It is dangerously easy to get people to stop caring about the suffering of a crowd of others. Much more difficult to persuade them to hate a specific individual who they can visualise. Eight years ago, the world looked in horror at pictures of one small boy lying dead on a beach and shared the pain of refugees forced to flee from their homes and then encountering even more tragedy.
Only a few years later, it has become possible to persuade all too many of us to harden our hearts and accept that it is fine to shut refugees away on barges and then fly them off to a country where over half a million people died in a genocide in the recent past.
That same failure to understand the collective experience whilst identifying with the individual applies to nature. Show people a picture of the destruction of a single sycamore tree that had been holding out against the odds on the Northumberland moors and there is uproar. Tell them that thousands of species will be driven to extinction because of the burning of the oil from the Rosebank well in the North Sea and many will repeat lame excuses about it being better if we do the damage by burning our own fossils than someone else’s.
Symbolic of widespread barbarism
The loss of a single tree diminishes us. Back in June of this year, I was fortunate enough to take a holiday close to Hexham and had the chance to revisit the amazing scenery of Hadrian’s Wall. Our family walked along it for a couple of miles so we could experience the isolation of those troops stuck out on the edge of Empire. The landmark we chose to head for was the very same classic tree in the gap which has now been cut down. It was impossible to look at it without being inspired by its wonderful defiance of the odds and the magnificence of its presence in the landscape.
Now that has gone because someone was grotesquely motivated to destroy it and got the chainsaw out. That was not an act of senseless vandalism it was a deliberately planned choice. If it turns out that environmental activists did it to draw attention to our destruction of nature there will be a national outrage and calls for long prison sentences. If it was done out of hatred from far-right activists towards those who care about nature then I fear we will hear much less.
Yet the real outrage is not the destruction of a single tree. It is the cutting down of entire forests. The reason that the tree was so isolated is because the natural woodland in that landscape has been removed by humans over the course of centuries. That destruction of nature has speeded up massively in recent times. As our technology has improved it has increased our ability to destroy.
Instead of responsibly managing that power we have shown a dangerous tendency to deploy it with full force if it brings a profitable return and the consequence has been the extermination of many of the creatures that we used to share this planet with and a loss of biodiversity on an unforgivable scale.
A senseless war upon ourselves
The day after the landmark tree that we care about so much was cut down a major report on the state of nature was published. It showed that we have lost 43% of our bird life since 1970. So even after all the destruction caused by DDT had already taken place, we have managed to destroy even more wildlife.
Climate change is only a small part of the forces that are killing off the variety of life on this planet. Rainforests are being destroyed so that we can import palm oil a little more cheaply. The UK is even paying subsidies to cut down trees, ship them halfway across the planet, transport them to Yorkshire and burn them in Drax power station.
Mile long fields of one single crop are being routinely sprayed with chemicals that kill insects indiscriminately. The loss of those insects means children growing up without the opportunity to see many of the butterflies that used to exist and birds disappearing from our skies because they can’t feed their young. Even the very depths of our oceans have been covered with a thin layer of plastic and we are still increasing our production of plastic products without any realistic plan for disposal of them. Meanwhile, agricultural runoff is pouring nitrates into our rivers and killing fish with algal blooms.
What will it take to break the greed and apathy?
Millions of trees have been burned up across Canada in wildfires this summer. The reaction of Rishi Sunak has been to tell the British people that we must stop the war on motorists. Temperatures across the whole of the world in July were 1.4 degrees centigrade above the average for the last 174 years. All that extra energy in the system has resulted in horrible floods in Libya and Greece. Sunak has responded by awarding more licences to drill for oil in the North Sea. Glaciers are disappearing in Switzerland at record rates whilst the sea ice around the Antarctic is at frighteningly low levels. Sunak has decided to delay the switchover to electric vehicles by five years.
Instead of ratcheting up our efforts to protect nature, Britain’s prime minister has chosen to try and win votes by telling people that he will stop anyone who tries to improve the quality of the air that we breathe.
So nature really is at threat from mindless vandalism. Unfortunately, that threat comes from the British prime minister. He is trying to cling onto power by unleashing the full force of reaction against environmentalists who want to protect our wildlife. We can only hope that he is driven to electoral extinction before he has the chance to contribute to the extinction of even more of the life on this planet.
