to their predisposition to climb trees, from our ability to throw objects precisely at a target (which no other creature can do) to our pleasure in bodily adornment, from men’s attraction to slim-waisted women (who appear to be not pregnant and thus available for mating) to women’s attraction to high-status men (who can better defend them) – even to our preference for certain types of landscape.

And there, it gets more fascinating still. Surveys have demonstrated that, shown different landscape images, people overwhelmingly favour one form in particular, one of open grassland interspersed with trees and a view to the horizon, and if possible water, and animal and bird life; and it has been suggested that this closely resembles the tropical African savannas on which
Homo sapiens
evolved, before spreading out across the rest of the world. (The idea is known as the savanna hypothesis.) The reason that many thousands of years ago we might have developed attachments to certain landscape features so powerful that they became hard-wired in our genes and are with us today, is simple: it was necessary for survival. The hunter-gatherers of the Pleistocene were constantly on the move – their existence was memorably characterised by Gordon Orians, originator of the savanna hypothesis, as ‘a camping trip that lasts a lifetime’ – and choosing which new landscapes to enter and which to avoid must have been an absolutely critical decision, a never-ending process of weighing up dangers against opportunities, of balancing the possible presence of predators (and hostile humans) against the chance of new food resources and shelter. Thus, many specific aspects of nature which aided survival – trees which branch close to the ground, undulations in the landscape which offer view-points, the presence of large mammals – evoke an instinctive and favourable response in us still. The profounder implication of it all is that, in more general terms, there persists,
deep inside us, deep in our genes, an immensely powerful, innate bond with the natural world.

The notion that we are part of nature, and nature is part of us, is of course not new; numerous pre-industrial societies, from Native Americans to Australian aborigines, have seen the world in this way (with their ways of imagining taken up by the modern Green movement), and many, many individuals have felt it, and often given it expression. But such notions of our unity with the biosphere have by no means entered mainstream thought, certainly among those people who administer the modern world, who make its decisions and run its governments and its corporations, and the countless millions who take their cue from them: rather, whatever their intrinsic value may be, such concepts have been largely ghettoised as anthropological or spiritual curios. The point about the idea of our bond with the natural world which comes out of evolutionary psychology – call it the bond of the fifty thousand generations, if you like – is that it is of a different order, for if it is true, as I believe it is, then it is not just spiritually true, it is also empirically true. It actually exists. It is a matter of fact.

But what might it mean to us? Powerful or not, might it be no more than a mere curiosity, a redundant evolutionary bequest that just happens to be there, like nipples on men? On the contrary, the bond seems increasingly to be of enormous practical importance for our physiological and psychological well-being, a phenomenon illustrated by the burgeoning research on the links between nature and human well-being, physical and mental. The study of this really took off in April 1984, when the prestigious journal
Science
carried a paper with one of those titles which, from time to time, make people around the world instantly sit up and take notice. It said: ‘View through a window may influence recovery from surgery.’ Its author, Roger Ulrich, an American architect who specialised in hospital design, had found that over nine years, patients in a hospital in Pennsylvania
who underwent gall-bladder surgery made substantially better and quicker recoveries if they had a natural view from their beds. Some of the windows of the hospital wing looked out on to a group of trees, and some on to a brown brick wall, and those lucky enough to have the tree view, Ulrich found, recovered faster, spent less time in hospital, had better evaluations from nurses, required fewer painkillers, and experienced fewer post-operative complications than those who only had the wall to look at. Contact with nature, even if only visual, clearly had an empirical, measurable effect on people’s physical and mental states; and since then, research on the practical health benefits of human involvement with the natural world has expanded enormously. A review of the literature to date published in 2005 reported that ‘nature plays a vital role in human health and well-being’, and suggested that contact with it should be an official part of all public health policies. The increasingly voluminous studies suggest that, even after five hundred generations, people are not really adapted to urban living and instinctively prefer natural environments to urban ones.

In fact, I would go further. I believe the bond is at the very heart of what it means to be human; that the natural world where we evolved is no mere neutral background, but at the deepest psychological level it remains our home, with all the intense emotional attachment which that implies – passionate feelings of belonging, of yearning, and of love. I said at the outset that the idea that we might
love
the natural world, as opposed to being aware merely of its dangers and opportunities, like the other creatures alongside which we have evolved, had long appeared to me an extraordinary phenomenon – but the bond of the fifty thousand generations is what makes it explicable. On the surface, in our everyday lives, this bond is largely invisible, it is very generally unfelt, as it has not only been overlain by the five hundred generations of culture which followed the conquering of nature by the farmers, but for those
of us (since 2007 the majority of people in the world) who live in towns and cities in an increasingly hyperactive age, it is buried under an impenetrable mass of urban mental clutter. Yet deep down, it is there: we may have left the natural world, but the natural world has not left us.

