The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (13 page)

All of this, energetically encouraged by the Ministry of Agriculture, naturally began to affect wildlife, and the damage was compounded by two new farming techniques, still barely comprehended by the public at large, the change from spring-sown to autumn-sown crops, and the shift from hay to silage. New varieties of crops sown in autumn were known to be more productive and could be harvested much earlier than traditional spring-sown cereals, in July or August rather than September, but they had enormous disadvantages for wildlife, particularly birds, which were doubly hit. Autumn sowing meant that the stubble from the previous harvest, rich in seeds which flocks of songbirds such as finches fed on right through the autumn and winter, was now quickly ploughed back into the ground, and the finches’ food supply disappeared; and when the spring came, the autumn-sown crops were already up in the fields, and so high that other farmland birds such as skylarks and lapwings could no longer nest in them.

The disappearance of haymaking, one of the age-old activities in the farming calendar, and with it of hay meadows and their replacement by fields of artificially fertilised ryegrass, was an even more detrimental change. Hay is grass which is cut just the once, in late summer, then dried so it does not rot when kept in a barn, and fed as fodder to horses. In 1950 there were still three hundred thousand horses working on British farms, but thirty years later they had nearly all gone, outpaced by the march of the machines. With them went the need for hay. Cattle could be fed on something else: silage, grass cut while still green,
which rots down into a gunk that cows find perfectly acceptable. A special variety, perennial ryegrass, was discovered to be ideal for the job, and to make it grow as quickly as possible it was treated with large amounts of artificial fertiliser, meaning it could be cut at the beginning of June or earlier, and then cut again six weeks later, and perhaps for a third or even a fourth time before summer was over.

All across England, ryegrass fields began replacing the hay meadows and ancient grazing pastures which had been among the countryside’s great delights, as they were botanical treasure houses crammed with wild flowers such as buttercups, red clover, yellow rattle, lady’s bedstraw, knapweed, green-winged orchid, ox-eye daisies, kidney vetch, and many many more, presenting an animated chaos of colour which could dazzle the eye. Abundance at its most enchanting. It is thought that about 97 per cent of them have gone now. In the ryegrass leys which replaced them, there was but one species only: ryegrass. It was green concrete, as the phrase has it. It had been so heavily fertilised that it out-competed any other plant; nothing else could survive. The process was known as ‘improvement’. (Traditional grassland, where it survives, is now referred to as ‘unimproved’.) But improvement was damaging to more than wild flowers. The various species of birds which nested or foraged in traditional meadows, such as corn buntings, quail, whinchats, and (once upon a time) corncrakes, had in the past always had room to breed successfully before the hay was cut in late July. But with the much earlier cuts for silage, usually repeated, their nests and eggs and chicks were mangled by the machines. Continually. They were as doomed as the sparkling wild flowers were.

That might all seem bad enough, the bulldozed hedges, filled-in ponds, grubbed-out orchards, the destruction of the autumn stubbles, the destruction of the hay meadows; but Farmer Giles, the ruddy-faced commonsensical custodian of the countryside,
who knew so much better than those folk in towns about how to look after it properly with his age-old wisdom, or so the poor deluded population of the British Isles continued to think, put the tin hat on it all with poisons. Agricultural poisons. Poisons for this, poisons for that. Kill off the insects. Kill off the snails. Kill off the wild flowers. Kill off anything that isn’t your money-making crop with herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, molluscicides . . . Farmer Giles loved them all, he turned on the tap and let a great flood of poison wash over the land, which, God help us, floods over it to this day. He began just after the war with the chlorinated hydrocarbon, DDT, the first of a new generation of synthetic pesticides – compounds made in the laboratory rather than from naturally occurring substances – and quickly followed it by spraying his fields with the even more powerful organochlorines, such as aldrin and dieldrin. The problem was, these things didn’t just kill insects; it turned out they killed birds as well, in startling numbers (and for good measure they quickly killed off all the otters of lowland England, probably because they built up in the fat of eels, a favourite otter prey item). It was several years before anyone noticed that English otters seemed to have vanished, but the corpses of thousands of dead birds were all too visible at once, and in America especially they provoked a fierce public outcry, led by Rachel Carson with her magisterial exposé and denunciation of the agrochemical industry and all its works,
Silent Spring
, whose publication in 1962 can be taken as the start of the modern environment movement.