And it can suddenly burst out. It can take you by surprise. You can sometimes not know quite what it is, why you are feeling as you are, why you are feeling so strongly:

   And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

You do not need to be Wordsworth looking down on Tintern Abbey to experience it; it is open to every one of us. Many people, faced with the beauty of nature, or its wonder, or its abundance, or the peace it can provide, or the sense we can feel in it every springtime of a world being reborn, have felt Wordsworth’s joy; and I am no different. I have felt nature and joy many times since that first afternoon on the Dee, half a century ago, and as I have got older I have become increasingly convinced of something: that the joy itself, the intense love we can sometimes suddenly feel for the natural world, shows the existence of our continuing inner union with it better than anything else can.

That is why I am going to set out the ways in which I have met with joy over the years, just as you may have met with it
in your life: I am going to present my evidence for the bond. I am not a scientist, not an evolutionary biologist nor a psychologist; I do not set out to prove it, to make formal argument, a step-by-step logical assembling of evidence. I am simply saying, this is what I experienced, and perhaps this will help towards understanding, for if our continued inner belonging to the natural world was not behind such intense emotion, what was? But it is indeed done in the hope that this novel feeling for what we are as humans, not yet forty years old, may subject to a wider awareness.

For the most important of the many important aspects of this new understanding is of course its context: this innovative sense of what nature really means to us, of what its value is, has come along at the very moment when we are tearing it to pieces. Just as
Earthrise
, the photo from space, showed us for the first time the planet’s fragility and beauty, its uniqueness and isolation, so the insights of psychology and of evolutionary biology are showing us for the first time how we as humans are bound to it, bound to it in our souls inextricably, and how if we destroy it, we are destroying not only our home, which is dreadful enough, but also a fundamental part of ourselves which we cannot afford to lose.

And there, at last, is the possibility of a new defence of nature, one more robust and all-encompassing than either the hopeful idealism of sustainable development or the hard-faced calculation of ecosystem services; there, may be the beginnings of a belief and an argument with which to shield the natural world in the terrible century to come. The natural world is not separate from us, it is part of us. It is as much a part of us as our capacity for language; we are bonded to it still, however hard it may be to perceive the union in the tumult of modern urban life. Yet the union can be found, the union of ourselves and nature, in the joy which nature can spark and fire in us – even in the joy of the fifteen-year-old boy with his budget
binoculars, listening to the cries of the wading birds borne upon the wind.

•

Terrible, though, is the word for it, the century that is coming for nature, and it is well under way. In fact, the destruction and the losses are already proceeding so rapidly and their scale is so colossal that a new problem arises: it is becoming difficult to describe them adequately, to do real justice to what each loss means, to expound them in other than the most generalised terms. You end up using statistics. I have done it here myself.
One in five vertebrates is threatened with extinction
. . . And perhaps it is worth considering that something vital can be missed, as the subject of environmental loss daily becomes more theoretical, abstract, and academic.

A prime example of this is the creation of two new metaphors to describe what is taking place. One is the Sixth Great Extinction. In the geological record researchers recognise five cataclysmic, life-extinguishing events in the earth’s prehistory, beginning at the end of the Ordovician period 440 million years ago, when each time, the majority of species on the planet died out. Some of these events may have been caused by drastic changes in climate; others by the impacts of asteroids or comets, such as the object which hit what is now the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, and wiped out the dinosaurs, in the most recent of the five. But such is the rate at which species are presently disappearing that many biologists consider we are today going through yet another major extinction, a sixth, which is comparable in scale to the rest – with the difference, of course, that this one has been caused by us.

The other metaphor is also inspired by the geological record,
specifically by the idea of the geological timescale; it consists of a new (and so far, unofficial) label, the Anthropocene, to designate the epoch in which we are currently living. This is still formally considered to be the Holocene, from the Greek for ‘wholly recent’, covering the period since the end of the last glaciation in which agriculture began and civilisation took off; but so overwhelming has the human impact on the planet now become, above all on the atmosphere, whose composition we are so rapidly altering with such potentially disastrous results, that a growing number of scientists accept that the present time has a decisive character of its own and ought to be renamed as such. So welcome to the Anthropocene: the epoch when humans changed the planet.

They are very suggestive, these large-scale conceptions. Far-reaching images, such as the Anthropocene and the Sixth Great Extinction are, help us register the true degree of the planet’s predicament and the real magnitude of the processes we have set in train which may bring about our ruin. They are of enormous value. They are talked about daily. Indeed, they are generating an academic industry on their own. But they do not necessarily convey the immediacy and astringent character of environmental loss, which in every case, somewhere along the line, involves hurt. If loss of nature becomes a sort of essay subject, we miss its immediacy; we may lose sight of its sadness and its nastiness, its sharp and bitter taste, the great wounding it really is. So before I take the high road to joy, I am going to return to loss, in a different way: not to the general or the broader picture, but to the specific. I am going to look at three particular examples of loss from my own experience, and the first follows on directly from my boyhood on the Dee.

•

We stand on the headland and look out over the plain, Nial Moores and I, the arid plain with a lorry trundling over it that till recently was a living estuary swept daily by the tides, an estuary holding flocks of wading birds so immense they were impossible to count precisely: twenty, fifty, seventy thousand, sometimes flocks of great knot, in particular, that may have been ninety thousand strong.