Dead robins littered across suburban lawns could not be ignored, no matter how loudly the US chemical industry screamed that Rachel Carson was an hysterical woman (the adjective and the noun each being half of the accusation), and so eventually DDT, aldrin, dieldrin, and other organochlorine compounds were banned, in America and Britain both. They were replaced with new generations of pesticides which generally did not kill birds
directly, such as carbamates, organophosphates, pyrethroids, and more recently, neonicotinoids. I say generally, although some of these compounds were still bird-toxic, such as carbofuran, a carbamate which (although banned) remains the substance of choice for British gamekeepers who want to poison birds of prey, or parathion, an organophosphate used to kill bird pests such as queleas in Africa. Certainly, however, they all killed insects, and they did not just kill ‘target’ insects, they killed almost all insects, just as herbicides usually killed almost all herbs, the vast majority of the flowers which had added to the beauty of cornfields (and in killing the insects and the non-crop plants they killed off the food supply for the birds); and in due course their widespread use became routine. For Farmer Giles, second-nature, even. He couldn’t get enough of them. This is the heart of the matter. The incorporation of the widespread use of deadly poison into everyday agricultural practice is what, above all else, has destroyed the wildlife abundance of my country and I curse it. You can say it’s essential for the production of food. I say, no it isn’t, not on the scale in which it has been used. It has dealt a mortal blow to half the life of the land in which I grew up.

That all this was happening took a very long time to dawn on the public; in fact, it was more than three decades before people began to perceive properly how intensive farming was wrecking the natural world, so strong was the Farmer Giles custodian myth. In the intervening years many rural communities had seen long-beloved pieces of countryside swept away, despoiled or changed beyond recognition by farmers chasing ever more profits, and had had their protests or passionate appeals to desist contemptuously refused, with no one in officialdom to turn to: farmers were outside the planning system, remember, and could do whatever they liked with their land – just as Genesis 1:28 had urged them to.

It was not until 1980 that the anger at what they were doing
finally exploded, through a groundbreaking book by the environmental campaigner and academic Marion Shoard.
The Theft of the Countryside
set out for the first time, in detail and at length, the results of British farmers’ remorseless pursuit of money at the expense of the traditional and dearly loved rural landscape, a pursuit which, although already calamitous, had been given a savage upward twist by Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (as the European Union was then called) in 1973. The EEC’s bizarre Common Agricultural Policy, which the French wanted in order to keep their thousands of small farmers on the land, and the Germans went along with because they wanted to get back into the human race after the Second World War, abolished the laws of supply and demand. Instead, everyone was to produce as much food as they possibly could, and even if there was no demand for it, the price would not fall! Consumers didn’t have to buy it – the Community would buy it! Then stick it all in warehouses, millions of unwanted tons of it – a butter mountain, a wine lake, but never mind, just keep producing, rip out every hedge, fill in every pond, kill off every insect and wild flower that might possibly be competing with you, ruthlessly turn all your acres into a clinical food factory and Brussels will definitely make it worth your while.

Marion Shoard shouted at Farmer Giles and his colleagues the first properly heard
I accuse!
She explained to a hitherto-ignorant public how if a farmer wanted a grant to destroy, in effect, a piece of well-loved landscape, there was no test of appropriateness, no means test, and it made no difference whether the commodity he was going to produce was in surplus or not: he was just handed the money, and there was no limit on the number of grants that could be given in any year. No official environmental oversight whatsoever took place of agricultural intensification, such as the planning system provided for development – the Ministry of Agriculture cared not a jot about that, it was simply not in its DNA, all it cared about was
maximising production – and there were virtually no restraints at all on what farmers could do. Shoard instanced case after case where captivating countryside, such as Graffham Down in Sussex, had been turned into cereal desert despite the ardent and heartfelt objections of local people. If a picknicker dug up a cowslip root, she pointed out, he or she could, under the Conservation of Wild Creatures and Wild Plants Act, 1975, be prosecuted; but if a farmer ploughed up a whole field of cowslips, no one could do anything about it.

The Theft of the Countryside
was impassioned polemic as well as documentary and it shot a timely hole in the myth of the farmer as countryside guardian, and was widely noticed: the sculptor Henry Moore wrote the foreword. But although it was the first major stocktaking of the damage intensive farming had done to Britain, it was essentially about landscape rather than wildlife: of the book’s 272 pages, only eight were given over to ‘Disappearing Wildlife’ specifically. That was understandable. Ravaged landscapes were readily visible, but the decline of wild-life populations, as it was happening, was then much harder to register. For the losses were of numbers, not of species. Consider: the principal metric the general public instinctively uses for wildlife loss is species extinction. National (and of course, global) extinctions of species are always observed and remarked upon. If they happen, everyone knows something’s wrong. But in Britain, national extinctions were not piling up like ravaged landscapes were. What was happening with wildlife was more subtle: it was a great thinning-out of all populations.

Right across the land, the once unsullied land now bulldozer-battered and awash with poisons, there was simply
less
of everything, year on year: fewer birds, fewer wild flowers, fewer butterflies. Species A might still be around; there just weren’t so many examples of it; and the process, of course, was cumulative. My experience of having written about this as a journalist, and having had extensive reader response, is that not a few
people sensed it intuitively, but could not quite put their finger on it. Was it really happening? Were they imagining it? They were uneasy, but not certain. It is only now, another thirty-five years on, that we are certain, that we know it was happening indeed, and this is because of a fortunate development which began in the 1960s: the setting up of a series of long-term wildlife recording schemes by Britain’s extensive community of naturalists, professional and amateur. These schemes, first to record wild flowers, then birds, then butterflies, were able to track precisely Farmer Giles’ pitiless onslaught on the biodiversity supposedly in his care, although they began when the process was well under way, so the baselines used were already degraded ones and did not reflect the position of, say, 1947; thus, the true losses are substantially underestimated by figures we have now. Nevertheless, they still present an irrefutable picture of staggering decline, not by national extinctions – which would have made headlines, and long ago alerted the nation to what was happening – but in general abundance.

With birds, for example, there were only two national extinctions in Britain in the post-war period, those of the red-backed shrike and the wryneck, both charismatic species, alas (although both have returned to breed intermittently). But the number of birds which have declined so much as to be
locally
extinct, over great swathes of the land, is hugely higher. In the period 1967–2011, according to the Common Bird Census (and its successor scheme, the Breeding Bird Survey), the turtle dove declined in Britain by 95 per cent, the grey partridge by 91 per cent, the spotted flycatcher by 89 per cent, the corn bunting by 88 per cent, and the yellow wagtail by 73 per cent, while the tree sparrow declined in England alone by 95 per cent; and so it goes on. In most of the country, they’ve simply vanished. The position is precisely paralleled with wild flowers. During the whole of the twentieth century, there were about twelve national extinctions among Britain’s fifteen hundred or so native
plants (the figure varies with how you define native), including such colourfully named species as thorow-wax, swine’s succory, narrow-leaved cudweed and summer lady’s tresses; and you might think, all things considered, that was not too bad.

But in the millennium year the naturalist Peter Marren, on behalf of the charity Plantlife, looked at the position on a county-by-county basis using the county
Floras
, those comprehensive wild flower catalogues which are such a feature of British botany –
The Flora of Cambridgeshire
,
The Flora of Kent
– and a dramatic and alarming picture emerged when it was local rather than national extinctions which were examined. Over the century Britain as a whole might have lost its dozen or so species, but Marren calculated that Northamptonshire, between 1930 and 1995, had lost 93; Gloucestershire, between 1900 and 1986, had lost 78; Lincolnshire, between 1900 and 1985, had lost 77; Middlesex, between 1900 and 1990, had lost 76; Durham, between 1900 and 1988, had lost 68; Cambridgeshire, between 1900 and 1990, had lost 66; and so on. (These figures were later re-examined and somewhat revised down by the botanist Kevin Walker, but even the revised figures are astounding.) And it is exactly the same story with butterflies. There have been only three national extinctions in the post-war years, those of the large tortoiseshell, of the large copper – which had been reintroduced, having gone extinct once before – and of the large blue (which has now been reintroduced itself, with great success); but since the butterfly recording schemes first started, nearly three-quarters of our fifty-eight remaining species have declined and disappeared over much of the country. Between 1970 and 2006, for example, the high brown fritillary declined in distribution by 79 per cent, the wood white by 65 per cent, the pearl-bordered fritillary by 61 per cent, the white-letter hairstreak by 53 per cent, and the Duke of Burgundy by 52 per cent. As some of these species were uncommon anyway and the declines were from what was already a very low base, they were left in a parlous position: the
high brown fritillary is now critically endangered in Britain, and the other four species just mentioned are all regarded as endangered, as are several others.